The Only Good Indians(13)

“Oh,” Lewis says. “Think we’re getting the deposit back?”

“Security deposits are overrated,” Peta says back, and maybe she really is Indian, right?

“Wait,” Lewis tells her, and retreats to the garage, comes back from the chest freezer with the trash bag that’s gone-with through six rental houses and one never-finished basement.

It’s maybe going to smell. But maybe not.

“We still have that?” Peta says.

Lewis tries to open the bag but it’s more like peeling a plastic tamale, the bag’s so old. Inside, kind of making his heart swell, is the hide he promised that young elk to use someday, to make everything she went through worth it.

The story he told Peta was that it was snowing thick, and she’d looked like a full-grown cow, not a teenager. That he never would have pulled the trigger if he’d seen her right.

It’s not a complete lie. Just, it’s not the complete truth, either.

Lewis swallows the memory down, gets back to whatever this is he’s doing: re-creating the scene of the crime? No. More like staging the accident all over again. With, this time, props.

“Is it still … ?” Peta asks about the tight bundle of rolled elk hide, hair still on.

Lewis shrugs, doesn’t know about the hide, if it’s still all one piece, or crumbly. It has a lot of nicks and holes, he knows, because, first, he’s a crap skinner, but second, that trading-post knife he was using only held its edge for like three minutes.

Should he thaw it before unrolling it? Would the microwave work? Would he ever be able to eat anything warmed in there again?

“I’ll just—” he says, and ceremonially sets the hide down in the middle of the masking tape. It looks like a fat, hairy burrito, and Lewis has to focus to keep from coughing, because that’ll turn into a gag, and he doesn’t want to be rude to her memory.

“That’s probably good enough,” Peta says, sitting back and eyeballing the hide, the tape, the whole setup.

“Well, then,” Lewis says, one foot already on the lowest rung, one hand up higher.

“The fan’s at the same speed?” she asks.

“I haven’t messed with it,” he says. “You?”

She shakes her head no, nods for him to go, that she’s watching.

“I was on this rung,” he narrates, using his hand to touch where his foot was, and then he’s going up, up.

He waits until the spinning blades of the fan are at his chest again to look down through them. At Peta, on the couch. At a dead elk made of masking tape, with a hairy burrito for a gut sack.

“Maybe it’s the light,” Peta says, and unfolds from the couch, backs into the edge of the living room, where she was standing when Lewis started his big slow-motion fall. “Am I making a shadow?” she calls up to him. She turns the hall light on and off behind her, keeping her feet in the same place.

“You had a bag,” Lewis tells her, still holding on to the chance that this might work, that there might be an explanation.

“O-kay …” she says, not as confident in this bag-possibility as he is, but all the same, she bounds into the kitchen to dig one up.

While she’s gone Lewis looks over the top of the fan, at the gouge the ladder left in the wall of the living room. The new wound in the house.

Moving there like an afterimage, like it was left behind, is just trying to creep past without being seen, he’s ninety percent sure there’s the shadow of a person up against that wall. A thin shadow, just for a flicker of a moment.

A woman with a head that’s not human.

It’s too heavy, too long.

When it turns as if to fix him in its wide-set eyes, he raises his hand to block her vision, to hide, but it’s too late. It’s been too late for ten years already. Ever since he pulled that trigger.





WEDNESDAY


What wakes him the next morning is … a basketball? Dribbling?

Lewis rolls out of bed and into the closest sweats, has to hold them up with his left hand all the way down the stairs—the dryer ate their drawstring back when they were brand-new.

There’s definitely someone dribbling a basketball in the driveway.

Lewis steps down from the kitchen into the garage, says to Harley, “Who is it, bub?”

Harley thumps his heavy tail once against a Star Wars sleeping bag but that’s all he can manage.

A neighbor kid, maybe? Did the former tenants tell all the kids on this street that they can come over anytime, shoot hoops?

If so, cool. Lewis needs someone to play with who’s at his skill level. Playing against Peta—doing anything athletic with her—is a study in shame, pretty much. Even grabbing her waistband when she slides past, pushing her in the back when she’s laying it up, he never can hit twenty-one before she does. He can never even get to ten before she wins.

Lewis bumps the garage door button with the side of his fist, his face pre-hard because that’s what you do in what could be a trespassing situation, what could be the former tenant, drunk, weaving back to the home he sort of remembers.

Slowly—it’s an old, heavy door—the sneakers out there become legs, then shape into a woman, then become … Shaney?

She spins around, making room against an imaginary defender, and comes back, rises into a fallaway that scissors her legs in the air, the back one touching down just as the ball banks in, smooth as butter. She shags the rebound, claps the ball between her hands like heads-up, and passes it across, a clean bounce right on target.