The Only Good Indians(28)

“Seriously?” he says.

She writes in books, apparently. In borrowed books. In pencil, and light like she maybe meant to erase it, but still, right?

Screw it, Lewis tells himself. Who cares? They’re mass market, not collectors’, and the story’s still the same, and it’s not like she’s putting happy faces or question marks in the actual margins. But now Lewis has to flip through to be sure there’s none of that going on, and, even while doing it, he’s wondering if he’s doing it to have something to rib her about at work. Which sounds a lot like flirting.

But it’s not that, he insists. This is book-policing. And it’s his book anyway. He can look through it all he wants.

Flipping through, he finds himself sitting down against the wall, back in the world of this story again. It’s the series about that stone the elves didn’t want, but didn’t want found, either, because it can destroy the whole world. So they hide it in a magic fountain. Which is also, Lewis forgets just how, twinned with the wishing well in the mall that one doofus works in … Andy? Yeah, Andy. Of course “Andy.” Andy the This, Andy the That. And then all the magical creatures are trolling the mall for the stone their magical radar is telling them is here somewhere. It’s kind of hilarious, and has more sex scenes than really make sense either for such an actiony story or for a story in a place as public as a mall, but that’s magical creatures for you.

“Did you like it, at least?” Lewis mumbles, flipping to Shaney’s notes.

She’s not jotting stuff down about the novel, though. She’s still thinking through the masking tape on Lewis’s living room floor.

What makes this elk so special? is the first note.

Under it she’s drawn three lines, like giving herself room to figure this out. But they’re blank.

Peta could have answered it, though. Because Lewis told her: this young elk had been pregnant, and farther along than she should have been for November. He thought that was what gave her fight, but what if—what if every great once in a while an elk is special, right? What if there are wheels within wheels up there on the mountain, where ceremony used to take place? Was that unborn elk supposed to, Lewis doesn’t know, grow some monstrous rack, be a trophy for some twelve-year-old’s first kill? Was it supposed to be the big elk an old man chooses not to shoot on his last hunt? Was it supposed to clamber up onto a certain stretch of blacktop, wait for headlights to crunch into it? Was it supposed to find new and safer grass for the herd? Was it not even about the calf, but the mother?

What process had Lewis broken by popping this elk back in illegal country?

“You’re thinking crazy,” he tells himself, just to hear it out loud. He’s right, though. These are the kind of wrong thoughts people have who are spending too much time alone. They start unpacking vast cosmic bullshit from gum wrappers, and then they chew it up, blow a bubble, ride that bubble up into some even stupider place.

Elk are just elk, simple as that. If animals came back to haunt the people who shot them, then the old-time Blackfeet would have had ghost buffalo so thick in camp they couldn’t even walk around, probably.

But they killed them fair and square, Lewis hears, and in Shaney’s voice, he thinks. Probably because he’s reading her writing.

Shaney’s next question, still in her voice, is, Why now?

Lewis is the only one who maybe knows this answer.

It has to do with her meat, doesn’t it? All that meat he gave away door-to-door on Death Row, which is where the closest-to-death of the elders get to live.

It’s not out of reach to think that one of those elders he gave the meat to is still alive. Some of them old cats can sit in the same chair for ten, twenty years. Or—

That’s it, Lewis knows all at once, sitting up from the wall, his face muscles tense from this certainty.

One of those elders was still alive … until last week, or last month.

This has to be it.

One of those elders finally kicked last week, and way in the back of her freezer, frozen to the side of it after all these years, there was one last packet of that meat left. Because it was locked in ice, her old fingers could never pry it free, and the reason none of her kids or grandkids ever mixed it into Hamburger Helper or cooked it up with taco seasoning, it was that raccoon stamp.

If you don’t know the story of the meat, if that elder couldn’t remember the kind young man assuring her it was elk, then what you think, with a black footprint like that on the white paper, it’s that somebody’s ground up some raccoon from somewhere—the road south, probably—and left it in this freezer like a joke, like a dare.

No, nobody ate it. Nobody would.

But now, with that elder dead, another family’s getting that house, right? Which means new furniture, new appliances. Out with the old freezer, in with the new one.

The meat finally thaws, gets tossed. For the birds, for the dogs. And that last packet of meat, it was Lewis’s one chance, wasn’t it? He’d promised the young elk that none of her would go to waste. But now some had.

That’s why now, Shaney. Shit.

The moment that packet of raccoon-printed meat hit the ground, started to thaw, the ground hatched open back in the elders’ hunting section. What clambered out, just like a monster movie, was the ghost elk, the one he’d had to shoot three times.

At first she’s wobbly on her legs, but with each step south, her hooves are more sure.