Indian Killer

The police interview Mark’s mother, making her go over and over the details of the night and paying seemingly prurient attention to the fact that she sleeps naked. They try and ascertain if there is anyone who might want to hurt Mark or the family but get nowhere. When she asks if they know anything, the police officer reveals that there are other crimes that might be connected to Mark’s disappearance.

John stands outside the anthropology building watching Marie in a lecture given by Mather, although John only sees a white man with a turquoise bolo tie, his hair in a ponytail. He can see that Marie is angry but cannot hear what she is saying. After the lecture, he follows Marie secretly as she secretly follows Mather to his car. When another white man greets Mather, Marie hides behind a car.

Mather discusses his difficulties with Marie with the other white man, the chair of the Anthropology department. He presents Marie as simply misguided and blames it in part on the tension within the group since David’s disappearance. He notes that, since Justin Summers was scalped, his white students are afraid to express themselves and accuses Marie of “taking advantage of their fear” (173). The two men leave to discuss things further over a drink. When John looks for Marie, she had disappeared.

Arthur Two Leaf walks along the trail on campus, thinking about his last chemistry lecture. His lecturer said that Europeans and Indians share about 99% of their DNA. Arthur thinks that, while this may be the case, “that one percent makes all the difference” (175). Arthur has a crush on his lecturer and is thinking about her blue eyes when he is accosted by three masked men. One of them, wearing a white mask and carrying a baseball bat, calls him a “prairie nigger” and “an Indian pig” before beating him with the bat (176).

Thinking about the Indian Killer, Wilson wonders whether “a real Indian was capable of such violence” (178), based on his own book-learned understanding of Indian culture. This is a confused jumble of traditional ceremonies, dances, music, and a hodgepodge of different indigenous practices. He dreams of being the best traditional dancer, cheered on by thousands of “real” Indians. Still struggling with writer’s block, Wilson goes for dinner at Big Heart’s Soda and Juice Bar, an Indian bar, which is to say, a bar owned by a white man that Indians frequent.   

Wilson is a regular visitor to the bar, but he still does not understand much about how Indians interact, not recognizing that distinctions between rich and poor are not considered as important, that their tribal differences and enmities are significant, and especially that “white people who pretend to be Indian are gently teased, ignored, plainly ridiculed, or beaten, depending on their degree of whiteness” (179). He does not know that the Indians all know that he is an author and an ex-policeman and see him as a white man trying to be Indian, referring to him as Casper the Friendly Ghost. Reggie enters the bar with two friends and greets Wilson as “Casper” before getting him to buy them drinks and gently teasing him.

Wilson brings up the scalping, and the Indians stop laughing. Wilson continues before realizing that he has crossed a line. When asked, Wilson says that he does not believe a “real” Indian would do such a thing, and Reggie becomes angrier, asserting that the real question is “which Indian wouldn’t do it” because “lots of Indian men out there have plenty enough reasons to kill white men. Three at this table right now” (184). Reggie and his friends leave the bar, and word about the scalping spreads from them around Seattle’s Indian population.

The police interview Arthur Two Leaf, who explains that he was walking back from a lecture when three masked men attacked him. The police ask if he provoked the attack, and Arthur replies, “You mean, aside from being Indian[?]” (188). He jokingly complains that being called a “prairie nigger” was inaccurate because “I’m from a salmon tribe, man […] [T]hey should have called me a salmon nigger” (188). The police say they are surprised that he can laugh about it, and he dismisses this reaction as simply being how Indians cope. When they ask if he was afraid, he says that he was but he is always afraid, surrounded and outnumbered by white people. He says that he has heard rumors of Indians organizing and seeking to scare some white people in revenge.

Mark wakes up in a dark space. He is tied up and gagged. The killer turns on a flashlight and uses it to highlight the knife with the turquoise gems hanging on the wall and, next to it, the blood-soaked scalp. Mark cries and screams through the gag. Worried that the boy will suffocate, the killer removes the gag so he can breathe and offers him a drink from a juice box.

The killer is disappointed that the police have managed to keep the media from reporting their crimes. However, the killer also knows that killing a white child will be more powerful than killing a white man and that “the kidnapping of Mark Jones was the true beginning, the first song, the first dance of a powerful ceremony that would change the world” (192). Trying to suppress their compassion and be as emotionless as the owl, the killer takes the knife and begins to cut. 

Truck Shultz is in the studio when his assistant brings in a box. He opens it to reveal a piece of Mark Jones’s pajamas and two owl feathers soaked in blood.

