Winter Counts(2)

I snaked out my arm and yanked his legs. He went down with a thud, and I saw my opening. I stood up, grabbed his right arm, and twisted it behind his back until I met some resistance. Then I twisted some more.

“How you like that, you son of a bitch?” I said.

Guv looked up at me and hissed, “Fuck you, halfie.”

I had to hand it to him, he had some balls. I flashed back to high school when I’d been much smaller, not the big guy I was now. I remembered all the times I’d been held down and beaten by Guv and the other full-bloods, my angry tears, the humiliation still with me.

I wondered if I should let Guv go, show him the mercy I’d never been given. That was the Lakota way, wasn’t it? Wacantognaka, one of the seven Lakota values—it meant compassion, generosity, kindness, forgiveness. I remembered the lessons from my teachers back at school. They’d taught that the greatest honor, the greatest bravery, came when a warrior chose to let his enemy go free and touched him with the coup stick. Legend was that even Crazy Horse had shown his courage by counting coup on a Pawnee warrior once, chasing him across the river, but deciding not to kill him, to honor his bravery and grant him his freedom. I knew that the honorable thing to do—the Lakota way—was to set Guv free without any more punishment.

Fuck that.

I twisted his arm until it came loose from the socket with a sickening crunch. Then I stepped back and kicked him in the cheek with all my force, snapping his head back violently. I took my boot heel and smashed it down on his face, teeth snapping like stale potato chips. I kneeled down and grabbed Guv’s hair.

“Listen to me, you goddamn scumbag. You ever touch another kid at that school, I’ll cut your dick off and shove it down your throat. Hear me, skin?”

He didn’t say anything. His left eye was swollen and bloody, and his nose seemingly gone, pounded back into his face. Blood streamed from the black hole of his former nose and mouth.

“How’s that for counting coup, asshole?”

I leaned over to see if he was still breathing. A few faint breaths. I saw some teeth lying on the concrete. They looked like little yellow tombstones. I scooped them up and stuck them in my pocket.





2


I opened the door to the shack that the government calls a house. Rap music was pounding, and the smell of frying meat had stunk up the place. My nephew, Nathan, had cooked up some cheap hamburger and was dipping a piece of old bread in the grease. His short black hair stuck straight up, a dark contrast to his light brown skin and hazel eyes. He was wearing his favorite hoodie, a grimy blue sweatshirt with the high school’s mascot—the Falcons—on the front. The music was so loud, he didn’t even hear me come in until I poked him in the ribs.

He’d been living with me for the last three years, ever since his mom—my sister, Sybil—died in a car accident. His dad was long gone, and there was no way I’d let him go to one of those foster homes or boarding schools. Sybil had been driving to work when someone hit her head-on. I was the one who had to tell Nathan that his mom had gone to the spirit world. The look on his face that day had stayed with me.

Nathan was fourteen now and had finally settled down some. Right after his mom died, he’d started skipping school and breaking car windows with his friends. He’d said he didn’t need school because he was going to be a famous Indian rapper—the red Tupac. I told him that was fine, but if I got stuck paying for another smashed window, I’d sell his video game console. Lately he’d changed his tune and was talking about college. Somebody from the local university had talked at his school and lit a fire under his ass. I didn’t know if that fire was going to stay lit, but I’d been hiding half of the money I’d earned from my last few jobs in a Red Wing shoebox at the back of the closet. I’d drunk up most of my cash back in the day, but that wouldn’t happen again. I’d quit drinking for good. The money I saved would pay for Nathan’s college. He’d be the first in our family to go.

“Hey old man,” he said. As he lifted his bread out of the grease, some of the hot oil landed on my arm. It felt like the tip of a switchblade.

“Can you turn that shit down?” I pointed to the boom box on the counter.

“That ain’t shit, skin!” He smirked. “That’s some old-school Biggie.”

“Yeah, whatever, just turn it off.” I grabbed some of the old bread and looked around for more food. “We got any of that cheese left?”

“Nah, but you can have some of this.” The pound of fatty hamburger I’d bought last week had cooked down to almost nothing. I scooped some up with the bread, the grease leaving trails on the plate like an oil spill.

“What happened to you?” he asked. From the look on his face, I knew it was bad. I didn’t want to look at myself in the mirror.

“I wiped out on the bike.”

“Uh, okay.” He returned to his bread.

“We got any aspirin?” I could feel the pain in my back and sides starting to come in. Tomorrow would be rough.

“Don’t think so,” he said. We barely had money for toilet paper sometimes, much less luxuries like painkillers.

“So, what happened at school today?”

“Nothing.”

I hadn’t expected to get any news. He’d always been quiet, but he’d cut off most real communication in the last year or so. To learn anything, I had to ask his best friend, Jimmy, when he came around. For some reason, Jimmy loved to talk to me, but I couldn’t get shit out of Nathan. Maybe he opened up to Jimmy’s ina when he went over there. Still, I tried to pry information out of him whenever I could.