Indian Killer (37 page)

“Indians,” whispered Peone.

“Yeah, Indians,” said Lester, the old man in the back seat. He laughed.

“What’s so funny?” asked Peone.

“Catholic cops are funny,” said Lester.

“You were listening?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? Catholic Indians are funny.”

“There’s lots of Catholic Indians.”

“There’s lots of Catholic cops.”

The old man started laughing again. Peone had to laugh a little with him.

“So, tell me the truth,” said Peone. “Why did your friend beat you up? I thought you Indians took care of each other.”

“We do take care of each other,” said Lester. “But I don’t know that Indian and he didn’t beat me up. I told you. Some white guys did it. And stole my goddamn shoes.”

Peone stepped out of the car, grabbed the shoes, and threw them into the back seat with the old man.

“There’s your shoes,” said Peone when he was back in the car. He wondered how he would fill out the paperwork on this encounter. After his fellow officers heard about this, they would probably give him a nickname. Something like Altar Boy or Shoes. Peone smiled. He liked nicknames.

W
ILSON WALKED INTO BIG
Heart’s Soda and Juice Bar. There was a small crowd of forty or fifty Indians. They all stared at Wilson as he sat at the bar, where Mick had a glass of milk waiting for him.

“Slow night?” Wilson asked Mick.

“With Indians,” said Mick, “it’s never slow.”

Wilson sipped at his milk and looked around the bar. It felt changed. He studied the patrons as they studied him.

“Hey, Casper,” said Reggie, the Spokane. Ty stood behind him. “How Indian are you tonight?”

“Indian enough,” said Wilson. “Where’s Harley?”

“He’s missing in action,” said Reggie. “Tell me again, how Indian are you?”

“Indian enough.”

“Sure you are. How much Indian blood you got anyways? Maybe a thimble’s worth?”

“The blood don’t matter. It’s the heart that matters.”

Ty and Reggie laughed.

“What’s so funny?” asked Wilson.

“You know,” Reggie said. “I was reading a movie magazine last week and found out that Farrah Fawcett is one-eighth Choctaw Indian. Isn’t that funny?”

“I didn’t know that,” said Wilson.

“Yeah,” said Reggie. “That means she’s got more Indian blood than you do. If you get to be an Indian, then Farrah gets to be Indian, too.”

“If she wants to be.”

“You really think that’s how it works, don’t you?” Reggie asked Wilson. Reggie was heating up. “You think you can be Indian just by saying it, enit?”

Wilson shrugged his shoulders.

“June 25, 1876,” Reggie said.

“The Battle of Little Bighorn,” said Wilson.

“No white people survived that, did they?”

“Nope, just a Cavalry horse named Comanche.”

“Every horse is an Indian horse.”

Wilson nodded.

“We might let you be an Indian for an hour if you buy us a drink.”

Wilson bought the two Indians their drinks.

“Hey,” asked Wilson, with little subtlety. “You guys been following that Indian Killer case?”

“What about it?” asked Reggie.

“They found another body,” said Wilson.

Reggie looked at Ty, then back to Wilson.

“How do you know that?” Reggie asked Wilson.

“Well, I don’t like to talk about it, but I’m an ex-cop.”

“We know you’re an ex-cop,” said Reggie. “And you’re a writer, too. Now, tell us something we don’t know. You think we’re so stupid. I was a goddamn history major. I’ve studied books you wouldn’t know how to read. Jeez, you come in here always asking questions about how we live, what we eat, about our childhoods. Taking notes in your head. We know it. What do you do when you leave here? Dig up graves?”

Wilson was wide-eyed.

“Don’t be so surprised, Casper. You white guys always think you’re fooling us poor, dumb Injuns.”

“Well, uh, I, ah,” stuttered Wilson, trying to regain his composure. “I was down at the station. They found the body downtown. They think the Indian Killer did it.”

“Every time they find a white guy, how come they think the Indian Killer did it?”

Reggie stared hard at Wilson. Ty took a step back. Wilson could feel the tension in the room. He could see Reggie’s blue eyes darken with anger. As casually as possible, Wilson reached inside his coat, and kept his hand there. Wilson had known Reggie for a while, had sat with him, and had tolerated the insults. Wilson had thought it all in good fun, but now he wondered if he had been mistaken.

“You know an Indian guy named John Smith?” asked Wilson with just the slightest tremor in his voice.

