Indian Killer

1. Mythology

THE SHEETS ARE DIRTY. An Indian Health Service hospital in the late sixties. On this reservation or that reservation. Any reservation, a particular reservation. Antiseptic, cinnamon, and danker odors. Anonymous cries up and down the hallways. Linoleum floors swabbed with gray water. Mop smelling like old sex. Walls painted white a decade earlier, now yellowed and peeling. Old Indian woman in a wheelchair singing traditional songs to herself, tapping a rhythm on her armrest, right index finger tapping, tapping. Pause. Tap, tap. A phone ringing loudly from behind a thin door marked PRIVATE. Twenty beds available, twenty beds occupied. Waiting room where a young Indian man sits on a couch and holds his head in his hands. Nurses’ lounge, two doctor’s offices, and a scorched coffee pot. Old Indian man, his hair bright white and unbraided, pushing his I.V. bottle down the hallway. He is barefoot and confused, searching for a pair of moccasins he lost when he was twelve years old. Donated newspapers and magazines stacked in bundles, months and years out of date, missing pages. In one of the examining rooms, an Indian family of four, mother, father, son, daughter, all coughing blood quietly into handkerchiefs. The phone still ringing behind the PRIVATE door. A cinderblock building, thick windows that distort the view, pine trees, flagpole. A 1957 Chevy parked haphazardly, back door flung open, engine still running, back seat damp and bloodstained. Empty now.

The Indian woman on the table in the delivery room is very young, just a child herself. She is beautiful, even in the pain of labor, the contractions, the sudden tearing. When John imagines his birth, his mother is sometimes Navajo. Other times she is Lakota. Often, she is from the same tribe as the last Indian woman he has seen on television. Her legs tied in stirrups. Loose knots threatening to unravel. The white doctor has his hands inside her. Blood everywhere. The nurses work at mysterious machines. John’s mother is tearing her vocal cords with the force of her screams. Years later, she still speaks in painful whispers. But during his birth, she is so young, barely into her teens, and the sheets are dirty.

The white doctor is twenty-nine years old. He has grown up in Iowa or Illinois, never seeing an Indian in person until he arrives at the reservation. His parents are poor. Having taken a government scholarship to make his way through medical school, he now has to practice medicine on the reservation in exchange for the money. This is the third baby he has delivered here. One white, two Indians. All of the children are beautiful.

John’s mother is Navajo or Lakota. She is Apache or Seminole. She is Yakama or Spokane. Her dark skin contrasts sharply with the white sheets, although they are dirty. She pushes when she should be pushing. She stops pushing when they tell her to stop. With clever hands, the doctor turns John’s head to the correct position. He is a good doctor.

The doctor has fallen in love with Indians. He thinks them impossibly funny and irreverent. During the hospital staff meetings, all of the Indians sit together and whisper behind their hands. There are no Indian doctors, but a few of the nurses and most of the administrative staff are Indian. The white doctor often wishes he could sit with the Indians and whisper behind his hand. But he maintains a personable and professional distance. He misses his parents, who still live in Iowa or Illinois. He calls them often, sends postcards of beautiful, generic landscapes.

The doctor’s hands are deep inside John’s mother, who is only fourteen, and who is bleeding profusely where they have cut her to make room for John’s head. But the sheets were dirty before the blood, and her vagina will heal. She is screaming in pain. The doctor could not give her painkillers because she had arrived at the hospital too far into labor. The Chevy is still running outside, rear door flung open, back seat red and damp. The driver is in the waiting room. He holds his head in his hands.

Are you the father?

No, I’m the driver. She was walking here when I picked her up. She was hitchhiking. I’m just her cousin. I’m just the driver.

The phone behind the PRIVATE door is still ringing. His mother pushes one last time and John slides into the good doctor’s hands. Afterbirth. The doctor clears John’s mouth. John inhales deeply, exhales, cries. The old Indian woman in the wheelchair stops singing. She hears a baby crying. She stops her tapping to listen. She forgets why she is listening, then returns to her own song and the tapping, tapping. Pause. Tap, tap. The doctor cuts the umbilical cord quickly. There is no time to waste. A nurse cleans John, washes away the blood, the remains of the placenta, the evidence. His mother is crying.

I want my baby. Give me my baby. I want to see my baby. Let me hold my baby.

The doctor tries to comfort John’s mother. The nurse swaddles John in blankets and takes him from the delivery room, past the old Indian man dragging his I.V. down the hallway, looking for his long-lost moccasins. She carries John outside. A flag hangs uselessly on its pole. No wind. The smell of pine. Inside the hospital, John’s mother has fainted. The doctor holds her hand, as if he were the loving husband and father. He remembers the family of four coughing blood into handkerchiefs in the examining room. The doctor is afraid of them.

With John in her arms, the nurse stands in the parking lot. She is white or Indian. She watches the horizon. Blue sky, white clouds, bright sun. The slight whine of a helicopter in the distance. Then the violent whomp-whomp of its blades as it passes overhead, hovers, and lands a hundred feet away. In the waiting room, the driver lifts his head from his hands when he hears the helicopter. He wonders if there is a war beginning.

A man in a white jumpsuit steps from the helicopter. Head ducked and body bent, the man runs toward the nurse. His features are hidden inside his white helmet. The nurse meets him halfway and hands him the baby John. The jumpsuit man covers John’s face completely, protecting him from the dust that the helicopter is kicking up. The sky is very blue. Specific birds hurl away from the flying machine. These birds are indigenous to this reservation. They do not live anywhere else. They have purple-tipped wings and tremendous eyes, or red bellies and small eyes. The nurse waves as the jumpsuit man runs back to the helicopter. She shuts the rear door of the Chevy, reaches through the driver’s open window, and turns the ignition key. The engine shudders to a stop.

Suddenly this is a war. The jumpsuit man holds John close to his chest as the helicopter rises. The helicopter gunman locks and loads, strafes the reservation with explosive shells. Indians hit the ground, drive their cars off roads, dive under flimsy kitchen tables. A few Indians, two women and one young man, continue their slow walk down the reservation road, unperturbed by the gunfire. They have been through much worse. The whomp-whomp of the helicopter blades. John is hungry and cries uselessly. He cannot be heard over the roar of the gun, the chopper. He cries anyway. This is all he knows how to do. Back at the clinic, his mother has been sedated. She sleeps in the delivery room. The doctor holds her hand and finds he cannot move. He looks down at his hand wrapped around her hand. White fingers, brown fingers. He can see the blue veins running through his skin like rivers. The phone behind the PRIVATE door stops ringing. Gunfire in the distance. Nobody, not even the white doctor, is surprised by this.

The helicopter flies for hours, it could be days, crossing desert, mountain, freeway, finally a city. Skyscrapers, the Space Needle, water everywhere. Thin bridges stretched between islands. John crying. The gunner holds his fire, but his finger is lightly feathering the trigger. He is ready for the worst. John can feel the distance between the helicopter and the ground below. He stops crying. He loves the distance between the helicopter and the ground. He feels he could fall. He somehow loves this new fear. He wants to fall. He wants the jumpsuit man to release him, let him fall from the helicopter, down through the clouds, past the skyscrapers and the Space Needle. But the jumpsuit man holds him tight so John will not fall. John cries again.

The helicopter circles downtown Seattle, moves east past Lake Washington, Mercer Island, hovers over the city of Bellevue. The pilot searches for the landing area. Five acres of green, green grass. A large house. Swimming pool. A man and woman waving energetically. Home. The pilot lowers the chopper and sets down easily. Blades making a windstorm of grass particles and hard-shelled insects. The gunner’s eyes are wide open, scanning the tree line. He is ready for anything. The jumpsuit man slides the door open with one arm and holds John in the other. Noise, heat. John cries, louder than before, trying to be heard. Home. The jumpsuit man steps down and runs across the lawn toward the man and woman, both white and handsome. He wears a gray suit and colorful tie. She wears a red dress with large, black buttons from throat to knee.

John cries as the jumpsuit man hands him to the white woman, Olivia Smith. She unbuttons the top of her dress, opens her bra, and offers John her large, pale breasts with pink nipples. John’s birth mother had small, brown breasts and brown nipples, though he never suckled at them. Still, he knows there is a difference, and as John takes the white woman’s right nipple into his mouth and pulls at her breast, he discovers it is empty. Daniel Smith wraps his left arm around his wife’s shoulders. He grimaces briefly and then smiles. Olivia and Daniel Smith look at the jumpsuit man, who is holding a camera. Flash, flash. Click of the shutter. Whirr of advancing film. All of them wait for a photograph to form, for light to emerge from shadow, for an image to burn itself into paper.

2. The Last Skyscraper in Seattle

WHEN NO BABY CAME after years of trying to conceive, Olivia and Daniel Smith wanted to adopt a baby, but the waiting list was so long. The adoption agency warned them that white babies, of course, were the most popular. Not that it was a popularity contest, they were assured. It was just that most of the couples interested in adopting a baby were white, so naturally, they wanted to adopt a white child, a child like them, but there were simply not enough white babies to go around.

“Listen,” the adoption agent said. “Let’s be honest. It’s going to take at least a year to find a suitable white child for you. Frankly, it may take much longer than that. Up to eight years or more. But we can find you another kind of baby rather quickly.”

“Another kind?” asked Olivia.

“Well, of course,” said the agent. “There’s always the handicapped babies. Down’s syndrome. Children missing arms and legs. Mentally retarded. That kind of kid. To be honest, it’s very difficult, nearly impossible, to find homes for those children. It’s perfectly understandable. These children need special care, special attention. Lots of love. Not very many people can handle it.”

“I don’t think we want that,” Daniel said. Olivia agreed.

“There are other options,” said the agent. “We have other difficult-to-place children as well. Now, there’s nothing wrong with these babies. They’re perfectly healthy, but they’re not white. Most are black. We also have an Indian baby. The mother is six months pregnant now.”

“Indian?” asked Daniel. “As in American Indian?”

“Yes,” said the agent. “The mother is very young, barely into her teens. She’s making the right decision. She’ll carry the baby to full term and give it up for adoption. Now, ideally, we’d place this baby with Indian parents, right? But that just isn’t going to happen. The best place for this baby is with a white family. This child will be saved a lot of pain by growing up in a white family. It’s the best thing, really.”

Olivia and Daniel agreed to consider adopting the Indian baby. They went home that night, ate a simple dinner, and watched television. A sad movie-of-the-week about an incurable disease. Daniel kept clearing his throat during the movie. Olivia cried. When it was over, Daniel switched off the television. They undressed for bed, brushed their teeth, and lay down together.

“What do you think?” asked Olivia.

“I don’t know,” said Daniel.

They made love then, both secretly hoping this one would take. They wanted to believe that everything was possible. An egg would drop, be fertilized, and begin to grow. As he moved inside his wife, Daniel closed his eyes and concentrated on an image of a son. That son would be exactly half of him. He saw a son with his chin and hair. He saw a baseball glove, bicycle, tree house, barking dog. Olivia wrapped her arms around her husband, pressed her face to his shoulder. She could feel him inside her, but it was a vague, amorphous feeling. There was nothing specific about it. During the course of their married life, the sex had mostly felt good. Sometimes, it had been uncomfortable, once or twice painful. But she did not feel anything this time. She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling.

Olivia knew she was beautiful. She had been a beautiful baby, little girl, teenager, woman. She had never noticed whether it was easy or hard to be that beautiful. It never really occurred to her to wonder about it. All her life, her decisions had been made for her. She was meant to graduate from high school, get into a good college, find a suitable young man, earn a B.A. in art history, marry, and never work. Somewhere between reading a biography of van Gogh and fixing dinner, she was supposed to have a baby. Except for producing that infant, she had done what was expected of her, had fulfilled the obligations of her social contract. She had graduated with honors, had married a handsome, successful architect, and loved sex in a guarded way. But the baby would not happen. The doctors had no explanations. Her husband’s sperm were of average count and activity. “In a swimming race,” their doctor had said, “your husband’s sperm would get the bronze.” She had a healthy uterus and her period was loyal to the moon’s cycles. But it did not work. “Listen,” the doctor had said. “There are some people who just cannot have babies together. We can’t always explain it. Medicine isn’t perfect.”

Still staring at the ceiling, Olivia moved her hips in rhythm with her husband’s. She wanted to ask him what he was thinking about, but did not want to interrupt their lovemaking. She lifted herself to her husband, listening to the patterns of his breathing until it was over.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you, too,” Daniel said.

He lifted himself off her and rolled to his side of the bed. She reached out and took his hand. He was crying. She held him until they fell asleep. When they woke in the morning, both had decided to adopt the Indian baby.

Olivia was determined to be a good mother. She knew it was a complicated situation, that she would have to explain her baby’s brown skin to any number of strangers. There was no chance that she would be able to keep her baby’s adoption a secret. Two white parents, a brown baby. There was no other way to explain it. But she did not fool herself into thinking that her baby would somehow become white just because she and Daniel were white. After John arrived, she spent hours in the library. With John sleeping beside her, she would do research on Native American history and culture. The adoption agency refused to divulge John’s tribal affiliation and sealed all of his birth records, revealing only that John’s birth mother was fourteen years old. Olivia spent hours looking through books, searching the photographs for any face like her son’s face. She read books about the Sioux, and Navajo, and Winnebago. Crazy Horse, Geronimo, and Sitting Bull rode horses through her imagination. She bought all the children’s books about Indians and read them aloud to John. Daniel thought it was an obsessive thing to do, but he did not say anything. He had named the baby John after his grandfather and thought it ironic. His grandfather had been born in Germany and never really learned much English, even after years in the United States.

“Honey,” Daniel whispered to his wife when John woke up crying. Three in the morning, the moon full and bright white. “Honey, it’s the baby.”

Olivia rose from bed, walked into the nursery, and picked up John. She carried him to the window.

“Look, sweetie,” she said to John. “It’s just the moon. See, it’s pretty.”

Daniel listened to his wife talking to their son.

“It’s the moon,” she said and then said the word in Navajo, Lakota, Apache. She had learned a few words in many Indian languages. From books, Western movies, documentaries. Once she saw an Indian woman at the supermarket and asked her a few questions that were answered with bemused tolerance.

“It’s just the moon,” whispered Olivia and then she softly sang it. “It’s the moon. It’s the moon.”

Daniel listened for a few minutes before he rolled over and fell asleep. When he woke the next morning, Olivia was standing at that same window with John in her arms, as if she’d been there all night.

“We need to get John baptized,” she said with a finality that Daniel didn’t question.

Because the baby John was Indian, Olivia and Daniel Smith wanted him to be baptized by an Indian, and they searched for days and weeks for the only Indian Jesuit in the Pacific Northwest. Father Duncan, a Spokane Indian Jesuit, was a strange man. A huge man, an artist. He painted contemporary landscapes, portraits, and murals that were highlighted with traditional Spokane Indian images. His work was displayed in almost every Jesuit community in the country. He was a great teacher, a revered theologian, but an eccentric. He ate bread and soup at every meal. Whole grains and vegetable broth, sourdough and chicken stock. He talked to himself, laughed at inappropriate moments, sometimes read books backward, starting with the last page and working toward the beginning. An irony, an Indian in black robes, he took a special interest in John and, with Olivia and Daniel’s heartfelt approval, often visited him. The Jesuit held the baby John in his arms, sang traditional Spokane songs and Catholic hymns, and rocked him to sleep. As John grew older, Father Duncan would tell him secrets and make him promise never to reveal them. John kept his promises.

On a gray day when John was six years old, Father Duncan took him to see the Chapel of the North American Martyrs in downtown Seattle. John found himself surrounded by vivid stained glass reproductions of Jesuits being martyred by Indians. Bright white Jesuits with bright white suns at their necks. A Jesuit, tied to a post, burning alive as Indians dance around him. Another pierced with dozens of arrows. A third, with his cassock torn from his body, crawling away from an especially evil-looking Indian. The fourth being drowned in a blue river. The fifth, sixth, and seventh being scalped. An eighth and ninth praying together as a small church burns behind them. And more and more. John stared up at so much red glass.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” asked Father Duncan.

John did not understand. He was not sure if Father Duncan thought the artwork was beautiful, or if the murder of the Jesuits was beautiful. Or both.

“There’s a myth, a story, that the blood of those Jesuits was used to stain the glass,” said Duncan. “But who knows if it’s true. We Jesuits love to tell stories.”

“Why did the Indians kill them?”

“They wanted to kick the white people out of America. Since the priests were the leaders, they were the first to be killed.”

John looked up at the stained glass Jesuits, then at the Spokane Indian Jesuit.

“But you’re a priest,” said John.

“Yes, I am.”

John did not have the vocabulary to express what he was feeling. But he understood there was something odd about the contrast between the slaughtered Jesuits and Father Duncan, and between the Indian Jesuit and the murderers.

“Did the white people leave?” asked John.

“Some of them did. But more came.”

“It didn’t work.”

“No.”

“Why didn’t the Indians kill all the white people?”

“They didn’t have the heart for it.”

“But didn’t white people kill most of the Indians?”

“Yes, they did.”

John was confused. He stared up at the martyred Jesuits. Then he noticed the large crucifix hanging over the altar. A mortally wounded Jesus, blood pouring from his hands and feet, from the wound in his side. John saw the altar candles burning and followed the white smoke as it rose toward the ceiling of the chapel.

“Was Jesus an Indian?” asked John.

Duncan studied the crucifix, then looked down at John.

“He wasn’t an Indian,” said the Jesuit, “but he should have been.”

John seemed to accept that answer. He could see the pain in Jesus’s wooden eyes. At six, he already knew that a wooden Jesus could weep. He’d seen it on the television. Once every few years, a wooden Jesus wept and thousands of people made the pilgrimage to the place where the miracle happened. If miracles happened with such regularity when did they cease to be miracles? And simply become ordinary events, pedestrian proof of God? John knew that holy people sometimes bled from their hands and feet, just as Jesus had bled from his hands and feet when nailed to the cross. Such violence, such faith.

“Why did they do that to Jesus?” asked John.

“He died so that we may live forever.”

“Forever?”

“Forever.”

John looked up again at the windows filled with the dead and dying.

“Did those priests die like Jesus?” asked John.

Father Duncan did not reply. He knew that Jesus was killed because he was dangerous, because he wanted to change the world in a good way. He also knew that the Jesuits were killed because they were dangerous to the Indians who didn’t want their world to change at all. Duncan knew those Jesuits thought they were changing the Indians in a good way.

“Did they die like Jesus?” John asked again.

Duncan was afraid to answer the question. As a Jesuit, he knew those priests were martyred just like Jesus. As a Spokane Indian, he knew those Jesuits deserved to die for their crimes against Indians.

“John,” Duncan said after a long silence. “You see these windows? You see all of this? It’s what is happening inside me right now.”

John stared at Duncan, wondering if the Jesuit had a stained glass heart. Rain began to beat against the windows, creating an illusion of movement on the stained faces of the murderous Indians and martyred Jesuits, and on young John’s face. And on Duncan’s. The man and child stared up at the glass.

Father Duncan’s visits continued until John was seven years old. Then, with no warning or explanation, Duncan was gone. When John asked his parents about Father Duncan’s whereabouts, Olivia and Daniel told him that the Jesuit had retired and moved to Arizona. In fact, Duncan’s eccentricities had become liabilities. After the strange Sunday when he had openly wept during Eucharist and run out of the church before the closing hymn, Duncan was summarily removed from active duty and shipped to a retreat in Arizona. He walked into the desert one week after he arrived at the retreat and was never seen again.

As he grew up, John kept reading the newspaper account of the disappearance, though it contained obvious errors. Anonymous sources insisted that Father Duncan had lost his faith in God. John knew that Duncan had never lost his faith, but had caused others to believe he did. His body was never found, though a search party followed Duncan’s tracks miles into the desert, until they simply stopped.

For John, though, Father Duncan did not vanish completely. The Jesuit, exhausted and sunburned, often visited him in dreams. Duncan never spoke. He just brought the smell, sounds, and images of the desert into John’s head. The wind pushing sand from dune to dune, the scorpions and spiders, the relentless yellow sun and deep blue sky, the stand of palm trees on the horizon. John always assumed it was a Catholic way to die, lost in the desert, no water, no food, the unforgiving heat. But the hallucinations must have been magical. John knew that real Indians climbed into the mountains to have vision quests. Stripped of their clothes, they ate and drank nothing. Naked and starved, they waited for a vision to arrive. Father Duncan must have been on a vision quest in the desert when he walked to the edge of the world and stepped off. Did it feel good to disappear? Perhaps Duncan, as Indian and Christian, had discovered a frightening secret and could not live with it. Perhaps Duncan knew what existed on the other side of the desert. Maybe he was looking for a new name for God.

John attended St. Francis Catholic School from the very beginning. His shoes always black topsiders polished clean. His black hair very short, nearly a crew cut, just like every other boy in school. He was the only Indian in the school, but he had friends, handsome white boys. And John had danced with a few pretty white girls in high school. Mary, Margaret, Stephanie. He had fumbled with their underwear in the back seats of cars. John knew their smell, a combination of perfume, baby powder, sweat, and sex. A clean smell on one level, a darker odor beneath. Their breasts were small and perfect. John was always uncomfortable during his time with the girls, and he was never sorry when it was over. He was impatient with them, unsure of their motives, and vaguely insulting. The girls expected it. It was high school and boys were supposed to act that way. The girls assumed the boys were much more complicated than they actually were. Inside, John knew that he was more simple and shallow than other boys, and less than real.

“What are you thinking?” the girls always asked John. But John knew the girls really wanted to tell him what they were thinking. John’s thoughts were merely starting points for the girls to talk about mothers and fathers, girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, pets, clothes, and a thousand other details. John felt insignificant at those times and retreated into a small place inside of himself, until the girls confused his painful silence with rapt interest.

The girls’ fathers were always uncomfortable when they first met John, and grew more irritated as he continued to date Mary, Margaret, or Stephanie. The relationships began and ended quickly. A dance or two, a movie, a hamburger, a few hours in a friend’s basement with generic rock music playing softly on the radio, cold fingers on warm skin.

“I just don’t think it’s working out,” she’d tell John, who understood. He could almost hear the conversations that had taken place.

“Hon,” a father would say to his daughter. “What was that boy’s name?”

“Which boy, daddy?”

“That dark one.”

“Oh, you mean John. Isn’t he cute?”

“Yes, he seems like a very nice young man. You say he’s at St. Francis? Is he a scholarship student?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Does it matter?”

“Well, no. I’m just curious, hon. By the way, what is he? I mean, where does he come from?”

“He’s Indian, daddy.”

“From India? He’s a foreigner?”

“No, daddy, he’s Indian from here. You know, American Indian. Like bows and arrows and stuff. Except he’s not like that. His parents are white.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Daddy, he’s adopted.”

“Oh. Are you going to see him again?”

“I hope so. Why?”

“Well, you know. I just think. Well, adopted kids have so many problems adjusting to things, you know. I’ve read about it. They have self-esteem problems. I just think, I mean, don’t you think you should find somebody more appropriate?”

The door would shut with a loud and insistent click. Mary, Margaret, or Stephanie would come to school the next day and give John the news. The daughters would never mention their fathers. Of course, there were a few white girls who dated John precisely because they wanted to bring home a dark boy. Through all of it, John repeatedly promised himself he would never be angry. He didn’t want to be angry. He wanted to be a real person. He wanted to control his emotions, so he would often swallow his anger. Once or twice a week, he felt the need to run and hide. In the middle of a math class or a history exam, he would get a bathroom pass and quickly leave the classroom. His teachers were always willing to give him a little slack. They knew he was adopted, an Indian orphan, and was leading a difficult life. His teachers gave him every opportunity and he responded well. If John happened to be a little fragile, well, that was perfectly understandable, considering his people’s history. All that alcoholism and poverty, the lack of God in their lives. In the bathroom, John would lock himself inside a stall and fight against his anger. He’d bite his tongue, his lips, until sometimes they would bleed. He would hold himself tightly and feel his arms, legs, and lower back shake with the effort. His eyes would be shut. He’d grind his teeth. One minute, two, five, and he would be fine. He would flush the toilet to make his visit seem normal, slowly wash his hands and return to the classroom. His struggles with his anger increased in intensity and frequency until he was visiting the bathroom on a daily basis during his senior year. But nobody noticed. In truth, nobody mentioned any strange behavior they may have seen. John was a trailblazer, a nice trophy for St. Francis, a successfully integrated Indian boy.

