Ten Little Indians: Stories Page 12

  “Are they beautiful?”

  William was pleasantly surprised to be asked such a question. “Yes,” he said. “Their names are Marie and Grace. They’re very beautiful. I love them very much.”

  “You must miss them when you travel.”

  “I miss them so much I go crazy,” said William. “I start thinking I’m going to disappear, you know, just vanish, if I’m not home. Sometimes I worry their love is the only thing that makes me human, you know? I think if they stopped loving me, I might burn up, spontaneously combust, and turn into little pieces of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes sir, I understand love can be so large.”

  William wondered why he was being honest and poetic with a taxi driver. There is emotional safety in anonymity, he thought.

  “I have a wife and three sons,” said the driver. “But they live in Ethiopia with my mother and father. I have not seen any of them for many years.”

  For the first time, William looked closely at the driver. He was clear-eyed and handsome, strong of shoulder and arm, maybe fifty years old, maybe older. A thick scar ran from his right ear down his neck and beneath his collar. A black man with a violent history, William thought and immediately reprimanded himself for racially profiling the driver: Excuse me, sir, but I pulled you over because your scar doesn’t belong in this neighborhood.

  “I still think of my children as children,” the driver said. “But they are men now. Taller and stronger than me. They are older now than I was when I last saw them.”

  William did the math and wondered how this driver could function with such fatherly pain. “I bet you can’t wait to go home and see them again,” he said, following the official handbook of the frightened American male: When confronted with the mysterious, you can defend yourself by speaking in obvious generalities.

  “I cannot go home,” said the taxi driver, “and I fear I will never see them again.”

  William didn’t want to be having this conversation. He wondered if his silence would silence the taxi driver. But it was too late for that.

  “What are you?” the driver asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you are not white, your skin, it is dark like mine.”

  “Not as dark as yours.”

  “No,” said the driver and laughed. “Not so dark, but too dark to be white. What are you? Are you Jewish?”

  Because they were so often Muslim, taxi drivers all over the world had often asked William if he was Jewish. William was always being confused for something else. He was ambiguously ethnic, living somewhere in the darker section of the Great American Crayola Box, but he was more beige than brown, more mauve than sienna.

  “Why do you want to know if I’m Jewish?” William asked.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, sir, if I offended you. I am not anti-Semitic. I love all of my brothers and sisters. Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, even the atheists, I love them all. Like you Americans sing, ‘Joy to the world and Jeremiah Bullfrog!’”

  The taxi driver laughed again, and William laughed with him.

  “I’m Indian,” William said.

  “From India?”

  “No, not jewel-on-the-forehead Indian,” said William. “I’m a bows-and-arrows Indian.”

  “Oh, you mean ten little, nine little, eight little Indians?”

  “Yeah, sort of,” said William. “I’m that kind of Indian, but much smarter. I’m a Spokane Indian. We’re salmon people.”

  “In England, they call you Red Indians.”

  “You’ve been to England?”

  “Yes, I studied physics at Oxford.”

  “Wow,” said William, wondering if this man was a liar.

  “You are surprised by this, I imagine. Perhaps you think I’m a liar?”

  William covered his mouth with one hand. He smiled this way when he was embarrassed.

  “Aha, you do think I’m lying. You ask yourself questions about me. How could a physicist drive a taxi? Well, in the United States, I am a cabdriver, but in Ethiopia, I was a jet-fighter pilot.”

  By coincidence or magic, or as a coincidence that could willfully be interpreted as magic, they drove past Boeing Field at that exact moment.

  “Ah, you see,” said the taxi driver, “I can fly any of those planes. The prop planes, the jet planes, even the very large passenger planes. I can also fly the experimental ones that don’t fly. But I could make them fly because I am the best pilot in the world. Do you believe me?”

  “I don’t know,” said William, very doubtful of this man but fascinated as well. If he was a liar, then he was a magnificent liar.

