The Only Good Indians(10)

Lewis does the code for the garage, makes a show of tapping his shoes at the door, then ushers them all into the World Famous Jumping Dog Show.

“He just started doing it,” he says on the way through the kitchen, walking backward like a proper tour guide. “I always thought he had some wolf in him maybe, along with sled dog or pit fighter. Now I’m thinking kangaroo.”

“Snow kangaroo,” Jerry says, the leathery skin around his eyes crinkling.

Silas snickers, running the tips of his fingers along the top of the table and then looking at them like for grime.

“Dog needs what’s on the other side of the fence, that’s a dog’ll learn to jump,” Shaney informs them all.

Jerry says something about this through his stache but it’s lost, and anytime Lewis asks him for a repeat Jerry just waves it off.

“Where’s the little lady?” Eldon asks, clapping his big hand onto the back of the couch.

“Making the big bucks,” Lewis says, miming the bright orange wands Peta parks planes with, using them both to direct this little tour group to his right, his right.

“Aren’t any big bucks in Great Fa—” Eldon starts to say, doesn’t get to finish, some of Peta’s more lacy underthings suddenly drying on the back of a chair.

“Divert, divert,” Lewis tells him, waving him back with his make-believe wands but smiling.

Still, “Nice,” Shaney says to Lewis and only to Lewis about the showy bra when she passes.

Past her, thankfully, Silas has liberated the housing for the Road King’s headlight assembly from the kitchen table, is holding it up to peer through it.

“Still looking for hard bags?” he asks.

“Got some?” Lewis says back, and flips the latch up on the sliding door. “What color?”

“Because everything else matches so well?” Eldon cuts in.

“Foul, foul,” Lewis calls, shining his wands on him because evidently he’s a ref now.

No, his bike doesn’t all match yet. But it will. He’s going to Pinocchio it up from the rolling skeleton it is now into the real bike it wants to be. The hard bags are what Peta’s insisting on, since, in a skid, they take the heat from the asphalt, keep the flesh and muscle on your leg and hip. Lewis tried telling her that only matters for riders who lay it over, but that pretty much just warranted a glare, not even a halfway grin.

“Anything about Silas’s scoot there suggest he’s got extra parts of any color laying around?” Jerry says over his shoulder. “Any extra pieces, he just tacks them on, don’t he?”

Silas’s bike right now is mid-transformation, somewhere between a cafe racer and a twelve-year-old’s drawing of his dream bike, but he has to grin and shrug about this, because it’s true.

Lewis twirls the sawed-off broomstick up from the sliding door’s track, swishes the glass back dramatically, and presents the backyard to these unbelievers, letting them go first so they can see there’s no trickery involved.

How he knows Harley will be there instead of running wild from yard to yard, it’s that he hooked Harley’s chain to the rusted baling wire of the laundry line before work, like every morning. Last he saw, Harley was running back and forth, he had a water pan, some shade, some grass, a clueless look on his face—everything a dog could need. The laundry line isn’t a permanent solution, but it’s solution enough until Lewis finds some hog-wire panels for the top of the fence.

“Maybe he’s a pole vaulter like his momma,” Eldon calls back from the uneven deck.

Lewis has bragged to them all about Peta, and Jerry and Silas have even met her a couple of times when it was raining and she had to pick him up in the truck.

“Or an escape artist,” Silas adds.

Lewis steps out after them, parts them to see from pole to rusted pole of the laundry line, and he’s right: no Harley. Also, no baling wire running between the poles anymore, to clip wet clothes to.

“I’m going to kill that dog,” he says, stepping out farther to make sure Harley’s not just standing there watching the house, which is when Shaney, over at the next corner of the back of the house, finishes that thought: “Think you’re a little late for that, Blackfeet.”

With her lips she shows Lewis where to look, and from the way she’s not joking, he gets a flash of warning, can feel regret washing up into his throat.

It’s Harley. He’s hanging by his chain from the top of the fence, eyes open but not seeing anything, gouges and furrows clawed into the fence because it took a while for him to strangle out, evidently.

“Well, shit,” Jerry says.

Harley was the first gift Peta ever got Lewis, nine years ago. One of her other aunts’ dogs had thrown a litter, and the dad was supposed to have been a real scrapper, and Lewis had already been talking about how the last good rez dog he’d had, he’d been a kid, and a horse in the parade had kicked it in the head while Lewis was grubbing for candy with the rest of the kids. So Harley, he’d been perfect, almost made Great Falls feel like home that first year—they grew into it together. And now he’s dead on the chain Lewis tied him up with.

“Sorry, man,” Eldon says, studying the high-dollar boots he always changes into for riding.

“Looks like he almost made it,” Shaney says for all of them, meaning they believe Lewis about Harley having found springs in his legs late in life.