Sherman Alexie - Indian Killer

“What kind of book are you writing, Mr. Wilson?” asked Olivia, falling back on politeness.

“It’s about the Indian Killer,” said Wilson.

“You can’t think John has anything to do with that?” asked Olivia, alarmed now.

“No, no. I was just doing some research when I heard about this Indian guy, your son, a high-rise construction worker. I thought it was interesting.”

“It’s the last skyscraper they’re going to build in Seattle.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Can you imagine that? When we think of cities, don’t we think of tall buildings? Now we have all these computers and things. People can work from anywhere. They don’t need to be bunched up in the same big buildings anymore. They don’t even need to be in the same country to work together anymore. Things change, don’t they?”

“Yes, they do.”

Olivia picked up a donut, nibbled at it, then studied it.

“John loves these things,” said Olivia.

Wilson looked around the room. It was spare and cluttered at the same time. Prints with Indian themes hung at strange angles on the walls. The bed was made haphazardly. Boxes of assorted junk were stacked neatly in every corner.

“Where is John?” asked Wilson.

“I don’t know,” said Olivia. “We’ve been looking for him for a long time.”

Wilson looked at Olivia’s left hand. Married to a rich man, judging by the size of the diamond. She wore the standard casual outfit for middle-aged white women in Seattle: a white T-shirt, blue jeans, black blazer.

“Do you have a family, Mr. Wilson?”

“No.”

“No wife?”

“No, never.”

Surprised, Olivia quickly studied Wilson’s features. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, middle-aged, a writer, probably intelligent. He should have been married a couple times by now. Then Olivia remembered that he had been a cop, and changed her mind. He must have lots of problems. She thought about asking him to leave, but decided that it did not matter. She couldn’t see how her troubles could get much worse.

“My son doesn’t even know I’m here, Mr. Wilson. He’d be angry if he knew I had a key to his place. He’s got some real problems, with me, and his father. He’s got problems with everybody. I’m not sure he’d even talk to you.”

“What kind of problems?” asked Wilson.

Olivia hesitated for a moment, then continued, too tired to maintain secrets.

“He’s got everything and nothing,” she said. “Every time we took him to a new doctor, there was something else wrong with him. But hey, he doesn’t drink or do drugs. He doesn’t even take the drugs that are supposed to help him.”

Olivia started to cry, got angry at herself for breaking down, and then cried even harder. Wilson took a step toward her, raised his hand as some sort of clumsy offering, and stopped.

“I’m sorry,” said Olivia, wiping her face with her hands. “I’m just so tired. I can’t sleep. I’m so scared. I keep thinking about this Indian Killer. Sometimes, I wonder. I think, maybe…”

Olivia closed her eyes, swallowed hard, trying to maintain her composure. When she had visited the donut shop just before trying John’s apartment, Paul and Paul Too had told her about John’s wild behavior.

“John was such a gentle boy,” said Olivia. “He wouldn’t even kill bugs. Really. Me, I’m terrified of spiders. Just phobic. I remember this one time, John couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, and I was cleaning the upstairs bathroom. I can remember it like it was yesterday, you know?”

Wilson nodded his head, and glanced at his watch.

“I even remember the song on the radio. The Beatles. That strawberry song, remember? I was singing with the radio, cleaning the bathtub, when this huge spider came out of the drain. I screamed like crazy. Daniel, my husband, was at work. It must have been summer because John was home. He heard my screaming and he came running, you know, to save Mommy. I was trying to smash that spider with my shoe when John came into the bathroom. He just screamed at me, ‘No, no!’ and then I smashed that spider flat.”

Wilson walked a few steps closer to Olivia, who seemed lost in the memory.

“Oh, God, he cried over that spider. Just bawled. Made me bury it in the backyard. We even had a funeral. Isn’t that funny?”

Olivia looked up at Wilson and smiled. He smiled and nodded his head.

“Mrs. Smith,” said Wilson. “He sounds like a good boy.”

“He was,” said Olivia. “He was.”

“You don’t have any idea where he is?”

Olivia sat up in the chair, wiped her face again, sensing Wilson’s impatience.

“No, Mr. Wilson, I have no idea.”

Wilson took the foreman’s photograph out of his pocket and showed it to Olivia.

“Is this your son?”

Olivia stared at the photograph of her son, his face empty and dark.

“That’s John,” she said.

Wilson tucked the photograph back into his pocket and turned to leave.

“Thank you, Mrs. Smith,” said Wilson as he opened the door.

“Mr. Wilson,” said Olivia just before he closed the door behind him.

“Yes.”

“If you see John, tell him to come home.”

Wilson left Olivia alone at the table. He raced down the stairs and jumped into his pickup. He figured he could find John or somebody who knew John at Big Heart’s. As he drove away, Olivia watched him from the apartment window. She knew that everything was going wrong, but she felt powerless to stop it. Her husband was probably asleep on the couch in his study. That’s how it must be. He had been too tired to walk up the stairs to bed, so he slipped off his shoes and pants, loosened his tie, and then curled up on the couch. He had probably called out to her, had not received a response, and had assumed she was asleep. That was how it must be. He was asleep on the couch, wearing a nice shirt and loosened tie. A decent man, he was probably dreaming about his son. Daniel twisting and turning in his sleep. All of it quickly becoming a nightmare. Olivia loved her husband. She watched Wilson’s pickup until it disappeared into the rest of the city. He drove north. Olivia looked south toward downtown Seattle and counted the number of streetlights. One, two, three, then ten, then more. She counted until there were none left to be counted, and then she began again.

MARIE AND BOO SET out to deliver their sandwiches on that last night. They drove from the Belltown shelter south toward Pioneer Square. A white van. Three traffic signals. Red light, stop. Green light, go. A stop sign that was mostly ignored. Intermittent wipers sweeping against the windshield every few seconds.

“You know,” Boo said. “You’re like the ice cream man in this truck. Remember how they used to play that music? Man, you could hear those trucks from miles away. We should hook some music up to this rig, don’t you think? We’d have homeless folks just chasing us down the street.”

Marie laughed. She stopped when she saw King staggering across the street. His face bloody. Marie helped King into the truck and saw that his wounds were not that serious. She bandaged him up with the first-aid kit. King told her that two white guys in a pickup had jumped him.

“Jeez,” King had said. “They would’ve killed me, I think. But some other white guys broke it up.”

Marie looked at King. She saw that blood and recognized it, knew that Indian blood had often spilled on American soil. She knew there were people to blame for that bloodshed. She felt a beautiful kind of anger. On the Spokane Indian Reservation, an old Indian woman grew violently red roses in the same ground where five Indian women were slaughtered by United States Cavalry soldiers.