The Only Good Indians(6)

At the end she’s hitting him in the chest with the sides of her fists, real hits that really hurt. Lewis pulls her to him and she’s crying now, her heart beating hard enough for her and Lewis both.

Raining down over the two of them now—Lewis almost smiles, seeing it—is the finest washed-out brown-grey dust from the fan, which Lewis must have hit with his hand on the way down. The dust is like ash, is like confectioner’s sugar if confectioner’s sugar were made from rubbed-off human skin. It dissolves against Lewis’s lips, disappears against the wet of his open eyes.

And there are no elk in the living room with them, though he cranes his head up over Peta to be sure.

There are no elk because that elk couldn’t have been here, he tells himself. Not this far from the reservation.

It was just his guilty mind, slipping back when he wasn’t paying enough attention.

“Hey, look,” he says to the top of Peta’s blond head.

She rouses slowly, turns to the side to follow where he’s meaning.

The ceiling of the living room. That spotlight.

It’s flickering yellow.





SATURDAY


On break at work—he’s supposed to be training the new girl, Shaney—Lewis calls Cass.

“Long time, no hear,” Cass says, his reservation accent a singsong kind of pure Lewis hasn’t heard for he doesn’t know how long. In response, Lewis’s voice, smoothed down flat from only ever talking to white people, rises like it never even left. It feels unfamiliar in his mouth, in his ears, and he wonders if he’s faking it somehow.

“Had to call your dad to get your number,” he says to Cass.

“What happens when you move away for ten years, yeah?”

Lewis shifts the phone to his other ear.

“So what’s going?” Cass asks. “Not calling from jail, are you? Post office finally figure out you’re Indian, what?”

“Pretty sure they know,” Lewis says. “It’s the first checkbox.”

“Then it’s her,” Cass says with what sounds like a grin. “She finally figured out you’re Indian, enit?”

What Cass and Gabe and Ricky had told him when he was running off with Peta was that he should get his return address tattooed on his forearm, so he could get his ass shipped back home when she got tired of playing Dr. Quinn and the Red Man.

“You wish she’d figure it out,” Lewis tells Cass on the phone, turning to be sure Shaney, his shadow for the day, isn’t standing in the break room doorway soaking all this in. “She even lets me hang my Indian junk on all the walls.”

“Like Indian-Indian,” Cass says, “or Indian just because an Indian owns it?”

“I called to ask a question,” Lewis says, quieter, closer.

Of Gabe and Ricky and Cass, Cass was always the one he could dial down to “serious” easiest. Like the real him, the real and actual person, wasn’t buried as deep under attitude and jokes and bluster as it was with Ricky and Gabe.

Not that Ricky, being dead, really has a telephone number anymore.

Shit, Lewis says inside.

He hasn’t thought about Ricky for nearly ten years now. Not since he heard.

The headline flashes in his head: INDIAN MAN HAS NO ROOTS, THINKS HE’S STILL INDIAN IF HE TALKS LIKE AN INDIAN.

Lewis breathes in, covers the handset to breathe out, so Cass won’t hear it across all these miles.

“Those elk,” he says.

After a long enough time that he can be sure Cass knows exactly the elk he’s talking about, Cass says, “Yeah?”

“Do you ever …” Lewis says, still unsure how to say it, even though he ran it through his head all last night and all the way in to work. “Do you ever, you know, think about them?”

“Am I still pissed off about them?” Cass fires right back. “I see Denny on fire on the side of the road, you think I stop to piss on him?”

Denny Pease, the game warden.

“He’s still on the job?” Lewis asks.

“Running the office now,” Cass says.

“Still a hard-ass?”

“He fights for Bambi,” Cass says, like that’s still in circulation all this time later. It was what they all used to say about the game crew: anytime Man was in the forest, all the wardens’ ears perked up, and their citation books flapped open.

“Why you asking about him?” Cass says.

“Not him,” Lewis says. “Just thinking, I guess. Ten-year anniversary, I don’t know.”

“Ten years in, what, a week?” Cass says.

“Two,” Lewis says, shrugging like he doesn’t mean to have it all figured down this precise. “It was the last Saturday before Thanksgiving, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cass says. “Last day of the season …”

Lewis winces without any sound, closes his eyes tight. The way Cass dragged that last part out all suggestive, it’s the same as reminding Lewis it wasn’t the last day of the season. Just, the last day they’d been able to all get together to hunt.

But it was also, as it turned out, the last day of their season in a different way, he guesses.

He shakes his head three times like trying to clear it, and tells himself again that no way did he see that young elk on the floor of his living room.