The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones.

[midnight_birth]

Title: The Only Good Indians.
Author: Stephen Graham Jones.
Genre: Fiction, horror.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2020.
Summary: A tale of revenge, cultural identity, and the cost of breaking from tradition. The novel follows four American Indian Blackfeet men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.

My rating: 7/10.
My review:


♥ His plan was Minneapolis-he knew some cats there-but then half-way there the oil crew had been hiring, and said they liked Indians because of their built-in cold resistance. It meant they might not slip off in winter.

Ricky, sitting in the orange doghouse trailer for that interview, had nodded yeah, Blackfeet didn't care about the cold, and no, he wouldn't leave them shorthanded in the middle of a week. What he didn't say was that you don't get cold-resistant because your jackets suck, you just stop complaining about it after a while, because complaining doesn't make you any warmer. He also didn't say that, first paycheck, he was gone to Minneapolis, bye.

♥ He might be going down in this parking lot in a puddle of his pwn 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 the bar.

..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 live.

♥ They'd seen him, made his Indian silhouette out against all this pale frozen grass.

He hissed a pissed-off blast of air through his teeth, shook his head once side to side, and straight-legged it across the asphalt to see how committed they might be. They want an Indian bad enough tonight to run out into the open prairie in November, or would it be enough just to run him off?

Instead of trusting the gravel and ice of the opposite shoulder, Ricky took it at a slide, let his momentum stand him up once his boot heels caught grass, then transferred all that into a leaning-forward run that was going to have been a fall even if he hadn't caught the top strand of fence in the gut. He flipped over easy as anything, the strand giving up its staples halfway through, just to be sure his face planted all the way into the crunchy grass on the other side.

Ricky rolled over, his face to the wash of stars spread against all the blackness, and considered that he maybe should have just stayed home, gone to Cheeto's funeral, he maybe shouldn't have stolen his family's guns. He maybe should have never even left the rez at all.

He was right.

When he stood, there was a sea of green eyes staring back at him from right there, where there was just supposed to be frozen grass and distance.

It was a great herd of elk, waiting, blocking him in, and there was a great herd pressing in behind him, too, a herd of men already on the blacktop themselves, their voices rising, hands balled into fists, eyes flashing white.

INDIAN MAN KILLED IN DISPUTE OUTSIDE BAR.

That's one way to say it.

♥ When it blinks Lewis lets out a little yip, completely involuntary, and flinches back, lets go of the ladder to wheel his arms for balance, and knows in that instant of weightlessness that this is it, that he's already used all his get-out-of-the-graveyard-free coupons, that this time he's going down, that the outermost brick of the "hearth" is already pointing up more than usual, to crack into the back of his head.

The ladder tilts the opposite way, like it doesn't want to be involved in anything this ugly, and all of this is in the slowest possible motion for Lewis, his head snapping as many pictures as it can on the way down, like they can stack up under him, break his fall.

♥ "Long time, no hear," Cass says, his reservation accent a sing-song kind of pure Lewis hadn'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.

♥ "Something Peta said last night," Lewis lies, always trying to be sure to remind Shaney about his wife, and then say something about her again, just to be sure. Not because he's the ladies' man of the USPS-there isn't one-but because him and Shaney are the only two Indians at this station, and for the last week, ever since Shaney passed the background check and hired on, everybody's been doing that thing they do with armchairs or end tables where they match: trying to push him and her together over in the corner, leave them there to be this perfect set.

♥ "Next time," she says, and hip-checks Lewis.

He rolls with it, doesn't push back is miles and years away.

♥ 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?

♥ 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.

The headline kicks up in Lewis's head on automatic, straight out of the reservation: not the FULLBLOOD TO DILUTE BLOODLINE he'd always expected if he married white, that he'd been prepping himself to deal with, because who knows, but FULLBLOOD BETRAYS EVERY DEAD INDIAN BEFORE HIM. It's the guilt of having some pristine Native swimmers-they probably look like microscopic salmon, even though the Blackfeet are a horse tribe-it's the guilt of having those swimmers cocked and loaded but never pushing them downstream, meaning the few of his ancestors who made it through raids and plagues, massacres and genocide, diabetes and all the wobble-tired cars the rest of America was done with, those Indians may as well have just stood up into that big Gatling gun of history, yeah?

♥ 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 already 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.

♥ "Sorry," Lewis says. Not for seeing, but for whatever happened.

"We're from where we're from," she says back. "Scars are part of the deal, aren't they?"