There were three hundred and seventy-six students at St. Francis. Along with three black kids, John was one of the four non-white students in the school. He was neither widely popular nor widely disliked. He played varsity basketball for two years, but never started, and entered the game when the outcome, a win or loss, was already decided. He was on the varsity only because he was an upperclassman and over six feet tall. His teammates cheered wildly whenever he entered the game because teammates are taught to behave that way. John understood this. He cheered for his teammates, even during those games in which he never played. He never really cared if the team won or lost. But he was always embarrassed when he had to play, because he knew he was not very good. In fact, he only played because his father, Daniel, a St. Francis alumnus, had been a star player.

“You need to get your hand behind the ball when you shoot,” Daniel Smith said to John during one of their driveway practices.

“Like this?” asked John, desperately trying to hold the basketball correctly.

“No,” Daniel said, calmly, patiently. Daniel Smith never raised his voice, not once, in all the years. He would coach John for hours, trying to show him how to play defense, box out for rebounds, throw the bounce pass. No matter how poorly John played, and he was awful, Daniel never yelled.

One winter, when John was a sophomore, Daniel read about an all-Indian basketball tournament that was going to be held at Indian Heritage High School in North Seattle. Daniel and Olivia both looked for any news about Indians and shared the information with John. The sportswriter made the tournament into some kind of joke, but Daniel thought it was a wonderful opportunity. He had never seen Indians play basketball. Maybe John would improve if he saw other Indians play.

John had spent time at different Indian events. Olivia had made sure of that. But he had never seen so many Indians crammed into such a small space. The Indian Heritage gym was full of Indians. All shapes and sizes, tribes and temperaments. Daniel and John found seats in the bleachers and watched a game between a Sioux team and a local team of Yakama Indians. The game was fast-paced and vaguely out of control, with offenses that took the first open shot, from anywhere on the court, and defenses that constantly gambled for steals. Most of the players were tall and impossibly thin, although a few were actually fat. The best player on the court was a chubby guy named Arnold, a Yakama Indian. Daniel and John knew he was named Arnold because they heard his name announced over the loudspeaker.

“Arnold for two.”

“Arnold with a three-pointer.”

“Arnold with the steal, and a nice pass for two.”

Daniel decided that Arnold was the best player he had ever seen. He could have played Division I basketball. God, Daniel thought, this Indian is fifty pounds overweight, closing in on forty years old, and still plays well.

“Watch,” Daniel said to John.

John was watching Arnold, but he was watching the people around him too. So many Indians, so many tribes, many sharing similar features, but also differing in slight and important ways. The Makahs different than the Quinaults, the Lummi different from the Puyallup. There were Indians with dark skin and jet-black hair. There were Indians with brown hair and paler skin. Green-eyed Indians. Indians with black blood. Indians with Mexican blood. Indians with white blood. Indians with Asian blood. All of them laughing and carrying on. Many Indians barely paying attention to the game. They were talking, telling jokes, and laughing loudly. So much laughter. John wanted to own that laughter, never realizing that their laughter was a ceremony used to drive away personal and collective demons. The Indians who were watching the game reacted mightily to each basket or defensive stop. They moaned and groaned as if each mistake were fatal, as if each field goal meant the second coming of Christ. But always, they were laughing. John had never seen so many happy people. He did not share their happiness.

“Look at him,” Daniel said. “Look at that guy play.”

John watched Arnold shoot a thirty-five-foot jumper that hit nothing but the bottom of the net. A glorious three-pointer. The crowd cheered and laughed some more. Arnold was laughing, on the court, doubled over, holding his stomach. Laughing so hard that tears ran down his face. His teammates were smiling and playing defense. The other team worked the ball around, trying to shoot a long jumper of their own, wanting to match Arnold’s feat. A big man caught the ball in the far corner, faked a dribble, then took the shot. An air ball, missing the basket and backboard completely, by two or three feet. The big man fell on his back, laughing. The crowd laughed and rolled all over the bleachers, pounding each other on the back, hugging each other tightly. One Yakama player grabbed the rebound and threw a long pass downcourt to Arnold. He caught the pass, fumbled the ball a bit, dribbled in for the layup, and missed it. So much laughter that the refs called an official timeout. John looked at his father. Daniel was laughing. John felt like crying. He did not recognize these Indians. They were nothing like the Indians he had read about. John felt betrayed.

John never did become a good basketball player, but he graduated from high school on time, in 1987. Since he was an Indian with respectable grades, John would have been admitted into almost any public university had he bothered to fill out even one application. His parents pushed him to at least try a community or technical college, but John refused. During his freshman year in high school, John had read an article about a group of Mohawk Indian steel workers who helped build the World Trade Center buildings in New York City. Ever since then, John had dreamed about working on a skyscraper. He figured it was the Indian thing to do. Since Daniel Smith was an architect, he sometimes flattered himself by thinking that John’s interest in construction was somehow related. Despite John’s refusal to go to college, his parents still supported him in his decision, and were sitting in the third row as he walked across the stage at St. Francis to accept his diploma. Polite applause, a few loud cheers from his friends, his mother and father now standing. John flipped his tassel from one side to the other, blinked in the glare of the flashbulbs, and tried to smile. He had practiced his smile, knew it was going to be needed for this moment. He smiled. The cameras flashed. John was finished with high school and would never attend college. He walked offstage and stepped onto the fortieth floor of an unfinished office building in downtown Seattle.

John Smith was now twenty-seven years old. He was six feet, six inches tall and heavily muscled, a young construction worker perfect for all of the heavy lifting. His black hair was long and tucked under his hard hat. When he had first started working, his co-workers used to give him grief about his hair, but half of the crew had long hair these days. Seattle was becoming a city dominated by young white men with tiny ponytails. John always had the urge to carry a pair of scissors and snip off those ponytails at every opportunity. He hated those ponytails, but he did not let them distract him at work. He was a good worker, quiet and efficient. He was eating lunch alone on the fortieth floor when he heard the voices again.

John swallowed the last of his cold coffee and gently set the thermos down. He cupped his hand to his ear. He knew he was alone on this floor, but the voices were clear and precise. During the quiet times, he could hear the soft why-why-why as Father Duncan’s leather sandals brushed against the sand on his long walk through the desert. Once, just once, John had heard the bubble of the baptismal fountain as Father Duncan dipped him into the water. Sometimes there were sudden sirens and explosions, or the rumble of a large crowd in an empty room. John could remember when it first happened, this noise in his head. He was young, maybe ten years old, when he heard strange music. It happened as he ran from school, across the parking lot, toward the car where Olivia waited for him. He knew this music was written especially for him: violins, bass guitar, piano, harmonica, drums. Now, as he sat on the fortieth floor and listened to those voices, John felt a sharp pain in his lower back. His belly burned.

“Jesus,” said John as he stood up, waving his arms in the air.

“Hey, chief, what you doing? Trying to land a plane?”

The foreman was standing in the elevator a few feet away. John liked to eat his lunch near the elevator so he could move quickly and easily between floors. He always liked mobility.

“Well,” said the foreman. “What’s up?”

John lowered his arms.

“On my break,” John said. He could still hear voices speaking to him. They were so loud, but the foreman was oblivious. The foreman knew John always ate lunch alone, a strange one, that John. Never went for beers after work. Showed up five minutes early every day and left five minutes late. He could work on one little task all day, until it was done, and never complain. No one bothered him because he didn’t bother anyone. No one knew a damn thing about John, except that he worked hard, the ultimate compliment. Not that the hard work mattered anymore, since there would be no more high-rise work in Seattle after they finished this job. They were building the last skyscraper in Seattle. Computers had made the big buildings obsolete. No need to shove that many workers into such a small space. After this last building was complete, the foreman would take a job for the state. He did not know what John had planned.

“Well,” the foreman said. “Lunch is over. Get in. We need you down on thirty-three.”

John was embarrassed. He felt the heat build in his stomach, rise through his back, and fill his head. It started that way. The heat came first, followed quickly by the music. A slow hum. A quiet drum. Then a symphony crashing through his spinal column. The foreman brought the heat and music. John looked at him, a short white man with a protruding belly and big arms. An ugly man with a bulbous nose and weak chin, though his eyes were a striking blue.

John knew if he were a real Indian, he could have called the wind. He could have called a crosscutting wind that would’ve sliced through the fortieth floor, pulled the foreman out of the elevator, and sent him over the edge of the building. But he’s strong, that foreman, and he would catch himself. He’d be hanging from the edge by his fingertips.

In his head, John could see the foreman hanging from the fortieth floor.

“Help me!” the foreman would shout.

John saw himself plant his feet just inches from the edge, reach down, take the foreman’s wrists in his hands, and hold him away from the building. John and the foreman would sway back and forth like a pendulum. Back and forth, back and forth.

“Jesus!” the foreman would shout. “Pull me up!”

John would look down to see the foreman’s blue eyes wide with fear. That’s what I need to see, that’s what will feed me, thought John. Fear in blue eyes. He would hold onto the foreman as long as possible and stare down into those terrified blue eyes. Then he’d let him fall.

“Let’s go, chief,” the foreman said, loud and friendly. “We ain’t got all day. We need you on thirty-three.”

John stepped into the elevator. The foreman pulled the gate shut and pressed the button for the thirty-third floor. Neither talked on the way down. John could feel the tension in his stomach as the elevator made its short journey. He fought against the music.

“Chuck needs your help,” the foreman said when they arrived.

John looked where the foreman pointed. The thirty-third floor was a controlled mess. Chuck, a white man with a huge moustache, was pounding a nail into place. He raised a hammer and brought it down on the head of the nail. He raised the hammer, brought it down again. Metal against metal. John saw sparks. Sparks. Sparks. He rubbed his eyes. The sparks were large enough and of long enough duration to turn to flame. The foreman didn’t see it. The rest of the crew didn’t see it. Chuck raised the hammer again and paused at the top of his swing. As the hammer began its next descent, John could see it happening in segments, as in a series of still photographs. In that last frozen moment, in that brief instant before the hammer struck again its explosion of flame, John knew exactly what to do with his life.

John needed to kill a white man.

3. Owl Dancing at the Beginning of the End of the World

JOHN SAT ALONE ON the fortieth floor. He could see a white man working at a small desk in an office across the street. A small man from any distance. John knew he could kill a white man, but he was not sure which white man was responsible for everything that had gone wrong. He thought hard that day, could barely work, and often stared off into space, trying to decide. Which white man had done the most harm to the world? Was it the richest white man? Was it the poorest white man? John believed that both the richest and poorest white men in the country lived in Seattle.

The richest man owned a toy company. No. He owned the largest toy company in the world. It had thousands of employees. John saw the rich man on television. In commercials. On talk shows. On goofy game shows. His wedding was broadcast nationally. He had married a movie star, one of those beautiful actresses whose name John always forgot. Julie, Jennifer, Janine. The rich man’s name was short and masculine, a three-lettered name that was somehow smaller and still more important than John. Bob or Ted or Dan or something like that. A monosyllabic, triangular monument of a name. A name where every letter loudly shouted its meaning. John could not understand how a man named Bob or Ted became rich and famous by selling toys. How can a toy maker meet and marry a beautiful actress? John knew that Bob or Dan must have sold his soul, that slaves worked in his factories. Thousands of children. No. Indians. Thousands of Indians chained together in basements, sweating over stupid board games that were thinly disguised imitations of Scrabble and Monopoly, cheap stuffed monkeys, and primitive computer games where all the illegal space aliens were blasted into pieces. But John could not convince himself that the richest man in the world deserved to die. It was too easy. If he killed the richest white man in the world, then the second-richest white man would take his place. Nobody would even notice the difference. All the money would be switched from one account to another. All the slaves would stop making toys, move to another factory, and begin making car alarms, director’s chairs, or toasters. John could kill a thousand rich white men and not change a thing.

The poorest white man in the world stole aluminum cans from John’s garbage. Well, that was not exactly true. Every Monday, John set the cans outside his apartment building for the recycling truck to collect, but the poorest white man always arrived first. John watched him from his bedroom window. The poorest white man dressed in ragged clothes. His skin diseased, face deeply pockmarked, hair pulled back in a greasy ponytail. The poor man would pick up the aluminum cans one by one and drop them into his shopping cart. Empty Campbell’s tomato soup cans, Pepsi cans, cans that once held stew or creamed corn, hash or pineapple chunks. One by one, carefully, as if the aluminum cans were fragile, priceless. John hoped the poorest white man sold the cans for cents on the pound, and then bought some food. The poorest man might have a family, a white wife, white kids, all starving in some city park. But John knew the poorest man sold the cans for booze money. He just drank and drank. Fortified wine, rubbing alcohol, Sterno. John hated poor white men, but he knew killing them was a waste. They were already dead. They were zombies. John could stick a bomb in one of his aluminum cans. A mercury switch. When the zombie picked up the can, the switch would move, and boom! But it would be a small gesture, little more than waving good-bye to someone you had just met.

Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief. Lawyer, doctor, architect, construction foreman. John knew this was the most important decision in his life. Which white man had done the most harm to Indians? He knew that priests had cut out the tongues of Indians who continued to speak their tribal languages. He had seen it happen. He had gathered the tongues in his backpack and buried them in the foundation of a bank building. He had held wakes and tried to sing like Indians sing for the dead. But Father Duncan was proof of something bigger, wasn’t he? Father Duncan, an Indian, had walked into the desert like a holy man and disappeared. Whenever he closed his eyes, John could see the desert. The cacti, lizards, washes, and sand dunes, the lack of water. John knew what water meant to life. A man could have a camel loaded down with food, enough for weeks, but that same man would die without water. A man without water could last for two days, three days, four days at most. Father Duncan did not take any water into the desert with him. He left behind his paints and an empty canvas. He left behind his hat and shoes. But there was no water in the desert, not for miles and miles. How could Father Duncan have survived such a journey? How was he saved? How had he arrived in John’s dreams, both awake and asleep? John could see the stand of palm trees at the horizon, either an illusion or a place of safety. Could see Duncan in his black robe staggering across the hot sand. If John concentrated hard, he could see Father Duncan’s red-rimmed eyes, cracked lips, burned skin. So much thirst.

After quitting time, John rode the elevator down through the unfinished building. He rode with the foreman and a couple other co-workers named Jim and Jerry. Nobody knew the foreman’s name. He was simply known as the foreman. John knew these white men were mostly harmless and would live forever. They would leave work and have a few beers at the same tavern where they had been drinking together for years. They were regulars. Jim, Jerry, and the foreman would walk into the bar and all the patrons would loudly greet their arrival.

John stepped off the elevator, ignored offers to go for beers, and walked through the downtown Seattle streets. There were so many white men to choose from. Everybody was a white man in downtown Seattle. The heat and noise in his head were loud and painful. He wanted to run. He even started to run. But he stopped. He could not run. Everybody would notice. Everybody would know that he was thinking about killing white men. The police would come. John breathed deeply and started to walk slowly. He was walking in work boots and flannel shirt through Seattle, where men in work boots and flannel shirts were often seen walking. No one even noticed John. That is to say that a few people looked up from their books and a couple drivers looked away from the street long enough to notice John, then turned back to their novels and windshields. “There’s an Indian walking,” they said to themselves or companions, though Indians were often seen walking in downtown Seattle. John the Indian was walking and his audience was briefly interested, because Indians were briefly interesting. White people no longer feared Indians. Somehow, near the end of the twentieth century, Indians had become invisible, docile. John wanted to change that. He wanted to see fear in every pair of blue eyes. As John walked, his long, black hair was swept back by the same wind that watered his eyes. He walked north along the water, across the University Bridge, then east along the Burke-Gilman Trail until he was standing in a field of grass. He had made it to the wilderness. He was free. He could hunt and trap like a real Indian and grow his hair until it dragged along the ground. No. It was a manicured lawn on the University of Washington campus, and John could hear drums. He had been on the campus a few times before but had never heard drums there. He walked toward the source of the drums. At first, he thought it was Father Duncan. He was not sure why Father Duncan would be playing drums. Then he saw a crowd of Indians gathered outside a large auditorium, Hec Edmundson Pavilion. There were two drums, a few singers and dancers, and dozens of Indians watching the action. So many Indians in one place. There were white people watching, too, but John turned away from their faces. He stepped into the crowd, wanting to disappear into it. A small Indian woman was standing in front of John. She smiled.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said.

“I’m Marie. Are you a new student here?”

“No.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. She was the activities coordinator for the Native American Students Alliance at the University and thought she’d found a recruit. A potential friendship or possible romance.

“What’s your name?”

“John.”

“What tribe you are?”

He could not, would not, tell her he had been adopted as a newborn by a white couple who could not have children of their own. Along with the clipping about Father Duncan’s disappearance, John always carried the photograph of the day his parents had picked him up from the adoption agency. In the photograph, his father’s left arm is draped carefully over his mother’s shoulders, while she holds John tightly to her dry right breast. Both wear expensive, tasteful clothes. John had no idea who had taken the picture.

His adopted parents had never told him what kind of Indian he was. They did not know. They never told him anything at all about his natural parents, other than his birth mother’s age, which was fourteen. John only knew that he was Indian in the most generic sense. Black hair, brown skin and eyes, high cheekbones, the prominent nose. Tall and muscular, he looked like some cinematic warrior, and constantly intimidated people with his presence. When asked by white people, he said he was Sioux, because that was what they wanted him to be. When asked by Indian people, he said he was Navajo, because that was what he wanted to be.

“I’m Navajo,” he said to Marie.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m Spokane.”

“Father Duncan,” said John, thinking instantly of the Spokane Indian Jesuit.

“What?”

“Father Duncan was Spokane.”

“Father Duncan?” asked Marie, trying to attach significance to the name, then remembering the brief fragment of a story her parents had told her. “Oh, you mean that one who disappeared, right?”

John nodded his head. Marie was the first person he’d met, besides the Jesuits at St. Francis, who knew about Father Duncan. John trembled.

“Did you know him?” asked Marie.

“He baptized me,” said John. “He used to visit me. Then he disappeared.”

“I’m sorry,” said Marie, who was definitely not Christian. With disgust, she remembered when the Spokane Indian Assembly of God Church held a book burning on the reservation and reduced Catcher in the Rye, along with dozens of other books, to ash.

“I know a Hopi,” said Marie, trying to change the subject. “Guy named Buddy who works at the U. He’s a history teacher. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“Oh, I thought you might. He hangs around with the Navajo bunch. Jeez, but they tease him something awful, too.”

John barely made eye contact with Marie. Instead, he watched all of the Indians dancing in circles on the grass. It was an illegal powwow, not approved by the University. John could figure out that much when he noticed how the dancers were trampling on the well-kept lawn. Indians were always protesting something. Marie had organized the powwow as a protest against the University’s refusal to allow a powwow. Only a few of the Indians had originally known that, but most everybody knew now, and danced all that much harder.

Marie had been organizing protests since her days on the Spokane Indian Reservation, though she had often been the only protestor. A bright child who read by age three, she had quickly passed her classmates by. When they had all been five and six years old, Marie had friends because she was smart. Everybody wanted to be smart. But as the years passed, many of Marie’s reservation friends flunked classes, lost interest, were intimidated into silence by cruel, white teachers, or simply had no energy for school because of hunger. Marie felt more and more isolated. Some bright kids were more interested in Spokane Indian culture than in a public school education. Many of those kids skipped school so they could travel to powwows or attend various cultural events. During the summer, when powwow season was really in swing, those kids were too busy to pick up books. They could speak Spokane as fluently as many elders, but they could barely read English. They were intelligent and humorous, and never wanted to leave the reservation. They had chosen that life, and Marie both resented and envied them. Because she did not dance or sing traditionally, and because she could not speak Spokane, Marie was often thought of as being less than Indian. Her parents, who did speak Spokane, had refused to teach Marie because they felt it would be of no use to her in the world outside the reservation. Her mother, the speech therapist at the tribal school, and her father, the principal, knew their bright daughter belonged in that larger world. Instead of teaching her about Spokane culture, they bought her books by the pound at pawn shops, secondhand stores, and garage sales. She read those books and many others, studied hard at school, and endured constant bullying and taunting from many of her peers. Marie learned to fight, and her best friend, Sugar, a traditional dancer and accomplished street fighter, helped. Marie fought fiercely, without control or thought. She tackled people, bit and pinched, spat and kicked. She refused to accept beatings. She always wanted revenge, and would wait until the perfect moment, which could be months later, to ambush her enemies. In one memorable instance, she had stolen a knife from the high school cafeteria and chased Double Andy across the playground. Marie had really meant to stab Double Andy. Everybody had seen the crazy look in Marie’s eyes that day and nobody bullied her for months after that. Still, her nose had been broken four times before she graduated high school.

After two years at tribal college, she was accepted into the University of Washington on a full scholarship. Through her intelligence and dedication, Marie had found a way to escape the reservation. Now she was so afraid the reservation would pull her back and drown her in its rivers that she only ventured home for surprise visits to her parents, usually arriving in the middle of the night. Even then, she felt like a stranger and would sometimes leave before her parents knew she was there. And she rarely spoke to any of her reservation friends. She was twenty-three, near the end of her final year as an English major, when she met John Smith.

“You live around here?” Marie asked John.

“No,” he said.

“Man, you’re breathing hard,” she said, trying to make conversation. “What did you do, run here?”

“No, but I thought about it.”

Marie laughed because she thought he was making a joke. John looked at her, not really sure why she was laughing.

“I can’t believe the U wouldn’t let us have a powwow in Hec Ed this year,” Marie said.

“What’s Hec Ed?”

“In the Hec Ed Pavilion,” Marie said. “You know, the gym? Inside there? They wouldn’t let us rent it this year, so we’re messing up their nice lawn. I can’t believe the cops haven’t come yet.”

“The cops? Really?”

“No, not really. We’ve got too many reporters here already. The U isn’t going to stop us now. They’d look really bad. You know how white people are.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Expecting the usual Indian banter, Marie waited for him to say more. When he remained silent, she accepted that silence as being just as Indian as the banter, and turned away from him to watch the dancers. John knew that his silence was acceptable, but he also knew that he could have asked about her tribe, that Indians quizzed Indians about all the Indian friends, family, lovers, and acquaintances they might have in common. He was afraid she would discover that he was an Indian without a tribe.

Even though he had felt like a fraud at urban powwows, he had always loved them. Often, when he was a child, Olivia and Daniel had taken him. Through years of observation and practice, he had learned how an Indian was supposed to act at a powwow. When he got old enough to go without Daniel and Olivia, he could pretend to be a real Indian. He could sit in a huge crowd of Indians and be just another anonymous, silent Skin. That was what real Indians called each other. Skins. Other Indian men might give him that indigenous head nod, which confirmed a connection he did not feel. Indian women might give him that look which implied an interest he ignored. But he had always known that if he remained silent, he would receive a respectful silence in return. If he pursued conversation, the real Indians would be happy to talk. With Marie, he had chosen his usual silence.

She stood beside him. He could feel her there, but he continued to watch the dancers move in circles. A tall fancydancer caught his attention. The fancydancer cartwheeled across the grass, his brightly colored feathers nearly shocking in their clarity. Reds and blues, yellows and greens. The crowd gasped at the cartwheels. The fancydancer was bold, original, dangerous. Many Indian elders would surely disapprove of the cartwheels. Many elders dismissed any kind of fancydancing. It was too modern, too white, the dance of children who refused to grow up.

“Jeez,” Marie said of the fancydancer. “He’s good.”

John turned his head to look at her. She smiled. She was a pretty, small-boned woman at least a foot shorter than he was. Her black hair was very long, hanging down below her waist. With her wire-rimmed glasses and black blazer, she looked scholarly and serious, even as she smiled. Her teeth were just a little crowded, as if there were one tooth too many. Her nose looked as if it had been broken once or twice. She had large, dark eyes magnified by her prescription.

“Do you dance?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“The strong silent type?” she asked. “All stoic and stuff, huh? How long you been working on that Tonto face? You should try out for the movies.”

He swallowed hard and tried to concentrate on the dancers again. She stared at him. With his looks and stature, she thought, John could have been a wonderful traditional dancer. The old style, slow and dignified, a proud man’s dance. John felt the power of her gaze, and was about to make an escape when the powwow’s master of ceremonies called for an owl dance.

“It’s ladies’ choice,” said the emcee. “Ladies, go snag yourself a warrior. If he says no, you bring him to me. Men, you know you can’t refuse a woman who asks you to dance. You’ll either pay up or tell everybody why you broke her heart.”

“Hey,” Marie said. “Do you want to dance?”

