White Sucker

WHITE SUCKER

by

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THOMAS HALKETT

When Mother goes off island to visit Aunt Thelma, Sissy howls and screams for me. I bang on Sissy’s door until my fists drain warm and creamy blood. Sissy’s door opens. Father’s puffy, three-fingered hand smacks me down the back stairs into the kitchen. A woman in pink shorts asks me how I slept. She smokes a cigarette while she spreads salted butter and raspberry jam on the heel of a loaf of warm and crusty bread. She hawks a louie onto the floor and eats the bread.

Wallace woke up. The smell of cigarettes and yeast bread baking gave way to the sound of a lonely barking dog. He pushed the button on his Timex Expedition Indiglo. It was 4:27 a.m. Mrs. Sockalexis’s stupid beagle. Maybe one hour of sleep. He looked at his hands. No blood. He rubbed his head.

Early May was a crazy moose time of year, so he wasn’t surprised when Cliff called and asked him to come by the house and bring his moose rifle, chain saw, and blue tarps. He was surprised, though, to see Bobby Curtis, city councilman and lawyer, of counsel with Chuck, Rollins, and Benjamin, a top-drawer firm who did a chunk of the tribe’s business, lying outside Cliff’s back door. Dead.

He glanced through the door. No one inside. They tarped Bobby and curled his body between two boat seats. Cliff put several firearms next to him, then went back into the house and brought out an armload of old bamboo fly rods. On his third trip, he put three ash pack baskets filled with fancy baskets into the stern of the boat. Camouflage? On his last trip, he opened the truck door and put two briefcases on the seat between them. He told Wallace he would like to drop the stuff at Paula’s before they headed upcountry. Those were the last words he spoke until they got stuck on that miserable skidder trail somewhere off T2475.

Cliff said that he arrived home early, about 4:30, opened the door, and startled Bobby Curtis, who stopped slapping his fourteen-year-old daughter Cindy’s tits and face when he saw him. She lay naked on Cliff’s leather recliner. Bobby Curtis smiled as he pulled up his pants and covered his slug-like pecker. Cindy puked onto a side table. Cliff said he went crazy on Bobby.

Cliff said he twisted Bobby’s neck, smashed him to the floor, and kicked him in the head for a very long time. He said he didn’t remember when Bobby stopped moving. When he looked up, Mamere crawled toward him from Cindy’s bedroom. He wrapped Cindy up in the afghan his grandmother made for her eighth-grade graduation and carried her to her bed. He put Mamere beside Cindy and called his cousin Paula, who was, surprisingly, still at the health center. Paula nursed Cindy and Mamere while Cliff dragged Bobby outside. That’s when he called Wallace.

Cliff said that Cindy, Paula, and Mamere were on their way to Subique. Cindy’s mother lived there, as did a medicine woman who would help them heal. Mamere had two goose eggs about to hatch on her forehead, and Paula was worried that she had a concussion, because she was speaking in Old Indian.

Cliff shrugged, looked right at Wallace, and said, You know she always does that when she’s drunk.

Wallace nodded. He thought he knew where they were going, so he took the tar road up to Township 41, Indian land. The road turned to gravel. An hour later, someone in a truck blinked their lights at them. They pulled onto logging road T2475 and followed the truck for close to fifteen miles before turning off onto a rough skidder trail, where they got stuck again. Roger, who had the point and thirty feet of heavy chain in his GMC ton dually, effortlessly pulled them out.

They arrived at a small clearing lit up by two sets of truck lights. Wallace looked at the cedar tree that one of the guys was pulling over with a skidder. It looked pretty limber until lots of roots came up. He and Cliff carried Bobby’s body to the tree and tossed it under the roots, into a hole that was more than six feet deep. When the skidder operator slacked up on the cable, Bobby disappeared as tree food. A couple of hours later, Roger cut down the tree. Now it was just one log in a truckload heading for a shingle mill in the western part of the state. The stump was Bobby’s gravestone.

