by Mira Jacob
CHAPTER 4
The George Washington Memorial Bridge, more commonly known as the Aurora Bridge, has been an anomaly in Seattle since its construction in 1932. In a city where eight-lane highways have been avoided in favor of two-lane roads that break for the rise of drawbridges between sweetly named neighborhoods—Fremont, Queen Anne, Ballard—it has always been violently off scale, looking from below like some terrible, sky-slung hammock. Touted as the final link in the Pacific Highway, it became the destination of choice for Seattle’s suicidal before it was even completed. The first person to jump off the bridge did so in 1932, one month before its opening to commemorate George Washington’s birthday. The 176th person arrived on August 26, 1992.
August in Seattle: an eternity of dusk that hints at Greek mythology, a sun setting so slowly over the Puget Sound that everyone looks like immortal versions of themselves. On August 26, 1992, it made them want their picture taken.
“Just one quick one, okay?” The Korean guy standing in front of Amina was too small for his cargo pants.
She looked at her camera apologetically. “I’m actually on assignment for the Post-Intelligencer.”
“Great.” He smiled and threw his arms around the two women at his sides. “Cheese!”
Amina did a quick calculation in her head (time explaining job versus time taking picture) and hit the shutter release. Fine. Done. She avoided eye contact with anyone else as she walked across the deck of the Crystal Blue, fighting the claustrophobia that crept into her lungs when on a yacht.
This particular yacht was teeming with the young programmers and developers of Microsoft. If it was jarring to see other kids just out of college having their success celebrated with an evening of play on the Puget Sound, it was downright annoying not to understand them. What on earth was a Linux? The very idea that something called C++ existed made her want to drink, but she was not there to drink, she was there to capture Seattle’s newest elite, their hoodied shoulders and chipper smiles.
“Give us a feel of the event,” the photo editor’s new assistant at the P-I had said, as though Amina would be attending a cashmere sweater. She had wandered around overwhelmed. She hadn’t found her shot yet, and now, crawling through the locks and canals on the way back to Lake Washington, she could feel her need to get off the boat as sharply as a full bladder.
“So fucking cool, right?” a guy with orange shorts said to his friend, pointing at the Aurora Bridge in front of them. “I can never get over how cool that looks. It’s so, like, Legoland, right?”
“Totally,” the friend agreed. “Majorly Legoland.”
Amina had slipped behind them, trying to get the right angle on their beers raised in toast to the cantilevered spine, when she saw the man. He was standing in the middle of the bridge, dressed in yellow with white on his face. A clown. This is what she thought at first. She zoomed in and saw a feathered headdress. She took the picture.
The guy in the orange shorts turned around. “Hey, didn’t see you. We should turn around, no?” He flashed her a smile.
“No … I …” She pointed at the bridge. “I was taking a picture of that guy.”
Orange Shorts followed her finger. “The guy cleaning the bridge?”
“I don’t think he’s cleaning it.”
“He’s wearing a uniform.”
“He’s wearing feathers,” Amina said.
“What?”
The Crystal Blue was slipping through the water at a steady pace, gliding closer to the bridge and the man, and now Amina could see him clearly through her viewfinder, his headdress shivering in the breeze.
“Hey, did they arrange for a bungee jumper?” Orange Shorts called out, pointing at the bridge. Heads turned up. The words buzzed over the lips of the crowd.
“Bungee jumper!” Someone yelled. A whoop went up from the boat.
This seemed to startle the man in the headdress, and he wobbled on the bridge uncertainly, eliciting a collective gasp. Amina moved to the edge of the prow, steadying herself against the railing.
The high wail of sirens seeped toward them, growing louder. Police cars were coming down Aurora in a steady line, and an ambulance followed, lights flashing. The whole boat seemed to swell with recognition: Look! Police! It’s a jumper! People were pressing in on her sides now, and Amina nudged them away, ignoring a disgruntled huff in her ear. She pulled her lens wide to get a better read on the cars, and this is what she was doing when Bobby McCloud decided to take a step forward. Not that she knew his name, or anything else about him at the time—all of those details would come later, as she scoured every last article she could find.
