JOHN SAT ALONE ON the fortieth floor. He could see a white man working at a small desk in an office across the street. A small man from any distance. John knew he could kill a white man, but he was not sure which white man was responsible for everything that had gone wrong. He thought hard that day, could barely work, and often stared off into space, trying to decide. Which white man had done the most harm to the world? Was it the richest white man? Was it the poorest white man? John believed that both the richest and poorest white men in the country lived in Seattle.
The richest man owned a toy company. No. He owned the largest toy company in the world. It had thousands of employees. John saw the rich man on television. In commercials. On talk shows. On goofy game shows. His wedding was broadcast nationally. He had married a movie star, one of those beautiful actresses whose name John always forgot. Julie, Jennifer, Janine. The rich man’s name was short and masculine, a three-lettered name that was somehow smaller and still more important than John. Bob or Ted or Dan or something like that. A monosyllabic, triangular monument of a name. A name where every letter loudly shouted its meaning. John could not understand how a man named Bob or Ted became rich and famous by selling toys. How can a toy maker meet and marry a beautiful actress? John knew that Bob or Dan must have sold his soul, that slaves worked in his factories. Thousands of children. No. Indians. Thousands of Indians chained together in basements, sweating over stupid board games that were thinly disguised imitations of Scrabble and Monopoly, cheap stuffed monkeys, and primitive computer games where all the illegal space aliens were blasted into pieces. But John could not convince himself that the richest man in the world deserved to die. It was too easy. If he killed the richest white man in the world, then the second-richest white man would take his place. Nobody would even notice the difference. All the money would be switched from one account to another. All the slaves would stop making toys, move to another factory, and begin making car alarms, director’s chairs, or toasters. John could kill a thousand rich white men and not change a thing.
The poorest white man in the world stole aluminum cans from John’s garbage. Well, that was not exactly true. Every Monday, John set the cans outside his apartment building for the recycling truck to collect, but the poorest white man always arrived first. John watched him from his bedroom window. The poorest white man dressed in ragged clothes. His skin diseased, face deeply pockmarked, hair pulled back in a greasy ponytail. The poor man would pick up the aluminum cans one by one and drop them into his shopping cart. Empty Campbell’s tomato soup cans, Pepsi cans, cans that once held stew or creamed corn, hash or pineapple chunks. One by one, carefully, as if the aluminum cans were fragile, priceless. John hoped the poorest white man sold the cans for cents on the pound, and then bought some food. The poorest man might have a family, a white wife, white kids, all starving in some city park. But John knew the poorest man sold the cans for booze money. He just drank and drank. Fortified wine, rubbing alcohol, Sterno. John hated poor white men, but he knew killing them was a waste. They were already dead. They were zombies. John could stick a bomb in one of his aluminum cans. A mercury switch. When the zombie picked up the can, the switch would move, and boom! But it would be a small gesture, little more than waving good-bye to someone you had just met.
Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief. Lawyer, doctor, architect, construction foreman. John knew this was the most important decision in his life. Which white man had done the most harm to Indians? He knew that priests had cut out the tongues of Indians who continued to speak their tribal languages. He had seen it happen. He had gathered the tongues in his backpack and buried them in the foundation of a bank building. He had held wakes and tried to sing like Indians sing for the dead. But Father Duncan was proof of something bigger, wasn’t he? Father Duncan, an Indian, had walked into the desert like a holy man and disappeared. Whenever he closed his eyes, John could see the desert. The cacti, lizards, washes, and sand dunes, the lack of water. John knew what water meant to life. A man could have a camel loaded down with food, enough for weeks, but that same man would die without water. A man without water could last for two days, three days, four days at most. Father Duncan did not take any water into the desert with him. He left behind his paints and an empty canvas. He left behind his hat and shoes. But there was no water in the desert, not for miles and miles. How could Father Duncan have survived such a journey? How was he saved? How had he arrived in John’s dreams, both awake and asleep? John could see the stand of palm trees at the horizon, either an illusion or a place of safety. Could see Duncan in his black robe staggering across the hot sand. If John concentrated hard, he could see Father Duncan’s red-rimmed eyes, cracked lips, burned skin. So much thirst.
