Short Story

KILLING AN INDIAN

by

M. Flaming
 

It was a hot, blue, Portland summer evening when I met up with my best friend, Nathan, to split a fifth of Jack Daniels and talk. Nathan had just broken up with the girl that he'd been dating for the last year, and was in need of some consolation. He climbed into my beat-up hatchback and I drove us down to the railroad switching yards by the river, a spot that I liked because of the way the downtown lights played across the water and the sad, slow silhouettes of the empty boxcars and grain silos and the train-tracks curving away into the distance. We sat on some sections of concrete pipe half taken-over by weeds beside the water, and passed the bottle between us.

I'd met Nathan while we were still in college, and we'd roomed together for our last two semesters. We looked alike - tall, dark and scrawny - and faroved the same bands and philosophers. We also both came from pasts that we were looking to outrun. His was a working-class suburb of Denver and mine a nowhere hick town in Northern California. Nathan wanted to be a musician, and I was trying to make my start as a writer.

Sitting down by the river that night, he leaned back and looked up at the sky, his narrow face mournful, and took a swig of whiskey. Overhead, the night was deep, warm and still, a yellow crescent of moon reflected in duplicate in his glasses. In the weeds and dry grasses along the bank where we sat, crickets chirped frantically, as if driven mad by the heat.

"The strange thing is," Nathan told me, "you know, the strange thing is, I don't feel that sad. I don't feel much of anything."

"And that worries you?" I asked. I myself felt filled by gentle sorrows at that moment, conjured by the ghosts of the place where we sat and the impending end of summer: of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, who had been my heroes in high-school, of sad saxophone, empty highway, and and the promise of an America that never quite could be. .

"Yeah, it worries me," he said. "I feel like I've shut off emotionally, like I've just repressed everything."

"Yeah." I nodded. "I do that too."

We passed the bottle, and drank.

"The thing is," Nathan said, "it's just, I have this habit of thinking of everything in terms of a horizon in the future. Because I don't want to commit to anything that'll get in the way of what I want, long term."

"And Nicole didn't fit in with your long term?"

"Something like that." He shrugged. "Maybe - there are just so many possible explanations for what went wrong that I get lost in them, you know?"

I nodded. "Being able to imagine too many alternatives. That's what paralyzes people like us." Neither of us said anything for a while.

"So tell me," I asked, "what's on that horizon? That future that you're thinking towards?"

He shrugged. "A time when... I'm happy. When I'm content. A famous musician, I don't know."

I thought about this for a while then, and how it was true of my life as well. Although it was getting harder, at twenty-six I could still fool myself into believing that the future was a blank slate, and that if only I avoided conceding anything to the present, all my options were still open. I took a swig from the bottle, and Nathan lit a cigarette.

We talked about other things then; we were young and full of ourselves and ready to bullshit the moon overhead down to earth. We talked about the things we always did: why Hume had it all wrong and Nietzche had it right, of the revolutions in writing and music that we had planned, of our fears of becoming our fathers. Then I noticed, or maybe Nathan saw him first, a man walking towards us. We slid down off the concrete pipes, and watched him.

He was walking slowly and we had time to study him as he approached. He was a striking figure: older than the two of us, short and powerfully built, with seamed brown skin and thick black hair that fell to the middle of his back. He was dressed in cowboy boots, faded jeans, and a clean red button-down shirt, tucked in to his belt and stretched taut over a protruding belly. From the uneven deliberateness of his steps, it was obvious that he was very drunk. He walked towards us and stopped a few feet away, planting his feet and crossing his arms.

"Whaddyou want?" he said, angrily. Both of us were silent, not sure what to say. "I'm Apache," he said, jabbing his chest with his thumb. "I'm from Arizona. Where're you from?" He wobbled slightly.

"We're from Portland," Nathan said. "We both live here."

The Indian slurred something.

"What did you say?" I asked.

The Indian made a slow, exaggerated gesture: he raised an invisible bottle to his lips, drank deeply, and then lowered it. "I'm an alcoholic," he said. "Today, I choose to be alcoholic. So-" he reached towards us. "Can you spare a dollar? I'm honest. I want to drink. Can you give me dollar?"

Nathan shook his head. "Sorry. I don't have anything."

"Whaddabout you?" he turned to me.

I had some money in my pocket: a roll of singles that I'd collected in tips from my job as a waiter. And often as not, I handed out money to the beggars and runaway kids who approached me: I've always thought that even if they spent it on drugs or drink, I'd probably do the same thing if I was living on the streets.

