The Only Good Indians(37)

It doesn’t matter. What does is that she didn’t know the books.

Lewis steps out, towels off, his shape blurry in the mirror.

She didn’t know about the books, he repeats in his head.

Meaning?

Meaning she was Elk Head Woman.

Because?

Because she was lying.

That means she’s a monster?

Lewis squats down in the hall, his face in his hands, his head shaking back and forth to resist this line of reasoning.

No, he finally has to admit to himself.

It doesn’t mean for sure she’s that monster, but added together with the basketball being so alien to her, and her knowing where to stand in the living room, and to turn the fan off, and, and: What about how she wouldn’t touch her own hide on the kitchen table?

Lewis stands nodding.

That, yeah.

She could have been lying about the books just for an excuse to break up his marriage, because that’s what she does, that’s the human thing she just does, but touching the skin she’d worn the last time she was alive, that probably would have made her relive her first death all over again, wouldn’t it have?

Lewis nods. It would have, yes. Definitely.

Oh, and also: She was lying about having to leave an hour early, wasn’t she? What she really wanted was more time alone over here before work. And Lewis can prove this.

He calls work again, gets Margie on the line again.

“You must really want to hear my voice,” she tells him.

“Shaney,” he says, switching ears like that can get across how much he doesn’t have time for small talk, “she—she never showed up, but if I run I think I can catch her, but I don’t know her address—the flower farm, right?”

It’s stupid, nobody lives over there, it’s probably not even zoned for residential, but it was the first sort of close place he could dredge up.

Margie’s silence means she’s weighing this for the bullshit it is.

“Please, please, Jerry’ll kick my ass if I’m not there,” Lewis adds, bouncing up and down like that can help make his case.

It’s that easy to get an address.

Moments later, still in his towel, he has the fold-out map of Great Falls spread over the back of the elk hide, his hair dripping all over the red and blue lines.

“No way,” he says when he finally finds Shaney’s place.

She did have to leave an hour early, because she does live all the way on the other side of town—Gibson Flats. That’s not even really Great Falls at all, is it? But, at the same time, she did really leave with the books. And they have really been showing back up, haven’t they?

Lewis plunks down into a chair, his eyes lost.

Finally, an explanation bubbles up.

It’s thin, it’s anorexic, but: What if she read the first chapter or two of book one, and it wasn’t for her, was just stupid elves in trench coats, halflings at the hot dog stand, so she drove the whole long-ass way over, dropped all ten books off on Lewis’s porch?

That would explain her not knowing about the story, the people in it.

But, then, who found that stack? Who’s been parsing them out one here, two there? And why?

To make you do what you did, Lewis hears in his head, in a colder voice than his own.

He stands breathing hard, shaking his head no.

She was Elk Head Woman. She had to be. She was—she’s the only Indian in his life down here, right? Lewis sees other Indians out and about, but that’s always just a nod without stopping. No, if it’s going to be anybody, it’s her.

There is one last way to tell, though, isn’t there? One way she wrote in the back of the third book?

Lewis goes to the corner of the living room behind the ladder, comes back with the red-handled screwdriver.

Next, the garage, the mound of sleeping bags and blankets.

He pulls them back from Shaney, tries to close her eyes that won’t stay closed.

Not gagging even a little, he threads her scalped hair up from her mouth where he’d stuffed it, thinking that had to be some old-time Indian shit. That she didn’t fight back when he was burying her in the sleeping bags and blankets, that meant it worked, the hair in the mouth.

This next part, though. Getting her hair into the spokes of the Road King, that was easy in comparison. This is a lot more involved.

But Lewis has skinned out he doesn’t know how many elk and deer. Once even a moose, right? He’s even delivered an embryo or a fetus up from a pregnant young elk, one he didn’t tell Peta was still kind of struggling in its thin, veiny bag.

He can do this.

First is opening her mouth with his fingers, then it’s forcing his hand in as deep as he can and pulling down hard, breaking the jaw at the crunchy-wet hinge so he can have the kind of access he needs. So he can see her top row of teeth.

Elk Head Woman told him what to look for, didn’t she? She told him how he’d know her.

(ivory)

He positions the screwdriver between a canine tooth and the next one over and jams the red handle with the heel of his hand, driving it in deep enough to lever out the canine he needs, bloody root and all. Because she’s fresh, the tooth doesn’t want to let go.

It does, though. Along with the one he was using for leverage.

Lewis rattles them in his hand, considers it lucky to have accidentally pulled two. That way he can compare them: normal and ivory.