Six men stood quietly around Bobby’s tree, drinking some cold ones. After half an hour, Cliff thanked everyone. No problem, bud, the mourners replied. That was the most recent of many cedar burials in which Wallace had participated, and every one of them had been for a real bastard or particularly slimy bitch. Unsolved deaths? You bet.

It was a quiet ride home. When they got close to the reserve, Cliff said, I don’t think I can stay in that house tonight. Why don’t you drop me off at Paula’s?

Wallace nodded.

Fucking dog. Three weeks ago, similar howling had hastened a chat about the dog’s early morning awakening issues. Wallace suggested to Mrs. Sockalexis in Indian, French, and English—the languages of her childhood, adolescence, and maturity—that should the dog continue these howling fests, he, as chief animal control officer, would be forced to take drastic measures. He promised he would cut out the dog’s liver and use it for togue bait.

She caught togue. "Ah, Chief Inspector Police Chief Wallace, you catch a big mud hen and I fix her up for you. Potato, onion, and new horseradish. You be King Wallace, oui?"

Good day, Mrs. Sockalexis. It was getting lighter, and Wallace smelled smoke. He got up, checked the scanner, and decided that the dump yahoos had gotten an early start to the day too. He took a leak and returned to the warmth of his down duvet. Spring rushed at his window and filled his bedroom with something like hope. It wasn’t a July feeling of hope when he awoke in diesel-engine-rumbling darkness. Then he felt salt come off the bay as he heard his grandfather humming in the kitchen. The humming grew louder and more syncopated as his grandfather finished fixing olive loaf and sweet relish sandwiches. Today, we’ll have a good haul. Then hope meant critters. Lots of lobsters to keep the summer folk happy and their own bank accounts filled. But now, he’d take any kind of hope, in or out of season.

Wallace looked out his window at a clump of birch trees that recently budded out. He was disturbed that the leaves were clearly larger than a chipmunk and probably a river rat’s ear. Wallace smiled. He rolled over to look out the kitchen door window. So what if he hadn’t been on the water at optimal time according to mouse ears? He was ready. He began psyching himself up. He was a fishing addict, and he enjoyed this full, early morning reverie in his addiction.

Reaching under his bed, Wallace slid out his yellow tackle box and double-checked to make sure he had every size and color of Mooselook Wobbler. He was short a medium silver. He’d detour to Dick’s after breakfast and pick up a couple. He picked up a silver-and-pearl spoon that had a bit of red on the top. Dynamite salmon lure, reminiscent of the pearl wobblers of the fifties. His father and grandfather had left him five or six, but he hadn’t fished them much. This year he planned to drop them overboard, one by one. As his grandmother was so fond of saying, And that’s the story on that.

It was time to put his father and grandfather to rest. Maybe he’d bury the whole pine box. He looked at his father’s green Johnson closed-face spinning reel. Yes, it was time to chuck ’em all overboard. Wallace grew excited as he anticipated this slaughter. He saw himself on the banks of First Roach, at the inlet, as he dumped the contents under a greasy rock and watched the wooden box float away. He might use it for target practice. Two shots from his 9 mm should blow it back to the shitty clam flats on the island. He knew it was time to really begin anew. This trip would help him bury the dead. What was he trying to salvage from relationships that had died more than forty years ago anyway?

Wallace focused on the twelve-foot, aluminum StarCraft sticking out of his muddy 2002 Ford F250 four-wheel-drive truck parked by the porch. Or maybe it was a Viking hearse. Fuck. During the first weekend of April, he had put his essential fishing gear into it. Two fly rods, one six-footer for little trout in brooks, and a nine-and-a-half for trolling, maybe casting, open-face spinning gear, two trolling rods with lead-cored line reels, a bait-casting combo he’d seen on Bassmasters, an old-fashioned bait-casting outfit for jigging, and a couple of closed-face reels and rods for kids and inexperienced adults who might show up for a day or two. Wallace considered this fishing lite. Creative parallel parking, with four feet of boat sticking out from underneath the Leer truck cap, would delight onlookers until October 30.

He had put a couple of three-gallon gas tanks into the boat. With his dunnage, he could stay in the woods for as long as he wanted. He’d even greased every fitting on the six-horse Yamaha four-stroke, so he felt very good about his preparation.

