Indian Killer (13 page)

Still, once he realized he was safe, David proceeded to have a great time. He’d brought only forty dollars with him and he intended to gamble until he was broke. He lost twenty bucks at blackjack, five at poker, spent five on a hamburger and french fries, and was down to his last ten when he decided to have a spin on the slot machines. There must have been a hundred machines lined up in a far corner of the casino. Most machines took quarters, but a few took silver dollars. Bright lights, flashing bulbs, sirens announcing wins. The
whirr-whirr-whirr
of the slots spinning, the
thuk-thuk-thuk
of the jackpot-jackpot-apple, a loser, falling into place. The housewives, with white buckets of quarters balanced in their laps, pumped money into the slots. It was all so loud, irritating, and irresistible. A few minutes before midnight, David sat at a one-dollar baseball-themed slot machine, beside a housewife who briefly glanced at him before turning back, with a loud sigh, to her own efforts. Her luck had been bad that night. With his no better, David soon lost nine dollars with nine spins of the slots.

“It’s been that kind of night,” the housewife announced.

“Yeah,” David said, holding his last silver dollar. “This is it. Wish me luck.”

“Luck.”

David dropped the silver dollar into the machine, pulled the handle, and watched the Single-Single-Single drop into place. The housewife screamed as one hundred dollars’ worth of silver dollars spilled onto the floor. A few other women jealously peered around corners as David scooped up his money. He’d won his money back! And then some.

“For luck,” he said to the housewife as he handed her one of his silver dollars.

“You’re not quitting, are you?” she asked.

“Well, maybe not. Maybe just one more.”

He dropped one more dollar into the machine and pulled the handle, realizing this was exactly how casinos made their money. The slots spun, dropped. Home Run–Home Run–Home Run. The housewife was shrieking now and hugging David, who hugged her back. The sirens were deafening. Flashing red lights. The sudden appearance of two beefy Indian security guards. A crowd of white farm folk. Two thousand dollars! Two thousand dollars! Two thousand dollars!

After turning down management’s attempts to give him a check, David walked out of the casino with two thousand dollars in small bills. He knew it was foolish, but he felt like a character in a Hemingway novel. Daring, masculine, without the slightest hint of fear. Or reveling in his fear, staring into the eyes of the charging beast. He wondered what Marie would say. What if she thought he was stealing from the Indians?

David, feeling wealthy and untouchable, walked past the Indian security guards, who were busy calming down a drunken farmer. David couldn’t believe his luck. Aaron would go crazy. They’d party all night, skip class tomorrow, and drink through the weekend. Hell, they could go rent a hotel room and drink it up in style, paper the walls with twenty-dollar bills. David was laughing to himself, lost in fantasy, when he bumped into an Indian man standing near an advertising kiosk outside the casino.

“Excuse me,” David said. He barely looked at the Indian, but noticed a funny sign on the kiosk.
WELCOME TO THE SIXTH ANNUAL TULALIP INDIAN NATION ALL-INDIAN BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT.

“Hey,” David said, pointing at the sign. “Gets pretty specific, doesn’t it?”

The Indian didn’t respond, which made David a little tense. He placed his hand on the large envelope of money in his coat pocket. He suddenly felt very white. The Indian, with a curious, canine twist of his head, looked at David. The Indian could smell the white boy’s fear.

“Well,” David said. “See you later.”

David could see his pickup in the parking lot. About a hundred feet away. Twenty seconds to get there. Remain calm, he thought. As he walked toward the pickup, David dug through his pockets. He found the right key, and readied it for quick use. Then he glanced back toward the casino and saw that the Indian was gone. The parking lot was dark. No people. The hum of the freeway a few hundred feet to the east. Increasingly nervous now, David began to hurry. He reached his pickup and tried to insert the key, but his hands were shaking and he dropped it. Jesus, David asked himself, what are you so scared of? He bent down to pick up the keys, felt a sudden, sharp pain at the back of his head, and then felt nothing at all.

“M
RS. JOHNSON, DID YOU
see anything or anybody suspicious in the casino?”

“No.”

