The Only Good Indians(32)
“Missing two people, schedule’s fried,” she says back.
“But you go in tomorrow, right?” Lewis asks. “Silas, his build, his bike—he was supposed to get a bracket from me the other day, right? When Harley … you know?”
“He’s not supposed to ride for two weeks,” Shaney recites. “Wind can blow his stitches out.”
“But he can still tinker around in the garage,” Lewis says. “This’ll help, it’ll be good.”
“A bracket?” Shaney repeats.
“For his headlight,” Lewis tells her. “I was thinking you could bring it up there to him, maybe.”
Long pause, in which Lewis imagines Shaney shying away from the bright window by her bed.
“Think it’s going to take more than a new headlight to get that bike in shape,” she finally says.
“It’s a start,” Lewis says.
“I’ll have to leave an hour early …” Shaney says, playing up the groan.
“Thank you, thank you,” Lewis says, and gets off the phone before she can tell him to leave it on the porch like she’s been doing with the books.
For two hours, then, Lewis wears out the carpet, going back and forth, gesticulating, orchestrating, framing ideas between his held-out fingers, trying to figure everything through from each possible angle. He tries to work on the Road King, get it closer to ready to maybe really go back to work, but his mind is too jumpy, won’t settle down. By midafternoon he’s got the tape measure out, is duct-taping a free-throw line on the driveway. His rule is he can’t quit until he makes three in a row, no iron, no backboard, but about fifty tries in he’s counting trash, because, he tells himself, this is basketball, and basketball is made of trash. Still, he can swish two easy enough, just, the third always back-irons out at some crazy angle, like the world is laughing at him. Maybe it’s for the best, though. This way he’ll still be shooting when Peta walks up, and maybe they can pull a replay of last night, happy ending and all, he’ll even use the same stupid joke about it not mattering they don’t have any protection out in the garage—Indians like to go bareback anyway, yeah?
Just like always, Peta will grin and pull his mouth to hers.
It’s looking good for a repeat—well, him being out there when she walks up, anyway—except then she’s calling, is having to cover some no-account’s shift again. Some no-account like Lewis, she doesn’t say. Some no-account who just doesn’t show up, doesn’t even call in.
“Fine, cool, great,” Lewis tells her, the phone going from side to side of his head because he can’t find the best way to hold it, can’t figure out what to do with his hands in the moment, or this whole day. But it is good, her pulling an extra shift, maybe edging into some overtime. Money’s about to be tight once his next check’s docked, if there even is a next check, so any way to earn a bit more’s pretty much just what the doctor ordered.
“Love you,” Lewis says into the phone. “Anything I can do, bring, be?”
It’s his usual sign-off.
“Just yourself,” Peta says like always, and they hang up together.
An hour later he’s warming a can of chili for dinner, eating it with a whole tube of crackers, all the crumbs raining down into the sink. By nine he’s nodding off at the kitchen table, and by ten he’s in bed trying to read the fourth book in the series, a longneck leaning cold against his right side.
Peta says it’s a bad habit to get into, drinking at lights-out, that your body can forget how to go to sleep on its own, and Lewis is sure she’s right, but she’s not here, either, and this whole “sleeping” thing seems to always be about to happen instead of actually happening, anyway. The pages gather in his left hand, thin out in his right. He’d forgotten how fun this mall is, and what a good contrast this magic is with the commerce going on around it. It’s cool how the seasons and the decorations are always changing, kind of giving a theme or motif to each installment, and it’s hilarious how these pagan characters both recognize and are seriously insulted by all these holidays—especially the elves. But they’re insulted by everything.
Inside an hour, finally, gratefully, Lewis starts to lose the line between reading and sleeping. Because Peta isn’t here to reach across, guide the book off his chest, careful to save the page, Lewis tells his distant index finger to be a bookmark, and then, right before the nothing of sleep, he asks himself what’s he going to do when Shaney’s elk head shows under the fan, and he’s up on the ladder.
He’ll know at last, but what will he do?
He mutters an answer but his lips and mouth and voice belong to someone else at this point of almost-sleep, and his ears can’t make out the words, quite.
He feels himself chuckle with satisfaction all the same.
TUESDAY
Lewis is standing on a five-gallon bucket, looking over the fence at what used to be Harley’s grave. Something’s dug him up, scattered the blankets and sleeping bags across the train tracks.
Lewis insists on that: something dug him up. Otherwise Harley struggled out of the dirt himself and walked up the railbed, that Star Wars sleeping bag holding on until it snagged on the grabby edge of one of the wooden ties.
Peta was already gone by the time he got up, so she didn’t have to see this. What’s she made of, Lewis wonders for the fiftieth time, that she can crawl in at one in the morning, be gone again before sunup? Can’t they just shut the airport down, let her catch a couple more hours’ sleep? But it’s good she’s not here, too.