Flight

Three

SUDDENLY, THE PRETTY WHITE boy is my best friend. Maybe the only real friend of my life.

We talk for hours. He understands me. He’s only two years older, but it seems like he’s lived for two thousand years.

I fall in love with him. Not romantically; it’s not about sex or anything physical like that. No, this kid is some kind of Jesus. I know it’s silly. And I know this kid doesn’t even like or respect Jesus — or Allah or Buddha or LeBron James or any other God. But I really get the feeling this white kid could save me from being lonely. I bet he could save the whole world from being lonely.

When I tell him my mother is dead and my father is invisible, the white kid says, “Santayana says there is no cure for birth and death so you better enjoy the interval.”

When I tell him I’m an Indian, he says, “I’m sorry that my people nearly destroyed your people. This country, the so-called United States, is evil. And you Indians were the only people who fought against that white evil. Everybody else thinks we live in a democracy. Everybody else thinks we’re free.”

“Indians have never been free,” I say.

“Exactly,” he says. “Do you know what Teddy Roosevelt said about Indians? He said, ‘I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.’ How can it be a democracy when presidents talk like that?”

When I tell him I like to start fires, he says, “It’s wrong to burn good things. If you want to set fires, you must burn down bad things. Remember, revolution is not about spontaneous combustion. The true revolutionary must set himself aflame.”

When I tell him that I get lonely, he says, “The individual has always had to work hard to avoid being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high for the privilege of owning yourself.”

“Who said that?”

“Nietzsche.”

He amazes me. I’ve never known anybody, especially a kid, who can talk like him.

“You’re so damn smart,” I say. “How many books have you read?”

“All of them,” he says.

We laugh.

And he hugs me. I’m not afraid of him. I’m not afraid that the cops might see us hugging. I’m not afraid of myself for hugging him. I’m a fatherless kid who wants another teenager to be my father.

This pretty boy gets out of jail before I do, but he promises me he’ll come rescue me from wherever they send me.

I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don’t share their shit. They’re like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try to get just one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you.

I get so angry sometimes that I want to hurt people. I dream about hurting people. About killing them. I’ve always had those kind of dreams.

I have this recurring dream where I’m attacked by this gang of black men. They’re punching and kicking me, and I think I’m going to die. But somehow I get to my feet and turn into a raving maniac. I tear those black guys apart. I kill them and go cannibal. I rip open those black guys’ bellies and chests and eat their livers and lungs. I break open their skulls and eat their brains.

Sounds racist, right?

But I don’t think I’m a racist. I measure men by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, and I find all of them are assholes.

A couple years back, this kid psychiatrist told me I have violent dreams and fantasies because I’ve seen so much violence in my life.

“You dream about killing and eating black guys,” he said, “because, in American society, black men are the metaphoric embodiment of rage and fear and pain.”

What the hell is a metaphoric embodiment? And why do I want to eat it?

The kid shrink told me I was programmed for violence.

“You can get better,” he said. “But your first response will always be to fight. To hurt. To cause pain and fear.”

Doesn’t that just give you hope for me?

The shrink also told me I have attachment issues. “All you know about is absence,” he said. “And you’re always looking to fill that absence.”

And do you know what I said to him? “You can stick your head up your hairy puss-filled absence.”

Ha, ha, ha, ha. Isn’t that funny? I threw a pun in his face. Of course, it was a violent pun, so maybe that doctor was right about me. Maybe I’m doomed to fill my empty life with fires and fists. Maybe I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life in jail cells like this one.

So I’m mulling these things, feeling double-dip-doomed, when Officer Dave visits me.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I say.

“Aren’t you getting tired of spending all your time in jail?”

“Jail here, jail there, it’s all the same.”

“You’re too young to be talking like that,” he says.

“Whatever,” I say.

Dave shakes his head. He looks disappointed. Depressed, even. I figure he’s going to walk away and never return.

“You’re running out of chances,” he says.

“What chances?” I ask.

“The chance to change your life.”

“Whatever,” I say.

