“John was such a gentle boy,” said Olivia. “He wouldn’t even kill bugs. Really. Me, I’m terrified of spiders. Just phobic. I remember this one time, John couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, and I was cleaning the upstairs bathroom. I can remember it like it was yesterday, you know?”
Wilson nodded his head, and glanced at his watch.
“I even remember the song on the radio. The Beatles. That strawberry song, remember? I was singing with the radio, cleaning the bathtub, when this huge spider came out of the drain. I screamed like crazy. Daniel, my husband, was at work. It must have been summer because John was home. He heard my screaming and he came running, you know, to save Mommy. I was trying to smash that spider with my shoe when John came into the bathroom. He just screamed at me, ‘No, no!’ and then I smashed that spider flat.”
Wilson walked a few steps closer to Olivia, who seemed lost in the memory.
“Oh, God, he cried over that spider. Just bawled. Made me bury it in the backyard. We even had a funeral. Isn’t that funny?”
Olivia looked up at Wilson and smiled. He smiled and nodded his head.
“Mrs. Smith,” said Wilson. “He sounds like a good boy.”
“He was,” said Olivia. “He was.”
“You don’t have any idea where he is?”
Olivia sat up in the chair, wiped her face again, sensing Wilson’s impatience.
“No, Mr. Wilson, I have no idea.”
Wilson took the foreman’s photograph out of his pocket and showed it to Olivia.
“Is this your son?”
Olivia stared at the photograph of her son, his face empty and dark.
“That’s John,” she said.
Wilson tucked the photograph back into his pocket and turned to leave.
“Thank you, Mrs. Smith,” said Wilson as he opened the door.
“Mr. Wilson,” said Olivia just before he closed the door behind him.
“Yes.”
“If you see John, tell him to come home.”
Wilson left Olivia alone at the table. He raced down the stairs and jumped into his pickup. He figured he could find John or somebody who knew John at Big Heart’s. As he drove away, Olivia watched him from the apartment window. She knew that everything was going wrong, but she felt powerless to stop it. Her husband was probably asleep on the couch in his study. That’s how it must be. He had been too tired to walk up the stairs to bed, so he slipped off his shoes and pants, loosened his tie, and then curled up on the couch. He had probably called out to her, had not received a response, and had assumed she was asleep. That was how it must be. He was asleep on the couch, wearing a nice shirt and loosened tie. A decent man, he was probably dreaming about his son. Daniel twisting and turning in his sleep. All of it quickly becoming a nightmare. Olivia loved her husband. She watched Wilson’s pickup until it disappeared into the rest of the city. He drove north. Olivia looked south toward downtown Seattle and counted the number of streetlights. One, two, three, then ten, then more. She counted until there were none left to be counted, and then she began again.
16. Marie
MARIE AND BOO SET out to deliver their sandwiches on that last night. They drove from the Belltown shelter south toward Pioneer Square. A white van. Three traffic signals. Red light, stop. Green light, go. A stop sign that was mostly ignored. Intermittent wipers sweeping against the windshield every few seconds.
“You know,” Boo said. “You’re like the ice cream man in this truck. Remember how they used to play that music? Man, you could hear those trucks from miles away. We should hook some music up to this rig, don’t you think? We’d have homeless folks just chasing us down the street.”
Marie laughed. She stopped when she saw King staggering across the street. His face bloody. Marie helped King into the truck and saw that his wounds were not that serious. She bandaged him up with the first-aid kit. King told her that two white guys in a pickup had jumped him.
“Jeez,” King had said. “They would’ve killed me, I think. But some other white guys broke it up.”
Marie looked at King. She saw that blood and recognized it, knew that Indian blood had often spilled on American soil. She knew there were people to blame for that bloodshed. She felt a beautiful kind of anger. On the Spokane Indian Reservation, an old Indian woman grew violently red roses in the same ground where five Indian women were slaughtered by United States Cavalry soldiers.
17. Catholicism
SEATTLE POLICE OFFICER RANDY Peone turned from Denny onto Third in downtown Seattle and saw a barefoot old Indian man staggering down the street.
“Officer, Officer,” the old man slurred. “I want to report a crime.”
“What crime?” asked Peone.
“I’ve been assaulted.”
The old man’s face was a mess of cuts and bruises. His left eye would be swollen shut in the morning.
“Who assaulted you?” asked Peone.
“A bunch of white kids,” said the old man. “They stole my shoes.”
The officer looked down at the old man’s bare feet. They were stained with years of dirt and fungus. Peone figured the old man was delusional. Who would want to steal the shoes that had covered those feet? But the old man was in a bad state, and there had been a number of racial attacks since the Indian Killer case became public, and especially since that white kid had been kidnapped. Though the child was safely home now, the Indian Killer was still at large.
“What’s your name?” Peone asked the old man.
“Lester,” he said.
Peone climbed out of the cruiser, tucked the old man into the back seat, jumped back into the car, and radioed the dispatcher.
“Dispatch,” said Peone. “This is unit twelve. I’ve got me a drunk who needs a band-aid and bath. I’m taking him to detox.”
Peone was on his way when he passed John Smith kneeling on the sidewalk farther north on Third. John was singing loudly and had attracted a small crowd. He was also holding a pair of shoes that could barely be defined as shoes. Peone figured he had found the man who had beaten up the old guy and stolen his shoes. These two Indians were probably buddies and had fought over the last drink in the jug. He pulled up close to John and turned his flashing lights on. The red and blue distracted John from his singing. Peone looked at John. A big guy, thought the officer, who only briefly considered calling for backup.
“Hey, there,” Peone said as he walked up to John, who was still entranced by the flashing lights.
“He’s crazy,” said a guy from the crowd that had gathered. “He’s singing church songs.”
The crowd laughed. Officer Peone looked at John and wondered which mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be-crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except for the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets.