Ten Little Indians

Flight Patterns

AT 5:05 A.M., PATSY Cline fell loudly to pieces on William’s clock radio. He hit the snooze button, silencing lonesome Patsy, and dozed for fifteen more minutes before Donna Fargo bragged about being the happiest girl in the whole USA. William wondered what had ever happened to Donna Fargo, whose birth name was the infinitely more interesting Yvonne Vaughn, and wondered why he knew Donna Fargo’s birth name. Ah, he was the bemused and slightly embarrassed owner of a twenty-first-century American mind. His intellect was a big comfy couch stuffed with sacred and profane trivia. He knew the names of all nine of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands and could quote from memory the entire Declaration of Independence. William knew Donna Fargo’s birth name because he wanted to know her birth name. He wanted to know all of the great big and tiny little American details. He didn’t want to choose between Ernie Hemingway and the Spokane tribal elders, between Mia Hamm and Crazy Horse, between The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Chief Dan George. William wanted all of it. Hunger was his crime. As for dear Miss Fargo, William figured she probably played the Indian casino circuit along with the Righteous Brothers, Smokey Robinson, Eddie Money, Pat Benatar, RATT, REO Speedwagon, and dozens of other formerly famous rock- and country-music stars. Many of the Indian casino acts were bad, and most of the rest were pure nostalgic entertainment, but a small number made beautiful and timeless music. William knew the genius Merle Haggard played thirty or forty Indian casinos every year, so long live Haggard and long live tribal economic sovereignty. Who cares about fishing and hunting rights? Who cares about uranium mines and nuclear-waste-dump sites on sacred land? Who cares about the recovery of tribal languages? Give me Freddy Fender singing “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” in English and Spanish to 206 Spokane Indians, William thought, and I will be a happy man.

But William wasn’t happy this morning. He’d slept poorly — he always slept poorly — and wondered again if his insomnia was a physical or a mental condition. His doctor had offered him sleeping-pill prescriptions, but William declined for philosophical reasons. He was an Indian who didn’t smoke or drink or eat processed sugar. He lifted weights three days a week, ran every day, and competed in four triathlons a year. A two-mile swim, a 150-mile bike ride, and a full marathon. A triathlon was a religious quest. If Saint Francis were still around, he’d be a triathlete. Another exaggeration! Theological hyperbole! Rabid self-justification! Diagnostically speaking, William was an obsessive-compulsive workaholic who was afraid of pills. So he suffered sleepless nights and constant daytime fatigue.

This morning, awake and not awake, William turned down the radio, changing Yvonne Vaughn’s celebratory anthem into whispered blues, and rolled off the couch onto his hands and knees. His back and legs were sore because he’d slept on the living room couch so the alarm wouldn’t disturb his wife and daughter upstairs. Still on his hands and knees, William stretched his spine, using the twelve basic exercises he’d learned from Dr. Adams, that master practitioner of white middle-class chiropractic voodoo. This was all part of William’s regular morning ceremony. Other people find God in ornate ritual, but William called out to Geronimo, Jesus Christ, Saint Therese, Buddha, Allah, Billie Holiday, Simon Ortiz, Abe Lincoln, Bessie Smith, Howard Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joan of Arc and Joan of Collins, John Woo, Wilma Mankiller, and Karl and Groucho Marx while he pumped out fifty push-ups and fifty abdominal crunches. William wasn’t particularly religious; he was generally religious. Finished with his morning calisthenics, William showered in the basement, suffering the water that was always too cold down there, and threaded his long black hair into two tight braids — the indigenous businessman’s tonsorial special — and dressed in his best travel suit, a navy three-button pinstripe he’d ordered online. He’d worried about the fit, but his tailor was a magician and had only mildly chastised William for such an impulsive purchase. After knotting his blue paisley tie, purchased in person and on sale, William walked upstairs in bare feet and kissed his wife, Marie, good-bye.

“Cancel your flight,” she said. “And come back to bed.”

“You’re supposed to be asleep,” he said.

