Indian Killer (21 page)

“Fuck you, Geronimo!”

A big white man in black boots. Driver’s door open now. Two white men. No, two white boys, tall and skinny. Laughing and drinking at a safe distance from John. Seattle was a safe city. The news proved it every day because every murder, rape, and bank robbery made the papers.

“What the fuck you staring at?”

John was staring at the white boys. They were pale and beautiful. John pointed at them.

“What the fuck you pointing at?”

John knew these white boys. Not these two in particular, but white boys in general. He had been in high school with boys like these. He had sat in their pickups, showered with them after gym class, shared pizzas. He had leaned out the windows of their cars and screamed at downtown drunks. Sometimes he had leaned out the window and screamed at everybody they passed.

John was still screaming. He stood on the Fremont Bridge and screamed. The two white boys shouted curses at him, but they kept their distance, ready to jump into their pickup at the slightest provocation. John saw them as Catholic boys, in their junior year at private school. One played varsity basketball; the other played baseball. Both were class officers. They were the boys who forced their hands down the pants of girls who pretended to like it.

“She wanted it, you know? But I let her go, you know? I took pity on her.”

John remembered how these boys talked. He had tried to talk that way himself. He had tried to lie as often as possible, understanding that lying was a valuable skill. High school taught white boys the value of lies, and John knew this. He knew these white boys intimately. He knew these two white boys standing on the Fremont Bridge were publicly loved and admired by their classmates and teachers. These were the boys who were secretly hated and envied, too. Their deaths could create a hurricane of grief and confusion.

During John’s senior year in high school, one of his classmates had been killed in a car wreck on the Interstate. John had been sitting in his homeroom when the principal walked into the class with the news.

“I have some tragic, tragic news,” said the principal without subtlety. “Scott O’Brien was killed last night.”

John began to cry for reasons he could not understand. He had not liked Scott O’Brien. A few weeping girls huddled together in the corner. Scott’s friends, all white boys, sat quietly and stoically, fighting back tears, sucking in their bottom lips, occasionally pounding their desks in imitation of the pointless, masculine methods of grief they saw on television. Sidney Bush, the only Jewish Catholic in Seattle, had his head down on his desk. His acned face was hidden, his fat shoulders were shaking. He might have been crying. But John knew better. Scott had been extremely cruel to Sidney.

“Kike!”

“Jewboy!”

“Fat ass!”

“Pizza face!”

John watched Sidney and knew that he was laughing quietly. Sidney had heard the news of Scott’s death, thrown his face down on the desk, and couldn’t help his joy. He was still laughing over there, in the far corner, near the tattered copies of Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
and seventy-two editions of the St. Francis Catholic School Annual, dating back to the institution’s early years.

“St. Francis, St. Francis, our trust in God for thee…”

Sidney Bush was laughing in the corner. John felt a single, hot tear sliding down his cheek and falling to the desk. John looked down at the tear, touched it with a fingertip. He knew that the next school annual would be dedicated to Scott O’Brien. A center spread filled with photographs and mementos, precious memories, and statistics. John knew there would be a prayer at graduation, a seat left empty in honor of the missing classmate. Yet, in the far corners of rooms, a few would be hiding their smiles.

“Fuck you, you fucking Indian!”

John remembered that he was still standing on the Fremont Bridge, still screaming, he believed, while the two white boys were getting bored, their curses losing volume and intensity. John felt the screams rattle his ribcage. His throat burned. He took a step forward, then another. The white boys were startled. The driver hopped into the pickup, ready to race away. The passenger threw his beer bottle in the general direction of John. The bottle revolved in the air as John watched its flight, its parabola, its sudden crash against the pavement at his feet. A close call. That white boy was an athlete.