  On both sides of the freeway, blue-collared men and women drove trucks and forklifts, unloaded trains, trucks, and ships, built computers, televisions, and airplanes. Seattle was a city of industry, of hard work, of calluses on the palms of hands. So many men and women working so hard. William worried that his job—his selling of the purely theoretical—wasn’t a real job at all. He didn’t build anything. He couldn’t walk into department and grocery stores and buy what he’d created, manufactured, and shipped. William’s life was measured by imaginary numbers: the binary code of computer languages, the amount of money in his bank accounts, the interest rate on his mortgage, and the rise and fall of the stock market. He invested much of his money in socially responsible funds. Imagine that! Imagine choosing to trust your money with companies that supposedly made their millions through ethical means. Imagine the breathtaking privilege of such a choice. All right, so maybe this was an old story for white men. For most of American history, who else but a white man could endure the existential crisis of economic success? But this story was original and aboriginal for William. For thousands of years, Spokane Indians had lived subsistence lives, using every last part of the salmon and deer because they’d die without every last part, but William only ordered salmon from menus and saw deer on television. Maybe he romanticized the primal—for thousands of years, Indians also died of ear infections—but William wanted his comfortable and safe life to contain more wilderness.

  “Sir, forgive me for saying this,” the taxi driver said, “but you do not look like the Red Indians I have seen before.”

  “I know,” William said. “People usually think I’m a longhaired Mexican.”

  “What do you say to them when they think such a thing?”

  “No habla español. Indio de Norteamericanos.”

  “People think I’m black American. They always want to hip-hop rap to me. ‘Are you East Coast or West Coast?’ they ask me, and I tell them I am Ivory Coast.”

  “How have things been since September eleventh?”

  “Ah, a good question, sir. It’s been interesting. Because people think I’m black, they don’t see me as a terrorist, only as a crackhead addict on welfare. So I am a victim of only one misguided idea about who I am.”

  “We’re all trapped by other people’s ideas, aren’t we?”

  “I suppose that is true, sir. How has it been for you?”

  “It’s all backward,” William said. “A few days after it happened, I was walking out of my gym downtown, and this big phallic pickup pulled up in front of me in the crosswalk. Yeah, this big truck with big phallic tires and a big phallic flagpole and a big phallic flag flying, and the big phallic symbol inside leaned out of his window and yelled at me, ‘Go back to your own country!’”

  “Oh, that is sad and funny,” the taxi driver said.

  “Yeah,” William said. “And it wasn’t so much a hate crime as it was a crime of irony, right? And I was laughing so hard, the truck was halfway down the block before I could get breath enough to yell back, ‘You first!’”

  William and the taxi driver laughed and laughed together. Two dark men laughing at dark jokes.

  “I had to fly on the first day you could fly,” William said. “And I was flying into Baltimore, you know, and D.C. and Baltimore are pretty much the same damn town, so it was like flying into Ground
Zero, you know?”

  “It must have been terrifying.”

  “It was, it was. I was sitting in the plane here in Seattle, getting ready to take off, and I started looking around for suspicious brown guys. I was scared of little brown guys. So was everybody else. We were all afraid of the same things. I started looking around for big white guys because I figured they’d be undercover cops, right?”

  “Imagine wanting to be surrounded by white cops!”

  “Exactly! I didn’t want to see some pacifist, vegan, whole-wheat, free-range, organic, progressive, gray-ponytail, communist, liberal, draft-dodging, NPR-listening wimp! What are they going to do if somebody tries to hijack the plane? Throw a Birkenstock at him? Offer him some pot?”

  “Marijuana might actually stop the violence everywhere in the world,” the taxi driver said.

  “You’re right,” William said. “But on that plane, I was hoping for about twenty-five NRA-loving, gun-nut, serial-killing, psychopathic, Ollie North, Norman Schwarzkopf, right-wing, Agent Orange, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, CIA, FBI, automatic-weapon, smart-bomb, laser-sighting bastards!”

