The Only Good Indians(73)

Cassidy lowers his hands, blood sheeting down over his face.

He looks up through it to Gabriel, and they’re both crying, neither can breathe right, neither wants to breathe ever again.

With an unsteady hand, Cassidy claps the snow for the thermos, finds it, passes it back up to Gabriel, and you have to cover your bloody mouth with your palm, because even in your most secret dreams you never would have guessed this part, would you have?

It’s perfect, it’s amazing.

Gabriel takes the thermos, their fingers touching over that black metal, and Gabriel remembers it all over again: D, yesterday, turning back to him with that sharp smile, no-looking free throw number ten just like Jordan, and it hurts so bad that he closes his eyes, brings the thermos down again, with a crunch. The next crunch is wetter, the one after that deeper, punching through into a darker space.

The muscles closest to Cassidy’s shin bone are the last to die.

Gabriel leans back, wavers, an insubstantial shape of a person.

Past Cassidy’s head is a dead dog, and a beer, still standing.

Gabriel crawls over, trades the bloody thermos for the beer, and drains the bottle.

He still can’t breathe. His right hand is slick with blood, and his face and shirt are spattered with it, and he doesn’t know whether to laugh or die, really. Both seem reasonable.

He struggles out of the shirt and it’ll hardly come, so he tears it, balls it up, stands to throw it as far as he can. It flutters, doesn’t go anywhere. He kicks back through the snow for his truck and stumbles into the Mauser, is a skin now along with Cassidy, meaning they’re on the same team, like always.

He looks at the rifle and then looks at it some more. His breath finally comes, washing through his head, leaving him dizzy.

The Mauser, yes, he decides. The Mauser, for the pest that he is. He can—he can be another statistic, he can make it so the pamphlets are right about Indian suicide rates, can’t he? He can keep the numbers good, keep everyone from having to print up new pamphlets. He can go—he can go with Cassidy. Maybe even still catch up to him.

He picks up the Mauser, falls to the old truck, the one the Crow’s dead under, and grubs cartridge after cartridge from Richard’s foggy bag, only stops when he cues into an eye watching him.

“Jo,” he says, like of course.

The hole he shot through Cassidy’s floorboard all those years ago, it’s pushed down now over the Crow’s face, her eyeball bulging up through it. Gabriel turns away shaking his head no. His fingers are shaking too much to get a shell in right, though. He fumbles the one 7.62mm he finally finds into the snow. His chest shudders with laughter. He can’t even do this right. He lets the rifle fall away, is looking back to the fire, squinting like to see it better. Or to see something over there better.

Denorah. Den. D.

He pushes away from the truck, makes himself take the walk to her. Just to hold her again. He wants to repeat her season average to her, and project what would have been her junior year on varsity, her senior year in the state tournament. He wants to tell her about all the games she would have won, all the posters they would have made with her on them. The line of shoes that would have been named after her.

Did you get the new Cross Guns yet?

They’re so dope.

Do I look like her when I come up like this, on the toes?

And then he’s there, stepping around the sparking fire.

“D?” he says.

Not because it’s her. Because it’s not. It never was.

Gabriel looks back to the mound in the snow his best friend is, then to not-Denorah again.

It’s the—it’s the kid? In the scrimmage jersey he has no reason to be wearing, that’s black on the outside, bright white on the secret inside. His hair is down and everywhere, could be Denorah’s hair, was D’s hair.

“N-Nate?” Gabriel says. “Nathan?”

Where the Mauser caught him is low down in the left side. Not the kill zone, but close enough. The kind of shot where you just have to follow whatever you shot back into the trees, wait for it to collapse at the end of its blood trail.

But he’s not dead yet. Not quite.

“Hard to kill, aren’t you?” Gabriel says with an almost smile.

It shakes the boy awake, and, maybe because Gabriel’s standing over him bloody-handed, bloody-faced, the boy jerks away, pushes with his heels, shaking his head no, no, and something else, the syllable and sounds coming fast, in a tumble, over and over.

Po’noka?

Gabe narrows his eyes, has to hunt deep in his head for this old word, then stand real still in his thoughts, wait for it to stand up from the snow, a brown form against all that white.

“Elk?” he says, and, following the boy’s eyes, looks behind him, looks all around, but you’re not there anymore.

When Gabriel comes back to the boy, the boy’s still trying to get away, leaving more and more blood in the dirty snow.

“Wait, wait, let me get your dad,” Gabriel says, going to his knees and holding his red hands up and out to show he’s no threat.

It doesn’t help.

The boy pushes back and back, past the lodge, under the lowest rail of the horse pen, leaving dark smears on the pipe.

“No, listen—” Gabe says, trying both to follow and not be scary, but he stops when the horses whinny in their panicked way about this intruder underfoot. “Shh, shh, guys,” he says to them, stepping in, but the way he smells—they shy back, rear up, rise and fall in the darkness, and there can’t be room in that pen for all four of them, can there? Their weight coming down shakes the ground and Gabriel looks away, kind of numb, finds himself just staring down at a clot of the blood the boy left behind in the slush. A clot of blood he probably needs, or would have needed, if the horses hadn’t done their thing to him.