The Only Good Indians(66)

While he’s drinking, he left-hands a pee. Cass is always saying not to piss too close to the camper, either go on out to the trees or use the outhouse, that the whole place is going to start smelling yellow if everybody just splashes pee all over, but screw it. Victor’s in there anyway, and Gabe can’t wait.

Liquid in, liquid out.

With a gasp he finally breaks his long kiss with the beer, wipes his lips with Cass’s shirt, oops, and manages a look down to what he’s peeing on.

It’s one of the dogs.

He angles his stream away, lets it sputter out, shakes off, and doesn’t zip up since this isn’t exactly a zipper situation.

He looks over to the camper, all its lights on. To the outhouse, hunkered down over its deep hole. To Victor’s car, drumming its loud beat out into the night.

And the dog.

It’s one of the two pups, not Miss Lefty, but … Dancer, yeah. Dancer the dead, dead, very dead dog.

Gabe squats down gingerly, unsurely, and touches the dog’s matted coat.

“What stepped on you, girl?” he says, petting the dog’s haunch.

Her guts are ballooned down into the interior skin of one of her back legs. Gabe’s seen it happen before, to dogs that have been run over.

But this dog, it’s been … stomped?

Her chest has been crushed, too, and because there was nowhere for the lungs and heart and liver to go, most of it’s splashed out the mouth in what looks like a single chunky gout. The tongue is hanging, not swollen up yet.

“What the hell?” Gabe says, standing, looking out into the darkness instead of behind him, where you are, on the other side of the truck. If he just turned around, chanced a look into the passenger window, through the cab, there you’d be out the driver’s side, watching him. Glaring hard at him, your five-fingered hands balled into fists.

He doesn’t, though. And he won’t. His whole life he’s been looking in the wrong places. Why should tonight be any different?

“Cass,” he says then, like trying it out, “one of your horses, man, it got out, I think. And it doesn’t like your dogs.”

He steps carefully around this dog, deeper out into the night.

Two slow steps later are the other two dogs.

Ladybear is dead, but Miss Lefty is still trying.

“Shit,” Gabe says, dropping to a knee.

Miss Lefty whimpers.

“Shit shit shit,” Gabe says, and sets his beer down in the snow, holds it there a moment to be sure he can let it go without it tipping over.

He feels around with his right hand for a rock, finds a good heavy one, then, with his left hand, makes sure where the dog’s head is.

She’s dead now.

He sets the rock back down, slumps on his thighs.

When he stands it’s without his beer, without the shirt. When he looks back to his truck there’s nobody there through the tunnel the windows make. Walking back, he runs the hair out of his eyes and smears blood all across his face.

That rock he used, or meant to use, it was the same one you used.

It’s almost funny.

Back at the truck he grubs a rag up from under the seat, cleans his hands and face, then, with his other hand, liberates another beer, drinks it down all at once, and turns, does a running throw to sling the bottle out as far into the darkness as he can.

It doesn’t land for seconds and seconds, and doesn’t shatter when it does, just thunks.

Cass is not going to like this, he knows. Nobody likes all their dogs being dead at once. But it’s not Gabe’s fault, either. And if—if he leaves pretty soon after the sweat, then he won’t even have to get involved in this, will he?

“You were never even here,” he says to himself, looking around to make sure Jo’s not suddenly standing there behind him, listening in.

Why would he even be thinking that?

“Getting jumpy in your old age,” he mumbles, and hauls the cooler of still-cold water up through the window.

It’ll be better than the water from Gabe’s tank. And they’ll need something better to dip it out with.

Gabe sloshes the cooler onto the hood, opens the passenger door and digs behind the seat, eyes staring straight up so his fingers can feel farther. Finally he comes up with some random metal thermos. He twists the cap off, dumps it into the floorboard then blows into the thermos once, hard, already turning his face to the side.

No mice skeletons or bug husks come back at him.

He holds it upside down, taps it against the front tire to break loose anything stubborn, and when nothing cakes out—it would just be coffee anyway, right?—he fixes its thin lip into his mouth, carries it like that, the cooler in both hands like the biggest, squarest, most refreshing fig leaf.

He’s going to be a hero, bringing water back with actual chunks of ice still floating in it. And the dogs dead in the snow? They haven’t even happened yet, aren’t even real.

On the way back to the lodge he raises his voice, singing with the singers, walking with the drumbeat, Indian-style.





BLACKFEET INDIAN STORIES


Nathan remembers some stupid summer program years ago, where all the ten-year-olds were supposed to be learning traditional stuff. This was back when he had three braids, was still being groomed to be an All-Star Indian. Before he started being who he really was.

Tre had been there, too, his hair in traditional braids as well.