  “You wouldn’t want to invite them for dinner,” the taxi driver said. “But you want them to protect your children, am I correct?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense. It’s all contradictions.”

  “The contradictions are the story, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a story about contradictions,” said the taxi driver. “Because you are a Red Indian, I think you will understand my pain.”

  “Su-num-twee,” said William.

  “What is that? What did you say?”

  “Su-num-twee. It’s Spokane. My language.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Listen to me.”

  “Ah, yes, that’s good. Su-num-twee, su-num-twee. So, what is your name?”

  “William.”

  The taxi driver sat high and straight in his seat, like he was going to say something important. “William, my name is Fekadu. I am Oromo and Muslim, and I come from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, and I want you to su-num-twee.”

  There was nothing more important than a person’s name and the names of his clan, tribe, city, religion, and country. By the social rules of his tribe, William should have reciprocated and officially identified himself. He should have been polite and generous. He was expected to live by so many rules, he sometimes felt like he was living inside an indigenous version of an Edith Wharton novel.

  “Mr. William,” asked Fekadu, “do you want to hear my story? Do you want to su-num-twee.”

  “Yes, I do, sure, yes, please,” said William. He was lying. He was twenty minutes away from the airport and so close to departure.

  “I was not born into an important family,” said Fekadu. “But my father worked for an important family. And this important family worked for the family of Emperor Haile Selassie. He was a great and good and kind and terrible man, and he loved his country and killed many of his people. Have you heard of him?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I haven’t.”

  “He was magical. Ruled our country for forty-three years. Imagine that! We Ethiopians are strong. White people have never conquered us. We won every war we fought against white people. For all of our history, our emperors have been strong, and Selassie was the strongest. There has never been a man capable of such love and destruction.”

  “You fought against him?”

  Fekadu breathed in so deeply that William recognized it as a religious moment, as the first act of a ceremony, and with the second act, an exhalation, the ceremony truly began.

  “No,” Fekadu said. “I was a smart child. A genius. A prodigy. It was Selassie who sent me to Oxford. And there I studied physics and learned the math and art of flight. I came back home and flew jets for Selassie’s army.”

  “Did you fly in wars?” William asked.

  “Ask me what you really want to ask me, William. You want to know if I was a killer, no?”

  William had a vision of his wife and daughter huddling terrified in their Seattle basement while military jets screamed overhead. It happened every August when the U.S. Navy Blue Angels came to entertain the masses with their aerial acrobatics.

  “Do you want to know if I was a killer?” asked Fekadu. “Ask me if I was a killer.”

  William wanted to know the terrible answer without asking the terrible question.

  “Will you not ask me what I am?” asked Fekadu.

  “I can’t.”

  “I dropped bombs on my own people.”

  In the sky above them, William counted four, five, six jets flying in holding patterns while awaiting permission to land.

  “For three years, I killed my own people,” said Fekadu. “And then, on the third of June in 1974, I could not do it anymore. I kissed my wife and sons good-bye that morning, and I kissed my mother and father, and I lied to them and told them I would be back that evening. They had no idea where I was going. But I went to the base, got into my plane, and flew away.”

  “You defected?” William asked. How could a man steal a fighter plane? Was that possible? And if possible, how much courage would it take to commit such a crime? William was quite sure he could never be that courageous.

  “Yes, I defected,” said Fekadu. “I flew my plane to France and was almost shot down when I violated their airspace, but they let me land, and they arrested me, and soon enough, they gave me asylum. I came to Seattle five years ago, and I think I will live here the rest of my days.”

  Fekadu took the next exit. They were two minutes away from the airport. William was surprised to discover that he didn’t want this journey to end so soon. He wondered if he should invite Fekadu for coffee and a sandwich, for a slice of pie, for brotherhood. William wanted to hear more of this man’s stories and learn from them, whether they were true or not. Perhaps it didn’t matter if any one man’s stories were true. Fekadu’s autobiography might have been completely fabricated, but William was convinced that somewhere in the world, somewhere in Africa or the United States, a man, a jet pilot, wanted to fly away from the war he was supposed to fight. There must be hundreds, maybe thousands, of such men, and how many were courageous enough to fly away? If Fekadu wasn’t describing his own true pain and loneliness, then he might have been accidentally describing the pain of a real and lonely man.

