The Only Good Indians(3)
The years can just fall away, man.
“So,” Ricky said, his hands balled into fists, chest already heaving, and turned around to get this over with, his teeth clenched tight so that if he was turning around into a fist it wouldn’t rattle him too much.
But … no one?
“What the—?” Ricky said, cutting himself off because there was something, yeah.
A huge dark form, clambering over a pearly white, out-of-place 280Z.
Not a horse, either, like he’d knee-jerked into his head. Ricky had to smile. This was an elk, wasn’t it? A big meaty spike, too dumb to know this was where the people went, not the animals. It blew once through its nostrils and launched into the truck to its right, leaving the pretty sloped-down hood of that little Nissan taco’d up at the edges, stomped all down in the middle. But at least the car had been quiet about it. The truck the elk had slammed into was much more insulted, screaming its shrill alarm loud enough that the spike grabbed onto the ground with all four hooves. Instead of the twenty logical paths it could have taken away from this sound, it scrabbled up across the loud truck’s hood, fell off into the between space on the other side.
And now that drunk little elk was banging into another truck, and another.
All the alarms were going off, all the lights going back and forth.
“What is into you, man?” Ricky said to the spike, impressed.
The feeling didn’t last long. Now the spike was turned around, was barreling down an aisle between the cars, Ricky right in its path, its head down like a mature bull—
Ricky threw himself to the side, into another truck, setting off another alarm.
“You want some of me?” Ricky yelled to the elk, reaching over into the bed of a random truck. He came up with a jawless oversized crescent wrench that would be a good enough deterrent, he figured. He hoped.
Never mind he was outweighed by a cool five hundred pounds.
Never mind that elk don’t do this.
When he heard the spike blow behind him he turned already swinging, crashing the crescent wrench’s round head into the side mirror of a tall Ford. The big Ford’s alarm screamed, flashed every light it had, and when Ricky turned around to shuffling hooves behind him, it wasn’t hooves this time, but boots.
All the roughnecks and cowboys waiting to get into the bar.
“He … he—” Ricky said, holding the wrench like a tire beater, every second truck in his immediate area flashing in pain, and showing the pounding they’d just taken. He saw it too, saw them seeing it: this Indian had got hisself mistreated in the bar, didn’t know who drove what, so he was taking it out on every truck in the parking lot.
Typical. Momentarily one of these white boys was going to say something about Ricky being off the reservation, and then what was supposed to happen could get proper-started.
Unless Ricky, say, wanted to maybe live.
He dropped the wrench into the slush, held his hand out, said, “No, no, you don’t understand—”
But they did.
When they stepped forward to put him down in time-honored fashion, Ricky turned, flopped half over the 280Z he hadn’t trashed, endured a bad moment when somebody’s reaching fingers were hooked into a belt loop, but he spun his hips hard, tore through, fell down and ahead, his hands to the ground for a few overbalanced steps. A beer bottle whipped by his head, shattered on a grille guard right in front of him, and he threw his hands up to keep his eyes safe, veered what he thought was around that truck but not enough—his hip caught the last upright of the guard, spun him around, into another truck, with another stupid alarm.
“Fuck you!” he yelled to the truck, to all the trucks, all the cowboys, just North Dakota and oil fields and America in general, and then, running hard down a lane between trucks, hitching himself ahead with more mirrors, two of them coming off in his hands, he felt a smile well up on his face, Gabe’s smile.
This is what it feels like, then.
“Yes!” Ricky screamed, the rush of adrenaline and fear sloshing up behind his eyes, crashing over his every thought. He turned around and ran backward so he could point with both hands at the roughnecks. Four steps into this big important gesture he fell out into open space, kind of like a turnrow in a plowed field, caught his left boot heel on a rock or frozen clump of bullshit grass, went sprawling.
Behind him he could see dark shapes vaulting over whole truck beds, their cowboy hats lifting with them, not coming down, just becoming part of the night.
“White boys can move …” he said to himself, less certain of all this, and pivoted, rose, was moving again, too.
When the footfalls and boot slaps were too close, close enough he couldn’t handle it, knew this was it, Ricky grabbed a fiberglass dually fender, used it to swing himself a sharp and sudden ninety degrees, into what would have been the truck’s long side, what should have been its side, but he was sliding now, he was going under, leading with the slick heels of his work boots.
This was the kind of getting away he’d learned at twelve years old, when he could slither and snake.
The truck was just tall enough for him to slide under, through the muck, his momentum carrying him halfway across. To get across the rest of the truck’s width, he reached up for a handhold, the skin of his palm and the underside of his fingers immediately smoking from the three-inch exhaust pipe.
Ricky yelped but kept moving, came up on the other side of the truck fast enough that he slammed into a beater that didn’t have an alarm. Two truck lengths ahead, the dark shapes were pulling their best one-eighty, casting left and right for the Indian.