Sherman Alexie - Indian Killer

“Are you okay?” Daniel asked, hearing the worry in his wife’s voice.

“I was just thinking about John. Have you heard from him?”

“No.”

“Well, I was just thinking, you know, that maybe we could go see if he’s at his apartment. I mean, he’s not answering his phone. But maybe he’s just ignoring it. Maybe he’s hurt.”

“If you want,” Daniel said, not wanting to admit how much he wanted to go searching for John.

After work, Daniel drove from downtown Seattle east across the 520 bridge to Bellevue, picked up Olivia from her part-time job at the Bellevue Art Museum, and then headed back across the bridge. Heavy traffic. Daniel hated the two bridges, 520 to the north and I-90 to the south, that connected the eastern and western halves of the Seattle metropolitan area. Like most American cities, Seattle was a city of distinct and divided neighborhoods, and though it had a reputation for cultural diversity, there was actually a very small minority population, consisting primarily of Asian-and African-Americans. And the minority populations mostly lived, by choice and by economic circumstance, in the Central, International, and University Districts. The middle-class whites generally lived on the twin hills of Queen Anne and Magnolia, overlooking the rest of the city, while the rich white people mostly lived in Bellevue or on Mercer Island, a financial and geographical enclave that sat in the waters of Lake Washington, halfway between Bellevue and Seattle. Where water had once been a natural boundary, it now existed as an economic barrier. And in those places where natural boundaries between neighborhoods didn’t exist, the engineers had quickly built waterways. So much water separating people.

Daniel knew that all the bridges and water were beautiful, but it was so hard to get from one place to another. Daniel hated traffic and constantly cursed other drivers. He took delays personally, as if each car were specifically placed to impede his progress. When John was young, Daniel had learned to control his tongue. But now that John was no longer a passenger, Daniel would fully vent his anger. He honked his horn, yelled, and mumbled by turns, wanting to talk to his son, John, the boy who, despite all the water so close to home, had never learned to swim.

Olivia did not mind sitting in the car. The Lexus had a great stereo system. She could play a compact disc and compose herself in preparation for their visit with John. She loved classical music, especially Glenn Gould’s rendition of the Goldberg Variations . For reasons she could not verbalize, Olivia had been immediately touched by his music. She was not a musical expert, had no scholarly vocabulary, but felt that she needed Gould’s piano playing in order to feel more substantial. Each series of notes, played straight, inverted, repeated, became the reason she could get out of the bed some mornings. The music came to mean even more to her after she read about Gould’s life, how he had quit performing publicly without the slightest warning. On that evening, he had signed an autograph for a backstage technician, told him that he was never going to perform again, and then played for the last time for an audience. It was wildly eccentric, Olivia thought, and impossibly romantic. It was the sort of rebellion that only a genius could have pulled off. Olivia wondered what Gould had felt that evening, how a weight must have lifted from his shoulders and drifted up into the rafters. As she and Daniel drove into Ballard in search of John, Olivia felt only sadness. While Gould had been very eccentric, quite probably mentally ill, he also managed to produce some of the greatest music of the twentieth century. Olivia wondered if her son, John, would ever be able to create anything of value.

John had left Olivia and Daniel’s home shortly after high school graduation. Daniel had encouraged the move and preferred to view it as some sort of initiation into manhood. Secretly, though, Daniel hoped that the move would be good for John, who had become increasingly withdrawn and distant. Most teenagers were temperamental, but John’s mood swings seemed to be too dramatic. Sometime during high school, he began to go immediately to his room after coming home. He would play one of the powwow music tapes he had bought, and not come out until morning. When Olivia brought John dinner in his room, Daniel felt that was being far too accommodating. But he knew he had been fairly lenient himself, due in large part, he thought, to John’s status as an adopted child. Oh, there were lots of times when John was simply their son, with no need for any qualifiers, but the stark difference in their physical appearances was a nagging reminder of the truth. If Olivia and Daniel could not forget that John was adopted, then John must have carried that knowledge even closer to his skin. Daniel wondered if his worries about John were normal parental worries, or unfounded obsessions that somehow changed John’s little teenage rebellions into full-scale wars. Maybe that was why John played his music so loudly, so he could not hear himself thinking about his mysterious origins. Sometimes, John would play his powwow music deep into the night.

“John!” Daniel would shout. “Turn that down!”

John would turn the music down for a few minutes, but then he would slowly increase the volume until it was as loud as it had been. Those drums filled the house. Midnight. One in the morning. Olivia seemed to sleep through it, but Daniel lay awake, a pillow over his head. Finally, after trying to shout the music down, Daniel would crawl from bed and storm down the hallway to John’s bedroom. It was always dark but Daniel never bothered to switch on the light. The walk was so familiar he could have closed his eyes and found his way quickly. Daniel sensed that life was all about patterns, with humans, animals, and insects finding those patterns and holding onto them with all of their strength. God was a series of recurring images. Daniel had walked faithfully down the dark hallway to John’s room without incident for eighteen years, bringing glasses of water and warm milk, comfort from nightmares and sleepy frustration, quiet discipline. Then, one evening when John was playing his powwow music at an exceptionally loud volume, Daniel tripped over a chair that had not been there before. As he hopped around and rubbed his bruised toe, Daniel did not stop to think about anything other than the pain and the music. He pounded on John’s door, which was jammed shut. A few months earlier, Daniel had removed the lock from the door because John had taken to barricading himself in his room, but John then kept the door shut to outsiders with a butter knife inserted into the jamb.

“John!” Daniel shouted while pounding on the bedroom door. But the music only increased in volume until it sounded like a whole tribe was beating drums.

Daniel pounded on that bedroom door for hours, years, until he found himself pounding on John’s apartment door in Ballard. Daniel wore a tailored suit, dark blue and tasteful, and a muted purple paisley tie, slightly out of style, his way of expressing his individuality. Olivia wore her favorite dress, red with large, black buttons. They both wore similar black overcoats. Daniel thought it vaguely embarrassing that he looked like his wife whenever it rained, without realizing how much he and Olivia always looked alike. Daniel pounded on the door. Olivia stood behind him. She had done this so often before, Daniel knocking and knocking, while John sat inside, ignoring them. Usually, if they stayed long enough, John would eventually answer the door. Once or twice, she had talked the landlord into opening the door, and then felt more like a trespassing thief than a mother. The landlord eventually gave her a key, but Olivia had never used it.