The Toughest Indian in the World

THE SIN EATERS

I DREAMED ABOUT THE WAR on the night before the war began, and though nobody officially called it a war until years later, I woke that next morning with the sure knowledge that the war, or whatever they wanted to call it, was about to begin and that I would be a soldier in a small shirt.

On that morning, the sun rose and bloomed like blood in a glass syringe. The entire Spokane Indian Reservation and all of its people and places were clean and scrubbed. The Spokane River rose up from its bed like a man who had been healed and joyously wept all the way down to its confluence with the Columbia River. There was water everywhere: a thousand streams interrupted by makeshift waterfalls; small ponds hidden beneath a mask of thick fronds and anonymous blossoms; blankets of dew draped over the shoulders of isolated knolls. An entire civilization of insects lived in the mud puddle formed by one truck tire and a recent rainstorm. The blades of grass, the narrow pine needles, and the stalks of roadside wheat were as sharp and bright as surgical tools.

Those were the days before the first color televisions were smuggled onto the reservation, but after a man with blue eyes had dropped two symmetrical slices of the sun on Japan. All of it happened before a handsome Catholic was assassinated in Dallas, leaving a bright red mark on the tape measure of time, but after the men with blue eyes had carried dark-eyed children into the ovens and made them ash.

I was a dark-eyed Indian boy who leaned against pine trees and broke them in half. I was twelve years old and strong, with fluid skin that was the same color as Chimacum Creek in April, May, when the mud and water were indistinguishable from each other.

Those were the days of the old stories, and in many of those stories I was the Indian boy who was capable of anything.

In one of those stories, I lifted a grown man, Edgar Horse, draped him over my shoulder like an old quilt, and carried him for two miles from the gnarled pine tree in front of the tribal high school all the way down to the trading post in downtown Wellpinit. I carried Edgar, as many others had carried Edgar, because we were living in the days before Indians discovered wheelchairs and the idea of wheelchairs.

In another of those stories, I was the maker of songs. Widowed grandmothers gave me dollar bills and I invented songs about their long-dead husbands. Often, as I sang, the grandmothers would weep tears that I collected into tin cups and fed to the huckleberry bushes growing on the low hills of the reservation. All these years later, those huckleberries still taste like grief, and a cellar filled with preserved huckleberries is a graveyard stacked high with glass tombstones.

Because I was the maker of songs, young men gave me small gifts, a blank piece of linen paper, a stick of gum, an envelope decorated with a beautiful, canceled stamp, and in return I taught them love songs. I taught those young men the love songs that transformed scraps of newspaper into thin birds. In the middle of a city, in the middle of a strong wind, a thousand paper birds rattled and sang. I taught those young men the love songs that forced horses to bow their heads and kneel in the fields, the love songs that revealed the secrets of fire, the love songs that healed, the love songs that precipitated wars.

In another of those stories, in one of many stories about me, about the reservation where I was born, I was the small soldier who lived with his Spokane Indian mother and his Coeur d’Alene Indian father in a two-bedroom house in a valley near the Spokane River.

I slept alone in one bedroom while my parents shared the second. The living room was small, with just enough space for an end table, console radio, and tattered couch. The kitchen was the largest room in the house. We spent most of our waking hours there at the table that my father had carved from a fallen pine tree. My father had built almost every piece of furniture in the house, but he was not a good carpenter. The chairs rocked though they were not rocking chairs. We had to place one of my father’s old work shirts under one short leg of the dining table to prevent food from sliding into our laps. The radio and all of its bright and mysterious internal organs sat inside a series of homemade wooden boxes that had to be replaced every few months because of small electrical fires.

When those fires burned, my father would laugh and dance. He would pick up the flames with his bare hands and hold them close to his chest.

Indians will love anything if given the chance.

I loved our house. I cried whenever I left it. I never wanted to leave it. I wanted to grow old in that house. I wanted to become the crazy elder who’d lived in the same house for all of his life. When I died there, I wanted to have ninety years of stories hanging in the closets.

Beside the house, a pine tree bent its back like an old Indian woman walking in a strong wind. A forest of old women marched from horizon to horizon. Two crows, looking for rodents and songbirds, floated in the morning sky. A mile above the crows, clumsy airplanes left behind thick veins of smoke. Miles and miles above the airplanes, seven sibling planets kept track of our secrets.

On that morning and inside that house, I pulled back the covers of my dream of war and the covers of my bed, and stepped onto the cold, uneven floor. Our house leaned in whatever direction the wind happened to be blowing. I walked into the kitchen. The wind was blowing from east to west.

“Mother, there’s going to be a war,” I said to the woman with brown skin and black hair. She was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee. The coffee was thick with grounds. The blue china cup was chipped at its edges. She had purchased it, as is, at a secondhand store in the city of Spokane. My mother’s eyes were as dark as the eyes of a salmon who has just returned to the place where it was spawned.

“Jonah,” she said to me and laughed. My mother had named me after a man who’d survived a miracle. Because of that, she seemed to regard every action of mine, no matter how ordinary, as a miracle of its own. That morning, as I stepped into her kitchen, fresh from a dream of war, my mother pointed at the miracle of my fevered face and mussed hair. She set her cup on the table and took me into her arms. She said my name again and laughed, as if I had truly just emerged from the belly of a whale, and not from the belly of a dream where the enemy soldiers wore surgical gloves and white smocks.

“The soldiers are coming,” I said to my mother. “We have to hide.”

“Where are we going to hide?” she asked. She thought we were playing a game. She covered my face and eyes with the thick curtain of her hair.

“I can’t see,” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “If you can’t see the soldiers, they can’t see you.”

She was wrong. I could have seen those soldiers if I had been blind from birth. Flames rose from their footprints.

“We can hide between the walls,” I said. “Or beneath the floor.”

“Like Anne Frank,” said my mother.

“No,” I said. “She didn’t hide good enough.”

I knew the long history of children who had been forced to hide in clumsy places and were subsequently discovered.

“Hush, hush,” said my mother.

“We’re going to die,” I said.

“Don’t say that,” said my mother. “Don’t ever say that.”

I looked up into the salt seas of her eyes. She was my mother, my priest, my chair in the confessional. I sat in her lap and whispered in her ear.

“Please,” I said. “Believe me.”

My mother was supposed to be stronger than I would ever be. She was supposed to convince me that my dream was not real. She was supposed to tell me that the enemy soldiers were marching only through the killing fields of my imagination. She was supposed to heal me. All of my life, she had healed me whenever I was ill.

“Jonah,” she said, using my name as she might have used aspirin or penicillin. “It was a dream.”

“There was so much blood,” I said. “A whole river of blood. And the Indians were trying to swim through it. Trying to swim for home. But the soldiers kept pulling us out of the water. They skinned us and hung us up to dry. Then they ate us up. They ate every one of us. And they ate every part of us. Except our skins. They fed our skins to the dogs. And the dogs were fighting over our skins. Just growling and fighting. It’s true.”

“Oh, Jonah,” said my mother. “It was just a nightmare.”

“It’s real,” I said and wept. “I know it’s real.”

“Oh, Jonah,” said my mother as she wept with me.

We were still weeping together at the kitchen table when my father returned from the night shift at the mine. He stared at us with dark eyes. His black hair was cut close to his scalp. His face was a relief map: rivers of scars, the desert floor of skin, and the badlands of wrinkles. With tremendous power and grace, he strode across the kitchen toward us. He was a huge man whose clothes never seemed to fit him correctly. My father placed his left hand on my mother’s shoulder and his right hand on my head.

Though my father was a bad carpenter, he had always been a clever magician. I knew he could conjure up different spells with each hand. His left hand made my mother’s back arch in the night. His right hand pulled down ripe apples from the surprised pine trees. His left hand made the sky open up and rain. His right hand started fires when he snapped his fingers. When he clasped his hands together in prayer, or slapped them together in applause, the distance between the earth and moon changed.

