Me and Rodney, This One Time

I grew up in a small Northern California town called Yreka, in the mountains about 12 miles from the Oregon border, in a pristine version of America with nearly no history.

It's also true that, one late fall day in eighth grade, as I rode in the back of the school bus on my way to a basketball tournament, I was sitting next to Rodney Grant, a full-blood Yurok Indian. There are two large reservations just down the Klamath River from Yreka. His people had been in this country for ten thousand years but that didn't in the least conflict with my version of an America with no history. I was a sharp kid; I could keep several completely contradictory thoughts in my head at the same time and not be bothered by it.

In my memory, me and Rodney bounce along in the bus, our hands inches away from each others.
I look down, say to Rodney, "Look how much darker your hand is than mine."
Rodney looks at me with this deadpan smile. He says, "That's because I'm Indian, stupid."

I didn't know details, really, and I didn't much connect it with Rodney but I did know that a couple years before a young Kurok man named Hooty Croy had gotten drunk one evening, tried to rob the liquor store on the north end of main street and shot a local sheriff's officer named Bo Hittson when he gave chase.
Here's how LA Times David Talbot tells the version related by the prosecution at trial:

"Shortly before midnight on July 16, 1978, a band of young Indians, riding high from a weekend of weed, whiskey and late nights, looted the Sports and Spirits liquor store in Yreka, Calif., a lumber town near the Oregon border, jumped in their getaway car and sped north, chased by the screaming sirens of the Yreka police department. As the carload of Indians raced down Route 263 in their aging Pontiac sedan, one of them, Darrell Jones, leaned out of the window and took a shot at the pursuing lawmen. The driver of the Pontiac, Jones' 23-year-old cousin, Patrick "Hooty" Croy, then took a sharp left up a deeply rutted dirt road known as Rocky Gulch and headed for his grandmother's house, an old miner's cabin in the foothills of Badger Mountain. When they got there, three of them--Croy, his sister Norma Jean and Jones--jumped out of the car and ran up a chaparral-covered ridge; from that vantage point they rained bullets down on the growing posse of Yreka police officers, Siskyou County sheriffs and California Highway Patrol officers below. During a lull in this hail of metal, Hooty Croy stripped off his shirt and shoes and, like a half-naked Indian warrior of old, made his way stealthily around the moonlit ridge, his .22-caliber lever-action magnum rifle in hand, and crept to the rear of the cabin, where he knew he could find extra ammunition. There he ambushed 27-year-old Yreka lawman Jesse Joe "Bo" Hittson, shooting him fatally through the heart"

That was the story I grew up with. Hittson was a fallen hero. Hittson's little sister was a gym teacher at my high school. His widow was prominent in the community. There was an annual stock car race to raise money for his family and there was a BMX park dedicated to his memory.

So there we are: me and Rodney, and there's Bo Hittson in the cemetary and there was Hooty Croy serving life in the state penitentary. Rodney and I were friends and I didn't really think he was upset with me, even if I had said something stupid. But I did notice that I didn't know what he was saying, and it bothered me. Something big had opened up in that moment and I didn't know what it was. Rodney was Indian, stupid. So he stopped playing basketball after 8th grade and I didn't see him much. I did the white kid thing--took college prep track classes, and went off to UC Davis, and a few years later my parents moved away. So it's been 34 years and I'm still wondering what he might have meant. 

In 1989 Hooty Croy came to retrial. This time his lawyer Tony Serra told a different story about the events of the evening: Croy was trying to buy beer and was refused by a white store clerk who then called the sheriff claiming attempted robbery. And more importantly, Serra told the story so that it revealed an Indian history of fear that I knew nothing about: the violence of that night hadn't begun at the liquor store but during the frenzied, land-grabbing days of the Gold Rush, miners and settlers slaughtering local Indians for land claims or collecting scalps or heads for bounties offered by local governments, including the city government of my own town. Sometimes Indians were killed for sport or to check the sighting on a gun. Indian children were kidnapped and sold as laborers or sex slaves, women were raped with impunity. In Serra's telling, Hooty Croy crept back down the hill not to ambush Bo Hittson but to protect his grandmother from a hostile occupying force with a long history of savagery. Hittson shot Croy twice in the back while Cry tried climb into his grandmother's house. Whirling, Croy shot Hittson through the heart with a single desperate shot in self-defense. Late in '89 Hooty Croy was released on time served.

I didn't know any of this, if indeed anything can be known with any confidence.

About a year ago I got a call from my childhood best friend Mark Yaconelli, who has returned to live nearby in Southern Oregon. He was doing research for a novel set in the 1880's near Yreka, and he was terribly upset by what he had been finding out. We talked about Rodney, and Mark reminded me of one summer when we were 19, when Mark was working along with Rodney on the same Forest Service work crew. They were out cutting brush with chain saws, walking roughly parallel about 200 yards apart in a line of about 6 guys. Mark's chainsaw kicked back on a rock and cut a deep gash in his knee. He went down bleeding hard, already in shock, he felt so sick that he couldn't call out well into the wind. One guy and then a second disappeared over the next ridge. Just before Rodney was about to top the ridge, he stopped, stood completely still for several seconds and then turned and looked, Mark says, exactly into Mark's eyes, and began running straight for him.

But so, all these stories: sentimental colonialist claptrap? Spooky Indian shit? Mark told me that night, "You didn't grow up in a pristine wilderness, dumbass. Those hills by your old house, they're soaked with blood."

When I was home last summer everything seemed the same. The Bo Hittson BMX park has fallen into disrepair but the memorial stock car race is still held every July. The mountains are so high and the land seems so huge as to be untouchable by history, undefileable by human cruelty. I thought of me and Rodney bouncing along at the back of the bus, two boys with skinny muscles and little fuzzy mustaches and big floppy hair.As the bus passes through a landscape dense with human hope and savagery, we sit there side by side, happy in each others company, no real idea what to say.