Tim Green - Exact Revenge

I cock myself their way on the stool and buy them a drink. He’s a math teacher in Union Springs. She’s a psychologist from Seneca Falls. Every nice weekend in the summer, they get on their bikes and ride across the state. He rides a 1953 Indian Chief.

“Rebuilt it myself,” he says, throwing back his shoulders. He butts out his Marlboro and his eyes take on a sheen. “One of the ones they made in their last order for the New York City police.”

I tell them I’m a lawyer from Syracuse with a summer cottage halfway up the lake. We communicate all this by leaning close and yelling above the sound of the band and the noise of the bar. Through the window, I can see the throng swaying with their hands in the air. People start taking off their shirts.

The math teacher finishes off his Saranac Ale and staggers to his feet.

“Be right back,” he says, clasping my shoulder and using it to keep from falling on his face.

He disappears around the corner where the bathrooms are before the girlfriend stretches a smile across her face, blushes, and says, “Me too.”

She slips off her stool. I put two more twenties on the bar, ask the bartender for another round and whatever the big guys next to me are drinking too. This keeps him busy while I slip the keychain over the lip of the bar and into the pocket of my baggy shorts.

I wait for them to come back and start working on their fresh drinks before I excuse myself for the bathroom. I push through the bar and around the corner. Left is the bathrooms, right is the front door. I go right. Across a small lane is a two-tiered stone parking lot. The Indian Chief is up in the second lot alongside an orange Honda 650. They’re parked between a white van and an old Ford Escort.

I look around quick, then mount up. I had a dirt bike growing up, so I know how to drive, but I’ve never been on something as big and heavy as this. I take it easy down Route 38 into Moravia, scanning ahead of me for the flashing lights of a roadblock.

It’s too soon for that, though, and instead of making a right in the center of town to keep going south on 38, I pull over under a streetlamp to check my map. Straight through the intersection takes me out of town on 38A. Less than a mile after that, I turn off onto a farm road and weave my way across the bottom of Skaneateles, past Glen Haven, through Otisco, across Interstate 81, and on up the other side of Syracuse on Route 46.

Sometime after I was born, in a brief fit of nostalgia, my mother bundled me up and took me to the reservation to show me off to her older half sister. A week later, my mother received a proud phone call from her sister. Of her own volition, the sister had registered me as a member of the tribe. Because my mother was a Mohawk, I was a Mohawk too. Nothing to be overly proud of in the Onondaga Nation, but still, one of the people.

With that lineage came certain rights. For the same reason my father and Black Turtle had been able to line up some help for me to leave the country at the end of my trial, I zigzag my way up along the Adirondack State Park. Sticking to back roads, I go through towns like Ava, Lowville, and Colton all the way to the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation.

I ease the big Chief down Route 37 onto the reservation and into the town of Hogansburg. Right there off the highway is a long single-story building, newly built. Longhouse of the twenty-first century. The Akwesasne Casino. The sky is beginning to lighten in the east as I pull into the lot. I am teetering on exhaustion until I see a bundle of newspapers that have been tossed onto the curb. I yank one out from beneath the plastic band and search for news of my escape. There is nothing. Yet. I know by the evening edition, my face will make page three at the least.

Inside, I am greeted by a weary-eyed Mohawk whose nameplate reads: UNCLE BUCK. Behind him a single blackjack table is illuminated in the gloomy cavern. A sluggish set of players take their cards from a big red-lipped blonde who just might be a transvestite.

I step into a small grill for a coffee and some eggs. Real eggs. I devour them and order four more, over easy, sopping up the yolk with buttered whole-wheat toast. I wash it down with the sweetest orange juice I’ve ever tasted. The coffee too is rich and it energizes me from the inside out. I pay with a hundred-dollar bill from 1977. That kind of bill might raise eyebrows, but this is a casino and I leave a tip that’s good, but not crazy enough to draw attention.

I return to the entrance, where Uncle Buck is affable enough and apologetic that the casino has no hotel. He tries to direct me across the border to the Canadian side of the reservation and a Best Western, but I know there will be customs agents at the bridge and, rather than risk it, tell him I want something local.

He shrugs. The only place in town is the Rest Inn Motel.

“People complain sometimes that you can smell the cow pasture,” he says, “but there’s a good gal that runs it.”

“I grew up near cows,” I say with a smile. “Will she mind me showing up at this hour? I’ve been riding all night.”

“No,” he says, his teeth gleaming beneath his regal nose. “She’s used to all kinds of things with the casino here now.”

My pride in the nation to which I am officially a member continues to deflate as I pass by sagging and decrepit one- and two-story homes with yard dogs snapping after me without restraint. The road needs repair and the scent of filth wafts up out of the ditch, reminding me of the prison’s belly.

The motel owner is a stout middle-aged Mohawk woman. I slip her my last hundred and tell her I’d like to pay for two nights. Her small dark eyes look deep into mine before she smiles and gives me a key. I draw the shades and use the bathroom before I lie down on top of the bed and fall into the pit of sleep.

I don’t know what time it is when I wake up, but I know what woke me.

The cold barrel of a revolver is tickling my nose.

THERE ARE THREE OF THEM. All Indians. All younger than me. Late twenties, early thirties. Long dark hair, flat angry mouths, and scowling brown eyes.

The smallest one has the gun. The two by the door are goons.

“You came to the wrong place to pass your shit, white man,” the little one says with a low growl, flipping a hundred-dollar bill at me with his free hand. “We’re gonna send you on your way, but we got a little present for you first. Get up.”

I get up off the bed with my hands in the air. The gun is still pressed into my nose. I glance down at the bill on the bed and see that it’s my own 1977 Ben Franklin. I need to use the bathroom and I tell them.

“You can piss your pants you got to go that bad,” the little one says.

The two goons snicker and they shove me out into the bright daylight. Puffy white clouds on a field of blue. The stout motel owner is scowling at me from the shadow of the porch in front of the office. Her hands are on her hips. My stolen motorcycle has already been loaded into the back of a big dark green Chevy with an extended cab.

They drive me down Route 37. Another pickup with a bed full of Indian men follows us. We pull over in a field behind a big billboard that welcomes the rest of the world to the St. Regis Indian Reservation. The biggest goon shoves me out of the truck. The other one dumps the bike out of the back and it crashes to the ground. The other truck pulls up. Everyone piles out and they make a loose circle around me. The little one they all call Bonaparte stuffs the pistol into the waist of his jeans, walks over to the bike, and pisses on it.

“I wasn’t trying to pass anything off on you,” I say for the tenth time, “and I’m not a white man. My mother was a Mohawk.”

“We’re Akwesasne,” the little one, Bonaparte, says, zipping up his fly.