So I don't know why I refused that night. I've thought about it a lot, and still don't have an answer. Maybe it was the fact that he was dressed well and didn't look like he really needed it. Maybe it was just because Nathan said no first. But for some reason, I didn't want to give him any money. Then I remembered the bottle in my hand.

"Sorry," I said. "I don't have anything either. But here - you want a drink?" I held out the bottle and as I did so was struck by the thought of maybe how this same gesture was made by the first white men on the continent to the first Native Americans they met.

Maybe the Indian thought the same thing. He ignored the bottle and instead took a step backwards and gave us the finger. "Fuck you," he said. "What you gonna do? Kick me?" He gestured at Nathan's sandals. "You gonna kick me with those things?"

"I don't want to kick you," Nathan said. "Why would I want to kick you?"

"Why not?" The Indian sneered at us. "You don' care about me. You don' care about nothing. Whaddyou care about?"

I wasn't scared, exactly: there were two of us, and only one of him. But I felt a tingle of nervous adrenaline climbing through my legs and my heart started to beat faster. I tried to think how to answer his question, and didn't know what to say. I cared a great deal, about art, and beauty, and the paradigms of modern thought, and the condition of modern man, to name a few things. But none of them were ideas that fit into this conversation.

"Hey," I said, "come on, man. Take it easy." I set down the bottle, trying to put distance between myself and the object of our conflict.

"Why should I? You don' care about anything," the Indian said contemptuously. "Lookatchyou! Why you even here? Why your ancestors come here? Go home!"

Neither of us said anything, not knowing how to respond.

"Well whatdmmy supposed to do then?" he asked, suddenly almost plaintive. "I'm Apache. Whatdmmy supposed to do?"

"We are the stories we tell ourselves," Nathan said, a little smugly, glancing over at me. It was a quote from a philosopher we both admired.

"What the fuck?" the Indian said, angry again. "What the fuck's that supposed to mean?"

"I think he means," I translated, "that you've just got to decide what to do with your life, and then do it." I tried to say this in a friendly tone of voice but somehow it came out wrong, more schoolteacher-ish than I'd intended. I glanced back at Nathan, and he nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "You've just got to choose the world you want to live in, right?"

"Fuck you," the Indian said, "fuck you, you can kiss my ass!" He took a step back and faked a punch at me, and I flinched.

I try to slow down my recollections of that night to single, grainy exposures, searching for some clue, but even in memory the scene pushes ahead, inevitable, outrunning my grasp. Even after I flinched, I think, I didn't understand how close to the precipice we were standing, how close the violence in the air. If I'd had more experience with such confrontations, I would have known. But as it was, I still took the encounter lightly.

"Hey," Nathan said, similarly blind. "hey, relax, OK?"

All at once something seemed to flare open in the Indian's eyes and he stepped forward, fast. I heard the smack of his fist and then Nathan was sitting in the weeds, clutching his jaw. It all happened with the cartoonish jerkiness of old silent films, people racing to and fro like overwound clockwork toys.

I stepped forward and clenched my fists without really really thinking. My pulse started to race. I thought of action movies I'd seen, and maybe somewhere a sick part of me was itching for a fight. I felt strong and young.

Without hesitating the Indian twisted around and punched me in the face.

I hadn't been hit in the face for years, since Junior High, and it felt for a second like my head had exploded. I staggered back, blinded, lines of pain shooting through my skull, and by the time I could see again, Nathan was trying to get up and the Indian kicked him in the ribs and my friend collapsed groaning. On the ground beside me, I saw the bottle we'd been drinking from and picked it up. I didn't think about this at all: I just knew that I needed something heavy in my hands.

And remembering this I can't help but think nonsensically, desperately, even to this day: next time I'll do this differently. As if somehow, maybe, a gap in the irreversibility of time will open up and I will have another chance.

The Indian was facing away from me. I jumped forward and hit him as hard as I could on the head. It was a square glass bottle, the kind whiskey comes in, and I hit him awkwardly with a corner instead of a flat surface. The bottle didn't shatter against his head; it just made a dull 'thunk' that reverberated up my arm. The Indian collapsed without a sound, onto his face.

And still I keep thinking that it could have been different, that it didn't have to be like this. That next time I will do this right. He collapsed, and didn't move.

