The Only Good Indians(72)

It’s—Gabriel is trying to process it, trying to resist it—what he sees is what he’s most terrified of ever having to see: the girl with the basketball, the Finals Girl. His daughter in her scrimmage-white jersey. Her name shapes itself on his lips a bit at a time, like trying to add up to her: D, Den, Denorah.

She’s still standing, her hair spilled forward, her face angled down at the blood spreading over her bright white jersey like checking to see if this is really real, if this is really happening.

Gabriel falls back, unaware of his fingertips on the ground, unaware of anything except what’s just happened, what can’t be taken back, what can never get undone.

His little girl, she—earlier in the day, at the little pad of concrete behind her house, she’d toed up to that charity stripe, she’d used textbook form, and she swished forty dollars’ worth of free throws through that net.

It was impossible, no kid could shoot like that. But she could. For forty dollars.

“I’ll bring it to the scrimmage tomorrow,” Gabriel’d said to her out the window of his truck, the engine already turning over to bring him here.

“It’ll be gone by then,” she’d said back, with her mother’s mouth. “And, you can come to the gym again?”

“It’s a scrimmage, not a game.”

“If I’m playing, it’s a game.”

“I don’t even have it yet,” Gabriel told her, shrugging like this was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.

“Who’s giving it to you?” she’d asked.

“Victor Yellow Tail,” Gabriel said. “Tonight. Police money. That’s the best kind, yeah?”

“For Nathan’s sweat?”

Yes.

Denorah had logged that, he knows now and doesn’t want to know, she’d logged it and weighed it and considered it, and now she’d caught a ride out here to collect before her loser-dad could spend what he owed. Before he could let it blow away across the snow.

Only, Cassidy shot her with a 7.62mm round before she could even announce herself, had shot her so clean that it hadn’t even thrown her back into the lodge, had just blown a ragged plug of meat out behind her.

But she’s not meat, she’s my daughter, Gabriel says inside, screams inside, can’t stop screaming about inside.

Exactly, you say back to him.

Gabriel slashes forward to catch her, but she tips forward onto her face before he’s even two steps closer. He falls to his knees by his own truck, pushes his whole face into the ground, his lips right to the dirt all the tires have cleared of snow.

His girl, his baby girl. She was going to take the team to state, she was going to take the whole tribe into the pros, into legend. Everybody was going to quit painting buffalo and bear footprints on the side of their lodges, were going to have to learn to draw all the lines in a basketball. She was the one who could plant her feet, get the rim in her sights, and drain ten free throws in a row. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred.

She was going to make it out of here, like Gabriel never had. Like nobody ever did. Exhibition one: Ricky. Exhibition two: Lewis.

Had he really seen her earlier today at lunch, walking away from school in the cold in that same white jersey? Was seeing her like that supposed to have been a warning? Was it a vision? Is Trina parked down at the cattle guard? Did she hear the shot? Is she standing from the opened door of her car, listening with mom ears for the next shot? For footsteps running in the dark? For her ex, trying to come up with one more excuse?

Shit. Shit shit shit.

And: no.

There is no excuse. Not for this.

When Cassidy drops to his knees beside Gabriel like What have we done here, Gabriel pushes him hard enough that Cassidy falls and slides, hard enough that the recoil drives Gabriel over into the side of his truck.

“You shot her!” he screams, standing, his hands balled into fists. He’s crying harder than he was, now. But at the same time he’s mad, mad enough to reach around to his own cratered-in windshield, come back with the black thermos.

“And you—you pushed a truck onto Jo …” Cassidy says.

“Not on purpose!” Gabriel says, and then, just like he’s supposed to, he steps out into the darkness after his best friend since forever, and when Cassidy crawls back, away from this thing trying to happen, Gabriel steps faster, finally comes down with his knees to either side of Cassidy’s hips.

The thermos is alive in his right hand, is both completely weightless and the heaviest thing in the world. He rolls it for a better grip, for a final grip, for the best way to hold it when doing a thing like this.

“You shot her, man,” he says, like he’s pleading. Like he’s trying to explain. “You shot Denorah. You shot my little girl …”

Cassidy is holding his hands over his face.

He nods that yes, yes, he did.

His body is hitching and jerking under Gabriel, and it’s like a current is passing between them. Like they’re kids again, learning to break-dance.

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel says, and brings the butt of the thermos down with the weight of all their years of friendship.

Because he’s holding it wrong, his pinkie finger is between it and Cassidy’s eyebrow.

The thermos glances off and dives into the ground, its open mouth standing it up in the crusty snow.