The Only Good Indians(39)

“Peta,” Lewis finally says, seconds and a lifetime too late.

The corners of her mouth grin just a little and then, like has to happen, her hips die down with the rest of her, like electricity’s leaving her body, is running into the ground or wherever it goes.

Lewis is still just standing there.

Peta’s blond hair is staining red, spreading out into the pale carpet. It’s not a stain he’s getting out. No, they’re not getting the security deposit back.

“Hey,” he says when he can, once he’s sure it’s too late, once he’s sure she’s not going to be answering.

Her pupils are fixed and dilated, her mouth open in a way she’d never let it hang in life.

Ten years, Lewis says to himself.

They made it ten years.

That’s a pretty good run, isn’t it? For an Indian and a white woman, especially when she outclassed him so much, and when he had all the usual baggage?

And—and maybe he was thinking right all along, he tries hard to believe. Maybe she appeared the summer after the Thanksgiving Classic for a reason—because she wanted to move from place to place with him, get him to invest his whole life in her, then stage a grand death scene like this, one he’d never be able to shake, would always be running from.

Wouldn’t that be the best revenge? Death is too easy. Better to make every moment of the rest of a person’s life agony.

Like with Shaney, though, there’s a way to check. A way to know.

Lewis steps up onto the ladder to pull the knife from the wall where it stuck. Because the way he broke Shaney’s jaw open let her teeth cut into his wrist like a bite from the wrong side of the grave, for Peta he grabs her chin from the outside, sets his knee against her forehead, and cracks the hinge that way.

Her teeth come out so much easier. All of them, like they were just waiting, were hardly in there at all. Maybe that’s a difference between white people and Indians?

Lewis lines all her teeth in a rough crack of grout between the bricks of the hearth.

None of them are ivory either.

He sits back, hugs his legs to him, resting his chin in the cradle between his knees.

This is a thing he did, a thing he’s definitely done.

Planes are probably going to be crashing into the terminal for months now, and mail’s going to be piling up on the dock at the post office.

In addition, two women are dead who probably didn’t have to be.

Lewis stares into what would be the fire if the chimney weren’t boarded up—the lease says no open flames, only gas grills—and then he has no real choice but to smile when the light in the ceiling flickers on, even without its can being pressed to the side.

It’s shining its bright little spotlight down on Peta. On her … stomach? Her belly?

Because everything means something now, what Lewis flashes on is that up-and-down scar that either is or isn’t on Shaney’s stomach in the garage.

It’s a scar he knows for sure Peta doesn’t have. But still, he’s thinking of it for a reason, isn’t he? Or, the world showed it to him in the driveway that day for a reason.

Soon enough, that reason pushes against the tight fabric of Peta’s uniform shirt.

Something’s struggling under there. Something’s moving.

It’s like—it’s like when Andy was trapped in the belly of that dead mammoth, but for Lewis, for this, it’s not a mammoth in there, is it?

“Indians like it bareback,” he hears himself recite, and chuckles about it.

Some of his salmon were pretty good swimmers.

Sure, it’s only been, what? Two nights? That’s plenty, though. Nine months would be a luxury, an indulgence, would take so long he’d probably forget. And anyway, Peta would be all falling apart by then.

Forty-eight hours to gestate feels just about perfect, to Lewis.

He can even see some tiny limb pushing against Peta’s skin now. Something in there suffocating, drowning, fighting to live.

His plan, only half formed but that’s how he does it, had been to stand after a few more minutes, stand and feel his way outside, flop over the fence, sit between the two rails of the train tracks, wait for the Thunderball Express to come, deliver his judgment at sixty miles per hour, its air horn filling the whole world with sound.

But this is something new, something unexpected, something wondrous.

Lewis never thought he might be a father.

There’s still hope, isn’t there?

This can all still work out.

Using the same dull knife he used to pry Peta’s teeth out, the same one he used to carve open that young elk ten years ago, he slits the tight skin of Peta’s swelling-up belly.

A thin brown leg stabs up and he grabs on to it, traces it to its terminus.

A hoof, a tiny black hoof.

Lewis nods about the rightness of this, pulls that leg gently, his other hand ready.

Two days later, his elk calf wrapped in its mother’s ten-year-old hide, he wakes under a rock ledge that’s partway between the rent house in Great Falls and the reservation he still calls his reservation.

Shaney’s yellow Toyota truck is two or three miles back on the plains, tucked just in from the gas station where he’s pretty sure someone called him in, from all the headlines that made the rounds Wednesday: NATIVE MAN ON KILLING SPREE, TWO DEAD SO FAR, BABY MISSING.