The Only Good Indians(22)

It’s probably not a good look, but Peta’s not looking, either. When it’s over he yanks his stupid sweats up and pushes his forehead into the flaky paint of the basketball pole just to have something solid to hold on to.

“I don’t understand,” he says.

“He’s dead,” Peta says, kind of obviously.

Yeah, but, Lewis doesn’t say.

If the door was only open four inches, like he’s been leaving it for air circulation, then … then: “What could have done that?”

Peta looks over from her grief hole, says, “Should we call your coworker about it?”

Lewis deserves that, he knows. “Coworker” is what he was calling Shaney for the few minutes after hustling her out the door with her armload of books.

“No, let’s not,” he says, cleaning his hands in the dirt. “I don’t even have her number.”

Except, he realizes, he does, doesn’t he? In the work directory thing, the brand-new one.

“What could have even done that to him?” he says, settling down beside Peta.

She scooches over like giving him room. Like there’s limited space on this two-car-wide pad of dribbled-in, oil-stained concrete.

No: like she doesn’t want to be touching him.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Peta says, staring off into the nothing all around, “he was just a dog,” which—is that an answer, really?

Without meaning to, Lewis clocks her socked feet.

No blood, no gore.

No hooves, either.

But the door, it was only up four inches. And Peta had to raise it to come sit out here and think. The only explanation is that it was either one of the two of them stomping Harley, or it was someone … something else.

Lewis cranks around, heart thudding in his chest, and studies the dark cave of the garage for a tall, top-heavy form standing flat up against a wall, hidden just nearly enough, her yellow eyes drinking the light in.

It wasn’t horse hooves that did that to Harley, he’s sure. It was an elk. How he knows is that it’s after midnight, meaning it’s technically Saturday now—it’s exactly one week before the ten-year anniversary of the Thanksgiving Classic.

“I don’t know if we should be here anymore,” he says.

Peta doesn’t look over.

“All new houses take some getting used to,” she says, always the rational one. “Remember that one with the attic?”

The place Lewis was so sure was haunted. The one where he nailed a board across that attic door up in the ceiling, in case anything wanted to crawl out, stand by the bed on his side. Or on any side. Indians are spooky had been his explanation to Peta. It’s pretty much all he’s got now, too.

“I can’t sleep,” he says.

“You were sleeping a few minutes ago.”

“Why are you up?” Lewis asks, watching the side of Peta’s face.

“Thought I heard something,” she says, shrugging one shoulder.

“Harley?” Lewis says, because it’s the obvious thing.

“The stairs,” Peta says, which instantly sucks all the heat from Lewis’s body.

He breathes in, breathes out long and shaky.

“I didn’t tell you the whole story about that … hunting thing because I didn’t want you to have to have it in your head,” he says.

This gets Peta looking over. A mealy-mouthed excuse like this, it deserves her full attention.

“You don’t like to hear stuff about … animals,” Lewis adds.

“It’s about you,” she says back without hesitating. “It’s who you are.”

“I didn’t tell her the end of it,” Lewis says, his voice barely more than a creak.

Peta’s still watching him. Waiting.

“You sure you want to know?” he asks.

“Who are you married to?” she says back. “Her, or me?”

Lewis nods, taking that hit, and wades into it one more time, starting with how, when he split that young elk open, when he carved into that elk who didn’t know when she was dead, what spilled out into the snow were her milk bags. They were light blue, muscular and veiny, the ductwork still attached and ready.

She was too young to be pregnant, probably couldn’t have carried full term all the way to spring, and it was too early for a calf to be this far along anyway, but still—that’s why she was fighting so hard, he knew, and still knows. It didn’t matter that she was dead. She had to protect her baby.

And that baby, that embryo or fetus, that calf, it was still rounded like a bean in there, its head shape ducked down into its chest like it was going to look up at him from its mother’s gore, like it was going to wobble up onto four spindly legs, walk away, grow bigger but never actually develop, so it’d end up being a seven-hundred-pound big-eyed, smooth-skinned fetus, always looking for its dead mother.

When Cass wasn’t watching, which was the whole time, Lewis used the butt of the rifle to scrape a hole in the frozen dirt, and nestled that unfinished, only-wriggling-a-little-bit elk calf into the ground, covered it as best he could, and then—never mind that storm swirling in, dumping load after load of snow—insisted on dressing this young elk mother out right, and all the way.

Nothing was going to spoil. No part of her could go to waste.