The Only Good Indians(14)

Lewis catches it because the other option is getting popped in the gut with it.

“I wake you, early bird?” she says like a challenge.

“Day off,” Lewis says.

“To spend with him,” Shaney says back, going to Harley now that the door’s open.

She cups his wide head in her hand, draws her nose to his, and squeezes her eyes shut, keeps them like that.

“You smell it, don’t you?” Lewis says.

“He’s dying,” she says, massaging his notched ears.

She rolls into a sitting position on the unassembled sweat, says about Harley and all his scars, “He’s an old warrior, isn’t he?”

“You come just to see him?” Lewis asks, trying not to make it sound confrontational. She hears it anyway.

“Your wife wouldn’t want me here, right? White girls of red men are always the most jealous of my kind.”

“Your kind?” Lewis says, though he kind of already knows.

“Indian, unattached, an ass like this,” Shaney goes on. “I know Jerry says I’m bad news.”

The headline back on the reservation: BASEBALL BASEBALL BASEBALL.

“What’s her name about anyway?” Shaney asks. “She a white-girl tortilla, or all against wearing animal skins, what?”

“Peta with an e, not an i,” Lewis recites, falling through Peta’s own explanation. “She was supposed to have been a boy, her dad’s name is Pete, so he put an a on his own name, handed it down.”

Shaney nods like she can track that, sure, and when she threads her bangs away Lewis clocks that her left eye’s all bloodshot, and that—has he ever even seen her forehead?—the skin above her eyebrow on that side’s drawn tight and bumply, like from sudden contact with a dashboard, or an aerosol can exploding in a burning pile of trash.

The eye, though. Bad date last night, Lewis has to think. Either that or the wrong boyfriend. He doesn’t ask, tries not to be too obvious about looking. Which pretty much means he telegraphs his thoughts word for word across to her, he knows.

“Anyway, I came over for a book, Mr. Library,” she says, shaking her hair back over her forehead and eye. “Not to jump your bones. Call her up, tell her that, I’ll wait. My day off, too, yeah?”

Lewis looks at her about this, about the book thing, because usually this kind of lead-in is the setup for some joke. Reading about wizards and druids at the mall, or werewolves and vampires being detectives, it doesn’t exactly bump a thirty-six-year-old’s cool meter up. And if anybody knew centaurs and mermaids are sometimes part of it? Or demons and angels? Dragons?

Keep those book covers folded all the way back, Lewis knows.

Except here’s a girl actually asking to see them.

Even Peta doesn’t really understand the fascination, the compulsion, the draw. How, camping, he always tucks a paperback or two in his pack, each inside its own separate ziplock bag. She’s a super-athlete, though. She was always running too fast or jumping too high to pick up reading. It’s nothing bad about her.

Keep saying that, Lewis tells himself.

Keep saying that and dribble out from under the garage, into the bright open sky. It’s that kind of November day.

“Anything particular?” Lewis says back to Shaney without looking, all his fascination on the rim so he can come up onto his toes to shoot. What he has planned is a trip to the bank, to show off, to match the shot she just made look so easy, but then he has to collapse that idea at the last instant to keep his sweats on his body. Nothing underneath.

“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” Shaney says. “Tall Indian choking on the court, I mean.”

The ball’s bouncing through the junk lumber behind the goal. Lewis picks through barefoot to retrieve it, finds an even worse way back to the concrete pad.

“Court intrigue or heroic quests to save the realm?” Lewis asks. “Ships or horses, elves or—”

“I don’t know, something exciting,” Shaney says. “First in a series, maybe? Nice long series. Something to keep me busy all night.”

Can she ever just talk about one thing?

“You being serious?” Lewis asks, chest-passing the ball across to her slow enough that she rips it from the air, like disgusted with the weakness of that lackluster pass. Her billowy T-shirt snags the grabby ball when she whips it across her midsection, though, so, pissed off about that, she bounces the ball high and wrenches her arms around behind her to tie her shirt, take up the slack, then catches the ball back. Peta, in this situation, usually tucks the front of her shirt up under her sports bra, but that isn’t really an option for Shaney today, Lewis can tell.

“Oh,” she says, following the look Lewis doesn’t mean at her stomach.

It’s a long ragged scar up and down, not side to side and low like a C-section. It’s an open-heart-surgery scar, just, too low for the heart, and with an ugly, uneven ridge of scar tissue. Is this and whatever happened to her forehead and eye a matching pair? One really bad night instead of a lot of pretty sucky ones?

Lewis wants to ask about that car crash, or ask if the baby made it, or if they got the guy did this, except what if she was the only one to make it through that wreck? What if the baby didn’t make it? What if that guy’s still out there, carrying no scars himself?