She was a small and dark woman who seemed to be smaller and darker at that time of the morning. Her long black hair had once again defeated its braids, but she didn’t care. She sometimes went two or three days without brushing it. William was obsessive about his mane, tying and retying his ponytail, knotting and reknotting his braids, experimenting with this shampoo and that conditioner. He greased down his cowlicks (inherited from a cowlicked father and grandfather) with shiny pomade, but Marie’s hair was always unkempt, wild, and renegade. William’s hair hung around the fort, but Marie’s rode on the warpath! She constantly pulled stray strands out of her mouth. William loved her for it. During sex, they spent as much time readjusting her hair as they did readjusting positions. Such were the erotic dangers of loving a Spokane Indian woman.

“Take off your clothes and get in bed,” Marie pleaded now.

“I can’t do that,” William said. “They’re counting on me.”

“Oh, the plane will be filled with salesmen. Let some other salesman sell what you’re selling.”

“Your breath stinks.”

“So do my feet, my pits, and my butt, but you still love me. Come back to bed, and I’ll make it worth your while.”

William kissed Marie, reached beneath her pajama top, and squeezed her breasts. He thought about reaching inside her pajama bottoms. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and tried to wrestle him into bed. Oh, God, he wanted to climb into bed and make love. He wanted to fornicate, to sex, to breed, to screw, to make the beast with two backs. Oh, sweetheart, be my little synonym! He wanted her to be both subject and object. Perhaps it was wrong (and unavoidable) to objectify female strangers, but shouldn’t every husband seek to objectify his wife at least once a day? William loved and respected his wife, and delighted in her intelligence, humor, and kindness, but he also loved to watch her lovely ass when she walked, and stare down the front of her loose shirts when she leaned over, and grab her breasts at wildly inappropriate times — during dinner parties and piano recitals and uncontrolled intersections, for instance. He constantly made passes at her, not necessarily expecting to be successful, but to remind her he still desired her and was excited by the thought of her. She was his passive and active.

“Come on,” she said. “If you stay home, I’ll make you Scooby.”

He laughed at the inside joke, created one night while he tried to give her sexual directions and was so aroused that he sounded exactly like Scooby-Doo.

“Stay home, stay home, stay home,” she chanted and wrapped herself tighter around him. He was supporting all of her weight, holding her two feet off the bed.

“I’m not strong enough to do this,” he said.

“Baby, baby, I’ll make you strong,” she sang, and it sounded like she was writing a Top 40 hit in the Brill Building, circa 1962. How could he leave a woman who sang like that? He hated to leave, but he loved his work. He was a man, and men needed to work. More sexism! More masculine tunnel vision! More need for gender-sensitivity workshops! He pulled away from her, dropping her back onto the bed, and stepped away.

“Willy Loman,” she said, “you must pay attention to me.”

“I love you,” he said, but she’d already fallen back to sleep — a narcoleptic gift William envied — and he wondered if she would dream about a man who never left her, about some unemployed agoraphobic Indian warrior who liked to cook and wash dishes.

William tiptoed into his daughter’s bedroom, expecting to hear her light snore, but she was awake and sitting up in bed, and looked so magical and androgynous with her huge brown eyes and crew-cut hair. She’d wanted to completely shave her head: I don’t want long hair, I don’t want short hair, I don’t want hair at all, and I don’t want to be a girl or a boy, I want to be a yellow and orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook.

“Daddy,” she said.

“Grace,” he said. “You should be asleep. You have school today.”

“I know,” she said. “But I wanted to see you before you left.”

“Okay,” said William as he kissed her forehead, nose, and chin. “You’ve seen me. Now go back to sleep. I love you and I’m going to miss you.”

She fiercely hugged him.

“Oh,” he said. “You’re such a lovely, lovely girl.”

Preternaturally serious, she took his face in her eyes and studied his eyes. Morally examined by a kindergartner!

“Daddy,” she said. “Go be silly for those people far away.”

She cried as William left her room. Already quite sure he was only an adequate husband, he wondered, as he often did, if he was a bad father. During these mornings, he felt generic and violent, like some caveman leaving the fire to hunt animals in the cold and dark. Maybe his hands were smooth and clean, but they felt bloody.

