“Fucking Indian!”
As the pickup left him behind, John raised his hand, fingers spread wide. He did not understand his own gesture. The pickup slowed, brake lights almost beautiful in the gray air, then stopped, still, reverse lights suddenly bright. John watched the pickup. He raised both hands in the air. He heard a man screaming, then realized he was screaming. As the pickup stopped short of him, the passenger door was flung open, and a big, black boot stepped down to pavement. John looked up into the night sky. The Aurora Bridge hung in the sky a couple hundred feet above the Fremont Bridge. Suicidal people jumped off the Aurora Bridge. Nobody jumped off the Fremont Bridge. More cars on the Aurora Bridge. Just the solitary pickup on the Fremont. John could hear every car and bridge in the city. So many cars and bridges in the city. John had lost count years before.
“Fuck you, Geronimo!”
A big white man in black boots. Driver’s door open now. Two white men. No, two white boys, tall and skinny. Laughing and drinking at a safe distance from John. Seattle was a safe city. The news proved it every day because every murder, rape, and bank robbery made the papers.
“What the fuck you staring at?”
John was staring at the white boys. They were pale and beautiful. John pointed at them.
“What the fuck you pointing at?”
John knew these white boys. Not these two in particular, but white boys in general. He had been in high school with boys like these. He had sat in their pickups, showered with them after gym class, shared pizzas. He had leaned out the windows of their cars and screamed at downtown drunks. Sometimes he had leaned out the window and screamed at everybody they passed.
John was still screaming. He stood on the Fremont Bridge and screamed. The two white boys shouted curses at him, but they kept their distance, ready to jump into their pickup at the slightest provocation. John saw them as Catholic boys, in their junior year at private school. One played varsity basketball; the other played baseball. Both were class officers. They were the boys who forced their hands down the pants of girls who pretended to like it.
“She wanted it, you know? But I let her go, you know? I took pity on her.”
John remembered how these boys talked. He had tried to talk that way himself. He had tried to lie as often as possible, understanding that lying was a valuable skill. High school taught white boys the value of lies, and John knew this. He knew these white boys intimately. He knew these two white boys standing on the Fremont Bridge were publicly loved and admired by their classmates and teachers. These were the boys who were secretly hated and envied, too. Their deaths could create a hurricane of grief and confusion.
During John’s senior year in high school, one of his classmates had been killed in a car wreck on the Interstate. John had been sitting in his homeroom when the principal walked into the class with the news.
“I have some tragic, tragic news,” said the principal without subtlety. “Scott O’Brien was killed last night.”
John began to cry for reasons he could not understand. He had not liked Scott O’Brien. A few weeping girls huddled together in the corner. Scott’s friends, all white boys, sat quietly and stoically, fighting back tears, sucking in their bottom lips, occasionally pounding their desks in imitation of the pointless, masculine methods of grief they saw on television. Sidney Bush, the only Jewish Catholic in Seattle, had his head down on his desk. His acned face was hidden, his fat shoulders were shaking. He might have been crying. But John knew better. Scott had been extremely cruel to Sidney.
“Kike!”
“Jewboy!”
“Fat ass!”
“Pizza face!”
John watched Sidney and knew that he was laughing quietly. Sidney had heard the news of Scott’s death, thrown his face down on the desk, and couldn’t help his joy. He was still laughing over there, in the far corner, near the tattered copies of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and seventy-two editions of the St. Francis Catholic School Annual, dating back to the institution’s early years.
“St. Francis, St. Francis, our trust in God for thee…”
Sidney Bush was laughing in the corner. John felt a single, hot tear sliding down his cheek and falling to the desk. John looked down at the tear, touched it with a fingertip. He knew that the next school annual would be dedicated to Scott O’Brien. A center spread filled with photographs and mementos, precious memories, and statistics. John knew there would be a prayer at graduation, a seat left empty in honor of the missing classmate. Yet, in the far corners of rooms, a few would be hiding their smiles.
“Fuck you, you fucking Indian!”
John remembered that he was still standing on the Fremont Bridge, still screaming, he believed, while the two white boys were getting bored, their curses losing volume and intensity. John felt the screams rattle his ribcage. His throat burned. He took a step forward, then another. The white boys were startled. The driver hopped into the pickup, ready to race away. The passenger threw his beer bottle in the general direction of John. The bottle revolved in the air as John watched its flight, its parabola, its sudden crash against the pavement at his feet. A close call. That white boy was an athlete.
“Fuck you!” from the departing pickup, squealing tires and laughter. John stood alone on the bridge. He needed a shower and shave. His whiskers had grown in clumsy patterns, thick at the chin and sideburns, barely visible at the cheeks and above his lip. His long hair was braided with a broken shoelace. John was quiet. He looked down at the pavement, stepped over the broken glass, and began walking. He walked up Aurora, past Big Heart’s Soda and Juice Bar up on 110th and Aurora. He sometimes visited the bar, but he felt no such need that night. He walked past the graveyard where prostitutes laid down with customers, past Kmart and Burger King, the Aurora Cinemas. John kept walking past all of that. He could not find the courage to stop walking. He walked miles beyond any neighborhood that resembled his own. He walked until he found himself on a dead-end street, a cul-de-sac, a vanishing point. At the end of the street, a small Catholic church, painted white with blue shutters, had tiny, stained glass windows. A candle burned above the front door.
Inside the church, John found the usual pews, altar, confessional, more candles, wood carvings of Jesus crucified, Jesus entombed, Jesus rising again. John still believed in the mystery of his Catholic faith. He used to enjoy Mass, felt some comfort in the numbing repetition of word, symbol, and action. How, every Sunday, he knew exactly what the priest was going to say. There were no surprises, no sudden starts and stops, no need to interpret and understand. The priest told the congregation what to believe and the congregation believed him. But John had not been to Mass in years.
As John walked further into that small church, he saw a priest kneeling at the front. John knew who it was.
“Father Duncan,” said John as he kneeled beside the priest, believing it was the same man who had baptized him years before. This was the priest who had walked into the desert and disappeared. This was the priest who knew everything.
“Father Duncan,” John said again.
Father Phil, a tall Irishman with red hair and ruddy skin, turned from his prayers to look at John.
“Father Duncan,” said John, desperately now, wanting recognition.
“No, it’s Father Phil. Did you know Father Duncan?”