The Only Good Indians(85)

My dad, Cassidy, she killed them all, you’ve got to—

No. Start with Victor.

Your … your cop, your officer, Nathan Yellow Tail’s dad, he tried shooting her but she … she—

Also: Her back is already hurt. That’s where you need to shoot her If you shoot her from the front she’ll just pull the bullet back out.

Like she’s even going to get to call. Like she can even make it the two more miles to the lake. Like she’s not going to fall one too many times, roll over, find Elk Head Woman standing over her.

Why would a phone even still be hooked up out there over winter?

But where else is there to go?

Denorah shakes her head, her hair down now.

She imagines Coach behind her, blowing the whistle.

The next time she looks back, there’s no elk head cresting. It doesn’t mean anything, she tells herself.

Run, run.

She does, harder, and it’s good that she does. This time when she looks back, Elk Head Woman is right there, maybe forty yards back.

She stops, turns her head to the side to get Denorah in one of her big eyes.

“I beat you,” Denorah mutters, not even close to loud enough, and forces herself up a steep rise, comes over it at a shamble, into … into—

Somebody’s old place. A ramshackle house low to the ground, all the windows gone, the walls peeling away. Two old hatchbacks left where they died, it looks like. A barn or shop that’s blown over except one corner. The only structures still standing, not caring about the wind and snow and loneliness, are three rusted-purple boxcars parked nose to tail, the kind people use for storage, the kind her stepdad recommends all around the reservation since they’re about the only thing bears can’t get into. Whoever set them up here was playing with a big train set, it looks like—no, of course: they were trying to get a snowbreak going. Giving the snow something to drift against, to keep it from building up against the house, but these boxcars are train-tall, too, are sitting on blocks or actual wheels or something.

“Hello!” Denorah yells down to the place, but it’s obviously abandoned.

And, is she hearing footsteps behind her? Hoofsteps?

She surges downhill, sliding on her butt and the heels of her hands over and over. When she looks back this time, Elk Head Woman is walking a straight line down the hill, not slipping even once, because elk always know where the foothold will be.

Denorah turns, frantic, considers trying to stay on the other side of one of the hatchbacks, always moving to the front when Elk Head Woman comes around the back, but all it takes to lose that game is one good trip. And the house, going in there she’d just dead-end in a bedroom, die there when Elk Head Woman filled the doorway.

Denorah shakes her head no, there’s nothing for her here. This is just a place to run through. She does, deciding at the last moment that burrowing down under the middle boxcar might slow Elk Head Woman down. If she only walks in straight lines, maybe she doesn’t bend over to go under things, either, right?

It’s as good a guess as anything.

Denorah slashes forward, Elk Head Woman only two car lengths behind now, and forces herself through the wind-scoured crust of snow packed between … probably not wheels, but it doesn’t matter.

Immediately she regrets closing herself in like this, and panics hard, digging with her hands, kicking with her legs until she surges ahead into … a dry cave under this boxcar. A magic kind of place. So quiet but not quite dark: the sunlight’s seeped in through the thousand-million crystals of snow packed all around her, making the walls glow blue like ice.

Not a cave, she tells herself, though. A tomb. A grave.

She gathers her will and pushes into the far blue wall, takes a deep breath to push through, but then each sidearm of snow she sweeps away, ready to break into open air, there’s just more snow, and more snow. She gasps her lungs empty, tries to suck a breath in but there’s only snow everywhere, in her mouth. She gags, bucks, gets her feet under her as best she can and just pushes. Into more snow.

But her hand, it’s through, it’s out there.

She’s swimming now, swimming up through a slushee, not quite surfacing but pulling enough crusted snow down that a sort of sinkhole to the sky opens above her. Her mouth at the bottom of that funnel, she draws as much air in as she can. And again.

Like whoever put the box cars there planned, and like she didn’t think to anticipate, the snow on this is drifted deep-deep, and sloped out for probably thirty feet.

Denorah trudges out through it, the crust cutting into her neck, then her chest, then her stomach, thighs, shins.

On level ground at last, she lowers herself to her fingertips, shakes her hair out of the way, and looks back through the chasm she just made, that’ll probably hold for a few more minutes yet.

Elk Head Woman’s high-tops and tall socks are there through the opening, blurry through the wall of icy snow on the other side. But they’re not moving. For the first time, they’re not moving.

What? Denorah says to herself.

She stands, ready to run, but then doesn’t. She looks through again.

Elk Head Woman’s high-tops and socks again. Still.

“What the hell?” Denorah says, looking left and right to be sure this isn’t a trick, that Elk Head Woman isn’t coming around either side.

Has … did Shaney get stupid when her head went all elk? Is she acting like an elk now more than a person?