The Only Good Indians(26)
Those two cops would love him to come in with that for evidence, or as explanation.
And thinking about it isn’t making it go away. Lewis chuckles at himself, shakes his head, and drops the mallet handle-first into the closest receptacle, which is one of the cheapo rubber boots Peta always keeps by the door of all the houses they’ve rented since moving out of her aunt’s basement. The boots are big enough that either Lewis or her can pull them on, wade out into the snow for the mail, then slip them off, not track slush in.
Lewis is so used to these boots by now that he doesn’t even see them, not until they’re in motion. From the mallet he dropped into the right one.
He pushes away just on instinct—boots don’t move on their own—then comes back closer to be sure he’s seeing what he’s seeing.
The motion is ants. The boots are coated in small black ants, summer ants, even though Thanksgiving’s just next week. Halloween ants, maybe? Is that a thing? If not, it should be, once he realizes what the ants are after: Harley. What’s left of him, smushed into the tread of the rubber soles, smeared on the toes because it wasn’t all stomping, evidently. There was some kicking, too.
Lewis shakes his head no, please no, and backs away, out into the light, then feels his way around to Harley’s grave. Lewis is breathing deep but he’s not going to cry. He’s a stoic Indian, after all. When he was a kid, he thought that was the fancy word for “stone-faced,” which he figured was some connection to Rushmore, since he knew it wasn’t supposed to look like that.
That was back when he was stupid, though. Before now, when he’s even stupider.
Except—what he’s thinking now. No.
Last night out here in the dark, when he kept asking Peta about Harley, about how that could have happened. Could she have just been seeing a dog that finally died from its injury? Had Lewis seen something completely different? Did his questions even make sense to her?
He thinks back through what he can dredge up of her answers, to see if they track with a Harley that wasn’t stomped to mush.
On his knees back by the fence, he claws the earth open with his desperate fingers, breathing fast. He pulls up the blanket with the ducks on it and the sleeping bag that tapers at the foot end, and one Star Wars sleeping bag deeper and it’s going to be Harley.
But then Lewis doesn’t pull that field of stars away.
Does he even really want to know? Will seeing Harley smashed to pulp prove anything about who was wearing those boots? Is that even for sure dead dog in the tread of those boots? What if Peta was hauling the trash out from the kitchen and it burst, and she had to wade through it? Halloween ants would go for that just the same, wouldn’t they? If there is such a thing as Halloween ants?
What he’s really afraid of, though, he knows, it’s that Harley will just be dead from being strangled by his collar, from hanging on the fence.
And now the ground is trembling with Lewis’s chest. The train’s coming. The train’s always coming.
Lewis closes his eyes against the screaming wheels and the sparks, but then a rock chip catches him on the arm and he falls away slapping at it, and that’s when he finally looks at the train rushing past. Not at the different-colored cars, not at the graffiti smearing past at sixty miles per hour, but at the space between the cars, that space that’s full full full full, then, for a flash, for a slice of an instant, empty.
Only, it’s not.
Standing out there in the yellow grass is a woman with an elk head, and—no, no.
Lewis stumbles forward, the train cars whipping just past his face now.
Is she wearing a thick brown jacket with reflective stripes? Like the kind the ground crew of an airport wears?
“It can’t be,” Lewis says, and the moment the train’s gone he’s scrambling up onto the hot tracks, but of course the grass over there is just grass again, like nobody was even there.
SUNDAY
For once, Lewis wishes he were at work. Because the only other option is faking sleep until Peta’s gone to her shift. For maybe thirty seconds he felt her standing in the doorway with her morning coffee, watching the mound of covers he was trying to make rise and fall like completely normal, non-mechanical breathing, but at least that kept her from asking him why he was acting like such a weirdo last night, cooking alone out on the grill like some backyard warrior, then staying in the garage with the Road King until late.
Are you pissed about something? she might have asked, if she’d seen an eyelid flicker.
The answer he had ready was No, and Harley, but then she bought his sleeping ruse, he guesses.
Well. If she’s Peta she bought it.
If she’s something else, well.
The dots he’s trying and trying not to let connect in his head are that Peta showed up on the reservation, didn’t she? And it was the exact summer after the Thanksgiving Classic, when he was all busy flipping the whole place off with both hands, denying it his sacred presence from here on out. Maybe that’s the answer for why this is starting with him, not Gabe or Cass: because he was the first to leave.
As for the case against Peta, or for her not being Peta, it doesn’t help that she’s a vegetarian, either, Lewis has to admit. Which is what you call a person who doesn’t eat meat. What you call an animal that doesn’t eat meat, that’s “herbivore.”