After quitting time, John rode the elevator down through the unfinished building. He rode with the foreman and a couple other co-workers named Jim and Jerry. Nobody knew the foreman’s name. He was simply known as the foreman. John knew these white men were mostly harmless and would live forever. They would leave work and have a few beers at the same tavern where they had been drinking together for years. They were regulars. Jim, Jerry, and the foreman would walk into the bar and all the patrons would loudly greet their arrival.
John stepped off the elevator, ignored offers to go for beers, and walked through the downtown Seattle streets. There were so many white men to choose from. Everybody was a white man in downtown Seattle. The heat and noise in his head were loud and painful. He wanted to run. He even started to run. But he stopped. He could not run. Everybody would notice. Everybody would know that he was thinking about killing white men. The police would come. John breathed deeply and started to walk slowly. He was walking in work boots and flannel shirt through Seattle, where men in work boots and flannel shirts were often seen walking. No one even noticed John. That is to say that a few people looked up from their books and a couple drivers looked away from the street long enough to notice John, then turned back to their novels and windshields. “There’s an Indian walking,” they said to themselves or companions, though Indians were often seen walking in downtown Seattle. John the Indian was walking and his audience was briefly interested, because Indians were briefly interesting. White people no longer feared Indians. Somehow, near the end of the twentieth century, Indians had become invisible, docile. John wanted to change that. He wanted to see fear in every pair of blue eyes. As John walked, his long, black hair was swept back by the same wind that watered his eyes. He walked north along the water, across the University Bridge, then east along the Burke-Gilman Trail until he was standing in a field of grass. He had made it to the wilderness. He was free. He could hunt and trap like a real Indian and grow his hair until it dragged along the ground. No. It was a manicured lawn on the University of Washington campus, and John could hear drums. He had been on the campus a few times before but had never heard drums there. He walked toward the source of the drums. At first, he thought it was Father Duncan. He was not sure why Father Duncan would be playing drums. Then he saw a crowd of Indians gathered outside a large auditorium, Hec Edmundson Pavilion. There were two drums, a few singers and dancers, and dozens of Indians watching the action. So many Indians in one place. There were white people watching, too, but John turned away from their faces. He stepped into the crowd, wanting to disappear into it. A small Indian woman was standing in front of John. She smiled.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said.
“I’m Marie. Are you a new student here?”
“No.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. She was the activities coordinator for the Native American Students Alliance at the University and thought she’d found a recruit. A potential friendship or possible romance.
“What’s your name?”
“John.”
“What tribe you are?”
He could not, would not, tell her he had been adopted as a newborn by a white couple who could not have children of their own. Along with the clipping about Father Duncan’s disappearance, John always carried the photograph of the day his parents had picked him up from the adoption agency. In the photograph, his father’s left arm is draped carefully over his mother’s shoulders, while she holds John tightly to her dry right breast. Both wear expensive, tasteful clothes. John had no idea who had taken the picture.
His adopted parents had never told him what kind of Indian he was. They did not know. They never told him anything at all about his natural parents, other than his birth mother’s age, which was fourteen. John only knew that he was Indian in the most generic sense. Black hair, brown skin and eyes, high cheekbones, the prominent nose. Tall and muscular, he looked like some cinematic warrior, and constantly intimidated people with his presence. When asked by white people, he said he was Sioux, because that was what they wanted him to be. When asked by Indian people, he said he was Navajo, because that was what he wanted to be.
“I’m Navajo,” he said to Marie.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m Spokane.”
“Father Duncan,” said John, thinking instantly of the Spokane Indian Jesuit.
“What?”
“Father Duncan was Spokane.”
“Father Duncan?” asked Marie, trying to attach significance to the name, then remembering the brief fragment of a story her parents had told her. “Oh, you mean that one who disappeared, right?”
John nodded his head. Marie was the first person he’d met, besides the Jesuits at St. Francis, who knew about Father Duncan. John trembled.
“Did you know him?” asked Marie.
“He baptized me,” said John. “He used to visit me. Then he disappeared.”
“I’m sorry,” said Marie, who was definitely not Christian. With disgust, she remembered when the Spokane Indian Assembly of God Church held a book burning on the reservation and reduced Catcher in the Rye, along with dozens of other books, to ash.
“I know a Hopi,” said Marie, trying to change the subject. “Guy named Buddy who works at the U. He’s a history teacher. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Oh, I thought you might. He hangs around with the Navajo bunch. Jeez, but they tease him something awful, too.”
John barely made eye contact with Marie. Instead, he watched all of the Indians dancing in circles on the grass. It was an illegal powwow, not approved by the University. John could figure out that much when he noticed how the dancers were trampling on the well-kept lawn. Indians were always protesting something. Marie had organized the powwow as a protest against the University’s refusal to allow a powwow. Only a few of the Indians had originally known that, but most everybody knew now, and danced all that much harder.
Marie had been organizing protests since her days on the Spokane Indian Reservation, though she had often been the only protestor. A bright child who read by age three, she had quickly passed her classmates by. When they had all been five and six years old, Marie had friends because she was smart. Everybody wanted to be smart. But as the years passed, many of Marie’s reservation friends flunked classes, lost interest, were intimidated into silence by cruel, white teachers, or simply had no energy for school because of hunger. Marie felt more and more isolated. Some bright kids were more interested in Spokane Indian culture than in a public school education. Many of those kids skipped school so they could travel to powwows or attend various cultural events. During the summer, when powwow season was really in swing, those kids were too busy to pick up books. They could speak Spokane as fluently as many elders, but they could barely read English. They were intelligent and humorous, and never wanted to leave the reservation. They had chosen that life, and Marie both resented and envied them. Because she did not dance or sing traditionally, and because she could not speak Spokane, Marie was often thought of as being less than Indian. Her parents, who did speak Spokane, had refused to teach Marie because they felt it would be of no use to her in the world outside the reservation. Her mother, the speech therapist at the tribal school, and her father, the principal, knew their bright daughter belonged in that larger world. Instead of teaching her about Spokane culture, they bought her books by the pound at pawn shops, secondhand stores, and garage sales. She read those books and many others, studied hard at school, and endured constant bullying and taunting from many of her peers. Marie learned to fight, and her best friend, Sugar, a traditional dancer and accomplished street fighter, helped. Marie fought fiercely, without control or thought. She tackled people, bit and pinched, spat and kicked. She refused to accept beatings. She always wanted revenge, and would wait until the perfect moment, which could be months later, to ambush her enemies. In one memorable instance, she had stolen a knife from the high school cafeteria and chased Double Andy across the playground. Marie had really meant to stab Double Andy. Everybody had seen the crazy look in Marie’s eyes that day and nobody bullied her for months after that. Still, her nose had been broken four times before she graduated high school.