The Only Good Indians(62)

“Lewis buried it,” Cassidy says. “That—that unborn calf, whatever.”

This silences Gabe.

“This is that same scrawny pre-cow he made us drag all the way up the hill?” he finally says. “The one got us caught by Denny the man?”

“We were getting busted anyway.”

“This is when y’all shot up that herd?” Nathan asks.

Cassidy and Gabe both look over to him.

“Denorah told me,” he says, like challenged to answer.

“You told her?” Cassidy says to Gabe.

“Who else that was there might have told her?” Gabe says right back, then does his lips like he’s going to spit onto the rocks but can’t muster any spit, so ends up just leaning over like a drunk old man telling important secrets to the ground.

“Oh yeah,” Cassidy says.

Denny. Denny Pease. Of course he would have told Denorah this story by now. Anything to make Gabe look worse than he already does.

“What are you saying?” Gabe says then to Cassidy, picking the idea of that elk calf back up. “That Lewis was all messed up? That all those elf books finally caught fire in his brain, made him kill two women and run around with an elk baby until the soldiers shot him down?”

“It wasn’t the books,” Cassidy says.

“Elves?” Nathan says, watching the two of them now.

“Breathe, breathe, you’re hearing things,” Gabe says.

“How much longer?” Nathan asks.

“You cured yet?” Gabe asks back.

“Of what?” Nathan says. “Being Indian?”

Gabe chuckles without really smiling, which is a sound Cassidy knows. He puts his fingertips to Gabe’s chest to keep him there, says across to Nathan, “You can leave whenever you want, man.”

“Once you’ve been purified,” Gabe adds unhelpfully, and then leans over to cough a lung up. Maybe two.

After nearly a minute of it, Nathan says to Cassidy, “He going to be all right?”

Cassidy studies Gabe, on his hands and knees now, nearly puking.

“One way or the other,” he says.

Nathan shakes his head in amusement.

“My dad says he’s busted him he doesn’t know how many times,” he says.

“White man’s laws,” Cassidy says. “Getting picked up, that just proves he’s Indian.”

“He says he busted you, too.”

“Your dad’s a good cop, mostly,” Cassidy says. “Just messes up sometimes.”

After a second or two, a grin crosses Nathan’s face.

“He’s standing out there like a cigar store Indian or something,” he says.

“He called in sick on a Friday night for this,” Cassidy says. “Because of being here, he’s going to have to work shit detail for the next month, probably. He’s doing this for you, man.”

“He doesn’t have to.”

“Tell him.”

“He doesn’t understand anything.”

“He was the first one into the Dickey house after that—Tina, with the gun?” Cassidy says, wincing from having to remember that. “He’s scraped so many kids up off the asphalt he could probably write the manual for how to do it best so they stay in one piece. He’s had to carry stoned babies to grandmothers and he’s had to walk out into the grass to find other grandmothers. Some of the drunks he shakes awake in the morning, they’re stiff, and he remembers them from second-grade homeroom. His first week, he was the rookie cop they made drag Junior Big Plume in from the shallows, when his face was all … he sent my brother Arthur to prison, how about that? He doesn’t want you to end up there, too.”

“I’m not like him and Granddad,” Nathan is already saying, his lower lip trembling hard enough he has to bite it in.

“He’ll stand out there and keep that fire going for you for as long as you need. That’s all I’m saying. Not every Indian dad’s like that. You got one of the good ones, man.”

“It’ll turn into an old-time Indian story,” Gabe chimes in, his voice weak and spent from the coughing. He plants a hand on Cassidy’s shoulder to pull himself upright again. “It’ll—it’ll be the story of the dad who stands outside the lodge for seven days, having to go farther and farther out for wood to keep the fire going, and then he asks the beavers to bring him some, meaning he’ll owe them a favor, and then when the fire almost dies out once, he needs some kindling, so he has to—has to call a hawk down to deliver him some dried moss, so he’s going to owe him something, too, then, then it’s something with a muskrat, then, then …” but he loses it to coughing again.

Cassidy shrugs to Nathan like, Yeah, that.

“Aren’t we supposed to be singing and praying and all that?” Nathan says, looking from Cassidy to Gabe.

“We are,” Cassidy says.

After that they all stare into the glowing rocks.

“We need more water,” Gabe finally says. “Maybe if we had, like, water guns in here, right? Old-time Indians never thought of that, I bet.”

He finger-shoots imaginary streams of cool, cool water at Cassidy, at Nathan, then into his own mouth, just drinking it up.

“You could have drank some from the cooler,” Cassidy tells him.