Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(62)
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
“I made us a snack,” Ela said, clambering down the plank steps, back into the root cellar.
She sat down on the blanket across from Dylan and laid a plate down between them.
“It’s corn,” she continued, as Dylan peeled the foil off one of the ears, “grown right here on the rez. I cooked it over a fire upstairs.”
Dylan finished peeling, noting a grayish-black patch that swelled out from a patch of kernels. “Looks like you burned it.”
“Nah,” Ela said, working the foil from her own ear of corn, “that’s what makes it a delicacy.”
Dylan gave the discolored growth a closer look. “Fungus? Mold?”
“Just eat it, dumb-ass. It’s a secret my people have kept for centuries, our greatest secret. Now, hand me my phone.”
Dylan did, still holding the ear of corn by a section of foil he’d left in place so he wouldn’t burn his fingers. Then he noticed that Ela had driven a roasting stick into one of the ends, so he could eat the corn while holding it, instead.
Ela took the phone and slid the cursor from left to right. “I said my phone.”
“Whoops, sorry.”
Dylan gave Ela her iPhone and took his back, watching her fire off a text as he raised the corn toward his mouth.
“It smells like shit.”
“But it’s good for you, that fungus included.”
He ate around the tarry patch anyway. Once they’d both finished, Ela handed Dylan a cup of the tar-colored tea, playing with the zipper of his jeans under the spill of lantern light.
“Stop,” he said, giving her back the cup and easing her away from him.
She took the cup and laid it aside, then went back to his zipper.
“I said stop.”
“Come on,” Ela said, flashing Dylan the smile that melted his insides, “we won. I want to celebrate.”
“What’d we win?” Dylan asked her. “You said this was all about maintaining the purity of the land. That we couldn’t let them spoil what nature had wrought—your words, Ela. You said this was about the survival of your people. That’s a quote, from when you got me to leave school.”
She pushed him down, atop the blanket on the uneven floor, straddling his torso, her butt pressed against his crotch. “We were never going to win everything. We won enough.”
“You never win with these kinds of people,” Dylan insisted. “They only let you think you have. Believe me, I know.”
Ela started pressing down on him. Dylan felt his insides flutter. “We’re the ones letting them think that they’ve won,” she said.
“What happened to my medal, the one that used to belong to my mother?”
Ela moved her toned butt back and forth. “You’re wearing it.”
Dylan pulled his shirt back to reveal a pair of chains, but not that one. “It was found near that dead guy’s body. How’d it get there?”
He took the tea she’d laid near him and spilled it onto the ground, its pungent aroma and black tar coloring telling him it was even stronger than the last batch of peyote tincture. “I was wearing it when we tripped, Ela.”
“We didn’t trip.”
“No? What would you call it then?”
“Opening our minds to a deeper, higher plane, where our emotions could communicate directly.”
“My mother was wearing that medal when she was murdered. My father gave it to me, said she’d want me to have it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“How’d it get out there?”
“How should I know?”
“Because I was wearing it when we reached that deeper, higher plane. Maybe our emotions communicating directly wasn’t such a good idea.”
Ela stopped rubbing against him. “You think I did this?”
“There’s not a lot of other options.”
“You don’t remember us being together all night?”
“I don’t remember much of anything.”
“Both of us ended up passed out. You were still passed out when I woke up—early, like I always do.”
“With the sun.”
“Close enough,” Ela said.
Dylan looked up at her, straddling him. He believed her because he wanted to. In that moment, he realized he’d been a fool for walking away from school to accompany Ela on this crusade, which had ended when the oil company agreed to fund a whole bunch of scholarships, provide job training, and, in the meantime, put every unemployed Comanche on the reservation to work laying the pipeline.
“You knew this protest shit wasn’t going to work,” Dylan said to her. “You knew you and your Lost Boys weren’t going to stick it out, from the beginning.”
“But we got more than I ever figured out of the deal.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Tell you what?”
“That was the plan all along.”
“Because it wasn’t.”
“So you’re telling me you weren’t working with the tribal elders on this the whole time?”
Ela swung her legs off Dylan and sat up next to him. She took his hands in hers.
“I’m going to forget you said that. It was my grandfather who told me to back off. After that man was killed,” she added. An afterthought.