The Only Good Indians(91)

So—this is where the old man looks from face to face of the children in the lodge with him, a blanket of stars spread out around them, this is where he says to all the children gathered around the fire that what the Girl does here, for Po’noka but also for her whole tribe, what she does is slide forward on her bloody knees, placing her small body between that rifle and the elk that killed her dad.

She holds her right hand up the slope, palm out, fingers spread—the old man demonstrates—and she says it clear in that cold air: No, Dad! No!

Is it the first time she’s called him that?

“It is,” the old man says. It is.

By slow degrees, the rifle raises, its butt settling down onto Denny Pease’s right hip. He’s just a silhouette all the way up there. Just another hunter.

For a long moment Elk Head Woman doesn’t move, is just hunched there around her calf, but then her long head wrenches around, ready to flinch from that next shot boring into her back, to take her legs away again, to start this whole cycle all over.

Instead, the man-shape up there, he’s sliding his right hand sideways, palm down, left to right like this, the old man says.

It’s the Indian way of saying a thing is over. It’s what he used to end every meeting with, when he was trying to pull Gabe and Cass and Ricky and Lewis back, keep them alive. It’s what he would have told his grandson, if he could have.

It’s over, enough, it can stop here if you really want it to stop.

The Girl nods about this, knows what this hand signal means. She turns back to Elk Head Woman beside her, but Elk Head Woman is jerking now without even being shot, is falling over onto her side, still holding on to her calf, protecting it from whatever this next thing is.

It’s her collapsing into the snow, her legs and arms kicking and reaching, twisting and creaking. Finally her right leg kicks through its human skin, is coarse brown hair underneath. Then an arm pushes through, has a clean black hoof at the end of it.

An elk cow stands up from the snow and lowers her face to her calf, licks its face until it wobbles up, finds it feet, and that’s the last anyone ever sees of those two, walking off into the grass, mother and calf, the herd out there waiting to fold them back in, walk with them through the seasons.

Because it’s the end of the story, the old man holds his right hand up again, like the Girl did that day, and all the children do as well, and then, just like the Girl does four years later, when her team loses State in double-overtime, he balls that hand into an upraised fist. What the Girl will be doing with that held-up fist at the end of that forever game, it’s honoring the Crow team that finally figured out how to shut her down—the first defense to ever do that, and one of the last.

That show of sportsmanship, of respect, of honor, it’s what gets silhouetted on thousands of posters all through high school sports, all across the land that used to be hers.

It’s not the end of the trail, the headlines will all say, it never was the end of the trail.

