A Tragedy with a Happy Ending

Theirs was a marriage of convenience. It would have been inconvenient for Samantha to have a best friend who was madly in love with her. It would have been inconvenient for Samantha to remain a single, closeted lesbian Arapaho woman – she was already approaching an age where she received odd looks for being unmarried. It would have been inconvenient to reply to her best friend, down on one knee in their favorite restaurant, the restaurant where they met and first shared a kabob, “No.” And so she did not. She looked into the squinting, handsome face of the only man not related to her that she had ever hugged, and responded to him with an emphatic “Yes. Yes I will.”

Patrons at the Crick clapped, as a public wedding proposal is supposed to end. It would have been horribly inconvenient for a woman such as Samantha, her life dedicated to the ceremony and pageantry of awards, to interrupt Howard’s proposal with a refusal and deny the spectacle of unsolicited public applause.

She knew she would never love him the way an average wife is supposed to love an average husband. But she also realized that most of those average husbands and wives also failed that test. She had a much more realistic goal. She would tolerate him. His nervous energy. The way he squinted when he wanted something from her. His messy hair. She would tolerate everything about him that wasn’t perfect, and hope for the same from her. His obliviousness to her sexual orientation, and his outright drooling at her when she would try on dresses at the department store, indicated he would fulfill this obligation.

Their plan began to form two years earlier, on the day they first met.

“I create measurement devices,” Howard said, replying to Samantha’s polite question. In her socially-conditioned deference, she’d learned to ask men, “What do you do?” The question took the focus off of her, and gave men a chance to talk about their two favorite thing: themselves, and status. Samantha had made trophies for a living in a previous life, and she knew that more than money, more than fame, men wanted to do something, anything, and then hear someone, anyone, say, “You’re great.”

“That sounds wonderful. I certify measurements,” Samantha responded, chuckling to herself at the thought of Bart Lawson hurtling through the air a very precise distance. Howard’s confused look was met with a smile. Samantha felt compelled to be kind to this poor, daft scientist, buying her lunch when he was already late for work. He looked like he’d been beaten up by too many of his peers as a child, and he had. Even to this day, Howard’s direct supervisor would call him demeaning nicknames and tell his coworkers about how Howard smelled. “I make trophies, or at least, I used to.”

Though she’d been away from trophy-making for some time, Samantha had spent a great deal of time on trophy-philosophy. Her experience with the Bart Lawson trophy had given her deep existential quandaries: Does my life’s work have meaning? Will I remain a footnote in obscure books of baseball trivia? Does the design of a trophy matter in any way?

Howard could tell that Samantha was somewhat bothered by no longer making trophies, a high point in his usually poor perception. He changed the subject and asked her about her family. He learned that Elan Straw Horse was killed by falling off a roof, the same injury that had taken Howard’s father’s legs, and his personality. “My dad’s not been the same since. Honestly, most of the people in the family wish he were dead, the bitter old coot.”

Samantha laughed. Though she loved her brother very much, the idea that it was better he were dead and buried than immobile but cranky brought her some relief. This was the ongoing nature of the personal relationship between Samantha and Howard. On occasion, Howard could make this rather serious woman laugh, even at the most morbid or serious of topics. And to his ears, her laughter sounded like the most important person in the world, to him, saying “You’re great.”

After their first meeting, Samantha convinced herself that it was a one-off occurrence. They’d not exchanged telephone numbers or addresses, and she’d left abruptly just as Howard’s third kabob arrived at their table and he’d taken a large bite. “See you around,” she told him, walking briskly to the door. And though she hoped she was lying, he’d believed her.

It was three days later, in the very same spot, that he saw her again. He’d looked intently for her every day he approached his office, adding at least two minutes to his walk in the process. He recognized her immediately, approached her with his eyes nearly closed, and asked if he could take her to dinner that night. She felt a great sympathy for him, and kept telling him yes out of self-preservation but also a fondness for him. She didn’t have many friends, and she hoped this would become one. Howard hoped for more, but he was a gentleman, and never so much as laid a hand on her. He enjoyed her company and bought her meat on sticks.

Samantha would, less than a year after meeting Howard, experience a tragedy with a happy ending. This tragedy is the incredibly common, often-preventable sexual assault of an Indian woman by a white man.

By 1953, Bart Lawson had been reduced to no more than a worthless drunk. His name adorned the most popular trophy of the century, and suddenly trophies were no longer considered “cool,” a term which Bart hardly understood and which bothered him greatly. He’d sold the rights to his name to a foundation set up within the American Baseball Association which existed to perpetuate the award, and there was talk about the award being cancelled after the seventh year of declining public interest. The foundation’s staff had been told to expect layoffs. The joke wasn’t funny anymore, and baseball players who attempted to throw one another would no longer elicit cheers from the spectators, but instead jeers. One memorable fan at an Ogden Reds game earlier that summer yelled at a player who looked like he might be ready to be thrown. The player was named Rick Tuber, nicknamed Spud. The fan yelled “Hey Spud! How about you win a game instead of a trophy?” The Reds had been doing poorly that year, but had several players with ambition to receive the Lawson, though no throwing had taken place.

