“I’ve seen Indians up by the Seattle Center,” said Barry. “On Queen Anne Hill.”
Cornelius and Zera, homeless Indians, huddled together in a doorway across the street from a Blockbuster Video on lower Queen Anne Hill. The doorway was a good spot, kept warm by the furnace beneath it. Fairly safe, too, in a busy neighborhood. Cornelius and Zera had spent a year of nights in that doorway.
“You warm?” Cornelius asked Zera.
“Warm enough,” she said. But she was shaking, and Cornelius pulled her closer. They’d been together for five years and had spent half of that time homeless. The other half, they’d shared and been evicted from three apartments. Money and jobs were seasonal. Cornelius, a Makah Indian, was a deep-sea fisherman, a job that would have kept him away for months at a time, and he just didn’t want to leave Zera, a Puyallup. She was manic-depressive and simply couldn’t take care of herself. So Cornelius worked as a manual laborer, losing the job whenever Zera showed up and terrorized customers and managers, or when he missed work to search for her after her latest disappearance. She’d been hospitalized three times and Cornelius had always missed her so much he couldn’t sleep. He would just walk around the hospital, one or two hundred times a day, until she was finally released.
“You warm now?” Cornelius asked.
She nodded her head, but he knew she was lying. He offered her a drink of coffee from the thermos. He’d always leave the empty thermos at the back door of the nearby McDonald’s, and Doug, the redheaded night manager, would secretly fill it again with leftover coffee. Small kindnesses. Cornelius also had a loaf of bread he’d bought with money he’d made selling Real Change, the newspaper written and distributed by the homeless. He took out two slices, jammed them together, and offered it to Zera.
“Hey, look,” he said. “A jam sandwich.”
She laughed, took the sandwich, and swallowed it down.
As Aaron piloted his truck through lower Queen Anne in search of Indians, he brooded about David. Frail David Rogers with his lopsided grin. Always reading some damn book or another. Loved Hemingway’s Nick Adams, the monosyllabic hero with the monosyllabic name. Nick. The first man, the essential man, the genesis of man. Adams. Everything that David was not. In high school, David tried to play football and made the team as a fourth-string receiver. He cheered on Aaron, the toughest linebacker in the league. Aaron had wanted to play college football at the University of Washington, one of the best programs in the country, but they hadn’t been interested in him. He was too small for Division I, the recruiters told him. Junior college would be best, the coaches told him. But Aaron would not accept anything less than UW, so he enrolled anyway, and David had followed him. Aaron hadn’t made it halfway through the first day of football tryouts when some behemoth knocked him unconscious and out of contention for a roster spot. After that, Aaron and David had grown even closer. More than brothers. They moved in with Sean and Barry, studied hard, and were well on their way to graduation when David disappeared. Aaron thought of his father, who was probably driving to Seattle right now.
“Fuck,” Aaron cursed while Barry held his baseball bat tightly. Sean was getting more nervous than angry. He’d never seen Aaron, who had quite a temper anyway, look so furious. Aaron had been on a short fuse since David had disappeared, and Sean could understand that. Hell, he missed David, too, but he was gone and there was nothing they could do about it. Maybe they thought they could do a lot about it, like beating the shit out of a few Indians with blunt instruments. Perhaps baseball bats. Sean shook his head. It was all getting out of control.
“They’re hiding,” Sean said. “We’re not going to find them now. Everybody must know about the Indian Killer.”
“We’ll find them,” Aaron said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Sean.
Before Aaron could respond, Barry shouted and pointed up the street at two Indians sleeping in a doorway. Aaron smiled. He slipped a ski mask over his face, as Sean and Barry did the same.
Cornelius was watching Zera sleep. She spent most of her waking hours in a struggle for emotional balance, and it showed in her face. Deep wrinkles, haunted eyes, sudden gestures and unpredictable movements. In sleep, she relaxed, sometimes smiled, and Cornelius thought her beautiful. Sleep is a little piece of death, he thought, and Zera found some peace in that temporary afterlife. He was busy looking at her while she slept when the truck pulled up to a sharp stop near the doorway.
“Hey, you fuckers!”
Three men in ski masks, white, purple, and blue, jumped out of the pickup. Two of them, white mask and blue mask, held baseball bats. Purple mask was empty-handed.
“Wake up, wake up!” Cornelius yelled as he shook Zera awake. They both struggled to their feet.
“Fucking drunks! Fuck you, fuck you!”
The man in the white mask advanced with his baseball bat. He was obviously the leader. For some reason, Cornelius held out the thermos as an offering. He looked down at his outstretched hand and couldn’t believe what he was doing.
“I don’t want your booze!” shouted white mask as he swung the bat and smashed the thermos out of Cornelius’s hand.
“Home run! Home run!” shouted blue mask. He came forward, swinging his bat as if he were a baseball player warming up. Purple mask stayed back.
“Come on, come on, you fucking Indian,” said white mask. He jabbed his bat into Cornelius’ belly. Zera was trembling beside him.
“We don’t want no trouble,” Cornelius said. “We’ll leave.”
“Go back to where you belong, man!” shouted blue mask. “Get the fuck out of our country, man!”
A crowd had gathered, though no one in it seemed eager to interfere. God, I hope somebody called the cops, thought Cornelius. When he flexed his hand, the pain told him white mask had broken it into pieces. Cornelius was still debating his options when Zera made her decision and tackled blue mask. Before Cornelius could react, white mask broke Cornelius’s jaw with a wicked swing of his bat.
“Get her off me! Get her off me!” blue mask shouted as Zera tore at his face. As purple mask tried to pull her off, white mask savagely beat Cornelius. Five, ten, twenty swings of the bat. Four cracked ribs, punctured lung, various contusions and abrasions, concussion.
Purple mask had pulled Zera off blue mask, who had smashed her across the face with his bat. The amount of blood shocked blue mask. He stepped back.
“Payback, motherfucker, payback!” shouted white mask. He kept swinging the bat at Cornelius, might have beaten the life out of the Indian, if purple mask had not pulled him away.
“We got to go!” shouted purple mask. Blue mask was already in the driver’s seat, ready to roll. White mask smashed Cornelius one last time, jumped into the 4Runner with the other two, and screamed triumphantly as they sped from the scene.
13. Night Terrors
AS OLIVIA AND DANIEL ate breakfast, the radio announced that Mark Jones had been kidnapped by the Indian Killer. A homeless Indian couple had been assaulted by three masked men. Olivia had wanted to talk, but Daniel excused himself from the table. A few minutes before seven in the morning, Daniel Smith left home, saying he had extra work at the architecture firm.
As Daniel drove away, Olivia knew that he was really going to look for John. As he drove from Bellevue over the 520 bridge west to Seattle, Daniel could see a few sailboats out for an early cruise on Lake Washington. A man and woman, dressed warmly, were aboard a large one with a red and white sail, just a hundred feet or so from the bridge. As Daniel imagined he heard their laughter, he felt jealous. Man, woman, boat, water, freedom. Everything so simple for them. The shadow of Mount Rainier rose on the southern horizon. On a slightly overcast day, the mountain was just a ghost, a subtle reminder of itself, a brief memory. With unlimited visibility, the mountain was spectacular and surreal, rising as it did over the urban landscape of Seattle. Daniel knew that accidents had occurred on Seattle freeways because of drivers who were distracted by Rainier’s beauty. Local Indians had always believed that Rainier was a sacred place, not to be climbed or trivialized. Daniel wondered if any Indians had wrecked their cars because of a view of the mountain.