Everything seemed to go silent, then. I watched Nathan climb to his feet. I probably asked him if he was okay and he probably said 'yes' but I can't remember hearing the words. I looked down and saw something dark and wet creep along the Indian's neck, out of his thick hair. Nathan started to cry. He stumbled over to the edge of the river and threw up into the water. I wanted to cry as well, but I couldn't. I just stood there, my hands dangling uselessly by my sides. I dropped the bottle and it hit the ground with a hollow, final sound like a punctuation mark in the hot night.

I remember feeling that if I could just stand still enough, if only I didn't let myself think anything, then nothing would have to happen next. That everything could just stop, and be all right. Because somewhere, I already understood what I had done, and wasn't ready to face what was coming next.

Nathan collected himself, wiping his eyes and mouth, and moved to stand next to me. We both looked down at the unmoving Indian. "What the fuck did you do?" he asked.

"I hit him with the bottle," I said, the words sounding distant, like they came from someone else.

"What, what do we do?" There was an edge of panic in Nathan's voice. "We've gotta get out of here. We've got to - we should call the cops or something. We've gotta get out of here."

I was waiting for the Indian to breathe. I tasted bile in the back of my throat. Fractured, half-formed thoughts kept winding through my head. I was trying to remember what we were supposed to do next, like an actor fumbling for a recollection of the script.

"Come on-" Nathan pulled at my arm. "Let's go."

"I think he's dead," I said.

"Fuck," Nathan said. His voice cracked. "We've got to call the cops. We've got to call 911."

I looked at the Indian lying on the ground and thought of the dust in his nostrils, the weeds and spiky dry grass pressing against his eyes. "We can't just - leave him like this?" I said. .

Nathan hesitated, then nodded. "Turn him over."

I shuddered. "Together," I said. .

Slowly we crossed to the body, waiting for the horror-movie moment when it would stir and sit up, full of vengeful fury. It didn't. Together, we rolled the Indian onto his back. Dead weight. There's a literal awfulness to that phrase that I'd never really understood before this. The Indian stared upward blankly, an expression of vacant confusion on his face.

"We should call the police," Nathan said again, forlornly.

I still can't explain what I did next. I felt distant from the scene, like I was watching the two of us crouch in the blue evening by the edge of the switching yard on TV. "Nathan." I looked up and met his eyes.

"What are you talking about?" he said, eyes focused on the distance across the water, responding to something I hadn't said yet.

"Why did it have to be like this?" I said. I felt almost dreamy, not knowing exactly what I meant by the words, but compelled to speak them still.

"What are you talking about?"

I thought: this is the tyranny of the sign. I thought: I refuse to be a murderer. "Maybe he wanted us to kill him" I said, half to myself. "Maybe this isn't really how it happened."

Nathan stood. "Come on," he said, almost gently. "We've got to go. Come on."

There's a kind a desperation to the explanations that we come up with after-the-fact for how we behave during moments of crisis. Gunshots ring out, cars crumple into each other in slow-motion, and all the rules go out the window; a part of the brain takes over that couldn't care less about the party line as we've stated it or the niceties which clothe our introspective safaris. In the face of such moments, reasons afterwards become nothing more than a retrospective scramble to patch up the ruptures in the persons who we know ourselves to be.

So forget reasons. Reasons are futile. This is what happened.

I stood up. I thought about going to the police, filling out reports, maybe even going to jail, and at that instant all the common sense in the world became meaningless. I felt beyond the bounds of myself, capable of anything. I looked at Nathan.

"What if we don't go to the police?" I asked.

"Then we'd be stupid. We'd be fucked."

"What if we throw him in the river?" My heart was pounding, I was shivering. I couldn't believe that I was saying these words. I couldn't not say them. "This could've happened so many ways. What if he fell in the river? No one would ever know, nobody saw us, nobody knows we were here."

"No," he said, horrified. "No, I can't believe you're saying this. What the hell is wrong with you?" His voice rose to a shout. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

But I could see that he understood me. Even as he was yelling, we exchanged a glance of complicity, the same look he wore when asking me not to tell his girlfriend that he'd just had a one-night stand. We weren't evil, I still believe. We were just selfish. We were relativists.

"It's going to sound crazy," I said, "but I keep thinking about Nietzche. About what he said about allowing yourself to be a master of the symbolic."

I watched Nathan remember what he'd said a few minutes ago, about choosing the world you live in.

"That doesn't apply here," he said. "He's dead."