“I guess,” he said. He had learned about owl dances, but feared them. John knew many Indian tribes believed the owl was a messenger of death. For those Indians, the owl was death itself. Yet, those same Indians who feared the owl still owl danced. John had always been confused by that. Were the Indians dancing out of spite? Were they challenging the owl? Or perhaps they were dancing to prove their courage. With Indians, death was always so close anyway. When Indians owl danced, their shadows were shaped like owls. What was one more owl in a room full of Indians dancing like owls?

She led him to the dance floor, where all the other couples had already formed a circle. There were old married couples, newlyweds, potential lovers, siblings, mothers and sons, a few reluctant teenagers, and a handful of preschoolers. Marie took John’s left hand in her right, and placed her left hand on his right shoulder. He reluctantly placed his right hand on her left hip. Together like that, they waited for a few other stragglers to join the circle, all of the dancers waiting for the drums to begin.

“I’m not any good at this,” he said. He had danced clumsy near-waltzes at high school dances with white girls, but had never danced with an Indian woman. He had never been close enough to an Indian woman to dance.

“Just like a foxtrot,” she said as the drums began. “Two steps forward, one step back. With the beat. Twirl me around when everybody else does.”

“Okay,” he said. He did as he was told. He looked down at his feet, tried to stay in rhythm, failed miserably.

“You’re a horrible dancer,” she said with a laugh. He dropped her hand, stopped dancing, stepped back.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wanting to run again.

“Jeez, it’s okay,” she said and smiled. “Just keep dancing. You can’t quit.”

It was a broom owl dance. One woman stood alone in the middle of the circle of dancers, holding a broom. She ran up to another dancing woman, gave her the broom, and they switched places. The displaced woman took the broom, ran around the circle, and gave the broom to a third woman. A kind of Indian musical chairs. There was much laughter. Friends chose friends. Sisters chose sisters. The broom passed from hand to hand. A tiny girl, barely able to lift the broom, dragged it around the circle, and gave it to her mother, who was dancing with the little girl’s father. More laughter. The emcee encouraged everybody, told bad jokes, teased the young lovers. Everybody kept dancing, two steps forward, one step back. As John danced with Marie, he looked at the other dancers, men, women and children, all with dazzling eyes and bright smiles. So much happiness so close to him, but John could not touch it.

Marie saw the sadness in John’s eyes. She had approached him because she thought he was a fellow student, another urban Indian, but now she felt his confusion and loss. He didn’t know how to dance, didn’t seem to recognize anybody at the powwow. Nobody shouted out his name in an effort to embarrass him as he danced. He was a stranger here, and Marie understood that isolation. Though she had blossomed in college and would be graduating with honors, her work for the Native American Students Alliance and her job at a downtown homeless shelter had led Marie to so many Indians who were, as John was, as she was, outcasts from their tribes. They were forced to create their own urban tribe. Some had been forced to leave their reservations because they were different, like Fawn, the Crow who would not talk about what had happened to her in Montana. Some had never lived on their reservations and had very little connection to their tribes. Nick, the son of a Ute doctor and Cheyenne nurse, had grown up upper-middle-class in St. Louis.

But, somehow, most every urban Indian still held closely to his or her birth tribe. Marie was Spokane, would always be Spokane. But she was also an urban Indian, an amalgamation that included over two hundred tribes in the same Seattle area where many white people wanted to have Indian blood. Marie was always careful to test people, to hear their stories, to ask about their tribes, their people, and their ties to the land from which they originated. The pretend Indians had no answers for these questions, while real Indians answered the questions easily, and had a few questions of their own for Marie. Indians were always placing one another on an identity spectrum, with the more traditional to the left and the less traditional Indians to the right. Marie knew she belonged somewhere in the middle of that spectrum and that her happiness depended on placing more Indians to her right. She wondered where John belonged.

“Hey,” Marie said to him. “You’re getting it now.”

John listened carefully to the drums, which had drowned out all the other noises in his head. He concentrated on the music, his brow furrowed. Sweat, deep breaths.

“Jeez,” Marie said. “Take it easy. You’re supposed to be having fun.”

A little girl handed Marie the broom. Suddenly, John was looking down at a new dance partner. She had huge brown eyes and short brown hair. She smiled with a mouthful of braces.

“I’m Kim,” she said, laughed, and then ducked her head. She was playing at a courtship game, flirting and teasing with John as if she were ten years older than she was. This was all practice for her.

“I’m John.”

The dance stopped, drums suddenly silent. The dancers clapped and thanked each other. The audience cheered. John looked for Marie. She was talking to a tall Indian man in traditional dance regalia. She stopped talking long enough to notice John. She smiled and waved. John raised his hand a little. He tried to smile, but could not make it happen. The traditional dancer with Marie turned toward John. He was fierce looking, all sharp feathers and angry beads, and seemed to be ten feet tall. John was not surprised that Indians had always terrified white people. He wondered what the early European settlers must have thought when they first encountered an Indian warrior in all of his finest regalia. Even in his flannel shirts and blue jeans, John knew he was intimidating. If I were dressed like a real Indian, John thought, I could rule the world.

“Thank you for the dance,” said the little girl, Kim. She was still standing beside John, waiting for him to acknowledge her presence with a traditional politeness.

“Thank you,” John said.

“You know,” she said. “I’m a twin. My sister’s name is Arlene. She’s sick. That’s why she’s not here. Do you know her?”

“What? No, I don’t know her,” John said. “I’m sorry she’s sick. Tell her I said so. Tell her to get well.”

Kim giggled and ran away. John watched the little girl run back into the arms of an old Indian woman, her grandmother perhaps, and then he turned back toward Marie. But she was gone. John scanned the crowd. She had disappeared. He breathed deeply. Had she left with the traditional dancer? No. The dancer, standing with a group of other dancers, was drinking a Pepsi. Disappointed, John walked away. He turned his back and left the powwow. He wasn’t even sure why he was disappointed, but he had overheard real Indian men talk to real Indian women. He could have mimicked their easy banter, their fluid conversation.

He could have said, “I’m not a dancer.”

“I figured that one out,” Marie might have said.

He could have been funny and self-deprecating. “I can’t sing, either. When I dance and sing, I’m insulting thousands of years of tribal traditions. I’ve got to be careful, you know? I start dancing and they close the powwow. That’s it. John has ruined it for everybody, the powwow’s over.” But John couldn’t say anything. Not to the Indian woman who knew Father Duncan. Not to the beautiful Indian woman with the crooked front tooth.

Walking silently and quickly away from the powwow, John found himself on University Way, the heart of the University District, which everybody called simply the Ave. John could never understand things like that. Why did people change names as easily as they changed clothes? Though it was just another Monday night, dozens of people walked the Ave. Secondhand bookstores and a dozen Asian restaurants. Movie theaters and street performers. A black man in a wheelchair outside Tower Records calling out to everybody who passed him. Three dogs in red bandannas being walked by a twenty-something white woman wearing a blue bandanna. A teenage white couple kissing in a doorway. They were all so young and white, whiter, whitest. Three Asian-Americans, two African-Americans, but everybody else was white and whiter and younger than John. So many people. John was dizzy. He staggered as he walked and bumped into a knot of people who were bidding each other good night.

“Hey,” said one of the young white men. “Watch your step, chief.”

The white man wore faded clothes that were supposed to be old, but they were expensive new clothes designed to look old. A goatee and pierced ears, small gold hoops that looked good, blue flannel shirt, a black stocking cap, big brown leather boots. John stared at him.

“You okay, buddy?” asked the white man.

John was silent, carefully listening to the sounds of the street.

“Hey, chief,” said the white man. “Had a few too many? You need some help?”

John did not respond. The white man was trying to be friendly. He was really not a man, John thought, just a boy dressed like a man. Though John was only a few years older, he felt ancient. He knew that Indians were supposed to feel ancient, old and wise. He concentrated on feeling old and wise, until the youth and relative innocence of this young white man infuriated him. John felt the rage he didn’t like to feel.

“Hey,” said the young man. “Hey, are you okay?”

“You’re not as smart as you think you are,” John said. “Not even close.”

The young man smiled, confused and a little intimidated.

“Calm down there, dude,” he said.

“I’m older than the hills,” said John, holding his hands out toward the white man. The young man looked at his friends, who shrugged their shoulders and smiled nervously. He turned back to John and flashed him the peace sign.

John was surprised by the gesture. He took a step back, momentarily disarmed. The young man finished his good-byes to his companions and walked away. John watched as the young white man crossed against the light, stopped briefly to look at himself in a store window, and then walked south down the Ave. Carefully and silently, John followed him.

4. How He Imagines His Life on the Reservation

IT IS A GOOD LIFE, not like all the white people believe reservation life to be. There is enough food, plenty of books to read, and a devoted mother. She is very young, probably too young to have a son like John Smith, but it had happened and she has coped well. She had nearly given John up for adoption but changed her mind at the last minute. The social workers had tried to convince her otherwise, but John’s mother refused to let him go.

“He’s my son,” she’d said. “He’s always going to be my son.”

They live with a large extended family group in a small house. John and his mother share a bedroom with two girl cousins. John’s two uncles and two aunts share another bedroom. John’s maternal grandparents share the third bedroom. One small boy cousin sleeps in a walk-in closet. Five or six transient relatives sleeping on the living room floor on any given night.

Everybody plays Scrabble.

It is not easy to explain why this particular group of Indians plays Scrabble. John’s grandmother had bought their Scrabble game for a dollar at a secondhand store. For some reason, all the E tiles were missing when she brought it home. E is the most common letter in the alphabet, John knows, but that does not explain why all the tiles are gone. The family has always compensated by allowing any other tile to function as an E. It has worked well. It is diplomatic. Near the end of a game, when John’s rack is filled with difficult letters, Q, Z, K, and he has nowhere to play them, he can always pretend they are all E tiles.

They eat well.

For breakfast, there is always corn flakes and milk, orange juice, whole wheat toast. John’s grandparents love their coffee black and his mother mixes hers with lots of sugar. John’s cousins eat quickly and run to school. They can all read and love their teachers, who are Indian. John is too young for school, but is smart enough to read books. He reads books all day, waiting to be old enough for kindergarten. His mother reads to him sometimes. They sit on the couch together and read books. John sometimes pretends that all of the difficult words, the big words with their amorphous ideas, are simpler and clear. A word like democracy can become rain instead. That changes everything. John can read a phrase from his history book and change it to “Our Founding Fathers believed in rain.”

John’s grandparents are very traditional people and are teaching John the ways of his tribe. Ancient ways. John is learning to speak his tribal language. Sometimes, the whole family plays Scrabble using the tribal language. This is much more difficult and John always loses, but he is learning. There are words and sounds in the tribal language that have no corresponding words or sounds in English. John feels the words in his heart, but it is hard to make his mouth work that way.

John is also learning to dance. His grandmother has made him a grassdancing outfit because he loves to dance.

“Listen to me,” his grandmother says. “The grassdancers are special. You see, the grassdancers were always the first ones in the old ways. They’re not first anymore, but before, they would dance in the tall grass and knock it down, make it flat enough for the other dancers. That’s why the grassdancers move the way they do. Even if there’s no grass, they have to pretend there is. Stomp the grass down when you dance. But remember, you have to fool the grass, too. You have to sneak up on it. You have to look like grass, move like grass, smell like grass. That’s why grassdancers look like they do.”

John is four years old when he dances at a powwow for the first time. His entire family is in the audience, cheering him on as loudly as tradition allows. He is nervous, waiting for the drums. Then they begin, and the singers, too, with their high-pitched wails. They are singing in a way that John feels in the center of himself, from his feet to his hair. The head dancer, a huge man in a traditional outfit, leads the dancers into the hall. This is the Grand Entry, the welcoming, the beginning of another powwow, John’s first as a dancer.

He dances with the other grassdancers, young men mostly. There are a few middle-aged grassdancers, but grassdancing is mostly for the young. They dance in order of age. The oldest dancers enter first, followed by the next oldest, until, finally, the youngest, John. He turns in fast circles. He is the grass. He is the grass.

John’s mother watches from the bleachers. She loves her son and cannot believe she almost gave him away. But that was so long ago, a million years ago, and she would never give him away now. Not for anything. Not for all the money in the world. She taps her feet in rhythm with the drums. She is a dancer, too, but wants this moment to be her son’s. If she were dancing, she would not be able to see him make his first circle. He looks up into the crowd, looking for her. She waves her arms wildly. He sees her. He tries not to smile. Grassdancing is serious business. But he cannot help himself and grins with all of his teeth.

For lunch, when he is ten years old, John eats peanut butter sandwiches. The peanut butter is commodity food, government surplus, but it still tastes good. There are dozens of cans and boxes of commodity food in the house. John’s mother uses them in wonderful and original ways. She makes the best commodity beef stew in Indian history.

She starts with the beef. She opens the can with a manual opener, a sharp and clever device. She barely has to work because the cutting is so easy. She pours the beef into a saucepan, seasons it with salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne, and brings it to a boil. In a separate pan, she combines vegetables from her garden — carrots, peas, celery, onions — and heats until tender. At the last possible moment, she combines beef and vegetables, stirring together. Stirring. When the vegetables are shiny with beef grease, his mother fills a bowl for each member of the family. They sit together to eat. Most every night, his cousins, grandparents, his entire family, all eat together. Then, of course, they have the fry bread. The fry bread! Water, flour, salt, rolled together and deep-fried. There is nothing like that smell, fry bread sizzling on the stove, a slight smoke filling the house. John can smell the fry bread smoke in his clothes. The scent rumbles his stomach. He loves this time, the dipping of fry bread into beef stew.

“So,” says his mother. “What did you do today?”

“We were over to the pipes today,” John says. He cannot lie.

“I told you not to go there,” his mother says, a little angry. John knows her anger is because of love. The pipes are abandoned sewer pipes piled on a hillside near the old high school. Rusted metal, in fifty-foot sections, the pipes are magical, the reservation playground. Running water and soil erosion have created caves beneath the pipes, and certain pipes, propped up by others, rise at gentle angles in the air. It is a maze. One pipe, pinned between two others, is nearly vertical. Only the strongest of the boys and girls can climb inside that pipe, using its metal ribs for handholds. Crazy Randy climbs to the top of that pipe and hangs down from the rim, thirty feet above the ground. Everybody is jealous of Randy’s strength and courage. They crowd around him to look at the cuts on his hands when he comes down. In the five years since the pipes were left there, no Indian child has ever been seriously hurt. There have been a few cuts and bruises, a couple of close calls, but the Indian children are safe in the pipes, a kind of safety that adults can never understand.

“It’s okay, mom,” John says. “Nobody gets hurt.”

John smiles, beams really, and tries to hide his glee. Just that day, he had climbed into a cave beneath the pipes, a small cave with an even smaller entrance. When John climbed inside, he saw Dawn, the most beautiful Indian girl in the world, face smudged with dirt, stray grass in her hair, holes in her jeans.

“Shh,” she said. “I’m hiding from Verla and them.”

“Oh, okay.”

They sat quietly, listening to the laughter and voices of other Indian kids. Somebody ran through the pipe directly above their cave. The echoes sounded like music. More kids ran through the pipe. The music was so loud that John worried the pipe was going to collapse. He was afraid. The fear felt wonderful.

“Do you like me?” asked Dawn, bold, as Indian girls and women always are.

“Yeah, sure,” John said.

“Well, kiss me then. Now or never.”

John kissed her then, quickly and dryly, chapped lips against chapped lips. He could feel her teeth clenched tightly behind her lips. His jaw ached with the effort. His heart sounded louder than the kids running through the pipes above his head. He wanted to sing a love song. The pipes were the best place in the history of the world.

“What are you smiling about?” asks his mother. John shakes his head. He fills his mouth with fry bread and stew, hoping his mother will not ask him any more questions. She smiles. She knows about Dawn. His whole family knows about Dawn and John.

No matter how much he enjoys breakfast and lunch, John knows that dinner is the best meal of all. No. After dinner is the best time. He is sixteen years old. His whole family sits in a circle in the living room and tells stories. His grandparents tell stories of the old times, before the white men came, when animals still talked. Coyote this, Coyote that. Raven flying around messing with everybody. Bear lumbering and rumbling across the grass. Mosquito mistaking urine for blood. His mother tells stories about other relatives, long since passed away. The uncle who was crushed beneath a falling tree. Another uncle who moved to the city and was never seen again. The aunt who went crazy. They are sad stories, but still filled with humor and hope, so the family is only half-sad. John knows that storytelling is a way of mourning the dead. His uncles and aunts, who are still alive and sharing the circle, tell stories about their travels. One uncle was in the Army, fought against Hitler, and came back with a medal. Another uncle built skyscrapers. A third fished for salmon in Alaska. The fourth fell in love with a Italian girl in Chicago, even though he only saw her a few times on a bus. So many stories to tell and songs to sing. John’s cousins, the little girls, sing Christmas carols, the only songs they know, no matter the time of year. Ninety degrees outside and the girls singing “Winter Wonderland.” John tells the longest stories, with many characters and changes of location. His stories are epic. They go long into the night. He invents ancestors. He speaks the truth about grandfathers and grandmothers. He convinces his family that Shakespeare was an Indian woman. The laughter and disbelief, the rubbing of bellies and contented sighs. His family listens to every word. His mother yawns once, twice, rubs her eyes, and listens some more. She can never get enough of her son. During his stories, John’s family laughs in the right places and cries when tears are due.

5. How It Happened

THE KILLER BELIEVED IN the knife, a custom-made bowie with three small turquoise gems inlaid in the handle, heavy but well-balanced, nearly long enough to be considered a sword. A beautiful weapon, polished until the killer could see clear eyes, curve of cheek, and thin lips in the silver sheen of the blade. During those moments, with knife in hand, the killer felt powerful, invincible, as if the world could be changed with a single gesture. Snap of the fingers, one step forward, a hand closed into fist. With the knife, the killer became the single, dark center around which all other people revolved.

At home, the killer had sharpened the blade until it could cut away a thin layer of skin when just lightly run along a forearm. Everything had a purpose. The knife needed to be sharp. The killer wanted to carry the knife at all times, but its size and weight made it difficult to conceal. A special knife needed a special sheath. Since the killer could not sleep, there was plenty of time to build a sheath, fashioned from irregular leather pieces and nylon cord. With the knife resting comfortably in its sheath, hidden beneath a jacket, the killer could move freely. More importantly, the killer had quick access to the blade as it sat just above the left hip. For hours, the killer practiced pulling the knife from its sheath, then slashing, cutting, and thrusting the blade into imaginary enemies. Faster and faster. The killer practiced, as hands blistered and arms ached with pain, until exhaustion. Only then did the killer fall asleep.

At night, the killer dreamed of the knife. Of the search for a perfect knife. It had not been easy. There were many choices. Paring, chef’s, boning knives. Bread, utility, carving knives. Wooden handles, plastic handles. So beautiful, the parts of a knife. Blade, bolster, tang, handle. Indestructible. Lifetime guarantees. Large sets. One knife at a time. Knife blocks with blade sharpeners included. Demonstration videos. County fairs. Mail order. Department stores and discount chains. Garage sales and secondhand stores. A Short Guide to Cutlery. In a large kitchen, the meat carver decided which piece of meat each guest received. The neck for the journalist, the breast for royalty. The killer had touched so many knives, studied their blades, tested their heft. The knife is the earliest tool used by humans, over two million years old. Knife, knifing, knives, to knife, to be knifed, knifelike. The killer sliced open test fruits and vegetables, ran fingers over the deep grooves cut into carving boards. Four thousand years ago, humans learned to separate elements, and discovered the power of iron. The killer shifted a knife from left to right hand, and then back again. How to hold a carving knife: last three fingers behind the bolster point, index finger on one side of the blade, thumb on the other side. The paring knife is an extension of the hand. The bread knife is perfect for cutting through objects with hard exteriors and soft interiors. Ancient and elemental, the knife. The Illustrated History of Swords. Blade against blade against blade. A knife must be sharp, clean, and stored properly. A blade should be sharpened before and after use. The mirror of a polished blade. The mirrors in a department store. The mirror of the sky visible between department stores. The Rockwell scale measured the hardness of steel. The higher the number, the sharper the blade. Steel tends to shrink back into itself after long periods of disuse.

Hiding that beautiful knife in the sheath beneath a jacket, the killer followed white men, selected at random. The killer simply picked any one of the men in gray suits and followed him from office building to cash machine, from lunchtime restaurant back to office building. Those gray suits were not happy, yet showed their unhappiness only during moments of weakness. Punching the buttons of a cash machine that refused to work. Yelling at a taxi that had come too close. Insulting the homeless people who begged for spare change. But the killer also saw the more subtle signs of unhappiness. A slight limp in uncomfortable shoes. Eyes closed, head thrown back while waiting for the traffic signal. The slight hesitation before opening a door. The men in gray suits wanted to escape, but their hatred and anger trapped them.

The killer first saw that particular white man in the University District. Confidently, arrogantly, the white man, Justin Summers, had brushed past the killer. With his head high and shoulders wide, Summers took up as much space as he possibly could. He strolled down the middle of the sidewalk, forcing others to walk around him. So when the arrogant white man rudely brushed past, the killer wanted to teach him a lesson. Nothing serious, just a simple and slightly painful lesson. Then, without reason or warning, the killer suddenly understood that the knife had a specific purpose. But the killer had to be careful. There were rules for hunting.

The killer knew that particular white man in the University District was all alone, and that was good. Men in a pack could protect each other. When threatened, they could scatter in many directions and confuse the killer. A solitary man was vulnerable. Easy to follow, that white man, so self-absorbed he failed to notice much of anything. Muttering to himself, looking down at the sidewalk, he walked block after block. He ate Thai food by himself and read a magazine. After he finished eating, the white man walked toward the Burke-Gilman Trail. The killer followed him closely, and once stood beside him as they waited for the walk signal. So close. At any time, the killer could have reached inside the jacket and pulled out the knife. The late evening streets were so quiet that the killer could have slid the knife into the white man’s kidney and then walked away. But the moon was terribly bright and illuminating. There was a chance the killer would be caught. Thrilled by the idea, the killer moved closer to the white man, until they were almost touching. The white man glanced at the killer. A superficial glance, nothing more important than a wind blowing a newspaper down the street. The killer reached inside the jacket and touched the knife.

The killer especially hated the white man’s clothes and followed him as he walked south for a few blocks, then turned west on the Burke-Gilman Trail. The killer could see and smell the white man. Aftershave, leather jacket, Thai food. It was late, a few bicyclists flashed by, but the trail was mostly deserted. The killer walked a few feet behind the white man for a few minutes, then reached out and tapped the white man on the shoulder.

“Whoa,” said the white man. “You scared the shit out of me.”

The killer was silent.

“Hey,” said the white man. “Do I know you, man?”

The killer took a step back, knowing that anger would change a face. The killer had seen other people do it. Other people could change the shape of their faces at will. Through a trick of shadow and moonlight, or through some undefined magic, the killer’s face did change.

“What’s going on?” asked the white man, now really frightened by what he saw in the killer’s face.

The killer saw the fear in the white man’s blue eyes. The man’s fear inspired the killer’s confidence. The killer slid a hand beneath the jacket and felt for the knife. It was there in its homemade sheath, blade sharp and beautiful. It would soak up all the moonlight. The white man was not stupid. When he saw the killer reach beneath the jacket, the white man began to desperately hope that somebody would walk along the trail soon. A dozen University cops were always breaking up unauthorized parties on campus, but very few ever patrolled the trail.

“What do you want?” asked the white man loudly, trying to inject anger into his voice. Be strong, he said to himself, don’t show any fear.

“Hey, let’s be cool about this. I don’t want any problems,” the white man said.

The killer moved quickly. With fingers wrapped around the handle, the killer snapped the knife out of its handmade sheath. The killer’s feet moved forward, and the sharp blade forced its way into the white man’s belly.

The killer had not necessarily meant for any of it to happen. The killer picked up the white man’s body, carried it on a shoulder, and walked along the trail in a daze. A group of UW students staggered past, on their way home from some party, and laughed loudly at the killer. The killer stopped, ready to drop the body, and run.

“Shit, you’re a strong one, huh?” one of the students slurred to the killer, and then tugged on the white man’s leg. “Jesus, you got wasted, huh? Shit, wake up, wake up. The party’s just starting.”

The white man groaned and shifted. The killer was surprised that the man was still alive. His blood ran down the killer’s back.

“Shit,” said the student. “Don’t you two be doing anything nasty now, huh?” Laughter. “You’re both going to be hating it in the morning. Hangover City, you’ll be hating it.”

