The Only Good Indians(49)
The safe he’s talking about is a powder-black thermos he’s got shoved up inside a rotted-out glasspack up under the truck, rotted out because when he’d pulled the engine forever ago, he’d left the headers mouth-up to all the rain and snow the sky could funnel down into them. The result is an exhaust system no one would ever try to spirit away, as it would crumble in their hands. Besides, anything worth stealing off that truck, making it work on some other truck, it was taken years ago.
And, an actual safe, tucked under the bed in the camper, or in a high cabinet, or hidden in some clever cutout? That would be exactly what anybody breaking in would key on, carry off to crack open in their buddy’s shop. It’s not like him and Jo can be at the trailer every hour of the day, and, way out and lonely like they are, the dogs and horses are no way keeping anybody from taking a pry bar to the flimsy door.
But no one would ever look in a trashy old glasspack barely hanging on under a truck with no engine, no wheels, only one vent window, its four drums up on cinder blocks. Already there’s six hundred dollars in that thermos in large bills, and, smushed way down at the bottom under that green, a little medicine pouch with a secret ring in it, for Jo.
She struggles another apparently too-dry bite down and hands her bowl to Cassidy, says, “I’m gonna teach you good taste if it takes forever,” and steps inside for the ketchup.
Forever, Cassidy repeats, liking that, spooning another bite in. It’s not that dry.
The paint at the fence shakes her head from too many horse thoughts rattling around in there and Cassidy shakes his head just the same, trying to get a rise out of her. She’s smart enough it works sometimes.
Not this time.
She’s looking past Cassidy.
He turns, stands slow, dropping his bowl and Jo’s both.
“Holy shit,” he says, having to move side to side to stay standing, from the dogs rushing this spilled lunch.
He doesn’t care about it anymore.
Spread out behind him, just down the slope from the camper, are probably eighty, ninety elk. Maybe a hundred.
They’re all looking right back at him, not a single tail flicking, not one eye blinking.
Cassidy swallows hard, wishing more than anything for his rifle.
The name he was born with wasn’t Cassidy Thinks Twice, even though that’s what he’s doing now—Where’s my gun, where’s my gun?—but Cassidy Sees Elk.
Names are stupid, though.
Pretty soon he won’t even need his.
FOUR THE OLD WAY
Standing up at Ricky’s grave behind the old lodge, sharing an after-lunch beer with him, tipping a bit out for Cheeto, too, what the hell, it’s not giving alcohol to minors if the minor’s in the ground, Gabe is still thinking about the basketball girl he saw not wearing a jacket, walking in the snow by the school.
What he’s talked himself into is that it couldn’t have been Denorah. Den’s tight-laced like her mom, wouldn’t be walking around with her hair just flying around her head like some Indian demon. And it had been school hours anyway, right? One rule about sports that Gabe’s pretty sure still holds, it’s that truancies mean you can’t play. A one-for-one kind of system, each truancy keeping you on the bench for a game, even though there’s so many more school days than there are games. It’s what Gabe blames for never being the basketball star he’s sure he could have been.
He shakes his head no again, that it couldn’t have been her. That he’s not a bad dad for not having stopped to get her warm, hike her up to wherever she was going. Just, what that means, he supposes, it’s that she was some other baller, out in shorts in the cold. Meaning he’s just not a good Indian.
But bullshit to that, too.
Gabe cashes his beer and hooks the neck of the bottle into one of the chicken-wire squares of the Boss Ribs family fence.
What if Den’s having some big war with Trina, though, right? They are alike, Denorah’s like a little clone of the girl Gabe knocked up fourteen years ago—fifteen, really—but that little clone, she’s got some Cross Guns in her veins, too. What this means, Gabe knows, it’s that she’s going to reach an age where she’ll want to take the world in her teeth and shake until she tears a hunk of something off for herself. And then, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s a scholarship or a five-year bid in state or two kids in as many years, she’ll sit in the corner by herself and chew it down, dare anybody to say this isn’t exactly what she wanted.
She’s going to be like him, he knows. She’s got that in her. She didn’t get that smile of hers from Trina, anyway. Gabe’s seen it when she plays, in spite of the restraining order. The order’s not about staying five hundred feet away from Denorah, or even from Trina, though he kind of self-imposes that one for purposes of self-preservation, it’s about not coming to any more home basketball games. Because of boisterousness, which is just cheering. Because of fighting, which wasn’t his fault. Because of public intoxication, which was only that one time.
With the right jacket and hat and sunglasses, though, he can still slip in with the visitors, so long as he doesn’t draw attention to himself. He’s pretty sure Victor, the tribal cop slipping him cash for the sweat tonight, has seen him over there all incognito, but Gabe keeps his hands in his pockets and he doesn’t explode up out of his seat each time Denorah pulls a no-call, so Victor lets this sleeping dog lie.