“Every time they find a white guy, how come they think the Indian Killer did it?”
Reggie stared hard at Wilson. Ty took a step back. Wilson could feel the tension in the room. He could see Reggie’s blue eyes darken with anger. As casually as possible, Wilson reached inside his coat, and kept his hand there. Wilson had known Reggie for a while, had sat with him, and had tolerated the insults. Wilson had thought it all in good fun, but now he wondered if he had been mistaken.
“You know an Indian guy named John Smith?” asked Wilson with just the slightest tremor in his voice.
Reggie shook his head. Ty made no response.
“I know him,” said a woman.
All three men turned to look at Fawn, who had been watching the confrontation, along with everybody else in Big Heart’s.
“Don’t talk to him, Fawn,” said Reggie. “He’s full of shit.”
Fawn ignored Reggie.
“I danced with John the other night,” Fawn said to Wilson. “He was kind of weird. Good-looking. But off, you know?”
Wilson took the photograph out of his pocket and showed it to Fawn. Reggie stepped closer to Wilson.
“Yeah, that’s him,” said Fawn. “See what I mean? Good-looking. But goofy.”
“You think he’s dangerous?” Wilson asked.
“John? No way. Reggie’s the dangerous one. Reggie and his dipshit sidekicks beat up John. Enit, Reggie?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Reggie said. “He’s a cop.”
“An ex-cop,” corrected Ty. Reggie silenced him with a rude hand gesture. Reggie took another step closer to Wilson, who reached further into his jacket. Reggie noticed and reached inside his jacket.
Nobody moved or said a word. Wilson looked around the room. The Indians stared at him with suspicion, bemusement, anger, and outright disgust. Wilson knew he had crossed some invisible boundary. His presence in the bar had been tolerated only because he had agreed to the terms of an unwritten treaty. Now he had broken the rules and smashed the treaty into pieces. Wilson could hear the alarms ringing in his head. He was not surprised that they sounded like drums. With his hand inside his jacket, he edged toward the door.
“You ain’t being so friendly now, Casper,” said Reggie, cutting off Wilson’s path to the door. Wilson glanced at Ty, who took a few steps backward. Good, thought Wilson, he was not going to get involved. Yet Wilson still felt like an idiot. He knew he had taken everything for granted. He was all alone in a hostile place.
“You think you’re so smart,” said Reggie. “You come in here acting all Indian, thinking you fit in, thinking you belong. I got news for you, Casper. We only let you hang around because it was fun to pitch you shit. You just ate all of that shit up and swallowed it down. You just took our shit and bought us drinks. We’ve been playing you hard, Casper. You don’t belong here, man, you never did.”
“Reggie,” said Wilson, searching for a way out. “I’m trying to decide if you’ve got a gun in your jacket. Maybe a blade instead. Or maybe you’re bluffing. Maybe it’s just your wallet. Or your comb. And I bet you’re wondering what I have my hand on, aren’t you? Do I have a knife, a pistol? I’m an ex-cop. I got to have a piece, right? Now, I was never Billy the Kid when I was working, and I’ve gotten older and slower, but I’m willing to bet that I’m fast enough to beat you. What do you think?”
With his hand inside his jacket, Reggie smiled at the mystery writer. Wilson was old and fat. He limped. He was going bald. Reggie smiled. Very slowly, he pulled his empty hand out of his jacket and showed it to Wilson.
“How, white man,” said Reggie in a sternly cinematic Indian voice, which caused the whole bar to break into laughter. One small battle was over. Suddenly the victor because he had shamed Wilson, Reggie triumphantly stepped out of Wilson’s way. With his hand still inside the jacket, Wilson edged toward the exit. He saw the smiling faces of the Indians as he backed out of the bar. Fawn was shaking her head. As the door closed behind him, Wilson heard the entire bar erupt into laughter.
19. Running
JOHN RAN UNTIL HE COULD barely breathe. He ran down the alleys into the dark beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct. He thought he might find safety there among the other Indians. But John could not find any Indians. He walked by the loading dock near Pioneer Square and found no Indians. From beneath the Viaduct, he peered north up toward the Union Gospel Mission and saw no Indians waiting to enter. No Indians in Occidental Park. No Indians among the homeless sleeping in cardboard houses down near the ferry docks. All the Indians had left the city and deserted John. He reeled with shock and fell to the ground. He pounded the pavement with his fists. He set his forehead against the damp cement and tried to quiet the noise in his head.
John was still prone on the ground when the 4Runner pulled up next to him. Aaron and Barry quickly climbed out of the pickup and jumped John, who curled into a fetal ball as protection. John could hear nothing now except the thud of boots against his body and the attackers’ violent exhalations of breath. There were no voices, no music, no wind or rain. He heard neither the sudden screeching of brakes nor the shouted curses when Marie pulled up in her sandwich truck and confronted the white boys who were beating him.
“Hey, hey, get away from him!” shouted Marie. She held a butter knife in her left hand.
Aaron and Barry stopped beating John long enough to look at Marie. She was a tiny Indian woman holding a butter knife, for God’s sake, and she was all alone.
“Get the fuck out of here,” threatened Aaron. Then he recognized Marie from his brother’s Native American literature class. “Oh, you fucking bitch. You’re next, you’re next.”
Barry heard something new and more dangerous in Aaron’s voice.
“You heard me,” said Marie, her voice steady and strong. “Get away from him.”
Aaron looked down at John, who was still curled into a ball. He looked back at Marie.
“Fuck you,” Aaron said and took a step toward Marie. She held the butter knife out in front of her.
“That’s all you got?” asked Aaron as he took another step closer to Marie.
Marie smiled.
“What you smiling at, bitch?”
She was still smiling when Boo opened the back door of the sandwich van and three Indian men and three Indian women stormed out. They were a ragtag bunch of homeless warriors in soiled clothes and useless shoes. But when John looked up from the ground, he saw those half-warriors attack the white boys. The Indians were weak from malnutrition and various diseases, but they kicked, scratched, and slapped with a collective rage. John wondered how those Indians could still fight after all they had been through. He had seen Indians like that before, sleeping in doorways, on heating vents outside city hall, in cardboard condominiums. He did not understand their courage, how they could keep fighting when all he wanted to do was close his eyes and fade into the pavement. The fight was quick and brutal. Two Indian men, clutching their stomachs, had fallen to the pavement. One Indian woman with a bloody mouth leaned against a car. Barry and Aaron fought their way through the remaining Indians and into their pickup.
“Get us out of here!” shouted Barry, who would notice his missing teeth later in jail. Aaron, who would notice the broken bones in his right hand when he fought the police officer who’d come to arrest him, dropped the car into gear and nearly ran over an Indian man as he careened off another car, jumped a curb, and drove away.
The Indians were celebrating their victory as Marie knelt beside John.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
John rolled over and looked up into Marie’s eyes.