The students laughed and staggered away. The killer watched them go, breathed deeply, and kept walking down the trail. The killer wanted to drop the body and leave it where it landed, but felt responsible for the white man. Honestly, the killer had not necessarily meant to hurt him and wanted to make sure the man was buried properly. There had to be a ceremony, a wake, silent prayers. That was how it was done. The killer had learned many ceremonies, but rarely practiced them.

The killer walked off the trail into a dark neighborhood. Silently singing an invisibility song learned from a dream, the killer carried the body to an empty house. A FOR SALE sign. Bare windows. A broken lock on the back door. The killer carried the body inside the house and gently set it on the living room floor. Kneeling beside the body, the killer cut the white man’s scalp away and stuffed the bloody souvenir into a pocket. So much blood. The killer was drenched with blood, soaking shirt, jacket, and pants. The blood was beautiful but not enough. One dead man was not enough. The killer was disappointed. Disappointment grew quickly into anger, then rage, and the killer brought the knife down into the white man’s chest again and again. Still not satiated, the killer knew there was more work to do. The dead man’s blue eyes were open and still, pupils dilated. With hands curved into talons, the killer tore the white man’s eyes from his face and swallowed them whole. The killer then pulled two white owl feathers out of another pocket, and set them on the white man’s chest. Blood soon soaked into the feathers, staining them a dark red.

6. Truck Schultz

“HELLO OUT THERE, FOLKS, this is Truck Schultz on KWIZ, the Voice of Reason, and boy, do I have a problem!”

Schultz sat in the radio station, smoking a cigar, drinking coffee. A tall, muscular white man with a receding hairline, blue eyes, and large ears, he was the host of the most popular talk-radio show in the city and was ready to go national, sure that he would be more popular than Rush Limbaugh. Truck had started with a late-night jazz show on KWIZ a few years earlier. Not long after conservative radio hit it big, KWIZ changed its format to talk and Truck became a star. His promotional billboards were everywhere: KEEP ON TRUCKIN’! Now Truck had a hundred thousand listeners and a drive-time slot. He never played jazz anymore. Leaning close to his microphone, Truck exhaled a cloud of thick, gray smoke and spoke loudly and clearly.

“Through my sources in the Seattle Police Department, I’ve just learned that the body of a white man was discovered in a house in Fremont early this morning. My sources say that the man was scalped and ritually mutilated. That’s right, folks. Scalped and ritually mutilated. My sources say certain evidence makes it clear that an American Indian might be responsible for this crime. My sources would not reveal what that evidence was, but they did make it clear that only an Indian, or a person intimately familiar with Indian culture, would know to leave such evidence behind. What do you think, folks? Give me a call.”

7. Introduction to Native American Literature

A FEW DAYS AFTER she met John Smith at the protest powwow, Marie Polatkin walked into the evening section of the Introduction to Native American Literature class for the first time. The professor had not yet arrived. The students were gossiping about the dead body that had been discovered in an empty house in Fremont.

“Yeah,” said one older white woman. “I read he was scalped.”

“Yeah,” said a white man. “Like an Indian would do it.”

“An Indian?”

“Yeah, Indians started that whole scalping business.”

“Oh, that’s spooky. And here we are, in an Indian class. I just got the shivers.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Marie said as she sat at a desk near the front. “The French were the first to scalp people in this country. Indians just copied them.”

The white students all stared at Marie, saw that she was Indian, and then turned back to their conversation.

“I bet it was one of those serial killers,” said another white woman.

“Yes,” said a third white woman. “There’s something in the water here. I mean, we’ve got the Green River Killer, Ted Bundy, the I-5 Killer. We, like, raise them here or something.”

Marie tried to ignore the morbid discussion. She was more concerned about the professor. She’d signed up for the class because she’d heard that Dr. Clarence Mather, the white professor, supposedly loved Indians, or perhaps his idea of Indians, and gave them good grades. But he was also a Wannabe Indian, a white man who wanted to be Indian, and Marie wanted to challenge Mather’s role as the official dispenser of “Indian education” at the University.

“He always wants to sweat with Indian students, or share the peace pipe, or sit at a drum and sing,” Binky, a Yakama woman, had said. “He’s kind of icky. He really fawns over the women, you know what I mean? Real Indian lover, that one.”

Still, in spite of and because of Dr. Mather, Marie assumed she’d be one of many Indians in the class, all looking for an easy grade. But she’d been wrong in her assumptions. She was the only Indian in the class. When Mather walked into the class, he was wearing a turquoise bolo tie, and his gray hair was tied back in a ponytail.

While Marie was surprised by the demographics of the class, she was completely shocked by the course reading list. One of the books, The Education of Little Tree, was supposedly written by a Cherokee Indian named Forrest Carter. But Forrest Carter was actually the pseudonym for a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Three of the other books, Black Elk Speaks, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, and Lakota Woman, were taught in almost every Native American Literature class in the country, and purported to be autobiographical, though all three were co-written by white men. Black Elk himself had disavowed his autobiography, a fact that was conveniently omitted in any discussion of the book. The other seven books included three anthologies of traditional Indian stories edited by white men, two nonfiction studies of Indian spirituality written by white women, a book of traditional Indian poetry translations edited by a Polish-American Jewish man, and an Indian murder mystery written by some local white writer named Jack Wilson, who claimed he was a Shilshomish Indian. On the recommendation of a white classmate, Marie had read one of Wilson’s novels a few months before the class. She’d hated the book and seriously doubted that its author was Indian, or much of a writer. She’d done some research on his background and found a lot of inconsistencies.

After seeing the reading list, Marie knew that Dr. Mather was full of shit.

“Excuse me, Dr. Mather,” Marie said. “You’ve got this Little Tree book on your list. Don’t you know it’s a total fraud?”

“I’m aware that the origins of the book have been called into question,” said Mather. “But I hardly believe that matters. The Education of Little Tree is a beautiful and touching book. If those rumors about Forrest Carter are true, perhaps we can learn there are beautiful things inside of everybody.”

“Yeah, well, whatever was inside that man, it wasn’t Cherokee blood.” Marie’s voice grew louder. “And there are only three Indians on this list, and their books were really written by white guys. Not exactly traditional or autobiographical. I mean, I think there’s a whole lot more biography than auto in those books. And there aren’t any Northwest Indian writers at all.”

“Ah, yes,” Dr. Mather said. “And your name is?”

“Marie. Marie Polatkin.”

“By your appearance, Ms. Polatkin, I assume you’re Native American.”

“I’m Spokane.”

“Ah, yes,” Dr. Mather said. “I taught a Spokane named Reggie Polatkin. A relative of yours?”

“My cousin,” said Marie suspiciously. She knew Reggie and Mather had been close at one time. But Reggie had been expelled from the University after assaulting Mather for reasons that were never clear. While Marie recognized that Mather was a pompous jerk, she also knew that Reggie was no saint. In fact, he’d been involved in more than a few fistfights in his life. And after he’d been expelled, Reggie had simply disappeared. No member of their family had heard from him in over a year. Marie didn’t want Mather to give her a poor grade simply because she was related to her crazy cousin. If she was going to get a poor grade, she wanted to receive it because of her own craziness.

“I trust you are aware that Reggie and I had, well, let’s say it was an academic conflict.”

“Yeah,” said Marie.

“Well,” said Mather with a smile. “I hope you don’t hold a familial grudge against me, Ms. Polatkin?”

“Reggie is Reggie. I’m me.”

“Fine, fine. Now, let’s see, where were we? Ah, yes. The Spokane Indians. Columbia Plateau, Interior Salish, closely related to the Colville, Coeur d’Alene, Flathead, and others. A salmon tribe whose reservation is bordered by the Columbia River to the north, the Spokane River to the south, and Chimakum Creek to the east. A veritable island of a reservation, is it not?”

“I guess,” said Marie.

“Well, Ms. Polatkin, I understand your concerns. But I must correct your math. We do have four Native American authors in this course. Mr. Black Elk, Mr. Lame Deer, and Ms. Crow Dog did have help transcribing their stories, but many people use professionals to help write their books. And Mr. Wilson, as you can see by the syllabus, is a Shilshomish Indian, which, unless I’m mistaken, is a Northwest tribe.

“You see, Ms. Polatkin, I envision this course as a comprehensive one, viewing the Native American world from both the interior and exterior. One would hope that we can all benefit from a close reading of the assigned texts, and recognize the validity of a Native American literature that is shaped by both Indian and white hands. In order to see that this premise is verifiable, we need only acknowledge that the imagination has no limits. That, in fact, to paraphrase Whitman, ‘Every good story that belongs to Indians belongs to non-Indians, too.’”

Mather dismissed any further questions with a slight nod of his head, and proceeded to launch into a detailed lecture about the long tradition of European-Americans who were adopted into Indian tribes. A red-headed, green-eyed Irish and British mix, Mather proudly revealed that he’d been adopted into a Lakota Sioux family, an example of the modern extension of that long tradition.

“Dr. Mather,” Marie said. “What about the long tradition of white guys who were killed by Indians? How about the white guy they found dead in Fremont? Can we talk about him, too? How about the modern extension of that long tradition?”

“Ms. Polatkin, I hardly see how the murder of one poor man has anything to do with the study of Native American literature.”

Dr. Mather tried to ignore Marie, but she felt compelled to challenge him and constantly interrupted his first lecture. She was enjoying herself. She’d found an emotional outlet in the opportunity to harass a white professor who thought he knew what it meant to be Indian. For Marie, being Indian was mostly about survival, and she’d been fighting so hard for her survival that she didn’t know if she could stop. She needed conflict and, in those situations where conflict was absent, she would do her best to create it. Of course, conflict with whites didn’t need much creating. Her struggle with Dr. Mather, which started out as intellectual sparring, became personal, and intensified as that first class hour went along.

David Rogers, who had taken the class because of a specific sense of guilt and a vague curiosity, was fascinated by Marie. She seemed exotic and impossibly bold, speaking to a college professor with such disdain and disrespect. He had never known any woman who behaved in such a manner. David’s mother had died when he was five years old, so he had only vague and completely pleasant memories of her. And most of the white girls in his hometown had been quietly conservative and unfailingly polite. David had not bothered to approach those few hometown white girls who had been even slightly rebellious. And he had never spoken to an Indian woman.

David had grown up on a farm near Marie’s reservation. Throughout his life, his only real contact with Indians happened in the middle of the night when reservation Spokanes crept onto his family’s farm to steal camas root, the spongy, pungent bulbs of indigenous lilies that had been a traditional and sacred food of the local Indians for thousands of years. The Spokanes arrived in the middle of the night because David’s father, Buck, refused to allow them to gather camas, even though it grew on a few acres of their otherwise useless land.

On one particular night when he was twelve years old, David Rogers had been sitting for hours in the family hunting blind with his older brother Aaron and their father, Buck. Twenty feet off the ground, the blind, camouflaged by leaves and sod, had stretched between trees in a stand of windbreak pines. Ordinarily, the blind was used to hunt for the deer that often wandered through the open fields of the Rogers family farm. That night, however, Buck Rogers and his sons had been waiting for the Indians who came to steal camas root.

“Is that weapon clean?” Buck Rogers had asked Aaron.

“Yes, sir,” Aaron had said and had given a smart salute. Though only a year older than David, Aaron had been much more experienced with weapons and held a vintage AK-47, semi-automatic, a full clip.

“How about yours?” Buck had asked David.

David had looked down at the small twenty-two-caliber rifle in his hands. Wood stock, metal trigger, smell of gunpowder. He’d looked back at his father and older brother.

“It’s ready, sir,” David had said, his voice breaking a little. He’d been scared.

Buck had heard the fear in his youngest son’s voice. David had always been a strange one, and if left to himself, would have spent all of his time reading. Buck loved David, but thought he was probably queer. Buck had always known that Aaron Rogers was a whole different animal. He had been staring out into the camas fields, waiting for the Indians to appear. Wanting the Indians to appear.

“You see anything?” Buck had asked.

“No, sir,” Aaron had said.

David had peered out of the blind. The fields brightly illuminated by the moon. Fallow fields reaching north to south. To the west, a dirt access road. David had swallowed hard when he saw the car, without headlights, appear over the horizon.

“There,” Aaron had said, surprised by his own giddiness. He’d wondered if this was how the great Indian-fighters, like Custer, Sheridan, and Wright, had felt just before battle.

“Oh, we got them now,” Buck had said. “We got them good.”

The car had rattled down the access road and stopped beside a camas field. The engine had idled for a few moments before shuddering to a stop. Slowly and quietly, five, six, seven Indians had crawled out of the car. David had not understood how seven people could have fit into that small car. Four children, David saw, and a man and woman, perhaps the mother and father of the children, and, following behind them, an elderly woman.

“Tell me when, tell me when,” Aaron had whispered to his father.

“Patience, patience.”

The Indians had walked across the field until they were standing less than fifty feet away from the hunting blind. With his finger lightly feathering the trigger, Aaron had stared down the barrel of his rifle and sighted in on the Indian father.

“When? When?” Aaron had asked.

David had watched as the Indians, even the children, pulled out strange curved tools and began digging in the earth. Digging for camas root. David had wondered why the Indians loved the root so much. Why had they come in the middle of the night? After Buck had threatened them with physical violence? Even the Indian children, who David had always seen as wild and uncontrollable, quietly and respectfully dug for those roots. David had no idea the Indians had been root digging for thousands of years.

“Get ready,” Buck had whispered. David, knowing what was expected of him, had reluctantly raised his rifle.

“They’re just kids,” David had whispered.

“Lice make nits,” Buck had whispered as he raised his rifle.

The Indians dug for roots. As the old woman dug, she’d remembered when she had come here with her grandmother.

“Remember,” Buck had whispered. “Shoot over their heads.”

David had aimed his rifle at the moon, not wanting to even see the Indians as they ran away. He’d heard the soft laughter of the Indian mother. David had wondered if she was beautiful.

“Now,” Buck had said and pulled the trigger. David had squeezed off a bullet and then had turned to look at his brother, who had not yet fired. David had seen the look in his older brother’s eyes and had known Aaron was sighting in on the Indian father. Not above his head, but at his head.

“No!” David had shouted as Aaron pulled the trigger. The Indian man had fallen to the ground. He didn’t move for a brief moment, long enough for David to cry out, but then the Indian man had jumped to his feet and, apparently unharmed, raced to the car. As the Indians drove away, Aaron and Buck had laughed and whooped loudly.

“You tried to shoot him,” David had accused his brother.

“What are you talking about?” Aaron had asked.

“You aimed at him. You tried to kill him.”

Buck had stared at his sons with recognition and love. Aaron, who had always wanted so much to be like his father that he wore the same shirts. And David, who had been scared of everything, but would fight Aaron for the slightest transgression.

“David,” Buck had said. “Aaron wouldn’t do something like that. We were just trying to scare them. Right, Aaron?”

“Right, Dad.”

David had thought his big brother was lying.

“Did you see them Indians run?” Aaron had asked his father.

“I saw it,” Buck had said.

“Just like the old days must have been, huh?” Aaron had asked. “Just like the old days!”

David had looked down at the rifle in his hands. He’d felt like crying.

“Hey,” Buck had said to David. “What’s wrong with you?”

David had looked at his father.

“Oh, Jesus,” Buck had said. “You ain’t going to cry?”

David had ducked his head.

“You look at me when I’m talking to you,” Buck had said impatiently. He hated it when his son avoided eye contact. It showed fear. Buck had always hated fear.

“Yes, sir,” David had whispered. With great effort, he’d looked into his father’s blue eyes. David and Aaron had inherited the same color and shape of their father’s eyes. Buck had seen a shadow of his face in his youngest son’s. More important, he had also seen his late wife’s fine features in David’s face.

“Listen,” Buck had said, softening. “I know this is a tough thing to do, shooting after people like this. But we ain’t trying to hurt them. We’re just trying to teach them a lesson. They’re stealing from us, son. This is our land. My land. Your land. Your brother’s land. This land has been in our family for over a hundred years. And those Indians are stealing from us. They’re trying to steal our land. We just can’t have that. Okay, son?”

“But they were kids,” David said. “And an old woman.”

“Indian is Indian,” his father had said, close to losing his temper.

“Hey, Dad,” Aaron had said, trying to divert attention away from his little brother. “Let’s go see if those Indians dropped anything. Maybe one of those weird digging sticks.”

Buck had stared at David for a few seconds, trying to understand how this boy could have been his son. But there could be no getting around it. David was his son, one of two. All the family he had left in the world. Buck had shrugged his shoulders, mussed David’s hair, and then climbed down from the stand. Just before he’d followed, Aaron smiled at his brother.

“Hey, bro,” Aaron had said. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll get them next time.”

Thinking about the camas field, David Rogers barely heard Dr. Clarence Mather lecturing during that first session of the Native literature class.

“Jack Wilson is much more than a mystery novelist,” said Mather. “He is a social realist. Unlike many other Native writers whose work seems to exaggerate the amount of despair in the Indian world, Wilson presents a more authentic and traditional view of the Indian world.”

“Oh, God,” Marie blurted out.

“Do you have something to add, Ms. Polatkin?” asked Dr. Mather. “Yet again?”

“How can Wilson present an authentic and traditional view of the Indian world if he isn’t authentic and traditional himself?” asked Marie. “I mean, I’ve done some research on this guy. He isn’t even Indian at all. How would he know about the despair, or happiness, in the Indian world?”

“Ms. Polatkin,” said Dr. Mather, speaking very slowly. “Since this is the first session of this class, perhaps you might let me actually conduct the class? But, in answer to your questions, Mr. Wilson is, in fact, a Shilshomish Indian.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he says so and I have no reason to doubt him.”

“But the Shilshomish don’t exist as a tribe anymore. There are no records of membership. Lots of people claim to be Indians, and Wilson’s vague statements about his Shilshomish ancestors can’t be verified.”

“Are you going to blame Mr. Wilson for the shoddy bookkeeping of others?”

“No, but don’t you find it highly ironic that all of these so-called Indian writers claim membership in tribes with poor records of membership? Cherokee, Shilshomish? I mean, there’s not a whole lot of people claiming to be Spokane. And do you know why? Because we’re not glamorous and we keep damn good records.”

“I fail to understand your point, Ms. Polatkin.”

“There’s more,” Marie said. “I’ve been more and more curious about Wilson. I’m active in all the Indian organizations around here and I’ve asked around. Nobody at the Seattle Urban Indian Health Center has ever met Wilson, and nobody at the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation knows him. Nobody at Indian Heritage High School. And he’s never been in contact with anybody at the Native American Students Alliance here at the University. I also called all of the local reservations and nobody has heard of him. Not the Lummi, Puyallup, Tulalip, or anybody else.”

“Ms. Polatkin, please.”

“And I called the American Indian College Fund and Wilson has never donated any time or money. About the only person who’d ever heard of Wilson was the owner of Big Heart’s, the Indian bar over on Aurora Avenue. And the owner was white.”

“Ms. Polatkin, will you please make your point.”

“Well, for somebody who is supposed to be so authentic and traditional, Wilson sure doesn’t have much to do with Indians. I mean, there are so many real Indians out there writing real Indian books. Simon Ortiz, Roberta Whiteman, Luci Tapahonso. And there’s Indian writers from the Northwest, too. Like Elizabeth Woody, Ed Edmo. And just across the border in Canada, too. Like Jeannette Armstrong. Why teach Wilson? It’s like his books are killing Indian books.”

“Are you finished now, Ms. Polatkin?” asked Dr. Mather.

“Yes.”

“Fine, may we all continue with the study of literature?”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

After class, David stopped Marie in the hallway. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. He just knew he wanted to talk to the pretty Indian woman.

“Man,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of guts, talking to a professor like that.”

Marie looked at the short, stocky white man. He was a decent-looking guy, with pale blue eyes and sandy hair.

“It doesn’t take guts to tell the truth,” she said.

“Where I’m from, it does,” he said.

“Where you from?”

“From Spokane. Well, from a farm outside of Spokane.”

“You don’t look much like a farm boy.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what my dad tells me. My brother, too.”

Marie laughed. David thought he was being charming.

“Hey,” said David. “What do you think about the scalping of that guy? Do you think an Indian could do something like that?”

Marie gave him a cold, hard stare.

“Listen,” he said, trying to change the subject. “You think maybe we could get together and study or something? I mean, I don’t know much about Indians. Maybe you could help me?”

“Help you what?”

“You know. Help me get a good grade. I mean, I know about Hemingway, but I don’t know anything about this Jack Wilson guy.”

“I don’t think so,” said Marie. “I don’t care much for study partners.”

“Oh, well, how about lunch or something? Maybe a movie?”

“Are you asking me out? For a date?” asked Marie. She wasn’t surprised. It had happened to her before. She thought David was just another white guy who wanted to rebel against his white middle-class childhood by dating a brown woman. He wouldn’t have been the first white guy to do such a thing. She had watched quite a few white guys pursue brown female students, especially Asian nationals, with a missionary passion. Go to college, find a cute minority woman, preferably one with limited English, and colonize her by sleeping with her. David Rogers wanted a guilt fuck, Marie thought, something to ease his pain.

“Uh, yeah, I guess,” said David. “Yeah, I’m asking you out.”

“I don’t date white men.”

With that, Marie turned and left David standing alone in the hallway. Disappointed, he walked home to the place he shared with his brother, Aaron, a mechanical engineering major, and two other U of W engineering students, Sean Ward and Barry Church. Sean and Barry were studying upstairs while Aaron was watching television downstairs.

“So, how was your Indian class?” Aaron asked David. He had not wanted David to take the class especially since Aaron had heard Truck Schultz reveal that a white man had been killed by an Indian. David was always taking useless classes, like African American literature and women’s literature. Yet, David had been the only male student in the women’s literature class, and Aaron certainly appreciated those odds.

“It was okay,” David said. “Only one Indian in there, though. A woman.”

Aaron saw the interest in David’s eyes.

“Is she fuckable?” Aaron asked.

David blushed.

“Oh, yeah, she must be a babe,” said Aaron. “I hear Indian women like it up the ass. Like dogs, you know?”

“She isn’t like that. She’s smart. Besides, she said she didn’t date white guys.”

“Hey, bro, that’s reverse discrimination,” said Aaron and turned back to the television, where Robert De Niro and John Savage were playing a game of Russian roulette with some Viet Cong soldiers. De Niro held the pistol against his temple and pulled the trigger.

8. Testimony

“MR. RUSSELL, COULD YOU please tell us what you saw on the Burke-Gilman Trail that night?”

“I’m sorry, Officer, I was really drunk. I barely remember anything from that night.”

“You were with a group of friends?”

“Yeah, we’d just come from one party and were headed for another.”

“One of your friends said you all ran into, how did she say it, a shadow carrying a white guy on his shoulder. That sounds pretty memorable to me. She said you talked to this so-called shadow.”

“I don’t remember, Officer. I mean, I just don’t remember.”

“What did this shadow look like?”

“I don’t remember. I remember long hair. But that’s it. I don’t think any of my friends remember much, do they?”

“It’s pretty sketchy.”

“Officer, can I be honest?”

“That’s what we want you to be.”

“Well, you see, there was this fog that night. Not like a real fog. But something else was happening, you know? It’s like when you get real drunk and nothing seems real. You know how that feels? Well, it was like that, except worse. It was like everything was turned around. Up was down, left was right. I mean, I started looking at my friend Darren and thinking he was pretty damn cute. It was like everything went contrary, you know?”

“Did you take any drugs that night?”

“No, Officer. I was just drunk. And I know this sounds crazy. But you know what I think? I think I don’t remember anything about that night because somebody wants me not to remember.”

9. Building

JOHN WAS WALKING IN a cold, persistent rain. He was not sure where he walked, or how he came to arrive at his apartment building in Ballard, the Scandinavian neighborhood of Seattle north of downtown.

John lived in one of the few areas in Ballard with trees still left in the yards. The Scandinavian immigrants who’d settled Ballard had cut down most of the trees upon their arrival. The Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians had missed the monotonously flat landscapes of their own countries, and wanted their new country to remind them of home. Since the first days of their colonization of the Americas, European immigrants had strived to make the New World look exactly like the Old. They either found similar geographical or climatic locations, such as the Swedes had in Minnesota and the Germans in North Dakota, or they plowed, tunneled, clear-cut, and sculpted the land into something ethnically pleasing.

