The Only Good Indians(8)

“I should come watch her play,” Lewis says.

“You should,” Gabe says. “Just, don’t tell Trina I told you to come. Maybe don’t even talk to her. If she looks at you? She does, maybe cut your hair, change your name, jump on a ship.”

“She still out for blood?”

“Woman can hold a grudge,” Gabe says. “Got to give her that.”

“For no reason, of course,” Lewis says, leaning back on the usual lines again.

“So to what do I owe this call, Mr. Postman?” Gabe says then, being all fake formal. “I forget to put a stamp on something, what?”

“Just been a while,” Lewis says.

“It was a while eight, nine years ago,” Gabe says. “You’re talking to me, man.”

A lump forms in Lewis’s throat. He tilts his face back, closes his eyes.

“I was just remembering when Denny—”

“Fucked us permanent?” Gabe cuts in. “Yeah, something about that maybe rings a bell or two …”

“You ever been back there by Duck Lake again?” Lewis asks.

“You have to have an old-timer with you,” Gabe says. “You know that, man. How long you been gone again?”

“I mean where it happened,” Lewis says. “That drop-off place.”

“That place, that place, yeah,” Gabe says, driving a nail into Lewis’s heart. “It’s haunted, man, didn’t you know? Elk don’t go there anymore, even. I bet they even tell stories around the elk campfires, right? About what went down that day? Shit, we’re legends to them, man. The four boogeymen—the four butchers of Duck Lake.”

“Three,” Lewis says. “The three boogeymen.”

“They don’t know that,” Gabe says.

“But you really think they might remember?” Lewis asks, just hanging it all out there at last.

“Remember?” Gabe says, the smile one hundred percent there in his voice. “They’re fucking elk, man. They don’t really have campfires.”

“And we killed them all anyway, yeah?” Lewis says, blinking the heat from his eyes. looking around again for Shaney.

“What’s this about?” Gabe says then. “You still missing that crappy knife, what?”

Lewis has to strain to dial back to what Gabe’s saying: that trading-post knife he’d bought, with the three or four interchangeable blades, one of them a weak little saw, for the breastbone and pelvis.

“That knife was a piece of shit,” Lewis says. “If you find it, lose it again fast, yeah?”

“Will do,” Gabe says, his voice far from the phone for a moment, basketball pouring into his end of the line. “Hey, we’re watching a—”

“I got to get gone, too,” Lewis says. “Nice hearing your dumb-ass voice again, though.”

“Shit, I should charge by the minute,” Gabe says, and ten, twenty seconds later the line’s dead again, and Lewis is standing there with his shoulder against the wall, tapping the handset into his forehead like a drumstick.

“Should I be taking notes, Blackfeet?” Shaney asks from the doorway.

Lewis hangs the phone up.

Shaney’s Crow, so calling him “Blackfeet” is this running joke, their tribes being longtime enemies.

“Something Peta said last night,” Lewis lies, always trying to be sure to remind Shaney about his wife, and then say something about her again, just to be sure. Not because he’s the ladies’ man of the USPS—there isn’t one—but because him and Shaney are the only two Indians at this station, and for the last week, ever since Shaney passed the background check and hired on, everybody’s been doing that thing they do with armchairs or end tables when they match: trying to push him and her together over in the corner, leave them there to be this perfect set.

“Something your wife said?” Shaney asks, Lewis sliding past her, leading them back to the big sorting machine. He flicks it on to continue this lesson.

“We’ve got this crap light in the living room,” he tells her. “Won’t come on when it’s supposed to. She thinks it might be a short in the wall. Was calling a guy I know who does electrician stuff on the side.”

“On the side …” Shaney repeats, and nudges an envelope this way into the sorting machine instead of that way.

Lewis tracks that fast piece of mail up into the belly of the beast and shakes his head with wonder when nothing catches, nothing crumples.

Shaney grins a mischievous grin, bites her lower lip in at the end of it.

“Next time,” she says, and hip-checks Lewis.

He rolls with it, doesn’t push back, is miles and years away.





MONDAY


Duckwalking backward on his stripped-down, double-throaty Road King that’s about to find its lope, Lewis clocks Jerry already at the edge of the post office’s parking lot, hanging his loose right hand down by the rear wheel of his custom Springer, his index and middle fingers waggling in an upside-down peace sign before they curl up into his fast fist. Lewis has no idea what it means, never rode with a real and actual gang like Jerry did in his Easy Rider youth, but it must mean something like This way or All clear or Smoke ’em if you got ’em, because Eldon and Silas throttle in right behind him, leaving Lewis to watch the back door like always, even though where they’re headed is to Lewis’s new place way the hell over on 13th.