“How much?” John asked her.
“How much for what?” she asked, smiling with a full set of dentures.
“Bigfoot,” John said, pointing to the sign.
The old woman looked up at John. She saw a tall, handsome Indian man.
“What tribe you are?” she asked.
“Navajo.”
“Ah, one of them, huh?” she asked and laughed loudly. John’s face went hot. “Yeah, I knew a Navajo once. Laura was her name. Laura Tohe. You know her?”
John shook his head.
“Ah, she was a good one,” said the old woman. “Haven’t heard from her in a long time. A long time.”
Thinking of Laura, the old woman sipped at her Pepsi.
“What’s your name, anyways?” she asked after a moment or two.
“John.”
The old woman studied John’s face, trying to determine if the name fit his features. It did not.
“My name is Lu,” she said. “But everybody calls me Sweet Lu.”
She extended her hand and John shook it in the Indian way. He had learned some small things.
“You know,” she said. “Most people call them Sasquatch these days. Makes it sound more Indian, don’t it?”
John nodded his head.
“I’ll take you to find ol’ Sasquatch,” she said. “And I’ll give you the Indian discount, too, okay? How’s twenty bucks sound?”
John handed her the money. Sweet Lu then packed up her folding chair and sign, threw them into the back of a rusty yellow pickup, and hopped into the driver’s seat. John had to push a pile of newspapers and magazines to the floor before he could sit in the passenger seat.
“You better buckle in,” she said. “It’s a rough ride.”
Sweet Lu drove that pickup deep into the woods, using logging roads and cattle trails. Once or twice, she simply imagined a path through the trees and followed it. They traveled for hours, mostly not speaking, though Sweet Lu would occasionally break the silence.
“You speak your language?” she asked John.
“No.”
“Ah, too bad. That Navajo language is beautiful. Jeez, I remember when Laura Tohe would talk Navajo and all the Indian boys would come running. There was this one guy, named Phil something-or-other. Ah, he had it something fierce for her. Would ask her to speak in Navajo. Laura, say chair. Laura, say horse. Laura, say desert.”
Sweet Lu laughed at the memory.
After a few hours, Sweet Lu dropped the pickup into low gear and chugged up a steep hill. She narrowly avoided a fallen tree, then stopped the pickup atop a rise. A small creek wound its way through the wash below. A few birds, which John could not identify, startled by the presence of humans, excitedly flew from tree to tree and chattered in their bird languages.
“Sasquatch fishes here, so keep your eyes open,” said Sweet Lu, then promptly leaned back in her seat and fell asleep.
John waited and watched. Sweet Lu snored loudly. The creek water was green from that distance, and John knew that it must be cold, ice cold. A small doe gracefully stepped from the trees to sip water from the creek. The birds had quieted, finally accepting John and Sweet Lu’s presence. A military jet, thousands of feet above them, left a vapor trail across the otherwise clear blue sky. John wondered if Sasquatch was out there in the woods, watching and waiting for the humans to leave. John knew he did not belong there or anywhere, but he never wanted to leave.
Near dark, Sweet Lu woke up with a sudden start. She had been dreaming about her late husband, a Hupa man who never did learn to speak English.
“You see him?” asked Sweet Lu.
John shook his head.
“Ah, too bad. I’ll give you half your money back, okay?”
John shook his head.
“You sure?” asked Sweet Lu.
“Yes,” said John.
Sweet Lu gave John a ride to the border of the reservation.
“I can’t cross the border,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t have my passport.”
John shook her hand again and waved as she pulled away. He stood there in the dark for a while, as cars filled with strangers passed him by, as the night sky became so clear that every constellation was visible. The Big and Little Dippers, Orion, Pegasus. John knew that stars were suns, that each was the center of its own solar system, with any number of planets dependent on its warmth and gravity. John, a falling star, brief and homeless, began the long walk back to Seattle, wondering what Olivia and Daniel would think of this adventure. Pragmatic people. When they swallowed the bread and wine at Mass, did they ever consider the magic of it all? There was magic in the world. John knew that real Indians felt it every day. He had only brief glimpses of it, small miracles happening at the edges of his peripheral vision, tiny wonders exploding while his back was turned.
John hitchhiked back to Seattle and made it to work that Monday morning. He was waiting when the foreman arrived early that morning, but John did not understand a word when the foreman tried to talk to him. All that morning, the foreman spoke a strange, unintelligible language. And worse than that, the foreman’s face changed. Deep beneath the changes, he still looked like the foreman, but he resembled Daniel Smith, too. No. That wasn’t quite right. The foreman could look like anybody. He could change his face at will. John knew that if he were a good Indian, he would have known the foreman was a shape changer, a loup-garou, a werewolf. Good Indians can always spot monsters. John also knew he could not stay on this job. He was frightened by the foreman and by all his co-workers. They were white men and he knew they talked about him. He knew they were plotting against him. There were too many of them and too few of John.