♥ Gabe took advantage of the silence to take a long read of all the faces, all the eyes, all the weak, weak spines. "Well, the elk aren't going to shoot themselves, gentlemen," he finally said, satisfied with what he'd seen, evidently. He hauled his rifle around to clear the chamber, Cass's rule since the new hole in the front floorboard of his truck, the hole Gabe insisted Cass would thank him for come summer, which is right where Lewis would like to freeze-frame that day, just stop it completely, hang it on the wall, call it "Hunting" or "Snow" or "Five Days Before Turkey and Football."

But he can't. The rest of the day was already happening, had already pretty much happened right when Gabe kept looking downhill, to were he said the elk were.

♥ It didn't feel like anything could go wrong.

Sure, yeah, he wanted an elk and wanted it bad, but all the same, this was what hunting is about: you and some buds out kicking it through the deep snow, your breath frosted, your right-hand glove forever lost, your Sorrels wet on the inside, Chief Mountain always a smudge on the northwest horizon, like watching over all these idiot Blackfeet.

♥ What Lewis remembers clearest about the next sixty seconds maybe closer to two impossible minutes, is the way his heart clenched in his chest, the way his throat filled with... with terror? Is that what too much joy and surprise can ball up into, when it comes at you all at once?

♥ ..and after that it would have been fast. The land claims what you leave behind.

♥ When he can balance enough, he steps into those same useless sweatpants, feels his way across the bedroom to stumble down the stairs, the same ones Peta caught him and Shaney on. Doing nothing, but still, right? Lewis made sure Shaney left with an armload of books, a whole series, to prove to Peta why she'd been there, but the whole time, stacking them up in Shaney's arms, it felt like an overcorrection, like trying to hide a body on the lawn by covering it with eight other bodies.

And Peta bought it, too, that was the thing. There was that moment when it all could have gone the other way, sure, but the reason it didn't, she told him later, it was his eyes. Lewis hadn't even been there on the stairs, not really.

All the same, Lewis knows it might have hurt Peta less for Shaney to have been just stepping back into her jeans. That would have been better than Lewis telling another woman something so intimate, so personal, so private. And that he'd been telling the elk story to another Indian, which Peta could never be no matter how fast she ran, no matter how high she jumped, that was maybe the final cut. The deepest, anyway. The one she was probably still nursing.

♥ Peta reaches up to his forehead, delicately removes a flake of paint from the basketball pole, and then pulls him to her chest, her palm to his cheek, and this, her, it's home, and it's not haunted, not even a little. This is where he wants to live forever.

♥ It's a small price to pay, really. It's not like Lewis has the nerve for shooting big animals anymore. Not after having gone to war against the elk like that. That craziness, that heat of the moment, the blood in his temples, smoke in the air, it was like-he hates himself the most for this-it was probably what it was like a century and more ago, when soldiers gathered up on ridges above Blackfeet encampments to turn the cranks on their big guns, terraform this new land for their occupation. Fertilize it with blood. Harvest the potatoes that would grow there, turn them into baskets of fries, and sell those crunchy cubes of grease back at powwows.

♥ Lewis thrusts both his hands up through his hair and like that both cops have drawn, are in that shooting crouch they like.

Going slow, finger by finger, Lewis lowers his hands back to his sides.

Dealing with cops is like being around a skittish horse: No sudden movements, nothing shiny or loud. Zero jokes.

Still, Lewis leans forward, shakes what hair he has to show there's no weapons there.

♥ Of course an elk can't "inhabit" a person. That person would fall over onto all fours and probably instantly panic. Unless he's like that shadow he saw in the living room. Woman body, elk head, no horns.

♥ Lewis is breathing deep but he's not going to cry. He's a stoic Indian, after all. When he was a kid, he thought that was the fancy word for "stone-faced," which he figured was some connection to Rushmore, since he knew it wasn't supposed to look like that.

That was back when he was stupid, though. Before now, when he's even stupider.

♥ Before filing the book back in the stack, he fans the top corner to make sure Shaney isn't a page-folder. She isn't-this alone pretty much means she's a good person-but he does catch something. He flips through again, slower, and doesn't see whatever it is again until... the inside of the back cover.

"Seriously?" he says.

She writes in books,m apparently. In borrowed books. In pencil, and light like she maybe meant to erase it, but still, right?

♥ What makes this elk so special? is the first note.

Under it she's drawn three lines, like giving herself room to figure this out. But they're blank.

Peta could have answered it, though. Because Lewis told her this young elk had been pregnant, and farther along than she should have been for November. He thought that was what gave her fight, but what if-what if every great once in a while an elk is special, right? What if there are wheels within wheels up there on the mountain, where ceremony used to take place? Was that unborn elk supposed to, Lewis doesn't know, grow some monstrous rack, be a trophy for some twelve-year-old's first kill? Was it supposed to be the big elk an old man chooses not to shoot on his last hunt? Was it supposed to clamber up onto a certain stretch of blacktop, wait for headlights to crunch into it? Was it supposed to find new and safer grass for the herd? Was it not even about the calf, but the mother?

