The Only Good Indians(29)
Peta didn’t stomp Harley, she did, this ghost elk. After … what let her in, though?
“That I was still thinking of her?” Lewis says in the hallway.
His memory of that young elk, his guilt over her, that was the tether she pulled herself back with, wasn’t it? That’s why she’s starting with him, not Gabe, not Cass: because they don’t remember her. She’s just one of a thousand dead elk to them.
It’s all making sense now. Without Peta here to talk him down, this is all making perfect sense, actually.
Shaney’s last note is only half formed, still in its egg of parentheses: (ivory?)
Shit. Of course. Lewis stands, paces back and forth, slapping the paperback against his thigh, pushing his other hand through his hair.
Shaney knows elk as well as he does, doesn’t she?
The thing with elk is that their canines, they used to be tusks, thousands of years ago. They’re shorter these days, but are still ivory. That’s why they look good polished up and sewn to a traditional dress. If Lewis and Gabe and Ricky and Cass had been thinking that day in the snow, their pockets would have been clinking with elk ivory, to trade back in town.
What Shaney is saying with that (ivory?) is that there’s a way to tell who the ghost elk is.
Check the teeth.
Lewis holds his left hand out. It’s shaking. He drops the paperback, grabs his left wrist with his right hand to steady it. When that doesn’t work he retreats to the garage again. By the time Peta gets home hours later, he’s got the Road King down to smaller and smaller pieces, arrayed all around him like an exploded diagram from a repair manual.
She stands out there under the goal and studies him—he can feel her. She’s studying him and she’s trying to make sense of all these parts, all this grease and oil. All this effort. A husband who doesn’t go to work anymore, and refuses to talk about it.
Finally she sets her duffel down, tosses her ear protection on top—she’s superstitious about them, won’t leave them at work—and uses her foot to flip the basketball up to her hands.
She spins it backward, dribbles it twice.
“Real leather,” she says, impressed. “Where’s it from?”
Lewis looks from it to the street, realizes he has no idea. Shaney was just shooting with it. He never stopped to ask if she’d brought it.
Like he can say that now.
He shrugs.
“Make it take it?” Peta says, chest-passing the ball at him, which is practically a skills challenge, what with how he has the garage booby-trapped. But that’s Peta.
Lewis catches the ball the same as he had to when Shaney zinged it at him—what is it with the women in his life? After rocking back and almost falling off the purple crate, he chocks the ball under his arm to clean his hands on his pants legs and eases out under the floodlight with her, dribbling once like testing is this ball up to his exacting standards.
“Eleven?” she says, coming around to place herself between him and the rim, palms up, eyes ready even though she has to have been awake going on twenty hours.
No way is she anything but herself.
Lewis smiles his best Gabe-smile and looks up to that orange rim like asking Peta if she’s sure about this, asking if she really thinks she’s ready for what he’s about to bring.
She is, and then some.
They trade buckets until they’re both slick with sweat, and Lewis never stops to think that she’s going easy on him, that she’s letting him feel like he has a chance.
What he’s doing specifically, for the first time in days it feels like, is not thinking, just stopping on dime after dime, faking to make airspace, running through the tall grass and junky lumber for the ball again and again. It’s one hundred percent exactly what he needs, and would have never known to ask for.
By the end he’s laughing, she’s laughing, and then they’re in each other’s slick arms, and he’s guiding her back onto the mound of blankets and sleeping bags whose sweat lodge dreams are over, and the door is lowering over them as they add their clothes to the pile, and the world is kind of perfect.
MONDAY
It’s lunch by the time Lewis gets the drive belt back onto the Road King. The bike is still a skeleton, but now it’s a skeleton with an engine that cranks and can blur the spokes of its rear wheel. No forks or bars, no seat or pegs, and the throttle is just a cable, but this is something, he tells himself. It’s a sign that he’s climbing back to his life. Once the Road King’s back together enough, then he can finally ride in to work, provided he still has a job. There’s a lot of steps to getting fired from a federal job, though.
Lewis might can stop them by sitting in the big office and taking his medicine, promising to be a model employee from here on out, offering to take all the shit details, covering for whoever needs it, coming in on holidays, on snow days, whatever it takes.
The best excuse he’ll have for his prolonged absence will be Harley, but that’s also the most embarrassing excuse: a dog. Is he really that fragile? Is he going to lodge a complaint about “Chief” next? Will his new name around the post office be “Kid Gloves”?
It’s not supposed to be easy, though, he tells himself. It’s not supposed to be easy or comfortable or fun or any of that. And if it ends up with him keeping his job, maybe even getting his own route someday, well, then it’ll have been worth it. Sorry, Harley. You deserved better. But right now it’s about proving to Peta that he’s not stalling out in the middle of his life. Right now it’s about showing her that she’s not going to have to carry him from here on out. She would, Lewis knows, she’d do it for as long as she could, but the strain would show. She’s pretty much superhuman, and would never complain, but they’re supposed to be a team, too. He delivers the mail, she brings the planes in, and they meet at the end of the day over tofu and beans, compare notes, and, like last night, work out their kinks on the court. And also on the floor of the garage.