“Well, listen up, Mr. Whatever,” Dave says. “I got you one more chance. Instead of more jail, I talked the judge into sending you to a halfway house.”

“Halfway to where?” I ask.

Officer Dave laughs and leaves me to my jailers. And those dang bullies take me out of my cell and ship me to a halfway house for juvenile offenders. I hate group homes even more than I hate foster homes.

I’ve had some nasty counselors and supervisors in group homes. Mean people, ugly people, and those sick bastards, those Uncle Creepy types, who try to stick their hands down your pants. I got sent to jail once because I punched one of those pedophiles in the crotch. I wanted to break his dick in half.

So I’m lying awake in a ground-floor bedroom of this juvie halfway house, where all the counselors are Uncle Creepy types who want to give you candy, and I’m thinking about running away when there’s a knock on the window.

I pull back the curtains and see him, the beautiful white kid, my new best friend.

I don’t know how he found me. But there he is. My hero.

He smiles and breaks the window.

I climb out and we escape together.

We run to an abandoned warehouse in SoDo, an industrial section of Seattle down near the waterfront.

We climb the dangerous stairs to the top floor where the white kid has made a home out of garbage and abandoned office furniture. We sit on chairs made out of newspapers. I laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he asks.

“I don’t even know your name,” I say.

He smiles, walks over to the corner, pulls something out of a sack, and walks back to me.

“This is my name,” he says, and hands me two pistols. One of them looks like a regular gun and the other one looks like a Star Wars laser.

“That one is a thirty-eight special,” the pretty boy says, “and the other one is a paint gun.”

I’ve seen paint-gun competitions on ESPN, those fake fights where fat white guys run around fake battlefields and shoot each other with balls of Day-Glo dye.

They like to fight fake wars because there aren’t enough real ones.

I’ve seen real people get shot by real guns. But I’ve never held a real gun. I’ve always heard and read that guns are cold metal. But not this one. It feels warm and comfortable, like a leather recliner sitting in front of a sixty-inch HDTV.

I laugh again.

“What’s funny this time?” he asks.

“Your name is Guns,” I say. “That’s a really stupid name.”

It’s his turn to laugh. “My name isn’t Guns,” he says. “My name is Justice.”

We laugh together.

“That is a corny-ass name,” I say. “Where’d you get it?”

“I gave it to myself,” he says. “But I wish I’d been given my name by Indians. You guys used to give out names because people earned them. Because they did something amazing. And it was the old people who gave out those names: the elders, the wise ones. I wish the wise ones were still here.”

I think of the great Oglala Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, who was given his name after he battled heroically against other Indians.

Yes, Indians have always loved to kill other Indians. Isn’t that twisted?

I think of how Crazy Horse was speared in the stomach by a U.S. Cavalry soldier while his best friend, Little Big Man, held his arms. I think of the millions of dead and dying Indians.

“Do you know about the Ghost Dance?” I ask.

“No,” Justice says. “Teach me.”

“It was this ceremony created by the Paiute holy man Wovoka, back in the eighteen-seventies. He said, if the Indians danced this dance long enough, all the dead Indians would return and the white people would disappear.”

“Sounds like my kind of dance,” Justice said.

“Yeah, but it didn’t work. All the Ghost Dancers were slaughtered.”

“Maybe they didn’t have the right kind of music.”

“Yeah, they should have had Metallica.”

Justice and I laugh. And then he stops laughing.

“Did you ever try to Ghost-Dance?” he asks.

“Nobody’s Ghost-Danced in over a hundred years,” I say. “And I don’t think one person can do it well enough to make it work. I think you need all Indians to do it.”

“Well, I think you’re strong enough to Ghost-Dance all by yourself. I think you can bring back all the Indians and disappear all the white people.”

I want to tell Justice that the only Indian I want to bring back is my father and the only white people I want to disappear are my evil foster families.

I guess Justice doesn’t realize that a successful Ghost Dance would make him disappear, too. But maybe he doesn’t think he’s white. Or maybe he thinks he’s invincible.