After quitting time, John rode the elevator down through the unfinished building. He rode with the foreman and a couple other co-workers named Jim and Jerry. Nobody knew the foreman’s name. He was simply known as the foreman. John knew these white men were mostly harmless and would live forever. They would leave work and have a few beers at the same tavern where they had been drinking together for years. They were regulars. Jim, Jerry, and the foreman would walk into the bar and all the patrons would loudly greet their arrival.
John stepped off the elevator, ignored offers to go for beers, and walked through the downtown Seattle streets. There were so many white men to choose from. Everybody was a white man in downtown Seattle. The heat and noise in his head were loud and painful. He wanted to run. He even started to run. But he stopped. He could not run. Everybody would notice. Everybody would know that he was thinking about killing white men. The police would come. John breathed deeply and started to walk slowly. He was walking in work boots and flannel shirt through Seattle, where men in work boots and flannel shirts were often seen walking. No one even noticed John. That is to say that a few people looked up from their books and a couple drivers looked away from the street long enough to notice John, then turned back to their novels and windshields. “There’s an Indian walking,” they said to themselves or companions, though Indians were often seen walking in downtown Seattle. John the Indian was walking and his audience was briefly interested, because Indians were briefly interesting. White people no longer feared Indians. Somehow, near the end of the twentieth century, Indians had become invisible, docile. John wanted to change that. He wanted to see fear in every pair of blue eyes. As John walked, his long, black hair was swept back by the same wind that watered his eyes. He walked north along the water, across the University Bridge, then east along the Burke-Gilman Trail until he was standing in a field of grass. He had made it to the wilderness. He was free. He could hunt and trap like a real Indian and grow his hair until it dragged along the ground. No. It was a manicured lawn on the University of Washington campus, and John could hear drums. He had been on the campus a few times before but had never heard drums there. He walked toward the source of the drums. At first, he thought it was Father Duncan. He was not sure why Father Duncan would be playing drums. Then he saw a crowd of Indians gathered outside a large auditorium, Hec Edmundson Pavilion. There were two drums, a few singers and dancers, and dozens of Indians watching the action. So many Indians in one place. There were white people watching, too, but John turned away from their faces. He stepped into the crowd, wanting to disappear into it. A small Indian woman was standing in front of John. She smiled.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said.
“I’m Marie. Are you a new student here?”
“No.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. She was the activities coordinator for the Native American Students Alliance at the University and thought she’d found a recruit. A potential friendship or possible romance.
“What’s your name?”
“John.”
“What tribe you are?”
He could not, would not, tell her he had been adopted as a newborn by a white couple who could not have children of their own. Along with the clipping about Father Duncan’s disappearance, John always carried the photograph of the day his parents had picked him up from the adoption agency. In the photograph, his father’s left arm is draped carefully over his mother’s shoulders, while she holds John tightly to her dry right breast. Both wear expensive, tasteful clothes. John had no idea who had taken the picture.
His adopted parents had never told him what kind of Indian he was. They did not know. They never told him anything at all about his natural parents, other than his birth mother’s age, which was fourteen. John only knew that he was Indian in the most generic sense. Black hair, brown skin and eyes, high cheekbones, the prominent nose. Tall and muscular, he looked like some cinematic warrior, and constantly intimidated people with his presence. When asked by white people, he said he was Sioux, because that was what they wanted him to be. When asked by Indian people, he said he was Navajo, because that was what he wanted to be.
“I’m Navajo,” he said to Marie.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m Spokane.”
“Father Duncan,” said John, thinking instantly of the Spokane Indian Jesuit.
“What?”
“Father Duncan was Spokane.”
“Father Duncan?” asked Marie, trying to attach significance to the name, then remembering the brief fragment of a story her parents had told her. “Oh, you mean that one who disappeared, right?”
John nodded his head. Marie was the first person he’d met, besides the Jesuits at St. Francis, who knew about Father Duncan. John trembled.
“Did you know him?” asked Marie.
“He baptized me,” said John. “He used to visit me. Then he disappeared.”