Bart’s unremarkable baseball career was ended by his rising alcoholism, and by belligerently earning the Lawson trophy one last time. In the summer of 1952, while Samantha Straw Horse was beginning a friendship with Howard F. Dunwarder, Bart Lawson was on the plate, at the bottom of the 4th inning of an away game the Bears were destined to lose, versus the incredibly competent fan-favorite San Jose Red Sox, in their new and luxurious stadium which sold two kinds of popcorn as well as kabobs. The score was 6-0, with the Sox’ six runs having been scored in Bart’s previous six pitches. This was due to the Red Sox’ skill, combined with the luck that their pitcher was drunk, short, and not a very good pitcher even when he wasn’t drunk. Bart caught a new ball from the umpire and looked into the dugout, where his coach stared at the ground and listened to runs four, five and six, having been too disgusted at seeing runs one, two and three to continue watching. A coach in this position would substitute any relief pitcher he had. Bart Lawson was the Bears’ last relief pitcher, relieving Danny Barazzo, who injured himself in the previous inning by throwing too hard to second base. Barazzo had been relieving the Bears’ star pitcher, David Miller, who was having surgery on a herniated disc in his spine.

There was no relief for the Bears relief pitcher, nor for the Bears. Bart Lawson could feel the disbelieving stares of his teammates, hear the cackles of Red Sox fans laughing at his unfortunately slow pitches, see fans in distinctive Bears hats getting up to leave out of embarrassment. He checked the bases, where no runners stood, and his first baseman yelled, “Pitch the fucking ball, Bart!” He put the ball in his right hand, his right hand in his mitt, his mitt held close to his chest, and looked home. Wearing his brand new San Jose Red Sox jersey was the recently-traded big-man fielder, Belfast Singleton, the man who’d thrown Bart Lawson, and then thrown him an award show.

Bart felt his drunken energy spike. He felt the sun on his neck. He heard the announcer begin an announcement that would be hilarious to anyone except Bart Lawson. “He’s either going to throw this game, or Singleton’s gonna throw him!” Driving on a nearby interstate and listening intently to the game, a young Hank Holder laughed his massive head off. Bart charged home plate, dropping his glove and ball. The fans took their feet, laughing excitedly at anything other than another Sox home run, which at this point had become monotonous. Singleton caught sight of the tiny pitcher barreling down on him, removed his batting helmet, and tossed it and the bat behind the catcher. The umpire took a step forward before seeing a glimpse of the hatred in Bart’s eyes, hatred toward the man who had condemned him to his mockery of a life. Belfast wasn’t an incredibly strong man, but he was luckily far more sober than the angry little pitcher. The Umpire stepped back, recognizing the determination in Bart’s eyes. Belfast braced himself, Lawson just inches away. Bart crashed into the lanky Singleton, his stumpy legs kicked out to both sides in anticipation that Belfast would fall backward, eliminating his height advantage and placing Bart squarely atop him. However, the Umpire had ducked behind Singleton, and Singleton had braced himself quite firmly, and Bart was small and not running very fast given his stupor. Bart jumped not very high into the air and collided with Singleton’s hips. Singleton tipped back just slightly into the cowardly, portly umpire, who fully supported the weight of the crash. Bart Lawson bounced off Belfast Singleton and landed approximately one foot away.

Due to the disruptive unpopularity of being thrown, not one other player had been thrown in an ABA game that year. Though this bounce did not technically qualify as a throw, the rare combination of Bart Lawson, Belfast Singleton, and a baseball player travelling a short distance through the air, was the last measured flight of a player in the ABA. Lawson earned the trophy, according to the Bart Lawson Award Foundation press release, sent just eight minutes before the President of the American Baseball Association called the President of the Bart Lawson Award Foundation and told him he and his staff were all fired and the Bart Lawson Award was no more.

Thus, a stockpile of tens of thousands of Bart Lawson Awards, beautiful though were, suddenly became an unnecessary use of a 6,000 square foot warehouse in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The ABA immediately sought an interested buyer via the usual channels, and an anonymous purchaser paid in cash within 5 hours of the solicitation, likely for the scrap metal.

In September of 1953, Bart Lawson rang the doorbell at 88 Steele Street, a dilapidated but well-decorated and warm home in Denver’s quickly-developing commercial district. The house was doomed to be bulldozed and replaced with any number of businesses including, for a brief period in 1973, a trophy store. But at this moment, twenty years prior to the trophy store’s opening, the building served as a home and workshop for Samantha Straw Horse.