On that morning, when my father set his left hand on my mother’s shoulder and his right on my head, I knew he was trying to stop our crying. I wanted him to stop the war from coming. But my mother and I continued to weep, and I knew the enemy soldiers continued to march toward us.

“What’s wrong?” asked my father, feeling powerless.

“He had a nightmare,” said my mother. “He thinks a war is coming.”

“Then why are you crying?” he asked her.

“He’s scaring me.”

My father wrapped his huge arms around his wife and son. He had no magic left in his hands. Bright tears fell from my father’s eyes and burned the kitchen table. He raised his face toward the ceiling and the sky beyond it, and opened his mouth to sing or scream. He was afraid too, for reasons he did not understand.

My dream of war filled the room like oxygen. The three of us breathed it in and choked on it. We tasted it. It tasted like salt; it tasted like blood.

I don’t know how long the three of us wept together. Minutes or hours could have passed. I burrowed into my mother and father. I wanted to hide between the walls of their ribs or beneath the floors of their hearts.

“Wait,” my father said after a long time. “Listen.”

My mother and I listened. We heard a storm approaching.

“Thunder,” said my mother.

“Lightning,” said my father.

“War,” I said.

“Rain,” said my mother.

“Dark clouds,” said my father.

“War,” I said.

“Floods,” said my mother.

“Famine,” said my father.

“War,” I said.

Together, my parents and I stepped into our front yard and stared up into the sky. We saw the big planes roar noisily through the rough air above the reservation. We saw the soldiers step from the bellies of those planes and drop toward the earth. We saw a thousand parachutes open into a thousand green blossoms. All over the Spokane Indian Reservation, all over every reservation in the country, those green blossoms fell onto empty fields, onto powwow grounds, and onto the roofs of tribal schools and health clinics. Those green blossoms fell between pine trees, beside deep and shallow rivers, and among the sacred and utilitarian headstones of our dead.

My parents and I watched one green blossom float down into our front yard. Then one more, and another, and a fourth. A fifth and sixth. The seventh landed in the back of our wagon.

A garden of parachutes.

With rifles raised, the soldiers advanced on us. I saw four white faces, two black faces, and a face that looked like mine.

“Step away from the house!” shouted the soldier-who-looked-like-me. “And lie facedown on the ground!”

My parents and I did as we were told. As I was lying on the grass, I watched an ant carry the dead body of another ant.

I was afraid.

I knew that other soldiers, white ones, black ones, and ones who looked like me, were parachuting onto every reservation in the country.

I could hear one million Indians holding their breath.

On our reservation, other soldiers soon arrived and swarmed into the house. I didn’t know what they were looking for.

“Your names!” a black soldier shouted at our backs as he stood above us. I couldn’t tell if he was making a statement or asking a question.

“What are your names?” asked the black soldier.

“We’re the Lots,” said my father. Still on the ground, I turned my head to look at my father’s face, but his head was turned the other way. I turned back to look at my mother’s face and saw that her eyes were closed tight. I wondered if she was praying.

“Joseph, Sarah, and Jonah Lot?” asked the black soldier. He knew our names.

“What are your names?” I asked.

“Quiet,” said the black soldier. I could hear the fear in his voice. He was afraid of us, or perhaps he was afraid of what was happening to the world, to him. He was the kind of soldier who had always followed orders, who had never questioned them, and who now did not know how to change at the moment when he desired, more than anything, to change.

Rifle shots in the distance. The earth trembled because somebody beautiful was running. Then more rifle shots. The wind shrieked because somebody beautiful was falling. Then more rifle shots. The earth trembled because somebody beautiful had fallen into dust. Then silence for twelve seconds. I counted them. One second, I inhaled. Two seconds, I exhaled. Six seconds, I inhaled. Seven seconds, I exhaled. Eleven seconds, I inhaled. Twelve seconds, I exhaled. Then one final rifle shot.

“What is your name?” I asked the black soldier. He ignored me.

“Are you Joseph, Sarah, and Jonah Lot?” asked the soldier. Tears were running down his face.

“Yes,” said my father.

“Joseph is full-blood Coeur d’Alene, Sarah is full-blood Spokane,” the black soldier said to a white soldier. “The Coeur d’Alene and Spokane are both Interior Salish tribes, so there should be no problem of contamination with the child.”

I heard the word contamination and cried out. I thought of disease, of deadly viruses floating invisibly through the air.

“Are there any other children?” asked the white soldier.

“No,” said the black soldier. “The child was supposed to be a twin, but the other baby was stillborn.”

My mother gasped. I wondered if her body had remembered the pain of my birth, and the greater pain of giving birth to my dead brother.

“What is this about?” asked my father. I could hear the fear in his voice. He tried to disguise it as anger. He turned his head to look at me. I could see the fear in his face. I’d never been more afraid of the fear in any man’s eyes.

“Quiet,” said a white soldier as he kicked my father in the ribs.

“Careful,” said the soldier-who-looked-like-me. “Don’t draw blood.”

Contamination.

A white soldier suddenly pulled me to my feet and looked me in the eyes. His eyes were an impossible green.

“Don’t hurt my baby,” begged my mother.

“What was your brother’s name?”

“His name was Joseph,” I said. “Same as my dad.”

The white soldier nodded his head as if he’d known it all along.

“Leave him alone!” shouted my father as he tried to rise from the ground. A white soldier smashed him back down with the butt of his rifle. My father bled into the dirt.

“Damn it,” said the soldier-who-looked-like-me. “I told you. No blood.”

Contamination.

The red glow poured from my father’s nose and mouth. My mother clawed at the dirt as if she thought she could escape by digging a tunnel.

“Jonah,” said the white soldier. “We don’t mean to hurt you. Or your parents.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “You’re going to eat us. You’re going to drink our blood.”

The white soldier’s face grew harder. Marble, granite, quartz.

“Jonah,” he said. “We’ve come to take you away from here. We need you.”

“I knew you were coming,” I said.

My father tried to breathe through his shattered nose and mouth. My mother pressed her face into the ground and wore it like a mask.

I bit deeply into my palm.

“I surrender,” I said to the white soldier as I offered my bloodied hand to him.

War is a church.

In my church, my mother and father were frozen in the stained-glass window above the altar. The red glass of my father’s bloody face was cradled by the blue glass of my mother’s dress.

Memory is a church on fire.

In my church, a soldier dropped a lighted match at the wooden feet of a crucified Jesus and watched the fire wrap around the savior like a shroud. Flames lifted away from Jesus’ body like angels and blessed the parched pews, threadbare curtains, and brittle hymnal books. Two rows of flames sang in the choir box. Flames climbed up the altar and walls to embrace my stained-glass parents.

The glass darkened with smoke.

The glass melted in the fire.

The glass exploded in the heat.

My parents’ faces fell to pieces in my mind only moments after those soldiers landed in our front yard. I began to forget pieces of my parents’ faces only moments after I was taken from them. By the time I was loaded into a school bus with twenty other kids from the reservation, I could remember only the dark of my mother’s eyes and the curve of my father’s jaw. By the time our bus crossed the border of the reservation, taking us away from what we had known and into what we could never have predicted, I had forgotten almost every piece of my parents’ faces. I touched my face, remembering that its features owed their shapes to the shapes of my parents’ faces, but I felt nothing familiar. I was strange and foreign.

Outside the bus, the landscape was familiar. With my parents, in our horse-drawn wagon, I had often traveled along that highway from the Spokane Indian Reservation into the city of Spokane. The blacktop road split the wheat fields into halves. On one side, irrigation equipment stepped like giant insects across the field. On the other side, a white farmer sat in a still tractor. He watched our bus slowly pass from left to right across his horizon. Farther along, a tribe of starlings perched in one pine tree. I raised my hand to wave a greeting to them and one thousand birds lifted simultaneously into flight. The grain silos were painted with the names of ghost towns. Those silos could have been the tombstones of giants. Red lights blinked at the tops of radio antenna towers. An orphaned stretch of barbed-wire fence was partially submerged in a roadside pond.