All John knew was that everything in this country had been changed, mutated. He kept walking. He had been walking for hours. He was exhausted. He made his way upstairs to his apartment and, fully dressed, climbed into bed, but Father Duncan kept him awake. No. He had briefly fallen asleep, but Father Duncan shouted him awake. No. The phone was ringing and John refused to answer it. He knew it was his parents, trying to contact him. Then, a knocking on the door. His parents again. They always showed up in the middle of the night, hoping to catch John when his defenses were down.

“John, sweetheart,” said Olivia. “Let us in. We’ve brought some food. Some breakfast. We’ve got oranges. Donuts. Wouldn’t you like some breakfast?”

“Go away!” shouted John.

“John, it’s your father. Let us in, champ. Let’s talk.”

“Go away! I don’t know you! I don’t know you!”

Sometimes, John opened the door and invited his parents into his apartment. Sometimes, he even telephoned his parents and invited them over. Once or twice, he had visited their home without their knowledge and stood over their bed as they slept. He talked to his parents every few days, just to be sure of their presence. However, he was never sure which Olivia and Daniel answered the phone, and he could never be sure which Olivia and Daniel came knocking at his door. He believed five different sets of Olivias and Daniels came to visit him, and he suspected there were many others, just waiting for him to weaken. One set of parents paid his rent, though John had plenty of money, and he had come to fear them most. They threatened him with words like “group home” and “medication.” John had a cardboard box filled with medication in his closet. All of the Olivias and Daniels who visited him brought him pills, more pills, and still more pills. Vitamins, cough drops, and other circles, brighter and smaller, that quieted the voices in his head for a little while. But John knew those pills slowly poisoned him, too. He could take the pills and die young, or ignore the pills and live forever with the music in his head. John ignored Olivia and Daniel’s knocking.

In his small, sparsely furnished apartment, John kept stacks of newspapers in all the corners, along with magazines, books, empty boxes, TV Guide, photo albums, a St. Francis yearbook. He slept on a twin bed with a red lamp, an apartment-warming gift from his mother, on the nightstand next to him. A tiny kitchen table ringed by more chairs than he needed. A refrigerator that held surprises, Tupperware containers filled with Olivia Smith’s decomposing casseroles. A sink full of dirty dishes. There were no cockroaches in John’s apartment. He had heard about cockroaches and feared them, though he had never seen one. He wondered if they carefully hid in the dark places of his apartment, and only came out when he was asleep. Cockroaches fear the light, and John understood that. He wondered if they talked to each other and whispered about him to the two other people who lived on the fourth floor with him. Though John rarely saw the human tenants, a Colombian woman who always seemed to be running off to play racquetball and an Irishman who played guitar long into the night, the roaches could have told them John’s secrets. As a defense against the roaches, John constructed elaborate homemade roach traps with shoe boxes and honey, and carefully set them in every cupboard.

Olivia and Daniel knocked for hours, but John stayed in bed. After they went away, John could hear another knocking on the door, which became a different door. He briefly wondered if it was Marie, the Indian woman who had danced with him. But he closed his eyes and could see Father Duncan walking across the desert floor. Duncan’s feet pounded so loudly that John covered his head with his pillow. Duncan was walking toward the stand of palm trees on the horizon. He looked disappointed and beaten, black robes coated with sand. His face sunburned, wrinkled. Duncan was a big bear of a man, half a foot taller than John and fifty pounds heavier, but with the most delicate hands. Those hands were completely contradictory placed at the ends of those huge, hairless arms. Those hands did not make sense, especially when Duncan was angry. Duncan would wave his arms in furious gestures, his beautiful hands floating like sails.

Still thinking of Father Duncan, John finally fell asleep and dreamed of the desert. He made it to work early that next morning. He walked carefully along the girders. Just after the morning break, John saw an image of Duncan’s hands so clear and startling that he nearly fell. John was attached to the building by a safety harness, but he knew that white men made the harnesses. It would only save white men. The leather, metal, and rope could tell the difference between white skin and Indian skin. But, despite his near fall, John kept working. As a good worker should be, he was always busy, but the foreman still watched him, and John knew he was being watched. He kept thinking of his mother, who had tried to visit him that morning. Olivia Smith was still exceptionally beautiful. Her few wrinkles just added a new regal quality. She had been absolutely stunning at thirty, thirty-five, forty. Clear pale skin and blue, blue eyes. She had been the object of many schoolboy crushes among John’s friends. John walked along the girder and into the lunchroom at St. Francis High School ten years earlier.

“John, buddy,” one friend whispered. “Your mom is a babe.”

“No shit,” a crass friend said. “If she was my mom, I would have never quit breast-feeding.”

John felt the rage rise inside him, up from his stomach to the back of his throat. He wanted to strike out, to break that friend’s nose, blacken another’s eyes. He wanted to cause them so much pain. He could not believe his friends would talk about his mother in that way. But they also talked about their mothers in the same way.

“My mom’s got a fat ass, all right,” a boy said. “You should see her panties hanging up to dry in the bathroom. They look like sails. Jesus, it’s like the goddamn America’s Cup in there.”

A huge jerk named Michael sat down beside John and started in.

“Smith,” Michael said to him, “I saw your mom at the store last night. You are a lucky fucker.”

Everybody at the table agreed and laughed, punched each other on the shoulders. John stared down at his sandwich. Sometimes he smiled and pretended to laugh when his friends teased him about his mother. He knew that was how he was supposed to react. Other times, he just ignored them and waited for the subject to change. A pretty girl would walk by and all his friends would launch into a long discussion of her alleged sexual history. But Michael would not leave it alone, even after John refused to acknowledge him.

“Smith,” Michael said, because white boys always called each other by their last names. “I was just wondering. I mean, you’re adopted, right? I mean, she’s not even your real mother. Not really. You could get a little of that nookie and it wouldn’t even be illegal, right? Not really.”

John looked at Michael, who was smiling. Michael, with his swollen, bright-pink face. Michael, who would grow up to become an investment banker, a rich man with a wife, two sons, and a relatively clean life.

“I mean,” Michael stage-whispered to John, so that everybody would be sure to listen closely. “Don’t you ever want to sneak into her bed at night and give it to her?”

Everybody at the table was stunned. A few laughed nervously, wanting the good times to continue, hoping their laughter would lessen the tension. One or two smiled, enjoying the torment. Most had no idea how to react, but they all knew that Michael had taken it too far. They waited for John’s reaction. When he sat frozen, Michael pushed further.

“Well,” Michael continued. “She’s a gorgeous white woman and you’re an Indian, right? Don’t you watch the movies? Don’t Indians always want to fuck white women?”

John moved quickly, grabbing Michael around the neck and wrestling him to the ground. They rolled around the floor, throwing ineffective punches and kicks, fighting like people who have never been in a fistfight. The other boys quickly circled them, excited by the violence, but just as quickly the teachers broke it up, and John and Michael were sent to the principal’s office. Michael went inside first, and came out with a forced smirk on his pimpled face.

“Now,” said Mr. Taylor, the principal, when John was finally in his office. “What was this all about?”

Near tears, John breathed deeply and deliberately. He did not want to cry. His chest burned. He looked around the office. He saw the walnut desk, the bookshelves stacked thick with books that had not been touched in years. Various diplomas hung on the wall, a photograph of Mr. Taylor standing near the Pope.

“Are you hurt?” asked Mr. Taylor, a tall, chubby white man in an ugly sport coat. He was the first principal in St. Francis’s history who was not a priest, although he frequently described himself as having been the best altar boy in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

“John,” said Mr. Taylor again. “Are you hurt?”

John shook his head.

“Well, then,” said the principal. “Tell me what happened.”

“Michael was,” John began. “He was insulting my mother. He was saying ugly things.”

Mr. Taylor knew how the boys saw Olivia Smith.

“John,” the principal said, “I’m going to tell you something, but it cannot leave this office. Agreed?”

“Okay,” John said. He was crying now.

“Michael is a jerk. Why did you listen to him? You’re a good kid, John. You should just ignore him. He was trying to get a rise out of you.”

John was shocked. Not just that this man knew Michael was wrong, but shocked at the same time that this offense could be trivialized.

“Don’t act so surprised,” said Mr. Taylor. “I’m not as out of it as all of you think I am. I know what goes on. Next time, you just walk away from him, okay?”

“Okay,” John agreed, knowing that he could not walk away from any of it, but knowing that Father Duncan had walked away into the desert.

“Okay, then,” said the principal and handed John a tissue. “Clean up your face and go back to class. I’ll deal with Michael.”

John stood to leave the office. Before he closed the door behind him, John turned back.

“Thanks,” John said, always the polite student, wanting to push his anger into a small place.

“You’re welcome.”

John left the St. Francis principal’s office and nearly stepped off the girder he was walking on ten years later. He looked at the ground thirty-seven floors below. Three hundred and seventy feet, give or take a few. The foreman was yelling at him.

“Quit your daydreaming and get to work.”

John looked at the foreman, who had begun to speak a whole new language. All of his words sounded foreign. John spoke high school French and German, knew a few Spanish phrases, and had a decent Catholic student’s knowledge of Latin, but the foreman’s language was something else entirely. He had always been a good boss, even though he had never spoken at a volume that John could tolerate, but John did not trust him anymore. Whenever the foreman was close, John quickly evaluated his escape routes and identified potential weapons. He never allowed the foreman to stand between him and the elevator. This resulted in strange conversations. John pretended to talk to the foreman, who hardly ever said anything that made sense. But if the foreman blocked his path to the elevator, John grew more and more nervous. He kept moving and talking, talking and moving, until he was closer to the elevator than to the foreman. The foreman was not stupid. He knew that John was acting strangely.

“I don’t know,” the foreman would often say to his other workers. “That John is acting pretty damn strange lately.”

“Lately?” somebody would usually ask. “He’s always been a little off. How do you tell the difference?”

“But he’s a good worker,” another man would usually put in.

“That’s true,” everybody would always agree. “He is that.”

Whatever the other men felt, the foreman genuinely worried about John. They had never been friends, had never shared one moment of recognizable camaraderie, but after years of working with him, the foreman had learned a few personal details about John. He knew that John was an Indian, that was obvious enough, but he had been raised by a white couple. The foreman did not know how that must have felt to son and parents. It did not make any emotional sense to him, but he knew that John barely spoke to his parents. He also knew that John never dated. At first, the foreman thought that John might be queer, but that was not it. John was just a loner, quiet and distant. It was only lately that he had become truly weird. John spent more and more break time alone on the fortieth floor, even spent work time there, and the foreman had had to go find him more than once.

After work that day, the foreman went home and ate two pork chops, five homemade biscuits, and canned green beans. His wife, Estelle, always had a good dinner waiting for him. They sat at their cheap table with four unmatched chairs in a kitchen whose walls had been a painful yellow when the paint was fresh, though now the glare had faded into a pale ugliness. They ate and watched the evening news on their thirty-one-inch television. While showing some homes to a potential buyer, a Century 21 salesman had discovered the body of the white man in an empty house in Fremont. The white man had been scalped and murdered. After hearing the bad news, the foreman pulled his wife closer and thought of John Smith. He loved his wife. She had gained a few pounds because of their three kids, but the foreman was no lightweight himself, and he knew it. He weighed himself every morning on the bathroom scale. He was getting to be a fat fuck. His pants did not fit right and his belly now hung over his belt. Everything seemed to be changing in his life, in the whole damn world. His kids were getting older, and wiser. They would know a lot more than he did pretty soon. Hell, he could barely remember their ages. Lately, when addressing a specific child, he ran through all of the possible combinations of their names before he found the correct one. Bobby, Dave, Cyndy, Robert, David, Cynthia, a group of strangers who could program a VCR. His wife had always been smarter. That did not bother him so much. She knew everything about him. She knew he had begun to hate work. He wanted to finish the lousy skyscraper and move on to his government job. He got a queasy feeling in his stomach every morning before work. Morning sickness, his wife teased him. But the foreman was beginning to wonder if he felt afraid of John.

“You know John, the Indian kid,” the foreman said to Estelle. “He’s been acting goofy. I’m wondering if he’s got mental problems or something.”

“What? Is he crazy?”

“Nah, he’s not bug-eyed and slobbering. But still, he’s…different.”

“Different? He’s always been different, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah, but now he’s really different.”

“You think you should talk to him?”

“I’ve tried. But he hardly talks, and when he does, he sounds like a robot.”

“Well, maybe you should talk to somebody else about him.”

“Who? The union? The architects? That’ll go over well. You see, gentlemen, we’ve got this Indian guy who doesn’t talk and eats his lunch alone. He doesn’t go for beers after work. He also arrives early, leaves late, does everything I tell him to do, and does it right. He’s a really big problem. I mean, we’ve got a few guys about ready to flunk drug tests, a couple ex-Hell’s Angels who ain’t so ex, and a guy who knocked over a 7-Eleven, but I’m really worried about this Indian.”

“Don’t get smart with me. You’re the one who brought it up.”

The foreman apologized to his wife and hugged her tightly as they stood in the kitchen of their small house, their kids running and yelling in the yard. Maybe he could count everything good in his life on one hand, but that was more than most people could do.

That night, after he made love to his wife in his quick and clumsy fashion, the foreman fell asleep and dreamed. In that dream, a figure stood on the top floor of the last skyscraper in Seattle. It was dark in the dream, only a sliver of moon illuminating the building. The foreman approached the figure. With its back turned, the figure could have been a man or woman. The foreman was scared of the figure, but also very curious. The figure held an object in its hand. Something valuable, a gift for the foreman perhaps. The foreman stepped beside the figure, and both stared down at the street hundreds of feet below. Suddenly afraid of falling, the foreman woke with a sudden start and sat up in bed. His wife was soundly asleep beside him. He curled up close to her, fell back asleep, and remembered nothing of his dream by morning.

10. Confessions

“THE ESTABLISHMENT OF GAMBLING casinos on Indian reservations is very much an act of fiscal rebellion,” said Dr. Clarence Mather during that second session of the Native American literature class. “However, I worry about the longtime cultural implications of such a rebellion. Are the Indians polluting their cultural purity by engaging in such a boldly capitalistic activity? As Jack Wilson writes in his latest novel, ‘Indians are gambling with their futures.’”

“Dr. Mather,” said Marie, raising her hand. Mather ignored her.

“Mr. Rogers,” Mather said to David. “How do you feel about this?”

“Well,” said David. “I’ve never been to a casino before. I don’t know how I feel about it. But the state runs a lottery, doesn’t it? Aren’t the Indian casinos and the state lottery the same kind of thing?”

Marie was surprised by David’s logic, but still suspicious. He tried to talk to her after that class, but she avoided him. Instead, she followed Dr. Mather back to his office. He was clueless, of course, as she tailed him through the dark campus, past quiet buildings and empty tennis courts. She could have closed her eyes and found her way. She had been negotiating the campus’s maze of buildings and paths for a few years. At that late hour, the campus was surprisingly busy. A few students recognized Marie because she was a very vocal Indian student leader, but she ignored the friendly greetings of some and the hostile stares of others. Instead, she silently followed Mather into the Anthropology Building and up the stairs to his office. He was unlocking his office door, with his name stenciled in black on its gray-green opaque window, when Marie tapped him on the shoulder.

“Oh, Ms. Polatkin, you startled me.”

Marie stared at the professor, who soon became very uncomfortable.

“Is there something I can do for you?” he asked.

“It’s Wilson’s book,” Marie said and handed the mystery novel over to Mather. “I refuse to study it.”

“Ms. Polatkin, Marie. Why do you insist on challenging everything I say?”

“I only challenge you when you’re wrong. You just happen to be wrong about Wilson. I mean, we need the casinos. It’s not like we’re planning a rebellion. We’re just putting food in our cupboards. If eating is rebellious, then I guess we’re the biggest rebels out there. Indians are just plain hungry. Not for power. Not for money. For food, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Wilson doesn’t know anything about that. You don’t know anything about that.”

Dr. Mather shook his head sadly.

“There you go again, creating an antagonistic situation. Don’t you understand what I’m trying to teach? I’m trying to present a positive portrait of Indian peoples, of your people. Of you. I simply cannot do that if you insist on this kind of confrontational relationship. I mean, with all this negative publicity surrounding the murder of that white man, don’t you understand I am trying to do a good thing here? People actually think an Indian killed and scalped that young man. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, people still think that Indians are savages. Don’t you understand that I’m on your side?”

“On my side?”

“Yes, Ms. Polatkin, we, you and I, are on the same side of this battle.”

Marie stared up at the tenured professor.

“What gives you the right to say that?” Marie asked him. “Who are you to tell me what battles I’m fighting?”

“Listen,” said Mather. “I understand what you’re going through, I really do. An Indian woman in college. I understand. I’m a Marxist.”

“Really,” said Marie. “I’m a Libra.”

Unable to respond, Dr. Mather walked into his office and closed the door in her face. She heard Mather throw the deadbolt and Marie felt a sudden urge to smash the glass, break down the door, pull down the building. She wanted to tear apart the world. Mather would have never treated a white student that badly, nor would he have shut the door in the face of a man. At that moment, she wanted Dr. Mather to disappear. She wanted every white man to disappear. She wanted to burn them all down to ash and feast on their smoke. Hateful, powerful thoughts. She wondered what those hateful, powerful thoughts could create.

She was still fuming when she stepped into the QuickMart convenience store on the Ave. A penniless student, Marie usually had cereal for breakfast and dinner every day, and also for lunch on weekends. She was out of milk and QuickMart had the cheapest quart of nonfat in the University District. She was standing in the cashier’s line when David and Aaron Rogers walked into the store.

“Hey, Marie,” said David, obviously happy to see her. “How you doing?”

Marie was in no mood to talk to David, nor the big hulk with him. Aaron Rogers was a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than Marie. Aaron was more conventionally handsome than his younger brother, but Aaron’s features seemed temporary, as if his blue eyes, aquiline nose, and strong jawline were simply borrowed from his parents’ faces.

“Hey. What’s your name again?” Marie asked David. She knew his name but wanted to offend him by pretending to forget it.

“It’s David, David Rogers. And this is my brother Aaron.”

With open disdain, Aaron stared down at Marie. She could smell the beer on his breath. She never drank, and absolutely hated its effect on people.

“So,” Aaron said to Marie. “I hear you’ve been a pain in the ass.”

Marie looked to David for an explanation.

“Hey, I never said that,” David said to Marie. “I just said you were tough on the professor.”

“Politically correct bullshit,” said Aaron. “That’s what I think.”

Without a word, Marie turned away from the brothers, paid for her milk, and walked out of the store. She was halfway down the block when David caught up to her.

“Hey, hey,” he said. “I’m sorry about that. Ignore him. He’s kind of a jerk.”

“He’s your brother,” said Marie. “Blood runs thick, enit?”

“Yeah, maybe. Listen, it’s just Aaron, you know? He doesn’t mean it. He just talks tough. He’s really a nice guy. I mean, he’s really good to me. He’s kind of been taking care of me since our mother died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. But Aaron just had to be tougher. He’s not very good at showing his feelings and stuff.”

“David,” asked Marie. “Why are you trying so hard?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why are you trying so hard to impress me? I’m really sorry your mother died, but it doesn’t mean much to me. And I couldn’t care less about your brother, you know? So, why are you telling me all of this?”

“I don’t know. I guess, well, it’s because I’m really sorry for what happened to Indians. It was a really bad deal.”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“I just never got the chance to talk to a real Indian before. And you’re real, so I wanted to tell you how I felt.”

Marie looked at David. She knew he was hiding something.

“Listen,” he said. “I heard about this casino up on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. I was wondering if you’d come with me. Kind of be my tour guide. Maybe Mather would give us extra credit. We could work on a paper together. Get the white boy’s and Indian girl’s take on it, you know?”

“David,” Marie said. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m not falling for it. Just leave me alone, okay?”

Marie left him standing there. David wanted to tell her about the camas fields back home. She was from the reservation. She must know about camas. He wanted to tell her about the Indian family that had come in the middle of the night to dig roots. Mother, father, four children, the old woman. Maybe Marie knew those Indians. Maybe Marie was one of those Indians. Maybe little Marie was running as David and Buck fired shots above her head. As Aaron shot at the Indian father. David wanted to tell Marie how he’d found one of those Indian root-digging sticks the morning after the shooting, and had buried it where his brother and father would never find it.

11. Cousins

AFTER SHE’D LEFT DAVID Rogers standing in the street outside the convenience store, Marie walked home to her small apartment. As she walked, her anger began to fade. She’d always had a quick temper, was the first to shout obscenities or throw fists, but she was also the first to laugh nervously and apologize. By the time she opened the door of her apartment and saw Reggie Polatkin sitting at the shabby kitchen table, Marie was calm. She’d neither seen nor heard from Reggie in over a year, but she was not surprised to find him waiting for her. Indian relatives had a way of just showing up at the doorstep.

“Hey, cousin,” Reggie said to Marie.

“How’d you get in?” Marie asked as she placed her milk in the refrigerator. Her apartment had one microscopic bedroom, a bathroom with just enough room for toilet, sink, and small shower stall, and a third room that functioned as living room, kitchen, dining room, and study. Dozens of books were piled onto every free space. Books served as furniture by propping up the black-and-white television, by supporting shelves that held yet other books, and by serving as impromptu coffee and end tables. Overpriced, depressingly cold, and battered by generations of student renters, the apartment felt like some tiny box of a reservation in the middle of a city. Marie had tried to brighten the place with flowers and colorful prints, but she still felt miserable whenever she came home.

“I got in by magic,” said Reggie. “And I told the landlord I was your long lost brother.”

“Long lost is right.”

Reggie smiled. He was a very handsome man, with a strong nose, clear brown skin, and startling blue eyes that instantly revealed his half-breed status. In an attempt to look more traditionally Indian, he braided his long black hair into two thick ropes. He was just a few inches over five feet, which was pretty short even for a small people like the Spokanes. Like many short men, Indian and not, Reggie tried to compensate for his stature by growing a mustache. But he had an Indian mustache, meaning that ten or twelve thick black whiskers poked out from the corners of his mouth.

Reggie had grown up in Seattle with his white father, Bird, and his Spokane Indian mother, Martha. Though he’d visited the reservation a few times during his youth, Reggie had always been a stranger to Marie. Reggie was the mysterious urban Indian, the college student, the ambitious half-breed, the star basketball player, the Indian who would make a difference. On the reservation, among Marie’s family, that was how Reggie had always been described, as the one who would make a difference. Reggie carried with him the collective dreams of the family. Marie had always been jealous of that, and when Reggie got himself kicked out of college because of an altercation with Dr. Clarence Mather, she’d felt a strange combination of relief and sadness. She’d felt sadness because she’d come to the University of Washington precisely because Reggie was enrolled there. She’d thought she would feel safer if she was near a relative, no matter how distant and aloof he was. And she’d felt relief because she’d hoped that Reggie’s failure somehow made the possibility of her failure less likely, as if Reggie’s expulsion from college had somehow paid in full her family’s psychic debt.

Now, as Reggie Polatkin sat at her kitchen table, smiling and acting as if he were a regular visitor, Marie wondered how such an intelligent man could have sabotaged himself in such a profound way.

Reggie Polatkin, ten years old and little, had stared up at his white father, Bird Lawrence, a small man, barely taller than his son, but with huge arms and a coarsely featured face that made him appear larger than he was.

“Come on, you little shit,” Bird had whispered. “You want to be a dirty Indian your whole life? What’s the answer?”

“Dad, I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, I’m sorry.”

Bird had slapped Reggie across the face.

“Okay, now for the second question. What year did the Pilgrims arrive in Massachusetts, and what was the name of the Indian who helped them survive?”

“Sixteen twenty,” Reggie had whispered. “And his name was Squanto.”

“And what happened to him?”

“He was sold into slavery in Europe. But he escaped and made his way back to his village. But everybody was dead from smallpox.”

“And was the smallpox good or bad?”

“Bad.”

“Wrong,” Bird had said and slapped Reggie again. “The smallpox was God’s revenge. It killed all the hostile Indians. You want to be a hostile Indian?”

“No,” Reggie had said.

At that time, in the early seventies, Bird had been the area director for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was under siege by the American Indian Movement. All over the country, hostile AIM members had been attacking peaceful BIA Indians and non-Indians. Bird had known that the murder rate in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, was the highest in the country. All because of the hostiles. And those hostiles had been making it tough to help the good Indians. It had been happening since Europeans had first arrived in the United States. In the nineteenth century, while a peaceful and intelligent chief like Red Cloud had been trying to help his people, a hostile Indian like Crazy Horse had been making it worse for everybody. But Bird had always believed that Crazy Horse got what he deserved, a bayonet in his belly, while Red Cloud had lived a long life.