"Saussure. The ambiguity of the sign."

Surreal, I thought: the blue night, the mad crickets chirping, the curving railroad tracks, the teetering lights across the river. Maybe there was a part of me, that night, that wanted to see just how far things could go. Like the point at which you've been driving for so long that you ache everywhere and distance doesn't mean anything anymore, and the world is all caffeine and 2am gas-station flourescents and an unfurling road, and the urge that will not leave you, to keep going, to see if some margin can be reached, some limit, some pure intensity, just to see. I had killed someone. There was a border that I'd crossed, and I couldn't remember anymore who I was supposed to be.

Or maybe this is just what I imagine, in retrospect.

"If we do this, I think we're always going to regret it," Nathan said. "I think this is a really bad idea."

"It was an accident."

"Rumi said regret is the opposite of life."

"So we won't regret." We wouldn't, I thought: all of this would become a story, too ridiculous to be true. We looked at each other and something seemed to stretch between us and then snap. Nathan looked away, shaking his head.

"No," he said, "no, I can't do it. This is crazy." .

All at once I knew he was right, that what I was suggesting was the absolute wrong thing to do. But I also felt caught up in some invisible mechanism, moved by something inevitable and terrible that wouldn't stop until the last logic of its unfolding was played out.

"Come on," I said. "Help me lift him."

"My God," Nathan said. "It's like you don't even care."

And at that moment, I think that I didn't care. It was too much, too big. I could only feel a kind of raw hollowness through my chest, and the ache of my face where the Indian had punched me. I stared at the pieces of broken bottles and cigarette butts on the ground. I wished that it didn't have to be this way, but suddenly all other options were impossible. I picked up the arms of the corpse.

"Come on," I said again.

I don't know what passed through Nathan's head then. I never asked him, and he never told me. He hesitated, rocking back on his heels, and let out a low moan. Then he picked up the feet.

The body seemed to have grown infinitely dense, and it took us an eternity to drag it over to the concrete ledge that bordered the river. We hoisted it up and pushed it over. It rolled down the hill to the river, gaining momentum, and hit the water with a splash. I looked at the dark current, trying to see where the corpse had landed, but it was already gone. I heard the chirping of crickets, the low horn of a barge somewhere downstream. I thought of the body floating past that barge unseen, eyes still open blankly in a questioning, startled stare up at the stars. I started to shiver uncontrollably.

"This too." I looked over at Nathan, standing beside me. He had picked up the bottle and was holding it out towards me. I shook my head, feeling like I could not move. Nathan stared at me for a second and then turned and threw the bottle, a high arc out over the water.

We stood there for a time then, neither of us moving. I knew that we should go, that staying where we were was the worst thing in the world. But I couldn't bring myself to turn away, mesmerized by the dim silver reflections of the river's shifting surface.

Finally one of us said: "Let's go."

During the car ride home I kept trying to think of what we had just done, but I couldn't. All I could think of were the lyrics to a Bruce Springsteen song that I used to love: Everything dies baby, that's a fact/But maybe everything that dies, someday comes back. This, and the aching sadness and warmth of the end-of-summer evening, the neon signs outside bars glimmering in the blue night, the legs of pretty girls in shorts on the sidewalk.

I didn't know then that that night would be the last time that I really saw Nathan, but I guess that I should have. We met a few times afterwards, by chance, but these encounters were brief and awkward, with both of us eager to make our escapes. A few months later, he moved away and neither of us tried to contact the other. The last I heard of him, he was working as a parking-lot attendant somewhere in Texas.

Mark Twain once said that a story should end with a death or a marriage, but how do you end a story about a death? In the years since, I've tried to forget about that night, and when that didn't work, I tried to understand what happened, to figure out why I did what I did. Sometimes I tell myself that there are terrible things, unknown things, inside all of us, waiting for a chance to appear. And sometimes this helps me get to sleep. But in the end, I don't have any real answers. And maybe that's the point. Maybe that's why I keep writing and re-writing this ending. Because sometimes, no matter how much we want them to, the stories we tell ourselves don't make any difference at all.

.

§ § §

Matthew Flaming studied philosophy at Hampshire College in Massachusetts before moving to the west coast of the United States where he supports himself as an itinerant IT worker. .

He writes book reviews and short stories, and is currently working on a historical novel. His work has appeared in print in Scrawl, and online in AnotherSun. He lives on the web at http://www.matthewflaming.com

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