What process had Lewis broken by popping this elk back in illegal country?

..It has to do with her meat, doesn't it? All that meat he gave away door-to-door on Death Row, which is where the closest-to-death of the elders get to live.

It's not out of reach to think that one of those elders he gave the meat to is still alive. Some of them old cats can sit in the same chair for ten, twenty years. Or-

That's it, Lewis knows all at once, sitting up from the wall, his face muscles tense from this certainty.

One of those elders was still alive... until last week, or last month.

This has to be it.

One of those elders finally kicked last week, and way in the back of her freezer, frozen to the side of it after all these years, there was one last packet of that meat left. Because it was locked in ice, her old fingers could never pry it free, and the reason none of her kids or grandkids ever moved it into Hamburger Helper or cooked it up with taco seasoning, it was that raccoon stamp.

If you don't know the story of the meat, if that elder couldn't remember the kind young man assuring her it was elk, then what you think, with a black footprint like that on the white paper, it's that somebody's ground up some raccoon from somewhere-the road south, probably-and left it in this freezer like a joke, like a dare.

No, nobody ate it. Nobody would.

But now, with that elder dead, another family's getting that house, right? Which means new furniture, new appliances. Out with the old freezer, in with the new one.

The meat finally thaws, gets tossed. For the birds, for the dogs. And that last packet of meat, it was Lewis's one chance, wasn't it? He'd promised the young elk that none of her would go to waste. But now some had.

That's why now, Shaney. Shit.

The moment that packet of racoon-printed meat hit the ground, started to thaw, the ground hatched open back in the elders' hunting section. What clambered out, just like a monster movie, was the ghost elk, the one he'd had to shoot three times.

At first she's wobbly on her legs, but with each step south, her hooves are more sure.

Peta didn't stomp Harley, she did, this ghost elk. After... what let her in, though?

"That I was still thinking of her?" Lewis says in the hallway.

His memory of that young elk, his guilt over her, that was the tether she pulled herself back with, wasn't it? That's why she's starting with him, not Gabe, not Cass: because they don't remember her. She's just one of a thousand dead elk to them.

♥ By the end he's laughing, she's laughing, and then they're in each other's slick arms, and he's guiding her back onto the mound of blankets and sleeping bags whose sweat lodge dreams are over, and the door is lowering over them as they add their clothes to the pile, and the world is kind of perfect.

♥ So it's Shaney, then. If it's not Peta, and it's not, then Shaney's the main and only one left. And maybe she didn't crawl up from that killing field up on the reservation, maybe she had a whole real life before... before she stopped being herself, opened her eyes, and looked around with a different set of instincts. Maybe she was up in Browning for Indian Days, or maybe she clipped an elk on the interstate down here, or maybe she just signed on to the wrong job, took a cigarette break on the wrong stoop by the loading dock, breathed in more than smoke.

♥ Enough time to unroll that hide. Not for the nicks he knows he left all over and through it, so it would probably only be good for a few pairs of gloves, nothing of size, but because...

Maybe some elk are special, right?

What if it wasn't that she was carrying a calf early? Or, what if she was carrying that calf early because she needs to get it birthed before... before some Gabe or Cass or Ricky or Lewis poached her in late spring, or some shed-hunter popped her with the handgun he only carries for bear?

What if she needed to get that calf out because she was already scheduled to die, so she could get skinned?

In the museum, behind glass, there's an old winter count, drawn on... it's probably buffalo, Lewis imagines. But why not elk?

And who's to say it's all drawn, either?

It could be that, back when, the people would bring any hides or skins that looked different in to the old-time version of a postal inspector. Because maybe some hides, some skins, right when they peel back from the meat, there's already some markings there, right? A starting point, maybe. A story of things to come. Pictures of the winter yet to come.

♥ Lewis backs off the throttle, lets the starter wires go.

Silence. Just that bare wheel winding down. Shaney's throat is still sucking air, her eyes locked on Lewis, calling him traitor, calling him killer, calling him "Blackfeet" one last time. Then she falls back, slumping into the sleeping bags and random parts, her left foot twitching, a line of saliva, not blood, threading down from the corner of her mouth. But there is bright red aerated blood-a spattery stripe bisecting the garage, going from floor to wall to ceiling then down the other wall again. It's a line between who Lewis used to be and who he is now.

He stands, pushes the button on the wall.

It's time to lower the door on all this.

♥ Just like with Harley, he doesn't rush up to hold her in these last moments.

He just stares, shocked.

