They call him Uncle Art.
This guy and I are best friends. This guy loves me. He loves my children. He loves my wife. This guy is part of my family.
Yes, this is the loving man who shot another man in the face.
“Hey, kids,” Art says, “why don’t we head to the cafeteria and let your mom and dad have a little time alone?”
My kids cheer as their Uncle Art, the killer, takes them downstairs for chocolate pudding.
After they’re gone, the beautiful woman leans over me. She is my wife and I don’t know her.
“Oh, Hank,” she says. “It’s so good to see you awake.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Are you contagious?” she asks.
If you can catch crazy, I’m a walking epidemic.
“It’s only a virus,” I say. “I don’t think you can catch what I have.”
“Maybe I want to,” she says.
I can’t believe this woman is my wife. She is beautiful. Black hair, blue eyes, pale skin. She is maybe the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in person.
I wonder if I’ll get to have sex with her.
I know this sexy woman is Hank’s wife. But I’m Hank right now. And she loves him so she loves me, too. I wonder if she knows that Hank kills people. I wonder if she knows that Hank helped kill a man a few nights ago. I wonder if she would still love Hank if she knew. I suspect she might. I suspect she sees Hank as her protector, as her children’s protector.
Hank makes the world safe. He is a good and loving husband and father. He is one hundred different versions of himself, and only one of them is a killer.
“I hear you’re coming home,” my wife says.
“I think so,” I say.
“That’s good, we’ve missed you so much.”
She kisses me on the mouth. It makes me feel powerful. I close my eyes again and kiss her back as hard as I can.
God, I think I would kill for her kiss.
Seven
I’M RUNNING THROUGH THE dark. I run toward the sound of laughter. I run toward a bright light in the distance.
I run super fast. And I wonder if I’m not running at all. What if I’m flying? What if I have become that bank guard’s bullet? What if I’m the bullet that blasted through my brain?
But, wait, no, I suddenly burst through the bright light, which is really the opening of a buffalo-skin tepee, and I run outside and stop.
I am standing in the middle of a gigantic Indian camp. And I don’t mean some Disneyland, Nickelodeon, roller-coaster, stuffed-animal, cotton-candy Indian camp.
Nope.
I am standing in the middle of a real Indian camp, complete with thousands of real Indian tepees and tens of thousands of real old-time Indians.
The tepees go on forever. They’re grouped in little circles inside bigger circles inside the biggest circles. This camp sits beside a small river. Small dusty hills rise above the water. Thin dry trees cover the hills.
I breathe dust; it makes mud in my mouth.
And there are so many Indians.
Yep, a bunch of real old-time Indians. I’m not exactly sure what year it is. It’s tough to tell the difference between seventeenth-and eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Indians.
These are how Indians used to be, how Indians are supposed to be. Justice always talked with admiration about Indians like this.
These old-time Indians have dark skin. There aren’t any half-breed pale-beige green-eyed Indians here. Nope, unlike me, these Indians are the real deal.
I don’t hear any of them speaking English. I don’t know what Indian language they are speaking. I can’t understand it, but all of them are speaking it. In fact, as I listen more closely, I realize these Indians — men, women, children, and old people — are speaking a bunch of different languages. So there are a lot of different tribes here.
Even the dogs seem to be barking in Indian. And there are a lot of dogs, hundreds of dogs.
And it stinks something fierce.
There are tens of thousands of human beings living in close quarters in the summer heat. And yes, it has to be summer because the sun is huge in the blue sky and it must be about 120 degrees.
So imagine a camp filled with tens of thousands of sweating Indians, dogs, and horses, along with what appears to be the rotting and drying corpses of hundreds of buffalo, deer, porcupines, badgers, squirrels, rats, and who-knows-what other animals, hanging on racks everywhere I look.
These Indians eat a lot of meat.
And deodorant has not been invented yet.
And it’s hotter than the pizza cheese that gets stuck to the roof of your mouth and burns you so bad you can have one of those skin flaps hanging down.
Imagine what this smells like.
Justice never said anything about the smell of old-time Indians. I never read anything about this smell. I never saw a television show that mentioned it.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but it smells like the Devil dropped a shit right here in the middle of this camp.
But you know what’s really crazy? I seem to be the only one bothered by the stench. Everybody else is smiling and gossiping and singing and laughing and living their way-cool old-time Indian lives. None of them are gagging and covering their noses like me.
And then I remember how some people’s houses just smell funny. They don’t stink. Not really. But they smell different. A few times in my life, I walked into new foster homes and knew I’d never be able to live there because of the strange smell.
Everybody’s house smells different. Some of them smell good, most of them just smell different, and a few of them stink.
So this huge village is like one of those stink houses. And the people who live here don’t notice the stink.
People smell different, too. Sometimes you meet people and you think they’re nice and decent, and it seems like you might be friends. But you get closer to them and they stink. They smell like rotten fish or dead raccoons or something. And you just have to run away.
Later, you mention the bad smell to your other friends and they say they didn’t smell anything different. That stink is reserved especially for you.
But, hey, it works the other way, too. Sometimes you meet a person, and you catch the scent and it’s like you’ve smelled a garden in Heaven, because all you want to do is follow that person around and breathe in for the rest of your life.
And later you mention this great scent to your other friends, and they say they didn’t smell anything different.
I remember this one time, when I was taking a video class at a special program for homeless kids in Seattle. I was learning how to use a computer to edit movies. And the teacher — her name was Sue — she smelled exactly like Campbell’s vegetable soup.
Now I never thought the smell of Campbell’s vegetable soup was sexy. I always liked it, but it didn’t get me all hormonal or anything. But when I smelled Sue, I began to think that Campbell’s vegetable soup might be the sexiest thing in the world.
Of course, being young and stupid and in love, I told Sue that she smelled exactly like Campbell’s vegetable soup. She just laughed at me.
But, wait, why am I talking about soup? Maybe it’s just safer and funnier to think about soup and sexy women named Sue than it is to find yourself transported to an old-time Indian camp.
And then I look down at myself and realize that I’m an old-time Indian kid, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. I’m thin and muscular, and the only thing I’m wearing is a loincloth.
I get shy for a second because I’m almost naked. But then I realize that every boy and man in the camp is wearing only a loincloth. And a few of the women and girls are pretty much naked, too.
Then I solve a mystery: I look under my loincloth.
Okay. I know for sure now that Indians didn’t have underwear beneath their loincloths.