Downstairs, he put on his socks and shoes and overcoat and listened for his daughter’s crying, but she was quiet, having inherited her mother’s gift for instant sleep. She had probably fallen back into one of her odd little dreams. While he was gone, she often drew pictures of those dreams, coloring the sky green and the grass blue — everything backward and wrong — and had once sketched a man in a suit crashing an airplane into the bright yellow sun. Ah, the rage, fear, and loneliness of a five-year-old, simple and true! She’d been especially afraid since September 11 of the previous year and constantly quizzed William about what he would do if terrorists hijacked his plane.

“I’d tell them I was your father,” he’d said to her before he left for his last business trip. “And they’d stop being bad.”

“You’re lying,” she’d said. “I’m not supposed to listen to liars. If you lie to me, I can’t love you.”

He couldn’t argue with her logic. Maybe she was the most logical person on the planet. Maybe she should be illegally elected president of the United States.

William understood her fear of flying and of his flight. He was afraid of flying, too, but not of terrorists. After the horrible violence of September 11, he figured hijacking was no longer a useful weapon in the terrorist arsenal. These days, a terrorist armed with a box cutter would be torn to pieces by all of the coach-class passengers and fed to the first-class upgrades. However, no matter how much he tried to laugh his fear away, William always scanned the airports and airplanes for little brown guys who reeked of fundamentalism. That meant William was equally afraid of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell wearing the last vestiges of a summer tan. William himself was a little brown guy, so the other travelers were always sniffing around him, but he smelled only of Dove soap, Mennen deodorant, and sarcasm. Still, he understood why people were afraid of him, a brown-skinned man with dark hair and eyes. If Norwegian terrorists had exploded the World Trade Center, then blue-eyed blondes would be viewed with more suspicion. Or so he hoped.

Locking the front door behind him, William stepped away from his house, carried his garment bag and briefcase onto the front porch, and waited for his taxi to arrive. It was a cold and foggy October morning. William could smell the saltwater of Elliott Bay and the freshwater of Lake Washington. Surrounded by gray water and gray fog and gray skies and gray mountains and a gray sun, he’d lived with his family in Seattle for three years and loved it. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, with any other wife or child, in any other time.

William was tired and happy and romantic and exaggerating the size of his familial devotion so he could justify his departure, so he could survive his departure. He did sometimes think about other women and other possible lives with them. He wondered how his life would have been different if he’d married a white woman and fathered half-white children who grew up to complain and brag about their biracial identities: Oh, the only box they have for me is Other! I’m not going to check any box! I’m not the Other! I am Tiger Woods! But William most often fantasized about being single and free to travel as often as he wished — maybe two million miles a year — and how much he’d enjoy the benefits of being a platinum frequent flier. Maybe he’d have one-night stands with a long series of traveling saleswomen, all of them thousands of miles away from husbands and children who kept looking up “feminism” in the dictionary. William knew that was yet another sexist thought. In this capitalistic and democratic culture, talented women should also enjoy the freedom to emotionally and physically abandon their families. After all, talented and educated men have been doing it for generations. Let freedom ring!

Marie had left her job as a corporate accountant to be a full-time mother to Grace. William loved his wife for making the decision, and he tried to do his share of the housework, but he suspected he was an old-fashioned bastard who wanted his wife to stay at home and wait, wait, wait for him.

Marie was always waiting for William to call, to come home, to leave messages saying he was getting on the plane, getting off the plane, checking in to the hotel, going to sleep, waking up, heading for the meeting, catching an earlier or later flight home. He spent one third of his life trying to sleep in uncomfortable beds and one third of his life trying to stay awake in airports. He traveled with thousands of other capitalistic foot soldiers, mostly men but increasing numbers of women, and stayed in the same Ramadas, Holiday Inns, and Radissons. He ate the same room-service meals and ran the same exercise-room treadmills and watched the same pay-per-view porn and stared out the windows at the same strange and lonely cityscapes. Sure, he was an enrolled member of the Spokane Indian tribe, but he was also a fully recognized member of the notebook-computer tribe and the security-checkpoint tribe and the rental-car tribe and the hotel-shuttle-bus tribe and the cell-phone-roaming-charge tribe.

William traveled so often, the Seattle-based flight attendants knew him by first name.

At five minutes to six, the Orange Top taxi pulled into the driveway. The driver, a short and thin black man, stepped out of the cab and waved. William rushed down the stairs and across the pavement. He wanted to get away from the house before he changed his mind about leaving.