Bart Lawson had interacted briefly with Samantha Straw Horse in 1947, when she’d recognized him in line at the grocery store and introduced herself. Lawson was purchasing a rather-ordinary amount of alcohol for a raucous weekend on the beach, which he intended to drink alone in his downtown penthouse apartment in one evening. “I designed the trophy you got for getting thrown,” she said, “I’m Samantha.”

His response, “Ah, lovely.” He was referring to Samantha, having been blackout drunk at his award show and forgotten the overwhelming beauty of the trophy she’d made. In Lawson’s distorted, conventional male mind, the Lawson Award continued for those few years not because of the impeccable beauty of the trophy, but because he, Bart Lawson, was so incredible. He saw the recurrence of the event as someone, anyone telling him, “You’re great.” He didn’t say a word of gratitude, went to his car and drove drunk home.

And then the award show was cancelled, the surplus of trophies sold, Lawson’s contract with the Bears summarily terminated, the lease on his penthouse broken due to lack of payment, and Lawson’s liver was nearing failure, a fact he suspected even as he drank his weight in tequila each night.

With nothing left to lose except his last quarter-full handle of cheap booze, he stumbled from the front door of his former residence, to a payphone, found an entry for “STRAWHORSE, S.,” complete with address and began his walk to her home. Samantha had once tried to explain to the phone company that her last name contained a space, and was met with the type of disinterest one would have expected of Mary Schemmer, owner of the Cherry Cricket.

The time was 9:06pm. The sun had been down for approximately 40 minutes. Samantha’s doorbell was a five-chime descending-ascending scale that sounded like a cereal jingle from the radio. Whenever Howard would visit her, which was often, he would ring the bell, which was not conspicuously-placed. Most guests would not notice the bell, and would knock. While working in her garage, typing away at her typewriter, the sound of the doorbell indicated to her that her best friend, her only real friend, had brought over beer and cards, as he would sometimes do after a particularly difficult day at the office.

Samantha finished her sentence, pushed her chair back, and meandered to the front door. Knowing her friend was on the other side, she didn’t turn on her porch light, pulled open the door, smelled liquor, and began to chuckle as it was apparent Howard had started without her. But her chuckle faded and her smile disappeared when she met eyes with Bart Lawson, nothing to lose but his life to alcoholism. Howard was across town at his desk, asleep on a pile of books. She barely recognized Bart, but she did recognize him. She’d heard about his fall from grace, and his collision with fate in the form of a 6’4” Norwegian outfielder. She’d placed an immediate order to preserve the surplus Lawson awards, assuming the lease over the Oklahoma City warehouse. She remembered wondering what would become of this former hero-turned-disgrace. In an eternity of split seconds, she realized that Lawson had no good purpose to be on her doorstep this late at night.

“You did this to me,” he said, in the slurred, accusatory style alcoholics employ. She had no luxury of responding, as he swung his nearly-empty bottle from his waist to her temple and knocked her out cold with one blow. For years he’d felt belittled by the trophy’s supposed greatness. Here now was his distorted opportunity to prove his own power.

She woke up several times under the weight of him. On the floor in her living room. Her vision was blurred, moreso in one eye, which was swelling and bloodied. She became unconscious repeatedly, concussed but also willfully detaching from herself. One of her worst fears had come true, in her home, on the evening of September 9th, 1953, between 9:06 and 10:00pm. At one point, she woke up and assumed he was gone, and began to prop herself up. The she heard Bart Lawson, in her kitchen, vomiting into her sink. She froze with disgust, shut her eyes, and her concussion overwhelmed her again. When she awoke again, he was gone.

She lay in her entryway for the longest half hour of her life, staring at the clock, when she finally made a sound, the first sound she had made since her chuckle upon opening the door. It was a piercing scream, of being stabbed, of being violated, of being robbed, of seeing a monster, of dying. Neighbors’ dogs barked at the sound, and her wail became an intense sobbing, an uncontrollable, hyperventilating anxiety-attack of a screaming cry, forming only one word, as she attempted to pull ripped clothing back onto her body, “Help.”

Police were summoned and arrived at approximately 10:44. Thirty minutes of screaming for help had finally elicited law enforcement. Two white men with guns knocked on the door of 88 Steele Street, and shining a flashlight around the perimeter of the doorframe, noticed the doorbell and rang it. The chimes began, and upon the third, Samantha covered her ears and screamed again. She would pay an electrician to disable the bell the following week.

