Stealing Indians

by John Smelcer

  Simon grabbed Elijah by the arm.

  “Come on, let’s go that way,” he said excitedly, pointing uptown.

  The Indians walked for blocks. It seemed like every time they stopped to look around, someone walking by would hand them some change. The boys didn’t understand why people should be giving them money. To them, city people were just the friendliest in the world.

  By the time they reached a man selling hot dogs from a street cart, the boys had enough change to buy two dogs with the works. The man piled on everything: brown mustard and catsup, cooked onions, steaming kraut, and hot chili. When the vendor was done piling on condiments, they could hardly see the dogs nestled in the hot, damp buns. The boys ate as they continued their city adventure, their smiling and amazed faces turning at each new sound, at each new motion. The day was perfect, warm with only a slight breeze. Caught up in the enjoyment of adventurous exploration, the boys were momentarily forgetful of their sadness.

  Briefly, they were happy.

  On one street corner, people were coming out of a hole in the ground. The sound of squealing brakes and the now-familiar sound of iron wheels on steel tracks cried out from the opening. Simon and Elijah ran down the steps, jumping two at a time, just missing a little old lady wearing a large, flowered hat and clutching a bright, yellow handbag.

  Simon paid the toll with loose change left over after buying the hot dogs. They had no plan to ride in the mysterious underground trains. They couldn’t take the chance of missing their real-world train. They only wanted to look around. Besides, it was cooler underground. To Simon, it was like being inside some of the caves back home, only the walls of these concrete caves were painted with graffiti that glowed beneath flickering fluorescent lights casting shadows behind the rows of pillars.

  Four older boys, probably in their late teens, emerged from the far end of the platform. They were wearing black leather jackets, even though it was a warm day. Their hair was combed back, slick and dark. They walked toward the two young Indians, talking and laughing among themselves as they approached. Simon and Elijah slowed their pace and tensed as they noticed the approaching pack. The older boys suddenly noticed the Indians. They stopped when they were close, blocking the way.

  Elijah tried to step around one of the boys, but the older boy moved to block his path.

  “Hey,” the tallest of the four said. “You guys ain’t from around here.”

  Simon spoke first. “We’re just looking around,” he replied, nervously.

  The one who looked to be the oldest of the boys spoke next. “What are you guys, Mexican or something? Got any pesos?”

  The other three laughed.

  Elijah took a step forward. “We’re Indian!” he said, his voice defiant, even prideful yet apprehensive.

  One of the other boys grabbed the strap of Elijah’s backpack.

  “What ya’ got in here?” the boy asked, yanking the strap so hard that he pulled Elijah off balance.

  Elijah turned his shoulder hard, breaking the older boy’s grip on the strap.

  “Stuff,” he said. “Nothing you’d want.”

  All four boys came closer to Elijah, encircling him, cutting him off from Simon, the way a wolf pack cuts off the too old, the too young, or the too sick from a herd. They were a pack—a pack roaming the undercity, a kind of wilderness.

  “Give it to us,” they demanded.

  Elijah was scared. But then, suddenly, he saw the vague image of a man standing beside one of the boys, as if the stale platform air had taken shape. The man was gray and out of focus. His dirty white shirt was open for the first two or three buttons below the collar. A black tie hung loosely around his neck. He looked drunk. His eyes were dark and sad and empty, and his hair was messed. He had a bottle in one hand, a belt in the other.

  Elijah spoke to the boy standing beside the apparition.

  “You’re going to end up just like your father,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your father died from drinking too much. He beat you all the time.”

  The boy was visibly shaken. His face turned pale, and his voice quivered.

  “How . . . how do you know about my old man?” he demanded.

  The other boys, Simon included, didn’t know what to do. They stood in the echoing cavern of the subway listening, goose bumps rising on their arms.

  “He beat the hell out of you with a baseball bat, didn’t he?”

  “How do you know about that!” the older boy screamed above the screeching of an arriving train. The hissing doors opened; a few people got off while some people got on.

  Elijah’s voice was calm now, almost trance-like, even sad.

  “He beat you when he was drunk, but you didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Tears welled up in the older boy’s eyes.

  “Shut up!” he shouted, knocking Elijah down to the dark, green-tiled floor.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Elijah said again, standing up.

  A man at the far end of the platform yelled in their direction, and when the pack turned to look, Simon grabbed his friend by the arm and pulled him along.

  “Run,” he whispered.

  That was the one thing Simon did better than anyone else. The one thing he knew could keep him safe. He ran.

  They hadn’t run a dozen steps when the pack gave chase. Simon poured it on. He ran as fast as he could, flying up the subway stairs three steps at a time. He ran down the street, passing yellow taxi cabs, a furniture delivery truck, a garbage truck, and pedestrians watching in disbelief. When he was two blocks away, he turned to his friend, laughing.

  “That was close,” he said.