“Is that everything, sir?” asked the taxi driver, his accent a colonial cocktail of American English, formal British, and French sibilants added to a base of what must have been North African.

“Yes, it is, sir,” said William, self-consciously trying to erase any class differences between them. In Spain the previous summer, an elderly porter had cursed at William when he insisted on carrying his own bags into the hotel. “Perhaps there is something wrong with the caste system, sir,” the hotel concierge had explained to William. “But all of us, we want to do our jobs, and we want to do them well.”

William didn’t want to insult anybody; he wanted the world to be a fair and decent place. At least that was what he wanted to want. More than anything, he wanted to stay home with his fair and decent family. He supposed he wanted the world to be fairer and more decent to his family. We are special, he thought, though he suspected they were just one more family on this block of neighbors, in this city of neighbors, in this country of neighbors, in a world of neighbors. He looked back at his house, at the windows behind which slept his beloved wife and daughter. When he traveled, he had nightmares about strangers breaking into the house and killing and raping Marie and Grace. In other nightmares, he arrived home in time to save his family by beating the intruders and chasing them away. During longer business trips, William’s nightmares became more violent as the days and nights passed. If he was gone over a week, he dreamed about mutilating the rapists and eating them alive while his wife and daughter cheered for him.

“Let me take your bags, sir,” said the taxi driver.

“What?” asked William, momentarily confused.

“Your bags, sir.”

William handed him the briefcase but held on to the heavier garment bag. A stupid compromise, thought William, but it’s too late to change it now. God, I’m supposed to be some electric aboriginal warrior, but I’m really a wimpy liberal pacifist. Dear Lord, how much longer should I mourn the death of Jerry Garcia?

The taxi driver tried to take the garment bag from William.

“I’ve got this one,” said William, then added, “I’ve got it, sir.”

The taxi driver hesitated, shrugged, opened the trunk, and set the briefcase inside. William laid the garment bag next to his briefcase. The taxi driver shut the trunk and walked around to open William’s door.

“No, sir,” said William as he awkwardly stepped in front of the taxi driver, opened the door, and took a seat. “I’ve got it.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the taxi driver and hurried around to the driver’s seat. This strange American was making him uncomfortable, and he wanted to get behind the wheel and drive. Driving comforted him.

“To the airport, sir?” asked the taxi driver as he started the meter.

“Yes,” said William. “United Airlines.”

“Very good, sir.”

In silence, they drove along Martin Luther King Jr. Way, the bisector of an African American neighborhood that was rapidly gentrifying. William and his family were Native American gentry! They were the very first Indian family to ever move into a neighborhood and bring up the property values! That was one of William’s favorite jokes, self-deprecating and politely racist. White folks could laugh at a joke like that and not feel guilty. But how guilty could white people feel in Seattle? Seattle might be the only city in the country where white people lived comfortably on a street named after Martin Luther King, Jr.

No matter where he lived, William always felt uncomfortable, so he enjoyed other people’s discomfort. These days, in the airports, he loved to watch white people enduring random security checks. It was a perverse thrill, to be sure, but William couldn’t help himself. He knew those white folks wanted to scream and rage: Do I look like a terrorist? And he knew the security officers, most often low-paid brown folks, wanted to scream back: Define terror, you Anglo bastard! William figured he’d been pulled over for pat-down searches about 75 percent of the time. Random, my ass! But that was okay! William might have wanted to irritate other people, but he didn’t want to scare them. He wanted his fellow travelers to know exactly who and what he was: I am a Native American and therefore have ten thousand more reasons to terrorize the U.S. than any of those Taliban jerk-offs, but I have chosen instead to become a civic American citizen, so all of you white folks should be celebrating my kindness and moral decency and awesome ability to forgive! Maybe William should have worn beaded vests when he traveled. Maybe he should have brought a hand drum and sang “Way, ya, way, ya, hey.” Maybe he should have thrown casino chips into the crowd.

The taxi driver turned west on Cherry, drove twenty blocks into downtown, took the entrance ramp onto I-5, and headed south for the airport. The freeway was moderately busy for that time of morning.

“Where are you going, sir?” asked the taxi driver.

