The Only Good Indians(59)

Gabe chances a look across at Nate, and for the first time there’s a hint of uncertainty in the kid’s eyes, and for an accidental flash Gabe is seeing himself in the side mirror of his truck, when D asked if he was hunting again, and he thought he saw black hair behind his reflection, lifting up from the bed of his truck.

Except that couldn’t have been. And the dogs weren’t smelling anything back there, either. They’re just stupid dogs.

Gabe breathes the heat in deep and holds it, holds it, eyes shut.





DEATH, TOO, FOR THE YELLOW TAIL

Victor plants the shovel into the ground by the fire after the next rock delivery—it takes two stabs to make sure it’ll stand—then crosses to his car. Not to lean back against the fender until called again, but to settle down into the front seat, key the dashboard alive. He leans down to it, into it, comes up with a cassette tape. He holds it to the dome light to squint at, then flips it over to the side he wants, pushes it in.

Drumbeats well up from inside the car. Drumbeats and singing. It’s been hot enough in the lodge for the last half hour that there hasn’t been any singing, any talking, any anything. The last time he leaned in through that flap, he looked from face to sweaty face, gauging each of them in turn, then nodded, turned the shovel over, let the green jacket flop down.

Maybe it’s working? Maybe this will have been a good thing?

Now he’s looking at the green lights of the dashboard, is unhooking a handset from under the dash and clicking the connection open.

A crackling silence erupts from the top of the car, from a speaker up there. It’s a loud nothing, full of emptiness and distance. Victor thumbs the sound away, pushes enough buttons or switches that the drumming and singing finally pour out of the top of that car all at once, making him flinch back from the suddenness. The sound swells, fills the night.

Inside the lodge one of them yips twice in celebration of this sound.

Victor nods with this, likes it.

He goes back to the fire, stirs it with the shovel, and notes the sparks drifting over to his son’s scrimmage jersey. He saves it from the hundred airborne embers, folds it onto the broken chair set up by the lodge like an end table, so Nathan can find it first thing when he’s done. Then he stirs the fire, watches the sparks spiral and climb even higher, like an invisible chimney, and then he leans the shovel against the trash barrel so he can inspect the rifle.

After making sure it’s not loaded, he runs the bolt back and forth twice, swings it out like tracking something, and, of all the places in the night he could have pointed that barrel, he points it right at you, your head still turned to the side, your eye on the right side rolling back down that rifle at him.

Without even thinking about it—this is what you do when in a hunter’s sights—you pull away.

Still, he sees … not you, but the motion of you. The idea of something.

He lowers the gun, stares out into the night.

“Jolene?” he calls out. “That you, girl?”

When you don’t answer he flattens his lips and cuts a sharp whistle, slapping the leg of his jeans twice.

You’re no dog, either.

Also: There are no dogs. Not anymore.

He settles the rifle back down into its place, watching the darkness the whole while. Moving mostly by feel, he pulls up three splits of wood from the pile, works them into the embers. Moments later one of them spurts a lick of flame up, and then all three are burning bright and orange and hot.

Victor stands in front of the fire, the dark silhouette of a hunter, still watching the darkness, the rifle in his hands again like a reflex, held crosswise down low.

From the lodge there’s another ho, this one from Nathan—the first time he’s been the one calling for more heat.

Victor considers the darkness, then finally turns away, trades the rifle for the shovel, and guides its blade under the burning logs, lifting a rock up and out. He shakes the shovel, ash and embers trailing off, and runs his gloved left hand up the handle, walks sideways to the lodge.

He taps at the door with his hip and it lifts up on a shiny silver strut, stays lifted.

Inside are three wet faces, each of them already spent. He deposits this next load of glowing rocks and just has his shovel clear of the lodge when one of the horses whinnies straight out of the heart of nowhere. Victor jerks hard enough to have dropped a burning rock if he’d still had any, but it’s just a stupid horse.

Still Victor studies the night all around him, his eyes scanning and panning, trying to pick a shape out.

If he was smart, if he was listening to the horses, he’d already be gone.

You wouldn’t leave, though, would you? You couldn’t.

You stand over your calf until you can’t stand, and then you try to fall such that your body can shield it. And then you come back ten years later and stand just outside the firelight, your soft hands opening and closing beside your legs, your eyes hardly blinking.

He can no more leave his calf than you could.

And now he’s standing from his car a second time. With a beam of light to stab around.

You flatten against the ground, let that heat raze across your back.

But still, he knows. The way you can tell is the smell of the pistol at his hip. Its oily sick taste is in his hand now.

“Come on out!” he calls, his words rolling into the darkness, turning back to nothing.