It’s the beginning.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


I don’t write this novel without Ellen Datlow—not sure how I would write horror at all without her being her—so, thanks, Ellen, always. Not sure how I’d write this novel without how Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife lodged in me, either. But that’s everything she writes. Her stories and characters and scenes are shattered all through my heart. Remove any one of them and I bleed out fast. Too, there’s Elizabeth LaPensée’s Deer Woman: A Vignette, which I picked up at the first Indigenous Comic Con. Or, I think Lee Francis IV maybe gave me a copy when I was there? I don’t remember for sure, but somehow I ended up curled around that comic book, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I’d be lying if I didn’t also cite the seventh episode of season one of Masters of Horror, “Deer Woman” by John Landis. I really liked how that woman kicked whoever needed kicking in that story. I want that for all Indian women. I also want them all to live, too, please. Some of them are my sisters, my nieces, and all of them are my cousins, my aunts. And Joe Lansdale is always kind of my model for how to write, how to get heart and laughs and action and everything good on the page, in whatever genre. And … somehow James Dickey’s poem “A Birth” is either really deep in the grass of this story or it’s part of my writer DNA in a way I can’t shake. The timid steps that new horse takes in that poem, into my world, that’s the way the elk walk for me in this novel. They’re looking at me while they graze, I mean, and if I don’t do them right, then they’re coming for me. I probably won’t hear them either, since my music’s always blasting. Example: when very first starting this novel, the song I had on repeat is D-A-D’s song “Trucker.” Rounding the corner to done, though, I needed people, not music. I think Matthew Pridham and Krista Davis were the first to read it, but Matthieu Lagrenade and Reed Underwood and Bree Pye and Jesse Lawrence and Dave Buchanan were close behind. Thank you all. Hope I’m remembering everybody there. If not, then write your name here: ______________. Thank you, ______________. Thanks as well to Alexandra Neumeister and David Tromblay and Theo Van Alst, and Billy J. Stratton, none of whom read this while I was writing it, but talking about different things with each of you nudged me this way in the story instead of that way. Thank you for those talks. And, talking about talking, I don’t speak Blackfeet, but Robert Hall and Sterling HolyWhiteMountain were able to make that all right and proper for me, along with a lot of Browning and Blackfeet Reservation details, which I didn’t know, as I didn’t grow up there. Which isn’t to say I didn’t still manage to jack it all up. But, if so, it’s on me, not them. Thanks, Robert and Sterling. And, okay, Sylvester Yellow Calf too, you’re on every page. And Pat Calf Looking, my great-uncle, you’re maybe on some as well. While finishing this, I taught a grad seminar on the haunted house, which was so helpful. Won’t list all the students in there, as I’m probably already getting the staredown (I’m really stretching “one paragraph” here … ), but our discussions in that classroom were so vital to me, getting this novel together, as were some old and not-so-old haunted house discussions with Nick Kimbro. Too, thanks to my brother-in-law Oliver Smith, for doing some last-moment eyeshine research deep into a writing night. And thanks to Migizi Pensoneau for helping me get some Great Falls facts … I won’t say “right,” as I tend to change things in the writing of them, but “less wrong,” anyway. I hope. Maybe. Thanks also to Jill Essbaum, who doesn’t yet know I smuggled the opening line from her Hausfrau up onto the rez, with some slight liberties taken. Really, though, thanks for always being my lifeline on the mountain, Jill. I can’t write if I don’t come back down, right? And, talking about making it down the mountain mostly in one piece: thanks to my dad, Dennis Jones, for taking me out before dawn morning after morning, when it’s so dark that everything’s sort of glowing light blue, and you can hear the elk so close that you’re pretty sure you can reach your hand out, touch them. Only, they’re ghosts, aren’t they? They’re so much smarter than I’ll ever be. Mostly what I come back with are stories. But stories last longer than meat, I say. One of those stories is from my great-uncle Gerry Calf Looking. It’s about how one time a herd of elk came to Browning, and how the train came through right when it needed to. And I bet either some of John Calf Looking’s actual stories are in here, or I stole the way he tells those stories. But I also stole the way Delwin Calf Looking said “Tasco” once when we were out after deer, so, you know: stealing’s what I do, yeah? Or: I’m always listening, anyway. And, the next-to-final reader this time was Mackenzie Kiera, who didn’t just give this novel a pass, she stepped inside it, looked out from it, and guided me back in, walked me through all the story’s rooms, one of which is the living room of the house I’m currently renting. It has this high, slanted ceiling, I mean, and this crazy-eyed light that doesn’t know what to do with electricity. So, thanks, ridiculous, probably-haunted light. I’d have never looked down through the blades of my ceiling fan without you. Thanks also—and this is maybe the first time I’ve done this, and I might still delete it, because who can believe me—to the dog that grew up with my kids, Rane and Kinsey. You were Harley here, Grace. You were the best girl. And? Thanks also to a dude I worked with at a warehouse a long time back. Butch. I hijacked you, man, renamed you Jerry. But it’s just because I miss you. You’re also in my “Discovering America” story from better than twenty years ago, I guess. I can’t quit writing about you. And, after all of that to get the novel together, after all the hijackings, all the lifelines and late-night texts, all the people talking me down from the many ledges ringed around each and every novel, thanks to BJ Robbins, first for making it better, for asking the good questions that I was kind of hoping nobody would think to ask, and second for believing in it enough to get it on the right editor’s desk. That editor was and is Joe Monti. Since it’s my name on the cover, you maybe can’t see the impression his hands have left in this story, this book, but, really, this novel didn’t find its final form, the one you’re holding in your hands, until he kind of shrugged and asked, “What if it was this way instead of that way, yeah?” It’s this way now. The other way—what was I even thinking? But sometimes, some books, it takes the right editor to push it those last few steps, into what it can be. Thanks, Joe, thanks, BJ, thanks, Lauren Jackson, best publicist ever, thanks to Madison Penico for helping me get this one right line-by-important-line, thanks, first, second, last, and current readers, thanks to everybody, especially the people I’m forgetting, the animals I’m keeping secret, but mostly, as always, thanks to my beautiful wonderful smart and perfect wife, Nancy, for putting herself between me and the world time and again, leaving me little pockets out of the wind where I can sometimes write a book or three. I write nothing without you shielding me like that. But, really, thanks just for seeing me across a wash of sand when we were both nineteen, and holding my eyes that one little moment longer, a moment that’s lasted and lasted for us, and still has a lifetime to go.