Her body spasms and her breath hitches for maybe ten seconds, her eyes locked on him like trying to communicate something, like... like trying to relive the last ten years with him? Like, now she can go back to sitting at that picnic bench in East Glacier and start the two of them all over again, live it right up until now. What was she drawing that day? Was she drawing her dream house, complete with fireplace and a little apron of brick before it, "hearth" labeled above it? Did she know all along this was what was going to happen, but then did it anyways, because these ten years were worth it?

"Peta," Lewis finally says, seconds and a lifetime too late.

♥ The way you protect your calf is you slash out with your hooves. Your own mother did that for you, high in the mountains of your first winter. Her black hoof snapping forward against those snarling mouths was so fast, so pure, just there and back, leaving a perfect arc of red droplets behind it. But hooves aren't always enough. You can bite and tear with your teeth if it comes to that. And you can run slower than you really can. If none of that works, if the bullets are too thick, your ears too filled with sound, your nose too thick with blood, and if they've already gotten to your calf, then there's something else you can do.

You hide in the herd. You wait. And you never forget.

What you do after you've made your hard way back into the world is stand on the side of the last road home, wrapped in a blanket torn from a wrecked truck, your cold feet not hard hooves anymore, your hands branching out into fingers you can feel creaking, they're growing so fast now. The family of four that picks you up is tense and silent, neither the father nor the mother nor the son saying anything with their mouths, only their eyes, the infant just sleeping. They make room in the backseat because if they don't stop, someone else will, and the father driving the car says that that never ends well for starved-down fourteen-year-old Indian girls wearing only one thin blanket.

You're fourteen, then. Already.

Just a few hours ago you're pretty sure you were what he would have called "twelve." An hour before that you were an elk calf being cradled by a killer, running for the reservation, and before that you were just an awareness spread out through the herd, a memory cycling from brown body to brown body, there in every flick of the tail, every snort, every long probing glare down a grassy slope.

But you coalesced, you congealed, you found one of the killers about to spark life into the body of another, a life you could wriggle into, look out of. He had to be groomed first, though, groomed and cornered and isolated.

It was so easy. He was so fragile, so delicately balanced, so unprepared to face what he'd done.

♥ The memory is an old one, not your generation but a few before, a thing that happened right there to the south, just past where the last fence is. The memory is of how the herd came down here in the night. How they found good grass closer and closer to the buildings, where nothing much ever grazed, and then they kept eating and eating, bloating their sides out because they needed this to get through the winter that was coming.

But then the hunters stepped out onto their porches, saw tall brown bodies in the waving yellow, and reached back inside for their rifles.

They approached on their bellies all morning, and the herd knew they were there, their smell so tangy, their crawling so loud, but the grass was good and the horizon was open on the other side from the hunters. The herd could run as one when they needed to run, could dig in with their hooves, bunch their haunches and burst away, move like blown smoke across the rolling prairie, collect in a coulee they knew. The water that ran through that rocky bottom was already trickling through their heads. From its taste they knew exactly where it came from in the mountains, and its whole story getting here.

They didn't know about trains, though. Not like the hunters did.

When the locomotive and all its boxcars thundered through, the scent hot and metal, it was as if those tracks in the grass had stood up. They became a flashing moving wall of sparks and wind no elk could run through (one tried) and the screeching and tearing of those great metal wheels covered the boom of the hunters' rifles firing again and again, until the sound of the rifles and the sound of the train were the same sound, and in the backseat of this impossibly fast car you reel from the acrid taste of this memory, causing the chemical boy in the backseat to pull away from you even more, but it was fair, what happened that day, and it had been the herd's own fault.

You run when you first taste hunters on the air, don't you? When you first even think that might be their ugly scent. One more pull of grass isn't worth it. Even if it's good and rich. Even if you need it worse than anything.

Knowledge of this day lodges in the herd, got passed down like what headlights meant, like how those blocks of salt aren't for elk tongues in the daytime, like how the taste of smoke means to walk somewhere else slowly, head down, feet light. The price of the knowledge about trains had been high and the coming winter harder, as less hooves means more wolves, but the herd didn't feed down near town anymore, and they didn't trust the metal tracks anywhere they encountered them, knew they could stand up into a sudden wall.

Instead they kept to the high country, the lonely places where the air tasted of trees and cold and the herd, the places the trucks never lurched into.

♥ An elk mother, cornered, will slash with her hooves and tear with her mouth and even offer the hope of her own hamstrings, and if none of that works, she'll rise again years and years later, because it's never over, it's always just beginning again.

♥ So it was all on accident, him and Jo, but at the same time it feels like it was meant to be. It's like he walked into the best thing ever, and all he was doing was screwing around at the powwow. But maybe that's the way it works when it's real?

♥ Anyway, it'll be good to sweat the past year out. Reset, like. The old-time Indians had it right, Cassidy figures.