  “What about your family?” asked William, because he didn’t know what else to ask and because he was thinking of his wife and daughter. “Weren’t they in danger? Wouldn’t Selassie want to hurt them?”

  “I could only pray Selassie would leave them be. He had always been good to me, but he saw me as impulsive, so I hoped he would know my family had nothing to do with my flight. I was a coward for staying and a coward for leaving. But none of it mattered, because Selassie was overthrown a few weeks after I defected.”

  “A coup?”

  “Yes, the Derg deposed him, and they slaughtered all of their enemies and their enemies’ families. They suffocated Selassie with a pillow the next year. And now I could never return to Ethiopia because Selassie’s people would always want to kill me for my betrayal, and the Derg would always want to kill me for being Selassie’s soldier. Every night and day, I worry that any of them might harm my family. I want to go there and defend them. I want to bring them here. They can sleep on my floor! But even now, after democracy has almost come to Ethiopia, I cannot go back. There is too much history and pain, and I am too afraid.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve talked to your family?”

  “We write letters to each other, and sometimes we receive them. They sent me photos once, but they never arrived for me to see. And for two days, I waited by the telephone because they were going to call, but it never rang.”

  Fekadu pulled the taxi to a slow stop at the airport curb. “We are here, sir,” he said. “United Airlines.”

  William didn’t know how this ceremony was supposed to end. He fel
t small and powerless against the collected history. “What am I supposed to do now?” he asked.

  “Sir, you must pay me thirty-eight dollars for this ride,” said Fekadu and laughed. “Plus a very good tip.”

  “How much is good?”

  “You see, sometimes I send cash to my family. I wrap it up and try to hide it inside the envelope. I know it gets stolen, but I hope some of it gets through to my family. I hope they buy themselves gifts from me. I hope.”

  “You pray for this?”

  “Yes, William, I pray for this. And I pray for your safety on your trip, and I pray for the safety of your wife and daughter while you are gone.”

  “Pop the trunk, I’ll get my own bags,” said William as he gave sixty dollars to Fekadu, exited the taxi, took his luggage out of the trunk, and slammed it shut. Then William walked over to the passenger-side window, leaned in, and studied Fekadu’s face and the terrible scar on his neck.

  “Where did you get that?” William asked.

  Fekadu ran a finger along the old wound. “Ah,” he said. “You must think I got this flying in a war. But no, I got this in a taxicab wreck. William, I am a much better jet pilot than a car driver.”

  Fekadu laughed loudly and joyously. William wondered how this poor man could be capable of such happiness, however temporary it was.

  “Your stories,” said William. “I want to believe you.”

  “Then believe me,” said Fekadu.

  Unsure, afraid, William stepped back.

  “Good-bye, William American,” Fekadu said and drove away.

  Standing at curbside, William couldn’t breathe well. He wondered if he was dying. Of course he was dying, a flawed mortal dying day by day, but he felt like he might fall over from a heart attack or stroke right there on the sidewalk. He left his bags and ran inside the terminal. Let a luggage porter think his bags were dangerous! Let a security guard x-ray the bags and find mysterious shapes! Let a bomb-squad cowboy explode the bags as precaution! Let an airport manager shut down the airport and search every possible traveler! Let the FAA president order every airplane to land! Let the American skies be empty of everything with wings! Let the birds stop flying! Let the very air go still and cold! William didn’t care. He ran through the terminal, searching for an available pay phone, a landline, something true and connected to the ground, and he finally found one and dropped two quarters into the slot and dialed his home number, and it rang and rang and rang and rang, and William worried that his wife and daughter were harmed, were lying dead on the floor, but then Marie answered.