Because of that damned dog, he did have a jump on the day. Thank you, mangy beagle. Still, he didn’t feel like jumping. He loved the warmth of his bed. After almost twenty-five years, he had even gotten used to the fake horsehair pillows left to him—according to Louise, director of the tribe’s housing authority—by Joseph’s father. One September morning, the previous year, Joseph had stopped by for coffee and to discuss his boy’s training schedule. As Joseph was leaving, Wallace had told him that he couldn’t figure out why some nights he woke up simultaneously holding his balls and scratching his head.

Joseph had laughed and said, "When my father was a boy, the Catholic nuns here gave the kids books about real Indians. They told the kids that if they learned to read, they would learn about the real red man’s way. The books had drawings of Indians on horseback. Our tribe didn’t have any horses, but the girls wanted horses. The nuns told the boys that real Indians got their girlfriends horses. Now, the boys weren’t so sure of that, but to keep up with the girls, the boys learned to read. They were maybe ten or eleven. My father said they read a lot about real Indian behavior—smoking bees out of trees, spearing fish, warfare, and scalping.

"Can you imagine, Wallace? Our tribe learned about scalping from nuns! My father said one of those bitch nuns whose breath smelled masimahte (yes, like her privates) was the first to lose her locks. The boys killed her like real Indians. You bet, with bows and arrows and war clubs. The elders were glad to see her go, and the church people didn’t seem to miss her either. Holy, oh, yes, she’s in your pillow. But she and the others won’t bother you anymore." Joseph had thanked Wallace for the coffee and walked out the door.

Wallace did sleep much better after that conversation. Maybe Joseph could talk with Mrs. Sockalexis’s dog. He’d ask when he saw him again. Wallace was glad to have this medicine man as a friend. If there were any fish in Lobstabaccus Lake, he’d see Joseph more often. Joseph had a one-room log camp where three teenage boys took instruction and—some would say—indoctrination from him. Lesson One began and ended with his essential teaching: Beware of white people. Beware of attempts at assimilation. Beware of anything written by a white person to you or anyone else.

Wallace knew that, as a rule, Joseph didn’t like white people. In fact, one would be reasonably accurate in saying that he hated white people. He wasn’t strictly racist, and it had taken fifteen years for Joseph to trust him. But Joseph had reached a time in his life when he felt that his power could best be used to help organize white people’s thoughts. Native Haldol. Thoughts effect changes in feelings, and those feelings change behavior. Joseph wanted to change white people’s behavior. A white doctor at the health center had impressed Joseph as he talked about the process of change and how important it was that if we wanted to bring about change, we had to do it at the right level. Joseph had asked Wallace about this. Do you know about this cybernetic theory, Wallace?

I’ve heard of it. I believe it suggests that change occurs only at the right or proper level of an intervention. Like if a rabid bobcat is running at you, the right intervention is not prayer, but a twelve-gauge shotgun. Something like that, I think.

Yes, so what is the right intervention, asked Joseph, for Anglos raping our daughters and looking at our women like they’re pieces of moose meat? And Anglo police? Not you, Wallace. You’re okay. I’m thinking of those staties and dog sheriffs who join in instead of helping out.

I hear you, Joseph, Wallace agreed. I don’t know. I don’t know what the right intervention or best level of intervention would be to make any difference. I do know it’s best just to eliminate those bad guys and get rid of them whenever you can.

Joseph sighed. Yes, eliminate them. It’s sad, Wallace. Each time I talk about this, it’s as though deep inside me, a block of ice gets more solid. We’ll find it, Wallace. When we find the right level of intervention, we’ll crush some white men. Justice will come streaming down the rocks of righteousness and wipe them out, like Malcom X wanted.

I believe you, Joseph, said Wallace, and I look forward to joining you on that day. You take good care.

