The Only Good Indians(2)
Fuck it.
All he was going to hunt in Minneapolis was tacos, and a bed.
But, until then, this beer would work.
The bar was all roughnecks, wall-to-wall. No fights yet, but give it time. There was another Indian, Dakota probably, nursing a bottle in a corner by the pool tables. He’d acknowledged Ricky and Ricky had nodded back, but there was as much distance between the two of them as there was between Ricky and his crew.
More important, there was a blond waitress balancing a tray of empties between and among. Fifty sets of eyes were tracking her, easy. To Ricky she looked like the tall girl Lewis had run off to Great Falls with in July, but she’d probably already left his ass, meaning now Lewis was sitting in a bar down there just like this one, peeling the label off his beer just the same.
Ricky lifted his bottle in greeting, across all the miles.
Four beers and nine country songs later, he was standing in line for the urinal. Except the line was snaking all back down the hall already, and the last time he’d been in there there’d already been guys pissing in the trash can and the sink both. The air in there was gritty and yellow, almost crunched between Ricky’s teeth when he’d accidentally opened his mouth. It wasn’t any worse than the honeypots out at the rig, but out at the rig you could just unzip wherever, let fly.
Ricky backed out, drained his beer because cops love an Indian with a beer bottle in the great outdoors, and made to push his way out for a breath of fresh air, maybe a fence post in desperate need of watering.
At the exit the bouncer opened his meaty hand against Ricky’s chest, warned him about leaving. Something about the head count and the fire marshal.
Ricky looked past the open door to the clump of roughnecks and cowboys waiting to come in, their eyes flashing up to him but not asking for anything. It was the queue Ricky would have to mill around in to wait his turn to get back in. But it was starting to not really be his decision anymore, right? Inside of maybe ninety seconds, here, he was going to be peeing, so any way he could up the chances of being someplace where he could do that without making a mess of himself, well.
He could stand in a thirty-minute line to eyeball that blond waitress some more, sure. Ricky turned sideways to slip past the bouncer, nodding that he knew what he was doing, and already a roughneck was stepping forward to take his place.
There wasn’t even any time to stiff-leg it over beside the bar, by the steaming pile of bags the dumpsters were. Ricky just walked straight ahead, out into the sea of crew cab trucks parked more or less in rows, and on the way he unleashed almost before he could come to a stop, had to lean back from it because this was a serious fire-hose situation.
He closed his eyes from the purest pleasure he’d felt in weeks, and when he opened them, he had the feeling he wasn’t alone anymore.
He steeled himself.
Only stupid Indians brush past a bunch of hard-handed white dudes, each of them sure that seat you had in the bar, it should have, by right, been theirs. They’re cool with the Chief among them being the chain monkey, but when it comes down to who has an eyeline on the white woman, well, that’s another thing altogether, isn’t it?
Stupid, Ricky told himself. Stupid stupid stupid.
He looked ahead, to the hood he was going to hip-slide over, the bed of the truck he hoped wasn’t piled with ankle-breaking equipment, because that was his next step. A clump of white men can beat an Indian into the ground, yeah, no doubt about it, happens every weekend up here on the Hi-Line. But they have to catch his ass first.
And now that he was, by his figuring, about three fluid pounds lighter, and sobering up fast, no way was even the ex–running back of them going to hook a finger into Ricky’s shirt.
Ricky grinned a tight-lipped grin to himself and nodded for courage, dislodging all the rifles he couldn’t keep stacked up in his head, rifles that were actually behind the seat of his truck back at the site. When he’d left Browning he’d taken them all, even his uncles’ and granddad’s—they were all in the same closet by the front door—and then grabbed the gallon baggie of random shells, figuring some of them had to go to these guns.
The idea had been that he was going to need stake-money when he hit Minneapolis, and rifles turn into cash faster than just about anything. Except then he’d found work along the way. And he’d got to thinking about his uncles needing to fill their freezer for the winter.
Standing in the sprawling parking lot of the roughneck bar in North Dakota, Ricky promised to mail every one of those back. Would he have to pull the bolts, though, mail them in separate packages from the rifles, so the rifles wouldn’t really be rifles anymore?
Ricky didn’t know, but he did know that right now he wanted that pump .30-06 in his hands. To shoot if it came to that, but mostly just to swing around, the open end of the barrel leaving half-moons in cheeks and eyebrows and rib cages, the butt perfect for jaws.
He might be going down in this parking lot in a puddle of his own piss, but these grimy white boys were going to remember this Blackfeet, and think twice the next time they saw one of him walking into their bar.
If only Gabe were here. Gabe liked this kind of shit—playing cowboys and Indians in all the parking lots of the world. He’d do his stupid war whoop and just rush the hell in. It might as well have been a hundred and fifty years ago for him, every single day of his ridiculous life.
When you’re with him, though, with Gabe … Ricky narrowed his eyes, nodded to himself again for strength. To fake it anyway—to try to be like Gabe, here. When Ricky was with Gabe, he’d always want to give a whoop like that too, the kind that made it where, when he turned around to face these white boys, it’d feel like he was holding a tomahawk in his hand. It’d feel like his face was painted in harsh crumbly blacks and whites, maybe a single finger-wide line of red on the right side.