“I’ve got business in Chicago,” William said. He didn’t really want to talk. He needed to meditate in silence. He needed to put his fear of flying inside an imaginary safe deposit box and lock it away. We all have our ceremonies, thought William, our personal narratives. He’d always needed to meditate in the taxi on the way to the airport. Immediately upon arrival at the departure gate, he’d listen to a tape he’d made of rock stars who died in plane crashes. Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Stevie Ray, “Oh Donna,” “Chantilly Lace,” “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” William figured God would never kill a man who listened to such a morbid collection of music. Too easy a target, and plus, God could never justify killing a planeful of innocents to punish one minor sinner.

“What do you do, sir?” asked the taxi driver.

“You know, I’m not sure,” said William and laughed. It was true. He worked for a think tank and sold ideas about how to improve other ideas. Two years ago, his company had made a few hundred thousand dollars by designing and selling the idea of a better shopping cart. The CGI prototype was amazing. It looked like a mobile walk-in closet. But it had yet to be manufactured and probably never would be.

“You wear a good suit,” said the taxi driver, not sure why William was laughing. “You must be a businessman, no? You must make lots of money.”

“I do okay.”

“Your house is big and beautiful.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“You are a family man, yes?”

“I have a wife and daughter.”

“Are they beautiful?”

William was pleasantly surprised to be asked such a question. “Yes,” he said. “Their names are Marie and Grace. They’re very beautiful. I love them very much.”

“You must miss them when you travel.”

“I miss them so much I go crazy,” said William. “I start thinking I’m going to disappear, you know, just vanish, if I’m not home. Sometimes I worry their love is the only thing that makes me human, you know? I think if they stopped loving me, I might burn up, spontaneously combust, and turn into little pieces of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Yes sir, I understand love can be so large.”

William wondered why he was being honest and poetic with a taxi driver. There is emotional safety in anonymity, he thought.

“I have a wife and three sons,” said the driver. “But they live in Ethiopia with my mother and father. I have not seen any of them for many years.”

For the first time, William looked closely at the driver. He was clear-eyed and handsome, strong of shoulder and arm, maybe fifty years old, maybe older. A thick scar ran from his right ear down his neck and beneath his collar. A black man with a violent history, William thought and immediately reprimanded himself for racially profiling the driver: Excuse me, sir, but I pulled you over because your scar doesn’t belong in this neighborhood.

“I still think of my children as children,” the driver said. “But they are men now. Taller and stronger than me. They are older now than I was when I last saw them.”

William did the math and wondered how this driver could function with such fatherly pain. “I bet you can’t wait to go home and see them again,” he said, following the official handbook of the frightened American male: When confronted with the mysterious, you can defend yourself by speaking in obvious generalities.

“I cannot go home,” said the taxi driver, “and I fear I will never see them again.”

William didn’t want to be having this conversation. He wondered if his silence would silence the taxi driver. But it was too late for that.

“What are you?” the driver asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you are not white, your skin, it is dark like mine.”

“Not as dark as yours.”

“No,” said the driver and laughed. “Not so dark, but too dark to be white. What are you? Are you Jewish?”

Because they were so often Muslim, taxi drivers all over the world had often asked William if he was Jewish. William was always being confused for something else. He was ambiguously ethnic, living somewhere in the darker section of the Great American Crayola Box, but he was more beige than brown, more mauve than sienna.

“Why do you want to know if I’m Jewish?” William asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry, sir, if I offended you. I am not anti-Semitic. I love all of my brothers and sisters. Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, even the atheists, I love them all. Like you Americans sing, ‘Joy to the world and Jeremiah Bullfrog!’”

The taxi driver laughed again, and William laughed with him.

“I’m Indian,” William said.

“From India?”

“No, not jewel-on-the-forehead Indian,” said William. “I’m a bows-and-arrows Indian.”

“Oh, you mean ten little, nine little, eight little Indians?”

“Yeah, sort of,” said William. “I’m that kind of Indian, but much smarter. I’m a Spokane Indian. We’re salmon people.”

“In England, they call you Red Indians.”

“You’ve been to England?”

“Yes, I studied physics at Oxford.”

“Wow,” said William, wondering if this man was a liar.

