The Only Good Indians(12)
The headline kicks up in Lewis’s head on automatic, straight out of the reservation: not the FULLBLOOD TO DILUTE BLOODLINE he’d always expected if he married white, that he’d been prepping himself to deal with, because who knows, but FULLBOOD BETRAYS EVERY DEAD INDIAN BEFORE HIM. It’s the guilt of having some pristine Native swimmers—they probably look like microscopic salmon, even though the Blackfeet are a horse tribe—it’s the guilt of having those swimmers cocked and loaded but never pushing them downstream, meaning the few of his ancestors who made it through raids and plagues, massacres and genocide, diabetes and all the wobbly-tired cars the rest of America was done with, those Indians may as well have just stood up into that big Gatling gun of history, yeah?
“How’s he?” Lewis says, tipping his head to the garage.
“I think it’s helping,” Peta says, holding the goat milk up.
According to one of the luggage guys at the airport, you can bring a parvo puppy back with goat milk. Harley’s not that kind of sick, but if goat milk can keep a puppy alive when its insides are turning to slurry, then surely it can do something for a dog that spent most of yesterday dying and then coming back, right?
It makes as much sense as anything.
At some point, though, and Lewis hates hates hates this, at some point, and soon, it’s going to come down to a rifle, and Harley’s last walk, or carry, whatever.
It won’t be because Harley was a bad dog. It’ll be because he was the best dog.
It’ll have to be the same rifle from ten years ago, too. He’ll drive up to the reservation to bum it off Cass, even—it’s the one he used for that young cow elk. The cow elk he’s tracing out on the carpet with a hundred torn-off pieces of masking tape.
“Need some help?” Peta says about this little project.
Any other person, any other woman, any other wife of a stupid husband who’s trying to hide from his dying dog by outlining an elk on the living room floor in masking tape, she’d tell him to quit messing her house up, to quit wasting tape, to be sure and clean up every bit of that when he’s done.
Peta works her way down beside Lewis, takes the roll of tape, tears off squares, and holds them up on her fingertips for when he’s ready.
Her theory about what he saw is that, the same way you can put lights on the spokes of a bike and they’ll gel into a picture at speed and hold that blurry glowing image, there must have been some random pattern of light and dark dust on the back of the fan blades. They produced a kind of blob in all that spinning, and Lewis just took it to his guilty place: that young elk.
About which, he hasn’t told her the whole story.
She’s vegetarian, and not for health reasons, but ethical ones. More nights than not, he’s eating potatoes or tofu or beans. And that’s fine. Every middle-aged Indian needs a diet exactly like this. So, Peta would listen to the whole story, sure, and make the right noises, hold her eyes in a way that meant she was getting it, but it would hurt her to hear it, and she’d have to go down to the high school, run around and around the track to try to stay ahead of that story. It’s better not to tell her all of it, then, not to burden her with it, scar her memory up. Who knows, even? She might just stand up after hearing it, walk away, not come back.
Twenty minutes later, maybe an hour, Lewis has the shape of the cow elk more or less roughed out, emphasis on the “rough.”
He stands to see it from higher up, and has no clue how the bow-and-arrow Blackfeet did it back in the day. The horses they drew into ledgers or onto the sides of lodges weren’t anatomically accurate—neither’s this—but they did suggest a sort of intimacy with the shape, with the form, that this masking-tape elk doesn’t even come close to. It’s more like somebody told Lewis about an elk than that he ever saw one in real actual life.
Peta covers her mouth with her hand to keep from laughing, and Lewis has to smile as well.
“Looks like a five-year-old tried to trace a giant sheep, doesn’t it?” he says. “While he was working on his third beer of the morning.”
Peta collapses onto the pushed-back couch, pulls her legs up under her, adds, “But the sheep kept kicking, trying to get away.”
“Sheep don’t know anything about art,” Lewis says, and falls into the couch beside her.
From this position, he of course ends up looking through the fan from the underside, and then at the little spotlight that’s dead again up there. It’s a mystery he’s resigned to never solving. Some lights you never figure out, and shouldn’t even try to.
“What next, then?” Peta asks.
For maybe thirty seconds Lewis doesn’t answer, then, “It’s stupid,” he finally says.
“What?” Peta says. “You mean like climbing up a shaky ladder alone in the middle of the day and almost cracking your head open?”
Point.
After stopping to say hey to Harley, tell him that Eldon’s covering the morning shift, Lewis walks the tall aluminum ladder around the side of the house again.
“It was here,” Peta says, positioning the ladder just shy of directly under the fan.
“How can you tell?” Lewis asks.
To show, she pivots around to the other side, braces her feet wide to lower the ladder down until the red plastic cap at the top fits perfectly into the wedge slammed into the wall on the other side of the living room.