Wallace hadn’t seen Joseph in a while. He wondered about the right level of intervention again and what was on Joseph’s mind. He knew Senator Wilcox was still bringing in Native girls from northern Quebec but that he’d slowed down some. He had heard that Rhode Island had raised the stripping age from sixteen to eighteen, or was considering it. There was not much that federal law could do to stop Wilcox, since he flew the girls from Canada in floatplanes and landed them offshore. When the girls reached Rhode Island, the senator’s buddies in Providence helped them disappear. Wallace’s foster family in Boston might consider a move on the senator and his friends this summer if this nasty girl business continued. History does repeat itself, Wallace thought. This senator even bragged that he managed to keep a few eleven- and twelve-year-olds in his clubs. A real sleazebag.

Perhaps after this fishing trip, Wallace would get over to see Joseph. Do some strategizing. He might run this by Father and Alphonse II. It was a little more difficult to whack a senator these days, but Al didn’t care much for this senator, and Wallace knew that with patience, nothing was impossible. Wallace would do it if asked. He ran through several assassination scenarios as he reviewed his impression of Joseph, who looked older than the last time he’d seen him. The opportunities Joseph suggested through cybernetic theory tickled Wallace. What was Joseph thinking? Wallace couldn’t blame him for hoping to personally rectify the rotten behavior of so many whites, not to mention the genocidal history he had inherited. It was easy to understand why Joseph hated whites. Much of the time, Wallace did too.

Wallace shaved and noticed that he needed a haircut. He went to the closet for his uniform. The tribe didn’t care how he dressed. He usually sported a prepped-out island boy, New York Yacht Club, hand-me-down look. Jeans and chinos, vests, tweed sport jackets, and blue blazers still looked strikingly good on his six-foot-four, 250-pound frame. He’d thrown away every pair of green and madras trousers that the Let’s launch another Cutty crowd wore. He cursed them then and now, as they took as WASP domain the best picnic spots on the island. Fuck them. He liked Mr. Rogers sweaters that helped conceal weapons and made him look less threatening. But no matter what Wallace wore, he looked threatening. His size twelve-and-a-half wide Red Wing Irish Setters had custom cushioned knife sleeves. Navy or black T-shirts and black boxers filled the second drawer of his bureau. In winter he wore midweight wool socks, usually L.L. Bean, and from this time of year until snowfall, he didn’t usually wear socks. He wore this uniform every day except when he took his semiannual trips to Beantown. Then, as he did when he was sixteen, he wore gray Brooks Brothers suits and cordovan tassel loafers.

He hitched up his pants while looking into his top drawer for a belt. He chose the dark brown webbed one, which he threaded through the loops. As he did, he wove in his four-inch skinning knife so that it fell over his left hip. He slipped a throwing knife down the inside of each boot and stood up, put on a red chamois shirt, and adjusted his shoulder holster. The short-barreled S&W .40 caliber fit loosely under his arm. Then he grabbed a vest from his closet. Overkill? Not at all, sir. Fish day. Wallace liked this relaxed red-and-blue look. He believed that he’d be changing clothes anyway before heading up to Fourth Roach. Fourth Roach. He could already smell and taste the cool snow lying on the ground as he envisioned a three-pound brookie flopping there.

Last year the pond had been iced in, from the so-called launch site to the south end, and he had had to carry in for a muddy half mile to the outlet. Thankfully the wind had shifted around, but he still had been forced to stay three days more than he’d planned. If God was really good, there would be a repeat performance. Wallace would camp by the inlet for a week, eat lightly cooked trout for supper, and go to sleep at seven o’clock if he wanted. He shook his head. It didn’t get any better than that. He was getting psyched. He felt like a boy again, without all of his adult baggage.

Wallace slipped a four-inch-barrel .40 caliber into the vest’s right pocket and two magazines into the left. His state-issued weapon, a 9 mm Glock, was hiding behind the useless utensils in a kitchen drawer. He lay the holstered weapon on the door stoop.