“You are surprised by this, I imagine. Perhaps you think I’m a liar?”

William covered his mouth with one hand. He smiled this way when he was embarrassed.

“Aha, you do think I’m lying. You ask yourself questions about me. How could a physicist drive a taxi? Well, in the United States, I am a cabdriver, but in Ethiopia, I was a jet-fighter pilot.”

By coincidence or magic, or as a coincidence that could willfully be interpreted as magic, they drove past Boeing Field at that exact moment.

“Ah, you see,” said the taxi driver, “I can fly any of those planes. The prop planes, the jet planes, even the very large passenger planes. I can also fly the experimental ones that don’t fly. But I could make them fly because I am the best pilot in the world. Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know,” said William, very doubtful of this man but fascinated as well. If he was a liar, then he was a magnificent liar.

On both sides of the freeway, blue-collared men and women drove trucks and forklifts, unloaded trains, trucks, and ships, built computers, televisions, and airplanes. Seattle was a city of industry, of hard work, of calluses on the palms of hands. So many men and women working so hard. William worried that his job — his selling of the purely theoretical — wasn’t a real job at all. He didn’t build anything. He couldn’t walk into department and grocery stores and buy what he’d created, manufactured, and shipped. William’s life was measured by imaginary numbers: the binary code of computer languages, the amount of money in his bank accounts, the interest rate on his mortgage, and the rise and fall of the stock market. He invested much of his money in socially responsible funds. Imagine that! Imagine choosing to trust your money with companies that supposedly made their millions through ethical means. Imagine the breathtaking privilege of such a choice. All right, so maybe this was an old story for white men. For most of American history, who else but a white man could endure the existential crisis of economic success? But this story was original and aboriginal for William. For thousands of years, Spokane Indians had lived subsistence lives, using every last part of the salmon and deer because they’d die without every last part, but William only ordered salmon from menus and saw deer on television. Maybe he romanticized the primal — for thousands of years, Indians also died of ear infections — but William wanted his comfortable and safe life to contain more wilderness.

“Sir, forgive me for saying this,” the taxi driver said, “but you do not look like the Red Indians I have seen before.”

“I know,” William said. “People usually think I’m a longhaired Mexican.”

“What do you say to them when they think such a thing?”

“No habla español. Indio de Norteamericanos.”

“People think I’m black American. They always want to hip-hop rap to me. ‘Are you East Coast or West Coast?’ they ask me, and I tell them I am Ivory Coast.”

“How have things been since September eleventh?”

“Ah, a good question, sir. It’s been interesting. Because people think I’m black, they don’t see me as a terrorist, only as a crackhead addict on welfare. So I am a victim of only one misguided idea about who I am.”

“We’re all trapped by other people’s ideas, aren’t we?”

“I suppose that is true, sir. How has it been for you?”

“It’s all backward,” William said. “A few days after it happened, I was walking out of my gym downtown, and this big phallic pickup pulled up in front of me in the crosswalk. Yeah, this big truck with big phallic tires and a big phallic flagpole and a big phallic flag flying, and the big phallic symbol inside leaned out of his window and yelled at me, ‘Go back to your own country!’”

“Oh, that is sad and funny,” the taxi driver said.

“Yeah,” William said. “And it wasn’t so much a hate crime as it was a crime of irony, right? And I was laughing so hard, the truck was halfway down the block before I could get breath enough to yell back, ‘You first!’”

William and the taxi driver laughed and laughed together. Two dark men laughing at dark jokes.

“I had to fly on the first day you could fly,” William said. “And I was flying into Baltimore, you know, and D.C. and Baltimore are pretty much the same damn town, so it was like flying into Ground Zero, you know?”

“It must have been terrifying.”

“It was, it was. I was sitting in the plane here in Seattle, getting ready to take off, and I started looking around for suspicious brown guys. I was scared of little brown guys. So was everybody else. We were all afraid of the same things. I started looking around for big white guys because I figured they’d be undercover cops, right?”

“Imagine wanting to be surrounded by white cops!”

“Exactly! I didn’t want to see some pacifist, vegan, whole-wheat, free-range, organic, progressive, gray-ponytail, communist, liberal, draft-dodging, NPR-listening wimp! What are they going to do if somebody tries to hijack the plane? Throw a Birkenstock at him? Offer him some pot?”

