The Only Good Indians(7)

She’s dead, she’s gone.

To pay for her, even, the day before he left with Peta, he’d taken all the packaged-up meat of her and gone door-to-door down Death Row, giving it to the elders. Because she’d come from the elders’ section—the good country saved back for them up by Duck Lake, so they could fill their freezers from the field instead of the IGA—because she’d come from there, it was all full circle and Indian, hand-delivering the meat to their doors. Never mind that Lewis couldn’t find any of his meat stamps, had to use Ricky’s little sister’s stamps. So, instead of STEAK or GROUND or ROAST, all the butcher paper the young elk was wrapped in had a black raccoon handprint on it, because that was the only one she had that wasn’t a flower or a rainbow or a heart.

But no way could that elk be coming up from thirty stew pots all this time later, walking a hundred and twenty miles south to haunt Lewis. First because elk don’t do that, but second because, in the end, her meat had got where it was meant to get, he hadn’t even done anything wrong. Not really.

“Gotta go, man,” he tells Cass. “My boss.”

“It’s Saturday,” Cass says back.

“Rain nor sleet nor weekends,” Lewis says back, and hangs up more abruptly than he means, holds the phone on its cradle for a full half minute before lifting it back.

He dials in the number Cass’s dad gave him for Gabe. It’s Gabe’s dad’s number, actually, but Cass’s dad had looked out the window, said he could see Gabe’s truck over there right now.

“Tippy’s Tacos,” Gabe says after the second ring. It’s how he always answers, wherever he is, whoever’s phone. There was never a place called that on the reservation, as far as Lewis knows.

“Two with venison,” Lewis answers back.

“Ah, Indian tacos …” Gabe says, playing along.

“And two beers,” Lewis adds.

“You must be Navajo,” Gabe says right back, “maybe a fish tribe. If you were Blackfeet, you’d want a six with that.”

“I’ve known some Navajo can flat put it away,” Lewis says, a deviation from the usual routine, like bringing it down, breaking it. For maybe five seconds Gabe doesn’t say anything, then, “Lewdog?”

“First try,” Lewis says, his face warming just to be known.

“You in jail?” Gabe asks.

“Still a comedian,” Lewis tells him.

“Among other things,” Gabe says back, then, probably to his dad, “It’s Lewis, remember him, old man?”

Lewis doesn’t hear the reply, but does hear a basketball game cranked up high enough to be blasting through the whole house.

“So what’s up?” Gabe asks when he’s back. “Need bus fare home, what? If so, I can hook you up with somebody. Little light at the moment myself.”

“Still hunting?”

“That’d be under the ‘Among Other Things’ category, wouldn’t it?” Gabe says.

Of course he’s still hunting. Denny’d have to work 24/7 to write up even half of what Gabriel Cross Guns poaches on a weekly basis, and the rangers over in Glacier would have to work even harder to find his tracks, going back and forth across the Park line, the return prints a couple hundred pounds deeper than the ones sneaking in.

“How’s Denorah?” Lewis says, because that’s where you start after this long.

Denorah’s Gabe’s daughter by Trina, Trina Trigo, has to be twelve or thirteen by now—she was walking around already when Lewis left, anyway, he’s pretty sure of that.

“My finals girl, you mean?” Gabe says, finally all the way into this call, it feels like.

“Your what?” Lewis asks all the same.

“You remember Whiteboy Curtis from Havre?” Gabe asks.

Lewis can’t dredge up Whiteboy’s actual last name—something German?—but yeah, he remembers: Curtis, the baller, this naturally gifted farm kid who was born for the court. He didn’t see it all with his eyes, he felt the game through his feet like radar, and didn’t even have to think to know which way to cut. And he had that basketball on a string, one hundred percent. Only thing kept him from going college was his height, and that he insisted he was a power forward, not a stop-and-pop sharpshooter. At high school height, sure, someone just six-two could crash in, dominate as a power forward. And he had some jumps, too, could rise up and flush it—only in pregame, with a lot of setup, but still. In the end, though, he wasn’t built like Karl Malone, but like John Stockton. Just, he couldn’t accept that, had the idea he could go inside at the next level, bang his way through the bigs, not be a pinball bouncing off them. Insisting he was that power forward, he’d lost so many teeth he looked like a hockey player, last Lewis had heard. And the concussions weren’t exactly doing anything good for his short-term memory. It would have been better for the rest of his life if he’d never figured he could play.

Still?

“He had that jump shot,” Lewis says, seeing it again, the way Whiteboy Curtis would just hang and hang, wait for everyone else to sink back down before releasing the ball so perfect, his eyes laser-guiding it up and up, and, finally, in.

“Denorah’s like that,” Gabe whispers, like the best secret ever. “Just, better, man. Serious. Browning’s never seen nothing like her.”