Martha Polatkin had married Bird because she was searching for a way off the reservation. She’d wanted to have a big house, a nice car, green grass, and, no matter how cruel Bird was, she’d known he could provide her with all of that. And because he had, in fact, provided her with all of that, she’d tried to ignore Bird’s hatred of “hostile” Indians, even after he’d impregnated her and she’d given birth to Reggie. As for Bird Lawrence, he’d hated hostile Indians so much that he insisted Reggie use Polatkin, his Indian surname, until he’d earned the right to be a Lawrence, until he’d become the appropriate kind of Indian.

“Do you want to be a hostile?” Bird had asked Reggie again.

“No,” Reggie had said.

“Good, good. What was the name of the Indian who led the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 through 1692, and why did he begin the revolt?”

“His name was Pope. He was from San Juan Pueblo, and he said a spirit had told him to rid his homeland of the Spanish.”

“What was the name of the Spanish commander who ended the revolt?”

“Uh, Diego. Diego.”

“Diego what?”

“Diego…I don’t remember.”

Bird had punched Reggie in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. When Reggie could speak again, Bird had continued the surprise quiz.

“You remember that crazy Indian’s name, but not the name of the white man who saved thousands of lives? Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re hopeless. Can you explain why the Iroquois Confederacy fell apart from the years 1777 to 1783?”

“Because of the Revolutionary War.”

“And?”

“Well, some Iroquois, like the Mohawks, wanted to fight with the British. But the Oneidas and the Tuscaroras wanted to fight with the United States. And the Seneca and the Onondaga didn’t want to fight at all. Nobody could get along, so they broke apart from the Confederacy.”

“And which Indians were right?”

“The Oneidas and Tuscaroras.”

“Correct. Name the four Indian cowards who were indicted for the murder of two FBI agents on July twenty-sixth near Pine Ridge, South Dakota.”

“Leonard Peltier, Bob Robideau, an Eagle, and, and…”

“I’ll give you that one. Now, for the last question. What was the name of the Indian who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima during World War Two?”

“Ira Hayes.”

“And what happened to him?”

“He was a hero.”

“No, you idiot. What really happened to him?”

“He died of exposure in the winter of 1955. Passed out in the snow.”

“Why did he do that?”

“Because he was a dirty Indian.”

“Exactly, and what tribe was he?”

“I don’t remember.”

Bird had slapped Reggie again and bloodied his nose.

“I want you to know I’m doing this for your own good,” Bird had said. “I don’t want you to end up like all the other Indians. I want you to be special. I don’t want you to be running around with a gun. I want you to love your country. I want you to know your history.” The white father gave his Indian son a handkerchief. “Here, clean your face.”

Trying to avoid his father’s beatings, Reggie had always studied hard and brought home excellent report cards. Bird would beam with pride and tape the reports to the refrigerator, that place of familial honor. On those rare occasions when Reggie had brought home a failed test or a flawed term paper, Bird would beat him.

“You stupid, dirty Indian,” Bird would say, never above a whisper. “You’ll never get into college this way. You want to be a drunk? You want to be one of those Indians staggering around downtown? What do you want to be, Reggie? What do you want to be?”

Over the years, Reggie had come to believe that he was successful because of his father’s white blood, and that his Indian mother’s blood was to blame for his failures. Throughout high school, he’d spent all of his time with white kids. He’d ignored his mother, Martha. He hadn’t gone to local powwows. He hadn’t danced or sang. He’d pretended to be white, and had thought his white friends accepted him as such. He’d buried his Indian identity so successfully that he’d become invisible.

Reggie had graduated from high school with honors and enrolled as a history major at the University of Washington. There he had met Dr. Clarence Mather.

“Hey,” Marie said to Reggie as she sat at the table across from him. “I’m taking a class with your favorite teacher.”

Reggie’s eyes narrowed.

“Yeah,” said Marie. “Dr. Clarence Mather.”

“He’s a fucking liar.”

“Yes, he is.”

Reggie was fuming. He’d never told Marie what had happened with Mather. She’d heard all kinds of stories from other Indian students. She’d heard Mather and Reggie had been lovers and that Reggie had threatened to kill Mather if he ever revealed it. She’d also heard that Reggie and Mather had fought because they’d fallen in love with the same Indian woman. She’d heard that Mather had stolen some of Reggie’s academic research and claimed it as his own. So many stories, so many half-truths and outright lies. But since Indians used gossip as a form of literature, Marie knew she’d never heard the true story about Reggie and Mather. She knew the real story was probably something very pedestrian.

“Hey,” said Marie, trying to be a good host. “You hungry or something? All I got is water and cereal.”

“What kind of cereal?”

“Apple Jacks.”

“Cool.”

Marie poured two bowls of cereal. As they ate that simple dinner, Marie smiled at the small tragedy of it all. The two smartest Spokane Indians in tribal history were forced to eat Apple Jacks cereal for dinner.

“Quite the feast, huh?” asked Marie and laughed.

“Well, at least it’s traditional,” said Reggie, fighting back a smile.

“Yeah, don’t mind us, we’re indigenous.”

They laughed together.

“So,” said Reggie, more friendly now. “How is school going?”

“Ah, you know,” said Marie. “It isn’t easy.”

Reggie knew.

“Are you working?” asked Marie.

“Mostly,” said Reggie, who’d been running through a series of minimum wage jobs since he’d been kicked out of college. He mostly played basketball, especially at the all-Indian tournaments held nearly every weekend on the local reservations.

“How’s your folks?” asked Marie.

“Mom’s okay. Bird’s got cancer.”

Bird had recently been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and spent a lot of time in hospitals. Once, when Martha had called to say that Bird had asked for him, Reggie had promised to come home to the hospital, but had traveled to a basketball tournament in Montana instead.

“Oh, shit,” Marie said. “I’m sorry. How is he? Really?”

“I don’t know. Don’t care much, either.”

They ate the rest of their dinner in silence, then settled in to watch a bad movie on Marie’s black-and-white television.

“Hey, cousin,” said Reggie after the movie was over. “I hate to ask. But do you got any money I could borrow?”

Marie knew that Reggie had been building up the courage to ask for money.

“Reggie,” she said. “If I had money, do you think we’d be eating Apple Jacks?”

Reggie smiled.

“Hey,” he asked. “Have you heard about the scalping of that white man?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

Marie shrugged her shoulders.

“Yeah, I agree,” said Reggie.

He slept on the couch that night, and when Marie woke up early the next morning, he was already gone.

12. Seattle’s Best Donuts

FOR THE FIRST TIME since he had started construction work, John asked for permission to leave early, and went straight home to sleep. He was tired and willing to admit it to the foreman. A little after ten that night, he woke from a nightmare he could not remember, but he felt its residual effects, the sweat, racing heart, tensed muscles. He rubbed his stomach, remembered how, when he was twenty years old, he thought he was pregnant. No one had believed him, so he had forced himself to throw up every morning to prove it. For nine months, he waited to give birth, surprised by how little his belly had grown.

“This is going to be the smallest baby ever,” John had told Olivia. “You’re going to be a huge grandmother. Gigantic. The biggest grandmother ever.”

John had decided to have his baby at home because he hated hospitals and doctors, though he loved the nurses with their white nylons and long eyelashes. Using his latest paycheck, John made a list and then bought all the items he’d written down:

towels, clean and hot

hammer and nails

baby blankets and toys

bottle

graham crackers and milk

needle and thread

radio

sharp knife

soup

brand-new tool belt

rent money

newspapers with all the want ads cut out

On his delivery date, John lay naked on his bed, waiting for the baby. He watched the digital clock. 7:51. 7:52. 7:53. But the baby would not come. John felt his stomach, wished for labor pains, and heard the music growing louder and louder.

“No!” he’d shouted. “Don’t cheat me! Don’t cheat me again!”

But the baby never arrived, and John realized he had never been pregnant. He felt foolish. He had told everybody that he was pregnant, his mother and father, the woman who worked at the supermarket, his landlord. John packed up all his birthing supplies, the toys and blankets, knife and newspapers, and packed them into a box. He shoved the box under his bed and never looked at it. No. He opened it sometimes to take inventory, to make sure everything was still there. Criminals were everywhere these days, especially in his neighborhood. A girl had been shot and killed outside Ballard High School, just a few blocks away from his apartment. He was not going to take any chances with his possessions.

John smiled at the memory of his failed pregnancy. He was awake. He had to work the next day and he always tried to get plenty of sleep on work nights. The foreman liked to start early, so they would be done before that late afternoon sun took over. John thought this a strange belief, especially during winter in Seattle, when the skies were gray and rain fell constantly. John had seen one of his co-workers fall over with heat exhaustion a few summers earlier, but had never known it to happen since. Still, the foreman knew that an unconscious worker was an unproductive worker and made sure his men drank lots of water. John worried about what might have been in the water, but he usually drank it anyway.

John could not fall back to sleep. He crawled from bed, dressed in his work clothes, and walked to the all-hours donut shop on the corner. Seattle’s Best Donuts. John liked their donuts well enough, but he was not sure if they were the best in Seattle. He had once asked if there had been some kind of contest, but the manager just laughed. The shop was small, simple, and passably clean, as if one wet rag had been used to clean the entire place. A large picture window fronted the store. A window display of donuts at the end of the counter and another display hanging on the wall behind the counter. The kitchen was dark and mysterious behind the swinging doors.

“Lookee here, lookee here,” said Paul, the graveyard shift worker at the donut shop, when John walked in. Paul was a twenty-year-old black man, an art major at the University. He was handsome, with clear eyes and a strong chin. His hair was shaved close to his head. He worked the shift with Paul Too, an old black man whose great-great-grandmother had escaped slavery by marrying into the Seminole tribe. Paul Too sat at the counter, smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. He had a face like an old map, stained with age and folded incorrectly one too many times.

“Good morning, John,” said Paul. “You having the usual?”

“Yeah,” John said and sat beside Paul Too, who looked up from his newspaper and nodded. Paul set a jelly-filled donut and a cup of coffee in front of John. Paul Too picked up John’s donut, took a bite, and set it back down. Then he sipped a little of John’s coffee. John watched Paul Too very carefully. One minute, two minutes went by. Paul Too had survived. The food had not been poisoned. John took a bite of his donut and washed it down with coffee.

“So, John,” said Paul. “You couldn’t sleep again?”

John shook his head.

“That’s horrible. I hate it when I can’t sleep. And I’ll tell you, this graveyard shift messes with my sleeping. I never know what time it is. Never. Ain’t that right, Paul Too?”

Paul Too sighed deeply and nodded his head in agreement, never lifting his eyes from the paper.

“How’s your health been?” asked Paul. “Been quiet?”

John shrugged his shoulders.

“Yeah, I know how that goes. I hate it when things get loud. I need peace and quiet myself. Time to paint well, to let the colors in my head be the colors on the canvas, you know what I’m saying? A man doesn’t need much in this world, does he, John? Just a little food, a little house, and a little peace and quiet. I once heard that a man needs a full stomach and a warm house before he’ll listen to anybody’s sermon.”

Paul Too cleared his throat.

“I know, I know,” said Paul. “I was going to give you credit, you grumpy old man.”

John looked from Paul to Paul Too.

“You see, John,” said Paul. “Old Paul Too told me that. He said every man needs a good meal, a big blanket, and some peace and quiet. He said it. I’m just paraphrasing.”

Paul Too loudly turned a page, newsprint crinkling like a little bit of thunder.

“Okay, okay,” Paul said. “So it was Bessie Smith who said it first. I was just paraphrasing Paul Too’s paraphrase of Ms. Smith. Are you happy now, old man?”

John finished his donut, drank the last of his coffee. Paul swept them away and wiped the counter clean, leaving the rag for John to inspect. It was blue. John knew the blue rags were sterilized.

“So,” said Paul. “How’s your folks?”

John felt a little heat in his belly. Olivia and Daniel often came to the donut shop searching for John. Sometimes, they found him there. Other times, they just ate donuts and waited for John to arrive. John did not know if the donuts here were the best in Seattle, but his parents thought they were.

“I haven’t seen them for a bit,” Paul said. “I was just wondering.” Then to change the subject: “Do you know who Bessie Smith was?”

John shook his head.

“She was a singer, a fine black woman, back in the twenties and thirties, sang like nobody can sing. Sang good enough to make you crazy, John. Just like what you hear in your head, except everybody could hear it. How’s that for crazy? Drove the whole world insane and then she bled to death because they wouldn’t let her in a white hospital.”

Paul Too looked up at Paul.

“Yeah,” said Paul to Paul Too, “I know you think it was murder. But you think everything is a conspiracy.” Then to John. “Paul Too here thinks that Richard Nixon killed both Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X.”

Paul Too wagged a finger at Paul.

“And,” added Paul, “he thinks Mr. Nixon designed Pintos. You know what I’m saying? Those ugly little cars that looked like insects? You remember how they used to blow up? One little tap on the bumper and boom!”

Paul slapped his hands together loudly. John jumped up from his seat.

“Hey,” Paul said. “I’m sorry there, John. Please, have a seat.”

John sat down. Paul Too smoothed his pants and shirt, smoothed his hair with his left hand, picked up the local news section, and exhaled slowly.

“They found a white man’s body,” said Paul Too, reading from his newspaper.

“What man?” asked Paul.

“A dead man. They found his body in some empty house near Fremont. Houses all around there and nobody saw nothing. He was all messed up. What do they say here? Multiple stab wounds.”

Paul whistled.

“How many is multiple?” asked Paul Too. “How do they say things like that? What do they do? Count them up and measure them? Well, this is a bunch of stab wounds, and this is a lot. But Jesus, this is multiple. I don’t much care for it, you hear?”

“I hear,” Paul said.

“What was his name?” John asked, surprising both Pauls. He rarely talked in the donut shop.

“Well,” Paul said. “Tell the man what his name was.”

“It says here his name was Justin Summers. Now, if that ain’t the whitest white-guy name of all time, then I don’t know what. It’s just a damn shame.”

John started to cry.

“What is it?” asked both Pauls, bracing for the worst. Olivia and Daniel’s phone number was on a list near the telephone.

John covered his face with his hands.

“Did you know him?” asked Paul Too.

John shook his head furiously.

“Are you okay?” Paul asked. “Do you need anything?”

John put his face down on the counter, his shoulders and back heaving, loud sobs. No. Now he was laughing, deep belly laughs, his eyes still wet with tears. He laughed until he felt sick. Paul and Paul Too watched him. He might have laughed until he passed out, he had done it before, but another customer walked in the door and broke the spell.

“Well, hello there, Mr. Ruffatto,” Paul said to the regular.

Paul Too placed a hand on John’s shoulder. John stared at the hand, black skin, long fingers, wrinkled knuckles, a huge hand, callused and old. John eased out from under that hand, backed out of the shop, and started walking. He walked downtown and sat outside the building site. He stared up at the last skyscraper in Seattle. It was small, even by Seattle standards, and pointless. Why were they finishing this tall building when most of the skyscrapers in downtown Seattle were already in financial trouble? So many vacant spaces, so many failed businesses. None of the buildings in downtown Seattle were owned by the people who had originally financed their construction. Nothing was original. John watched his building. A few night people passed by, but John ignored them. He sat alone and quiet, wondering what would happen to him after the construction was complete.

13. Indian Gambling

DAVID ROGERS HAD NEVER been to an Indian gambling casino before that night. He’d never been on an Indian reservation for that matter, despite the fact that there were at least a dozen in and around the Seattle area, and five within a few hours’ drive from his family’s farm. In fact, the city of Spokane was named after a local tribe, but David had never visited their reservation. He knew that Marie Polatkin was Spokane, but she had refused his offer to accompany him to the Tulalip Casino. He wasn’t even sure why he wanted to go to the casino. He wanted to see Indians, he knew, but he didn’t know what he would do after that.

His brother, Aaron, and his other housemates, Barry Church and Sean Ward, hadn’t wanted to come with him.

“I’m not going on some reservation,” Aaron had said. “You don’t know what those Indians might do. Hell, they already killed one white guy. And you better not go either. What would Dad say if he knew you were going up there?”

So, with neither his brother’s help nor his father’s permission, David found himself alone and more than a little jumpy as he walked into the Tulalip Tribal Casino, just forty miles north of Seattle. David had expected to find something more illicit and foreign inside. From all the newspaper editorials, the public outcry, and his father’s rantings, David had assumed the casino would be filled with drunk Indian men, half-naked Indian women, and Italian mobsters. Instead, on this weeknight, David saw a couple dozen white farmers losing money at the poker and blackjack tables while the farmers’ wives dropped buckets of quarters into the slot machines. He was probably the youngest man in the casino, but he certainly wasn’t the only white one. He looked like most of the other gamblers. All of the Indians, dressed formally in tuxedos and evening gowns, were working as dealers, cashiers, and waiters. David was vaguely disappointed. He’d come for some cheap, rebellious thrills, a white boy slumming it among the Indians, but he soon discovered that the most dangerous thing in the casino was the thick cloud of cigarette smoke.

Still, once he realized he was safe, David proceeded to have a great time. He’d brought only forty dollars with him and he intended to gamble until he was broke. He lost twenty bucks at blackjack, five at poker, spent five on a hamburger and french fries, and was down to his last ten when he decided to have a spin on the slot machines. There must have been a hundred machines lined up in a far corner of the casino. Most machines took quarters, but a few took silver dollars. Bright lights, flashing bulbs, sirens announcing wins. The whirr-whirr-whirr of the slots spinning, the thuk-thuk-thuk of the jackpot-jackpot-apple, a loser, falling into place. The housewives, with white buckets of quarters balanced in their laps, pumped money into the slots. It was all so loud, irritating, and irresistible. A few minutes before midnight, David sat at a one-dollar baseball-themed slot machine, beside a housewife who briefly glanced at him before turning back, with a loud sigh, to her own efforts. Her luck had been bad that night. With his no better, David soon lost nine dollars with nine spins of the slots.

“It’s been that kind of night,” the housewife announced.

“Yeah,” David said, holding his last silver dollar. “This is it. Wish me luck.”

“Luck.”

David dropped the silver dollar into the machine, pulled the handle, and watched the Single-Single-Single drop into place. The housewife screamed as one hundred dollars’ worth of silver dollars spilled onto the floor. A few other women jealously peered around corners as David scooped up his money. He’d won his money back! And then some.

“For luck,” he said to the housewife as he handed her one of his silver dollars.

“You’re not quitting, are you?” she asked.

“Well, maybe not. Maybe just one more.”

He dropped one more dollar into the machine and pulled the handle, realizing this was exactly how casinos made their money. The slots spun, dropped. Home Run — Home Run — Home Run. The housewife was shrieking now and hugging David, who hugged her back. The sirens were deafening. Flashing red lights. The sudden appearance of two beefy Indian security guards. A crowd of white farm folk. Two thousand dollars! Two thousand dollars! Two thousand dollars!

After turning down management’s attempts to give him a check, David walked out of the casino with two thousand dollars in small bills. He knew it was foolish, but he felt like a character in a Hemingway novel. Daring, masculine, without the slightest hint of fear. Or reveling in his fear, staring into the eyes of the charging beast. He wondered what Marie would say. What if she thought he was stealing from the Indians?

David, feeling wealthy and untouchable, walked past the Indian security guards, who were busy calming down a drunken farmer. David couldn’t believe his luck. Aaron would go crazy. They’d party all night, skip class tomorrow, and drink through the weekend. Hell, they could go rent a hotel room and drink it up in style, paper the walls with twenty-dollar bills. David was laughing to himself, lost in fantasy, when he bumped into an Indian man standing near an advertising kiosk outside the casino.

“Excuse me,” David said. He barely looked at the Indian, but noticed a funny sign on the kiosk. WELCOME TO THE SIXTH ANNUAL TULALIP INDIAN NATION ALL–INDIAN BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT.

“Hey,” David said, pointing at the sign. “Gets pretty specific, doesn’t it?”

The Indian didn’t respond, which made David a little tense. He placed his hand on the large envelope of money in his coat pocket. He suddenly felt very white. The Indian, with a curious, canine twist of his head, looked at David. The Indian could smell the white boy’s fear.

“Well,” David said. “See you later.”

David could see his pickup in the parking lot. About a hundred feet away. Twenty seconds to get there. Remain calm, he thought. As he walked toward the pickup, David dug through his pockets. He found the right key, and readied it for quick use. Then he glanced back toward the casino and saw that the Indian was gone. The parking lot was dark. No people. The hum of the freeway a few hundred feet to the east. Increasingly nervous now, David began to hurry. He reached his pickup and tried to insert the key, but his hands were shaking and he dropped it. Jesus, David asked himself, what are you so scared of? He bent down to pick up the keys, felt a sudden, sharp pain at the back of his head, and then felt nothing at all.

14. Testimony

“MRS. JOHNSON, DID YOU see anything or anybody suspicious in the casino?”

“No.”

“Are you okay, Mrs. Johnson? Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes. It’s just. I mean, he seemed like such a sweet boy. What was his name?”

“David. David Rogers.”

“Yes, that’s it. He give me a silver dollar. I have it right here. He said it was for luck and then he hit the jackpot. I guess he wasn’t so lucky, was he?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you know what happened to him? Do you know anything at all?”

“We’re working on it, ma’am. Right now, we just know he left his pickup in the parking lot. That’s all we know.”

“It’s like he just disappeared, isn’t it?”

“Something like that.”

“And all that’s left of him is this silver dollar, isn’t it?”

“Right now, it looks that way.”

“But it’s so small.”

“Very small, ma’am.”

“Does this have anything to do with that boy who was scalped down in Seattle?”

“We don’t know, ma’am.”

15. Variations

AFTER OLIVIA HEARD THE news about the young man who had disappeared from the Indian casino, she called Daniel at work.

“Daniel, have you heard about that boy who disappeared? From the reservation?”

“Yes,” said Daniel impatiently.

“What do you think happened to him?”

“I don’t know. It sounds like a robbery.”

“I bet his family is worried sick,” said Olivia, thinking about how John had often disappeared from her life, only to reappear at unexpected times. She wondered how she would feel if John disappeared forever. She thought about the white man who had been scalped and murdered. She wondered how his family felt about his death.

“Are you okay?” Daniel asked, hearing the worry in his wife’s voice.

“I was just thinking about John. Have you heard from him?”

“No.”

“Well, I was just thinking, you know, that maybe we could go see if he’s at his apartment. I mean, he’s not answering his phone. But maybe he’s just ignoring it. Maybe he’s hurt.”

“If you want,” Daniel said, not wanting to admit how much he wanted to go searching for John.

After work, Daniel drove from downtown Seattle east across the 520 bridge to Bellevue, picked up Olivia from her part-time job at the Bellevue Art Museum, and then headed back across the bridge. Heavy traffic. Daniel hated the two bridges, 520 to the north and I-90 to the south, that connected the eastern and western halves of the Seattle metropolitan area. Like most American cities, Seattle was a city of distinct and divided neighborhoods, and though it had a reputation for cultural diversity, there was actually a very small minority population, consisting primarily of Asian-and African-Americans. And the minority populations mostly lived, by choice and by economic circumstance, in the Central, International, and University Districts. The middle-class whites generally lived on the twin hills of Queen Anne and Magnolia, overlooking the rest of the city, while the rich white people mostly lived in Bellevue or on Mercer Island, a financial and geographical enclave that sat in the waters of Lake Washington, halfway between Bellevue and Seattle. Where water had once been a natural boundary, it now existed as an economic barrier. And in those places where natural boundaries between neighborhoods didn’t exist, the engineers had quickly built waterways. So much water separating people.

Daniel knew that all the bridges and water were beautiful, but it was so hard to get from one place to another. Daniel hated traffic and constantly cursed other drivers. He took delays personally, as if each car were specifically placed to impede his progress. When John was young, Daniel had learned to control his tongue. But now that John was no longer a passenger, Daniel would fully vent his anger. He honked his horn, yelled, and mumbled by turns, wanting to talk to his son, John, the boy who, despite all the water so close to home, had never learned to swim.