“Marijuana might actually stop the violence everywhere in the world,” the taxi driver said.

“You’re right,” William said. “But on that plane, I was hoping for about twenty-five NRA-loving, gun-nut, serial-killing, psychopathic, Ollie North, Norman Schwarzkopf, right-wing, Agent Orange, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, CIA, FBI, automatic-weapon, smart-bomb, laser-sighting bastards!”

“You wouldn’t want to invite them for dinner,” the taxi driver said. “But you want them to protect your children, am I correct?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense. It’s all contradictions.”

“The contradictions are the story, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I have a story about contradictions,” said the taxi driver. “Because you are a Red Indian, I think you will understand my pain.”

“Su-num-twee,” said William.

“What is that? What did you say?”

“Su-num-twee. It’s Spokane. My language.”

“What does it mean?”

“Listen to me.”

“Ah, yes, that’s good. Su-num-twee, su-num-twee. So, what is your name?”

“William.”

The taxi driver sat high and straight in his seat, like he was going to say something important. “William, my name is Fekadu. I am Oromo and Muslim, and I come from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, and I want you to su-num-twee.”

There was nothing more important than a person’s name and the names of his clan, tribe, city, religion, and country. By the social rules of his tribe, William should have reciprocated and officially identified himself. He should have been polite and generous. He was expected to live by so many rules, he sometimes felt like he was living inside an indigenous version of an Edith Wharton novel.

“Mr. William,” asked Fekadu, “do you want to hear my story? Do you want to su-num-twee.”

“Yes, I do, sure, yes, please,” said William. He was lying. He was twenty minutes away from the airport and so close to departure.

“I was not born into an important family,” said Fekadu. “But my father worked for an important family. And this important family worked for the family of Emperor Haile Selassie. He was a great and good and kind and terrible man, and he loved his country and killed many of his people. Have you heard of him?”

“No, I’m sorry, I haven’t.”

“He was magical. Ruled our country for forty-three years. Imagine that! We Ethiopians are strong. White people have never conquered us. We won every war we fought against white people. For all of our history, our emperors have been strong, and Selassie was the strongest. There has never been a man capable of such love and destruction.”

“You fought against him?”

Fekadu breathed in so deeply that William recognized it as a religious moment, as the first act of a ceremony, and with the second act, an exhalation, the ceremony truly began.

“No,” Fekadu said. “I was a smart child. A genius. A prodigy. It was Selassie who sent me to Oxford. And there I studied physics and learned the math and art of flight. I came back home and flew jets for Selassie’s army.”

“Did you fly in wars?” William asked.

“Ask me what you really want to ask me, William. You want to know if I was a killer, no?”

William had a vision of his wife and daughter huddling terrified in their Seattle basement while military jets screamed overhead. It happened every August when the U.S. Navy Blue Angels came to entertain the masses with their aerial acrobatics.

“Do you want to know if I was a killer?” asked Fekadu. “Ask me if I was a killer.”

William wanted to know the terrible answer without asking the terrible question.

“Will you not ask me what I am?” asked Fekadu.

“I can’t.”

“I dropped bombs on my own people.”

In the sky above them, William counted four, five, six jets flying in holding patterns while awaiting permission to land.

“For three years, I killed my own people,” said Fekadu. “And then, on the third of June in 1974, I could not do it anymore. I kissed my wife and sons good-bye that morning, and I kissed my mother and father, and I lied to them and told them I would be back that evening. They had no idea where I was going. But I went to the base, got into my plane, and flew away.”

“You defected?” William asked. How could a man steal a fighter plane? Was that possible? And if possible, how much courage would it take to commit such a crime? William was quite sure he could never be that courageous.

“Yes, I defected,” said Fekadu. “I flew my plane to France and was almost shot down when I violated their airspace, but they let me land, and they arrested me, and soon enough, they gave me asylum. I came to Seattle five years ago, and I think I will live here the rest of my days.”