“Are you okay, Mrs. Johnson? Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes. It’s just. I mean, he seemed like such a sweet boy. What was his name?”

“David. David Rogers.”

“Yes, that’s it. He give me a silver dollar. I have it right here. He said it was for luck and then he hit the jackpot. I guess he wasn’t so lucky, was he?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you know what happened to him? Do you know anything at all?”

“We’re working on it, ma’am. Right now, we just know he left his pickup in the parking lot. That’s all we know.”

“It’s like he just disappeared, isn’t it?”

“Something like that.”

“And all that’s left of him is this silver dollar, isn’t it?”

“Right now, it looks that way.”

“But it’s so small.”

“Very small, ma’am.”

“Does this have anything to do with that boy who was scalped down in Seattle?”

“We don’t know, ma’am.”

A
FTER OLIVIA HEARD THE
news about the young man who had disappeared from the Indian casino, she called Daniel at work.

“Daniel, have you heard about that boy who disappeared? From the reservation?”

“Yes,” said Daniel impatiently.

“What do you think happened to him?”

“I don’t know. It sounds like a robbery.”

“I bet his family is worried sick,” said Olivia, thinking about how John had often disappeared from her life, only to reappear at unexpected times. She wondered how she would feel if John disappeared forever. She thought about the white man who had been scalped and murdered. She wondered how his family felt about his death.

“Are you okay?” Daniel asked, hearing the worry in his wife’s voice.

“I was just thinking about John. Have you heard from him?”

“No.”

“Well, I was just thinking, you know, that maybe we could go see if he’s at his apartment. I mean, he’s not answering his phone. But maybe he’s just ignoring it. Maybe he’s hurt.”

“If you want,” Daniel said, not wanting to admit how much he wanted to go searching for John.

After work, Daniel drove from downtown Seattle east across the 520 bridge to Bellevue, picked up Olivia from her part-time job at the Bellevue Art Museum, and then headed back across the bridge. Heavy traffic. Daniel hated the two bridges, 520 to the north and I-90 to the south, that connected the eastern and western halves of the Seattle metropolitan area. Like most American cities, Seattle was a city of distinct and divided neighborhoods, and though it had a reputation for cultural diversity, there was actually a very small minority population, consisting primarily of Asian-and African-Americans. And the minority populations mostly lived, by choice and by economic circumstance, in the Central, International, and University Districts. The middle-class whites generally lived on the twin hills of Queen Anne and Magnolia, overlooking the rest of the city, while the rich white people mostly lived in Bellevue or on Mercer Island, a financial and geographical enclave that sat in the waters of Lake Washington, halfway between Bellevue and Seattle. Where water had once been a natural boundary, it now existed as an economic barrier. And in those places where natural boundaries between neighborhoods didn’t exist, the engineers had quickly built waterways. So much water separating people.

Daniel knew that all the bridges and water were beautiful, but it was so hard to get from one place to another. Daniel hated traffic and constantly cursed other drivers. He took delays personally, as if each car were specifically placed to impede his progress. When John was young, Daniel had learned to control his tongue. But now that John was no longer a passenger, Daniel would fully vent his anger. He honked his horn, yelled, and mumbled by turns, wanting to talk to his son, John, the boy who, despite all the water so close to home, had never learned to swim.

Olivia did not mind sitting in the car. The Lexus had a great stereo system. She could play a compact disc and compose herself in preparation for their visit with John. She loved classical music, especially Glenn Gould’s rendition of the
Goldberg Variations
. For reasons she could not verbalize, Olivia had been immediately touched by his music. She was not a musical expert, had no scholarly vocabulary, but felt that she needed Gould’s piano playing in order to feel more substantial. Each series of notes, played straight, inverted, repeated, became the reason she could get out of the bed some mornings. The music came to mean even more to her after she read about Gould’s life, how he had quit performing publicly without the slightest warning. On that evening, he had signed an autograph for a backstage technician, told him that he was never going to perform again, and then played for the last time for an audience. It was wildly eccentric, Olivia thought, and impossibly romantic. It was the sort of rebellion that only a genius could have pulled off. Olivia wondered what Gould had felt that evening, how a weight must have lifted from his shoulders and drifted up into the rafters. As she and Daniel drove into Ballard in search of John, Olivia felt only sadness. While Gould had been very eccentric, quite probably mentally ill, he also managed to produce some of the greatest music of the twentieth century. Olivia wondered if her son, John, would ever be able to create anything of value.

