Sherman Alexie: Indian Killer

The helicopter flies for hours, it could be days, crossing desert, mountain, freeway, finally a city. Skyscrapers, the Space Needle, water everywhere. Thin bridges stretched between islands. John crying. The gunner holds his fire, but his finger is lightly feathering the trigger. He is ready for the worst. John can feel the distance between the helicopter and the ground below. He stops crying. He loves the distance between the helicopter and the ground. He feels he could fall. He somehow loves this new fear. He wants to fall. He wants the jumpsuit man to release him, let him fall from the helicopter, down through the clouds, past the skyscrapers and the Space Needle. But the jumpsuit man holds him tight so John will not fall. John cries again.

The helicopter circles downtown Seattle, moves east past Lake Washington, Mercer Island, hovers over the city of Bellevue. The pilot searches for the landing area. Five acres of green, green grass. A large house. Swimming pool. A man and woman waving energetically. Home. The pilot lowers the chopper and sets down easily. Blades making a windstorm of grass particles and hard-shelled insects. The gunner’s eyes are wide open, scanning the tree line. He is ready for anything. The jumpsuit man slides the door open with one arm and holds John in the other. Noise, heat. John cries, louder than before, trying to be heard. Home. The jumpsuit man steps down and runs across the lawn toward the man and woman, both white and handsome. He wears a gray suit and colorful tie. She wears a red dress with large, black buttons from throat to knee.

John cries as the jumpsuit man hands him to the white woman, Olivia Smith. She unbuttons the top of her dress, opens her bra, and offers John her large, pale breasts with pink nipples. John’s birth mother had small, brown breasts and brown nipples, though he never suckled at them. Still, he knows there is a difference, and as John takes the white woman’s right nipple into his mouth and pulls at her breast, he discovers it is empty. Daniel Smith wraps his left arm around his wife’s shoulders. He grimaces briefly and then smiles. Olivia and Daniel Smith look at the jumpsuit man, who is holding a camera. Flash, flash. Click of the shutter. Whirr of advancing film. All of them wait for a photograph to form, for light to emerge from shadow, for an image to burn itself into paper.

WHEN NO BABY CAME after years of trying to conceive, Olivia and Daniel Smith wanted to adopt a baby, but the waiting list was so long. The adoption agency warned them that white babies, of course, were the most popular. Not that it was a popularity contest, they were assured. It was just that most of the couples interested in adopting a baby were white, so naturally, they wanted to adopt a white child, a child like them, but there were simply not enough white babies to go around.

“Listen,” the adoption agent said. “Let’s be honest. It’s going to take at least a year to find a suitable white child for you. Frankly, it may take much longer than that. Up to eight years or more. But we can find you another kind of baby rather quickly.”

“Another kind?” asked Olivia.

“Well, of course,” said the agent. “There’s always the handicapped babies. Down’s syndrome. Children missing arms and legs. Mentally retarded. That kind of kid. To be honest, it’s very difficult, nearly impossible, to find homes for those children. It’s perfectly understandable. These children need special care, special attention. Lots of love. Not very many people can handle it.”

“I don’t think we want that,” Daniel said. Olivia agreed.

“There are other options,” said the agent. “We have other difficult-to-place children as well. Now, there’s nothing wrong with these babies. They’re perfectly healthy, but they’re not white. Most are black. We also have an Indian baby. The mother is six months pregnant now.”

“Indian?” asked Daniel. “As in American Indian?”

“Yes,” said the agent. “The mother is very young, barely into her teens. She’s making the right decision. She’ll carry the baby to full term and give it up for adoption. Now, ideally, we’d place this baby with Indian parents, right? But that just isn’t going to happen. The best place for this baby is with a white family. This child will be saved a lot of pain by growing up in a white family. It’s the best thing, really.”

Olivia and Daniel agreed to consider adopting the Indian baby. They went home that night, ate a simple dinner, and watched television. A sad movie-of-the-week about an incurable disease. Daniel kept clearing his throat during the movie. Olivia cried. When it was over, Daniel switched off the television. They undressed for bed, brushed their teeth, and lay down together.

“What do you think?” asked Olivia.

“I don’t know,” said Daniel.

They made love then, both secretly hoping this one would take. They wanted to believe that everything was possible. An egg would drop, be fertilized, and begin to grow. As he moved inside his wife, Daniel closed his eyes and concentrated on an image of a son. That son would be exactly half of him. He saw a son with his chin and hair. He saw a baseball glove, bicycle, tree house, barking dog. Olivia wrapped her arms around her husband, pressed her face to his shoulder. She could feel him inside her, but it was a vague, amorphous feeling. There was nothing specific about it. During the course of their married life, the sex had mostly felt good. Sometimes, it had been uncomfortable, once or twice painful. But she did not feel anything this time. She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling.

Olivia knew she was beautiful. She had been a beautiful baby, little girl, teenager, woman. She had never noticed whether it was easy or hard to be that beautiful. It never really occurred to her to wonder about it. All her life, her decisions had been made for her. She was meant to graduate from high school, get into a good college, find a suitable young man, earn a B.A. in art history, marry, and never work. Somewhere between reading a biography of van Gogh and fixing dinner, she was supposed to have a baby. Except for producing that infant, she had done what was expected of her, had fulfilled the obligations of her social contract. She had graduated with honors, had married a handsome, successful architect, and loved sex in a guarded way. But the baby would not happen. The doctors had no explanations. Her husband’s sperm were of average count and activity. “In a swimming race,” their doctor had said, “your husband’s sperm would get the bronze.” She had a healthy uterus and her period was loyal to the moon’s cycles. But it did not work. “Listen,” the doctor had said. “There are some people who just cannot have babies together. We can’t always explain it. Medicine isn’t perfect.”

Still staring at the ceiling, Olivia moved her hips in rhythm with her husband’s. She wanted to ask him what he was thinking about, but did not want to interrupt their lovemaking. She lifted herself to her husband, listening to the patterns of his breathing until it was over.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you, too,” Daniel said.

He lifted himself off her and rolled to his side of the bed. She reached out and took his hand. He was crying. She held him until they fell asleep. When they woke in the morning, both had decided to adopt the Indian baby.

Olivia was determined to be a good mother. She knew it was a complicated situation, that she would have to explain her baby’s brown skin to any number of strangers. There was no chance that she would be able to keep her baby’s adoption a secret. Two white parents, a brown baby. There was no other way to explain it. But she did not fool herself into thinking that her baby would somehow become white just because she and Daniel were white. After John arrived, she spent hours in the library. With John sleeping beside her, she would do research on Native American history and culture. The adoption agency refused to divulge John’s tribal affiliation and sealed all of his birth records, revealing only that John’s birth mother was fourteen years old. Olivia spent hours looking through books, searching the photographs for any face like her son’s face. She read books about the Sioux, and Navajo, and Winnebago. Crazy Horse, Geronimo, and Sitting Bull rode horses through her imagination. She bought all the children’s books about Indians and read them aloud to John. Daniel thought it was an obsessive thing to do, but he did not say anything. He had named the baby John after his grandfather and thought it ironic. His grandfather had been born in Germany and never really learned much English, even after years in the United States.