Sherman Alexie - Indian Killer

“Ms. Polatkin, please.”

“And I called the American Indian College Fund and Wilson has never donated any time or money. About the only person who’d ever heard of Wilson was the owner of Big Heart’s, the Indian bar over on Aurora Avenue. And the owner was white.”

“Ms. Polatkin, will you please make your point.”

“Well, for somebody who is supposed to be so authentic and traditional, Wilson sure doesn’t have much to do with Indians. I mean, there are so many real Indians out there writing real Indian books. Simon Ortiz, Roberta Whiteman, Luci Tapahonso. And there’s Indian writers from the Northwest, too. Like Elizabeth Woody, Ed Edmo. And just across the border in Canada, too. Like Jeannette Armstrong. Why teach Wilson? It’s like his books are killing Indian books.”

“Are you finished now, Ms. Polatkin?” asked Dr. Mather.

“Yes.”

“Fine, may we all continue with the study of literature?”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

After class, David stopped Marie in the hallway. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. He just knew he wanted to talk to the pretty Indian woman.

“Man,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of guts, talking to a professor like that.”

Marie looked at the short, stocky white man. He was a decent-looking guy, with pale blue eyes and sandy hair.

“It doesn’t take guts to tell the truth,” she said.

“Where I’m from, it does,” he said.

“Where you from?”

“From Spokane. Well, from a farm outside of Spokane.”

“You don’t look much like a farm boy.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what my dad tells me. My brother, too.”

Marie laughed. David thought he was being charming.

“Hey,” said David. “What do you think about the scalping of that guy? Do you think an Indian could do something like that?”

Marie gave him a cold, hard stare.

“Listen,” he said, trying to change the subject. “You think maybe we could get together and study or something? I mean, I don’t know much about Indians. Maybe you could help me?”

“Help you what?”

“You know. Help me get a good grade. I mean, I know about Hemingway, but I don’t know anything about this Jack Wilson guy.”

“I don’t think so,” said Marie. “I don’t care much for study partners.”

“Oh, well, how about lunch or something? Maybe a movie?”

“Are you asking me out? For a date?” asked Marie. She wasn’t surprised. It had happened to her before. She thought David was just another white guy who wanted to rebel against his white middle-class childhood by dating a brown woman. He wouldn’t have been the first white guy to do such a thing. She had watched quite a few white guys pursue brown female students, especially Asian nationals, with a missionary passion. Go to college, find a cute minority woman, preferably one with limited English, and colonize her by sleeping with her. David Rogers wanted a guilt fuck, Marie thought, something to ease his pain.

“Uh, yeah, I guess,” said David. “Yeah, I’m asking you out.”

“I don’t date white men.”

With that, Marie turned and left David standing alone in the hallway. Disappointed, he walked home to the place he shared with his brother, Aaron, a mechanical engineering major, and two other U of W engineering students, Sean Ward and Barry Church. Sean and Barry were studying upstairs while Aaron was watching television downstairs.

“So, how was your Indian class?” Aaron asked David. He had not wanted David to take the class especially since Aaron had heard Truck Schultz reveal that a white man had been killed by an Indian. David was always taking useless classes, like African American literature and women’s literature. Yet, David had been the only male student in the women’s literature class, and Aaron certainly appreciated those odds.

“It was okay,” David said. “Only one Indian in there, though. A woman.”

Aaron saw the interest in David’s eyes.

“Is she fuckable?” Aaron asked.

David blushed.

“Oh, yeah, she must be a babe,” said Aaron. “I hear Indian women like it up the ass. Like dogs, you know?”

“She isn’t like that. She’s smart. Besides, she said she didn’t date white guys.”

“Hey, bro, that’s reverse discrimination,” said Aaron and turned back to the television, where Robert De Niro and John Savage were playing a game of Russian roulette with some Viet Cong soldiers. De Niro held the pistol against his temple and pulled the trigger.

“MR. RUSSELL, COULD YOU please tell us what you saw on the Burke-Gilman Trail that night?”

“I’m sorry, Officer, I was really drunk. I barely remember anything from that night.”

“You were with a group of friends?”

“Yeah, we’d just come from one party and were headed for another.”

“One of your friends said you all ran into, how did she say it, a shadow carrying a white guy on his shoulder. That sounds pretty memorable to me. She said you talked to this so-called shadow.”

“I don’t remember, Officer. I mean, I just don’t remember.”

“What did this shadow look like?”

“I don’t remember. I remember long hair. But that’s it. I don’t think any of my friends remember much, do they?”

“It’s pretty sketchy.”

“Officer, can I be honest?”

“That’s what we want you to be.”

“Well, you see, there was this fog that night. Not like a real fog. But something else was happening, you know? It’s like when you get real drunk and nothing seems real. You know how that feels? Well, it was like that, except worse. It was like everything was turned around. Up was down, left was right. I mean, I started looking at my friend Darren and thinking he was pretty damn cute. It was like everything went contrary, you know?”

“Did you take any drugs that night?”

“No, Officer. I was just drunk. And I know this sounds crazy. But you know what I think? I think I don’t remember anything about that night because somebody wants me not to remember.”

JOHN WAS WALKING IN a cold, persistent rain. He was not sure where he walked, or how he came to arrive at his apartment building in Ballard, the Scandinavian neighborhood of Seattle north of downtown.

John lived in one of the few areas in Ballard with trees still left in the yards. The Scandinavian immigrants who’d settled Ballard had cut down most of the trees upon their arrival. The Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians had missed the monotonously flat landscapes of their own countries, and wanted their new country to remind them of home. Since the first days of their colonization of the Americas, European immigrants had strived to make the New World look exactly like the Old. They either found similar geographical or climatic locations, such as the Swedes had in Minnesota and the Germans in North Dakota, or they plowed, tunneled, clear-cut, and sculpted the land into something ethnically pleasing.

All John knew was that everything in this country had been changed, mutated. He kept walking. He had been walking for hours. He was exhausted. He made his way upstairs to his apartment and, fully dressed, climbed into bed, but Father Duncan kept him awake. No. He had briefly fallen asleep, but Father Duncan shouted him awake. No. The phone was ringing and John refused to answer it. He knew it was his parents, trying to contact him. Then, a knocking on the door. His parents again. They always showed up in the middle of the night, hoping to catch John when his defenses were down.

“John, sweetheart,” said Olivia. “Let us in. We’ve brought some food. Some breakfast. We’ve got oranges. Donuts. Wouldn’t you like some breakfast?”