The Only Good Indians(41)

It was so easy. He was so fragile, so delicately balanced, so unprepared to face what he’d done.

You settle into the soft fragrant backseat of the car taking you the rest of the way home. The father behind the wheel turns the radio knob constantly backward and forward, looking for a song that may not exist, and the mother beside him, holding the new calf—baby, baby baby baby—to her chest, she’s staring out the side window, maybe at all the dry grass slipping by.

The boy in the backseat with you smells like chemicals. They steam up from his skin and his eyes are wet and mad behind his waist-long hair, and in him you can sense all his ancestors before him, and you’re surprised he doesn’t recognize you for what you are.

You say something to him in your own language, this mouth and teeth and throat and tongue not made for the shape of these words, and the boy just stares at you for a long moment, says, “What are you?” and then rotates in the seat, away from you.

So he does sense you. Just, not in a way he can acknowledge.

Good, good.

If you can’t interact with him, then interact with the grassland sweeping past with so little effort. Lean over to the center of the backseat to see the white mountains rolling up. It feels like you’re rushing, like you’re stretched out and running. You can’t help but smile a bit from the feeling, from the velocity. It’s your first smile in this face. On the last hill down to the town, though, your smile droops when the necessary memory rises, from seeing the train tracks from far away and above like this.

The memory is an old one, not your generation but a few before, a thing that happened right there to the south, just past where the last fence is. The memory is of how the herd came down here in the night. How they found good grass closer and closer to the buildings, where nothing much ever grazed, and then they kept eating and eating, bloating their sides out because they needed this to get through the winter that was coming.

But then the hunters stepped out onto their porches, saw tall brown bodies in the waving yellow, and reached back inside for their rifles.

They approached on their bellies all morning, and the herd knew they were there, their smell so tangy, their crawling so loud, but the grass was good and the horizon was open on the other side from the hunters. The herd could run as one when they needed to run, could dig in with their hooves, bunch their haunches and burst away, move like blown smoke across the rolling prairie, collect in a coulee they knew. The water that ran through that rocky bottom was already trickling through their heads. From its taste they knew exactly where it came from in the mountains, and its whole story getting here.

They didn’t know about trains, though. Not like the hunters did.

When the locomotive and all its boxcars thundered through, the scent hot and metal, it was as if those tracks in the grass had stood up. They became a flashing moving wall of sparks and wind no elk could run through (one tried) and the screeching and tearing of those great metal wheels covered the boom of the hunters’ rifles firing again and again, until the sound of the rifles and the sound of the train were the same sound, and in the backseat of this impossibly fast car you reel from the acrid taste of this memory, causing the chemical boy in the backseat to pull away from you even more, but it was fair, what happened that day, and it had been the herd’s own fault.

You run when you first taste hunters on the air, don’t you? When you first even think that might be their ugly scent. One more pull of grass isn’t worth it. Even if it’s good and rich. Even if you need it worse than anything.

Knowledge of this day lodged in the herd, got passed down like what headlights meant, like how those blocks of salt aren’t for elk tongues in the daytime, like how the taste of smoke means to walk somewhere else slowly, head down, feet light. The price of the knowledge about trains had been high and the coming winter harder, as less hooves means more wolves, but the herd didn’t feed down near town anymore, and they didn’t trust the metal tracks anywhere they encountered them, knew they could stand up into a sudden wall.

Instead they kept to the high country, the lonely places where the air tasted of trees and cold and the herd, the places the trucks never lurched into.

Until one did.

In the backseat of this speeding car you thin your lips, remembering that day as well.

An elk mother, cornered, will slash with her hooves and tear with her mouth and even offer the hope of her own hamstrings, and if none of that works, she’ll rise again years and years later, because it’s never over, it’s always just beginning again.

The father lets you out in the parking lot of the grocery store, where you’ve told him with this new voice that you can call your aunt, but you’re really only there to dip into another car that’s not even locked. You stand from that car with a duffel bag of clothes, never mind the starving dogs circling around now, snarling and tearing at the air, the wiry hair at their spines maned up, tails tucked over their soft parts.

You snap your teeth back at them, watch them roil with spit-flecked rage, writhe with desire they want you so bad, want you gone even worse.

Town is such a funny place, isn’t it?

You can’t rid yourself of the annoyance of these dogs without drawing more annoyances, though. But you won’t be here long.

It’s another thing the herd’s always known: never stay in one place. Keep moving, always moving.

First, though, one of their calves is sitting in eighth-grade geography—girl, girl girl girl, not “calf.” And this girl has this certain father you remember, and that father, he has a friend you remember as well, from looking up a long snowy slope, their monstrous forms black against the sky.