John had left Olivia and Daniel’s home shortly after high school graduation. Daniel had encouraged the move and preferred to view it as some sort of initiation into manhood. Secretly, though, Daniel hoped that the move would be good for John, who had become increasingly withdrawn and distant. Most teenagers were temperamental, but John’s mood swings seemed to be too dramatic. Sometime during high school, he began to go immediately to his room after coming home. He would play one of the powwow music tapes he had bought, and not come out until morning. When Olivia brought John dinner in his room, Daniel felt that was being far too accommodating. But he knew he had been fairly lenient himself, due in large part, he thought, to John’s status as an adopted child. Oh, there were lots of times when John was simply their son, with no need for any qualifiers, but the stark difference in their physical appearances was a nagging reminder of the truth. If Olivia and Daniel could not forget that John was adopted, then John must have carried that knowledge even closer to his skin. Daniel wondered if his worries about John were normal parental worries, or unfounded obsessions that somehow changed John’s little teenage rebellions into full-scale wars. Maybe that was why John played his music so loudly, so he could not hear himself thinking about his mysterious origins. Sometimes, John would play his powwow music deep into the night.

“John!” Daniel would shout. “Turn that down!”

John would turn the music down for a few minutes, but then he would slowly increase the volume until it was as loud as it had been. Those drums filled the house. Midnight. One in the morning. Olivia seemed to sleep through it, but Daniel lay awake, a pillow over his head. Finally, after trying to shout the music down, Daniel would crawl from bed and storm down the hallway to John’s bedroom. It was always dark but Daniel never bothered to switch on the light. The walk was so familiar he could have closed his eyes and found his way quickly. Daniel sensed that life was all about patterns, with humans, animals, and insects finding those patterns and holding onto them with all of their strength. God was a series of recurring images. Daniel had walked faithfully down the dark hallway to John’s room without incident for eighteen years, bringing glasses of water and warm milk, comfort from nightmares and sleepy frustration, quiet discipline. Then, one evening when John was playing his powwow music at an exceptionally loud volume, Daniel tripped over a chair that had not been there before. As he hopped around and rubbed his bruised toe, Daniel did not stop to think about anything other than the pain and the music. He pounded on John’s door, which was jammed shut. A few months earlier, Daniel had removed the lock from the door because John had taken to barricading himself in his room, but John then kept the door shut to outsiders with a butter knife inserted into the jamb.

“John!” Daniel shouted while pounding on the bedroom door. But the music only increased in volume until it sounded like a whole tribe was beating drums.

Daniel pounded on that bedroom door for hours, years, until he found himself pounding on John’s apartment door in Ballard. Daniel wore a tailored suit, dark blue and tasteful, and a muted purple paisley tie, slightly out of style, his way of expressing his individuality. Olivia wore her favorite dress, red with large, black buttons. They both wore similar black overcoats. Daniel thought it vaguely embarrassing that he looked like his wife whenever it rained, without realizing how much he and Olivia always looked alike. Daniel pounded on the door. Olivia stood behind him. She had done this so often before, Daniel knocking and knocking, while John sat inside, ignoring them. Usually, if they stayed long enough, John would eventually answer the door. Once or twice, she had talked the landlord into opening the door, and then felt more like a trespassing thief than a mother. The landlord eventually gave her a key, but Olivia had never used it.

“He’s not home,” said Olivia.

“He’s home,” said Daniel, frustrated and slightly frightened because John had disappeared before.

Now, again, no answer as Daniel pounded on the door, as Olivia held her breath, as they tried to make contact with their son. The neighbors, Salgado in 401 and Heistand in 402, turned up their televisions. They had heard this knocking many times before. In the beginning, it had been touching and slightly irritating, the audible proof of parental love. But it had become desperate and lonely.