For weeks, months, she would wonder what made her ratchet up the aperture so suddenly, what guided her finger to the shutter release so that when Bobby McCloud flew past her lens, she would capture him. And yet she had done it. She’d gotten the impossible shot. In the photograph that appeared next to the article, her first ever and only to run on a front page, Bobby McCloud would appear forever suspended between the arching underside of the Aurora Bridge and the flat screen of the water, his headdress folding against the air like wings in prayer, his arms flung wide.
“Spectacular,” the photo editor had said before rushing the picture to print.
He had pulled a few other pictures from her roll (“Where are the afters?” he had asked, looking fleetingly disappointed when she shook her head) and now turned his attention to the televisions in the far corner of the room. All three local stations were covering the story in as much depth as the few hours allowed, taking statements from eyewitnesses and panning again and again to the railing on the bridge.
Amina watched, wishing she felt sick, or distraught, or anything other than coolly relieved. Even the Microsoft crowd had the decency to be rattled—telling and retelling the last twenty minutes of the ride in shaky voices, as if there were some clue between seeing the man and watching him fall that would reverse the motion. One woman just bawled and bawled until two female colleagues hoisted her to the lower-deck bathroom.
Amina left the office, driving immediately to Linda’s Tavern. Forty minutes later, snug in the peaty blur of three beers, she ordered a fourth. When the door opened to reveal a young man wearing a jacket that looked like the one Akhil died in, her hands began to shake.
It was the money that killed him. That’s what the papers said, first the P-I and The Seattle Times, then the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as the story went national. The $162 million settlement for the Puyallup Tribe of Tacoma Indians—the second-largest in history between the Native Americans and the U.S. government—had come for Bobby McCloud like it had for his brother, his cousin, and his uncle before that.
In the library, hunched over the microfiche reader in a sour-smelling sweatshirt, Amina followed the previous years’ news. The tribe’s decision to give up their claim to the land along the Tacoma basin had been contentious from the start. The land—18,000 acres that were allotted to them in the Treaty of Medicine Creek in 1854 and then slowly poached in a series of “negotiations” that left them on about 33 acres by 1934—was their birthright. Taking money for it was a direct refutation of that right, and of everything their ancestors had stood for. It would only bring harm, even if it did give every member of the tribe twenty thousand dollars right away.
Blood money, Amina heard Akhil saying so clearly that for a minute it seemed the past nine years had not actually occurred. She looked up from the hum of the microfiche, but the only other person in that dank corner of the library was an old man who looked half-asleep. She read on.
Opinions on taking the settlement varied widely within the tribe, as did the imagined uses of the twenty thousand dollars. People said they’d get food, winter clothes, but some expressed misgivings.
“I’m just trying to make sure I don’t blow it,” Raydene Feaks, a thirty-four-year-old recovering crack addict at the tribal treatment center, said (PUYALLUP TRIBE PREPARES FOR WINDFALL, Seattle Post-Intel
ligencer, February 23, 1990).
“The twenty thousand is not the point,” Bobby McCloud maintained. “The one hundred thirty-eight million in social programs, and business start-up money, and land—that’s going to be the end to our poverty.”
Bobby McCloud did not drink. He did not smoke, and he did not allow smoking in his office at the Tribal Center, where pictures of him with Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton hung on the walls, along with his diploma from the University of Washington. At age thirty-six, Bobby McCloud was one of the very few in the tribe who had managed to dodge every statistic coming at him, from the eight-thousand-dollar median income to the ninth-grade level of education to the 50 percent chance of becoming dependent on alcohol or drugs by the time he was sixteen.
“Everyone is saying our birthright is the land. Our birthright is to live! It’s to succeed, and grow, and watch our children grow,” Bobby McCloud said.
A-fucking-men, Red Man.
