The Only Good Indians(75)

You can feel your eyes are the hazel and yellow that feels right, and that they’re maybe a smidge or two bigger than makes sense for this face.

Gabe nods, says, “It was you who did all this, wasn’t it? Lewis too, right?”

You don’t owe him an answer. You don’t owe him anything.

“Anybody ever tell you you’ve got eyes just like an elk?” he says. “Not the—the color. But … something, I don’t know.”

Down the slope the herd is already waiting for you, drifted in like ghosts, not even one of them bleating or calling. The ground under them is churned and dark and raw. The smell is so wonderful. You can’t breathe it in deep enough.

“The kid saw you, didn’t he?” Gabriel says, laughing it true. “P-Po’noka, right?”

“Ponokaotokaanaakii,” you say down to him. Elk Head Woman.

Gabriel works through this, gets it enough, looks up to you and nods that he can see that, sure.

You hold the rifle out to him. An offering.

“Why?” he says, shying away from it, but finally having to catch it when you throw it sideways down at him.

He plants the Mauser’s butt in the snow to prop himself up, says it again. “Why are you doing all this?”

If you tell him, he would get to die knowing it was all for a reason, that this has been a circle, closing. Which would be more than you ever got, that day in the snow.

You nod to the rifle he’s holding, say in his bitter English, “Do it or I go after your calf for real.”

He watches you for maybe five seconds here, and then he looks to this rifle.

When he racks the bolt back, the wet brass flashes in there for a bright instant.

“I dropped that shell in the snow,” he says.

“It stinks,” you tell him back, crinkling your nose.

“You’ll really leave her alone?” he says, ramming the bolt home in a way that straightens your back. “You won’t touch her? She’s—you know she’s going to get away from here, don’t you? You can see that?”

It would be so easy for him to angle that barrel at you, wouldn’t it?

But he’s not thinking like a hunter right now. He’s thinking like a father.

“Okay, okay,” he says at last, and angles the awkward rifle around, the barrel chocking up under his chin, his head having to tilt up because the rifle’s long. “Like this?”

His breath is fast and shallow like getting ready, and then he closes his eyes, pulls the trigger all at once.

Click.

“Oh shit,” he says, flipping it back around with a halfway laugh, the barrel pointed right into you now, his finger still on the trigger, his thumb figuring the big obvious safety out.

“You promise you won’t come after her?” he says one last time.

You shake your head no, so he’ll get the rifle back under his chin. But then he stops, says, “Wait, does that mean you will or you won’t go after her?”

He finally smiles when you’re just drilling your eyes into him. He leans back a bit, says, “I always—I wanted it to be like those two Cheyenne I read about, yeah? I wanted to run my horse back and forth in front of all the soldiers, so it would be like … it would be heroic. Like the old days. Not like—not like this.”

“Now,” you tell him.

“Okay, okay, geez,” he says, “at least let me—” and instead of using his own hand, he shoves his friend’s dead index finger through the trigger guard.

“I killed his almost-wife,” he explains, getting the finger positioned just right. “This is—he’s avenging her, like. It’s an Indian thing. You’d understand if you were, you know, a person.”

He opens his mouth, swallows the barrel in deep enough that his eyes fill with tears. The metal rattles against his teeth. His breath is fast and shallow, like it matters anymore how much air he has.

“D, D, D,” he says around the barrel, and nods once to himself for rhythm, then again to be sure, and on the third time he raises his fingers over his friend’s hand and gallops them down one after the other, until the last one, the one that makes the trigger pull, and right as the sound blasts a fist-sized hole through the top of his head you realize that he’s made his fingertips into horse hooves, that it’s still the cavalry taking a shot at him, and finally getting lucky.

The rifle is angled away from you but the red mist of him rises, plumes over, coats your face.

You wipe it off, don’t lick it away, then look back down the idea of the road, to the cattle guard out there in the deep dark.

Now there’s only one left, one you just promised you wouldn’t go after.

Killing a calf is the worst of the worst, you know.

Beside it, breaking a promise is nothing, really.

Nothing at all.





MOCASSIN TELEGRAPH


Say we’re all in a John Wayne movie. Say your trusty reporter here has his ear pressed right down to the railroad tracks, so he can listen up the future.

What am I hearing? you ask.

The bus tires of Havre leaving their parking lot for tonight’s big scrimmage with the girls, sure. But you don’t need to be a real Indian to know the Blue Ponies are coming to town for a grudge match, to prove that last year’s tournament win was due to skill, not injury.