A white man comes in the room.
He wears a black tie with a gold clip. He holds a coffee in a styrofoam cup and he sets it on the table and I realize that my hands are cuffed and the cuffs are attached to a chain that runs down between my legs and loops through a ring in the floor.
“How are we doing today, chief,” the man says, and he offers me a cigarette, which is already lit, so the smoke wafts along his extended arm.
It seems like a long while since I smoked a cigarette. I suck on it greedily and eye the room. It’s lit by a single bare bulb and its yellow light throws the white man’s shadow on green walls. The table is a heavy wood one, and there’s nothing on it except a single sheet of paper next to the styrofoam cup. It’s like a police interrogation room, and I guess that could be where we are.
I try to think of the last thing that I remember. All I see is the camp by the river next to the priest’s cabin, and how the priest used to hit us kids with the flat of a book when we forgot the school lesson. I never did learn to read. The black marks on that sheet of paper mean nothing to me.
The white man sits down in a chair on the other side of the table. I shift in my seat, and the chains rattle and I realize just how heavy they are.
“Tell me about the girl,” the white man says.
A shock takes my breath away, the same as that one time on a sunny February day when my friends dared me to jump from the camp’s big rock into the river. I can see the sunlight sparkling through the splash that arced up around my tightly curled body, before the water fell back and devoured me.
I don’t want to remember the girl. I splay my fingers and pull my hands apart as far as the cuffs will allow. There’s no give in those cuffs. The metal just cuts into my wrists. I think of how I stood shivering in the river that day, palming the water out of my eyes so I could see my friends on the rock all pointing and laughing at me, and I move to rub my eyes the same way now, but the chain stops them halfway to my face.
“We know that you picked her up at Charlie’s around midnight on the third,” the man goes on. “We’ve got half a dozen guys that saw her leaving on the back of your bike. That makes you the last person to see her alive. But what then? Where did you take her? Did you go straight to the river?”
I don’t want to remember the girl, but I can see Charlie’s, the gravel lot awash in neon and arc lighting, the Harley’s lined on their kickstands along the wall. I can hear the roar and pop of engines, the laughter and shouts taken by the night. I don’t want to, but I remember the laughter and shouts turning to catcalls and whistles when she bounced out the door to meet me, her black hair pulled forward and falling over her shoulders and breasts all the way to her waist. Her eyes shone even in the dark.
I can feel her body against my back and her arms encircling my waist and the wind in my face as my headlight cut the dark highway between the pines. But I fight the memory, screeching my chair back with both legs. The chain pulls my hands up. There’s no give in it, but I lean and make slack and jerk on it until my shoulders and hands scream with pain.
When I stop and sit there heaving, the white man smiles. “You aren’t gonna break free,” he says, and he uncaps a pen and pushes the paper with the lines I can’t read in my direction. “But if you sign this we can get those chains off and set you up in a comfy little cell.”
My shoulders and hands are burning, but I’m still pulling against the chain, feeling how solid that ring in the floor is, like it’s bolted to an immovable rock, and I’m about to pull myself off the chair. I can hear my father telling the old story in his tipi at the river camp, where he lived without ever going to visit the priest. Over and over he would tell of how the remnants of the starving and defeated tribe had signed away its homeland and lost its freedom.
“But I did not sign the white man’s paper,” he would say, and he would stare at me with eyes like bright knives.
The white man is staring at me too, but his eyes are gleeful, like he’s thrilled at how they have me there, chained to the floor. He can’t wait to let that paper put me in a cell. But I think he knows that I won’t sign it.
“You can just tell me what happened,” he says. “Just tell me what you did.”
I don’t want to remember what happened after we parked just off the road and walked down the bank to the river, the trees and rocks tinted blue-white by the strawberry moon. It feels like my heart blood pooling into my chest. I don’t want to remember anything beyond the moment her fragile hand gripped mine as we navigated the steep drop.
Instead I think of that day on the river with my friends, when they pointed and laughed after my freezing jump, and I waded over to the rock they stood on until I could grab Wolf and pull him in. The others soon followed, like they were bound with rope to Wolf and me, and then we were all together in the icy flow.
I can smell the water like metal, taste the sun drops in the splashes, touch the love in Wolf’s shoulders when I dunk him and hold him under, until he breaks free and trips me. Under the water, I’m actually there in my innocence, eyes smarting, and I see bubbles swirling and boys’ legs roughhousing, and then the legs become salmon running upriver to spawn.
I grab on to one of the shimmery tails, and I am transformed to run wild and free with ice water coursing through my gills. I flop through shallow rapids, thrust through still pools, and leap white falls until, around a bend, as the river narrows to a quiet stream, I see myself as a man on the bank in moonlight.
I watch myself, and it looks like I am fucking the girl. She doesn’t want it, so I am strangling her, and my hands locked around her throat are like my hands locked in cuffs and chained to that immovable rock.