Winter Counts(88)

Then the world rotated away as I was pulled backward onto the ground, my gaze fixed on the light fixtures up on the ceiling. It took me a second to realize that there was an arm around my neck, choking me. Loco was behind me, squeezing the breath from my lungs. He’d somehow shaken off enough electricity to put down a buffalo.

I struggled to pry his arm loose, but he had me in a sleeper hold. The move was highly effective; I’d used it many times when I needed to incapacitate someone. His right arm was looped around my throat, and his other pushed against my neck, cutting off the flow of both blood and air. He increased the pressure on my larynx, and I started choking, knowing that I had about ten seconds before I’d go unconscious.

I tried turning my head to open my airway, without success. My only chance of breaking a choke hold was to force his arms off my neck. I started clawing at them, but the loss of blood from the gunshot had weakened my strength, and I couldn’t get any leverage. My vision started going gray around the edges.

I could hear Nathan yelling something at me. What was it? It seemed like he was saying he was proud of me. I didn’t think there was a goddamn thing to be proud of—I’d had clean shots at Loco and flat out missed. Then I’d failed again with the hotshot. I thought about my life ending in this crappy building, how everything I’d experienced and lived had brought me to this place, this moment.

“The prod! The prod!”

Suddenly I understood that, while Nathan was tied to the chair, he’d somehow managed to kick the cattle prod toward me with his foot. I grabbed it with my right hand and stabbed blindly at Loco with it. Startled, he lessened the pressure for a second, which gave me an opening. I finally broke his choke hold and breathed in deeply, the oxygen flooding my cells as I stood up.

Loco was kneeling on the ground and I kicked him hard, stunning him and knocking him on his back. “Fuck you!” he hissed.

“No, fuck you, wanagi.” Ghost. Loco was an evil spirit, and it was time to banish him from this world and send him to the next.

I took the cattle prod and jammed it into his right eye socket. He screamed, and I leaned in with all of my weight, inserting the device as far as I could into his head. I pushed down until I felt resistance, the back of his skull. He started shaking, his body jerking and convulsing, then he began to babble and drool, trying to express some final thoughts.

I wouldn’t take any chances this time. I hit the power switch on the hotshot, sending the voltage directly into his brain, frying whatever was left in there. His head shuddered and trembled, but I kept at it until he wasn’t moving at all.

Though I knew he was dead this time, I glanced down at his body to make sure. After a moment of staring at the corpse, I was convinced, then decided to sit down. I wanted to cut Nathan loose, but the pain from the gunshot was back in full force, and I felt tired. Exhausted, really. I stretched out on the floor and looked around for Nathan. The butane torch was still burning on the ground, blue sparks glimmering. I tried to tell Nathan to turn the damn thing off, but I couldn’t spot him, and I don’t think he heard me. I thought he was speaking, telling me something, but whatever he was saying, I couldn’t understand. It didn’t matter now anyway.

When I tried to stand, I couldn’t make it up. Time seemed to expand and contract, and I could feel my thoughts pooling in my head. I wondered what sort of bullets Loco used, and if he’d used a hollow-point that had fragmented in my body. I reflected about what happens when a bullet explodes inside you, how dozens of little shards ricochet and bounce around, slicing open veins and arteries.

It started to hurt to lie on my back, so I curled up on my side. It felt good to rest after the day I’d had. I thought I saw an eagle fly above me in the room, which didn’t make any sense. I heard sounds, but they were just like the ghostly voices in my dream, fleeting and evanescent.

Though Nathan was really yelling at me now, I still wasn’t listening. I thought again about the vision I’d had in the yuwipi, and the little child—the lost bird—who had been shot by the soldier at Wounded Knee. The baby had looked at me in her last moments, and that’s when I’d seen everything I would ever need to know. The expression on her face was compassionate, and I saw she’d accepted her fate and wanted me to understand that. She wanted me to know that I was forgiven, and that there was mercy for me and for all the wounded and the lost. I focused on the baby, her little face filled with love, and closed my eyes.





Epilogue


Nine Months Later

I pulled into the parking lot for the powwow. Nathan got out of my truck, a used Ford F-150, and ran out to find his girlfriend, Shawna, who was already there. He’d been running cross-country at his new high school and had discovered he had a talent for it. He was talking about running cross-country and track at college, and he and Shawna spent every night discussing various combinations of universities they could attend together.

All charges against Nathan had been dropped once it became clear he’d been framed. But it had taken him some time to recover from the incident at the slaughterhouse. For a long while, he had trouble sleeping and suffered from a pretty deep depression. He wouldn’t go to school—claimed there were too many bad memories there. But after a few months he started to open up, largely due to Shawna, who’d come by to visit him. He’d transferred to her high school, and it had made all the difference. He wasn’t the same person he’d been a year ago, but maybe none of us were.