Indian Killer (6 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The young man smiled, confused and a little intimidated.

“Calm down there, dude,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody plays Scrabble.

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

They eat well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, okay.”

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

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

“Yeah, sure,” John said.

“Well, kiss me then. Now or never.”

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

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

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