Reggie shook his head. Ty made no response.

“I know him,” said a woman.

All three men turned to look at Fawn, who had been watching the confrontation, along with everybody else in Big Heart’s.

“Don’t talk to him, Fawn,” said Reggie. “He’s full of shit.”

Fawn ignored Reggie.

“I danced with John the other night,” Fawn said to Wilson. “He was kind of weird. Good-looking. But off, you know?”

Wilson took the photograph out of his pocket and showed it to Fawn. Reggie stepped closer to Wilson.

“Yeah, that’s him,” said Fawn. “See what I mean? Good-looking. But goofy.”

“You think he’s dangerous?” Wilson asked.

“John? No way. Reggie’s the dangerous one. Reggie and his dipshit sidekicks beat up John. Enit, Reggie?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Reggie said. “He’s a cop.”

“An ex-cop,” corrected Ty. Reggie silenced him with a rude hand gesture. Reggie took another step closer to Wilson, who reached further into his jacket. Reggie noticed and reached inside his jacket.

Nobody moved or said a word. Wilson looked around the room. The Indians stared at him with suspicion, bemusement, anger, and outright disgust. Wilson knew he had crossed some invisible boundary. His presence in the bar had been tolerated only because he had agreed to the terms of an unwritten treaty. Now he had broken the rules and smashed the treaty into pieces. Wilson could hear the alarms ringing in his head. He was not surprised that they sounded like drums. With his hand inside his jacket, he edged toward the door.

“You ain’t being so friendly now, Casper,” said Reggie, cutting off Wilson’s path to the door. Wilson glanced at Ty, who took a few steps backward. Good, thought Wilson, he was not going to get involved. Yet Wilson still felt like an idiot. He knew he had taken everything for granted. He was all alone in a hostile place.

“You think you’re so smart,” said Reggie. “You come in here acting all Indian, thinking you fit in, thinking you belong. I got news for you, Casper. We only let you hang around because it was fun to pitch you shit. You just ate all of that shit up and swallowed it down. You just took our shit and bought us drinks. We’ve been playing you hard, Casper. You don’t belong here, man, you never did.”

“Reggie,” said Wilson, searching for a way out. “I’m trying to decide if you’ve got a gun in your jacket. Maybe a blade instead. Or maybe you’re bluffing. Maybe it’s just your wallet. Or your comb. And I bet you’re wondering what I have my hand on, aren’t you? Do I have a knife, a pistol? I’m an ex-cop. I got to have a piece, right? Now, I was never Billy the Kid when I was working, and I’ve gotten older and slower, but I’m willing to bet that I’m fast enough to beat you. What do you think?”

With his hand inside his jacket, Reggie smiled at the mystery writer. Wilson was old and fat. He limped. He was going bald. Reggie smiled. Very slowly, he pulled his empty hand out of his jacket and showed it to Wilson.

“How, white man,” said Reggie in a sternly cinematic Indian voice, which caused the whole bar to break into laughter. One small battle was over. Suddenly the victor because he had shamed Wilson, Reggie triumphantly stepped out of Wilson’s way. With his hand still inside the jacket, Wilson edged toward the exit. He saw the smiling faces of the Indians as he backed out of the bar. Fawn was shaking her head. As the door closed behind him, Wilson heard the entire bar erupt into laughter.

J
OHN RAN UNTIL HE COULD
barely breathe. He ran down the alleys into the dark beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct. He thought he might find safety there among the other Indians. But John could not find any Indians. He walked by the loading dock near Pioneer Square and found no Indians. From beneath the Viaduct, he peered north up toward the Union Gospel Mission and saw no Indians waiting to enter. No Indians in Occidental Park. No Indians among the homeless sleeping in cardboard houses down near the ferry docks. All the Indians had left the city and deserted John. He reeled with shock and fell to the ground. He pounded the pavement with his fists. He set his forehead against the damp cement and tried to quiet the noise in his head.

John was still prone on the ground when the 4Runner pulled up next to him. Aaron and Barry quickly climbed out of the pickup and jumped John, who curled into a fetal ball as protection. John could hear nothing now except the thud of boots against his body and the attackers’ violent exhalations of breath. There were no voices, no music, no wind or rain. He heard neither the sudden screeching of brakes nor the shouted curses when Marie pulled up in her sandwich truck and confronted the white boys who were beating him.

