Indian Killer (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John shook his head.

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

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

Mr. Taylor knew how the boys saw Olivia Smith.

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

“Okay,” John said. He was crying now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re welcome.”

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

“Quit your daydreaming and get to work.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What? Is he crazy?”

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

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

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

“You think you should talk to him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“T
HE ESTABLISHMENT OF GAMBLING
casinos on Indian reservations is very much an act of fiscal rebellion,” said Dr. Clarence Mather during that second session of the Native American literature class. “However, I worry about the longtime cultural implications of such a rebellion. Are the Indians polluting their cultural purity by engaging in such a boldly capitalistic activity? As Jack Wilson writes in his latest novel, ‘Indians are gambling with their futures.’”

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

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

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

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

“Oh, Ms. Polatkin, you startled me.”

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Mather shook his head sadly.

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

“On my side?”

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

Marie stared up at the tenured professor.

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

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

“Really,” said Marie. “I’m a Libra.”

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