“Fuck you!” from the departing pickup, squealing tires and laughter. John stood alone on the bridge. He needed a shower and shave. His whiskers had grown in clumsy patterns, thick at the chin and sideburns, barely visible at the cheeks and above his lip. His long hair was braided with a broken shoelace. John was quiet. He looked down at the pavement, stepped over the broken glass, and began walking. He walked up Aurora, past Big Heart’s Soda and Juice Bar up on 110th and Aurora. He sometimes visited the bar, but he felt no such need that night. He walked past the graveyard where prostitutes laid down with customers, past Kmart and Burger King, the Aurora Cinemas. John kept walking past all of that. He could not find the courage to stop walking. He walked miles beyond any neighborhood that resembled his own. He walked until he found himself on a dead-end street, a cul-de-sac, a vanishing point. At the end of the street, a small Catholic church, painted white with blue shutters, had tiny, stained glass windows. A candle burned above the front door.

Inside the church, John found the usual pews, altar, confessional, more candles, wood carvings of Jesus crucified, Jesus entombed, Jesus rising again. John still believed in the mystery of his Catholic faith. He used to enjoy Mass, felt some comfort in the numbing repetition of word, symbol, and action. How, every Sunday, he knew exactly what the priest was going to say. There were no surprises, no sudden starts and stops, no need to interpret and understand. The priest told the congregation what to believe and the congregation believed him. But John had not been to Mass in years.

As John walked further into that small church, he saw a priest kneeling at the front. John knew who it was.

“Father Duncan,” said John as he kneeled beside the priest, believing it was the same man who had baptized him years before. This was the priest who had walked into the desert and disappeared. This was the priest who knew everything.

“Father Duncan,” John said again.

Father Phil, a tall Irishman with red hair and ruddy skin, turned from his prayers to look at John.

“Father Duncan,” said John, desperately now, wanting recognition.

“No, it’s Father Phil. Did you know Father Duncan?”

“Yes.”

Father Phil had one of Duncan’s paintings hanging in his study. He knew the story of the Indian Jesuit who’d walked into the Arizona desert and disappeared.

“He’s gone,” said John. “He disappeared.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

John wept. Father Phil placed a hand on John’s shoulder.

“I have sinned,” said John.

“How long has it been since your last confession?”

“Years.”

“What have you done?”

“I have had impure thoughts.”

Father Phil closed his eyes, whispering prayers that John could not make out. John wanted to be forgiven. He felt the pain and rage rising in his throat.

“Father,” said John, his voice rising, his hands gesturing wildly. “All the anger in the world has come to my house. It’s there in my closet. In my refrigerator. In the water. In the sheets. It’s in my clothes. Can you smell it? I can never run away from it. It’s in my hair. I can feel it between my teeth. Can you taste it? I hear it all the time. All the time the anger is talking to me. It’s the devil. I’m the devil. If I could I’d crawl into a hole if I knew God was in there. Where’s the hole? You know, I just killed two white boys on the bridge. They were there on the bridge. They wanted to hurt me. They were the devil. I killed them. I threw them off the bridge into the water. They can’t hurt me anymore. They hurt me. They wanted to steal my eyes. They wanted everything. What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

Phil looked at John. He reached out and held John’s hands. Phil wondered if the Indian was a killer, or lost, or both.

“My son,” said Father Phil. “Tell me about your pain. I will listen.”

John looked around the small chapel.

“Father, your church is empty.”

“I know. Sometimes it feels empty even when it’s full of people.”

“How come?”

“Because people are lost.”

John left that priest and his church and soon found himself standing outside his Ballard apartment. A note from his parents was taped to the door:

John—

Please call us when you get in.

We are worried about you. We love you.

Mom & Dad

John tore the note from the door, crumpled it into a ball, and shoved it into his pocket. He found the apartment key his mother had sewn into his pants. She had done the same for every pair of pants he owned. He opened his door and stepped inside.

T
HE BLUE VAN ROLLED
slowly down a dirt road on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. Thick stands of trees flanked the road. The faint sounds of Interstate 5 could be heard in the distance, though the people inside the van, a Spokane Indian couple, were not comforted by those distant sounds of civilization.

“I think we’re lost,” she said.

“We’re not that lost,” he said. “You can hear the freeway. Listen.”

