The Only Good Indians(86)

Denorah stares at the backside of the drift she just clawed up from.

Jutting up from it, to the roof of the boxcar, is the built-on ladder.

This is what smart girls do, she tells herself. When the killer’s right on their tail, they run up to someplace they can’t get down from.

But she has to see. She has to know.

Denorah nods to herself, nods again, then backs up and rushes ahead, to run up the side of the icy drift, clamp a hand onto that lowest rung.

She makes it three steps before the drift swallows her whole for a second time.

Ten sputtery seconds later she bursts up through the drift partway up the ladder, stabs a hand up one rung higher, pulls herself free.

She clambers to the top, hooks a leg over, and just tries to breathe.

She’s wet head to toe now, which isn’t wonderful.

It’s windier up here, too. Of course.

Denorah hugs herself and inches forward, being sure of each footstep before giving it the rest of her weight. She does not need to fall through, into whatever got left behind in this boxcar.

The last four feet are on her stomach, her hair coiled in her hand so it doesn’t blow over the edge ahead of her, give her away.

Elk Head Woman is just standing there, her ungainly head cocked a bit to the side, the boxcar locked in her glare.

Denorah smiles.

You’re afraid of trains, she doesn’t say out loud.

But it’s true.

Elk, which is what Elk Head Woman must be in there somewhere, maybe more and more with each step, they’re train-shy. Her dad told her this. It was a story from one of his great-uncles, about how once all the men in town had backed a herd of elk up to the tracks, blown them away when the train came. They hadn’t meant to use the train as a fence, were just using it for sound cover since they weren’t supposed to be shooting in town, but it had turned into a fence all the same. The one or two elk that got away, her dad said, had told the rest the Truth About Trains, and that was that, no more using train tracks to hunt.

Evidently trains themselves are even scarier, never mind that there’s no wheels on this train. Never mind that the cars aren’t even actually connected. Never mind that there aren’t any tracks.

Elk might be tough and fast, Denorah figures, but they don’t seem to be the best problem-solvers. Still, it’s not going to take Elk Head Woman forever to figure out that this train is only three cars long, and not making any sparks, not filling the world with sound.

Elk Head Woman opens her mouth and a low bleat eeks out, like testing this situation, like announcing her uncertainty, like asking the herd for help here. When none comes she steps back, like the train trance she’s in is losing a bit of its grip.

Denorah turns, crawls back to the ladder, hand-over-hands it down into the drift, kicks out the other side, walking her previous churned-up path.

Still no Elk Head Woman.

“Choo-choo, crazy lady,” Denorah says, tossing a middle-finger salute off her forehead—another thing she learned from her dad, every time they’d just passed a cop.

The lake, she’s saying inside.

She can make Duck Lake now.

The one time she looks back, there’s no Elk Head Woman rounding either side of the boxcars. But there will be, she knows. There will be.

Denorah quickens her pace.





BLOOD-CLOT BOY


She should have crossed the dirt road she needs ten minutes ago, Denorah knows. Twenty.

It’s like—it’s like all the roads are gone. Like the reservation’s dialed back a hundred years, to before cars. Like that broken-down corral back there, like it’s probably still standing, has a stone house beside it now, smoke curling up from the chimney.

Either that or Denorah’s a town girl, knows every inch of the basketball court, but the ungreat outdoors? Not so much.

One tree is the same as the next. All this snow looks like all the rest of the snow.

The lake, though.

Every few hundred yards she’ll work her way up a rise, see it shimmering in the distance.

What time does it get dark? Four?

Coach is going to flip when her star player doesn’t show up an hour before the game. But that’s good. Wait, no: That doesn’t matter. By then Denorah’s mom will have called in the National Guard, probably. She’ll have walked up Cassidy’s long driveway, found all the bodies burning, seen the blood splashed on the court, found Victor Yellow Tail over by the outhouse, killed twice.

And … and there are tracks in the snow, aren’t there? Denorah looks behind her to be sure.

Hopefully Elk Head Woman is still stuck on the wrong side of that ghost train. But: Don’t count on that, Denorah tells herself. Elk Head Woman’s got to be close already. Don’t look now. Okay, don’t look again, and again.

Denorah sags to her knees, makes herself push up, push on.

Her first wind was spent before Cassidy’s camper was even out of sight. Her second wind didn’t even register. She’s going on pure need to survive now. Need to survive and the conditioning Coach is always saying can decide a game.

All that plus a little hope: the lake houses.

Maybe some crazy hermit of an ice fisherman is down there, snowed in. Maybe some of the high schoolers have broken into one of the cabins like always, are partying this weekend. Denorah can … she can take one of their snowmobiles, tear out of there, run for Canada.