Suddenly, everything looked dangerous. Sharp stars ripped through the fabric of the morning sky. Morning dew boiled and cooked green leaves. Sun dogs snarled and snapped at one another. The vanishing point was the tip of a needle.

Inside the bus, a dozen soldiers stood in the aisle between the seats. Another soldier drove the bus. I counted them again and again. There were ten white soldiers, two black soldiers, and the soldier-who-looked-like-me. I sat a few seats behind the black soldier who was driving the bus. In the back, Arlene and Kim, the Cox twins, hugged each other and wailed. Farther forward, the five Juniors, four boys and one girl, pushed their faces against the windows. There were two boys named James — one who went by Jimmy and one who went by Jamie — and three Johns. Jimmy was the chess player and Jamie was dyslexic. The three Johns hated one another. Randy Peone, the green-eyed Spokane, was shouting curses in English and Salish, the languages of our tribe. A white soldier quickly pinned Randy to his seat, tied his arms behind his back, and covered his mouth with duct tape. There were three Kateris, all named after the Mohawk woman who was canonized when her smallpox scars disappeared. Two of the Kateris prayed quietly, while the third had long ago discarded her faith and was now trying to pry a spring loose from her seat to use as a weapon. Teddy, who had a white father, sat with his half-brother, Tyrone, who had a black father. Billy the Retard was smiling. I wondered if this new world was the world he’d been living in all along and if he was now happy that the rest of the Indian kids had finally joined him. Sam the Indian, who was really white, trembled in the seat across the aisle from me.

“Jonah, is it real?” asked Sam the Indian. He was a small boy, the subject of a thousand reservation schoolyard taunts, but none of that mattered in the bus. At that moment, as we all traveled together down the longest highway in tribal history, Sam the Indian was instantly loved and beloved by all of the Indians on that bus. Sam the Indian was a white child who loved Indians, who had come to live among us, and who had never been allowed to learn any of our secrets. As we Indians cowered in our seats, we all made silent apologies to Sam. We all said silent prayers for his safety because we had all, collectively and unconsciously, just decided that Sam’s pale skin contained some kind of magic. We thought the white soldiers would notice Sam’s white skin and call him brother. We thought they’d lift Sam to their shoulders in celebration, in some kind of strange and raucous ceremony, and carry him away while all of us Indian children made our escape. We all thought Sam could save us, but I was the only one who spoke to him.

“Help us,” I said to Sam.

Sam did not understand.

“Jonah,” he said. “Is this real?”

“It’s real,” I said.

“Quiet,” said the white soldier standing between us.

Sam the Indian looked from me to the soldier and back to me.

“Why is it real?” asked Sam the Indian.

“Quiet,” said the white soldier again without looking at us. I was happy I didn’t have to answer Sam’s question. I’m not sure what I would have said. And if I had told the truth, if I had given Sam an answer that was close to the truth, I might have lost all hope and faith. I might have closed my eyes and never opened them again.

“Why is it real?” asked Sam again.

“Shut up,” said the white soldier. He swallowed hard. I wondered if he hated us. I couldn’t see any obvious hate in his blue eyes. I studied the eyes of all of the soldiers. Five of the white soldiers had blue eyes, one had green, one had hazel, and the other had brown. One of the black soldiers had light brown eyes but I couldn’t see the eyes of the other black soldier, who was driving the bus.

I studied the face of the soldier-who-looked-like-me. He was the tallest soldier. He had a cross tattooed on the back of his right hand. He couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen. He had brown eyes and skin. His hair was blacker than mine. He had a thin purple scar that arced from the corner of his left eye back toward his ear. His eyes passed over me as he scanned the faces of his prisoners. It was not enough. I wanted him to study my face as carefully as I was studying his face. I wanted him to tell me why he was a soldier holding a rifle instead of a fellow prisoner sitting in the seat beside me. I wanted to know the story of his scar.

“Where are you taking us?” I asked as I stood in my seat.

“Quiet,” said that white soldier for the third time as he pushed me back down.

I rose again.

“Where are you taking us?” I asked.

That white soldier wrapped his left hand around my throat and squeezed.

“You get to breathe,” said the soldier. “Or you get to ask questions. You make the choice.”

“Release that boy,” said another white soldier.

That white soldier gave my throat one last squeeze and dropped me to the floor. I coughed and gagged.

The bus was quiet. I lay on the floor and heard the hum-hum-hum of the bus wheels. I closed my eyes and pressed my hands flat against the floor. As the bus traveled, I could feel every pebble and irregularity in the road.

We traveled for twenty-two miles. I lay on the floor and counted each mile, counted each and every part of a mile, until the bus pulled into the small town of Wright. From my place on the floor, I could hear the loud murmurs of a gathered crowd. I climbed into my seat and looked out the window. Other soldiers were marching in neat rows beside the bus. The citizens of Wright were lined up on both sides of the road. I could see the smiles on some of their white faces. Others were clapping and singing. A few waved as the bus passed them by. One or two were laughing. Fathers lifted sons onto shoulders for a better view. Mothers kneeled next to daughters and made justifications. White teenagers stood on the hoods of cars. Some silently pumped their fists into the sky in celebration, while others screamed unintelligibly and threw obscene gestures at us.

A blood parade.

I could also see the pain and terror in other white faces. Pale hands pressed to open mouths. Mothers dragged their daughters away. Young white women wept and screamed. Strong men broke through the crowds and stood in front of the bus, trying to stop it, but the soldiers beat them and dragged them away. A Jesuit priest stood on the roof of the bank and shouted prayers for everybody on the bus. The Presbyterian minister attempted to stop the bus by ramming it with her ancient automobile. The bus barely slowed as it crushed her. Parishioners pulled her body from the wreck and wept. Neighbor scuffled with neighbor. One son fainted in the street after he saw the hate in his father’s eyes.

The crowd, friendly and not, surged toward the bus.

Outside the bus, the soldiers panicked and fired indiscriminately, while inside the bus, the soldiers pushed us down into our seats and covered us with their bodies.

Outside, a burning tire rolled past a little girl in a yellow dress.

Inside, the high-pitched screams of Indian children could have been the high-pitched wails of Indian singers.

Outside, the hands that pounded on the bus could have been the same hands that pounded drums.

That music sounded exactly the same as all of the music I had ever heard before.

One singing bullet passed through the front window of a blue house, through the living room and narrow kitchen, and out the back window where it lodged in the thick bark of an oak tree.

The clouds of smoke were shaped like horses.

Inside, I struggled against the white soldier who covered me. I punched and kicked at him, but he did not respond. At first, I thought he was immune to pain, but then I looked up at his face and saw the dark bullet hole between his eyes. With all of my strength, I pushed his body to the floor. He was a young man, barely older than me, and I mourned his death as I had been taught to mourn, briefly and powerfully.

“I’m sorry,” I said to him. I kneeled beside him, touched his face, and closed his blue eyes.

I prayed for him, the enemy, and wondered if he had prayed for me the night before, or the week before, when he had first been told, when he had first been given the orders, the battle plan, when he first discovered that he would be coming to my reservation to steal me away from my mother and father. I wondered if he had mourned for me.

Looking at him, his slight body and small hands, purple and yellow with bruises, I knew he had prayed for me. I knew he had wrapped those pale hands so tightly into prayer fists that he’d bruised his skin.

Prayer is painful.

Using a vocabulary I did not understand, the other soldiers were screaming orders at one another.

War and the idea of war.

I stood as the bus rolled past the last few protesters standing at the edge of the town and gained speed. Still standing, I looked back and saw one small white boy sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of the road. He was as bald and translucent as a newborn. As the town rioted behind him, that white boy weakly raised his arm. He grew smaller and smaller as the bus accelerated. Soon that pale boy was a shadow rising just above the horizon, then he was a part of the horizon, and then he was nothing at all.

On the bus, the soldiers cursed and wept angry tears. One green-eyed white soldier touched the face of the white soldier who had been shot in the head.

“He’s dead,” that green-eyed white soldier whispered to me.

“I know,” I said. “He covered me.”

I had been saved.

