The Only Good Indians(87)

Are there any train tracks between here and there? She’s not counting on bears to save her anymore, but train tracks.

Run, run, she tells herself.

Last three seconds of the game, push. And again.

Her lungs aren’t burning anymore, they’re cold, and there’s blood in the back of her throat she’s pretty sure, what Coach calls lung cheese. But Denorah should have blown all that out two months ago, when practice started. And she’s lactose-intolerant anyway, she says about the lung cheese, trying to make a joke out of it. The saddest, most-alone joke.

She breathes a long hair down her throat and has to stop to cough it up, puke a little besides.

She’s not going to make it.

Is the lake still the same distance away? It can’t be.

Denorah closes her eyes tight to reset, to find herself in all this pain, all this cold. Distantly, like it’s someone else, she’s aware that she’s on her knees, that her hands are over her face.

The road has to be up here somewhere. It will be up here.

What’s happening is that she’s thinking like she’s in a car, where distance goes by fast. But she’s on frozen wet feet, and not taking anything even close to a straight line, and the road does swerve the other way anyway. She’s probably just coming in above that bend, meaning the road will be farther.

Don’t panic, girl. Gather the ball, collect your wits, and check the time clock.

Denorah lowers her hands, looks up to the hazy sun.

At least three hours left, she decides. Three hours before Elk Head Woman is stepping out of every darkness, which will be all there is.

But you’ll be dead long before then, she reminds herself, and brings her face down. To a long brown face watching her from maybe twenty feet ahead, just behind the next rise.

Denorah knows not to flinch back, knows better than to scream, but still, inside, all her big plans are falling off their flimsy metal shelves, clattering down into the pit of her stomach.

This is it, then.

Denorah stands, her hair lifting all around her, her hands opening and closing by her thigh because she’s about to be gouging eyes and tearing ears, whatever she can get to—you come at a reservation girl, bring a box of Band-Aids—but then … then—

It’s a buck. A mule deer. She knows because back when she still had to stand up on the seat of her dad’s truck to see over the dash, he taught her how to tell mulies and whitetails apart. It’s size, sure, and how their racks are shaped if they’re male, but before all that, it’s color. Mule deer are dusky brown for life out here on the flats, and they don’t have white rings around their mouth and nose so much, and, according to her dad, they taste better, but color’s an easier tell than running one down, taking a bite.

This one’s just staring at Denorah with his big black-marble eyes. Waiting to see what she is, his tail twitching out the seconds.

And then he’s looking past her. Behind her.

“No …” Denorah says, turning around all the same.

Elk Head Woman, plowing ahead, leading with her wide forehead.

Denorah turns back to tell the mulie to go but he’s already gone, running down some frozen creek bed, probably—yep: on cue he bounds up like off a hidden trampoline, floats for a span of ground Denorah is completely jealous of. The instant he hits the ground his hooves are already digging in, churning him forward.

“Hit it, brother,” she says, and urges her own self forward as well.

She’s got maybe a quarter mile of space between her and Elk Head Woman, if that.

What was that little kid story her dad told her about whitetails? He said he’d heard it from his granddad, but Denorah learned later that he never knew her great-granddad—their years hadn’t overlapped, quite. He’s heard it from some granddad, then. Either way, when he told it, it was so real. The way whitetails got that white ring around their mouth and nose, according to him, it was because they were always sneaking into Browning to drink from the bowls of milk everybody used to leave out, from back when there weren’t any reservation dogs, only reservation cats. That was why the whitetail could come into town like that: no barking. But the cats were too good, they got the mice all so scared that the mice got smart, started living so deep in the walls of the houses that the cats couldn’t get to them, so one day all the cats just left. It was two, maybe three days after that the first dog trotted into town with a stupid grin on its face, looked around for what it could pee on.

Denorah hates that she’d believed that, once upon a time. And she wants to cry for not getting to believe it anymore.

Yes, the deer drank milk, and that left their mouths ringed white.

Fuck it.

Run, run.

She tells herself not to, but she looks back all the same.

No Elk Head Woman. Meaning—meaning Denorah can wait for her to slog up from whatever dip she’s in, or she can cover some more ground.

She moves, moves.

What she’s counting on now, since the lake isn’t getting any closer, is finding the road before her mom’s driven down it, finding it and then flagging her mom down, not even letting her stop the car all the way, just climbing in, locking all four doors, and waving her ahead, Go, go, faster, I’ll explain later, go.

Denorah falls, gets up, falls again, gets up again, and now the horizon is wavery. Not from heat, but from exhaustion. From cold. From no more adrenaline. From too many last three seconds.