The Only Good Indians(11)
“Stupid dog,” Lewis says, keeping it short because he doesn’t trust his voice not to break into pieces, choke him up.
And then one of Harley’s hind legs twitches once, exactly in rhythm somehow with the way that elk on the living room floor blinked her eyes. The elk that wasn’t dead on the floor of Lewis’s living room, that wasn’t alive on the floor—that wasn’t there at all.
Lewis’s response to Harley being sort of alive isn’t the right response, isn’t the response he’s proud of: he sucks air in and steps back, almost falls on his ass.
Of the five of them it’s Silas who dives forward to hug on to Harley, lift him up, get the pressure off his throat. Jerry reaches up with a meaty paw, unhooks the chain from the top of the fence, and Shaney’s already guiding Harley’s bloody collar up over his head, being careful of his ears.
Silas turns around, Harley cradled in his arms, and Lewis pulls his eyes away for just a moment, finds himself watching Shaney, who’s maybe going to step forward, hug Harley to her, but then she’s jerking back all at once, startled from the wall of sound suddenly rushing at them all.
Eldon grabs Lewis’s shoulder like to pull him out of the way, or use him to push off of, and even Jerry looks up faster than his walrus-looking self usually does.
The whole backyard is shaking and loud and fast and dangerous, the kind of sensory trauma where Lewis is pretty sure that, if there were a sprinkler rainbowing a wall of water back and forth, that iridescent sheet of color would collapse, turn to mist.
It’s the train that runs behind this neighborhood twice a day, what Peta calls the Thunderball Express. It’s why her and Lewis can swing rent on a place with a ceiling this high. It’s also why Harley can’t be getting out of the backyard anymore.
Lewis looks up at the coal and graffiti smearing past, sees tomorrow’s headline in his head: ONCE-LOCAL MAN CAN’T EVEN TOUCH HIS OWN DYING DOG.
Sometimes the headlines get it right. And the story on 12b this time, it’s accompanied by a small out-of-focus black-and-white photograph Lewis’s mind takes on reflex, because he can’t really deal with it in the moment, what with the train screaming past, tearing its necessary hole in the world: Harley’s mouth yawning open, flashing teeth, snapping back at the source of what he thinks is the cause of all this pain.
Silas jerks his face away right as the bite’s happening, right when Harley’s teeth have hooked into the skin of his cheek, but that just makes it worse, really.
TUESDAY
Lewis is using little short tear-offs of masking tape to outline a certain dead animal on the carpet of the living room floor. It’s to prove that it couldn’t have happened, that she wouldn’t have even fit right there. That’s what he’s telling himself anyway.
He’s got the couch shoved back, Peta’s grandmother’s antique coffee table pushed the other way. Peta’s family isn’t old-money Great Falls—is there any such thing?—but they’ve been here in one way or another since about when the original reservation was staked out.
She’s in the garage with Harley, on the nest of sleeping bags and blankets she pulled together for him when she walked home from the make-do park-n-ride two streets over, found Lewis and Shaney and Eldon on the back porch dribbling water into Harley’s mouth. Jerry was gone in the truck, delivering Silas to the hospital, his face packed in towels.
After they’d pulled away, Jerry driving easy, one hand on the wheel, the other keeping Silas upright, Eldon said it figured that a mailman would get it from a dog, right?
Right.
According to Peta, who spent most of her childhood nursing dogs and cats and baby birds, Harley could still go either way. Silas was never in that kind of danger—though, before he left, Lewis could see yellowy teeth through the flapped-open cheek skin.
Jerry says Lewis shouldn’t hold it against Harley. He didn’t know what he was doing. When the whole world hurts, you bite it, don’t you?
Harley’s nest of sleeping bags and blankets were meant to be the insulation around the sweat lodge Lewis had planned for the backyard, but screw it. Maybe they still will be. Maybe, next year, wrapped in heat and darkness and steam, Lewis will dip some water out of the bucket and tip a little out for Harley. In memory of, all that.
You can do it for dogs the same as people, he’s pretty sure. And, if not, some old chief gonna step down out of the sky, slap his wrist?
Lewis tears off another longish rectangle of masking tape, sticks it to the carpet in front of the couch, then peels it up and sticks it again, trying to get the slow turn down from the belly to the front of the back leg just right. Thing is, these re-stuck sections of tape all curl up after a few minutes, like retracting from the shape Lewis is forcing them to be part of.
The rear hoof is just starting to come together when Peta steps back in with the dishrag over her shoulder, the bottle of goat milk in her hand, and for a slice of an instant she’s a mom, tired from one in diapers, one just balancing around on wobbly legs. But that’s another life than this one, Lewis reminds himself. She doesn’t want kids, was up-front about that even those first couple of weeks in East Glacier. Not because Lewis is Indian, but because she thinks her pre-Lewis self made enough bad decisions of the chemical variety that any kids she had would have to pay that tab, so they’d be starting out with the world stacked against them already.