Indian Killer

Olivia and Daniel Smith are unable to conceive and decided to adopt a baby, only to be informed that waiting for a white child could take years. They are offered an Indian child instead, with the assurance that the child “will be saved a lot of pain by growing up in a white family” (10). That night, they make love, both hoping Olivia will conceive, Daniel focusing all the while on a son who resembles him. Afterwards, they cry and sleep, and in the morning, they decide to adopt the Indian child, whom they name John.

Olivia extensively researches Native American history, buys John children’s books featuring Indians, and even learns several words in various Indian languages. They decide to have John baptized but insist that the priest be an Indian. They find Father Duncan, a Spokane Indian Jesuit. He is an artist and an eccentric and will later tell John many secrets that John will never reveal.

When John is six years old, Father Duncan takes him to a chapel and shows him stained glass windows depicting Jesuits being killed by Indians. Father Duncan explains that the Indians killed the priests because they wanted to drive the white people from their land. John asks if Jesus was an Indian, and Father Duncan says that he was not “but he should have been” (15). John then asks if the Jesuits died like Jesus. Father Duncan feels conflicted: As a Jesuit, he knows that they were martyred for their faith, but as a Spokane Indian, he knows that their deaths were deserved because of their treatment of the Indians. In the end, he says, “You see these windows? You see all of this? It’s what is happening inside me right now” (15).

When John is seven, Father Duncan suddenly leaves. His eccentricities having become too extreme, he is moved to a retreat in Arizona. John learns that within a week, he left the retreat and walked alone into the desert and disappeared, his tracks through the sand simply stopping with no sign of a body. John keeps the newspaper cutting describing the disappearance and regularly dreams about Father Duncan, wondering if he left on a vision quest or to learn more of God.

John attends a Catholic school. He has brief relationships with girls, although he is never comfortable in their presence. The girls’ fathers are always unhappy about their children dating an Indian and persuade them to break up with him. John tries not to be angry at this or at the other aspects of his life, but frequently he has to excuse himself to go to the bathroom to suppress his rage, biting his tongue until it bleeds. Daniel Smith tries to teach John basketball without much success. He takes John to watch an Indian basketball tournament, and John is overwhelmed by the number of Indians and finds himself jealous of their shared laughter. 

When John leaves school, he gets a job as a steelworker building skyscrapers, having read an article about Mohawk Indians who helped build the World Trade Center. At 27, he is a tall, well-muscled worker helping to construct the last skyscraper in Seattle. The foreman respects his dedication to his work but is unsettled by his silence and the way he sometimes stares absently, his head filled with noises and voices that no one else can hear. John is embarrassed to be caught doing this one day and fantasizes about being a “real Indian” who could call the wind to knock the foreman from the tower. As his vision is distorted by fantasies and hallucinations, John decides that he must kill a white man.

John tries to decide which white man to kill, endeavoring to work out which is “responsible for everything that had gone wrong” (27). Killing the richest white man would only mean that another would take his place, while the poorest white men, homeless alcoholics, are already dead, already zombies. He knows that priests cut out the tongues of Indians who would not give up their native languages, but he considers that Father Duncan was also a priest.

After work, John walks onto the University of Washington campus, imagining the lawn as wilderness and himself as a “real” Indian with hair flowing to the ground. He encounters a group of Indian students holding an illegal pow-wow in protest of the university’s not letting them hold a pow-wow. He meets the organizer, Marie, a Spokane Indian. She asks him which tribe he belongs to, and he is too embarrassed to say that he does not know because he was adopted, so he tells her that he is Navajo. He blurts out Father Duncan’s name and is surprised that she has heard of him and remembers the story of his disappearance.

Marie was an intelligent child, but as she grew older, she found her intelligence isolating as many of her peers lost interest in school due to lack of resources or bullying by white teachers, or because they could not concentrate through their hunger. Some intelligent children immersed themselves in Spokane culture, speaking Spokane fluently and learning traditional songs and dances. Marie’s parents thought that her future lay beyond the reservation and did not teach her these traditional skills, and Marie sometimes feels “less than Indian” as a result (33). She learned to fight in response to endless bullying, once chasing another child with a knife she was determined to use. She also learned a great deal of academic knowledge and was accepted into the University of Washington on a scholarship.

Marie tries to banter with John, but he is anxious that she will discover he does not have a tribe and remains largely silent. He thinks of other urban pow-wows he has attended and how he pretended to be a “real” Indian, being accepted by other Indians around him. The master of ceremonies announces an owl dance, for which men cannot refuse women, so when Marie asks him, John dances with her. John dances badly and is embarrassed, but Marie does not mind. She sees great sorrow in his eyes and thinks about how so many Indians she knows feel like outcasts and have had to form their own urban tribe.

After the dance, John quickly leaves the campus but becomes overwhelmed on a busy street full of white people. He bumps into a young white man and feels the tremendous rage he always tries to suppress. The man apologizes but is intimidated by John. When he leaves, John follows him.

John imagines his mother deciding not to give him up and the life he might have had on a reservation. In his imagination, life on the reservation is good, with plenty of food and books to read. A large extended family lives all together, playing Scrabble and exchanging stories. Everyone is literate, and the children all love school and their Indian teachers. John is too young for school but is learning English and his own tribal language. He is also learning traditional dancing and dances at his first pow-wow at four years old.

The children all play in disused metal sewage pipes on the reservation. One day, he kisses Dawn, “the most beautiful Indian girl in the world” (47), as they hide among the pipes. He smiles about their kiss as he enjoys a wonderful dinner with his family. After dinner, they tell stories: traditional stories, stories of family members who have died, stories of their own invention. John’s own stories are vast and complex, full of jokes and tricks and sorrow, and his family both laughs and cries as he tells them.

“The killer” feels powerful when they hold “the knife,” a large, custom-made blade with turquoise gems in the handle. The killer cannot sleep, so they craft a leather sheaf for the knife and wear it under their jacket. During the day, they practice stabbing and hacking with the blade for hours and read about knives and weaponry, everything from A Short Guide to Cutlery to The Illustrated History of Swords. At night, if they sleep, they dream of the knife.

The killer follows random white men and watches how miserable they are in their lives. One white man, Justin Summers, brushes past the killer, rudely and arrogantly. The killer wants to teach him a “simple and slightly painful lesson” and realizes that the knife has a purpose (51). The killer follows Justin to a secluded trail on campus and stabs him in the stomach. Picking up the body, the killer passes a group of drunk students who assume that the stabbed man is unconscious due to alcohol. The killer did not entirely mean to hurt Justin and now wishes to ensure that he is buried with appropriate ceremony. The killer takes the body to an empty house and scalps it, putting the scalp in their pocket. Disappointed and angry that “one dead man [is] not enough” (54), the killer stabs the body repeatedly and then pulls out his eyes with fingers like talons and swallows them. The killer places two owl feathers on Justin’s chest, and they are quickly stained red by his blood.