8 – Lost Dog declares war on white man
"Never
trust a white man, Lost Dog," his mother once said, hands gripping her
death bed as if heavy with child not tumor. It was only time she'd given
advice. The whole time living in Tucson she'd played dutiful wife, serving her
drunken husband as if he never beat her for "having those goddamn
eyes." Guilt over alcohol and other women made him beat her, Mike figured
later. Or maybe because he got away with it, neighbors saying nothing over the
black and blue marks left on her face and shoulders. They rated an Indian woman
one full step below Chicano in Tucson. Her husband, a white man, probably had
good cause.
The man beat her the day she announced her
pregnancy, as if he was too cheap to pay the white crosstown butchers the price
of an abortion, trying to induce it himself. When she got back from the emergency
room with a still-living child, he gave up, figuring the child too tough to
kill.
But some racial memory remained; Mike hated
his father from birth, and the company of redneck-pickup-truck drunkards around
whom his father congregated, a pack of coyotes devouring the redlight district
in weekly raids, coming home, smelling of other women, covered with other men's
blood.
Fate and age beat Mike to killing the man, a
stroke knocking him down during a gay-bashing party downtown. A few drinking
buddies showed for the funeral, giggling through the brief ceremony. His mother
died two years later, strung out on welfare and bad doctors, who treated
symptoms of a growing tumor with aspirin and bedrest, saying only after the
death it had likely been caused by the beatings.
The
state claimed the thirteen-year-old Mike as its ward,
acceptably
white enough for a foster home; but wild and Indian enough not to stay there,
avoiding the trap of her mother's tribal reservation. Any place so bad as to
make her marry a bastard, wasn't a place for him.
He stayed on in Tucson, hooking up with one of
the Chicano gangs, a not too wild bunch of spat-on hoodlums, too young for
serious crimes, stealing baseball cards, free meals, and occasional drugs from
the better-established thieves’ markets downtown. A local restauranteur
supplemented slumping sales with drug and alien smuggling, and high-class
prostitution. As the gang grew older, it slipped into transporting pot across
the border for the man and made a decent living in exchange.
Decent enough to get married on. To a Hopi
chick who'd eyed him for years. A brown-clay lady as tough and skilled in this
import business as Mike was. Both seemed to have the same inner sense, perceiving
things others could not.
But neither saw the black narc or the line of
police cars waiting at the Mexican border until too late-- riding full speed
towards them in a truck full of bailed pot. Cops waiting as if expecting Mike.
As if this one little smuggling job for himself had offended the local
establishment so much as to turn him in on it.
Don't want any bad examples, Mr. Dundee had
said during the trial.
I
let you moonlight then everybody'll want to.
It all came out in court, where his appointed
lawyer begged the judge and jury for mercy. Saying how Mike’s new born child
would turn his life around. How he had committed this last crime only as a means
of escaping the corruption. He had intended on splitting Tucson for some other
town to start fresh. Straight. With a house and lawn like every other white man.
But the court saw his red skin and threw the
book at him. Twenty years without parole. The prosecutor protested. The
American Indian representative from Washington said it was too harsh. Even the arresting
officer objected.
The court went further, and had the child made
a ward of the state. Can't have a woman like that raise a child, his honor had said.
Drug dealers are drug dealers, and she's one, too.
Court officers dragged the screaming Mike from
court, he vowing between his curses to get his kid back. It took him two days
to break out of jail, and two more to find his kid and steal him away-- no one
knowing anything until he, Chris and the kid were a thousand miles away,
setting up a new life in Detroit, under new names, with a new dream: an
auto-plant job paying the bills.
But
kidnapping was kidnapping, and the Feds asked Demetre to hunt him down, tracing
the faint trail to the house and lawn. Mike felt the tingle on his way home
from work and eased into the run-down neighborhood in time to see the black
cars pulling away from his door-- Chris and his son securely stashed in the
back seat.
It was the day Lost Dog declared war on the
white man.
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