Sherman Alexie - Indian Killer

John was still prone on the ground when the 4Runner pulled up next to him. Aaron and Barry quickly climbed out of the pickup and jumped John, who curled into a fetal ball as protection. John could hear nothing now except the thud of boots against his body and the attackers’ violent exhalations of breath. There were no voices, no music, no wind or rain. He heard neither the sudden screeching of brakes nor the shouted curses when Marie pulled up in her sandwich truck and confronted the white boys who were beating him.

“Hey, hey, get away from him!” shouted Marie. She held a butter knife in her left hand.

Aaron and Barry stopped beating John long enough to look at Marie. She was a tiny Indian woman holding a butter knife, for God’s sake, and she was all alone.

“Get the fuck out of here,” threatened Aaron. Then he recognized Marie from his brother’s Native American literature class. “Oh, you fucking bitch. You’re next, you’re next.”

Barry heard something new and more dangerous in Aaron’s voice.

“You heard me,” said Marie, her voice steady and strong. “Get away from him.”

Aaron looked down at John, who was still curled into a ball. He looked back at Marie.

“Fuck you,” Aaron said and took a step toward Marie. She held the butter knife out in front of her.

“That’s all you got?” asked Aaron as he took another step closer to Marie.

Marie smiled.

“What you smiling at, bitch?”

She was still smiling when Boo opened the back door of the sandwich van and three Indian men and three Indian women stormed out. They were a ragtag bunch of homeless warriors in soiled clothes and useless shoes. But when John looked up from the ground, he saw those half-warriors attack the white boys. The Indians were weak from malnutrition and various diseases, but they kicked, scratched, and slapped with a collective rage. John wondered how those Indians could still fight after all they had been through. He had seen Indians like that before, sleeping in doorways, on heating vents outside city hall, in cardboard condominiums. He did not understand their courage, how they could keep fighting when all he wanted to do was close his eyes and fade into the pavement. The fight was quick and brutal. Two Indian men, clutching their stomachs, had fallen to the pavement. One Indian woman with a bloody mouth leaned against a car. Barry and Aaron fought their way through the remaining Indians and into their pickup.

“Get us out of here!” shouted Barry, who would notice his missing teeth later in jail. Aaron, who would notice the broken bones in his right hand when he fought the police officer who’d come to arrest him, dropped the car into gear and nearly ran over an Indian man as he careened off another car, jumped a curb, and drove away.

The Indians were celebrating their victory as Marie knelt beside John.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

John rolled over and looked up into Marie’s eyes.

“John?” She was surprised. His face was battered and bruised.

He nodded his head.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded his head.

“Hey, help me out here,” Marie called to the others. They carried John to the sandwich van and set him inside. The rest of the Indians climbed in and pulled the door shut behind them. The men were loudly celebrating, exchanging high fives and hugs. Boo, Indian-for-a-day, screamed triumphantly and pumped his fists into imaginary enemies, shadowboxing with his whole life. Marie sat in the driver’s seat, resting her head on the steering wheel. She wanted to cry. She was shocked by her anger, and how much she had wanted to hurt those white boys. Nearly blind with her own rage, she had wanted to tear out their blue eyes and blind them.

“Did you see them run?” asked Crazy Robert. “They ran like Custer, cousins, they ran like Custer.”

Joseph, holding his bruised belly in pain, laughed loudly.

“The Indians won again!” shouted King, forgetting that Indians had never won anything in the first place. The Indian men hugged one another, laughed into one another’s faces, eyes brighter and wider than they had been in years.

Boo, who had been busy punching the shadows, now sat quietly in his chair. The Indian men had forgotten he was there. Boo looked down at his hands.

Agnes and Annie were tending to Kim’s bloody mouth. Agnes held a handful of Kim’s teeth.

“Hey!” Agnes shouted. “We got to get her to a hospital!”

Her green eyes electric with pain, Kim stared up at Agnes and Annie, and tried a toothless smile.

“We did it,” said Kim.

“Did what?” asked Agnes.

There was no answer to that question.

“Marie!” shouted Annie. “We got to go!”

Marie sat up in the driver’s seat, looked back at her passengers. John had struggled to a sitting position.

“John,” said Marie. “You should lie down.”

John looked at Marie. He saw the large eyes, the long, black hair, and those crooked teeth. He noticed that her glasses were missing. Probably knocked off her face during the fight. Scratch marks across her forehead and cheeks. The glasses were probably broken, lying on the street outside, in pieces and fragments.

“John?” asked Marie, wanting to ask a question, but unsure what she wanted to know.

The other Indian men had stopped celebrating to watch John. The Indian women watched him, too. John could see his face in their faces, the large noses and cheekbones, the dark eyes and skin, the thin mouth and prominent chin, white teeth. He looked into the faces of these Indians who had saved him.

King, the failed college student, who walked the shelves of the Elliott Bay Book Company, picked out a book at random, and read a few pages a day until he finished it. Joseph, the recluse, who always wore a pair of nonprescription sunglasses, kept a hand drum hidden in the brush near the freeway, and would still sing old tribal songs. The newspaper man, Crazy Robert, who was a reporter for the Seattle Times when he was twenty-five and homeless by the time he was thirty-five. Obese in his youth, Robert had become impossibly thin. And the women. Agnes, who kept a menagerie of stray dogs and scavenger birds, spoke in whispers. Green-eyed Kim, the angry one, the nurse who had spent ten years in prison for killing an abusive husband. Annie, with black hair that once flowed down to her knees, now knotted and tangled beyond repair. She used to sing standards in a Holiday Inn Lounge in Norman, Oklahoma.

John did not know any of these Indians, could know nothing of their backgrounds. He did not know why they had fallen apart or what small thread kept them tied together now. Despite all their pain and suffering, these Indians held together, held onto one another.

John looked into the eyes of those Indians. He looked into the eyes of Boo, the white man who had been forever damaged in a war. Boo and the Indians all had the same stare, as if they spent most of their day anticipating the sudden arrival of the bullet that was meant for them. John saw the bruises and blood. And wanted to talk, to finally speak. To tell them about Father Duncan and the desert, the dreams he had of his life on a reservation, and those rare moments when he had stood on tall buildings and seen clearly. But there was no language in which he could express himself.

John saw that Marie, the sandwich lady, was crying now, tears rolling down her face. Falling to the floor of the van, they would collect and fill up the world. He wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to get on his knees before her and confess all of his sins. He wanted to rest his head in her lap, feel her fingers combing through his hair, and hear her softly singing. Hush, hush, she would sing, everything will be fine in the morning. He wanted to tell her about the desert. He wanted to give her a gift for all that she had done.