The Only Good Indians(15)

“Say it,” Shaney says about the scar, “go ahead, I’ve heard them all. Did I go to the emergency room or the butcher?”

She axles the ball between her two bird-fingers, rotating it with her thumbs, keeping it between Lewis and her midriff … as much bluff as she has, she still doesn’t much want him looking, he can tell.

“Can hardly even see it,” he one hundred percent lies. “Did—did everything …”

Her eyes flit up to the goal, and her non-answer is all the answer he needs, and her story comes together in his head, glued together from all the other stories he knows: she was young, the emergency room doc was a reject from the American medical system, so she ran from that tiny grave as far as she could, which ended up being about one tank of gas away from her reservation.

“Sorry,” Lewis says. Not for seeing, but for whatever happened.

“We’re from where we’re from,” she says back. “Scars are part of the deal, aren’t they?”

Lewis steps out onto the court proper, wading into this game.

“So you really want a book?” he asks, still sure this is some complicated joke.

“I read, yeah,” she says like insulted, shrugging one shoulder, dribbling up to him and then turning around in invitation. One thing all guy ballers can learn from how the girls play, it’s that trick right there: giving the defender your ass, so you can protect the ball, slash out either way around them. Problem is, guys always think it’s an ego thing, that it’s a bigger coup to face up, lock eyes, then juke them any the hell way. And maybe it is. But the guys get their pockets picked more, too.

Shaney presses right up to Lewis, dribbling far from her body so he can’t reach around.

This would be a bad time for Peta to come strolling up, he knows. He might as well be leaning around a barely halter-topped girl in the bar who’s pretending not to know how to play pool. Peta won’t be walking up, though. She’s not off work for hours yet, and even then, it’s a ten-minute hike in from the park-n-ride, her work duffel slung over her shoulder, her ear protection slung around her neck, the world so quiet to her, probably, after planes throttling up around her all day.

Peta.

Lewis vows to keep her name in his head for the next few minutes.

Shaney leans right like she’s going to use her left to throw the ball ahead, a long dribble that gets her into layup territory if she glides a bit, underhands it, has that kind of touch, but then she’s twisting left already, and Lewis, like always, like with Peta, falls for it. Shaney eels past, has had a coach really make her get her footwork right, and the net’s already spitting the ball down.

“I had to hold my pants up,” Lewis calls out.

“No you didn’t,” Shaney says, and bounces the ball into the garage, well away from both Harleys: the dying dog and the parked Road King. “Now, book me, officer.”

It takes a second for Lewis to get that. And he’s fully aware she just smuggled “handcuffs” into his head. He leads her in all the same, one hand clutching his sweats, and when he makes the turn up the stairs, Shaney’s still back at the kitchen table.

“Blackfeet?” she’s saying.

She’s almost touching the rolled elk hide on the table, and she either just said her name for Lewis, or she’s asking if this hide is from the reservation.

“What?” Lewis says, stopped with his non-sweats-hand gripping the newel post at the turn upstairs.

“I didn’t know,” she says, looking across to him with new eyes. “You’re a—you’re a bundle holder? They let it come all the way down here?”

From the look on his face, she explains: “It’s like a pipe holder. Just, with a bundle.”

“Oh, that’s just—” Lewis begins, doesn’t finish. “I didn’t really grow up traditional.”

“Think tradition found you just the same,” she says, impressed, and almost touches the outermost brown hairs, then draws back like afraid of what might happen, what might pass from this Blackfeet bundle to her Crow self.

It’s just an elk hide, Lewis doesn’t say. Mostly because now she’s drifted over to the couch, can see the masking-tape insult to all elk on the carpet of the living room. She looks from it to him then back, and, without saying anything, she’s there, has the masking tape, is tearing off a few long strips, affixing them to the side of the couch. They look like long, careful shavings of wood, curling up.

Lewis doesn’t say anything, just steps over like caught, a hundred possible explanations swirling through his head, all of them built to fail.

Moving deliberately, Shaney applies the long strips to the carpet, not adding to the elk, but giving it some insides—that inward-going tube of an arrow Lewis has always seen on lodges and in ledgers, that ducks back from the mouth to the stomach, for reasons he’s never had clue one about. Why would the esophagus and stomach be more important than the heart, the liver?

“Now it’s right,” Shaney says.

It is. It was a smushed sheep before. Now it’s … not so much a young cow elk, but a shape that somehow represents a young elk better than even an actual young elk, lying right there.

“How’d you know?” Lewis asks.

“You asking that because I’m a girl?”

“It was just a blob with legs,” Lewis tells her.