The Only Good Indians(46)
Don’t look away.
Make him be the one to break eye contact.
Listen to his truck accelerate away.
It doesn’t matter that he saw you now, either. The next time he lays eyes on you, you’ll be taller, different, better. Already these stolen clothes are getting tight.
SEES ELK
Cassidy is changing his name again.
From here on out, as long as it lasts, he’ll be Cashy, he thinks.
It’s payday in the Thinks Twice household. Or, the Thinks Twice camper, anyway. Not that Thinks Twice is his born name either, it’s just what his auntie Jaylene always called him like to remind him what to do, but, in his head anyway, it kind of stuck.
In addition to his check, cashed and still in big bills, Gabe’s sliding him forty just for rehabbing his old sweat and keeping the fire stoked all day. In the old days, which means up until last month, forty dollars extra would have pretty much turned itself into a cooler of beer. Just, poof, Indian magic, don’t even need any eagle feather fans or a hawk screeching, just look away long enough for it to happen.
Since Jo, though, Cassidy is a new man. Gainfully employed—even more legal once he takes the driving test—home by an hour after dark most nights, up with the sun like there’s this big long string tied between him and it. Who’d have thought a Crow would be the one who finally stepped in, saved his lame ass? Never mind all the sage around the camper, all her smudging. There was something bad following him, Cassidy finally had to admit, but it wasn’t anything Indian. Or, well, it was pretty Indian, he guessed: a bench warrant. But it wasn’t even for anything bad, was just an unpaid ticket, which can happen to anybody.
Still, he can tell Jo’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. At the high school basketball games he hauls her to so she can start knowing everybody, he can tell she’s always looking around, watching for a ten-or fifteen-year-old with pale eyes like his, even though he guarantees her he never slipped any past the goalie, that he would have heard all about it if he was owing anybody child support.
What he figures is that he’s shooting blanks, just like all the Indians when they’re fighting John Wayne, and what he blames for that, or thanks, is uranium in the water. Gabe and Ricky and Lewis had grown up down in Browning, which, the water’s not perfect there, but you can usually drink it anyway. Cassidy has been living on his dad’s place in East Glacier most of the time, though, where the water’s cloudy with who knows what-all. It is kind of weird, though, he’s always thought. Of him and Gabe and Ricky and Lewis, they’ve altogether only had one kid? He figures Lewis and that blonde he’d run off with might be waiting till the time was right like white people do, or maybe she already had some before Lewis, didn’t want any more, but that Ricky never threw any kids before he died—it’s not like he was ever careful, right? The only one of them to leave a kid behind so far, though, it’s Gabe, and that was, shit, what? Fourteen years ago already? It’s really been that long since him and Trina? At least he did it right, though. Denorah Cross Guns can flat-out ball. She’s the one Jo’s always standing up for at the games and telling to shoot, shoot, that this game is hers if she wants it.
She’s right, of course, the girl has Trina’s drive on the court, not Gabe’s interest in what’s happening behind the gym, but still, the first time Jo came up out of her seat like that, not looking around for permission or to see if she was the only one who could see the magic happening at the top of the key, Cassidy knew she was going to be all right here. It’s so stupid, too: Jo was just a random Crow girl he got to talking to at the powwow last summer—well, her and her cousin, whatever her name was. They’d been doing a thing of standing up in front of tourists’ cameras right when they were about to take the perfect shot of the grand entrance, and they weren’t doing it to protect the Blackfeet or anything, they were just doing it for the hell of it. Cassidy had liked that, had scooted over to stand up with them, and then, before he even really knew it was happening, he was driving down to her rez every other weekend, then every weekend, then every day if he could get away. And then, after her big fight with her mom, and after her cousin moved down south, taking away Jo’s couch, Cassidy was coming back with Jo’s stuff mounded in the bed of his truck, a borrowed horse trailer dragging behind.
So it was all on accident, him and Jo, but at the same time it feels like it was meant to be. It’s like he walked into the best thing ever, and all he was doing was screwing around at the powwow. But maybe that’s the way it works when it’s real?
Cassidy rolls the doubled-over pad of cash in his front pocket and considers going into the camper to wake Jo just to be sure she’s there, that he isn’t just dreaming all this, but … she works nights, is a stocker, the one and only Crow to ever work at the new grocery so far—she needs her sleep, he knows. Instead he goes to the camper of the old truck, where the dogs sleep. They won’t miss the pile of sleeping bags and blankets and old jackets for one night, will they? For one sweat?
Maybe he’ll buy them forty dollars of dog food.
Well, twenty.
He hauls an armful of the blankets out and down and drops them to the dirt, finds a corner here, an edge there, a sleeve poking out like it’s reaching up to get saved. One by one Cassidy separates them all and shakes them out, then carries them to the frame of the old sweat. The poles are still good, are from some kids’ tent he guesses, propped up with forks of tied rebar at the four points. Not four for any bullshit Indian reason, but because, first, the day Cassidy had put this together, he’d only been able to scavenge eight pieces of rebar, two per prop, X’d like he was doing, and, second, the tent frame was made to hold a kid’s tent, not forty-odd pounds of dog bedding.