She listened, could hear the big trucks hauling their cargo north to Canada and south to Seattle, quickly passing senior citizens leisurely touring in their recreational vehicles. She could hear the whine of a traffic helicopter. All those people so close and far away at the same time.

“Well,” she said. “Unless I’m mistaken, we’d have to walk through the woods to get to the freeway. On foot, we’d know exactly where we are. But, unless I’m mistaken again, we’re in the van. And since we can’t drive through those woods, we are lost, enit? Listen, there were a couple houses back there. We could go back and ask for directions.”

“We’ll be fine,” he said.

He drove five miles down the road until the asphalt turned into dirt and a sign proclaimed
PRIMITIVE ROAD—NO WARNING SIGNS.

“Now,” she said, “I think that is reason enough to turn around.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“Hold on a second,” she said. “I have to go pee.”

She grabbed the roll of toilet paper they always kept in the glove compartment, jumped out of the van, and went searching for a good spot. She always felt like a dog when she had to go in the woods. Amusing herself, she pretended to sniff at a few trees, looked back at the blue van where her boyfriend waited, and then walked farther into the brush. She was wishing she had a temporary penis for outdoor urination use when she caught a whiff of something foul.

“Jeez,” she whispered to herself, plugging her nose.

She tried to walk away from the smell, but it seemed to be everywhere. A dead animal, she thought. Then she wondered if it might be a dead porcupine. If the poker had not been dead too long, she might be able to salvage the quills and give them to some Indian grandmother. Indian grandmothers could always use more quills. She stood still and tried to discern the source of the smell. She could not tell in which direction she should go, but she knew it was close. She started walking in ever-widening circles, hoping to find the dead porcupine by stumbling over it. The smell grew more powerful as she walked closer to a stand of pines. When she stepped between two large trees, she saw the body sitting back against a stump.

“Holy Mary,” she whispered and made the sign of the cross.

Dressed in a University of Washington sweatshirt and blue jeans, David Rogers almost looked as if he were resting after a long walk. His head fell against his left shoulder, a single bullet hole between his eyes. There was very little blood and no other wounds, though the body was well into its decomposition. For some reason, she noticed that the boy’s tennis shoes were untied.

“T
RUCK,” SAID THE ASSISTANT
over the intercom.

“Yeah,” said Truck, without opening his eyes.

“You’ve got a call on line three, from Johnny Law.”

Truck sat up quickly and took the call. Johnny Law was the pseudonym for Truck’s source in the Washington State Patrol office. After Truck had received the piece of Mark Jones’s pajamas and the two bloody owl feathers, he’d learned from Johnny Law that a serial murderer, dubbed the Indian Killer, was loose in the Seattle area. Leaving behind two owl feathers as a calling card, the Indian Killer had murdered and scalped Justin Summers, had kidnapped little Mark Jones, and was a suspect in the disappearance of David Rogers. Truck had been itching to broadcast the news, but the police had threatened to shut him down if he went public.

“What’s up?” Truck asked Johnny Law.

“We found that college boy’s body, David Rogers, up on the Tulalip Reservation about thirty minutes ago. He was murdered, shot in the head. The money he’d won was gone, of course.”

“Is it an Indian Killer murder?”

“Doubtful. He was shot in the head. No signs of mutilation on the body. No feathers. Looks like a robbery. But we’re not ruling anything out.”

The caller hung up and Truck smiled. Fuck the police, he thought.

“When are we back on air?” asked Truck.

“Two minutes,” said the assistant.

“Get me the file on that college kid who disappeared a couple weeks back.”

The assistant raced to the filing room, pulled out the folder, and rushed it back to Truck. David Rogers. Twenty-one years old. A junior English major. Three point one grade-point average. He worked part-time in the computer lab.

“Thirty seconds to air,” said the assistant.

“Free all the phone lines,” said Truck. “I’ve got things to say. And try to get David’s brother on the phone. Aaron, I think his name is. We’ve got his number around here somewhere. He called in a while back.”

Truck continued to read. David’s mother had died of cancer when he was five years old. His father, Buck, living on the family farm outside of Spokane, was distraught by his youngest son’s disappearance. A good boy.