Sherman Alexie - Indian Killer

Near tears, John breathed deeply and deliberately. He did not want to cry. His chest burned. He looked around the office. He saw the walnut desk, the bookshelves stacked thick with books that had not been touched in years. Various diplomas hung on the wall, a photograph of Mr. Taylor standing near the Pope.

“Are you hurt?” asked Mr. Taylor, a tall, chubby white man in an ugly sport coat. He was the first principal in St. Francis’s history who was not a priest, although he frequently described himself as having been the best altar boy in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

“John,” said Mr. Taylor again. “Are you hurt?”

John shook his head.

“Well, then,” said the principal. “Tell me what happened.”

“Michael was,” John began. “He was insulting my mother. He was saying ugly things.”

Mr. Taylor knew how the boys saw Olivia Smith.

“John,” the principal said, “I’m going to tell you something, but it cannot leave this office. Agreed?”

“Okay,” John said. He was crying now.

“Michael is a jerk. Why did you listen to him? You’re a good kid, John. You should just ignore him. He was trying to get a rise out of you.”

John was shocked. Not just that this man knew Michael was wrong, but shocked at the same time that this offense could be trivialized.

“Don’t act so surprised,” said Mr. Taylor. “I’m not as out of it as all of you think I am. I know what goes on. Next time, you just walk away from him, okay?”

“Okay,” John agreed, knowing that he could not walk away from any of it, but knowing that Father Duncan had walked away into the desert.

“Okay, then,” said the principal and handed John a tissue. “Clean up your face and go back to class. I’ll deal with Michael.”

John stood to leave the office. Before he closed the door behind him, John turned back.

“Thanks,” John said, always the polite student, wanting to push his anger into a small place.

“You’re welcome.”

John left the St. Francis principal’s office and nearly stepped off the girder he was walking on ten years later. He looked at the ground thirty-seven floors below. Three hundred and seventy feet, give or take a few. The foreman was yelling at him.

“Quit your daydreaming and get to work.”

John looked at the foreman, who had begun to speak a whole new language. All of his words sounded foreign. John spoke high school French and German, knew a few Spanish phrases, and had a decent Catholic student’s knowledge of Latin, but the foreman’s language was something else entirely. He had always been a good boss, even though he had never spoken at a volume that John could tolerate, but John did not trust him anymore. Whenever the foreman was close, John quickly evaluated his escape routes and identified potential weapons. He never allowed the foreman to stand between him and the elevator. This resulted in strange conversations. John pretended to talk to the foreman, who hardly ever said anything that made sense. But if the foreman blocked his path to the elevator, John grew more and more nervous. He kept moving and talking, talking and moving, until he was closer to the elevator than to the foreman. The foreman was not stupid. He knew that John was acting strangely.

“I don’t know,” the foreman would often say to his other workers. “That John is acting pretty damn strange lately.”

“Lately?” somebody would usually ask. “He’s always been a little off. How do you tell the difference?”

“But he’s a good worker,” another man would usually put in.

“That’s true,” everybody would always agree. “He is that.”

Whatever the other men felt, the foreman genuinely worried about John. They had never been friends, had never shared one moment of recognizable camaraderie, but after years of working with him, the foreman had learned a few personal details about John. He knew that John was an Indian, that was obvious enough, but he had been raised by a white couple. The foreman did not know how that must have felt to son and parents. It did not make any emotional sense to him, but he knew that John barely spoke to his parents. He also knew that John never dated. At first, the foreman thought that John might be queer, but that was not it. John was just a loner, quiet and distant. It was only lately that he had become truly weird. John spent more and more break time alone on the fortieth floor, even spent work time there, and the foreman had had to go find him more than once.

After work that day, the foreman went home and ate two pork chops, five homemade biscuits, and canned green beans. His wife, Estelle, always had a good dinner waiting for him. They sat at their cheap table with four unmatched chairs in a kitchen whose walls had been a painful yellow when the paint was fresh, though now the glare had faded into a pale ugliness. They ate and watched the evening news on their thirty-one-inch television. While showing some homes to a potential buyer, a Century 21 salesman had discovered the body of the white man in an empty house in Fremont. The white man had been scalped and murdered. After hearing the bad news, the foreman pulled his wife closer and thought of John Smith. He loved his wife. She had gained a few pounds because of their three kids, but the foreman was no lightweight himself, and he knew it. He weighed himself every morning on the bathroom scale. He was getting to be a fat fuck. His pants did not fit right and his belly now hung over his belt. Everything seemed to be changing in his life, in the whole damn world. His kids were getting older, and wiser. They would know a lot more than he did pretty soon. Hell, he could barely remember their ages. Lately, when addressing a specific child, he ran through all of the possible combinations of their names before he found the correct one. Bobby, Dave, Cyndy, Robert, David, Cynthia, a group of strangers who could program a VCR. His wife had always been smarter. That did not bother him so much. She knew everything about him. She knew he had begun to hate work. He wanted to finish the lousy skyscraper and move on to his government job. He got a queasy feeling in his stomach every morning before work. Morning sickness, his wife teased him. But the foreman was beginning to wonder if he felt afraid of John.

“You know John, the Indian kid,” the foreman said to Estelle. “He’s been acting goofy. I’m wondering if he’s got mental problems or something.”

“What? Is he crazy?”

“Nah, he’s not bug-eyed and slobbering. But still, he’s…different.”

“Different? He’s always been different, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah, but now he’s really different.”

“You think you should talk to him?”

“I’ve tried. But he hardly talks, and when he does, he sounds like a robot.”

“Well, maybe you should talk to somebody else about him.”

“Who? The union? The architects? That’ll go over well. You see, gentlemen, we’ve got this Indian guy who doesn’t talk and eats his lunch alone. He doesn’t go for beers after work. He also arrives early, leaves late, does everything I tell him to do, and does it right. He’s a really big problem. I mean, we’ve got a few guys about ready to flunk drug tests, a couple ex-Hell’s Angels who ain’t so ex, and a guy who knocked over a 7-Eleven, but I’m really worried about this Indian.”

“Don’t get smart with me. You’re the one who brought it up.”

The foreman apologized to his wife and hugged her tightly as they stood in the kitchen of their small house, their kids running and yelling in the yard. Maybe he could count everything good in his life on one hand, but that was more than most people could do.

That night, after he made love to his wife in his quick and clumsy fashion, the foreman fell asleep and dreamed. In that dream, a figure stood on the top floor of the last skyscraper in Seattle. It was dark in the dream, only a sliver of moon illuminating the building. The foreman approached the figure. With its back turned, the figure could have been a man or woman. The foreman was scared of the figure, but also very curious. The figure held an object in its hand. Something valuable, a gift for the foreman perhaps. The foreman stepped beside the figure, and both stared down at the street hundreds of feet below. Suddenly afraid of falling, the foreman woke with a sudden start and sat up in bed. His wife was soundly asleep beside him. He curled up close to her, fell back asleep, and remembered nothing of his dream by morning.