“Hey, hey, get away from him!” shouted Marie. She held a butter knife in her left hand.

Aaron and Barry stopped beating John long enough to look at Marie. She was a tiny Indian woman holding a butter knife, for God’s sake, and she was all alone.

“Get the fuck out of here,” threatened Aaron. Then he recognized Marie from his brother’s Native American literature class. “Oh, you fucking bitch. You’re next, you’re next.”

Barry heard something new and more dangerous in Aaron’s voice.

“You heard me,” said Marie, her voice steady and strong. “Get away from him.”

Aaron looked down at John, who was still curled into a ball. He looked back at Marie.

“Fuck you,” Aaron said and took a step toward Marie. She held the butter knife out in front of her.

“That’s all you got?” asked Aaron as he took another step closer to Marie.

Marie smiled.

“What you smiling at, bitch?”

She was still smiling when Boo opened the back door of the sandwich van and three Indian men and three Indian women stormed out. They were a ragtag bunch of homeless warriors in soiled clothes and useless shoes. But when John looked up from the ground, he saw those half-warriors attack the white boys. The Indians were weak from malnutrition and various diseases, but they kicked, scratched, and slapped with a collective rage. John wondered how those Indians could still fight after all they had been through. He had seen Indians like that before, sleeping in doorways, on heating vents outside city hall, in cardboard condominiums. He did not understand their courage, how they could keep fighting when all he wanted to do was close his eyes and fade into the pavement. The fight was quick and brutal. Two Indian men, clutching their stomachs, had fallen to the pavement. One Indian woman with a bloody mouth leaned against a car. Barry and Aaron fought their way through the remaining Indians and into their pickup.

“Get us out of here!” shouted Barry, who would notice his missing teeth later in jail. Aaron, who would notice the broken bones in his right hand when he fought the police officer who’d come to arrest him, dropped the car into gear and nearly ran over an Indian man as he careened off another car, jumped a curb, and drove away.

The Indians were celebrating their victory as Marie knelt beside John.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

John rolled over and looked up into Marie’s eyes.

“John?” She was surprised. His face was battered and bruised.

He nodded his head.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded his head.

“Hey, help me out here,” Marie called to the others. They carried John to the sandwich van and set him inside. The rest of the Indians climbed in and pulled the door shut behind them. The men were loudly celebrating, exchanging high fives and hugs. Boo, Indian-for-a-day, screamed triumphantly and pumped his fists into imaginary enemies, shadowboxing with his whole life. Marie sat in the driver’s seat, resting her head on the steering wheel. She wanted to cry. She was shocked by her anger, and how much she had wanted to hurt those white boys. Nearly blind with her own rage, she had wanted to tear out their blue eyes and blind them.

“Did you see them run?” asked Crazy Robert. “They ran like Custer, cousins, they ran like Custer.”

Joseph, holding his bruised belly in pain, laughed loudly.

“The Indians won again!” shouted King, forgetting that Indians had never won anything in the first place. The Indian men hugged one another, laughed into one another’s faces, eyes brighter and wider than they had been in years.

Boo, who had been busy punching the shadows, now sat quietly in his chair. The Indian men had forgotten he was there. Boo looked down at his hands.

Agnes and Annie were tending to Kim’s bloody mouth. Agnes held a handful of Kim’s teeth.

“Hey!” Agnes shouted. “We got to get her to a hospital!”

Her green eyes electric with pain, Kim stared up at Agnes and Annie, and tried a toothless smile.

“We did it,” said Kim.

“Did what?” asked Agnes.

There was no answer to that question.

“Marie!” shouted Annie. “We got to go!”

Marie sat up in the driver’s seat, looked back at her passengers. John had struggled to a sitting position.

“John,” said Marie. “You should lie down.”

John looked at Marie. He saw the large eyes, the long, black hair, and those crooked teeth. He noticed that her glasses were missing. Probably knocked off her face during the fight. Scratch marks across her forehead and cheeks. The glasses were probably broken, lying on the street outside, in pieces and fragments.

“John?” asked Marie, wanting to ask a question, but unsure what she wanted to know.

The other Indian men had stopped celebrating to watch John. The Indian women watched him, too. John could see his face in their faces, the large noses and cheekbones, the dark eyes and skin, the thin mouth and prominent chin, white teeth. He looked into the faces of these Indians who had saved him.