The Only Good Indians(30)

The more Lewis thinks about it, tightening this bolt, wiping that smudge off, no way can it be Peta, right? If she were really this “Elk Head Woman” he’s making up, which isn’t even a Blackfeet thing so far as he knows, then why would she have saved him from bashing his head in on the hearth when he fell off the ladder? Answer: she wouldn’t have. That would have been just what she wanted. And it would have been the perfect accident, giving her an excuse to go up to the reservation for the funeral, look across the grave to Gabe and Cass right there, like they know it’s their turn.

No, Peta’s Peta, Lewis decides.

But the only reason he thought she wasn’t?

Shaney.

He stands to find a cable clip he knows is in the garage somewhere, probably within arm’s reach, and manages to kick a housing into the torque wrench he has leaned against the front tire, and it all clatters down like misshapen dominoes and Lewis just stands there, unable to take his frustration out on any of this because that’ll make even more of a mess.

Shaney, though.

What if that elder whose freezer got cleaned out didn’t die a week or two ago, but a month or two ago? Shaney could have heard it hit the ground, clawed up from the pile of weathered bones at the bottom of that steep slope, and walked on wobbly legs down across half of Montana, finally got steady enough that she was able to stride right through the front door of the post office, fill out a federal application.

And it makes sense that when that elk took two-legged form, human form, that person might have skin to match Lewis’s own. He doesn’t know why he didn’t see this before.

The clincher comes when he’s back in the house, cleaning a grimy washer in the sink, trying to use the dish brush as little as possible, since Peta doesn’t like grease showing up in the kitchen. Which Lewis completely understands. So he’s just brushing the washer lightly, with the very tip of the blue bristles, not the white ones.

Walking back to the garage turning the washer back and forth to see if it’s possible anymore to tell which side had been facing out, his heel on the floor shakes the house in the way it needs for that spotlight in the living room to jiggle on in his peripheral vision.

Lewis freezes, half afraid to look directly at it, since he’s trying hard for this episode of his life to be over.

For it to really be over, though, he has to prove he’s not scared anymore, doesn’t he? He makes himself look.

On cue, like it’s shy, the light sucks back up into the bulb.

Lewis stamps his heel on the kitchen floor again. Nothing.

“Such bullshit,” he says, shaking his head at the stupidity of all this, haunted houses and ghost elk and Crow women, and then, not wanting to in the least but making himself, because he doesn’t need to be handled with kid gloves, he looks up, through the spinning blades of the fan instead of at them. The angle from the kitchen is bad, so he feels safe, but still, there’s the chance he’s going to see a woman-shape up in the far corner, trying to skitter out of view.

Nothing.

He lets himself breathe out, rubs the coolness of the washer against his chin, and tracks down from the fan to … where he saw her first. The couch, the carpet there.

“Oh shit,” he says, letting the washer fall and not bothering to go after it.

Why didn’t he see this the other day? It’s so obvious.

When—when Peta was helping him re-create the conditions of what he thought he’d seen, he’d climbed the ladder, he’d looked down through the fan blades at the carpet, and … he’d also looked down at Peta, on the couch, looking back up at him, not judging, not having to suppress her smile, just playing along with her losing-it, spooky-Indian husband.

That’s not the important part, though. The important part is that, through the revealing blades of the fan, through that flickering that strips away fake faces or whatever, she’d been herself.

“I’m sorry,” Lewis says to her. For avoiding her the other night. For even allowing the possibility that it could have been her.

It was never her. That’s just what he was supposed to think—that’s what Elk Head Woman wants, for him to tear down his own life. That way she doesn’t even have to do anything, can just sit back and watch.

She’s devious like that.

And … using the same logic he used to indict Peta—that she’d shown up the summer right after the Thanksgiving Classic—Lewis realizes it can’t be any accident that the day Shaney showed up at his house, delivered by him, Harley was already most of the way dead.

If he hadn’t been, then he would have gone for her throat, wouldn’t he have? He would have ripped her mask off, shown her for what she was.

Shit.

It’s like rebuilding a carburetor. You seat that last jet and then realize this thing can breathe on its own now.

Like to confirm that, when Lewis steps outside to just not be in the house for a minute or two, the fourth book in the series is there, balanced on top of a stray beer can so anybody leaving or coming home has to trip on it, find it.

Lewis stares down at the book for maybe twenty seconds before nudging it over with his toe, like there might be something ready to spring up from the can. The book falls open-faced on the rough concrete, the can doing its tinny roll for a foot or so, until it finds a pebble to stop against.

Lewis kneels, saves the book from the scratchy concrete, and flips to the inside back cover first thing, for the next note.