The Only Good Indians(16)

Now she’s looking to the ladder, to the nothing happening on the ceiling.

“My books are—” Lewis tries, but this isn’t a library visit anymore.

“Why do this here, by the couch?” she asks just generally, coming back around to fix him in her thirsty eyes. She opens her hand to the masking tape elk, leaves her fingers spread like that.

“Wherever I did it, that could be the question,” Lewis says, stalling.

“But you did it here, not anywhere else,” Shaney says back, not pushing this time, but eliciting.

“It’s stupid,” he says, sitting down on the third step of the stairs. “Just something I thought I saw the other day.”

She leans back onto the arm of the couch, her eyes still locked on him, says, “Which was?”

“It’s not like in the books,” Lewis says. “When you—when you see something that doesn’t fit, like.”

“Like a werewolf digging through your trash,” she completes for him, hauling his current book up from the coffee table and showing him the cover, which is … a werewolf digging through a dumpster, trash strewn all over the alley.

Lewis nods, even more caught, his hands cupped over his mouth, his breath hot on his palms.

Is he really about to tell her? Does the hot girl from work get to know what his wife doesn’t?

But she knew how to finish that elk on the floor, didn’t she? That has to mean something. And—Lewis hates himself for saying it, for thinking it, but there it is: she’s Indian.

More important, she’s asking.

“It was the winter before I got married,” he says. “Six—no, five days before Thanksgiving, yeah? It was the Saturday before Thanksgiving. We were hunting.”

“We?” Shaney prompts.

“Guys I grew up with,” Lewis says with a shrug, like they’re not the real focus. “Gabe, Ricky, Cassidy—Cass.”

Shaney nods like he’s doing good so far, and looks over to the masking tape elk again, kind of for both of them it feels like, and then Lewis is talking, is confessing, is saying it all out loud for the first time, which must mean it really happened.





THAT SATURDAY


The sky was spitting these hard little snowballs that kept catching in Lewis’s girly eyelashes that he always thought were maybe just normal eyelashes.

“Wearing mascara now, princess?” Gabe asked all the same, bumping over into him. “Gonna bat your eyes, bring all the big bulls to your door?”

“You should talk,” Lewis said, lifting his chin to Gabe’s own frosted eyelashes.

Off-rez, people always used to default-think that Lewis and Gabe were brothers. Gabe, at six-two, had always been a touch taller, but otherwise, yeah, sure. In John Wayne’s day Lewis and Gabe would have been scooped up to die in a hail of gunfire, would have been Indians “16” and “17,” of forty. Cass, though? Cass would have been more the sitting-in-front-of-the-lodge type, the made-for-the-twentieth-century type, maybe even already wearing some early version of John Lennon shades. Ricky, he’d be Bluto from Popeye, just, darker; put him in front of a camera, and all he could hope to play would be the Indian thug off to the side, that nobody trusts to remember even half a line. Of Lewis and Gabe and Cass, though, he was the only one who could struggle out a sort-of beard, if he made it through the itchy part, and didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. “Custer in the woodpile” was the excuse he would always give, smoothing his rangy fourteen hairs down along his cheeks like Grizzly Adams.

Gabe leaned across to Lewis, making smoochy lips, saying, “A little flirting would probably work better than what we’re—” but then Cass, ahead of them at the truck, raised his left hand, silencing them.

“What you got?” Ricky asked, coming back.

He was always ranging out to the side, sure they were just missing a whole herd, that all the elk were single-filing it past just out of sight, ducking their heads down so their racks wouldn’t crest over the snow.

“Shh,” Cass said, coming down to one knee to read sign like a real Indian.

Tracks.

Elk had been nosing into the bed, probably remembering that some trucks carry hay, and hay never gets all the way gone. Not without elk that are tall enough to lean over the side of the truck, that have long enough necks to even get under the toolbox for every last straw.

“Heavy guys,” Gabe said, lowering down to insert a trigger finger into the deep hoofprint. He had some complicated method where a bull weighed this much if it was up to his second knuckle, that much if it was halfway past that, but Lewis never bought it.

“Told you they were up here,” Ricky said, looking all around like these elk might be turned around at the tree line like a stupid whitetail, to twitch their tails and watch.

“Up here” wasn’t high-high, snowmobile or horse country, but halfway there, anyway, just down from Babb, over toward Duck Lake. With the weather moving in, the elk should have been filing down from the timber, to wait the big snow out. The idea was to meet them halfway.

“This is some bullshit,” Cass said, his usual call, and Ricky responded with his obligatory line, “Literally,” toeing over a fresh black mound, the pellets more tapered at one end, not both. Nine times out of nine, that’ll mean “bull,” not “cow.”