As he walked toward his fire pit, the sun’s heat and decaying soil drew Wallace’s attention more than the baying hound had. He walked clockwise several times around the pit, stopped, and thanked everyone and everything—all sentient and nonsentient beings—for sharing life’s gifts. He prayed for the awakening of all in creation and to make a right beginning, the few words he remembered from the Episcopal liturgy. Then he prayed for everyone to walk in love, seek wisdom, and show profound compassion in all that they said and did. After walking counterclockwise several times until he reached the east stone, Wallace reached down, lifted the stone, and picked up a scallop shell. Then he walked to the north stone, where he found a small tin box. He sprinkled sage and cedar into the scallop shell and lit it with his lighter. The wind was out of the northeast. Uh-oh. His eyes teared while he continued smudging, so he closed them as he listened to life all around him on its own terms.

When Wallace opened his eyes and looked around, he decided that he and the dog were okay. One of the elders had told him years ago that the best thing Jesus ever said was Be of good cheer. Wallace often thought of that as he walked around his fire pit, smelling the healing power of One coming from and going to the Four Directions, the earth and sky, and each touching his heart.

He prayed every day, enjoying the repetitiveness of his active prayer life. Often his life around the fire pit opened up into some sort of metatextual experience. He saw that the actualizing of potential truth and mystery, as described in many so-called mystical writings, was the same in the spiritual realm as in the empirical. The physical laws that produced the hydrogen bomb existed before humans flashed fire. So too did these paranormal or spiritual laws exist from the get-go, creating greater, or more unique, or more inclusive, or just weirder space-time continuums and shifts than people could predict. Now we have thousands of expressions of those laws in the spiritual and religious realm. Wallace’s master’s thesis had shown, to his satisfaction, that when we deny these laws, religion and the state may flourish, but only at the expense of their and our souls.

He preferred to call those perhaps-limited expressions frequencies. He’d met a guy in ’Nam, Chou Mien, who had gotten him onto them. He and Chou had stumbled onto each other while on recon. They both figured they were fucked, so they slowly put down their American-issued M16s and just sat down. They looked at each other for a long time before speaking, but then Chou spoke first—or rather, he hummed. He hummed Amazing Grace. Wallace sang softly, I once was lost and now am found, was blind but now I see.

Chou laughed. "Un peu de très bon English de les très bonnes Soeurs de Sainte Marie?" Wallace spoke some Canuck French. This became one of the most curious conversations Wallace had ever had.

Chou said that if we listened to these types of frequencies, la movement de la heavens, not only would this war end, but we could create new realities that could transcend our dualistic thinking and the ways we chose to live. Chou believed that, as the Yin and Yang showed, nothing was completely good or completely evil. In fact, it’s possible to take some of the good out of bad, and the bad out of good, in the Yin and Yang symbology of the relative and absolute. When that happened, good would triumph over evil.

Right now, Chou said, we are living within even exchanges whose adjustment changes every second. The joie de vivre, our happiness, is constantly in flux. The accumulative energy in each exchange becomes the ethic or cultural status quo by which we live. Torture is shunned by most cultures and banned in the Geneva Conventions. Not torturing another human being is the ethical status quo, but almost every nation-state participates in some form of torture. Wallace knew this to be true. As did Chou, it seemed. So to choose to torture is to maintain ethical relationships based on present understandings. For example, take the US Army and the Viet Cong. Relationships are fluid, but as long as all parties agree to minimize their evil or destructive behavior toward other human beings, balance is maintained. Toutes encores en la rotten guerre, n’est-ce pas? The big problem, according to Chou, was that any balance believed to have been achieved essentially by treaty, pour example, or by l’intention heureuse, creates an imbalance in reality. So the Yin-Yang symbol reflects not the way things really are, but a fabrication of reality and serious fantasy.

There is a song, various parts of which are known by many people, that could restore balance in all relationships. Chou had said that he knew part of the reconciliation song, but that he had never heard the beginning or the ending. He believed that some people knew both, but not the middle. If everyone who knew part of the tune got together, there would be spiritual awakenings. If the good in evil and the evil in good melded or exchanged somehow, then the ethical status quo would change and there would be renewed grace and loving-kindness in our relationships.

Chou had hummed a tune that was sharply pitched and full of dissonant bass lines. It reminded Wallace of Kabuki dancers. He could sense physical motion in the music, and he believed these frequencies were meant to be danced to. Chou had smiled at his interpretation and said, When you hear this again, Wally, our time will be almost over.