“Okay, okay, grunts,” shouted the soldier-who-looked-like-me. “Let’s get it together. Let’s get our shit together.”

The soldiers stood and straightened as one body. I was made instantly jealous by their obvious tribal bond. The soldiers pushed all of us back into our seats. Most of us sat with our backs straight, as we had been taught to do by seven generations of tribal school teachers.

“Get in your damn seats,” the soldiers shouted at us, the Indian children, though we were all sitting in our original seats.

“Let’s get it together!” shouted the soldier-who-looked-like-me. His face was brightly lit by his anger. The long scar on his face was swollen and purple, as if he’d been injured just a few moments earlier rather than years before.

The bus rolled past isolated farmhouses where whole families stood on front lawns and watched us pass. One large white woman held a glass of lemonade in one hand and used her other to shade her eyes. She wore a white sundress and white pumps. She was beautiful. I wanted to climb out of the bus and call her mother. I wanted to lay my head down in her fleshy lap and listen to her stories.

“Talk to me,” I whispered to her image and then to the memory of her image. I wanted to hear a story told by a woman who knew thousands of stories. Stories had always kept me safe before. I had always trusted stories. Frightened and tired, I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to tell myself a story. But I could think of nothing but the blood on that dead soldier’s face. I could hear nothing but the monotonous hum of the bus. And I was still thinking of that blood when the bus rolled through the front gates of Steptoe Air Force Base.

At the gates, a few hundred protesters were being beaten by a few hundred soldiers with clubs. Smoke and tear gas. One large soldier raised his rifle into the air and fired at something only he could see. Another soldier walked up to an old-man protester, pressed a pistol against the old man’s temple, and pulled the trigger. Blood fountained from the old man’s head as he toppled to the ground. A third soldier, screaming something I could not hear, ran up to the murderous soldier. With their hands swinging wildly in obscene and obscure gestures, the two soldiers argued with each other. They argued until the murderous soldier pressed his pistol against the other soldier’s chest and pulled the trigger again. And then both soldiers were swallowed up by the surging crowd.

Contamination.

As the bus pulled through the heavily fortified gates and drove deeper into the base, I saw plane after plane lifting off from runways. I didn’t know then that those planes were carnivorous. I didn’t know then that the bellies of those planes were filled with Indians.

I saw soldiers herding Indians into large buildings made of cold metal, steel and aluminum. I tasted steel and aluminum. The darkest Indians, the ones with black hair and brown skin, were herded into a red building. The Indians with brown hair and lighter eyes were herded into an orange building. The Indians with light hair and eyes, the Indians with white skin, were herded into a pale building.

I suddenly wondered if we were going to be slaughtered. I wondered if we were going to be eaten. I wondered if rich white men were going to turn the pages of books that were made with our skins.

On our bus, the soldiers pulled the Indian children to their feet.

“Move, move, move!” shouted the soldier-who-looked-like-me.

Once we were off the bus, the soldiers divided us into three groups, each destined for a different building.

I was in the darkest group with two Juniors, a John, Kim and Arlene Cox, Billy the Retard, and the third Kateri. There were another dozen Indian kids I didn’t recognize, but we had the same purple-black hair and brown skin. Randy Peone, the green-eyed Spokane, was in the second group with two Juniors, one James, two Kateris, Tyrone, the half-black kid who had dark skin, and many other half-breed kids. Sam the Indian, who was really white, was in the third group with two of the boys named James, two Johns, the girl named Junior, Teddy, the half-white kid with blond hair and gray eyes, and a hundred others. They were the largest group. When they were separated from each other, Tyrone and Teddy, the half-breed half brothers, wailed and beat their heads against the ground. The blood on their foreheads was impossibly bright.

“Pick them up! Pick them up!” shouted a tall white soldier with a crooked nose.

“No blood! No blood!” shouted another white soldier with large hands.

Strange aircraft hovered above us. I looked up and swore I could see tears on the face of one pilot. I wondered if he was Jesus.

There was so much gunfire in the distance that I thought it was birds singing. At that moment, the third Kateri rose up with the coiled metal spring she had pulled from her seat on the bus. She was beautiful. I could see in her face and form the woman she would have become. Screaming with rage, the third Kateri shoved that spring into the brown eye of a black soldier. She broke free and ran. Sam the Indian ran after her. Escape, and the thought of escape. I wanted to run with them, but my knees gave out, dropping me to the ground, and saved me. I watched Kateri and Sam the Indian run. I wanted to know how it felt to run.

“Stop them!” shouted the soldier-who-looked-like-me.

A white soldier, young and wide-eyed, raised his rifle and pulled the trigger twice. A chorus of screams. Sam and Kateri fell. They were now just two bags of blood.

“Goddamn it, who fired their weapon?” shouted a white officer. “Who fired their weapon?”

The wide-eyed white soldier raised his hand and the white officer stormed over to him. The officer snatched the soldier’s rifle from his hands.

“Who gave you the order to fire?” shouted the officer.

“Nobody, sir!”

“I said, who gave you the order to fire?”

“Nobody, sir!”

“Then why in the hell did you fire?”

“They were escaping, sir!”

“We’re in the middle of a goddamn Air Force base,” shouted the officer. “Did you honestly believe those kids were going to escape?”

The wide-eyed soldier hesitated.

“I, I, I didn’t think, sir,” he said.

Furious, the officer smashed the barrel of the rifle down on the soldier’s nose. The wide-eyed soldier crumpled to the pavement.

“Somebody get his dumb ass out of here!” shouted the officer.

Two other soldiers ran in and dragged the unconscious soldier away.

“Goddamn it!” shouted the officer. “This is a military operation and I want some discipline! I want some goddamn organization!”

The officer waded into the crowd of dark Indian children, scooped up a little brown girl, and marched toward the red building.

“Let’s go, honey,” the officer said to the little brown girl in his arms. “We’ve got work to do.”

Silently and obediently, the rest of us in the red group followed the officer. I didn’t know what happened to the other groups and would never know.

We walked into a bright light.

I walked into the bright light.

Inside the red building, beyond the bright light, I saw many more Indians than I had ever seen in one place in my entire life. There were so many Indians that I had to close my eyes against the magnitude of it. I wondered if every Indian in the world was inside that building.

We were forced into cattle chutes and led from station to station.

At the first station, we were shaved bald.

I was shaved bald by a white woman. I looked into her eyes as she took the last of my hair. She was beautiful. She was crying.

“What do you do with it?” I asked her.

“With what?” she asked.

“With the hair.”

She looked down at her white uniform covered with the stray hairs of thousands of Indians. She looked down at all of the dark hair carpeting the floor.

Janitors were sweeping the hair into enormous piles, some of them taller than me.

“The hair,” I asked her. “What happens to it?”

She opened her mouth to say something, but changed her mind, and then she was gone, moving to the next Indian in line.

I knew they must have burned the hair after we left.

I imagined the smoke and smell of burning hair filling the air.

At the next station, we were stripped of our clothes. Old men and old women, young boys and young girls, powerfully built fathers and beautiful mothers, all naked. I covered my genitals with my hands. Humiliated and defenseless, I kneeled down on the floor and tried to hide my body. Other Indians proudly stood still, their hands at their sides, and stared into the eyes of every soldier. At the third station, doctors and nurses huddled over our bodies and thrust tools and fingers into our ears, mouths, noses, vaginas, penises, and anuses. Sickly people were led away, through another door, and into what I was sure were the ovens.

Fire.

I tried not to breathe, because I knew I would be inhaling the ash those sickly Indians had become. We were then forced into red jumpsuits and marched across a brightly lit tarmac into the belly of a plane. There were a thousand Indians inside that plane. I counted them, the sound of their screams and whimpers, the sound of their curses and whispers. We were made to crouch as the plane lifted up into the sky. That was the first time I had ever consciously thought about flight. I realized I had never flown before and laughed hysterically. A large hand reached out and touched my shoulder. It was too dark to see. That hand could have been my mother’s or my father’s. It had to be somebody’s mother or father.