John is walking through otherwise deserted streets in the rain and fog when two white boys get out of a truck and insult him, trying to provoke a fight. John hears screaming and realizes that he is the one crying out. John recognizes the type of boys from his school days: popular boys who were both revered and despised by jealous classmates. He knows that “their deaths could create a hurricane of grief and confusion” (197). When John, still screaming, advances on the boys, they get back in their truck and drive away.

Unkempt and in need of a shower, John walks for a long time, far away from his own neighborhood, until he finds a small Catholic church. A priest kneels inside, and John greets him as Father Duncan, but the priest is a red-haired Irishman. Father Phil offers to take John’s confession, and John says that he is filled with rage, has had “impure thoughts,” and claims to have “just killed two white boys” (200). John leaves the church and returns home, where he finds a note from his parents taped to his door asking him to call them because they are worried.

A Spokane Indian couple is lost on the dirt tracks of the Tulalip Indian Reservation, trying to find the freeway. When the woman goes to urinate in the woods, she smells decaying flesh, and hoping to find a dead porcupine and take its quills, she investigates. Instead, she finds the body of David Rogers. He has been shot between the eyes and now sits slumped against a tree, decomposing.

Truck Shultz’s police source informed him about the Indian Killer and the owl feathers left at the crime scenes, although he is not allowed to make the information public. He receives a call from his source telling him that David Rogers’s body has been found but that it is unlikely that the Indian Killer murdered him. Truck decides to go ahead and broadcast this, adding the false information that David was a victim of the Indian Killer and was scalped.

Truck presents the murders and kidnappings as violence targeted at white men, the result of “our current political climate, with its constant vilification of white males” (207). He argues that white men created America, conquering the wilderness and bringing civilization to a benighted land. He suggests that the city would be outraged if two black men had been killed or if a black child had been kidnapped.

Suggesting that the crimes were committed by an “Indian savage,” Truck complains that white people gave Indians a far better life that they had previously, even granting them special concessions and privileges, but that this has only made them greedy and incompetent, unable to look after themselves or find their way out of poverty. He suggests that Indian tribes should have been “terminated” from the offset and Indians forcibly “assimilated into normal society long ago” (209).

After Truck personally calls Aaron to tell him about his brother’s murder, Aaron goes looking for Indians to attack with his roommates, Barry and Sean. Sean is nervous and does not believe that beating up Indians will achieve anything. He is trying to get the others to give up when Barry spots two homeless Indians sleeping in a doorway. Aaron tells them, “Go back to where you belong” and “Get the fuck out of our country, man!” before brutally beating them (215). Sean manages to convince them to flee the scene but not before one of the Indians has received severe injuries.

Olivia and Daniel listen to the news on the radio and learn that the Indian Killer took Mark Jones and that homeless Indians have been beaten by three men in masks. Daniel leaves, saying he has to do extra work, but Olivia knows he is going looking for John. Downtown, Daniel speaks to a homeless Indian man, but he only tells him, “Ain’t nobody knows any Indian named John Smith, Ain’t no such thing. You must have dreamed him up” (219). The man also claims to know who the Indian Killer is, declaring that he is a combination of Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, and Geronimo. He says that all Indians are keeping score and that, now that the killer killed two white men and took one white boy, the score is “about ten million to three, in favor of the white guys,” making the killer “the underdog” (220).

That night, both Daniel and Olivia have disjointed dreams about John. Daniel wakes confused, convinced he can smell his son and insisting to Olivia that John is in the room. As much as she wishes to find him standing there, Olivia tells Daniel that he is dreaming and eases him back to sleep.

Wilson wakes in his apartment and remembers how he used to wet the bed when he was a young boy growing up in foster homes. Although some foster parents responded kindly to this, others were cruel or abusive. After he wet himself during a sleepover, Wilson was abandoned by his friends. Instead, he befriended family pets, but if they ignored him, he would kick them, purposefully get them lost, or tie them to posts miles from home.

Wilson was up late working on his novel about the Indian Killer but achieved very little writing. When he eventually went to bed, he dreamed graphic details of David and Justin’s murders and Mark’s kidnapping, and he awakes with aching limbs. He goes a local park, hoping to ask homeless Indians for information, eventually eavesdropping on an Indian’s phone call. He thinks about the Indian Killer using the phone, deciding that the killer would call an “ancient ancestor, somebody from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, a wise old medicine man […] [who] wants the Indian Killer to get revenge” (233).

Marie watches Wilson from her sandwich van thinking of the crude entitlement of white men who pretend to be Indian and reflecting that her white blood does not make her white, no matter how much she might have wanted it to in the past. When Wilson and the other white people leave, she feeds the homeless people and regrets that she never has enough food for all of them.