  But Elijah wasn’t there. Simon had run too fast. Without thinking, he had unintentionally left his friend behind. Simon walked back down the busy street, but Elijah wasn’t there. He made his way back to the subway entrance, but still he didn’t see his friend. He crept down the steps, cautiously looking out for the pack. From the bottom of the steps he saw the four boys standing over Elijah on the nearly empty subway platform. They were rifling through his knapsack. Every time he tried to stand up, one of the boys shoved him down or kicked him in the side. A shabby, elderly woman was standing near a trash bin shouting at the boys to stop their bullying, but they ignored her.

  “That’s mine!” Elijah was yelling, reaching for his pack. It was clear even from the stairs that Elijah was crying. Anger mounted inside Simon. It was anger born of frustration and helplessness, the kind of pent-up anger many of the young men back on the reservation harbored deep inside. It grew so immense that it displaced the sadness he felt from being taken from his home. Without even thinking, he bounded down the stairs and jumped on the back of the closest boy, pounding on the side of his greasy head.

  “Get him off me!” the boy screamed, spinning with the weight of the angry, young Indian on his back, Simon’s long black hair sloshing back and forth.

  The other boys joined in. They peeled Simon from the back of their fellow, like a tenacious strip of Indian Velcro. Once Simon was on the ground they started kicking him. Elijah stood up and shoved one of the boys. The unanticipated assault caught the boy off guard, and he tripped and fell. Things went badly for Simon and Elijah after that, simply a matter of mathematics. The four boys were much older, bigger, taller, and heavier. Besides, their lives had offered them an abundance of street-fighting experience, and their thick leather jackets reduced the impact of the smaller boys’ punches. In no time, both Indians lay on the cold floor, tired and defeated.

  One of the bullies grabbed Elijah’s tan knapsack and poured out its contents in a shattering.

  “There’s nothin’ in here but pictures,” he said, bending over a heap of broken glass and twisted picture frames.

  As they walked away down the poorly lit platform, two or t
hree of the pack boys smoothed back their hair with their palms. Another was running a long, black comb straight back through his mop, depositing the comb, when finished, in his hip pocket.

  Simon stood up first, offering Elijah his hand.

  “We’d better get going,” he said.

  After replacing the contents in the knapsack, the boys walked up the stairs, their arms thrown over each other’s shoulder, their free hand nursing aches and bruised ribs.

  Neither spoke again until they were several blocks from the subway entrance, the train station looming in the distance.

  “Don’t worry,” Simon said, his lower lip bleeding slightly. “You still got the pictures. That’s what matters.”

  Elijah smiled, his left eye slowly swelling closed and darkening with deepening shades of blue, violet, purple.

  Half an hour later their train rolled out of the shadowy station into the bright sunlight. The two boys sat across a table from each other playing cards, pausing occasionally to massage bruises gently and to look out the window as the teeming city gave way to slower-paced suburbs and finally to tranquil, flat countryside, the vanishing point of the iron tracks stretching toward their future.

  Chapter Three

  THE BLUE-FACED SILVER BUS slowed to a stop. Over the preceding two days, it had collected more and more Indian children, in towns and cities along the bus’s long route. By the time it arrived at this destination, more than half the passengers were Indian.

  Noah Boyscout looked out the window.

  It was beginning to rain.

  “Last stop!” the bus driver shouted, pulling the door lever and looking in the rear view mirror. “All you Indian kids gotta get off here!”

  More than two dozen boys and girls stepped off the bus and gathered in the drizzle, looking up and down the wet road.

  “Now what?” one boy asked, looking up at the driver, reaching to close the door.

  “See them buildings over there?” he replied, nodding his head in the direction of a large complex of buildings on a slight hill. “That’s your school.”

  As the anxious children picked up their bags and began to shuffle in the direction of the buildings, a train blared its arrival. Everyone turned. A long train was pulling to a stop alongside a small covered platform two hundred yards down the road from where they had disembarked from the bus, which was disappearing around a gentle distant curve in the road. The train came to a full stop, and a hundred or more Indian children stepped onto the platform, milling around until they began to march toward where Noah Boyscout and Lucy Secondchief and the other bus passengers stood. Some carried suitcases, some duffel bags, and some nothing at all.

  Some of the younger children were crying, the older ones comforting them.

  Buses and trains had been stopping all day and even the day before to unload children, gathered from almost a hundred different tribes across the country.

  The crowd from the train joined the small group from the bus, and together they walked alongside a high, redbrick wall until coming to the school’s gate. Noah and Lucy stopped and looked up, the shuffling line of students passing around them. A beautiful, young woman wearing high heels that clicked on the cobblestone smiled at them as she passed. They wondered if she was a teacher. The imposing gate framed the view of the school beyond it. On each side rose a supporting square pillar of dark, reddish-brown bricks, the edges worn smooth from decades of rain. The pillars were tall, perhaps eight feet high, and a black iron arch spanned the cobbled walkway. The name of the school was spelled out in the middle, as if written by an iron finger.

  Wellington.

  Noah recognized the gate from the photograph the government man had showed him and his parents in their small cabin.