“Hush, hush,” said a voice.

I moved away from that hand. I crawled through the dark, searching for something familiar. I smacked my face into another face.

“Billy,” said the other face. I recognized it instantly, recognized the familiar lilt and upward inflections of my fellow tribal member.

“Billy,” I repeated.

“Billy,” he said again.

“Billy the Retard,” I said.

“Billy the Retard,” he repeated.

“Big Bill,” I said.

“Big Bill,” he repeated.

“What’s happening?” I asked him.

He leaned in close to me. I could smell him. He smelled like the water and trees of home.

“They’re going to take the tomorrow out of our bones,” he said.

“The tomorrow?” I asked.

“The tomorrow,” repeated Billy.

I could hear his heart and stomach working inside his body.

“I dreamed it,” he said.

“I know it,” I said. “I dreamed it too.”

“They’re going to take the tomorrow,” Billy said again.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Big Bill,” said Billy the Retard.

“I don’t understand,” I said again.

The plane rose higher and higher above the earth. At that height, I knew gravity was a story passed from one generation of undiscovered birds to the next. At that height, oxygen was a sacrament.

The plane landed in a flat, anonymous desert. Other planes landed in the flat, anonymous desert.

A thousand Indians, beaten and exhausted, all dressed in red jumpsuits, stepped carefully from the planes, onto the tarmac crowded with soldiers, and huddled together in the lonely desert. We moved as one unit, as if we were migrating birds.

The soldiers’ faces were slack and anonymous, save for the brown face of the soldier-who-looked-like-me. We regarded each other. His eyes narrowed and he turned his head away with disdain or shame, or a combination of both, or perhaps with no emotion at all.

I recognized none of the other Indian prisoners, or perhaps I recognized all of them. In the haze and heat of the desert, we all looked alike, though I knew intuitively that we could not all look alike, especially given the vast tribal and geographic differences among us. But, as I scanned the faces around me, I saw that we all had the same brown skin, long noses, strong jawlines, and large cheekbones. We could all have been siblings. We could all have been the same person. We could all have been a thousand vestigial reproductions of a single organ, all of us struggling to find a purpose, a space to stand and breathe, enough room to function within the large body of a thing, a person, a crowd called Indian.

Like a newborn, I was losing my ability to tell the difference between my body and the body of the person next to me.

There, in the desert, the horizon was not a straight line stretched taut between the sky and earth. Instead, the horizon was a series of arcs that connected to form a circle of red sand that was a hundred miles wide at its diameter. I stood at the exact epicenter of that circle. I stood at the exact epicenter of seven different circles: circle of red sand, circle of Indians, circle of heat, circle of soldiers, circle of sun, circle of blood, circle of wind. Like a newborn, I turned my head and closed my eyes because it was all too much to comprehend. I listened and heard. Indians wept. I opened my eyes and witnessed. Children climbed into the arms of women strangers and reinvented their mothers. Men fainted and were held up only by the sheer weight of the people around them. The soldiers shouted at one another, then shouted at us. Soon, we were marched away from the plane and into the desert. We followed a path worn into the sand by thousands of recent footprints. Other Indians, other siblings. I knew that path would be swallowed up overnight by the sand and wind.

The soldiers marched us beyond the first horizon and through the one door carved into the desert floor. We carefully descended a long series of staircases. I counted steps. Fourteen steps to every flight of stairs. I counted flights. Ten, thirty, fifty, more. I counted and counted until the numbers grew too large for me to remember clearly. I counted until the numbers themselves held no meaning I could decipher. At the bottom of every flight of stairs, we paused on the landing. At every landing, another group of soldiers stood at the entrance of a long dark tunnel. At the mouth of every dark tunnel, more and more Indians were separated from the rest and marched into the darkness beyond. I wondered when it would be my turn to walk into the darkness. I was not afraid of it, the dark. I wanted to give it a name, so I called it Mother.

Finally, at the bottom of the last staircase, at the bottom of the world, I was marched into the darkness of the very last tunnel. Inside, it was cool, nearly cold, but dry. Beyond the walls, I could hear strange machinery working. I could hear voices in the distance. Screams, too. I walked with seven Indian strangers: two young girls who huddled together; a teenage boy whose eyes were twice as old as his face; two women, one of them pregnant; and two men, one of them large and imposing with a port-wine birthmark that covered half of his face and the other one smaller than me. With our shaved heads, in our red jumpsuits, we looked like we had been in a concentration camp for years, though we had been prisoners for only a matter of hours. Together, led by the soldiers, including the soldier-who-looked-like-me, we walked for miles, or for inches, I could no longer tell the difference. We marched through the darkness until we could see a bright light in the distance. The light grew larger and larger. I was afraid of it. I wanted to give it a name, so I called it Father.

Soon, the eight of us were marched out of the dark tunnel and into a long white hallway where white doors were evenly spaced along both sides like God’s teeth. We were marched through an open door at the end of that hallway and into a circular room. In the room, eight beds, each with clean sheets and thin blankets. In the room, an exposed toilet. In the room, a water faucet, a large plastic bucket, and eight small plastic cups. In the room, a surveillance camera.

No secrets in a circular room.

“Grab a bunk,” said a soldier with a large nose. His voice shook the floor of our room-cell and reverberated in the hollow bones of my feet.

Each of us, the eight Indians, chose a bed. I could not tell north from northwest. I only knew my position by the faces and shapes of my neighbors. On my immediate left, the pregnant Indian woman, then the two girls huddled together on one bed, then the small Indian man, then the other Indian woman, then the boy with old eyes, and then, to my immediate right, the large Indian man with the port-wine birthmark.

“Okay, listen up,” said the large-nose soldier. “I want to welcome all of you here. Now, I know you’ve been through a rough journey and the accommodations here are a bit spartan…”

“Why are we here?” shouted the large Indian man.

A nervous white soldier gently placed the muzzle of his rifle against the large Indian man’s forehead. The man was suddenly quiet. Though he had never fired a gun, had never been threatened with a gun, had never had the desire to use a gun, that Indian man understood the meaning of a gun held in white hands and pointed at a brown face. Genetic memory.

“Sir,” the large-nose soldier said, nearly whispered, to the large Indian man. “We don’t really have the time to answer your questions. We have quite a bit of work yet to do here.”

The large Indian man said nothing. The large-nose soldier studied the Indian’s garish red birthmark.

“Pity about your face,” said the large-nose soldier.

“They want our blood,” I said. “They’re vampires.”

Large nose turned away from the large Indian man, walked up close to my bed, and kneeled down in front of me.

“Son,” he said. “What is your name?”

“Jonah.”

“Ah, that’s a good name. Very strong name, that Jonah.” The large-nose soldier smiled. “Jonah, you can call me Ishmael. You see, we all have our whales.”

Then he slapped my face so hard that I momentarily blacked out. In those seconds, I dreamed of my mother and father, though I dreamed only of their hands because I could not remember their faces. When I regained consciousness, Large nose was standing again in the middle of our room.

“First of all,” he said, “we have a couple of basic rules here. Number one, you will not speak unless spoken to. Number two, you will follow our orders exactly. And by exactly, I mean you will not deviate in any form whatsoever. Any deviation will result in severe punishment. Continued rebellion will result in isolation and restraint.”

Large nose looked around the room.

“As you can see,” he said, “you have access to an unlimited amount of water for bathing and consumption. And you will receive six small meals a day. Three times a week, for one hour a day, you will be escorted into a recreation room where you will exercise your body. The lights will be dimmed for eight hours every night so that you may sleep.”

I wanted to lie down on my strange bed and fall asleep forever.

“Citizens,” said large nose, “you are here to perform a great patriotic service for your country. The sacrifices you have made and are going to make have been and will be greatly appreciated by your fellow Americans. And remember, please, that you are here for your own safety and we plan to take good care of you. Now, I wish you all a good night.”

