We all justify our sins, venal or mortal.
There was also a third murderer at that New Year’s Eve party, but that killing would take place a few years later. So maybe I should say there was a future murderer at the party. And that murder would take place in a convenience-store parking lot in Spokane. It would happen in an old car. One of my father’s more distant friends would shoot and kill one of my father’s closest cousins.
He served only five or eight years in prison for the murder and then vanished, either to escape the Indians intent on revenge or because those vengeful Indians had made him vanish.
But no, my little sister fact-checked me and said, “That guy got out of prison and lived in a HUD house on the rez until he died.”
“What?” I said. “He lived in Wellpinit? No way. Did you ever talk to him?”
“He tried to talk to us,” she said. “But I just walked past him.”
“And nobody tried to get revenge on him?”
“No, he was just an outcast. People walked circles around him like he was a disease.”
“That’s all that happened to him?” I asked.
“Killers get away with killing,” she said.
So, yes, I grew up with murderers. But, strangely enough, I wasn’t all that worried about their presence at that New Year’s Eve party. I wasn’t afraid of being killed as much as I was afraid of being sexually abused. I knew there would be five or six party guests who’d sexually molested my friends and cousins. There would be guests who’d raped only adults. And guests who’d raped only children. And opportunists who had and would violate any vulnerable woman, man, or child. I’d been abused by one man. I knew he’d be at the party, so I assumed I’d have to specifically protect myself against him and generally protect myself against all of the other predators.
As an adult, I can look back at the violence on my reservation and logically trace it back to the horrific degradations, sexual and otherwise, committed against my tribe by generations of white American priests, nuns, soldiers, teachers, missionaries, and government officials. The abused can become abusers. It’s a tragic progression. But, as a child, even a very bright child, I had little knowledge of Native American history. We Spokane Indian children weren’t even taught about our own tribal history. I only knew my personal history. And, in my story, the villains were other Spokane Indians. My monsters had brown skin, with dark hair and eyes, and they looked like me.
So, as my mother and father prepared for that New Year’s Eve party, I walked downstairs into my bedroom, reached far under my bed, and pulled out a clear plastic bag heavy with forty metal butter knives. I’d purchased the bag of used knives at Goodwill or Value Village or Salvation Army or some other secondhand store. Or maybe I bought them at Dutch’s Pawnshop in downtown Spokane. I don’t remember. But I do recall that the bag cost me two dollars. That was a significant amount of money for a poor reservation kid. I could have bought at least thirty pieces of penny candy at Irene’s Grocery Store. But, even as a kid, I had more important uses for my money than sweets. I needed knives. And I shoved them, one by one, into the narrow gap between my bedroom door and the jamb. This locked the door in place. It could not be easily opened. That door looked armored with all of those knives. That door looked like a giant wood and metal porcupine, fierce and ready to defend me. But, alas, that door and jamb were actually hollow and thin. The knives were cheap and pliable. I still hoped their combined strength would be enough to keep the door shut against any monsters. Well, truthfully, I knew those knives were not strong enough to keep a dedicated monster from breaking into my room. But those forty knives would be strong enough to make a monster pause and reconsider. Those forty knives would make a monster worry that he was making too much noise as he beat at the door. He’d be scared that the noise would attract the attention of other adults—maybe my parents if they weren’t too bottle-blind—who would then come downstairs to investigate the commotion. Those forty knives might make a monster wonder if I was armed with other, sharper knives. Maybe that monster would decide to search for an easier target. Do you know that old joke about how you don’t have to run faster than a charging grizzly—you just have to run faster than your hiking companions? Well, I was using the same survivor logic. My bedroom fortress didn’t need to be impenetrable. It just needed to be stronger than everybody else’s defenses—stronger than all of the other Indian children who were as vulnerable as or more vulnerable than me.
Self-preservation was my religion.
Above all else, I knew those forty butter knives would delay the monster long enough for me to climb through my basement window and escape into the pine forest behind my house. I’d spent so much time in those woods that I’d memorized them. I could safely run and avoid all the trees, fallen and not. I could leap the small creek and hurdle the glacial boulders. It would not have mattered if the forest was barely lit by moonlight or not illuminated at all. I wasn’t afraid of the dark nearly as much as I was afraid of the monsters who hunted by night and day.
But the monsters didn’t come after me that night. Instead, it was my parents who terrified me the most.
I was still awake at midnight when the party went into full crazy mode, with singing and screaming and cursing and pistols and rifles fired into the night sky. Those reservation Indian parties felt less like celebrations and more like ceremonial preparation for a battle that never quite arrived.
But I was asleep when I heard my father curse and grunt and war-whoop. When I heard bodies slamming into walls. When I heard my father cry out in pain.
Stupidly, bravely, I crawled out of bed, pulled the forty butter knives from my door—keeping one as a dull weapon—and ran upstairs. I was only seven or eight or nine years old, but I was going to defend my father. I’d always been that foolish and brave. When I was four, I picked up a miniature wooden baseball bat and attacked the skulls, arms, and legs of three white boys who were picking on my big brother in a motel parking lot in Spokane. I chased those white boys away and then, still blind with rage, attacked my brother. And, as he often had to during our youth, he disarmed me, and bear-hugged me until I, exhausted and furious, passed out in his arms.