♥ He's always kind of wondered about the dogs, though. Back when, dogs would sometimes pull little travois, wouldn't they? He's pretty sure he's seen drawings. But, wouldn't those dogs have pretty much just been domesticated wolves? At the same time, though, all the dogs living on the streets in town, they may have started out as Saint Bernards or Labradors or Rotts or whatever, but, to grit out the winter, to fight it out over every scrap, they bush their coats up, they bare their teeth first thing, and their eats aren't as floppy as whatever line of lapdog Frisbee-catchers they come from. It's like, living like they do, it's turning them back into wolves.

♥ Never mind she was twice the rider he was, and probably three times the Indian.

Not that she could come into the sweat tonight. If it was just him and her, sure, always, forever, please. Gabe had read in one of his books that women and men didn't mix in the sweats, though, and anyway: the kid. Cassidy still remembers his own first sweat. It was bad enough sitting in all that dark heat with a bunch of naked uncles. Add a woman into that mix-especially one like Jo: two unfair inches taller than Cassidy, curvy, solid, long black hair-and it wouldn't have been ceremonial anymore, it would have been about how, Look, I'm tough, this heat isn't anything, I can take it longer than any of these old-timers.

He probably never would have sung, either, if there'd been a woman there. Yeah, sweats shouldn't be like the bar, he figures.

♥ Spread out behind him, just down the slope from the camper, are probably eighty, ninety elk. Maybe a hundred.

They're all looking right back at him, not a single tail flicking, not the eye blinking.

Cassidy swallows hard, wishing more than anything for his rifle.

The name he was born with wasn't Cassidy Thinks Twice, even though that's what he's doing now-Where's my gun, where's my gun?-but Cassidy Sees Elk.

Names are stupid, though.

Pretty soon he won't even need this.

♥ They're alike, Denorah's like a little clone of the girl Gabe knocked up fourteen years ago-fifteen, really-but that little clone, she's got some Cross Guns in her veins, too. What this means, Gabe knows, it's that she's going to reach an age where she'll want to take the world in her teeth and shake until she tears a hunk of something off for herself. And then, whether it's good or bad, whether it's a scholarship or a five-year bid in state or two kids in as many years, she'll sit in the corner by herself and chew it down, dare anybody to say this isn't exactly what she wanted.

♥ He hooks the bottle in the fence alongside the others, just like it's the old days, the four of them always together, and leaves a drink sloshing in it for the dead Indian hamsters. Halfway to the truck he turns back to the grave, undoes the black bandanna from his arm, and ties it into the fence as well, like a prayer he doesn't know how to say with words. It's about Lewis, though. And Ricky. And how they all used to be.

♥ "Bring it," Denorah says, lining up again.

The only thing she regrets about basketball, that baseball and football and even golf have over it, it's that those players all get to wear war paint under their eyes.

What Coach tells them in the locker room before every game, it's what their war paint is on the inside of their face, it's in how they hold their faces, it's in how they look the other girls in the eye and don't look away. Dribbling and passing and shooting are just the parts of the game that get recorded in the stats. There's also who wants it worse.

To steel herself against the kind of bullshit Indian teams always get hurled at them when the game's close, Denorah tries to inoculate herself with all the bullshit that the other side of the gym will be chanting.

It's a good day to die.
I will fight no more forever.
The only good Indian is a dead Indian.
Kill the Indian, save the man.
Bury the hatchet.
Off the reservation.
Indian go home.
No Indians or dogs allowed.

Her sister heard them all in her day, perverted on spirit ribbons, usually illustrated, too. Shoe-polished on the windows of buses, the big one was always, Massacre the Indians!

Bring it, Denorah says in her head, and drops another through the net. If the only good Indian is a dead one, then she's going to be the worst Indian ever.

♥ "So what do you know about this kid?" Cassidy says.

"Nate Yellow Tail? You know. Twenty years ago, he's you and me. He's Ricky and Lewis."

"Half of us are dead, yeah?"

"Either that or one of us here is already half dead," Gabe says, and slings a dollop of water across the heat at Cassidy, to show this isn't completely serious. That it is, but he wants to get away with having said it.

"Maybe it'll be good for him, I mean," Cassidy says. "Help him out, like."

"Arrows are straight, but they have to bend, too," Gabe says, his voice dialed down to Wooden Indian to deliver Neesh's old line. It's what the old man used to always end his group sessions on. There was even a series of posters all along one wall of the substance abuse office, an arrow looking all bowed out at the moment of the string's release, like it's going to crack, shatter, blow up. But it doesn't. It's bent out to the side in the first poster, it snaps back a foot or two from the riser of the bow in the second poster, and then in the rest it's snapping back and following through, bending the arrow the other way now, and until the last possible instant before the bull's-eye, it's flopping back and forth through the air like that, trying to find true.