“I’m sorry,” said Marie, who was definitely not Christian. With disgust, she remembered when the Spokane Indian Assembly of God Church held a book burning on the reservation and reduced Catcher in the Rye, along with dozens of other books, to ash.
“I know a Hopi,” said Marie, trying to change the subject. “Guy named Buddy who works at the U. He’s a history teacher. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Oh, I thought you might. He hangs around with the Navajo bunch. Jeez, but they tease him something awful, too.”
John barely made eye contact with Marie. Instead, he watched all of the Indians dancing in circles on the grass. It was an illegal powwow, not approved by the University. John could figure out that much when he noticed how the dancers were trampling on the well-kept lawn. Indians were always protesting something. Marie had organized the powwow as a protest against the University’s refusal to allow a powwow. Only a few of the Indians had originally known that, but most everybody knew now, and danced all that much harder.
Marie had been organizing protests since her days on the Spokane Indian Reservation, though she had often been the only protestor. A bright child who read by age three, she had quickly passed her classmates by. When they had all been five and six years old, Marie had friends because she was smart. Everybody wanted to be smart. But as the years passed, many of Marie’s reservation friends flunked classes, lost interest, were intimidated into silence by cruel, white teachers, or simply had no energy for school because of hunger. Marie felt more and more isolated. Some bright kids were more interested in Spokane Indian culture than in a public school education. Many of those kids skipped school so they could travel to powwows or attend various cultural events. During the summer, when powwow season was really in swing, those kids were too busy to pick up books. They could speak Spokane as fluently as many elders, but they could barely read English. They were intelligent and humorous, and never wanted to leave the reservation. They had chosen that life, and Marie both resented and envied them. Because she did not dance or sing traditionally, and because she could not speak Spokane, Marie was often thought of as being less than Indian. Her parents, who did speak Spokane, had refused to teach Marie because they felt it would be of no use to her in the world outside the reservation. Her mother, the speech therapist at the tribal school, and her father, the principal, knew their bright daughter belonged in that larger world. Instead of teaching her about Spokane culture, they bought her books by the pound at pawn shops, secondhand stores, and garage sales. She read those books and many others, studied hard at school, and endured constant bullying and taunting from many of her peers. Marie learned to fight, and her best friend, Sugar, a traditional dancer and accomplished street fighter, helped. Marie fought fiercely, without control or thought. She tackled people, bit and pinched, spat and kicked. She refused to accept beatings. She always wanted revenge, and would wait until the perfect moment, which could be months later, to ambush her enemies. In one memorable instance, she had stolen a knife from the high school cafeteria and chased Double Andy across the playground. Marie had really meant to stab Double Andy. Everybody had seen the crazy look in Marie’s eyes that day and nobody bullied her for months after that. Still, her nose had been broken four times before she graduated high school.
After two years at tribal college, she was accepted into the University of Washington on a full scholarship. Through her intelligence and dedication, Marie had found a way to escape the reservation. Now she was so afraid the reservation would pull her back and drown her in its rivers that she only ventured home for surprise visits to her parents, usually arriving in the middle of the night. Even then, she felt like a stranger and would sometimes leave before her parents knew she was there. And she rarely spoke to any of her reservation friends. She was twenty-three, near the end of her final year as an English major, when she met John Smith.
“You live around here?” Marie asked John.
“No,” he said.
“Man, you’re breathing hard,” she said, trying to make conversation. “What did you do, run here?”
“No, but I thought about it.”
Marie laughed because she thought he was making a joke. John looked at her, not really sure why she was laughing.
“I can’t believe the U wouldn’t let us have a powwow in Hec Ed this year,” Marie said.
“What’s Hec Ed?”
“In the Hec Ed Pavilion,” Marie said. “You know, the gym? Inside there? They wouldn’t let us rent it this year, so we’re messing up their nice lawn. I can’t believe the cops haven’t come yet.”
“The cops? Really?”
