The Only Good Indians(36)
Except that’s exactly what he doesn’t want her doing.
She killed Harley, he makes himself remember. She killed Harley and she’s trying to turn Peta against him. And the final way he can tell she is what she is, the thing that gave her away for sure, even more than the basketball, it’s that she doesn’t know about Andy the Mammoth Rider. The books were just props to her, just excuses to be over here, turning the wheels of her plan. If she really had read book four, then she would have ridden that emotional roller coaster Lewis and the rest of the world had to ride after Andy “died” at the end of book three, and then was a no-show for the first half of book four. He wasn’t pulling a Gandalf, though, was just trapped in the fizzy world inside the fountain drink dispenser, waiting for the right set of circumstances to get born into the world again—which turned out to be a mammoth one of his ancestors had driven over a cliff, except that mammoth had fallen into a pool that was right where the fountain was. So, when that mammoth fell again, like happens when time is a cycle, the elves carved Andy up from its belly. At first he was just a skinny mammoth fetus, but then he grew into himself over the course of a single day, rode that dead mammoth’s mate right through the makeup and perfume department, became the true champion and savior he was always meant to be. It wasn’t the kind of return a person forgets, especially if she just read it.
“You know who I am?” Shaney says over the scream of the unmufflered four-stroke, still holding that dummy vacuum tube shut with the pad of her index finger, and that’s all she gets out before this thing is happening.
The drive belt is on Lewis’s side of the bike—Shaney isn’t stupid, Elk Head Woman isn’t stupid, she would have clocked that danger, that little conveyor belt of instant death—but he started it in first gear, meaning that naked rear wheel he’s already got in place, it’s spinning as well, is an instant silver blur.
It takes maybe half a second for those chrome spokes to grab her long spiral curls, crank her head both up and to the side, her neck obviously cracking. But her hair’s still pulling, still winding into the spinning spokes, the flickering spokes. An instant after her neck breaks, the top of her head scalps off and her forehead tilts loosely down into the rear wheel, the spokes shearing skull as easy as anything, carving down into the pulpy-warm outside of her brain. It’s greyish pink where it’s been opened, and kind of covered with a pale sheath all around that, the blood just now seeping into the folds and crevices.
Lewis backs off the throttle, lets the starter wires go.
Silence. Just that bare wheel winding down. Shaney’s throat is still sucking air in, her eyes locked on Lewis, calling him traitor, calling him killer, calling him “Blackfeet” one last time. Then she falls back, slumping into the sleeping bags and random parts, her left foot twitching, a line of saliva, not blood, threading down from the corner of her mouth. But there is bright red aerated blood—a spattery stripe bisecting the garage, going from floor to wall to ceiling then down the other wall again. It’s a line between who Lewis used to be and who he is now.
He stands, pushes the button on the wall.
It’s time to lower the door on all this.
STILL TUESDAY
Lewis never built the sweat he wanted, but if he stands in the upstairs shower long enough that it’s all steam, he can pretend, can’t he? The blood and brains Shaney splashed on his face swirls down the drain, is gone forever.
Her little yellow Toyota truck is still pulled up outside, but once he’s clean he can drive it wherever, walk back, no witnesses. Yes, Officer, she stepped by for a part, but she left with that part. The proof of that is—hey, that part’s not here, right?
Easy as that.
Now the next ten years of his life can start, finally. Payment came due for that young elk, for all nine of those elk—ten if the unborn calf counts—but, this far from the reservation, he just managed to duck paying it.
As for what to do with Shaney herself, his first instinct is to bury her with Harley, but the cops are going to be digging there before too long, and the noon train’s coming through anyway, and he doesn’t need an audience for that kind of work.
No, for once in his life he’s going to be smart about a thing. And he’s not even really a killer, since she wasn’t even really a person, right? She was just an elk he shot ten years ago Saturday. One who didn’t know she was already dead.
Still, his soapy hand, when he raises it into the stream of hot water, it’s trembling, won’t stop trembling. Twice so far he’s ripped the shower curtain to the side, sure he saw a shadowed figure standing out there, sure he’d heard a door creak, or footsteps. Hooves.
It’s just nerves, he tells himself. Any first-timer would be having the same exact panic attack now.
He puts his face into that scalding water some more, promises himself not to crank his brain up, but it cranks up anyway, can’t stop dwelling on how could it be that Shaney didn’t seem comfortable around a basketball, didn’t automatically catch it like any real player would have to, just let it slip past like an object, not a thing she’d sweated countless hours over.
But, could she still be that same player she was before? Did she sidestep that pass because she was holding a delicate bracket? Did she dodge it because, unlike him, she’s not obligated to catch a ball she didn’t ask to be thrown?