“Hey, John, you want to get a beer?” they always asked him, even after he had declined dozens of previous offers. Somewhere inside himself, John knew they just wanted him to be a part of the team. He understood what it meant to be a teammate. He’d been a teammate once. But he did not want to deal with the complications, the constant need to reassert his masculinity, the graphic talk about women. John could no longer stand such talk about women. Rain washed the windows of the building across the street, and John could see the blurry image of a woman talking on the telephone. She gestured wildly. From that distance, she was just a beautiful series of shapes and colors. Blond hair, a red dress, small hands, long fingers. He knew she was beautiful but, strangely enough, all he wanted was to watch her. He felt no need to touch her or even speak to her. His teammates and co-workers would have spoken of all the horrible things they might do to the beautiful white woman across the street. Or to a woman like Marie, the pretty Indian. John had heard such talk from the rich white men at his father’s parties and from the working white men at the construction site. All poison and anger. John knew his co-workers wanted to poison him with their alcohol and mean words. They wanted to get him drunk and helpless. John had never taken a drink of alcohol in his whole life and he was not about to start now. He knew what alcohol did to Indians. Real Indians did not drink. John knew he could not stay in that place any longer. Father Duncan was praying in the desert. Perhaps he was praying for John’s salvation. But John knew he needed to find his own salvation. He thought about the old woman, Sweet Lu, and wondered if she ever shared a salmon meal with Sasquatch. He thought about the beauty of myths and the power of lies, how myths told too often became lies, and how lies told too often became myths. He looked at the city’s skyline, understanding the myth and lies of its construction, the myths and lies of its architects. John knew there was one white man who should die for all the lies that had been told to Indians. Understanding that, he set down his gear and walked away from the construction site without saying a word to anyone. The foreman watched John leave with no way of knowing if he would ever come back to work. As John walked away, the foreman remembered when the Indian had first appeared nine years earlier.
“Hello,” he’d said, slowly and carefully, “I’m John Smith.”
The foreman had offered his hand and John loo
ked at it briefly, as if he were unsure of what to do. The foreman had figured that John was just nervous, especially after he refused to make any eye contact. John was always looking down at the floor, studying his hands, looking out the window.
“So,” the foreman had said. “Why do you want to work construction?”
“I read about it,” John had said. “In a magazine. Indians like to work construction. Mohawks. In New York City.”
The foreman knew about the Mohawk construction workers, who had passed from ordinary story into outright myth. They were crazy bastards, walking across girders without safety harnesses, jumping from floor to floor like they were Spiderman’s bastard sons. There were three or four generations of Mohawk steel workers. Old Mohawk grandfathers sat around Brooklyn brownstones and talked stories about working on the Empire State Building. They scared children with tales of relatives, buried alive in building foundations, who come back to haunt all of the white office workers.
“Are you Mohawk?” the foreman had asked.
“Uh, no.”
“What are you? Snohomish? Puyallup?” the foreman had asked, running through his limited knowledge of the local tribes.
“No, I’m Lakota Sioux.”
“Sioux, huh? Bad old buffalo hunter? The Plains are pretty damn flat. What makes you think you can climb up the side of a building?”
“I’m strong.”
For no reason that he could verbalize, the foreman had hired John on the spot to do the grunt work, and John was strong, very strong. He carried scrap metal and garbage, pallets stacked with building supplies. He did every damn thing that you could want him to do, except talk much. But hell, the foreman had figured, good talkers are usually bad workers. The foreman had snuck John into the union, and pretty soon, John was climbing up the sides of buildings.
Things had been fine until John started talking to himself. Then he had stopped talking at all, stayed silent for a couple weeks, and now was walking off the job without permission, something he had never done.
“See you tomorrow, chief,” the foreman said to himself as John disappeared into the lunch-hour crowd. The foreman was pissed that John had not bothered to officially clock out. But John had been so withdrawn and goofy this morning, the foreman had even thought John might try to take a dive off the building. Better to just let him walk away. The foreman wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief and turned back to work.
John kept walking. He was unsure of where to go and could not tell the difference between the noise of the lunch-hour crowd and the noise of the crowd in his head. Maybe they were the same people. He smelled the salt in the air and decided to walk to Elliott Bay. Maybe if he stood near the water, he could clear his head. But he was not sure how to get there. He knew he should carry a map because he was always getting lost, but he had just never bothered to buy one. Besides, maps were dangerous. If you were seen looking at a map, then everybody knew you were lost and vulnerable. You were easy prey. But John was strong. He looked for familiar landmarks, saw the neon lights of a porno shop and the huge sculpture outside the Seattle Art Museum. The Hammering Man. Fifty feet tall. Nothing abstract or confusing. Just a tall man with a hammer pounding the air. A moving sculpture that had received so many insults. A waste of tax money. No face, no hair, no sexual organs, no pores, no skin. Just the metal skeleton and the metal hammer. The Hammering Man was neither Indian nor white. He may have not been a man. What did it mean? John wasn’t sure what the artist might have meant. But that didn’t matter to John. The artist wasn’t important anymore. The Hammering Man was simply all that John wanted to be. Important and powerful. Simple, unconcerned. The Hammering Man looked as if he could have stepped away from the museum, away from all the small details and painful reminders of his past, and walked into Elliott Bay. Walked until his head and hammer disappeared beneath the surface of the water. Kept walking. The hammer still pounding, still moving, back and forth, back and forth. The hammer was all that mattered. The tool and the use of the tool.
