The Only Good Indians(23)
To do it right, he hacked a thick branch from the brush, split her sternum with just the knife—she wasn’t even old enough to need the saw—then cracked the pelvis like prying a butterfly’s wings apart, jammed the branch into her chest to prop her open. To be sure to get every bit of her ruptured guts, the last little bit of her lungs, he even crawled in like a kid with his first elk, scooping and pushing, and when he finally rolled out, dislodging the branch, Gabe was standing there watching.
“Just the hindquarters today, Super Indian,” he said with a smile, a big brown leg Fred-Flintstoned over his shoulder, the black hoof cupped in his hand, blood dripping down the back of his jacket.
Lewis didn’t take Gabe’s bait. Just kept working.
The next part of his promise to the young elk was the skinning, which was a job he really needed to hang her up for, from a stout rafter in a shop, the radio playing over on the workbench. What he had was a trading-post knife that was too sharp at first, then too dull, and by the end of the job Gabe and Ricky and Cass were all standing there watching, the snow coating their shoulders, not even melting in their hair anymore.
And Lewis was maybe crying by then, he admits to Peta. He doesn’t say it for pity, just because not saying that part would feel like lying.
“What did Gabe and them say about that?” Peta asks, her hand to his forearm now, because he’s trying not to cry here, he’s trying not to be that stupid, that needy.
“They were my friends,” Lewis says, sputtering now and trying to just keep it in. “They didn’t—they didn’t say anything.”
Peta reaches up to his forehead, delicately removes a flake of paint from the basketball pole, and then pulls him to her chest, her palm to his cheek, and this, her, it’s home, and it’s not haunted, not even a little. This is where he wants to live forever.
But he still hasn’t said it all, about that day.
What he didn’t get to before turning into a blubbering excuse for a grown-up is the four of them struggling that young elk up the hill, finally just using the junk come-along as a cable after digging the truck out, never mind that this ledge is the exact point on the reservation where all the wind gathers to sweep down like the end of the world.
Against all rationality, and though each step uphill takes about twenty steps in total, the young elk makes it all the way up, and in one piece, the four of them sweating in the freezing air. And neither Gabe nor Ricky nor Cass even asks Lewis why this is so important. They don’t blame him, either, when Denny Pease is waiting by the truck on his game warden four-wheeler, looking from face to face like impressed that they thought they could get away with something of this magnitude on his watch. It’s just as well. The snow’s too deep, is coming down too fast. Without Denny’s radio to call in more help, the truck doesn’t make it out, Gabe and Cass and Ricky and Lewis don’t get found until spring, and Lewis never meets Peta, never gets Harley, never goes to work for the post office, never builds his Road King.
The condition Denny lays down that day, it’s that the four of them can either throw their honorable kills back down that slope and pay the fine for what they’ve done here, multiplied by nine, not counting any elk that ran off shot, are out there dying now, or they throw all this meat back down that slope and then cash out once and for all, never hunt on the reservation again. Happy early turkey day, turkeys.
It’s a small price to pay, really. It’s not like Lewis has the nerve for shooting big animals anymore. Not after having gone to war against the elk like that. That craziness, that heat of the moment, the blood in his temples, smoke in the air, it was like—he hates himself the most for this—it was probably what it was like a century and more ago, when soldiers gathered up on ridges above Blackfeet encampments to turn the cranks on their big guns, terraform this new land for their occupation. Fertilize it with blood. Harvest the potatoes that would grow there, turn them into baskets of fries, and sell those crunchy cubes of grease back at powwows.
Even after taking Denny’s option two—I will hunt no more forever—all Lewis could think about, standing there, was that young elk he’d spent so much time on. She was freezing solid on the ground between them all, skinless, surrounded by sawed-off legs.
“Can we at least keep her?” he asked Denny, Gabe already rushing to the ledge to sling his elk haunch out into open space, the storm swallowing it whole.
Like a ritual, Cass stepped forward, hurled his leg down the slope, and then Ricky did it, his going the highest before disappearing, all five of them tracking its descent until they couldn’t.
Denny looked over to Lewis about his question, then down to the young elk, all her muscles showing, a hole blown in her back, her head mostly gone, and Lewis, in the driveway well after midnight, shudders against Peta. Not because Denny shrugged a what-the-hell about the young elk, but because Harley’s dead, isn’t he? And not just dead, but killed, in a way that had to be terrifying. It should have been Lewis under those flashing elk hooves, Lewis knows, it should have been him paying for that young elk. Not Harley.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he says into Peta’s chest, his hand gripping hard on her leg. All her running muscles are still there, are there forever, probably.
“Something must have got in,” she says back, about Harley.
She’s right, of course, but the real question isn’t what got in, it’s when did it get in.