The Only Good Indians(54)

Before Cassidy can get close enough, Ladybear nips at Gabe’s left hand. In response Gabe pops the forestock down across the bridge of her nose. Then he steps into her space, driving her back, his lips thin like this could get serious.

Ladybear whimpers, backs off, the other two following.

“Shit,” he says, shaking his hand, opening his door back up to see it with the dome light.

Cassidy leans over to see. Gabe’s bleeding from the meat of his left palm. Two neat, welling punctures.

“Got rabies now,” Gabe says, wiping the blood onto the saddleblanket seat cover. “What, they on JoJo’s side now? She even got the dogs turned against my ass?”

“Watch out for the horses is all I’m saying,” Cassidy says, and returns to the lawn chair. The fire’s down to coals mostly.

Gabe steps in, hunkers down into the other chair still holding his hand, settles the rifle across the top of his legs.

“Those rocks working out?” he asks.

“They’re rocks,” Cassidy says.

“Got water for the sweat?” Gabe asks.

“In there,” Cassidy says, pointing to the lodge with his chin. “Got the money?”

“About that,” Gabe says.

Cassidy chuckles and shakes his head, turns the bottle of water up and drains as much as he can without drowning. He’s not thirsty, but he will be.

“She here?” Gabe asks, tilting his head over at the camper, its windows dark in the gathering dusk.

“Work.”

“I’ve never done one at night,” Gabe says then, leaning back in Jo’s chair, the chair not quite bending. Yet.

“A sweat?” Cassidy says.

“There’s nothing, like, against doing it at night, is there?” Gabe asks.

“Let me check the big Indian rule book,” Cassidy says. “Oh yeah. You can’t do anything, according to it. You’ve got to do everything just like it’s been done for two hundred years.”

“Two thousand.”

They laugh together.

Cassidy fishes a dripping bottle of water up from the cooler and spirals it across the fire to Gabe. The droplets spinning off it hiss against the embers, send up tiny geysers of steam.

“So what do you know about this kid?” Cassidy says.

“Nate Yellow Tail? You know. Twenty years ago, he’s you and me. He’s Ricky and Lewis.”

“Half of us are dead, yeah?”

“Either that or one of us here is already half dead,” Gabe says, and slings a dollop of water across the heat at Cassidy, to show this isn’t completely serious. That it is, but he wants to get away with having said it.

“Maybe it’ll be good for him, I mean,” Cassidy says. “Help him out, like.”

“Arrows are straight, but they have to bend, too,” Gabe says, his voice dialed down to Wooden Indian to deliver Neesh’s old line. It’s what the old man used to always end his group sessions on. There was even a series of posters all along one wall of the substance abuse office, an arrow looking all bowed out at the moment of the string’s release, like it’s going to crack, shatter, blow up. But it doesn’t. It’s bent out to the side in the first poster, it snaps back a foot or two from the riser of the bow in the second poster, and then in the rest it’s snapping back and following through, bending the arrow the other way now, and until the last possible instant before the bull’s-eye, it’s flopping back and forth through the air like that, trying to find true.

That’s how they were supposed to be. It’s what they, at fifteen, were supposed to have been doing. They’d been fired into adolescence and were swerving to each side now like crazy, trying to find the straight and narrow. If they did? Bull’s-eye, man. Happy days.

If they didn’t?

There were examples under every awning in town, drinking from paper-bagged bottles. White crosses along the side of all the roads. Sad moms everywhere.

“He’ll sweat it out,” Cassidy says. “Sing it out.”

“Wish we had a drum,” Gabe says.

“I got some tapes.”

“Screw tapes, man. This is for Lewis, too, yeah? But don’t tell Victor-Vector.”

“Maybe don’t call him that,” Cassidy says.

“It’s not bad, is it?”

“For Lewis,” Cassidy says, holding his water up in salute.

Gabe lifts his the same, says, “He always was a stupid ass, wasn’t he?”

“Smarter than you,” Cassidy says. “He got out of here.”

“But then he tried to come back,” Gabe says, drinking once and swallowing hard. “They didn’t shoot him until he tried to come back.”

“He was just running for home base,” Cassidy says. “They’d have shot him if he’d stayed where he was just the same.”

“Why you think he did it?” Gabe says. “His wife, that Flathead girl?”

“She was Crow, man.”

“Serious?”

“He probably couldn’t have told you even while he was doing it, yeah?” Cassidy says, studying the clarity of this bottled water.

“Still,” Gabe says, draining his, dropping it into the fire. The plastic shrivels even before the label flares up.