The Only Good Indians(84)

On the other side of the lodge, through the scrim of smoke but staring right through it, is Elk Head Woman.

“You killed them all!” Denorah screams through the smoke, holding her right hand with her left. “You killed my … my—”

Instead of answering—her mouth is no longer shaped for human words—Elk Head Woman steps forward, over what’s left of Victor’s broken body, his head just hanging by tendons now, and the way she looks down to get her feet in the right place, it’s because her eyes are on either side of her head now.

Denorah steps back, falls down, comes up already running.

In practice, there’s a drill Coach makes the team do maybe once a week. More than that would leave them too beat-up to play. But, once a week, she’ll line all the girls up on the baseline and step in among them, the ball rocked back to let loose.

The whole time before she blows that whistle, too, she’s yelling to them like a drill sergeant, asking, How bad do you want it? How bad do you want it?

At the end of a game or the beginning, it doesn’t matter, it’s never the fastest or the strongest player who gets that rolling-away ball. It’s whatever girl dives the hardest. Whoever fights for it. Whoever doesn’t let anybody take it away. Whoever doesn’t care about their precious hair or skin or teeth. It’s all about whoever wants it the worst.

This is the drill Denorah’s running right now.

Only, this time it’s no drill.





ONE LITTLE INDIAN


The first place Denorah’s going is Mona’s. If she can cut across, find the road, it’ll take her right to Mona’s trailer, and, and, and maybe that old bear will be there, maybe he never went to sleep this winter, maybe he’ll smell an elk and stand up, forget about waiting those berries out.

It’s a good plan—it’s a stupid, stupid plan—until, maybe a mile out, her lungs raw, her shins bloody from how hard the snow’s crusted, her feet soaking wet and numb forever, Denorah runs right up to the lip of a drop that’s probably a hundred rocky feet down.

The wind coming up it pushes her back, saves her life.

Down at the way-bottom there’s an old broken-down corral and a stone something, but nobody’s lived down there for eighty, a hundred years. This is one of those far-out allotments that somebody tried to make work, but Blackfeet aren’t farmers, Blackfeet aren’t ranchers.

“Nooo!” Denorah screams down into that big empty space she can’t cross.

She looks back like she’s been telling herself not to, and maybe a quarter mile back, not even that, it looks at first like a horse is cresting the rise. Her heart swells, thinking it’s her dad on one of Cassidy’s horses, but that was a lie, the men never went down to see what the dogs had tied into, the dogs were already dead by then, they all were.

And this still isn’t a horse head.

It’s Shaney, whatever she is. Elk Head Woman.

She walks forward, has human shoulders, a woman’s arms, one arm red from all the blood coming down from her shoulder. Long gym shorts and tall socks. Wide eyes fixed right on Denorah.

“Why won’t you even run!” Denorah yells back.

Elk Head Woman just keeps coming.

Denorah bounces on her feet, her back to that long drop, and looks left and right, her only two choices.

Right is more of the same: what looks like snow forever, all the way over to the Park, but with coulees gouging through deep and sudden. Left is that same snow for maybe a mile, but then there’s the lake out that way. The one her dad’s friend drowned in, or whatever. And—and that’s where his other friend got arrested—

“Oh yeah,” Denorah says.

There’s lake houses over on the shore. Cabins with steep roofs and canoes lashed to the porch across the door, like that would really keep anybody out. Her dad’s friend Ricky had broken into one to report that body floating facedown in the water—to call and report a body in the water.

Meaning: a phone.

Denorah can call Mona’s from there, she can call the Game Office, her dad, her new dad, she can report the massacre, report an officer very, very down.

Denorah looks back to Elk Head Woman, gone again, slogging through the deep snow that’s between the rises—she only walks in a straight line, like following a ridge would be undignified, would be the land making her do something.

Picking her foot placements as carefully as she can, so she’s walking where the wind’s scoured the snow away, Denorah goes left and keeps low, always picking the side of the brush that threatens to drop her down the cliff instead of the other side, where she can be seen.

She remembers some grade school teacher talking about how Indians having long hair—it was Miss Grace, a French-accented blond woman from Canada—how long hair, it helped with hunting. When hanging down, it wavered back and forth like grass, and it hid the recognizable human features.

It had been bullshit, of course—hair isn’t grass, faces are faces—but Denorah has never forgotten it, either.

Running now, half certain that Elk Head Woman anticipated which direction her prey would take, is cutting across on the diagonal, is about to step over this rise right here, Denorah hooks a finger into the tail of her braid and runs the band off, combs the rest free with her fingers.

In her head she’s practicing what she’s going to say into the phone.