“No, not really. We’ve got too many reporters here already. The U isn’t going to stop us now. They’d look really bad. You know how white people are.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Expecting the usual Indian banter, Marie waited for him to say more. When he remained silent, she accepted that silence as being just as Indian as the banter, and turned away from him to watch the dancers. John knew that his silence was acceptable, but he also knew that he could have asked about her tribe, that Indians quizzed Indians about all the Indian friends, family, lovers, and acquaintances they might have in common. He was afraid she would discover that he was an Indian without a tribe.
Even though he had felt like a fraud at urban powwows, he had always loved them. Often, when he was a child, Olivia and Daniel had taken him. Through years of observation and practice, he had learned how an Indian was supposed to act at a powwow. When he got old enough to go without Daniel and Olivia, he could pretend to be a real Indian. He could sit in a huge crowd of Indians and be just another anonymous, silent Skin. That was what real Indians called each other. Skins. Other Indian men might give him that indigenous head nod, which confirmed a connection he did not feel. Indian women might give him that look which implied an interest he ignored. But he had always known that if he remained silent, he would receive a respectful silence in return. If he pursued conversation, the real Indians would be happy to talk. With Marie, he had chosen his usual silence.
She stood beside him. He could feel her there, but he continued to watch the dancers move in circles. A tall fancydancer caught his attention. The fancydancer cartwheeled across the grass, his brightly colored feathers nearly shocking in their clarity. Reds and blues, yellows and greens. The crowd gasped at the cartwheels. The fancydancer was bold, original, dangerous. Many Indian elders would surely disapprove of the cartwheels. Many elders dismissed any kind of fancydancing. It was too modern, too white, the dance of children who refused to grow up.
“Jeez,” Marie said of the fancydancer. “He’s good.”
John turned his head to look at her. She smiled. She was a pretty, small-boned woman at least a foot shorter than he was. Her black hair was very long, hanging down below her waist. With her wire-rimmed glasses and black blazer, she looked scholarly and serious, even as she smiled. Her teeth were just a little crowded, as if there were one tooth too many. Her nose looked as if it had been broken once or twice. She had large, dark eyes magnified by her prescription.
“Do you dance?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“The strong silent type?” she asked. “All stoic and stuff, huh? How long you been working on that Tonto face? You should try out for the movies.”
He swallowed hard and tried to concentrate on the dancers again. She stared at him. With his looks and stature, she thought, John could have been a wonderful traditional dancer. The old style, slow and dignified, a proud man’s dance. John felt the power of her gaze, and was about to make an escape when the powwow’s master of ceremonies called for an owl dance.
“It’s ladies’ choice,” said the emcee. “Ladies, go snag yourself a warrior. If he says no, you bring him to me. Men, you know you can’t refuse a woman who asks you to dance. You’ll either pay up or tell everybody why you broke her heart.”
“Hey,” Marie said. “Do you want to dance?”
“I guess,” he said. He had learned about owl dances, but feared them. John knew many Indian tribes believed the owl was a messenger of death. For those Indians, the owl was death itself. Yet, those same Indians who feared the owl still owl danced. John had always been confused by that. Were the Indians dancing out of spite? Were they challenging the owl? Or perhaps they were dancing to prove their courage. With Indians, death was always so close anyway. When Indians owl danced, their shadows were shaped like owls. What was one more owl in a room full of Indians dancing like owls?
She led him to the dance floor, where all the other couples had already formed a circle. There were old married couples, newlyweds, potential lovers, siblings, mothers and sons, a few reluctant teenagers, and a handful of preschoolers. Marie took John’s left hand in her right, and placed her left hand on his right shoulder. He reluctantly placed his right hand on her left hip. Together like that, they waited for a few other stragglers to join the circle, all of the dancers waiting for the drums to begin.
“I’m not any good at this,” he said. He had danced clumsy near-waltzes at high school dances with white girls, but had never danced with an Indian woman. He had never been close enough to an Indian woman to dance.
“Just like a foxtrot,” she said as the drums began. “Two steps forward, one step back. With the beat. Twirl me around when everybody else does.”
“Okay,” he said. He did as he was told. He looked down at his feet, tried to stay in rhythm, failed miserably.
“You’re a horrible dancer,” she said with a laugh. He dropped her hand, stopped dancing, stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” he said, wanting to run again.
