The Only Good Indians(47)
Too, it’s good that Gabe wants to do this in winter. In summer, because of Cassidy’s great idea to dig the floor of the sweat down a foot and a half, it’s sometimes soggy. Frozen like this, though, it’ll be perfect. Anyway, it’ll be good to sweat the past year out. Reset, like. The old-time Indians had it right, Cassidy figures.
At the frame he tightens all the shoestrings holding the poles and rebar together, then shakes each blanket and sleeping bag and jacket out before draping them across the white plastic skeleton of the sweat, saving his prison brother’s old Army coat for the flap. The sleeping bag with the silvery insides flashing in the sun spooks the horses and Cassidy notes this, reminds himself to keep this one free, that maybe it’ll scare the magpies, too. Last summer they stole threads from his favorite shirt when it was hanging on the line between the camper and the pens. Somewhere back in the trees there was a nest with colorful accents, he figured, which was great and all, but not at the cost of his favorite shirt. Now, to protect Jo’s clothes that he should probably be taking down so they don’t smell like smoke, he’s got Christmas tinsel strung up all down the wire. So far the magpies just think it’s pretty. They squawk their thanks to him for dressing the place up, keeping things interesting.
When the sweat’s together—it looks like an igloo made from homeless dudes—Cassidy goes to the tack shed, roots around, comes back with a mallet and enough junky tent stakes to be sure no flaps blow open tonight except the door flap. But the door flap is a greasy old BDU jacket with a rock in its pocket to keep it down, so that should be good.
Next, what should have been first: sweeping out the floor. If he’d done it before, he could have used a normal broom. Now he has to use the broken-off head of a broom, and a tray like from a cafeteria. Zero clue where that’s from, but it works.
Slapping the tray on the side of the pen spooks the horses again, too.
“What’s with y’all fraidy-cats today?” Cassidy says to them.
The paint whinnies back, stomps her front hoof like trying to pull the ground between them closer, and Cassidy ducks back into the lodge for one last sweeping. A little extra dirt doesn’t matter to him, but it’s the Yellow Tail kid’s first sweat, so he’s probably going to have his face right down by the ground, just trying to breathe. Heat rises, kid. Way it is. Sorry. Maybe this’ll clean him right up, though. It’s a different kind of getting baked, right?
“Here all night,” Cassidy calls out to the horses and the dogs, and parade waves to them all. The paint swishes her shampoo-commercial tail back at him. The dogs are pretending to be guarding some other camper, it looks like. One they’d be more proud to be associated with.
Cassidy turns around to take his world in. For miles around there’s just yellow grass and crusty snow and, in the folds of the hill where seeds can blow and water can flow, clumps of trees. The only thing keeping this from being 1800 or all the centuries before are the utility poles hitching the power cable out to the camper. Well, he supposes the camper’s not very pre–white people, either. Or the horses.
He’s always kind of wondered about the dogs, though. Back when, dogs would sometimes pull little travois, wouldn’t they? He’s pretty sure he’s seen drawings. But, wouldn’t those dogs have pretty much just been domesticated wolves? At the same time, though, all the dogs living on the streets in town, they may have started out as Saint Bernards or Labradors or Rotts or whatever, but, to grit out the winter, to fight it out over every scrap, they bush their coats up, they bare their teeth first thing, and their ears aren’t as floppy as whatever line of lapdog Frisbee-catchers they come from. It’s like, living like they do, it’s turning them back into wolves.
Case in point: Cassidy’s three women, each faster to snap at your hand than the other. The black one with the blaze, Ladybear, is the mom of the two others. There used to be a boy dog he called Stout, because he was, but the problem with the males is that they’re never content to hang around the camper. Stout went out on self-imposed patrol one day, which Cassidy figured was really just looking for women in heat or something to fight, and he must have found one or the other, because the next time Cassidy saw him was when him and Jo were trotting the horses a couple miles off, just killing the afternoon. Stout was a mat of ratty hair and a few bones.
“Always wondered where he got off to,” Jo’d said, her paint dancing and spinning under her.
“Not far,” Cassidy said.
That was probably only a couple of months after she’d moved in, when he was still trying to prove to her that he was a Real Indian. Exhibit one: I ride my own horses on the same land my ancestors did.
Whatever. It had worked, Cassidy supposes. Never mind she was twice the rider he was, and probably three times the Indian.
Not that she could come into the sweat tonight. If it was just him and her, sure, always, forever, please. Gabe had read in one of his books that women and men didn’t mix in the sweats, though, and anyway: the kid. Cassidy still remembers his own first sweat. It was bad enough sitting in all that dark heat with a bunch of naked uncles. Add a woman into that mix—especially one like Jo: two unfair inches taller than Cassidy, curvy, solid, long black hair—and it wouldn’t have been ceremonial anymore, it would have been about how, Look, I’m tough, this heat isn’t anything, I can take it longer than any of these old-timers.