  Although neither knew it at the time as they shuffled beneath the gate, for the rest of their lives Lucy and Noah and every new student in that slow-moving mass of drenched and somber children would know Wellington by a different name. Every Indian boy and girl who attended came to know the school as Wekonvertum. The mock-Indian term arose from what the children themselves came to understand as the purpose of the school: to “convert” not so much from ignorance to knowledge as from red to white, from citizens of home to citizens of a larger, more powerful culture, useful citizens of an overconfident nation.

  Between the gate and the first closely grouped buildings, the way led across from a cemetery, clearly demarcated by a low iron fence. Noah detoured off the cobblestone path and toward the cemetery as he walked slowly up the hill, drawing close enough to read the names on many of the headstones. Some were very old, some new, the chiseled names and dates soft and vague or sharp and crisp, depending on the age of the slowly weathering stones. The simple markers were all about the same size, each about two feet in height, but they varied in width and thickness, due both to age and to slight design differences. Some of the stones bore only first names, some both names, mostly only surnames. Each included the name of a tribe: Sioux, Apache, Sac and Fox, Crow, Alaskan, Shoshone, Cherokee, Oneida, Creek, Eskimo, Hopi, Navajo, Ojibwa, Pueblo, Mohawk, Seneca, Chippewa, Cheyenne, Winnebago, Onondaga, Choctaw, Seminole, Shawnee, Iroquois, Osage.

  There were hundreds of them.

  The names, as Noah was later to learn, were of Indian children who had died at the school over the long years, mostly in the early days from rampaging and poorly treated diseases to which the Indians had no previous exposure or immunity. They died mostly from influenza, trachoma, small pox, or tuberculosis, which was the worst. A diagnosis of TB was a death sentence.

  The government blamed the epidemic on the Indians’ physical inferiority, even though it was they who brought the diseases to the children.

  A gray squirrel scampered down an old massive oak tree, the only tree in the graveyard, searching for food among the dead. The tree was far older than the school, older than the laws that permitted this sad procession of children. It had witnessed more than the entire history of the nation.

  Noah trotted back to join the group and Lucy, who was trembling, holding her arms tightly across her chest for warmth. He looked around at the hundreds of Indian boys and girls standing in the long line slowly shuffling toward the first building. There were almost as many children in the trudging mass as there were headstones in the cemetery.

  Somewhere in the line ahead, Noah could hear crying.

  At the top of the slight hill, toward the center of the institution’s grounds, large buildings constructed of red bricks loomed in the drizzly overcast. The architecture was efficient, enduring, and depressingly institutional to the two young Indians. Broad, well-kept lawns separated the buildings from one another. A wind dragged itself with fistfuls of newly fallen leaves across the lawns. The air was chilly, and the distant structures, though massive, seemed to offer little reassuring warmth. Even the smoke billowing from the tall chimneys looked like cold, gray winter clouds.

  A boy just behind Noah asked, “How’d you get here? I was on the train.”

  “We were on the bus,” Noah replied, trying to be friendly.

  Then a girl standing nearby joined their conversation.

  “I started off in the back of a truck. There were maybe forty of us in the back of this truck. There wasn’t even room enough to sit down. It was really cold, and everyone got hungry. Some of the kids had sack lunches and they shared. But most of us didn’t get a sack. The truck didn’t even stop to let us go to the bathroom. They just drove on and on. Finally, we were put on that train back there,” she said, turning around and pointing downhill in the general direction of the train platform.

  A boy in line ahead of them turned and joined the discussion.

  “I was in the bottom of a ship for two days. It was dark and they didn’t let us out, neither. It was like we was cows or something. They just herded us in and closed the door.”

  Lucy and Noah were glad that their travels had invo
lved less physical suffering.

  They felt blessed.

  By now, the mass of young humanity was bunching up before the door to the first big building, where some staff were organizing things at the entrance. Every now and then the line moved forward a couple steps.

  Lucy and Noah stood for a long time until their turn finally came to walk through the double doors of the administration building. They could feel heat pouring out the door, and they were glad to have made it inside. Posters dotted the wall. Most of them had a background formed of the American flag, with some patriotic slogan printed across it: Home of the Free, Land of the Brave; or America the Beautiful; or With Liberty and Justice for All. But one poster, by far the largest, simply had two words, without any flag, printed in large red letters. Just two words.

  English Only.

  The line of new students curved around a corner, but from its invisible front, they could hear the voices of school officials. Within minutes, Lucy and Noah were at the front of the line, standing before an elderly woman with tightly curled gray hair who asked them their last names.

  “Boyscout,” Noah replied. “This is Lucy Secondchief,” he continued, placing one hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  “You go to the first line,” the old woman said, pointing to the closest of several long tables arranged across the room, two women sitting stiffly behind each one. “The girl goes to the end.”

  Lucy didn’t move.

  “Go on now,” the woman demanded, her voice firm though practiced, not angry but without apparent feeling.

  Noah leaned down and whispered to Lucy.