Most of the police in Samantha’s town were white supremacists: active participants in meeting spaces of white people who proudly proclaimed their superiority to all other races. As such, they were particularly sensitive to skin color and facial features, even in their supposed duties to serve and protect. The crime scene they had entered was obvious to both of the officers. Forced entry, assault, battery, rape, and possible theft. They had seen this all before. Indian women were four times as likely as white women to be victims of sexual violence, most often at the hands of white men.

“Is anything missing from your home, ma’am?” was the first question they asked her.

“Ma’am, can you hear us? Please stand if you’re able to,” was their second question, and first lawful order.

Samantha lost consciousness again. She awoke on the floor of her rented home, which no longer felt like home. An incident report lay on the floor next to her, including instructions which read, “If you have more information about this crime, please call us immediately.”

Samantha called Howard, who came to her side, and took her to the hospital, and stayed awake all night waiting for any sign she was in trouble, hand on the button to call the nurse. She received six stitches above her left eye, drugs for pain, and strict orders not to nod off. Howard kept her awake with card games, until both of them were exhausted and a nurse gave her a small dose of a sleep-inducing drug.

It was four months to the day after her attack when Bart Lawson was apprehended outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Police connected Samantha’s assault with a bottle to a similar incident that took place early the next morning, when a cab driver from Denver was found in Cheyenne, unconscious in his cab, shards of glass in his bleeding head. He’d been struck with a bottle at least four times, and it lay broken around him. Brain damage had prevented the driver from speaking for some time, but upon his recovery he was able to identify Lawson as the man who’d attacked him after making him drive for two hours and refusing payment. Lawson was living with scruffy facial hair under an assumed name, but his hard drinking made him easy to find in the sleepy rural town of Hillsdale. One doesn’t easily forget when a new drunk comes to town and quickly makes a name for himself in all the bars, even if that name happens to be assumed.

Police handcuffed “Drunk David” while he was passed out in his rented room, and he only woke up halfway through the drive back to Denver, where he would face charges for aggravated assault, breaking and entering, battery, menacing, public intoxication, assault with a deadly weapon, and in the case of the cab driver, attempted murder. He would be tried in Federal Court, as his crimes spanned multiple states. This swift delivery of justice was only possible for Samantha because Howard had intervened. His years as a researcher and many interactions with government had made him adept with the law, and as a white man he commanded a respect that Samantha could not costume herself into receiving in the racist diners of the American Judiciary.

Bart “Drunk David” Lawson was forced to pay several hundred dollars in damages to each of his victims, and sentenced to 64 years in a Federal penitentiary, with potential for parole after 35 years. He would serve just six of those years. While in prison Bart quickly discovered that racialized gangs were the only social order. He never found out that one of the prominent Indians in the Indian gang had been a childhood friend of Elan Straw Horse, who was himself a gang member, nor that this Indian had known since the day of Lawson’s arrival that Samantha Straw Horse was a victim of crimes for which he had not been convicted. Lawson’s final moment came while he was using the toilet in his cell. The cell door loudly unlocked, which was typically only an indication of two occurrences. Assuming he had a visitor or a random inspection, he hopped up from the commode, and three large Indian men descended upon him. Each had fashioned a knife out of a toothbrush handle, and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest, face and neck. He died with his pants still around his ankles, his head forced into a tin pot of his own urine. The corrupt guards and coroner, bought off with prostitutes, told the media it was a suicide. Lawson’s family had disowned him for his crimes and did not question the falsified coroner’s report.

Six months to the day after Samantha’s assault, Howard had invited her to the Cherry Cricket for a kabob, for old times’ sake. Samantha wore her most ill-fitting cowboy shirt, and a wide pair of unflattering jeans. They ordered plenty, as Samantha was hungry. Howard got up to get napkins, and was taking a while. Samantha turned to see him talking to Mary behind the counter, who was beaming a smile. Mary looked at Samantha for the first time with some hint of compassion.

Howard returned to the table, but did not sit. Instead, he knelt beside her, on one knee, and he proposed to her. But he did not do so loudly, so that the people nearby would hear him. Instead he leaned toward Samantha, and he whispered in her ear, “I know you’re trying to hide it, but you can’t anymore. I will raise this child just like he is my own. Please, be my wife. I’m in love with you.”

Her eyes teared. It would be a marriage of convenience. One that would protect her identity, protect the child she was carrying from the perils of being raised by a single mother, and protect them both from the awful truth of his conception. A marriage would bring a joyous sanity to what had been the most sorrowful and insane year of her life. It was convenient to say “yes.” It would be inconvenient to say “no.”

Their friendship would last for the rest of their lives, and they would never divorce. Their love for one another, hardened by fire, was platonic, brother-and-sisterly, and stronger than any marriage borne of the expectations of average husbands and wives. Junior Dunwarder was born on May 22, 1954, to two loving parents, at the Lamb Memorial Hospital.