“The thing is,” Justice says, “what if this Ghost Dance is real? What if you can bring back your parents if you dance?”

“I don’t have rhythm,” I say.

“Be serious,” he says, and flashes the pistols at me. “What if you could resurrect your parents with these? Would you kill a white man if it would bring back your mother?”

Jesus, what a question.

Justice lets me think about my answer for two or three minutes, but I can’t say yes or no. I don’t know what I would do if I knew that killing someone would bring my mother back to life.

Then Justice says he’s hungry, so he hides the pistols again and we go on a food quest, rummaging through supermarket Dumpsters and restaurant trash cans.

For two weeks, we hunt for food during the night and talk during the day.

When we talk, Justice lets me hold the real pistol. We take the bullets out of it, and I practice pulling the trigger.

Click, click.

Then we tape up newspaper and magazine photos of people we hate, like George W Bush and Dick Cheney and Michael Jackson and that British dude from American Idol, and I practice shooting at them with the empty gun.

Click, click, click.

Then we go up on the roof of the warehouse, and I practice shooting at cars driving by on the freeway. And at people walking the streets down below us.

Click, click, click, click.

Some nights, Justice and I go out with the paint gun, hide in dark places, and shoot people.

The thing is, when two kids jump out of an alley and point a gun at you, it isn’t like you’re going to think, Oh, it’s just a paint gun.

Nope, you’re going to think, Oh, shit, two kids are going to kill me!

So, man, oh, man, do I hear some people scream. You know what’s really funny? When people think they’re going to die, they all scream like nine-year-old girls.

One night, down on the waterfront, a big old white guy faints when I point the gun at him. I don’t even have to cover him with red dye. He just falls down on the sidewalk and twitches.

Justice and I stand over the unconscious dude. He looks dead, and I feel powerful.

There are moments when a boy can feel immortal.

I practice killing people until it feels like I’m really killing them. I wonder how long it would take me to really shoot somebody. I wonder what would happen if I killed ten, twenty, or thirty people. If I killed enough people for real, would it begin to feel like practice?

Every night, after hours of talking and practice-shooting with the real gun and fake-shooting with the paint gun, Justice asks, “What would you do if the Ghost Dance is real?”

His question echoes in my head. It stays there and I want to give Justice the best answer. The only answer. The answer he wants.

“What if the Ghost Dance is real?” Justice asks me again and again.

The question crawls into my clothes and pushes its way through my skin and into my stomach. The question feeds me.

“Do you think the Ghost Dance is real?” Justice asks.

After hearing that question a thousand times, I finally have the answer.

“Yes,” I say.

Justice laughs and hugs me. I am so proud. I feel like I finally deserve his love.

“Okay, okay,” he says. “Now you can dance. Now you understand. Now you have the knowledge. Now you have the power. So what are you going to do with that power?”

I stare at the pistol in my hand.

“I’m going to start a fire,” I say.

“Yes,” Justice says, and keeps on hugging me. He loves me. And I love Justice.

The next day, during lunch hour, I stand in the lobby of a bank in downtown Seattle. Fifty or sixty people are here with me: men, women, and children of many different colors. I hear four or five different languages being spoken. And I guess these people have many different religions. But none of that matters. I know these people must die so my mother and father can return.

I breathe, try to relax, and pull the real and paint pistols out of my pocket. I say a little prayer and dance through the lobby. I aim my pistols at the faces of these strangers. They scream or fall to the floor or run or freeze or weep or curse or close their eyes.

One man points at me.

“You’re not real,” he says.

What a strange thing to say to a boy with a gun. But then I wonder if he’s right. Maybe I’m not real. And if I’m not real, none of these people are real. Maybe all of us are ghosts.

Can a ghost kill another ghost?

I push the real and paint pistols into the man’s face. And I pull the triggers.

I spin in circles and shoot and shoot and shoot. I keep pulling the triggers until the bank guard shoots me in the back of the head. I am still alive when I start to fall, but I die before I hit the floor.