The Only Good Indians(42)
For them, ten years ago, that’s another lifetime.
For you it’s yesterday.
THE GIRL
Her name is Denorah. Her dad used to tell her she was supposed to have been Deborah, since that was the name of one of her dead aunts, but his handwriting had never been so good, and then he’d smile that sharp-at-the-right-side smile that had probably been killer in high school, a hundred thousand beers ago.
Her dad is Gabriel Cross Guns. He’s the one who shot the hole in your back, took your legs away.
In Denorah’s eighth-grade geography right now, six days before Thanksgiving turkey, Mr. Massey is saying that all of the details aren’t in, that it might have been highway patrol that shot that Native American man just off the reservation, that it doesn’t have to have been vigilantes or militia, even though this state is stacked deep with the second, all of them hoping to be the first.
“Native American?” Tone Def says back to Mr. Massey. “I thought he was Blackfeet.”
“Tone Def” is Amos After Buffalo’s hip-hop name.
The class falls in behind him against Mr. Massey. Not because they care, but because it’s fun to harass the white teacher.
Tone Def Amos—the name he’s earned—stands up from the desks, calls out about is there really some big difference between state troopers and idiots with guns anyway, at which point Christina or one of them over by the window says back that this dead Indian who nobody on the reservation really remembers anyway, he killed his wife and gutted the baby from her and pulled all her teeth out, didn’t he? Does it matter who shot him down for that? And now voices are rising and more kids are standing and a couple are crying already just from the tragedy and drama of it all and there’s probably not going to be any geography going on today.
Denorah pages her spiral notebook over to a blank page and tries to think if she really even remembers this Blackfeet who got shot. His name, sure. His name was a joke, except this joke had been by the dead Indian’s parents, who probably came up with it down the hall in history class. But it’s hard to tease what she actually remembers apart from what she’s been told twenty or thirty times.
There is this dim sort-of image of her dad and Cassidy, as he likes to be called now even though it’s a girl name. They’re crossing the living room before dawn on a Saturday, and Denorah’s sleeping on the couch, just a kid, not even in kindergarten yet. At the door are two not-yet-dead Indians: the joke-named one just shot down over by Shelby, and Ricky Boss, who she’s pretty sure died from getting beat up outside a bar over in North Dakota. Unless that was somebody else. But she’s pretty sure about the North Dakota part.
Anyway, Denorah remembers this early morning living room not because it was the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and not because her real dad and Cassidy were being too loud with their hot-hot coffee. It’s not because the knocking at the door woke her from sleeping on the couch, either. Her real dad long-stepped past her to keep the door quiet, Cassidy right behind. It was Ricky Boss and that other dead one, Lewis, with rifles slung over their shoulders and sleep in their eyes. The only reason Denorah has any of this left ten years later, now, it’s because when Ricky Boss was slurping from his coffee, the steam like a veil in front of his eyes, he was looking straight through it at her on the couch, like he knew what was going to happen that day, hunting, and wanted instead to just stay inside, drink the rest of his coffee.
It was something she would have tried to draw, once upon a time. When she used to draw.
It had started in sixth grade, the drawing, two years ago, before she got serious about basketball. It was right after the museum visit. A class project. It didn’t matter that they were all drawing just in spiral notebooks. Miss Pease, who’s her aunt now, explained how, back when, ledgers were the spiral notebooks of the day.
Denorah would never admit it no matter what, but she’d believed Miss Pease that day. Sitting in the second row, she hadn’t even had to close her eyes to see the picture of an old-time lodge, inside it all manner of things for sale: beaver pelts, pipes, braids of sweetgrass, hunks of boiled buffalo meat with brown-colored ropy string through them (for hanging on pegs), pounded-flat strips of pemmican (yuck), beaded bags like at the trading post for tourists, where the flaps are big to show off the beadwork, and, way back in the corner, a stack of blank ledgers. She knew she just had to put her finger on the fast-forward button of that picture, keep it pressed until that lodge grew shoulders, squared up into a building, a store, one with a school supplies aisle. Now the ledgers are spiral notebooks, just like Miss Pease was saying.
It felt magical in class that day, opening her spiral up to that new blank page, that modern-day ledger. She imagined it being in a museum, even pictured a class of sixth-graders single-filing it up to the glass display case someday, to see how the old ones used to do it, back when spiral notebooks were everywhere, back in that handful of years when Indians only had reservations, before they got all of America back.
The assignment was for class to draw their favorite holiday. It was supposed to be Christmas or Thanksgiving or the powwow from the summer like everybody else was doing, but what Denorah drew is from when her sister’s team went to regionals in basketball the year before, the holiest day of all in her family, even though they weren’t completely a family yet, since her mom and new dad were only dating.
This is the day her big sister, Trace, who’s her new dad’s daughter he already had, scored ten just in the first quarter, then eight in the second, and came back from halftime to go six for twelve, then in the fourth, when it was down to the wire and the whole gym was stomping and screaming, when the other team had figured out how to swing a double-team over to her if she so much as touched the ball, she passed out of it every time, to whoever had to be free, and racked up nine crushing assists in a single quarter. The other side was chanting, Indians go home, Indians go home, but Trace was home, all of this was home, no place more than a basketball court in the last thirty seconds.