Sherman Alexie - Indian Killer

“Hey, let’s be cool about this. I don’t want any problems,” the white man said.

The killer moved quickly. With fingers wrapped around the handle, the killer snapped the knife out of its handmade sheath. The killer’s feet moved forward, and the sharp blade forced its way into the white man’s belly.

The killer had not necessarily meant for any of it to happen. The killer picked up the white man’s body, carried it on a shoulder, and walked along the trail in a daze. A group of UW students staggered past, on their way home from some party, and laughed loudly at the killer. The killer stopped, ready to drop the body, and run.

“Shit, you’re a strong one, huh?” one of the students slurred to the killer, and then tugged on the white man’s leg. “Jesus, you got wasted, huh? Shit, wake up, wake up. The party’s just starting.”

The white man groaned and shifted. The killer was surprised that the man was still alive. His blood ran down the killer’s back.

“Shit,” said the student. “Don’t you two be doing anything nasty now, huh?” Laughter. “You’re both going to be hating it in the morning. Hangover City, you’ll be hating it.”

The students laughed and staggered away. The killer watched them go, breathed deeply, and kept walking down the trail. The killer wanted to drop the body and leave it where it landed, but felt responsible for the white man. Honestly, the killer had not necessarily meant to hurt him and wanted to make sure the man was buried properly. There had to be a ceremony, a wake, silent prayers. That was how it was done. The killer had learned many ceremonies, but rarely practiced them.

The killer walked off the trail into a dark neighborhood. Silently singing an invisibility song learned from a dream, the killer carried the body to an empty house. A FOR SALE sign. Bare windows. A broken lock on the back door. The killer carried the body inside the house and gently set it on the living room floor. Kneeling beside the body, the killer cut the white man’s scalp away and stuffed the bloody souvenir into a pocket. So much blood. The killer was drenched with blood, soaking shirt, jacket, and pants. The blood was beautiful but not enough. One dead man was not enough. The killer was disappointed. Disappointment grew quickly into anger, then rage, and the killer brought the knife down into the white man’s chest again and again. Still not satiated, the killer knew there was more work to do. The dead man’s blue eyes were open and still, pupils dilated. With hands curved into talons, the killer tore the white man’s eyes from his face and swallowed them whole. The killer then pulled two white owl feathers out of another pocket, and set them on the white man’s chest. Blood soon soaked into the feathers, staining them a dark red.

“HELLO OUT THERE, FOLKS, this is Truck Schultz on KWIZ, the Voice of Reason, and boy, do I have a problem!”

Schultz sat in the radio station, smoking a cigar, drinking coffee. A tall, muscular white man with a receding hairline, blue eyes, and large ears, he was the host of the most popular talk-radio show in the city and was ready to go national, sure that he would be more popular than Rush Limbaugh. Truck had started with a late-night jazz show on KWIZ a few years earlier. Not long after conservative radio hit it big, KWIZ changed its format to talk and Truck became a star. His promotional billboards were everywhere: KEEP ON TRUCKIN’! Now Truck had a hundred thousand listeners and a drive-time slot. He never played jazz anymore. Leaning close to his microphone, Truck exhaled a cloud of thick, gray smoke and spoke loudly and clearly.

“Through my sources in the Seattle Police Department, I’ve just learned that the body of a white man was discovered in a house in Fremont early this morning. My sources say that the man was scalped and ritually mutilated. That’s right, folks. Scalped and ritually mutilated. My sources say certain evidence makes it clear that an American Indian might be responsible for this crime. My sources would not reveal what that evidence was, but they did make it clear that only an Indian, or a person intimately familiar with Indian culture, would know to leave such evidence behind. What do you think, folks? Give me a call.”

A FEW DAYS AFTER she met John Smith at the protest powwow, Marie Polatkin walked into the evening section of the Introduction to Native American Literature class for the first time. The professor had not yet arrived. The students were gossiping about the dead body that had been discovered in an empty house in Fremont.

“Yeah,” said one older white woman. “I read he was scalped.”

“Yeah,” said a white man. “Like an Indian would do it.”

“An Indian?”

“Yeah, Indians started that whole scalping business.”

“Oh, that’s spooky. And here we are, in an Indian class. I just got the shivers.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Marie said as she sat at a desk near the front. “The French were the first to scalp people in this country. Indians just copied them.”

The white students all stared at Marie, saw that she was Indian, and then turned back to their conversation.

“I bet it was one of those serial killers,” said another white woman.

“Yes,” said a third white woman. “There’s something in the water here. I mean, we’ve got the Green River Killer, Ted Bundy, the I-5 Killer. We, like, raise them here or something.”

Marie tried to ignore the morbid discussion. She was more concerned about the professor. She’d signed up for the class because she’d heard that Dr. Clarence Mather, the white professor, supposedly loved Indians, or perhaps his idea of Indians, and gave them good grades. But he was also a Wannabe Indian, a white man who wanted to be Indian, and Marie wanted to challenge Mather’s role as the official dispenser of “Indian education” at the University.

“He always wants to sweat with Indian students, or share the peace pipe, or sit at a drum and sing,” Binky, a Yakama woman, had said. “He’s kind of icky. He really fawns over the women, you know what I mean? Real Indian lover, that one.”

Still, in spite of and because of Dr. Mather, Marie assumed she’d be one of many Indians in the class, all looking for an easy grade. But she’d been wrong in her assumptions. She was the only Indian in the class. When Mather walked into the class, he was wearing a turquoise bolo tie, and his gray hair was tied back in a ponytail.

While Marie was surprised by the demographics of the class, she was completely shocked by the course reading list. One of the books, The Education of Little Tree , was supposedly written by a Cherokee Indian named Forrest Carter. But Forrest Carter was actually the pseudonym for a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Three of the other books, Black Elk Speaks, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions , and Lakota Woman , were taught in almost every Native American Literature class in the country, and purported to be autobiographical, though all three were co-written by white men. Black Elk himself had disavowed his autobiography, a fact that was conveniently omitted in any discussion of the book. The other seven books included three anthologies of traditional Indian stories edited by white men, two nonfiction studies of Indian spirituality written by white women, a book of traditional Indian poetry translations edited by a Polish-American Jewish man, and an Indian murder mystery written by some local white writer named Jack Wilson, who claimed he was a Shilshomish Indian. On the recommendation of a white classmate, Marie had read one of Wilson’s novels a few months before the class. She’d hated the book and seriously doubted that its author was Indian, or much of a writer. She’d done some research on his background and found a lot of inconsistencies.