That's how they were supposed to be. It's what they, at fifteen, were supposed to have been doing. They'd been fired into adolescence and were swerving to each side now like crazy, trying to find the straight and narrow. If they did? Bull's-eye, man. Happy days.

If they didn't?

There were examples under every awning in town, drinking from paper-bagged bottles. White crosses the side of all the roads. Sad moms everywhere.

♥ "You ever wonder where the term buck-naked comes from?" Gabriel says, down to his saggy boxers.

"Listen close," Cassidy warns, stepping out of his boots, "you're about to hear some good lies."

"Settlers moving into Indian territory used to call us bucks, back when," Gabriel says with authority, looking around for what to lean on while he one-legs it out of his boxers. "Because we were always horny, I guess, right? They could tell we were because we were naked, since Levi's hadn't been invented yet. So, you know, them Indians coming in to the trading post, They're all naked again, Jim, what are we going to do? Look, look, hide the women, those bucks are naked, man, they're buck-naked..."

♥ "It's bullshit, you know."

"When I was fourteen I knew everything, too."

The boy shakes his head, kicks his shoes off, is already counting the seconds of this night.

♥ "Anyway," Gabe says. "Neesh, Granddad, whatever, he told us that none of the old stories are ever about a war party attacking a sweat that's happening. That it wouldn't just be bad manners to do that, it would be the worst manners. You don't even jump somebody when they're done, are all staggering out, weak and pure and shit. It's a holy place, like. It means right here where we are, it's about the safest place in the Indian world."

Nate snickers, says, "Safest place in the Indian world? That mean we're only eighty percent probably going to die here, not ninety percent?"

"Nobody ever dies in a sweat," Cass says. "Not even the elders."

♥ "I like meat lover's. That's real Indian pizza."

"Nobody says 'Indian' anymore." Nate says, voice somewhere between insult and disappointment.

Gabe closes his eyes, lilts out, "One little, two little, three little Natives," lets it fall dead between them all, then says: "Doesn't really sound right, does it?"

"We grew up being Indian," Cass says, something about his delivery making it sound like his arms are crossed. "Native's for you young bucks."

"And indigenous and aboriginal and-"

♥ He deposits this next load of glowing rocks and just has his shovel clear of the lodge when one of the horses whinnies straight out of the heart of nowhere. Victor jerks hard enough to have dropped a burning rock if he'd still had any, but it's just a stupid horse.

Still Victor studies the night all around him, his eyes scanning and panning, trying to pick a shape out.

If he was smart, if he was listening to the horses, he'd already be gone.

You wouldn't leave, though, would you? You couldn't.

You stand over your calf until you can't stand, and then you try to fall such that your body can shield it. And then you come back ten years later and stand just outside the firelight, your soft hands opening and closing beside your legs, your eyes hardly blinking.

He can no more leave his calf than you could.

♥ This is for Lewis, he's telling himself. Lewis, who was trying to come home.

It's funny, almost: Lewis runs from home, dies on the way. Ricky runs away from home, dies on the way. Gabe and himself stay right here, are perfectly fine.

♥ "Your dad's a good cop, mostly," Cassidy says. "Just messes up sometimes."

After a second or two, a grin crosses Nathan's face.

"He's standing out there like a cigar store Indian or something," he says.

"He called in sick on a Friday night for this," Cassidy says. "Because of being here, he's going to have to work shit detail for the next month, probably. He's doing this for you, man."

"He doesn't have to."

"Tell him."

"He doesn't understand anything."

"He was the first one into the Dickey house after that-Tina, with the gun?" Cassidy says, wincing from having to remember that. "He's scraped so many kids up off the asphalt he could porobably write the manual for how to do it best so they stay in one piece. He's had to carry stoned babies to grandmothers and he's had to walk out into the grass to find other grandmothers. Some of the drunks he shakes awake in the morning, they're stiff, and he remembers them from second-grade homeroom. His first week, he was the rookie cop they made drag Junior Big Plume in from the shallows, when his face was all... he sent my brother Arthur to prison, how about that? He doesn't want you to end up there, too."

"I'm not like him and Granddad," Nathan is already saying, his lower lip trembling hard enough he has to bite it in.

"He'll stand out there and keep that fire going for you for as long as you need. That's all I'm saying. Not every Indian dad's like that. You got one of the good ones, man."

.."Aren't we supposed to be singing and praying and all that?" Nathan says, looking from Cassidy to Gabe.

"We are," Cassidy says.

After that they all stare into the glowing rocks.

♥ "Boys always forget there's going to be an after."