Without ceremony, large nose and all of the soldiers filed out of the room and locked the door behind them. I harbored a brief and dangerous hope that the soldier-who-looked-like-me would turn back, open the door, and release us, but the locked door stay locked. We, the eight Indians, waited together in the silence as thin and strong as our own skins. None of us said a word for minutes that slowly became hours. I looked down at my bare and dirty feet. I felt the rough cloth of my red jumpsuit. I studied the meager details of the room until I could close my eyes and see them, in exact reproduction, on the blank walls of my imagination. The two young girls, who had been strangers before and would never be more than a few feet apart for the rest of their lives, continued to huddle together and weep. The pregnant woman laid down on her bed with her back to us, with her face toward the curved wall, and pretended to sleep, or fell asleep and made all of us jealous with her ability to hide in plain sight. The other Indian woman drank cup after cup of water.

Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen.

The large Indian man pounded on the closed door while the small Indian man softly sang a tribal song. The boy with old eyes stared at me and I stared back. His eyes were two abandoned houses standing together on a grassy plain burned brown by the sun. Wooden flesh fell away from those houses and left only two skeletal frames. Crows and owls perched on rotting timbers. Wild grass and prodigal weeds burst through the foundation.

Everything is reclaimed, everything is reclaimed.

The boy with old eyes stood and walked toward me. He leaned down so close to me I could see the old black woodstove still smoldering in the houses of his eyes.

“Jonah,” he whispered.

“Yes,” I whispered back.

“Everybody here is full-blood.”

“I know.”

“What happened to the others?” he asked, meaning the half-breeds, the mixed-bloods, the people with just a trace of Indian blood, and the white people who had lived among Indians for so long that they had nearly become Indians.

“I don’t know,” I said, but I assumed they had been shipped to prisons of their own.

“The soldiers want our blood,” said the boy with old eyes.

“I know,” I said. “I dreamed it.”

“I dreamed it too.”

“We all dreamed it,” said the pregnant woman as she rose from sleep, or the illusion of sleep.

We all moved closer to one another, except for the small Indian man. He sat alone on his bed and continued to sing.

“We’ve got to escape,” said the large Indian man. He looked strong enough to tear down the door.

“How?” said the Indian woman who was not pregnant. For the first time, I noticed her beauty. She was beautiful even with her head shaved bald. I could not imagine how beautiful she must have been before her hair had been taken. I imagined her hair had been a black river flowing down the landscape of her back.

“Tell us,” she said. “Tell us how we’re supposed to get out of here?”

There was no possible answer to her question. If we could have somehow crawled out of the belly of that underground prison, we would have found ourselves standing alone in the desert, without water, without shoes, without compass, without destination, without home.

“I don’t want to die here,” said the two Indian girls, together, as if they possessed only one voice. They were small and dark.

“If they were going to kill us,” said the beautiful Indian woman, “they would have done it already. They need us for something.”

“I told you,” I said. “They want our blood.”

“It has to be more than that,” she said. “We must have some disease. The Black Plague or something.”

“That couldn’t be,” said the large Indian man. “Those soldiers weren’t wearing masks. They were breathing in some of the air we breathed out. They weren’t afraid of us.”

“But they kept talking about blood,” said the boy with old eyes.

“Yes,” I said. “I saw a soldier get beaten because he killed two Indians.”

“No blood, no blood,” said the two Indian girls together. “They kept saying that. No blood, no blood.”

“You’re right,” said the pregnant woman. “It’s our blood. There’s something in our blood.”

“You’re all wrong,” whispered the small Indian man. His voice sounded like a house fire.

We all turned toward him.

“You’re all wrong,” he said again.

“What do you think?” asked the beautiful woman.

“None of you,” said the small man, pointing a finger at each of us. “None of you knows who you are anymore. None of you knows who we’re going to be.”

“You’re talking riddles,” said the large man.

“Listen to me,” said the small man. “I’m talking truth. Don’t you know what we are to them? What we have always been?”

“No,” I whispered.

“You see,” said the small man. “Right outside that door, those soldiers, those people are getting things ready. They’ve got their own ceremonies, you know?”

The small man stood. He was barely over five feet tall, though his hands were large, his fingers long and feminine. His skin was as dark as a black man’s.

“Right outside that door,” he continued, “they have big rooms. Big rooms filled with the dead. Filled with their dead. All the dead white people lined up in rows and rows and rows.”

“What dead?” asked the large man.

“All of them. Every white person who has ever died. They’ve got them lying on beds, all clean and perfumed and naked.”

“Naked?” I asked.

“Every man, woman, child. Naked. White skin everywhere. White skin so bright and shining it will blind you. And we will go blind down here, you know? Living down here like rodents, like worms.”

“I’m no worm,” said the pregnant woman.

“Yes, you are, you’re a worm. You’re less than a worm to them. You’re an exile, you’re a leper, you’re a pariah, you’re a peon, you’re nothing to them. Nothing.”

The short man stood on his bed. He was shouting, spittle flying from his mouth, and raising his arms like he was some kind of preacher. And maybe he was a preacher.

“Smell the air,” he said. “Smell the air!”

I inhaled. I could smell nothing except the antiseptic walls and floors of our cell and the fear and fatigue of my fellow prisoners.

“Do you smell that?” asked the small man. “That’s a feast you’re smelling. That’s roast beef you’re smelling. Venison. Lamb. Veal. That’s vegetables of every kind. That’s fruits so sweet they’ll make your mouth burn. That’s bread from a hundred different countries.”

My stomach rumbled with the thought of so much food. With a full belly, I believed I could begin to have some hope.

The short man ranted on. We were all entranced by him. He was our momentary savior and we were his temporary disciples.

“And do you know what they’re doing with all of that food?” he asked us. “They’re piling it on every one of those dead bodies. There’s a feast on the chest of every one of those dead white people out there. And that food is soaking up all of the hate and envy and sloth in those white people. That food is soaking up all of the anger and murder and thievery. That food is soaking up all of the adultery and fornication and blasphemy. That food is soaking up all of the lies and greed and hatred.”

We prayed; he preached.

Call and response, call and response.

He preached; we prayed.

Call and response, call and response.

“Children,” he said. “There’s a white body in there for each of us. There’s a feast in there for each of us. There’s a feast of sins shining on every one of those bodies. And tomorrow morning, those soldiers are going to lead us all, you hear me, lead us all into that room and they’re going to force us to kneel at those bodies, and they’re going to force us to devour those feasts, devour those sins.”

The small man fell down on the floor and I fell facedown beside him because I believed.

Early the next morning, or during what they wanted us to believe was morning, three soldiers, one black and two white, forced the large Indian man from our room, despite our cries and protests, and we wondered if we would ever see him again.

“He’s gone forever,” said the small Indian man, our prophet. His name was John, a Colville Indian. We all looked at one another and wondered who would be next. I closed my eyes and saw the room filled with the corpses of white people. I saw the feast piled on the chest of the white man I had been chosen to save. I opened my eyes and looked into the eyes of the Indians I would soon call my family.

“What are your names?” I asked.

The boy with old eyes said his name was Joseph. He said he was a Seminole Indian from Florida. He said he could run for days and days. The beautiful Indian woman said she was Navajo. She was a librarian, she said. I’ll miss books, she said. The two girls who held each other and refused to let go were the same two girls who also refused to speak to us. They just cried and whimpered, so we left them nameless. The pregnant Indian woman lay on her bed with her back to us.

“What is your name?” I asked her.

“Leave me alone,” she said.

“Please,” I said. “We want to know who you are.”

“I don’t care,” said the pregnant woman.

She stood, ran across the room, and smashed her big belly into the wall. She punched herself in the stomach again and again. Four of us, the prophet, the boy with old eyes, the beautiful woman, and I, all had to work together in order to hold her down.

“Let my baby die!” she screamed. “Let him die!”

We fought her. We wanted the baby to live, not because we loved him or loved the idea of life, but because we knew his death would take something else from us, and we had so little left to call our own.

Hours later, after the pregnant woman had passed out, after exhaustion had taken all of our energy, three other soldiers, including the soldier-who-looked-like-me, came into our room, and despite the cries and protests, which had grown considerably weaker, I was taken away.