Olivia did not mind sitting in the car. The Lexus had a great stereo system. She could play a compact disc and compose herself in preparation for their visit with John. She loved classical music, especially Glenn Gould’s rendition of the Goldberg Variations. For reasons she could not verbalize, Olivia had been immediately touched by his music. She was not a musical expert, had no scholarly vocabulary, but felt that she needed Gould’s piano playing in order to feel more substantial. Each series of notes, played straight, inverted, repeated, became the reason she could get out of the bed some mornings. The music came to mean even more to her after she read about Gould’s life, how he had quit performing publicly without the slightest warning. On that evening, he had signed an autograph for a backstage technician, told him that he was never going to perform again, and then played for the last time for an audience. It was wildly eccentric, Olivia thought, and impossibly romantic. It was the sort of rebellion that only a genius could have pulled off. Olivia wondered what Gould had felt that evening, how a weight must have lifted from his shoulders and drifted up into the rafters. As she and Daniel drove into Ballard in search of John, Olivia felt only sadness. While Gould had been very eccentric, quite probably mentally ill, he also managed to produce some of the greatest music of the twentieth century. Olivia wondered if her son, John, would ever be able to create anything of value.

John had left Olivia and Daniel’s home shortly after high school graduation. Daniel had encouraged the move and preferred to view it as some sort of initiation into manhood. Secretly, though, Daniel hoped that the move would be good for John, who had become increasingly withdrawn and distant. Most teenagers were temperamental, but John’s mood swings seemed to be too dramatic. Sometime during high school, he began to go immediately to his room after coming home. He would play one of the powwow music tapes he had bought, and not come out until morning. When Olivia brought John dinner in his room, Daniel felt that was being far too accommodating. But he knew he had been fairly lenient himself, due in large part, he thought, to John’s status as an adopted child. Oh, there were lots of times when John was simply their son, with no need for any qualifiers, but the stark difference in their physical appearances was a nagging reminder of the truth. If Olivia and Daniel could not forget that John was adopted, then John must have carried that knowledge even closer to his skin. Daniel wondered if his worries about John were normal parental worries, or unfounded obsessions that somehow changed John’s little teenage rebellions into full-scale wars. Maybe that was why John played his music so loudly, so he could not hear himself thinking about his mysterious origins. Sometimes, John would play his powwow music deep into the night.

“John!” Daniel would shout. “Turn that down!”

John would turn the music down for a few minutes, but then he would slowly increase the volume until it was as loud as it had been. Those drums filled the house. Midnight. One in the morning. Olivia seemed to sleep through it, but Daniel lay awake, a pillow over his head. Finally, after trying to shout the music down, Daniel would crawl from bed and storm down the hallway to John’s bedroom. It was always dark but Daniel never bothered to switch on the light. The walk was so familiar he could have closed his eyes and found his way quickly. Daniel sensed that life was all about patterns, with humans, animals, and insects finding those patterns and holding onto them with all of their strength. God was a series of recurring images. Daniel had walked faithfully down the dark hallway to John’s room without incident for eighteen years, bringing glasses of water and warm milk, comfort from nightmares and sleepy frustration, quiet discipline. Then, one evening when John was playing his powwow music at an exceptionally loud volume, Daniel tripped over a chair that had not been there before. As he hopped around and rubbed his bruised toe, Daniel did not stop to think about anything other than the pain and the music. He pounded on John’s door, which was jammed shut. A few months earlier, Daniel had removed the lock from the door because John had taken to barricading himself in his room, but John then kept the door shut to outsiders with a butter knife inserted into the jamb.

“John!” Daniel shouted while pounding on the bedroom door. But the music only increased in volume until it sounded like a whole tribe was beating drums.

Daniel pounded on that bedroom door for hours, years, until he found himself pounding on John’s apartment door in Ballard. Daniel wore a tailored suit, dark blue and tasteful, and a muted purple paisley tie, slightly out of style, his way of expressing his individuality. Olivia wore her favorite dress, red with large, black buttons. They both wore similar black overcoats. Daniel thought it vaguely embarrassing that he looked like his wife whenever it rained, without realizing how much he and Olivia always looked alike. Daniel pounded on the door. Olivia stood behind him. She had done this so often before, Daniel knocking and knocking, while John sat inside, ignoring them. Usually, if they stayed long enough, John would eventually answer the door. Once or twice, she had talked the landlord into opening the door, and then felt more like a trespassing thief than a mother. The landlord eventually gave her a key, but Olivia had never used it.

“He’s not home,” said Olivia.

“He’s home,” said Daniel, frustrated and slightly frightened because John had disappeared before.

Now, again, no answer as Daniel pounded on the door, as Olivia held her breath, as they tried to make contact with their son. The neighbors, Salgado in 401 and Heistand in 402, turned up their televisions. They had heard this knocking many times before. In the beginning, it had been touching and slightly irritating, the audible proof of parental love. But it had become desperate and lonely.

Olivia and Daniel were silent on the long drive back to Bellevue. As they drove over the 520 bridge, Olivia looked down and saw a man in a kayak, or actually the dark silhouette of a man in a kayak, passing beneath the bridge. A crazy man, thought Olivia, to be all alone, out there, on the dark water. Glenn Gould played his piano. Olivia did not say anything when Daniel switched off the CD player, silencing Gould, and turned on the radio.

“Hello out there, folks, this is Truck Schultz on KWIZ, the Voice of Reason…”

16. Greek Chorus

“…AND BOY, DO I HAVE a problem. You see, folks, I just got this newsletter from the Washington State Indian Tribes for Aboriginal Gambling. The W.S.I.T.A.G. How do you say that anyway? What do you think it means in Indian? Well, I think it means they want to turn our state into a nest of sin and debauchery.

“The W.S.I.T.A.G. wants to increase the number of full-scale gambling casinos in Washington. We’re talking blackjack, poker, slot machines. We’re talking roulette, keno, bingo, with absolutely no bet limits or state supervision. That’s right, folks, the Indian tribes in this state want to subvert our constitution. They want to ignore the wishes of our government officials, of the voting public, and establish Vegas-style gambling casinos, complete with show girls, neon lights, and Wayne Newton.

“The Indian tribes insist that they have the legal right to establish casinos. They contend that the state has no say in these matters because of treaties that the tribes signed a century ago with the federal government. Can you believe this, folks? The Indian tribes believe that they are above the law. I wonder how far these Indians are willing to take this. What’s going to happen next? When you wake up tomorrow morning, will there be an Indian tribe camped out on your front yard, demanding that your land revert back to them?

“Listen, folks, I admit that what was done to the Indians was wrong. But that was hundreds of years ago, and you and I were not the people who did it. We have offered our hands in friendship to the Indians, but they insist on their separation from normal society. They are an angry, bitter people, and treat the rest of us with disdain and arrogance. Maybe this whole Indian gambling thing is about revenge on the white man. They want to take all of our money. They want to corrupt our values. They want to teach our children that greed and avarice are good things.

“Let me give you an example of what Indian gambling has brought to our state. I want to tell you a little story about a young man named David Rogers. David is a student at the University of Washington. An upstanding young man, a good son, an English major who loved Hemingway. He shares a house with his brother, Aaron, who called me up this morning. Aaron told me all about his brother. You see, a couple days ago, David Rogers wanted to go gambling at the Tulalip Indian Casino just north of Seattle.

“Now, David didn’t want to go alone, so he invited his brother to come along. But he refused. In fact, Aaron tried to discourage his little brother, but David was seduced by the easy money he thought he was going to make. Aaron kept telling his brother it was dangerous. He reminded his younger brother about the scalping and murder of Justin Summers. But David would not be denied.

“So, David went to the casino alone, and, lo and behold, he won two thousand dollars at the slot machines. Can you believe that? He must have thought he was the luckiest man alive. And you know what, he was lucky for a few minutes. He was also smart. Most people would have gambled their winnings away, thinking they were on a hot streak. But David, despite the protest of the casino management, collected his money and left the casino, anxious to celebrate with his brother. He left the casino and he has not been seen since.

“That’s right, folks. David is missing. His pickup was found in the casino parking lot, but there is no trace of him. He’s disappeared. Now, I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I can just imagine what happened.”

Truck sipped at his coffee.

“The Indian tribes of Washington State have declared a cultural war on us, and the weapon they’ve chosen is the casino.

“What do you think, folks? Give me a call…”

17. All the Indians in the World

IN SEARCH OF DAVID Rogers, Aaron and Buck drove onto the Tulalip Indian Reservation. The Tulalip Tribal Casino was just a few hundred feet off the freeway, close to a Burger King restaurant and a 7-Eleven convenience store.

“Jeez,” said Aaron, trying to ease the tension. “Long ways from camas root, don’t you think?”

Buck didn’t respond. He hadn’t spoken much since he’d arrived in Seattle. On the short trip from Seattle to the Tulalip Reservation, Buck had driven with a calculated fury. He’d raced up on slower cars, flashing his lights and honking his horn. He’d changed lanes with sudden twists of the wheel. Aaron had been terrified.

Now, as he slowly pulled into the casino parking lot, Buck seemed to have calmed.

“Where was David’s pickup?” asked Buck.

“Over there,” said Aaron and pointed to the approximate place. The police had long since taken the pickup away.

Buck and Aaron stood in the parking lot, in the place where David’s truck had been. In the very same air. Aaron breathed in deep. Unsure of what else to do, Aaron stared down at the ground, searching for evidence, some reason for David’s disappearance. Aaron knew about the two thousand dollars David was carrying, but he also knew that David would have given it to a mugger in a second. He would have never fought back. David didn’t work that way.

“Indians,” whispered Buck as two large Indian men walked out of the casino. They looked like brothers, Aaron thought, although most Indians looked alike. The Indians were laughing loudly. Buck glowered at them. Aaron knew his father was carrying a pistol beneath his jacket. Aaron took a deep breath, ready for anything to happen. The Indians, still talking and laughing, walked past the two white men. Buck and Aaron turned to watch them as they climbed into a battered pickup and drove away.

“It could’ve been them,” said Buck. “It could’ve been any of these Indians.”

Inside the casino, more Indians. But no answers. Inside the Burger King and 7-Eleven, still more Indians. Indians driving by. Indians walking. Indians laughing. A world suddenly filled with Indians. But no answers.

“They took him,” said Buck. “They’ve taken my David.”

On the drive back to Seattle, Aaron stared at the trees beside the road. Tall, dark, and thin, they looked like Indians, ready to reach out and steal everything.

“Why’d you let him go there alone?” Buck asked Aaron.

“I told him not to go,” said Aaron.

“You’re his big brother. You’re supposed to take care of him.”

“I’m sorry.”

Buck backhanded his son and bloodied his nose.

“No excuses,” said Buck. “You let him down. You let me down.”

Aaron, fighting back tears, wiped blood from his face. Buck passed a gasoline truck and two recreational vehicles. Aaron thought about his late mother, how she wasted away and died during one long summer.

“He’s all we have,” said Buck. “He’s all we have left.”

Aaron and Buck drove in silence after that. They didn’t speak when Buck dropped Aaron off at his house. They didn’t speak after Buck drove back to the family farm, sat at the kitchen table, and waited for his younger son to come home. He waited for a long time.

For Aaron, school simply ceased to be important. He felt a tremendous amount of guilt for letting David go alone to the casino. David had asked him to come along, but Aaron had refused. Their other roommates, Barry and Sean, had also passed on the offer, but Aaron felt a special responsibility for David. He was a weak, clumsy boy who had often needed protection from school bullies. Aaron had always provided that protection until the night that David disappeared.

Aaron designed a missing-person sign on his computer, printed hundreds of copies, and stapled them to telephone poles and advertising kiosks all over western Washington. Two or three times, he drove alone to the Tulalip Tribal Casino to look for any signs of David. Somewhere deep inside himself, Aaron realized it was probably hopeless, but it was all he knew to do. He could not cry, though he wanted to. He locked himself in the bathroom, stripped naked, sat on the floor, and prayed for tears. But it would not happen. After that, with only the faintest trace of emotion, he walked from store to store, asking each to place a missing-person flyer in the window. The store managers never turned him down. Everybody knew about the missing college student, the boy from Spokane who loved Hemingway. Aaron spent so much time searching for David that he just stopped attending classes. His other roommates, Barry and Sean, tried to comfort him in their clumsy ways, wanting to ease his pain, but Aaron refused all compassion. He needed some kind of ceremony in which to express his grief, but he was without ceremony. Without the ability to mourn properly, Aaron could only steep in his anger. Tapping a thirty-six-inch baseball bat against the floor, he spent hours alone in his dark bedroom, listening to Truck Schultz’s radio show. Aaron made plans for revenge against the unknown. He stood and smashed the bat against the wall, punching a hole in the plaster. Then he swung the bat again.

18. In Search Of

ON A BRIGHT AND cold Saturday morning, John saw Father Duncan more clearly than he had ever seen him before. Duncan, that grizzly of a man, was kneeling in the sand. John could see his shoulders shaking with tears, or laughter, or passionate prayers. What does a priest pray for? For himself, for his own needs, for the same reasons that everybody else prays? John knew that priests also prayed for their congregations, for the Pope, for the blessing, for communion, for offering. Prayers for every occasion. Father Duncan kneeled in the sand and prayed, or laughed, or cried, or maybe he did all three simultaneously. Duncan, wanting to be heard by every version of God, prayed in English, Latin, and Spokane, a confusing and painful mix of syntax, grammar, and meaning. John could see that Father Duncan’s black hair had grown so much that it reached the small of his back. Duncan’s face was hidden behind those delicate hands, which were blistered, bruised, and trembling. The sun was so low that Father Duncan could have stood and touched it. Sand, scorpions testing the armor of enemy scorpions, tarantulas hiding in their self-made caves. That stand of palm trees still on the horizon. Storm clouds.

Feeling the need to run from that storm, John stuffed a few belongings into a backpack and hitchhiked down the coast. John often visited reservations searching for his mother, answers, some kind of family. Now, as he left, he didn’t tell anyone where he was going. He planned on being back to work by Monday morning. He simply locked his apartment door behind him and walked out into the cold morning. In search of Bigfoot, he hitchhiked south to the Hupa Indian Reservation in northern California.

John had become obsessed with Bigfoot after watching an episode of In Search Of, the Leonard Nimoy-hosted television series about monsters and myths. John had learned about the cabin in Ape Canyon on Mount Saint Helens where a group of miners battled a small army of angry Bigfoot. John had been fascinated by the account, reenacted for television by bad actors, but had doubted it. Bigfoot were incredibly strong and intelligent. If an army of Bigfoot had angrily attacked a small group of miners in a thin-walled cabin, then John doubted that the miners would have survived. Instead, John believed that the Bigfoot had been having fun with the miners, those pale-skinned men who loudly crashed through the forest, announcing their presence to everybody, never burying their waste, leaving behind foul evidence of their passing. John could hear the Bigfoot laughing among themselves as they hoisted rock after rock against the roof of the cabin. He could hear the terrified screams of the miners as they cowered inside. When morning came, after the Bigfoot had tired of their game and gone, the miners quickly abandoned their camp. Ashamed of their cowardice, the miners had invented the story of their epic battle against the monsters who lived on the mountain. That was how it worked. John knew that white men did not know how to tell the truth. They lied constantly about women, money, monsters. White men made promises and did not keep them.

John had been mesmerized when Leonard Nimoy introduced the footage of the “most convincing evidence of Bigfoot’s existence,” and then screened Roger Patterson’s famous film of his encounter with the monster on the Hupa Indian Reservation. John had kneeled down in front of his television as the Bigfoot stepped over the deadfall in the middle of a clearing, and walked, with enormous, beautiful grace, from left to right across the screen. Patterson’s horse, spooked by the monster, had thrown him, so the film was unsteady and dizzying. Despite the commotion, Patterson had kept filming as he fell, regained his footing, and ran after the Bigfoot. For effect, the frame was frozen just as the Bigfoot turned to look directly into the camera. Huge, brown, pendulous breasts; large chunks of muscle and fat carried at her hips and belly.

With his backpack and a few possessions, John hitchhiked to the Hupa Indian Reservation. It was a quick and uneventful journey. Over the course of fifteen hours, a long-haul trucker picked him up within the Seattle city limits and gave him a lift down Interstate 5 to Portland, Oregon, where John caught another ride, to the Hupa Reservation, with a salesman who leased movie videos to many of the small-town supermarkets, mom-and-pop rental stores, and obscure convenience stores in southern Oregon and northern California.

Once in Hoopa, on the reservation, John was unsure of what to do. He was confused by the spelling of Hupa, the tribe, and Hoopa, the town, and knew that something had been lost. And it appeared strange that this reservation town contained few Indians. It appeared to be a typical small town, with a grocery store, a gas station, a post office, a number of turn-of-the-century houses, a small clinic, and a few anonymous government buildings, though it was set down in the middle of a beautiful valley. The redwood trees filled the horizon. John walked around the town, attracting a lot of attention from the small number of Indians. The girls gossiped behind their hands, while the boys wondered if they could talk John into playing for their basketball teams. A tribal policeman with mirrored sunglasses and braids cruised by John. The Hupa Reservation was the kind of place where fugitives of all kinds came to disappear. John walked until he saw an old Hupa Indian woman sitting on a folding chair outside the local cafe. She was small and ancient, with a walnut face deeply lined with wrinkles. She wore a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt that read BIGFOOT HUNTER. A handwritten sign at her feet said BIGFOOT HUNTER FOR HIRE.

“How much?” John asked her.

“How much for what?” she asked, smiling with a full set of dentures.

“Bigfoot,” John said, pointing to the sign.

The old woman looked up at John. She saw a tall, handsome Indian man.

“What tribe you are?” she asked.

“Navajo.”

“Ah, one of them, huh?” she asked and laughed loudly. John’s face went hot. “Yeah, I knew a Navajo once. Laura was her name. Laura Tohe. You know her?”

John shook his head.

“Ah, she was a good one,” said the old woman. “Haven’t heard from her in a long time. A long time.”

Thinking of Laura, the old woman sipped at her Pepsi.

“What’s your name, anyways?” she asked after a moment or two.

“John.”

The old woman studied John’s face, trying to determine if the name fit his features. It did not.

“My name is Lu,” she said. “But everybody calls me Sweet Lu.”

She extended her hand and John shook it in the Indian way. He had learned some small things.

“You know,” she said. “Most people call them Sasquatch these days. Makes it sound more Indian, don’t it?”

John nodded his head.

“I’ll take you to find ol’ Sasquatch,” she said. “And I’ll give you the Indian discount, too, okay? How’s twenty bucks sound?”

John handed her the money. Sweet Lu then packed up her folding chair and sign, threw them into the back of a rusty yellow pickup, and hopped into the driver’s seat. John had to push a pile of newspapers and magazines to the floor before he could sit in the passenger seat.

“You better buckle in,” she said. “It’s a rough ride.”

Sweet Lu drove that pickup deep into the woods, using logging roads and cattle trails. Once or twice, she simply imagined a path through the trees and followed it. They traveled for hours, mostly not speaking, though Sweet Lu would occasionally break the silence.

“You speak your language?” she asked John.

“No.”

“Ah, too bad. That Navajo language is beautiful. Jeez, I remember when Laura Tohe would talk Navajo and all the Indian boys would come running. There was this one guy, named Phil something-or-other. Ah, he had it something fierce for her. Would ask her to speak in Navajo. Laura, say chair. Laura, say horse. Laura, say desert.”

Sweet Lu laughed at the memory.

After a few hours, Sweet Lu dropped the pickup into low gear and chugged up a steep hill. She narrowly avoided a fallen tree, then stopped the pickup atop a rise. A small creek wound its way through the wash below. A few birds, which John could not identify, startled by the presence of humans, excitedly flew from tree to tree and chattered in their bird languages.

“Sasquatch fishes here, so keep your eyes open,” said Sweet Lu, then promptly leaned back in her seat and fell asleep.

John waited and watched. Sweet Lu snored loudly. The creek water was green from that distance, and John knew that it must be cold, ice cold. A small doe gracefully stepped from the trees to sip water from the creek. The birds had quieted, finally accepting John and Sweet Lu’s presence. A military jet, thousands of feet above them, left a vapor trail across the otherwise clear blue sky. John wondered if Sasquatch was out there in the woods, watching and waiting for the humans to leave. John knew he did not belong there or anywhere, but he never wanted to leave.

Near dark, Sweet Lu woke up with a sudden start. She had been dreaming about her late husband, a Hupa man who never did learn to speak English.

“You see him?” asked Sweet Lu.

John shook his head.

“Ah, too bad. I’ll give you half your money back, okay?”

John shook his head.

“You sure?” asked Sweet Lu.

“Yes,” said John.

Sweet Lu gave John a ride to the border of the reservation.

“I can’t cross the border,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t have my passport.”

John shook her hand again and waved as she pulled away. He stood there in the dark for a while, as cars filled with strangers passed him by, as the night sky became so clear that every constellation was visible. The Big and Little Dippers, Orion, Pegasus. John knew that stars were suns, that each was the center of its own solar system, with any number of planets dependent on its warmth and gravity. John, a falling star, brief and homeless, began the long walk back to Seattle, wondering what Olivia and Daniel would think of this adventure. Pragmatic people. When they swallowed the bread and wine at Mass, did they ever consider the magic of it all? There was magic in the world. John knew that real Indians felt it every day. He had only brief glimpses of it, small miracles happening at the edges of his peripheral vision, tiny wonders exploding while his back was turned.

John hitchhiked back to Seattle and made it to work that Monday morning. He was waiting when the foreman arrived early that morning, but John did not understand a word when the foreman tried to talk to him. All that morning, the foreman spoke a strange, unintelligible language. And worse than that, the foreman’s face changed. Deep beneath the changes, he still looked like the foreman, but he resembled Daniel Smith, too. No. That wasn’t quite right. The foreman could look like anybody. He could change his face at will. John knew that if he were a good Indian, he would have known the foreman was a shape changer, a loup-garou, a werewolf. Good Indians can always spot monsters. John also knew he could not stay on this job. He was frightened by the foreman and by all his co-workers. They were white men and he knew they talked about him. He knew they were plotting against him. There were too many of them and too few of John.

“Hey, John, you want to get a beer?” they always asked him, even after he had declined dozens of previous offers. Somewhere inside himself, John knew they just wanted him to be a part of the team. He understood what it meant to be a teammate. He’d been a teammate once. But he did not want to deal with the complications, the constant need to reassert his masculinity, the graphic talk about women. John could no longer stand such talk about women. Rain washed the windows of the building across the street, and John could see the blurry image of a woman talking on the telephone. She gestured wildly. From that distance, she was just a beautiful series of shapes and colors. Blond hair, a red dress, small hands, long fingers. He knew she was beautiful but, strangely enough, all he wanted was to watch her. He felt no need to touch her or even speak to her. His teammates and co-workers would have spoken of all the horrible things they might do to the beautiful white woman across the street. Or to a woman like Marie, the pretty Indian. John had heard such talk from the rich white men at his father’s parties and from the working white men at the construction site. All poison and anger. John knew his co-workers wanted to poison him with their alcohol and mean words. They wanted to get him drunk and helpless. John had never taken a drink of alcohol in his whole life and he was not about to start now. He knew what alcohol did to Indians. Real Indians did not drink. John knew he could not stay in that place any longer. Father Duncan was praying in the desert. Perhaps he was praying for John’s salvation. But John knew he needed to find his own salvation. He thought about the old woman, Sweet Lu, and wondered if she ever shared a salmon meal with Sasquatch. He thought about the beauty of myths and the power of lies, how myths told too often became lies, and how lies told too often became myths. He looked at the city’s skyline, understanding the myth and lies of its construction, the myths and lies of its architects. John knew there was one white man who should die for all the lies that had been told to Indians. Understanding that, he set down his gear and walked away from the construction site without saying a word to anyone. The foreman watched John leave with no way of knowing if he would ever come back to work. As John walked away, the foreman remembered when the Indian had first appeared nine years earlier.

“Hello,” he’d said, slowly and carefully, “I’m John Smith.”

The foreman had offered his hand and John looked at it briefly, as if he were unsure of what to do. The foreman had figured that John was just nervous, especially after he refused to make any eye contact. John was always looking down at the floor, studying his hands, looking out the window.

“So,” the foreman had said. “Why do you want to work construction?”

“I read about it,” John had said. “In a magazine. Indians like to work construction. Mohawks. In New York City.”

The foreman knew about the Mohawk construction workers, who had passed from ordinary story into outright myth. They were crazy bastards, walking across girders without safety harnesses, jumping from floor to floor like they were Spiderman’s bastard sons. There were three or four generations of Mohawk steel workers. Old Mohawk grandfathers sat around Brooklyn brownstones and talked stories about working on the Empire State Building. They scared children with tales of relatives, buried alive in building foundations, who come back to haunt all of the white office workers.

“Are you Mohawk?” the foreman had asked.

“Uh, no.”

“What are you? Snohomish? Puyallup?” the foreman had asked, running through his limited knowledge of the local tribes.