♥ Cassidy shakes his head no and then she's gone, inside, packing, the camper creaking and groaning, all the windows yellow now, which pretty much means their one light is on. But still, it looks alive in a way that pretty much makes all of everything worth it.

♥ "Ho!" he calls out to Victor, but there's no Victor to say it to, just drums and darkness, horses and cars, and, standing right there, so close now, you.

♥ But this dog, it's been... stomped?

Her chest has been crushed, too, and because there was nowhere for the lungs and heart and liver to go, most of it's splashed out the mouth in what looks like a single chunky gout. The tongue is hanging, not swollen up yet.

"What the hell?" Gabe says, standing, looking out into the darkness instead of behind him, where you are, on the other side of the truck. If he just turned around, chanced a look into the passenger window, through the cab, there you'd be out the driver's side, watching him. Glaring hard at him, your five-fingered hands balled into fists.

He doesn't, though. And he won't. His whole life he's been looking in the wrong places. Why should tonight be any different?

♥ ..and big bad Officer Yellow Tail was right, Nathan kind of knows: Gabriel and Cass are him and Tre, twenty years down the road. Or, they would have been, if Tre were still around. Or, if he were over with Tre now.

That is all you really need, isn't it? Just one good friend. Somebody you can be stupid with. Somebody who'll peel you up off the ground, prop you against the wall.

♥ ..Gabriel says, standing, holding his hands out like they can fend off accusations, like they can stop bullets, like they can make all of this make sense.

♥ He wipes his tears away, raises the rifle back, can't hold it steady enough, but he's only ten feet away. It's how far Lewis was from you when he shot you the second time, in the head. And the third time.

It's the perfect distance. It's the distance they've earned.

♥ Only, Cassidy shot her with a 7.62mm round before she could even announce herself, had shot her so clean that it hasn't even thrown her back into the lodge, had just blown a ragged plug of meat out behind her.

But she's not meat, she's my daughter, Gabriel says inside, screams inside, can't stop screaming inside.

Exactly, you say back to him.

Gabriel slashes forward to catch her, but she tips forward onto her face before he's even two steps closer. He falls to his knees by his own truck, pushes his whole face into the ground, his lips right to the dirt all the tires have cleared of snow.

His girl, his baby girl. She was going to take the team to state, she was going to take the whole tribe into the pros, into legend. Everybody was going to quit painting buffalo and bear footprints on the side of their lodges, were going to have to learn to draw all the lines in a basketball. She was the one who could plant her feet, get the rim in her sights, and drain ten free throws in a row. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred.

She was going to make it out of here, like Gabriel never had. Like nobody ever did.

♥ ..Gabriel says, and then, just like he's supposed to, he steps out into the darkness after his best friend since forever, and when Cassidy crawls back, away from this thing trying to happen, Gabriel steps faster, finally comes down with his knees to either side of Cassidy's hips.

The thermos is alive in his right hand, is both completely weightless and the heaviest thing in the world. He rolls it for a better grip, for a final grip, for the best way to hold it when doing a thing like this.

"You shot her, man," he says, like he's pleading. Like he's trying to explain. "You shot Denorah. You shot my little girl..."

Cassidy is holding his hands over his face.

He nods that yes, yes, he did.

His body is hitching and jerking under Gabriel, and it's like a current is passing between them. Like they're kids again, learning to break-dance.

"I'm sorry," Gabriel says, and brings the butt of the thermos down with the weight of all their years of friendship.

Because he's holding it wrong, his pinkie finger is between it and Cassidy's eyebrow.

The thermos glances off and dives into the ground, its open mouth standing it up in the crusty snow.

Cassidy lowers his hands, blood sheeting down over his face.

He looks up through it to Gabriel, and they're both crying, neither can breathe right, neither wants to breather ever again.

With an unsteady hand, Cassidy claps the snow for the thermos, finds it, passes it back up to Gabriel, and you have to cover your bloody mouth with your palm, because even in your most secret dreams you never would have guessed this part, would you have?

It's perfect, it's amazing.

Gabriel takes the thermos, their fingers touching over that black metal, and Gabriel remembers it all over again: D, earlier, turning back to him with that sharp smile, no-looking free throw number ten just like Jordan, and it hurts so bad that he closes his eyes, brings the thermos down again, with a crunch. The next crunch is wetter, the one after that deeper, punching through into a darker space.

The muscles closest to Cassidy's shin bone are the last to die.

Gabriel leans back, wavers, an unsubstantial shape of a person.

♥ "Then there was me," Gabriel mumbles, smiling a sloppy smile, and closes the door. It swings back open, so he shuts it again, and again and again and again, slamming it shut enough that none of this can even have happened.

But it did.