Fekadu took the next exit. They were two minutes away from the airport. William was surprised to discover that he didn’t want this journey to end so soon. He wondered if he should invite Fekadu for coffee and a sandwich, for a slice of pie, for brotherhood. William wanted to hear more of this man’s stories and learn from them, whether they were true or not. Perhaps it didn’t matter if any one man’s stories were true. Fekadu’s autobiography might have been completely fabricated, but William was convinced that somewhere in the world, somewhere in Africa or the United States, a man, a jet pilot, wanted to fly away from the war he was supposed to fight. There must be hundreds, maybe thousands, of such men, and how many were courageous enough to fly away? If Fekadu wasn’t describing his own true pain and loneliness, then he might have been accidentally describing the pain of a real and lonely man.

“What about your family?” asked William, because he didn’t know what else to ask and because he was thinking of his wife and daughter. “Weren’t they in danger? Wouldn’t Selassie want to hurt them?”

“I could only pray Selassie would leave them be. He had always been good to me, but he saw me as impulsive, so I hoped he would know my family had nothing to do with my flight. I was a coward for staying and a coward for leaving. But none of it mattered, because Selassie was overthrown a few weeks after I defected.”

“A coup?”

“Yes, the Derg deposed him, and they slaughtered all of their enemies and their enemies’ families. They suffocated Selassie with a pillow the next year. And now I could never return to Ethiopia because Selassie’s people would always want to kill me for my betrayal, and the Derg would always want to kill me for being Selassie’s soldier. Every night and day, I worry that any of them might harm my family. I want to go there and defend them. I want to bring them here. They can sleep on my floor! But even now, after democracy has almost come to Ethiopia, I cannot go back. There is too much history and pain, and I am too afraid.”

“How long has it been since you’ve talked to your family?”

“We write letters to each other, and sometimes we receive them. They sent me photos once, but they never arrived for me to see. And for two days, I waited by the telephone because they were going to call, but it never rang.”

Fekadu pulled the taxi to a slow stop at the airport curb. “We are here, sir,” he said. “United Airlines.”

William didn’t know how this ceremony was supposed to end. He felt small and powerless against the collected history. “What am I supposed to do now?” he asked.

“Sir, you must pay me thirty-eight dollars for this ride,” said Fekadu and laughed. “Plus a very good tip.”

“How much is good?”

“You see, sometimes I send cash to my family. I wrap it up and try to hide it inside the envelope. I know it gets stolen, but I hope some of it gets through to my family. I hope they buy themselves gifts from me. I hope.”

“You pray for this?”

“Yes, William, I pray for this. And I pray for your safety on your trip, and I pray for the safety of your wife and daughter while you are gone.”

“Pop the trunk, I’ll get my own bags,” said William as he gave sixty dollars to Fekadu, exited the taxi, took his luggage out of the trunk, and slammed it shut. Then William walked over to the passenger-side window, leaned in, and studied Fekadu’s face and the terrible scar on his neck.

“Where did you get that?” William asked.

Fekadu ran a finger along the old wound. “Ah,” he said. “You must think I got this flying in a war. But no, I got this in a taxicab wreck. William, I am a much better jet pilot than a car driver.”

Fekadu laughed loudly and joyously. William wondered how this poor man could be capable of such happiness, however temporary it was.

“Your stories,” said William. “I want to believe you.”

“Then believe me,” said Fekadu.

Unsure, afraid, William stepped back.

“Good-bye, William American,” Fekadu said and drove away.

Standing at curbside, William couldn’t breathe well. He wondered if he was dying. Of course he was dying, a flawed mortal dying day by day, but he felt like he might fall over from a heart attack or stroke right there on the sidewalk. He left his bags and ran inside the terminal. Let a luggage porter think his bags were dangerous! Let a security guard x-ray the bags and find mysterious shapes! Let a bomb-squad cowboy explode the bags as precaution! Let an airport manager shut down the airport and search every possible traveler! Let the FAA president order every airplane to land! Let the American skies be empty of everything with wings! Let the birds stop flying! Let the very air go still and cold! William didn’t care. He ran through the terminal, searching for an available pay phone, a landline, something true and connected to the ground, and he finally found one and dropped two quarters into the slot and dialed his home number, and it rang and rang and rang and rang, and William worried that his wife and daughter were harmed, were lying dead on the floor, but then Marie answered.

“Hello, William,” she said.

“I’m here,” he said.