She must have PTSD. Or maybe it was just run-of-the-mill drunkenness. Or simply the obvious reaction to stumbling into the exact kind of story that would have infuriated her brother. The second time Amina heard Akhil, she was in bed, photocopies of Bobby McCloud articles scattered in piles around her. She blinked down the dark hallway that cut through the center of her railroad apartment. It was empty. She got up and shut the bedroom door.
When the phone rang, jolting her out of a midafternoon nap, Amina knocked over the glass of water on her bedside table. “Shit.”
“They are calling because you own the rights,” Dimple said. “You’ve got to do something.”
The water spilled over the edge and began pattering down on the last shirt she’d worn outside of the house three days earlier. Amina added a few stray socks to the pile to soak it up. A mostly full bottle of whiskey stood sentry on the nightstand, watching.
“Amina, are you listening to me?”
“Yeah.”
It had been a mistake to tell Dimple about the calls. Of course she was going to want to “take advantage” of the offers coming in from agencies wanting the picture. Of course she would see this as an opportunity for them to “cut their teeth” (an expression that always brought the image of a horse bit into Amina’s mind) in the world of agencies.
“We’ve got an open window now,” Dimple was saying. “Right now. Not forever and maybe not even tomorrow. All we need to do is make some calls. I guess I just really don’t understand what the fucking problem is here.”
Stop the presses. Dimple doesn’t understand something.
“Shut up,” Amina said.
“What?”
Amina pressed her eyelids until circles popped in their meaty darkness. “I just … I think the P-I might own the rights.”
“No. They. Don’t.” Dimple took pains to enunciate. “Remember when we went back and forth before you signed the contract? That was about owning the rights to your pictures. The P-I is allowed to use the picture because technically you were on assignment for them, but after that the rights revert to you. Anyone who wants the picture needs to deal with you.”
“What if I don’t want to be dealt with?”
“That’s why I’m saying I’ll do it for you.”
Surely all that was required was a yes, thank you, a quick disconnection. A roll back under the covers, back to dreams riddled with Akhil. But it was coming again, the cold grip that had arrived with the previous day’s paper, the name Bobby McCloud, the stunned grief of the people who loved him clenching over her entire body like some big fist. What could they have felt when they saw that picture? What had she made them see? Amina shivered.
“Ami, are you there?”
“They’re never going to be able to unsee it.”
“What?”
“He had kids. Did you know he had kids?”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
“I’m coming over,” Dimple said.
Bad idea.
“Don’t!” Amina cast a quick eye at the piles of chaos around her room, the bottles, the butts, the newspapers. “You’ll get in trouble at work.”
“Just to bring you lunch, okay? We don’t even have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“Dimple, I’m fine.”
“Yeah, okay. See you in ten.”
“No! Stop! Jesus, just give me a moment. I was asleep when you called. I just need to get my bearings and—it’s fine, okay? Do it. You should do it. Negotiate it with the agencies or whatever. Go for it.”
“Oh, God, I don’t fucking care about that now. I wasn’t thinking, okay? I know this is about Akhil. Just let me come.”
“It’s not …” Amina heard her voice cracking and swallowed. “Can you just please just take care of the agencies? That would really help.”
She held her breath, waiting for Dimple’s conscience to wrestle through the moment.
“Really?” her cousin asked after a few seconds.
Amina exhaled. “Yes.”
“Okay, but I’m coming right after work.”
“I’ve got plans that might go late,” Amina lied. “I’ll call you.”
After, when the phone was back in the cradle and Dimple was safely held at bay, Amina leaned off the bed, needing to put something between herself and the afternoon light slipping under the shades. And though it was not her style, really, though it reeked of women’s television dramas and asking-for-it from some damning God, though it was overblown and overdramatic and more than a little bit disgusting, she pulled the bottle off the nightstand and took a sip, gagging as it hit her gut.
Cheers, kid.