I could hear the other Indians call my name as I was led away.

“Jonah,” they said.

With two white soldiers walking a few steps behind me and the soldier-who-looked-like-me walking a few steps in front, I marched farther down the bright hallway, past those countless white doors. I knew there were Indian prisoners trapped behind every one of those doors. I wondered if they could hear us marching down the hallway, if they could hear the rhythmic stomp of the soldiers’ boots and the soft shuffle of my bare feet. If I had pressed my ear to the cold metal of those white doors, I might have heard the stories, the rumors whispered so often that in just a few hours they had become myth. I might have heard the rumors about rescue attempts, about the half-breed Indian rebels who had broken out of their own prisons and who were now trekking across the desert to save us, or about the Indians who had avoided capture and who were now being secretly trained by sympathetic white soldiers, or about the multiethnic armies, formed by black, red, white, and brown soldiers, formed by men, women, and children, that were only awaiting a leader, a white man on a pale horse, to come along and lead them to victory.

I wondered if I was just a rumor as I walked down that hallway, between those white doors, with those soldiers marking time with each disciplined exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale. I wondered if I had been forgotten by the Indians still left in my room, in my cell. I wondered what had happened to the large Indian man after they had taken him from our room, and if they were now taking me to the same place where they had taken him.

I was young and small. I could have stepped inside the body of the soldier-who-looked-like-me and been lost forever.

I closed my eyes and easily marched in a straight line. All the while, I was convinced they were marching me toward a large room that was filled with the corpses of a million white people. The damp smell of disinfectant and indestructible mold could have been the smell of a terrible feast. I heard the hum of machinery and wondered if I was hearing a country of flies all speaking at once.

“Stop,” said the soldier-who-looked-like-me.

I stopped.

“Open your eyes,” he said.

I could not open my eyes. I was afraid of what I might see.

“Open your eyes,” he said.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Open your eyes before I pry them open and staple your eyelids to your forehead.”

I held my breath and opened my eyes. I was standing in a very small room with a stainless-steel table bolted to the floor. Black leather restraining straps were lying like sleeping snakes across that table. As with every other wall in our prison, the walls of that room were white and clean, clean, clean.

“Take off your jumpsuit,” said the soldier-who-looked-like-me.

“Where’s the large man?” I asked.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” said the soldier-who-looked-like-me.

“The large Indian man,” I said. “The one with the birthmark on his face.”

“Strip,” one of the white soldiers said as he pushed me to the floor. I looked up into the face of the soldier-who-looked-like-me. He pushed the muzzle of his rifle against my narrow chest.

“Stop looking at me,” he said.

“Where’s the large man?” I asked again.

“Get on your feet,” he said as he looked down at me along the barrel of his rifle. I wondered if he was going to murder me. I dreamed of a hero’s grave, a white cross, the proper flag.

I stood and stripped. It was cold, so cold that I could barely breathe, though it had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of that room.

“Get on the table,” said one of the white soldiers. I looked at him but could see only the blue of his eyes.

I tried to walk but my knees buckled. I sank to the floor.

“Get your ass up,” said blue eyes.

I could feel the blood flooding through my veins. At that moment, I was convinced that most of my blood, the plasma, the red and white blood cells, was so close to the surface that it would take only a few moments to completely empty me.

“Stop,” I said or thought I said. It did not matter.

The soldiers forced me onto the table and strapped me facedown with the black restraining belts. One belt on each ankle, one across the back of each knee, another across my lower back, another across my neck and shoulders, and one for each wrist. The only movement I could make was turning my head from side to side. I could see the silver belts circling the soldiers’ waists. I could see their hands tightly gripping their rifles.

“Put the mask on,” said blue eyes.

A black leather hood was pulled over my head. I was blind. I thrashed and struggled against the mask and the restraining belts, against the laughter of the soldiers.

“Please,” I said. “Stop.”

One of the soldiers slapped my bare behind and then all three of them walked out of the room. I heard the door click shut. I heard the lock turn. I heard the sound of their boots as they walked away. I heard everything.

When you are blind, there is no such thing as silence. In the dark and din, I waited. I waited. I whispered my name over and over, and whispered the names of my parents, and whispered the names of all of the trees and plants growing on my reservation, and whispered the color of my family’s home and the color of the sky at three in the morning when I walked outside to use the outhouse, and whispered the date of my birth, and whispered the dates of my mother’s birth and my father’s birth, and the birth date of my twin brother, who died in the womb and was little more than a handful of flesh when he fell out of my mother’s body. I was worried that my fear might take away all of my memories, as it had already eradicated the memory of my parents’ faces, but as I listened to my own voice, as it traveled from one corner to the next, as it slid along the clean white walls and bounced off the clean white floors, I knew that place was being filled with my rumors, my myths, my stories. With my voice, I suddenly believed, I could explode the walls of that room and escape.

So I lifted my head and shouted my name.

My voice pushed against the walls.

The walls did not move.

I lifted my head and shouted my name.

My voice pushed against the walls.

The walls did not move.

Exhausted, I lay my head against the cold metal table and waited.

I waited.

I waited until the door opened again and I heard the soft squeak of leather shoes, four shoes meaning two people, and the cacophonous rattle of four wheels. The two people pushed a cart, a table, something into the room until it bumped against my table.

“Excuse me, young Mr. Lot,” said a male voice, accented, British perhaps or Australian, cultured, refined, as smooth as the clean white walls of the room.

“Don’t hurt me,” I said.

“I will certainly do my best not to,” said the British or Australian man. I felt his cold hands touching my arms, my legs, pushing and prodding.

“Twelve years old, are you not?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re very big for your age, Mr. Lot.”

“My family, we’re all big.”

“We don’t need the local,” the British or Australian man said to the other person in the room.

“No anesthetic?” asked the other person, a woman, a deep voice, no accent at all. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” said the British or Australian man as he flipped through a book. I could hear the turning of pages and wondered if he was reading the Bible.

“Are you priests?” I asked them.

Both of them laughed.

“No, Jonah,” said the man. “We’re doctors.”

“Don’t hurt me,” I said again. I begged. The male doctor placed his hand on my head. It was not a tender touch. His hand was heavy.

“Son,” he said, though he was not my father. “We’re going to do what we have to do, and we’ll do it as quickly and as painlessly as possible. That’s all I can promise. Now, you need to hush while we work.”

I could hear the rattle of metal against metal. I did not know if I heard tools scraping against a metal tray or surgical instruments being sharpened. In my mind, I could see the needles and knives, the saws and hammers. I could see the cruel eyes of the doctors, the rest of their faces hidden by white surgical masks. Behind those masks, I knew there must be scars, open wounds, and jagged teeth. Behind those masks, I knew there must be more metal: aluminum staples holding the skin together, iron sockets containing the eyes, and steel blades substituting for teeth.

“This is going to be a little cold,” said the female doctor.

I felt an icy liquid roll over my left hip, then my right hip. I was so frightened and cold that it could easily have been my own blood.

“What was that?” I asked, crying now.

“Disinfectant,” said the male doctor. “Now, please, be quiet. I’ve told you once.”

“What are you doing to me?” I asked. I lifted my head. I struggled against the restraining belts.

“Stop moving,” said the woman doctor.

I felt a strong hand on the back of my neck as it pressed my head against the table. I could not move. The male doctor leaned down close to my ear.

“Jonah,” he whispered. “That is your name, is it not? Jonah?”

“Yes,” I said. The pressure on my neck was painful.

“Jonah,” he said. “You’re irritating me. And I am sure you’re also irritating Dr. Clancy. Is he not, Dr. Clancy?”

“He certainly is,” she said.

“Jonah,” he said. “I know this is all very frightening for you. I wish there was something I could do about that. But there is simply nothing that can be done. Now, if you refuse to be quiet, we’ll have to gag you. And you don’t want that, do you now?”

“No,” I whimpered.

“Then I suggest you keep your fucking mouth shut,” he said. I heard the anger in his voice and something beyond that, a kind of resignation, a weary acceptance of his role in that prison.