“No, I’m Lakota Sioux.”

“Sioux, huh? Bad old buffalo hunter? The Plains are pretty damn flat. What makes you think you can climb up the side of a building?”

“I’m strong.”

For no reason that he could verbalize, the foreman had hired John on the spot to do the grunt work, and John was strong, very strong. He carried scrap metal and garbage, pallets stacked with building supplies. He did every damn thing that you could want him to do, except talk much. But hell, the foreman had figured, good talkers are usually bad workers. The foreman had snuck John into the union, and pretty soon, John was climbing up the sides of buildings.

Things had been fine until John started talking to himself. Then he had stopped talking at all, stayed silent for a couple weeks, and now was walking off the job without permission, something he had never done.

“See you tomorrow, chief,” the foreman said to himself as John disappeared into the lunch-hour crowd. The foreman was pissed that John had not bothered to officially clock out. But John had been so withdrawn and goofy this morning, the foreman had even thought John might try to take a dive off the building. Better to just let him walk away. The foreman wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief and turned back to work.

John kept walking. He was unsure of where to go and could not tell the difference between the noise of the lunch-hour crowd and the noise of the crowd in his head. Maybe they were the same people. He smelled the salt in the air and decided to walk to Elliott Bay. Maybe if he stood near the water, he could clear his head. But he was not sure how to get there. He knew he should carry a map because he was always getting lost, but he had just never bothered to buy one. Besides, maps were dangerous. If you were seen looking at a map, then everybody knew you were lost and vulnerable. You were easy prey. But John was strong. He looked for familiar landmarks, saw the neon lights of a porno shop and the huge sculpture outside the Seattle Art Museum. The Hammering Man. Fifty feet tall. Nothing abstract or confusing. Just a tall man with a hammer pounding the air. A moving sculpture that had received so many insults. A waste of tax money. No face, no hair, no sexual organs, no pores, no skin. Just the metal skeleton and the metal hammer. The Hammering Man was neither Indian nor white. He may have not been a man. What did it mean? John wasn’t sure what the artist might have meant. But that didn’t matter to John. The artist wasn’t important anymore. The Hammering Man was simply all that John wanted to be. Important and powerful. Simple, unconcerned. The Hammering Man looked as if he could have stepped away from the museum, away from all the small details and painful reminders of his past, and walked into Elliott Bay. Walked until his head and hammer disappeared beneath the surface of the water. Kept walking. The hammer still pounding, still moving, back and forth, back and forth. The hammer was all that mattered. The tool and the use of the tool.

19. Native American Studies

DR. CLARENCE MATHER SAT at a disorganized desk in the bowels of the Anthropology Building. He always came down here to relax, and he needed relaxation because his office was being bombarded with crank calls concerning the murder of Justin Summers and the disappearance of David Rogers, and because his Native American literature class had become a terrible power struggle with Marie Polatkin. Though fairly intelligent and physically attractive, she was rude and arrogant, thought Mather, hardly the qualities of a true Spokane. As if it ran in the family like some disease, Reggie Polatkin had also failed to behave like a true Spokane. Mather knew he could teach both of them a thing or two about being Indian if they would listen to him, but it seemed all of the Spokanes were destined to misunderstand his intentions.

Mather and Reggie Polatkin had been friends from the very beginning. Though Reggie couldn’t have said as much, he’d immediately felt a strange kinship with the white man who wanted to be so completely Indian. Reggie was a half-Indian who wanted to be completely white, or failing that, to earn the respect of white men. Mather and Reggie were mirror opposites. Each had something the other wanted, and both had worked hard to obtain it.

Reggie and Mather traveled to men’s gatherings and went into the sweathouse together. Reggie had usually been the only Indian at those gatherings and willingly played the part of shaman for the sad and lonely white men, many years his senior, who’d come to him for answers. For the first time in his life, Reggie felt as if being Indian meant something, as if he could obtain tangible reward from simply behaving as an Indian was supposed to behave, acting as an Indian was supposed to act. And the act became so convincing that Reggie began to believe it himself. His Indian act earned him the respect of white men and the sexual favors of white women.

Through Reggie, Mather was able to obtain entry into the Seattle urban Indian community. He went to parties where all the guests were Indian. He used a counterfeit tribal enrollment card to play in the all-Indian basketball tournaments. Together, Mather and Reggie went into Indian taverns and snagged Indian women. While Reggie went to bed with the most attractive woman of any pair of friends, Mather slept with the other, only slightly less attractive, half.

This had all continued until Mather found that box of recordings of traditional Indian stories. Mather had always enjoyed negotiating the narrow passageways, rummaging and foraging here and there. A few years earlier, he had found two boxes of reel-to-reel tapes filled with the voices of Pacific Northwest Indian elders. Recorded by a forgotten anthropologist during the summer of 1926, the tapes had just been collecting dust in a storage room when Dr. Mather stumbled upon them. Excited, but still protective of the discovery, Mather had decided to play the tapes for Reggie, one of the brightest Indians Mather had ever encountered.

The professor thought Reggie had a grasp of Indian history almost as strong as his own. And Reggie’s knowledge of Spokane Indian history was probably a little more complete than Mather’s. Mather thought the young Spokane might have been able to clarify some aspects of the story.

“Listen to this woman,” Mather had said to Reggie as they listened to an Indian elder telling a story. “She’s Spokane. Do you think you can identify her?”

Reggie didn’t speak Spokane well, but he’d recognized that Spokane Indian elder’s story.

“That’s a family story. It belongs to the family. Not on some tape. It’s not supposed to be told this way. You should erase that tape.”

Mather had been shocked by the suggestion. Up until that point, Reggie had been a dedicated student. In fact, Mather had seen himself as a father figure for Reggie, and the young Indian had become something of a son. Mather had trusted Reggie, maybe even loved him, and had always assumed that Reggie felt the same about him. But Mather had felt only disappointment when Reggie said he wanted to erase the tapes. The professor had wanted to make them public and publish an article about them, but Reggie had heard the recorded voice of that old Spokane woman and had been suddenly ashamed of himself. He’d heard that ancient voice and wanted to destroy it. He’d wanted to erase the tapes because he had not wanted anybody else, especially a white man like Mather, to have them. He’d wanted to erase them because they’d never be his stories.

“This is a very valuable anthropological find,” Mather had said. “I mean, nobody even tells these stories anymore. Not even Indians. We have to save them.”

“Stories die because they’re supposed to die,” Reggie had said.

“But these stories aren’t dead,” Mather had said. “The elders must have wanted them to be saved. They allowed the anthropologist to record them.”

“Look, I’m sure the elders definitely didn’t understand how these stories were going to be used. Dr. Mather, you have to let these stories go. Burn the tapes. Or I’ll burn them for you.”

Reggie had stared at Mather with such startling anger that the professor had stepped backward and, frightened, had promised to burn the tapes. Later, angry at himself for having played the tapes for Reggie, Mather had hidden them in a dark corner of the basement instead. When Reggie had asked him later if the tapes had been destroyed, Mather denied that the tapes had ever existed. Mather had told that first lie because he believed he was protecting the recordings. He’d come to see those stories as his possessions, as his stories, as if it had been his voice on those tapes. He’d lied to preserve his idea of order. But with each successive lie Mather had told, he’d begun to lose track of the original reasons for lying. Layer after layer of lies. As an anthropologist, Mather could have dug into himself for years and not discovered the truth.

For Reggie, Mather’s lie had become the breaking point after which he believed all white men were lying all the time. Reggie knew the history. Mather’s friendship had simply become another broken treaty. Another beautiful series of promises that had been, in fact, a worthless stack of paper.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mather had lied to Reggie first, and then to Dr. Faulkner, the department chair, after Reggie had lodged a formal protest. All three men had been sitting in Faulkner’s office, along with Bernice Zamora, the department secretary, who’d been taking notes.

“Why do you think Mr. Polatkin would make these kinds of accusations against you?” Dr. Faulkner had asked Mather.

“Frankly, I think it’s because of Reggie’s distrust of authority figures. In particular, Reggie has had an extremely difficult relationship with his father, a white man. I don’t pretend to be a psychologist, but I believe Reggie is confusing his feelings about his father with his feelings for me.”

“You liar,” Reggie had said and left the office. He’d understood that Mather’s lies would go undetected and unpunished. Later that day, Reggie had cornered Mather in the Student Union Building.

“I trusted you,” Reggie had said.

“It’s you who violated my trust,” Mather had replied. “You certainly aren’t behaving like a true Spokane.”

Reggie had punched Mather then and wrestled him to the ground, but a few other students had broken it up quickly. Naturally, Reggie had been expelled from the University.

Now, as Mather sat in the Anthropology Building basement and listened to his beloved secret tapes, he was professionally disappointed that he could never reveal their existence. Still, he was personally in love with the Indian elders’ voices, men and women, Snohomish, Makah, Yakama, Spokane, and he’d memorized all of the stories. With those tapes, Mather owned twelve hours’ worth of magic. He listened to the magical recording of a Spokane Indian elder telling a traditional story. A true Spokane. She spoke fractured English, which Mather could barely understand, but her fluent Spokane was being translated by a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent. The story was about Coyote, the trickster, and it echoed through the cluttered basement. Boxes of various artifacts were stacked in tall piles. A maze of doors, small rooms, and hallways. Some rooms had not been opened since the early part of the century, and exploring the basement involved a contemporary sort of archaeology. The basement even had its own mythology. Chief Seattle’s bones were supposedly lost somewhere in the labyrinth. And the bones of dozens of other Indians were said to be stored in a hidden room.

As the Spokane Indian elder finished her trickster story, the basement went dark. Mather smiled and thought of Coyote, assuming it was just a temporary power outage. But as five minutes passed, then ten, Mather grew agitated. At least, he told himself he was agitated. Actually he was becoming very frightened. The building creaked and groaned. Other mysterious noises in the distance sounded like footsteps, whispers, a door slowly opening.

“Hello, this is Dr. Mather.” His voice echoed loudly. “I’m in the northwest corner. By the furnace.”

Dr. Mather listened for a response, heard nothing, and then realized he’d given away his exact position. If somebody was trying to hurt him, he’d know where Mather was. Nonsense, Mather thought, someone’s coming to help me. But then he realized that nobody knew he was in the basement. It was late. Very late. Probably nobody was in the entire Anthropology Building except Mather. Or, nobody should be.

“Hello?” Mather asked, a question now.

He continued to sit at the desk and listen carefully. He heard somebody breathing, though he soon realized he was hearing his own inhalation and exhalation. Holding his breath, he listened, and heard a strange rattling. There, off to his right, that rattling again. Not like a snake, but like beads shaking, or sand in a shell, or bones rubbing together. Mather sat up straight in his chair. He thought of the Indian remains in that basement. The forgotten bones and fragments of clothing, Chief Seattle’s bones. The rattling again. Mather was sweating, telling himself not to be such a child, a superstitious fool. Be analytical, he thought, decipher the sound. Wasn’t it there before? Hadn’t it been there all along? The total darkness had intensified other senses. You’re hearing things you simply didn’t notice before, Mather told himself. You hear better with your eyes closed. So what is it you’re hearing? He listened. Bone moving against bone, ancient and forgotten. Calm yourself, Mather thought, and then something brushed against his face, and he panicked. The instinct for flight took over and Mather was up and running, tripping over boxes, smashing into shelves and closed doors. He could feel that something was chasing him, was right behind him, reaching for his neck. Mather ran for his life. He was still running when the lights suddenly flickered and brightened. Nearly blinded, he caught a brief glimpse of the low overhang ahead of him just before he ran into it, knocking himself unconscious.

“Dr. Mather?” asked the janitor as he came around the corner and saw the professor lying on the floor. “Is that you?”

20. The Sandwich Lady

JOHN SAT ON A sidewalk in downtown Seattle beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct. An ugly, gray monstrosity that would surely fall to pieces during a major earthquake, it served as a noisy barrier between downtown Seattle and the waters of Elliott Bay. However, as an unplanned benefit, the Viaduct also provided shelter for Seattle’s homeless. Beneath the Viaduct, one could find cover from Seattle’s rains, with the nearby waterfront and Pike Place Market attracting tourists who were sometimes willing to empty their pockets of loose change.

When he worked downtown, John visited the homeless Indians who congregated beneath the Viaduct and those in Occidental Park in Pioneer Square. But John was more often drawn to the Indians beneath the Viaduct. He’d walk down there during his lunch hours to spend time with them, though he never spoke more than a few words to anyone. Usually, he just walked by those real Indians, who sat in groups of three or four, nodding their heads when John walked past.

“Hey, cousin,” the homeless Indians always called out to John. “You got any coins?”

John had come to know a few by their names, King, Agnes, and Joseph, and he recognized a few dozen by sight. Before he’d met them, John had shared the common assumption that all homeless Indians were drunks. But he had soon discovered that many of them didn’t drink. John had been surprised by that discovery, and both relieved and saddened. He was relieved that many of the homeless Indians refused to surrender and drink themselves to death. He was saddened that so many Indians were homeless and had no simple reasons to offer for their condition.

On that evening, John sat by himself, apart from a group of Indians who were singing and telling jokes. More laughter. John watched those Indians, in dirty clothes and thirdhand shoes, miles and years from their reservations, estranged from their families and tribes, yet still able to laugh, to sing. John wondered where they found the strength to do such things. They were still joking and singing when Marie Polatkin drove up in a battered white delivery van. John recognized her from the powwow at the University. The Indian woman with crowded teeth. She haphazardly parked the truck and jumped out, talking fast and loud. The dozens of homeless women and men, Indian and otherwise, who lived beneath the Viaduct soon gathered around her.

“What is this?” John asked a white man in an old wheelchair. He wore an army surplus jacket and a dirty pair of blue jeans.

“It’s Marie, the Sandwich Lady,” said the wheelchair man.

“Sandwich Lady?”

“Yeah, man. You know? Sandwiches? Two pieces of bread with something between? When was the last time you ate?”

John thought about the lunch box he had left at work. Inside, a can of Pepsi, a convenience-store sub sandwich, an apple.

“Well,” said the wheelchair man. “You better get in line if you’re hungry. Her sandwiches go fast, man. I help her sometimes, you know? Making the sandwiches. Me and her are tight. Yeah, my name is Boo.”

Boo offered his hand, but John ignored it. Shrugging his shoulders, Boo took his place in line, behind a woman talking to herself.

“Here’s a ham and cheese, Bill,” Marie said to the first man in line. She knew their names! “How you doing, Esther? You look good, Charles. Lillian, how’s the tooth? Martha, where have you been? I’ve got a peanut butter and jelly for your son. Where is that boy?”

The wheelchair man and John stepped up next. John was embarrassed. He had nothing to give Marie, no gift, no blanket, no basket. He wanted to run, hoping to run away from everything, hoping he could run into a new skin, a new face, a new kind of music. He wanted to run into the desert. But he wanted to see Marie, wanted to hear her voice.

“Marie,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, not recognizing John for a brief moment, then visibly surprised when she did. John was homeless, she thought, an explanation for his strange behavior at the protest powwow.

“Marie,” John said again.

“John, right?”

John nodded.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I wanted to see you.”

“Well, it’s good to see you. Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich?”

John looked down at the sandwich in Marie’s hand. He wondered if it was poisoned.

“No,” John said. He struggled to speak. He wanted to tell Marie everything. He wanted to tell her about Father Duncan. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and then turned to run. He ran until he could no longer recognize anything around him.

“Who was that?” the wheelchair man asked Marie as John raced away.

“I’m not sure. A guy named John. Navajo.”

“I think he likes you.”

“Yeah, maybe, Boo. How’ve you been? How’s the poetry coming along?”

“I wrote one for you,” said Boo. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a tightly folded wad of paper, and handed it to Marie. She took it, unfolded it, and read the poem.

“Thank you, Boo,” she said. “That’s very nice. Here’s a turkey and Swiss.”

“Thank you,” he said and rolled himself away. Marie handed sandwiches out until her arms ached. For an hour, two. She talked to her friends, consoled, reprimanded, and touched them, her hand on their shoulders, her hand clasping their hands, fingers touching fingers, in greeting, in conversation, in departure. She ate a sandwich herself, washed it down with a Pepsi, and watched the night grow darker by degrees. She knew there were many men and women who waited for her to deliver those sandwiches. They waited for the food, for the company, for proof they were not invisible. For the mentally disturbed, Marie knew these sandwich visits might be the only dependable moment in their lives. She also knew she delivered the sandwiches for her own sanity. Something would crumble inside of her if she ever walked by a homeless person and pretended not to notice. Or simply didn’t care. In a way, she believed that homeless people were treated as Indians had always been treated. Badly. The homeless were like an Indian tribe, nomadic and powerless, just filled with more than any tribe’s share of crazy people and cripples. So, a homeless Indian belonged to two tribes, and was the lowest form of life in the city. The powerful white men of Seattle had created a law that made it illegal to sit on the sidewalk. That ordinance was crazier and much more evil than any homeless person. Sometimes Marie wondered if she worked so hard at everything only because she hated powerful white men. She wondered if she went to college and received good grades just because she was looking for revenge. She woke up at four in the morning to study before she went to class. She rushed from the University down to the shelter, to a protest, to the sandwich van. All to get back at white men? A police car rolled by. Officer Randy Peone. Marie knew him. She knew most of the cops who worked downtown. Patrols had been increased because the police knew something bad was happening. The officer waved to Marie. She waved back.

21. Killing the Dragon

ON A COLD MORNING, the killer walked through the park near home. The killer thought about the owl, the messenger of death for many tribes. The owl had night vision and could turn its head three hundred and sixty degrees without moving its body. The owl was silent, and wasted neither time nor emotion. The owl felt no guilt, no remorse. It lived to hunt, and hunted to live. One kill was no more important than the next, each successive murder replacing the preceding in the owl’s memory. The owl kept no souvenirs, no mementos from the scene of the crime. The killer wanted so much to behave like an owl, to kill without emotion. But the killer felt incomplete, as if more needed to be done, as if the first hunt had only been partially successful, as if one dead body were not enough. The killer also needed trophies, the bloody scalp nailed to the wall, the shrine-in-progress. One beautiful knife, one beautiful scalp, and space enough for more. The killer knew that the next victim would have to be perfect and beautiful. The killer would have to send a message that would terrify the world.

The park was small and lovely. A few acres of perfectly manicured lawn, a softball diamond, a basketball court with chains on the hoops. A dozen picnic tables, pine trees, a man-made pond. A playground, with swing set, seesaw, and slide, where the killer sat and watched the neighborhood nannies congregate with their employers’ children. With the babies in the nearby carriages and the older children climbing, swinging, and sliding through the playground, the nannies shared a morning conversation the killer could not hear. A majority of the nannies were black, a few were Latina, and one or two were young white women. The black and Latina women were older and most assuredly had their own children. Every morning, those brown women left their children behind and traveled to better neighborhoods to take care of their employers’ children. Brown women spent more time with the white children than their own parents did. Brown children were left behind.

Anger growing, the killer thought of those rich, white children holding their arms out to strangers, not mothers, and about brown children holding their arms out to air. A simple and brilliant human connected two knives at a balance point and invented the scissors. And where were all the fathers? The brown fathers were killing themselves and each other. Like royalty, the white fathers crowded into stadiums to watch brown men kill each other. Kill, killed, killing.

The killer watched one little blond boy running across the playground. Mark Jones, six years old, though the killer had no way of knowing his name or age. The killer just saw a beautiful white boy. Blue eyes, blue stocking cap, white tennis shoes, Seattle Seahawks jacket buttoned tight. A perfect child who, through no fault of his own, might grow up into a monster. The killer felt the weight of the knife. Blade, bolster, tang, handle. Right now, the killer could run across the playground, pick up the white boy, and slash his throat before anybody could intercede. Killing the dragon before it could breathe flames. Working quickly and efficiently, the killer could probably kill a number of white boys before the nannies overcame their shock and reacted. One, two, three, the killer counted the white boys on the playground, seven, eight, nine. The killer watched the beautiful boy, Mark Jones, spinning on the merry-go-round. The meat carver held the most prestigious position on the kitchen staff.

The killer studied Mark and the other children, noting the hierarchy of playmates, the playground distribution of power. The boys and girls played together until they were seven years old, then separated by gender after that. The kids under five years old were treated with a general respect by the older children, but were definitely subject to the whims of their elders. Fat kids were ridiculed and left to play in their own groups. The one black child, a girl, played quietly with two white girls. Most of the kids were clumsy and weak and posed no threat to the killer, but there were two white boys with physical coordination beyond their years, and they fought for leadership of the playground. One of the boys, fairly short for his age, but stout and confident, was a conservative. When he was in charge, the group played games they’d played a thousand times before. Frozen Tag, King of the Hill, Double Dare. The other boy, Mark, the blond in the Seahawks jacket, was tall, thin, and fearless, a revolutionary. As the killer watched, Mark invented a game. During that game, all the kids piled onto the merry-go-round, then Mark and two or three of his favorites spun them around and around, as fast as possible. As the kids became sick or scared, they screamed for it to stop, but Mark ignored them as he continued to spin them. The only way to quit the game was to jump from the merry-go-round. Kids rapidly collected skinned knees and bruised faces as they worked up the courage and leapt into the dirt. When one last child was left on the merry-go-round, that one child most afraid to jump, Mark proclaimed that last child the winner. The kids played it again and again. Watching that game, the killer knew that Mark would grow into a powerful man.

So the killer waited until Mark Jones and Sarah, his young white nanny, walked out of the park. Holding the knife close, the killer trailed Mark and the nanny through a quiet neighborhood, past a 7-Eleven, a Safeway supermarket, Talkies Video, and dozens of anonymous apartment buildings to a two-story house partially hidden behind large trees. Silently singing an invisibility song, the killer ascended into one of the larger trees and looked into the kitchen and living room. Through the large windows, the killer watched the nanny feed Mark a bowl of tomato soup, a sandwich, and most of a bag of corn chips. Then the nanny and Mark settled down on the couch to watch television.

A little after six, Mark’s mother, Erin Jones, a bank manager, pulled into the driveway. There was no sign of the father. The mother stepped into the house, received a warm greeting from the nanny and a brief nod of interest from Mark, and then walked into the kitchen to prepare her dinner. As she was cooking, the nanny gathered up her things and left the house without a word. She stood beneath the killer’s tree and lit a cigarette. The exhaled smoke drifted up and past the killer, who could smell the boy’s scent also wafting up from the nanny’s clothes. The killer understood what needed to be done.

After dinner, Mark’s mother got him ready for bed. Dressed in his favorite pajamas, the ones covered with the blind superhero Daredevil, Mark washed his face and brushed his teeth. His mother read him two stories before she turned out the light and left him alone in his bedroom. The killer saw the mother mix herself a drink and watch a movie. She was tall and skinny, with pinched features and very short, blond hair. A pretty woman, the killer thought, but obviously lonely. After the late news, the mother stripped naked and crawled into bed without washing her face or brushing her teeth. She read a magazine for a few minutes, then turned off the lamp, and quickly fell asleep.

The killer waited in that tree until midnight. The knife felt heavy and hot. With surprising grace, the killer stepped from the tree, walked up to the front door, and slipped the knife between the lock and jamb. The killer was soon standing inside a dark and quiet house, tastefully decorated in natural wood and pastel colors, with stylish prints hanging on the walls. With confidence, the killer explored the living room, bathroom, and study downstairs. Then the killer walked upstairs and into the master bedroom, where the mother slept alone. She had thrown off her covers, and the killer studied her naked body, pale white in the moonlight streaming in from the window. Small breasts, three dark moles just above the light brown pubic hair. She was almost too skinny, prominent ribcage, hipbones rising up sharply. The killer knelt down beside the bed as if to pray. Then the killer did pray.

Later, after that prayer was over, the killer walked down the hallway into the boy’s room. Mark was curled up in a fetal position. An active dreamer, he was mumbling something the killer could not understand. The killer recognized the superhero on Mark’s pajamas. Daredevil, the blind superhero, who used his other highly developed senses to fight crime. The killer’s eyes closed. The killer wondered if the boy could be found by using other senses. The boy’s smell, toothpaste, sleepy sweat, socks. By touch, warm and sticky skin. With eyes now open, the killer leaned over close to the boy and softly licked his face. Salt, something bitter, a slight sweetness. The boy stirred, opened his eyes, and stared at the killer’s face, which shimmered and changed like a pond after a rock had been tossed into it. The killer set two owl feathers on the pillow beside Mark Jones’s head and then gently lifted the boy from the bed.