Along with speculation about the identity of the Indian Killer came the disturbing news of several racially motivated attacks. An Indian man had been attacked on the Burke-Gilman Trail by three masked men swinging baseball bats. An Indian couple had been brutally beaten by those masked men and were now in the hospital with fractured skulls and other injuries.
Wilson finished the newspaper and breakfast, washed the bowl and spoon, and dressed. He had work to do. He combed his hair, brushed his teeth, locked the apartment door behind him, and caught a bus downtown to Occidental Park in Pioneer Square. It had been more than ten years since he’d walked a beat in the Square. But he knew the street where the homeless Indians still hung out, and they could have some answers.
He stepped off the bus a couple blocks away from Occidental Park and heard the music. It was a Thursday. Wilson remembered that the Pioneer Square Business Owners Committee had decided, whatever the weather, to hold outdoor concerts in Occidental Park every Thursday at noon. It was not much of a park, one city block filled with benches and bad publicly funded sculpture. No grass and no flowers, just red brick pavement covered with cigarette butts and graffiti. Skinny trees grew at regular intervals. The merchants had convinced the city that holding concerts in the park would attract more tourists to the downtown area, but there was a problem. Occidental Park was a gathering place for dozens of homeless people. So every Thursday morning around ten, the Seattle Police Department quietly drove the homeless out of the park. By noon, it would be filled with tourists. Around one in the afternoon, the homeless would begin filtering back in. By five, the park would once again belong to the street people.
Wilson walked into the park just as the street people were starting to return. Due to the Indian Killer threat, police patrols had been increased, and five cops walked through the park. Some band played an unidentifiable mix of trumpets, piano, strange-looking guitars, and voices. Everybody in the band was white. One homeless white guy in a wheelchair had rolled himself right next to the stage. He was loudly singing along with the band. The musicians gave him angry looks, but the homeless guy was probably a better singer than any of them. Wilson watched that scene for a while, but he was looking for Indians. A few dozen Indians were regulars in and around Pioneer Square, as Indians had been when Wilson was a rookie cop. Some of those walking slowly in the Square were the sons and daughters of Indians from Wilson’s youth.
A local phone company had set up a promotional display at the south end of the park. Anyone could make a free three-minute long-distance call to anywhere in the country. All people had to do was to leave their names and current phone numbers, so they could be subjected to dozens of calls from minimum-wage telephone solicitors. There were six telephones and a pile of directories. A smiling woman answered questions.
Wilson sat on a bench near the telephones. For a while, he watched tourists surprising people back home. One vacationing man made an anonymous semi-obscene phone call to his boss back in Wisconsin. Amused and bored at the same time, Wilson was about to leave when he noticed an Indian man leaning against a tree about twenty feet from the phones. He was obviously homeless. Dressed in dirty clothes, shoes taped together, broken veins and deep creases crossing his face. The Indian might have been twenty or fifty. There was no way of knowing for sure. Slowly, the Indian man made his way closer to the phones. Wilson watched him. The Indian stood next to a traveling salesman making a call home to his wife. Wilson stood up and carefully walked closer. He did not want to scare the Indian guy away. Wilson felt he still looked like a cop.
“Yeah, it’s been fun,” said the salesman into the telephone. “It’s been raining a little, but not like they say. I could see the mountains. Yeah, this Indian Killer thing is going on. No, I’m not worried. You know how it is.”
As the businessman talked, the Indian moved closer to the phone. Wilson moved closer, too. The Indian smelled bad. The businessman wrinkled his nose, finished his conversation, hung up the phone. He looked at the Indian with disdain, and then quickly walked away. The Indian picked up the phone and held it to his ear.
“Can I help you, sir?” asked the telephone woman. She looked at the Indian as if he were contagious. She said “sir” like anybody else would have said “asshole.” She wondered if he was the Indian Killer, but decided this man couldn’t have hurt anyone in his condition.
“I want to make a call,” said the Indian.
“And where might you be calling?” asked the telephone woman.
“Home,” said the Indian. “My reservation.”
“And where, precisely, is your reservation, sir?”
“Montana.”
The telephone woman assessed him. This promotion was certainly not targeted at him. But she was just a temporary employee anyway, and who wants to get into an argument with a homeless Indian in downtown Seattle? She read from her list of questions.
“Sir, who’s your current long-distance carrier?”
“What?” asked the Indian.
“Who’s your current long-distance carrier?”
“Oh. The Moccasin Telegraph.”
“Are you happy with their service?”
“You bet. They’re loud and proud.”
“And what other long-distance carriers have you had?”
“Oh. You mean like smoke signals?”
“Sure, like smoke signals.”
“Well, then, I had smoke signals.”
“And were you happy with their service?”
“Damn right I was.”
“Have you ever employed Pacific Sun as your long-distance carrier?”
“No, who’s that?”
“We’re Pacific Sun, sir. Would you ever consider using our service?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, then,” said the telephone woman as she handed the Indian a clipboard and pen. “Sign here and fill in your address and current phone number here.”
“No problem,” said the Indian as he filled out the form with bogus information.
“Use that phone there,” the telephone woman said. “You’ve got three minutes.”
Amazed, Wilson watched as the Indian dialed the telephone, surprised the telephone woman had played along. The Indian closed his eyes in concentration, slowly pulling each digit from some phone number in his past. Wilson wanted to know who the Indian was calling. A grandmother? Parents? Lover?
As Wilson edged closer and eavesdropped on the conversation, Marie Polatkin watched it all from across the street. She was sitting in her sandwich van, waiting for the concert to end. The ten-year-old van was white, with “Seattle Open Heart Mission” painted crudely on both sides. Inside the van, there was a driver’s seat, a passenger seat, and a dozen bakery racks, enough to hold hundreds of sandwiches.
Marie had been watching Wilson since he first walked into the park. She had recognized him from the author photograph on the back of his book she’d been forced to study in her Native American literature class. Dr. Mather had told the class that Wilson was going to be giving a public reading at the Elliott Bay Book Company soon, and he was giving extra credit to anybody who attended. Marie planned to go, but she certainly wasn’t going to sit quietly and listen to Wilson tell lies. She had read some interview where Wilson had proudly revealed that his great-grandfather or uncle or somebody had a little Indian blood. She couldn’t understand the gall of such people. After all, she had a little bit of white blood, but that damn sure did not make her white. She looked in the rearview mirror of the van and saw what anyone would see reflected, an Indian woman. Dark eyes and hair, brown skin. She could not be white if she wanted to be white. And she had wanted to be white more than once. When she was nine years old, sitting on the front porch, she had rubbed her face with a piece of her dad’s sandpaper, trying to get rid of her color. Her skin was raw and bloody when she quit, still Indian. Now she was proud of being Indian, but it wasn’t a simple feeling. In the eyes of the white world, any Indian woman was the same as all other Indian women. Only white people got to be individuals. They could be anybody they wanted to be. White people, especially those with the most minute amount of tribal blood, thought they became Indian just by saying they were Indian. A number of those pretend Indians called themselves mixed-bloods and wrote books about the pain of living in both the Indian and white worlds. Those mixed-blood writers never admitted their pale skin was a luxury. After all, Marie couldn’t dress up like a white woman when she went to job interviews. But a mixed-blood writer could put on a buckskin jacket, a few turquoise rings, braid his hair, and he’d suddenly be an Indian. Those mixed-bloods could choose to be Indian or white, depending on the social or business situation. Marie never had the opportunity to make that choice. She was a brown baby at birth, born to a brown mother and brown father.