The Only Good Indians(50)

It’s not easy being quiet, though.

Denorah is a special player, that once-in-a-generation kind. Yeah, he’s her dad, but everybody else says it, too, even that newspaper guy. She’s got everything her big stepsister had, but Trace, she does it at college with all the basics she’s had drilled in, which, as far as Gabe can tell, has pretty much stamped all the Indian out, left it on the practice gym floor.

Den’s got those basics down pat, can walk that line in practice day after day just like her coach wants. When the game’s down to it, though, when the buffalo chips are down, as Cass used to say when he was still just Cass, when two defenders are ganged up on this little Indian girl straight out of Browning, that’s when she’ll smile a smile that Gabe has to smile with her.

It’s that hell-for-leather look, that come-at-me look, that let’s-do-this look.

Instead of passing out of a double-team like she’s been told to, what Den’ll do is back off these two defenders, look from one to the other, and then get her dribble and her feet just out of sync enough to throw them off balance, giving her room to split them.

Second game of the season, she even threw the ball between a tall girl’s legs and caught it before the second bounce, cut for the basket straight as any arrow ever let loose.

That was the game they had to escort Gabe out, disinvite him from the rest of the season. The reason he got kicked out was because her coach had benched her for showing off. For being Blackfeet. It was like—it was like what Gabe had read about in that one book. Those two Cheyenne from the old days who got caught by the cavalry, sentenced to death, but asked if they could die like they wanted.

Sure, the stupid Custers said.

The way those two Cheyenne wanted, it was to die on their horses, with all those soldiers shooting at them as they ran past.

Only, they did it once, and made it through all the bullets.

And then again.

Finally they had to walk slow, give those plowboy soldiers a chance.

That’s what Coach had done to Den: made her slow down, when she was faster than any of them, fiercer than them all.

Gabe figures he should maybe slip through town on the way to Cass’s, look D up, make sure everything’s good, be sure that wasn’t her out walking in the cold.

It’s the day before their first scrimmage, isn’t it? There’s really one place she’ll be.

“She’s good, man,” he says down to Ricky, cracking the top off a second beer, killing this one all at once, like old times.

He hooks it into the fence alongside the first one. They look like two bottles in the side of a hamster cage. One for him, one for Ricky.

Gabe opens a third, considers it, the white chill swirling up from that brown neck.

“So ask Lewis what the hell, if you see his ass,” he says to Ricky, tipping the first swig out for him, for them, for all the dead Indians. But for Lewis first.

He wasn’t the best of them, was maybe the stupidest of them, really, always with his nose in a book, but that didn’t mean the staties needed to pop him like that.

But—Gabe squints his face up, tracks a cloud scudding along the treetops, the sky grey and forever behind it—but why would Lewis have been carrying a dead little elk around with him? At first Gabe knew he had to have heard it wrong, but then the paper confirmed it: when the truck Lewis’s body had been in back of had wrecked, there’d for sure been an elk calf thrown in there beside him, because he’d been carrying it, and it might be some Indian evidence, or evidence of Indians, who knew.

Just, when the emergency responders piled onto the scene of the accident, they were interested in dead people, not dead animals that had probably been in the ditch already, as far as they knew. By the time they realized it was evidence, had come back for the calf, the coyotes had probably dragged it off, made themselves a fine meal.

Good for them.

It doesn’t explain what Lewis had been doing with the calf in the first place, though.

The only thing Gabe has to sort of explain it is how sentimental or whatever Lewis had got over that skinny elk, that day they’d jumped that herd out in the elder section.

Lewis had known they were just sawing haunches off and running, but he’d insisted on taking all of her, even her head, which he’d just have to throw away in town anyway, right? He’d skinned her too, hadn’t he, and carried that rolled-up wet hide under his arm like a football, like he was some Jim Thorpe wannabe? Like this really was some bullshit Thanksgiving Classic? Gabe nods, can see it again, Lewis struggling up that long hill, all the odds against him.

What he told them was that he needed her head because he wanted her brains, to tan that hide with. Like he knew anything about leather. Like that hide hadn’t been thrown out years ago, like every other hide any of them had ever saved. Like she’d even had all her brains in her head at that point.

Good job, Lewis.

Gabe tips beer number three up to him and drinks it down, hooks it in the fence in line with the others. One bottle for Ricky, one for Lewis, and one for himself. They chime against each other once, then still.

He shakes another one up from the little cooler, for Cass, even though he’s seeing Cass in a few, here. Four’s too many for three-thirty in the afternoon, on zero food, but screw it. He’ll sweat it all out come nightfall, and then some.

Was that what Lewis had actually been smuggling home, that old hide? Had Lewis made it down to the city with it, kept it frozen all this time, and had he been trying to bring it back to the reservation now? Did the cops just not know the difference between a thawed-out, ten-year-old skin and an elk calf? Had they shot him enough times that it was all guesswork?