They visited for several hours, until they decided that one of them really should kill the other. They were at war, after all, and Wallace was a marine—not fucking Francis Tolliver. Chou was a Communist and a Buddhist, but this was war. They flipped Wallace’s dog tag, and Wallace won two out of three times, which was a sign—or they took it as one anyway. Chou asked Wallace if he could kill himself. No problem. Chou walked into the jungle, and soon Wallace heard a pistol shot. It was a long walk back to his buddies.

Wallace walked back into his house. It had been a big week for him. His master’s thesis lay on the table. The Division of Celtic Priestcraft after the Roman Invasion had been accepted, but Wallace was pissed because none of the readers seemed to get its implication. They were numb to his assertion that two groups of Druidic priests had influenced the development of Western Christianity up to the point of the Church tightening its control over noncanonical propositions, or heresies. He had linked Druidic dualism with some radical dualists in the Middle Ages, such as the Cathars. He almost walked out when two of his readers said they were actually sympathetic to the Roman Catholic Church. After all, orthodoxy, right belief, is so much more important than orthopraxy, right action. And yes, Wallace, that is what separates the Western and Eastern churches. Thank God at least a few popes knew how to defend the faith.

So the genocidal activity of the Roman Church in its Crusade against the Cathars, when more than eighteen thousand men, women, and children had been tortured and murdered in several days, was all right because it maintained right belief? Wallace considered that he might have argued too passionately. He probably shouldn’t have said that the psychosexual torture of twelve-year-old girls and fourteen-year-old boys was designed to give the pope a hard-on while he plotted more Crusades. No response to that? Well, fuck ’em if they couldn’t take reality. The only one who admitted to enjoying hard-ons was the chairwoman of religious studies, Sally Pingree, PhD. She enjoyed his that evening, but Wallace really looked forward to seeing Father Martinian—his mentor, thesis adviser, and friend—this morning. He had told Father that if he passed his oral defense, they would take an afternoon off to eat several pounds of sushi and drink a gallon or two of sake. He’d soon firm up the time with Father.

Wallace needed to get moving. If he drove quickly, he could greet Father Martinian on his way to breakfast. Every morning, the old Greek Orthodox priest said his prayers between four and six o’clock, and Mass was at seven. Father Martinian took tea and raisin toast in between, and Wallace had found that to be the best time to meet him. Father knew about frequencies and seemed to be plugged into a very old and benevolent one. His face both projected and inspired light.

Wallace walked to his truck, which was really muddy. But it was often muddy, so that wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. He thought the boat looked clean of Bobby’s DNA as his fogged mind briefly considered the immeasurable worth of those blue tarps. But just to be safe, when he got to the lake, he’d splash chub or white sucker blood on any reddish-brown spots. He was sure he’d catch his limit of trash fish in a hurry.

His truck started fine, and he knew he could make it to Saint Aloysius’s by six o’clock. He turned on the police scanner—quiet, very quiet, just the way we like it, uh-huh, uh-huh. He kept that song in his brain for the length of Morgan Avenue until he turned right onto Franklin. Five little bars, all in a row. Sometimes a bit of info was worth sipping piss beer for a couple of hours. Wallace hadn’t cared about busting little dealers for a long time, and they appreciated that. Oh yeah, that’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Saint Aloysius’s was in a depressing neighborhood that had been, at the start of the twentieth century, an aromatic broth of immigrants. Greek, Albanian, Cyprian, and Armenian—both pre– and post–Turkish genocide—encamped here. Families found work in shoe shops, paper mills, starch and butter factories, and fish-processing plants. As they acquired capital, they opened restaurants and clothing and shoe stores, and then moved from three- and four-family houses to single-family homes in the developing sections of town. Cow fields and frog ponds fell to developers’ angst, and wetlands become newly enfranchised homeland. But the ghetto church remained as a reminder that God continued in the hearts of Orthodox people even when they found prosperity in the suburbs.

Wallace checked out Columbia Street before turning right onto Cottage—as cute