The Only Good Indians(27)
Elk are herbivores. Grass-eaters. Vegetarians.
And: maybe she wasn’t lying when she said it was her past making her not want to have kids? Only, the past she meant was the one where she already lost a calf?
Moments after the front door shuts and locks, Lewis covers his face with his pillow, screams into it.
If it’s her or if it’s not her, either way, one fact is that somebody in those boots stomped Harley dead. And he definitely for sure saw a woman with an elk head through the boxcars flashing past—maybe even flashing past at the same flicker rate as the ceiling fan?
It’s too much to hold in his head all at once.
He loves Peta, and also he’s terrified of her.
Worse, there’s no proof either way. No way to tell.
Lewis smushes the pillow up his face, pushes it behind him, and, with his ears cleared now, hears a telltale creak on the stairs. As if, say, someone didn’t actually just leave. As if someone just shut the door and locked it from the inside.
Slowly, deliberately, the most distinct footfalls he’s ever heard are coming up the stairs, but each light thunk is preceded by a draggy whisk. Because an elk will feel forward with its hooves, right? Find the leading edge of the next step before actually taking it?
Lewis rolls over fast, his bare back to the door, and stares at the curtainless window, trying to memorize each waver and imperfection in the glass so he can clock the reflection when it comes. And his right ear, the one that’s up, dials down as sensitive as he can get it. The kind of sensitive that can hear a large set of nostrils breathing his scent in, should that happen.
A tear spills from his left eye, soaks into the pillow.
Is she there now? And if she is, then which her is it? Peta-Peta, or Peta with an elk head?
When one of the ripples in the window glass finally smears with color, with motion, Lewis breathes in deep, says, “Hey, forget something?”
No answer.
When he breathes his next breath in, it’s thready, unsteady, isn’t a breath he can trust not to explode into a scream.
“Or was it—?” he says, rolling over fake-groggily like he has an end to that sentence.
The doorway’s empty.
Lewis closes his eyes, opens them, doesn’t let himself rush to the window to see who, or what, might be walking away.
It’s too early for this shit.
He brushes his teeth and pees at the same time, spits into the toilet and sort of on his hand, and makes his way downstairs, taking the steps slow, trying to memorize each creak. It’s hopeless, though. Each stairstep makes one sound in the middle, a completely different sound eight inches over. Of course.
At the kitchen table he stands before the elk bundle—the hairy burrito—for maybe thirty seconds, finally pushes a finger into it. It’s mushy and rough at the same time, smells like some soft cheese that was on the table at a party once, that he knew better than to eat.
“Cheese,” though. Now he’s thinking cheese.
It’ll wreck his digestion, but, figuring that’s the least of his concerns right now, he makes a grilled cheese for breakfast, just staring down into the yeast-craters in the toasting bread while it cooks in the pan.
Because he’s such a good and considerate husband, he eats it over the sink. Either that or he’s kind of scared of the living room. His big irrational fear now is that that spotlight in the ceiling’s not broken, it’s just waiting for him to be the right kind of alone, so it can shine down like a UFO beam, a woman with an elk head materializing in it. Or it can shine down on Peta when she’s standing right there, that light showing her true form.
Which is just Peta, Lewis insists to himself, raising the last triangle of the grilled cheese high to slam it down through the rubber flaps of the disposal, as if a grilled cheese can be the deciding gavel. It sort of works, but the crust breaks away on the backswing, lets that last good bite go flying. Trying to imagine either him or Peta finding a moldering hunk of bread and, worse, cheese behind some jar or can next week, he flips the light on, hunts the lost bite down.
Instead of finding it, he sees a paperback on top of the refrigerator. Not either of the two Shaney left in the garage, which he already put up, but the third in the series. Already. Beside it is Peta’s thermos, the one she takes to work, that she can never find, that she evidently didn’t find this morning, either. The thing with her is she’s tall, so when she comes home she sets stuff in the first place she sees, which is generally somewhere high. The top of the refrigerator, this time. The book must have been out front somewhere, the porch, maybe.
“You can bring them back all at once …” Lewis says to the idea of Shaney, taking the book down from its perch, and, as if by design, the guilty last bite of grilled cheese is right there behind it. Lewis pinches it up like it’s gross, like he wasn’t just eating it ten seconds ago, and delivers it to the sink, the headline scrolling across the back of his forehead: INDIAN MAN FIRST IN HISTORY TO PICK UP AFTER HIMSELF.
He smirks about that, kind of stupidly proud, and takes the stairs two at a time up to the linen closet that’s his new bookshelves.
Before filing the book back in the stack, he fans the top corner to make sure Shaney isn’t a page-folder. She isn’t—this alone pretty much means she’s a good person—but he does catch something. He flips through again, slower, and doesn’t see whatever it is again until … the inside of the back cover.