The Only Good Indians(21)
Shaney doesn’t blink.
“You were gonna be a tough one, weren’t you?” the Lewis of back then said, his lower lip starting to tremble, and then he pulled the trigger.
Cass’s rifle bucked free of his one-handed grip and the young elk fell again, and what he was saying in his head, what he was telling himself even though he was Indian, even though he was this great born hunter, what he was telling himself to make this okay, to be able to make it through the next minute, and the next hour, it was that shooting her, it was just like putting one in a hay bale, it was just like snapping a blade of grass in a field, it was like stepping on a grasshopper. The young elk didn’t even know what was happening, animals aren’t aware like that, not in the same way people are.
“You believed that, too, didn’t you?” Shaney says.
“For ten years,” Lewis says back. “Until I saw her again, right over there.”
“Still dead?” Shaney asks, sitting on the second step of the stairs now, her hand on the knee of his sweats, and that’s how she is and that’s how Lewis is when Peta walks in the front door.
FRIDAY
When the Thunderball Express slams past at 2:12 in the morning, Lewis’s half-asleep mind turns those slamming wheels into thundering hooves, going up and down faster and faster into some muck, until he sits up hard from … what?
His knee-jerk thought is that the train threw one of those grey rocks into the fence, knocked another slat out, left it spinning on the cross-board like a cartoon, but it wasn’t the train at all, he realizes. It was a … chain? He sits up when that word connects to what’s right under the bedroom: the garage. The sound that shook him awake was the garage door chain in its long greasy track, the little motor grinding and pulling.
And the garage door would only be going up because someone pushed the button. And Peta’s not on her side of the bed, is she?
Lewis sits up, his feet to the carpet now, his head trying to swim back to functional. When he can balance enough, he steps into those same useless sweatpants, feels his way across the bedroom to stumble down the stairs, the same ones Peta caught him and Shaney on. Doing nothing, but still, right? Lewis made sure Shaney left with an armload of books, a whole series, to prove to Peta why she’d been there, but the whole time, stacking them up in Shaney’s arms, it felt like an overcorrection, like trying to hide a body on the lawn by covering it with eight other bodies.
And Peta bought it, too, that was the thing. There was that moment when it all could have gone the other way, sure, but the reason it didn’t, she told him later, it was his eyes. Lewis hadn’t even been there on the stairs, not really.
All the same, Lewis knows it might have hurt Peta less for Shaney to have been just stepping back into her jeans. That would have been better than Lewis telling another woman something so intimate, so personal, so private. And that he’d been telling the elk story to another Indian, which Peta could never be no matter how fast she ran, no matter how high she jumped, that was maybe the final cut. The deepest, anyway. The one she was probably still nursing.
Thursday, the little him and Peta saw each other, she was cordial but not really herself. Not like she had something to say so much as she didn’t have anything to say. And now she’s gone from the bed at two in the morning, when she’s a sleeper who treasures every minute she can get until that five o’clock alarm.
Coming down the stairs, holding on to his sweats, Lewis overshoots the step-off at the bottom, falls ahead into the living room, tight-wiring it around the edge of the masking tape, and, because it’s not on any human schedule, that stupid spotlight in the ceiling flickers. From Lewis’s stumbling footfalls? Is that what makes it come on? Or are the aftershocks from the garage door what’s flickering it on?
Before the mystery of that spotlight, though, there’s the mystery of the wife.
Lewis pulls the door to the garage in kind of reverently, and the light built into the garage door motor is still on because it’s only been about forty seconds since the door came up. Sitting on the pad of concrete out at the soft edge of that light, her knees to her chest, arms hugging them, white-blond hair cascaded down her back, is Peta in her sleep shirt, her ankle socks, her breakfast scrunchy around her left wrist, ready for cereal.
She’s been crying. Lewis doesn’t have to see her face to know. He can tell just from the curve of her back.
He steps down onto the cold smooth concrete of the garage to pick his way through to her, and that’s when he sees it.
Harley, but not. Not anymore.
That good dog from his childhood, that got its head kicked in by a horse? That’s the closest thing to this. To what’s happened to Harley. Except that was just one fast kick, there and back in a snap, so nobody watching the parade even knew what had happened for a breath or two.
This—this is a dog that got ran down by a horse, and the horse had some serious score to settle, went down and came up over and over, slamming that dog into nothing, into a red chunky smear, teeth here, flash of bone there, matted fur all in and among.
The vomit’s coming up and out of Lewis’s mouth before he even realizes it. It’s hot, thin, and already on his hands, like keeping it from splashing down onto the floor of the garage is suddenly the most important thing. Once he feels it stringing out between his fingers, he really gags, is shambling for the outside, losing everything under the basketball goal, his sweats around his ankles.