The Only Good Indians(43)
What Denorah drew at the bottom right of the blue-lined page she’d quartered up into panels that day in sixth grade, it was her sister at the end of that game, the one free throw she had in the whole second half, a technical for illegal defense, only the way Denorah drew her arms, it isn’t proper form at all. Her big sister’s got her arms up and out like she’s holding a bow, like the ball balancing in the cup of her outstretched fist is an arrow, one she’s aiming up at the whole world.
She rode that historical free throw, that game, that win, to a full-ride four-year college scholarship down in Wyoming, and Denorah talks to her every week on the phone, big sis to little one, no “step” between. When she was done with her ledger art that day, when it got Miss Pease’s “B–” scrawled top-right—“Is this really Indian, D? Shouldn’t you do something to honor your [[p142]]heritage?”—she mailed it to Trace, careful to fold along the panel lines, and Trace said Denorah got it just right, that’s just how it happened, thank you thank you, Denorah should keep practicing, she’s better than any twelve-year-old has any right to be, she’ll tell her coach, she’ll make her listen, this is A-plus work. A-plus plus.
It’s two years after that B minus, though.
Denorah hasn’t drawn probably since last summer. Not since her hands got big enough to make a basketball look like it’s going one way when it’s really going a completely different way.
She really is good. That’s not just something her sister tells her. Coach says it after practice, to Denorah’s new dad, and when he’s home from his busy time in a couple of months, he’s promised they’re going to go up to the gym every night and run drills, work on her left-side attack—so long as she keeps her grades up. Because they don’t just hand scholarships out.
New dad: “And why do you need to be sure to go to college?”
Same daughter: “Because you can’t eat basketballs when you grow up.”
Even though secretly she kind of thinks she can.
But still, she won’t get good enough to live on basketball if she doesn’t run all those drills, and she doesn’t get to run those drills if she doesn’t maintain a solid B average.
In the left-hand margin, Denorah pencils her grades in with the lightest pencil. It’s her way of reminding herself that they’re not stable, that they can change in an instant, with the least quiz:
Pre-Algebra: B–
Biology: C+
English: B+
Geography: A
Athletics: AAA+
Health: ?
So, health, once that six-week unit kicks in, can make all the difference, Denorah maths out. She draws three hearts by “Health” like hit points and shades in the first one, half of the second one. She pretends the red margin line on the left side of the page is a pole and draws some dramatic shade coming down from it. She thinks about how a good point guard holds the defender’s eyes with her own, to keep that defender from watching the ball. She remembers back when spiral notebooks were Big Chief tablets, and how she used to think those came from Chief Mountain, and that her reservation was the only reservation that got them. She tunes in to Mr. Massey, trying to defend both the highway patrol and the Shelby vigilantes, trying to flip this turtle of a discussion onto its back to see the real issues scratched on its belly, but there’s nothing there Denorah hasn’t heard in her first three classes already, so she closes her spiral notebook and holds it closed, looks out the window at the storage trailer with the big dent in its side, from when a senior tried to push it over with his dad’s truck and got expelled, joined up with the fire crews, and burned up before he even would have graduated.
But … what?
There’s a figure standing there in the ragged shade of that storage trailer. A pair of eyes that blink once and resolve into a blank face so much like Denorah’s, the long hair not braided, a bright white scrimmage jersey, gym shorts, knee socks—My workout gear from the car? Denorah thinks, leaning closer to the glass to see.
You look right back at her, your hair lifting all around your shoulders.
She doesn’t know you yet, no.
She will.
DEATH ROW
Gabriel Cross Guns, right before lunch.
While his daughter he hasn’t seen in going on two weeks is flinching back in her seat in geography, drawing her teacher’s attention, he’s raising a dusty rifle from the front closet of his dad’s living room and trying not to make a big production of it.
The rifle’s an old Mauser that his dad used to load with bird shot, so it could be a real mouser. The baseboards of the living room are pitted and scored from it, and there’s a crater near Gabe’s right eye that’s not acne, but a ricochet that he was never sure if it was a pellet or salt or a shattered fragment of mouse bone or splinter of wood or what, just that it stung and it was close enough to his eye that he’d slapped at this sudden dab of pain without thinking, and probably just succeeded in pushing it in deeper, meaning he’s got some salt or lead or some baseboard or some rodent in his face. It’s a dot in his life he’s always touching. It makes him feel like Cyclops from the X-Men, like he can place his finger to that dot, that button, that release, and glare a ruby optic blast at whatever he wants, blow it so deep into next week that nobody’ll ever catch up with it.
He hasn’t read comic books for years now, though, is only thinking about them from a couple of weekends ago, from a smoky couch he was sitting on that he’s pretty sure Ricky’s little brother died on back when—drowned, technically. Gabe was sitting on the couch because he’d woke on it with his boots on, and when he sat up he’d had to carefully extract his arm from deep between the cushions, down where the lumpy-flat mattress was folded over three times.