“The ten-gauge?” asked Dr. Clancy, the female doctor.

“Yes,” said the male doctor.

I wondered what kind of weapon the doctors were talking about. I felt two sets of hands on my body.

“You’re going to feel some pressure here,” said Dr. Clancy.

I felt a hot pain as a needle slid into my left hip, through the skin, through the muscle and into the hip socket, into the center of the bone. But more than that, I felt the pain deep in my stomach, and beyond that, in the very spirit of my stomach. I felt the needle bite into me, heard the impossibly loud hiss of the hypodermic syringe as it sucked out pieces of my body, sucked out the blood, sucked out fluid ounces of my soul, sucked out antibodies, sucked out pieces of all of my stories, sucked out marrow, and sucked out pieces of my vocabulary. I knew that certain words were being taken from me.

I cried out in surprise and pain, and my cries sounded like tiny prayers.

“Hush, hush, Jonah,” said the male doctor as he pushed the needle deeper into my body, as Dr. Clancy pushed another needle deep into my other hip. “You’re doing a brave thing. You’re saving the world.”

I woke naked and alone in a bright room. I stood with much difficulty and stared into a wall of mirrors that were really windows. Beyond the glass, doctors and soldiers watched me. I was afraid. I was without words. I was small and would not grow again. Arrested. The door opened. Two soldiers pushed a naked Indian woman into the room. The door closed.

She stood there, tall and proud. Perfect brown skin. Large breasts. Shaved head. She threw obscene gestures against the mirrors that were really windows. Then she looked at me. She saw me.

“You’re just a boy,” she whispered. Then she shouted, “He’s just a boy. Look at his penis.”

She was right. I crouched low, trying to hide what I did not have.

“He’s been tested,” said a disembodied voice, filling the bright room. “He’s fertile.”

“I’m not going to do it,” she said. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong.”

There was no response.

She walked over to me, kneeled beside me. She lifted my face and looked into my eyes.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“I don’t remember,” I said. I would never remember.

She wiped the tears from my face with her fingers. She touched them to her lips.

“Why are they doing this?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve heard stories. But you know how Indians are.”

“Yes, we just talk and talk.”

We smiled together. She took my hand.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“I’m Spokane,” I said. “From the reservation.”

“I’m Apache,” she said. “I live, I used to live, in Los Angeles.”

I closed my eyes and tried to see that city, with its large spaces between people.

“What is it like?” I asked. “That city?”

“It goes on forever,” she said. “And there are earthquakes that shake you out of bed in the morning. And there are more Indians living there than in any city in the whole world.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yes, wow,” she confirmed.

“Please commence,” said the disembodied voice.

“Shut the hell up,” the Indian woman screamed at the walls. I startled, but she pulled me close, pressed my face against her naked breasts.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “But I hate them. I hate them.”

“Please commence,” said the disembodied voice again.

“No,” said the Indian woman. She whispered it, more to herself than to me, or to the doctors and soldiers on the other side of the glass.

She spoke softly.

“This is five times today,” she said.

“Five times what?” I asked.

She stood and took me with her. She marched up to the mirrors that were really windows.

“Look at him,” she said as she pushed me closer to the glass. “Look at him. He’s just a child.”

“Please commence,” said the disembodied voice.

“I’ve done it five times today,” she shouted. “Five times. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that enough?”

“Please commence. Or be punished.”

“Fuck you,” she shouted. “I’m not doing it, I’m not doing it.”

Two soldiers rushed into the room. I could not see their faces behind their helmets, but I imagined their eyes were ivory-colored and fragile, as fragmented as eggshells. They carried electrical sticks. They jabbed one of the sticks into the Indian woman’s belly and one into mine. The blue light rose from my belly, squeezed my heart, and stopped my brain for one breath.

The Indian woman screamed in pain as she fell to the floor. She kicked and punched at the soldiers. But I could only press my face against the cold floor and pray. I looked at my hands and remembered, briefly, so briefly, the feel of my father’s hands when he touched my face, when he whispered secrets to me. And then it was gone, all gone.

“Fuck you, fuck you,” shouted the Indian woman. She climbed to her feet and pushed against the soldiers.

“Please commence or punishment will continue,” said the disembodied voice.

“What are you doing to me?” asked the Indian woman. She pointed at the soldiers. “Take off your masks. Let me look at you.”

Like stained glass, the soldiers remained still and cold, all of their emotions created by the artificial light passing over their faces.

“Do you have mothers?” the Indian woman asked the stained-glass soldiers. “Do you have daughters? Look at me. I’m a woman. Would you do this to the women in your life? Would you?”

She pulled me to my feet. I retched, threw up what little food was in my stomach.

“Look at me,” she shouted. “He’s just a child. A boy. Look at him. Look at him.”

The soldiers didn’t move.

“Please commence or punishment will continue.”

The Indian woman lifted her face toward the ceiling and screamed. I imagined that all of the Indians in the world — all of those who had survived the blood parade — turned their heads when they heard the sound of her voice. I would never again see most of those Indians. For the rest of my life, I would see only rooms with white walls and the brown skin of naked Indian women. For the rest of my life, they would come to my room and lie down with me. Most of them would not speak; a few of them would die in my arms. They would surrender. I would survive and live on.

“He’s just a boy,” shouted the Indian woman and rushed the soldiers. The larger one swung his electric stick and bloodied her mouth.

“Do not draw blood,” said the disembodied voice. “Do not draw blood.”

The Indian woman screamed through the red glow in her mouth.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “What is wrong with you?”

“Please commence or you will be eliminated.”

She pulled me closer and whispered in my ear. I could hear the blood fall from her lips and felt it land on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But we have to do this. We have to do this.”

She pushed me back to the floor. We lay there together as the two soldiers stood above us.

“What are we supposed to do?” I asked.

“We’re supposed to make love, have sex,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

“Yes,” I said. I’d walked in on my mother and father when they were in bed. They’d explained it to me.

“They want me to get pregnant,” she said. “I’m in my fertile time. I’ve already had sex with five men today. I don’t know when they’ll let me stop. I don’t know when.”

She cried then and pressed her face against me.

I touched her belly. I wondered if we would have a child together. I wondered if I would ever see my son or my daughter.

“Please commence or you will be eliminated.”

She kissed my forehead.

“I’m sorry it has to be this way,” she said. “This shouldn’t be happening to you.”

“I’ve never done it before,” I said.

She smiled then — sadness — and kissed my lips — more sadness.

“Do you have children?” I asked. “I mean, did you have them before this?”

“Three,” she said. “I’ll never see them again.”

She took my hand in hers and placed it on her breast.

“Rescue me,” she said.

We made love.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “Pretend we’re alone. Pretend I’m not me. Pretend you’re somebody else. Don’t let them touch you. Don’t let me touch you.”

We made love.

I closed my eyes and saw my mother. I saw her bring a cup of water to my lips.

“Drink,” my mother said. “Drink.”

I touched my mother’s hands. I held my face against her dark hair and breathed in all of her smells.

She smelled like smoke.

We made love.

“Keep your eyes closed,” she said.

On the other side of the glass, they watched us. They were always watching us.

“Don’t let them hurt you,” she said.

My mother kissed my forehead. Her breath smelled of coffee and peppermint — the scent of forgiveness, of safety and warmth. She chased my nightmares out of the house with her mother’s broom.

“Keep your eyes closed,” she said. “And they can’t see you.”

We made love.

The two soldiers stood above us and prayed. They took deep breaths and smelled coffee and peppermint.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “We’re alone, we’re alone.”

I kept my eyes closed as I found my way inside of her, as I walked through the rooms of her, as I opened one door after another, as I found a bed where I could lie down and cover myself with thick quilts.

They wanted our blood. They would always want our blood.

“Hide,” she said. “Don’t let them see you.”

Inside of her, I breathed in the dark. I was warm; I was safe.

“Are you my mother?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. She said, “Yes.”

“Mother,” I whispered. “Mother, mother, mother.”