19
Native American Studies
DR. CLARENCE MATHER SAT at a disorganized desk in the bowels of the Anthropology Building. He always came down here to relax, and he needed relaxation because his office was being bombarded with crank calls concerning the murder of Justin Summers and the disappearance of David Rogers, and because his Native American literature class had become a terrible power struggle with Marie Polatkin. Though fairly intelligent and physically attractive, she was rude and arrogant, thought Mather, hardly the qualities of a true Spokane. As if it ran in the family like some disease, Reggie Polatkin had also failed to behave like a true Spokane. Mather knew he could teach both of them a thing or two about being Indian if they would listen to him, but it seemed all of the Spokanes were destined to misunderstand his intentions.
Mather and Reggie Polatkin had been friends from the very beginning. Though Reggie couldn’t have said as much, he’d immediately felt a strange kinship with the white man who wanted to be so completely Indian. Reggie was a half-Indian who wanted to be completely white, or failing that, to earn the respect of white men. Mather and Reggie were mirror opposites. Each had something the other wanted, and both had worked hard to obtain it.
Reggie and Mather traveled to men’s gatherings and went into the sweathouse together. Reggie had usually been the only Indian at those gatherings and willingly played the part of shaman for the sad and lonely white men, many years his senior, who’d come to him for answers. For the first time in his life, Reggie felt as if being Indian meant something, as if he could obtain tangible reward from simply behaving as an Indian was supposed to behave, acting as an Indian was supposed to act. And the act became so convincing that Reggie began to believe it himself. His Indian act earned him the respect of white men and the sexual favors of white women.
Through Reggie, Mather was able to obtain entry into the Seattle urban Indian community. He went to parties where all the guests were Indian. He used a counterfeit tribal enrollment card to play in the all-Indian basketball tournaments. Together, Mather and Reggie went into Indian taverns and snagged Indian women. While Reggie went to bed with the most attractive woman of any pair of friends, Mather slept with the other, only slightly less attractive, half.
This had all continued until Mather found that box of recordings of traditional Indian stories. Mather had always enjoyed negotiating the narrow passageways, rummaging and foraging here and there. A few years earlier, he had found two boxes of reel-to-reel tapes filled with the voices of Pacific Northwest Indian elders. Recorded by a forgotten anthropologist during the summer of 1926, the tapes had just been collecting dust in a storage room when Dr. Mather stumbled upon them. Excited, but still protective of the discovery, Mather had decided to play the tapes for Reggie, one of the brightest Indians Mather had ever encountered.
The professor thought Reggie had a grasp of Indian history almost as strong as his own. And Reggie’s knowledge of Spokane Indian history was probably a little more complete than Mather’s. Mather thought the young Spokane might have been able to clarify some aspects of the story.
“Listen to this woman,” Mather had said to Reggie as they listened to an Indian elder telling a story. “She’s Spokane. Do you think you can identify her?”
Reggie didn’t speak Spokane well, but he’d recognized that Spokane Indian elder’s story.
“That’s a family story. It belongs to the family. Not on some tape. It’s not supposed to be told this way. You should erase that tape.”
Mather had been shocked by the suggestion. Up until that point, Reggie had been a dedicated student. In fact, Mather had seen himself as a father figure for Reggie, and the young Indian had become something of a son. Mather had trusted Reggie, maybe even loved him, and had always assumed that Reggie felt the same about him. But Mather had felt only disappointment when Reggie said he wanted to erase the tapes. The professor had wanted to make them public and publish an article about them, but Reggie had heard the recorded voice
of that old Spokane woman and had been suddenly ashamed of himself. He’d heard that ancient voice and wanted to destroy it. He’d wanted to erase the tapes because he had not wanted anybody else, especially a white man like Mather, to have them. He’d wanted to erase them because they’d never be his stories.
“This is a very valuable anthropological find,” Mather had said. “I mean, nobody even tells these stories anymore. Not even Indians. We have to save them.”
“Stories die because they’re supposed to die,” Reggie had said.
“But these stories aren’t dead,” Mather had said. “The elders must have wanted them to be saved. They allowed the anthropologist to record them.”
“Look, I’m sure the elders definitely didn’t understand how these stories were going to be used. Dr. Mather, you have to let these stories go. Burn the tapes. Or I’ll burn them for you.”
Reggie had stared at Mather with such startling anger that the professor had stepped backward and, frightened, had promised to burn the tapes. Later, angry at himself for having played the tapes for Reggie, Mather had hidden them in a dark corner of the basement instead. When Reggie had asked him later if the tapes had been destroyed, Mather denied that the tapes had ever existed. Mather had told that first lie because he believed he was protecting the recordings. He’d come to see those stories as his possessions, as his stories, as if it had been his voice on those tapes. He’d lied to preserve his idea of order. But with each successive lie Mather had told, he’d begun to lose track of the original reasons for lying. Layer after layer of lies. As an anthropologist, Mather could have dug into himself for years and not discovered the truth.