“Jeez, it’s okay,” she said and smiled. “Just keep dancing. You can’t quit.”
It was a broom owl dance. One woman stood alone in the middle of the circle of dancers, holding a broom. She ran up to another dancing woman, gave her the broom, and they switched places. The displaced woman took the broom, ran around the circle, and gave the broom to a third woman. A kind of Indian musical chairs. There was much laughter. Friends chose friends. Sisters chose sisters. The broom passed from hand to hand. A tiny girl, barely able to lift the broom, dragged it around the circle, and gave it to her mother, who was dancing with the little girl’s father. More laughter. The emcee encouraged everybody, told bad jokes, teased the young lovers. Everybody kept dancing, two steps forward, one step back. As John danced with Marie, he looked at the other dancers, men, women and children, all with dazzling eyes and bright smiles. So much happiness so close to him, but John could not touch it.
Marie saw the sadness in John’s eyes. She had approached him because she thought he was a fellow student, another urban Indian, but now she felt his confusion and loss. He didn’t know how to dance, didn’t seem to recognize anybody at the powwow. Nobody shouted out his name in an effort to embarrass him as he danced. He was a stranger here, and Marie understood that isolation. Though she had blossomed in college and would be graduating with honors, her work for the Native American Students Alliance and her job at a downtown homeless shelter had led Marie to so many Indians who were, as John was, as she was, outcasts from their tribes. They were forced to create their own urban tribe. Some had been forced to leave their reservations because they were different, like Fawn, the Crow who would not talk about what had happened to her in Montana. Some had never lived on their reservations and had very little connection to their tribes. Nick, the son of a Ute doctor and Cheyenne nurse, had grown up upper-middle-class in St. Louis.
But, somehow, most every urban Indian still held closely to his or her birth tribe. Marie was Spokane, would always be Spokane. But she was also an urban Indian, an amalgamation that included over two hundred tribes in the same Seattle area where many white people wanted to have Indian blood. Marie was always careful to test people, to hear their stories, to ask about their tribes, their people, and their ties to the land from which they originated. The pretend Indians had no answers for these questions, while real Indians answered the questions easily, and had a few questions of their own for Marie. Indians were always placing one another on an identity spectrum, with the more traditional to the left and the less traditional Indians to the right. Marie knew she belonged somewhere in the middle of that spectrum and that her happiness depended on placing more Indians to her right. She wondered where John belonged.
“Hey,” Marie said to him. “You’re getting it now.”
John listened carefully to the drums, which had drowned out all the other noises in his head. He concentrated on the music, his brow furrowed. Sweat, deep breaths.
“Jeez,” Marie said. “Take it easy. You’re supposed to be having fun.”
A little girl handed Marie the broom. Suddenly, John was looking down at a new dance partner. She had huge brown eyes and short brown hair. She smiled with a mouthful of braces.
“I’m Kim,” she said, laughed, and then ducked her head. She was playing at a courtship game, flirting and teasing with John as if she were ten years older than she was. This was all practice for her.
“I’m John.”
The dance stopped, drums suddenly silent. The dancers clapped and thanked each other. The audience cheered. John looked for Marie. She was talking to a tall Indian man in traditional dance regalia. She stopped talking long enough to notice John. She smiled and waved. John raised his hand a little. He tried to smile, but could not make it happen. The traditional dancer with Marie turned toward John. He was fierce looking, all sharp feathers and angry beads, and seemed to be ten feet tall. John was not surprised that Indians had always terrified white people. He wondered what the early European settlers must have thought when they first encountered an Indian warrior in all of his finest regalia. Even in his flannel shirts and blue jeans, John knew he was intimidating. If I were dressed like a real Indian, John thought, I could rule the world.
“Thank you for the dance,” said the little girl, Kim. She was still standing beside John, waiting for him to acknowledge her presence with a traditional politeness.
“Thank you,” John said.
“You know,” she said. “I’m a twin. My sister’s name is Arlene. She’s sick. That’s why she’s not here. Do you know her?”
“What? No, I don’t know her,” John said. “I’m sorry she’s sick. Tell her I said so. Tell her to get well.”
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.