He had underestimated the power of the money. Not the $138 million—Bobby McCloud was right about that portion—which, wisely invested in the Emerald Queen Casino and the Chief Leschi Schools, really would pull the tribe out of permanent poverty. But the effects of the $20,000 settlement checks on individual members of the tribe—that he had misjudged entirely.
“Bobby used his smarts and his place in the tribe to give us away wholesale today,” his brother Joseph “Jo-Jo” McCloud told reporters on the Tacoma Sheraton steps immediately after the signing ceremony (TRIBE TRADES LAND FOR FUTURE, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 24, 1990). “If our parents were alive, they’d be weeping.”
From May 1990 to the beginning of 1991, the Puyallup Indians lived what one anonymous tribal member referred to as “a big eight months of the American dream.” Cashing a single check worth more money than many made in two years, they bought cars (Firebirds, Z28’s, fourth-hand BMWs, a team of pickup trucks), vacations (Disneyland, SeaWorld, Vegas), necessities (diapers, gas, food, heaters, tires, clothes), and nonnecessities (family portraits, dinners out, drugs).
By June 1991, a year and a half after the checks were cut, an estimated 75 percent of those who had received the money had spent it all.
Well, there’s a fucking shocker.
“It’s understandable,” Amina said, folding the paper in half.
No one said it wasn’t understandable.
“Don’t believe that romantic BS about when you don’t have money, you don’t realize what you’re missing. When you’re hungry and broke, you feel plenty bad,” said tribal member Gladys Johns (ONE YEAR LATER: THE PUYALLUP TRIBE LOOKS BACK, The Seattle Times, March 23, 1991). “But when you have money and it goes? Then it feels worse.”
Vacations became a series of photographs. Houses swallowed down payments and spat out inhabitants. Cars were repossessed so regularly that coming out of a bar to find that someone had “stolen your horse” was less embarrassing than it was inconvenient.
“It was killing Bobby,” childhood friend and tribal member Sherilee Bean told The New York Times Magazine (“Buying Off the American Conscience,” October 12, 1992). “All of us, but Bobby especially. Everyone was hit so hard when the money dried up. Even those of us who spent it wisely or invested, we still had to watch our brothers and sisters crash.”
In January 1992, Uncle Ronnie McCloud was found in a La
s Vegas hotel room, dead from a ten-day alcoholic binge. In March, cousin Michael John was paralyzed from the neck down in a truck crash. In May, brother Jo-Jo McCloud swallowed two bottles of aspirin. He died on May 15, 1992, after spending three days in a coma.
“Aminaminamina!” Thomas crowed into the answering machine. “Wake up, fuzz head! Shake off the day! Rise and shine! Tell us all about it! Your mother’s head is already swelling like a balloon, and we haven’t even gotten to—”
“But why can’t you be telling us anything, koche?” Kamala sounded bitterly pleased. “Bala herself says Dimple says some picture of yours is on the front papers and everyone wants it, and now that Queen of Sheba is calling and telling Sanji and Raj and God-knows-who-else like it’s her daughter who—”
“And she said something about in The New York Times Magazine itself?” Thomas asked. “You must send a copy!”
There was a brief pause while Amina’s parents, spent, breathed silent elation into the phone line. Then they hung up, Thomas first, Kamala next, and only after reminding Amina to send the picture and also to please rub the coconut oil into her hair once a week to make it blacker.
In the late afternoon of August 26, 1992, Bobby McCloud parked in the parking lot in the back of the Still Life Café and walked up Fremont Avenue to Sally’s Party Supply. There he bought the “Cherokee Male” costume for children ages fourteen and up. Seven minutes later, having changed into the yellow plastic fringed shirt and pants in the employee bathroom, he headed out of the store.
The first check of several that would arrive throughout the year was more than Amina made in three months. It was certainly more than she would make in September and October, seeing as how she had all but stopped working. She set the check on the kitchen counter and watched as a patch of sunlight moved over it, half expecting it to turn to ash, and lighting another cigarette when it didn’t.
