The Only Good Indians(76)
No, you come to this column for the real dirt, don’t you? Let me dish. And, as always, you didn’t hear it from me.
Word has it that a certain big-time college scout has been seen in blaze orange down at the diner. Further word has it that, once his lunch schedule was established, it’s completely possible that a certain coach may or may not have sidled up to his table, mentioned where the elk have been the last week or two, and kind of, shall we say, bundled that tidbit in with a certain scrimmage going down tonight.
Supposedly, the trade was that if a certain scout bagged his trophy early enough in the day, well, that would leave his evening free, wouldn’t it?
And, if he was free enough, why not come for the junior high game as well, right? You thought I was talking about a certain high school coach, not the coach who wears her hair in two pigtails?
For shame.
Junior high coaches know as well as high school coaches that all the elk are bunched together up towards Duck Lake all this week. The game wardens have been trying to scare them back over to the park, or onto the old folks’ happy hunting grounds, but elk are elk, right?
This isn’t the Fish & Game column, though. This is what you won’t hear anywhere else, unless you have your ear to the rail like me. Trust me, a certain junior high coach either has or hasn’t got a big-time college scout out to watch her star player. You know the one. You’ve seen her after practice, smoking the varsity girls and boys both? We’ve never had a player like her, niiksookowaks. This is history in the making. I’ll be there, trying to read over the scout’s shoulder.
And, remember, you didn’t hear this from me.
IT CAME FROM THE REZ
SATURDAY
Denorah can tell the order the sweat lodgers got there last night.
Cassidy was first, of course. It’s his place. He didn’t so much get there as just never leave. Her dad was next, front tires cocked at what he tells her is a rakish angle, like his truck just stopped there in the middle of some crazy slide and he had to wait for all the dust to settle before kicking the door open, stepping down, peeling out of his sunglasses one side at a time. After that dramatic or not dramatic entrance had been Victor and Nathan Yellow Tail, the cop car nosed right up to the fire like claiming it for its own, its tracks in the snow showing where it had to step off the sort-of road to get around all the trucks that thought they were so important.
Last, this morning probably, when her shift was over, was Jolene, pulled up right behind Cassidy’s old truck that used to be up on blocks but is flat to the ground now, like embarrassed about something it’s done.
None of the sweat lodgers are up and about yet. Denorah would think it was for the usual reason—beer-after-ceremony, which her dad would have claimed was “rehydration”—but then Victor’s car wouldn’t still be there. And no way would Officer Yellow Tail let minor Nathan drink with her dad and Cassidy, even if Cassidy’s finally settling down a little, according to Denorah’s mom.
“Hello?” Denorah says, still a good walk away from it all. She could have screamed it if she wanted, she supposes. Near as she can tell, the place is dead times two. Even the sweat lodge is collapsed, smoke and the lines of heat blurring the air above it, the blankets and whatever smoldering, meaning it’s a trash pit now. Next time, the sweat will be somewhere else.
It’s good Denorah’s mom didn’t see that smoke.
“I’m only letting you do this because that Crow from the grocery is there,” she’d just told Denorah at the cattle guard, after confirming the presence of Jolene’s truck. “I’ll be back in one hour, got it? You’re lucky I had to return this to Mona.”
“This” was Mona’s casserole dish that had wended its way from Tre’s house to Denorah’s, because Trina is always coming up this way to smoke cigarettes with Mona in her new trailer. There’s an old bear that gets after the berry bushes just down from the trailer in the spring, and Denorah’s mom is forever talking about that—as she calls it—silly old bear. Silly or not, that bear is her mom’s excuse for one more cigarette, one more pack, one more carton. It’s like she’s the most willing prisoner in Mona’s little window nook thing, that Denorah thinks looks like the cockpit of a spaceship, like the two of them are plotting some big escape, once Denorah’s out of the house.
“One hour, right here,” Denorah said back to her mom.
It feels military, repeating commands back so there’s no confusion, but it seems to result in less grief, so Denorah plays along.
Still standing at the cattle guard, Cassidy’s place either a ghost town or a junkyard, no dogs even—no dogs?—Denorah looks back to the road for her mom’s car. Past where the road ducks down to the right there’s just snow and snow and more snow, though, and then the shimmer of the lake where her dad told her one of his running buddies died, way back.
But her dad’s got a story for every place on the reservation, doesn’t he? If not someone he used to run with in high school, then a coulee where he popped a blacktail once, a ridge where he found a little pyramid of brass shells for a buffalo gun, a place he once saw a badger humping it across the grass, an eagle dive-bombing it like it thought this was the biggest prairie dog ever.
When she was a girl Denorah had soaked every one of those stories up, and then, later, her mom told her to be careful what she took for gospel. The dead friend stories, though, Denorah still kind of believes those. Because it would be bad luck to lie about that, she thinks, and her dad’s the kind of superstitious he thinks nobody notices. Case in point: That day him and Ricky and Cassidy and Lewis popped all those elk back in that section they weren’t supposed to be in, the one down by the lake? He’s never mentioned that to her even once, even in defense, even to give her the rest of the story, how it wasn’t like it sounds, the story her stepdad told her isn’t the real story, isn’t the one with feet on the ground and smoke in the air, bang bang bang. And the reason he hasn’t said anything to her about it, she’s pretty sure, it’s because to talk about it out loud would throw his sights off next time he was lining up on an illegal elk, those being the only kind he can shoot anymore.