Excerpt from Thomas Sparrow’s crime noir Northwoods Standoff.
Dedicated to the brave souls of the Occupy movement. May their resolve maintain.
PART THREE
Roy said the name Hollinday came from his mother and was originally Hole-in-the-Day in the native tongue. Roy’s mother was a Chippewa Indian who had raised him alone after his French Canadian father ran off with a white woman when Roy was four. This arrangement lasted until eighth grade when Roy, experimenting with a bow and arrow that he and his friends had fashioned out of a willow branch and some fishing line, had the misfortune of shooting another kid in the ear.
As Roy put it: “Four white kids and one skin… and who do you think shoots someone with a bow and arrow? We had an old, broken arrow with a nail stuck in the end, and everybody was betting me that I couldn’t hit Charlie McMillan, who was about seventy yards away. I never thought I’d hit him, but I drew back that flimsy bow and let fly and the goddamn thing came down and stuck poor Charlie right in the fucking flap of his ear. You should’ve heard the screams. Charlie took off running and screaming like Apaches were attacking Silver Bay.”
Roy was placed in a reform school where his name was changed to a more-white sounding Hollinday. Adding injury to insult, there were constant attempts by the staff to beat him into submission and “change his attitude.”
Years later, in high school, Roy finally rebelled against the years of conditioning, punched a teacher in the nose and was expelled. According to Roy, the baseball coach/history teacher used to take great pleasure in saying Roy’s entire name—Roy Rogers Hollinday—in front of the class, often remarking how unusual it was for an Indian to be named after a movie cowboy, as they were always killing Indians. Roy took exception to this disrespect and after school did a John Wayne on the instructor.
Shortly thereafter, Roy left northern Minnesota and joined the Marines. About said duty, spent mostly as a military policeman in Korea, he wouldn’t speak, only saying, with a haunted look in his eye while squeezing furiously on a red rubber ball, that he’d “done some things over there….”
(To be continued)