And he's the only one still standing knee-deep in it all, he knows. He's the one they're going to say did it, who cares why. Because he's an Indian with a Bad Track Record. Because a Tribal Police Office Came Out. Because He Didn't Like His Other Friend's Fiancée. Because His Mind Boiled Out in a Sweat. Because His Murderer Friend Just Got Shot. Because the Great White Stepfather Stole All Their Land and Fed Them Bad Meat. Because the Game Warden Wouldn't Let Him Get His Own Meat. Because His Father Reported Him for Stealing a Rifle. Because the Rifle Was Haunted by War. Because because because. He did it for all those reasons and whatever else the newspapers can dream up.

♥ "The kid saw you, didn't he?" Gabriel says, laughing it true. "P-Po'noka, right?"

"Ponokaotokaanaakii," you say down ho him. Elk Head Woman.

Gabriel works through this, gets it enough, looks up to you and nods that he can see that, sure.

You hold the rifle out to him. An offering.

"Why?" he says, shying away from it, but finally having to catch it when you throw it sideways down at him.

He plants the Mauser's butt in the snow to prop himself up, says it again, "Why are you doing all this?"

If you tell him, he would get to die knowing it was all for a reason, that this has been a circle, closing. Which would be more than you ever got, that day in the snow.

♥ The only thing Denorah can do, her only hope, it's to extend the ball as far from her body as possible now, around Shaney's side where any defender would least expect it, meaning Denorah's one-handing it now, has just enough grip to spin it up, kiss it soft off the other side of the board, and then she's falling away, is falling for miles, back into legend.

♥ Shaney turns her head to the side like he better not, but he pulls the trigger.

This shot catches her in the right shoulder, flings her off the court, into the frozen grass and snow.

Denorah stands, doesn't know what to do.

Instead of just lying there and hurting, like would make sense, Shaney is flopping and writhing in the snow, screaming from the pain, the fingers of her left hand digging into her shoulder, and... and: no.

Her face.

Her head.

She arches back, her fingers deep in the meat and muscle of her shoulder, and her face is elongating from the strain.

Her cheeks and chin tear with a wet sound and the bones crunch, resettling.

At the end of it her long hair is blowing away from her, isn't connected to her scalp anymore, and her face, it's, she's, her face is-

Not a horse, which is what Denorah thinks at first.

Not a horse, an elk.

Elk Head Woman.

♥ In practice, there's a drill Coach makes the team do maybe once a week. More than that would leave them too beat-up to play. But, once a week, she'll line all the girls up on the baseline and step in among them, the ball rocked back to let loose.

The whole time before she blows that whistle, too, she's yelling to them like a drill sergeant, asking, How bad do you want it? How bad do you want it?

At the end of a game or the beginning, it doesn't matter, it's never the fastest or the strongest player who gets that rolling-away ball. It's whatever girl dives the hardest. Whoever fights for it. Whoever doesn't let anybody take it away. Whoever doesn't care about their precious hair or skin or teeth. It's all about whoever wants it the worst.

This is the drill Denorah's running right now.

Only, this time it's no drill.

♥ She remembers some grade school teacher talking about how Indians having long hair-it was Miss Grace, a French-accented blond woman from Canada-how long hair, it helped with hunting. When hanging down, it wavered back and forth like grass, and it hid the recognizable human features.

It had been bullshit, of course-hair isn't grass, faces are faces-but Denorah has never forgotten it, either.

♥ Either way, when he told it, it was so real. The way whitetails got that white ring around their mouth and nose, according to him, it was because they were always sneaking into Browning to drink from the bowls of milk everybody used to leave out, from back when there weren't any reservation dogs, only reservation cats. That was why the whitetail could come into town like that: no barking. But the cats were too good, they got the mice all so scared that the mice got smart, started living so deep in the walls of the houses that the cats couldn't get to them, so one day all the cats just left. It was two, maybe three days after that the first dog trotted into town with a stupid grin on its face, looked around for what it could pee on.

Denorah hates that she'd believed that, once upon a time. And she wants to cry for not getting to believe it anymore.

Yes, the deer drank milk, and that left their mouths ringed white.

♥ Denorah gets the full attention of one of those big yellow eyes, and she doesn't wait, she's already running.

This isn't a second or even a fourteenth wind, she knows. This is running on hardpack with feet she can't even feel. This is running downhill, toward water.

This is the real last three seconds.

♥ Denorah pulls herself up with a bush that scratches every part of her face, even her lips-is this what her dad calls buckbrush? Or, used to call, she reminds herself.

"But I'm a doe," she says, drunk with the pain of it all, and puts one foot in front of the other, and then repeats that complicated process, and a court length or two into that she realizes that this is what it's like to die, isn't it?

You hurt and you hurt, and then you don't.

It's soft at the end. Not just the pain, but the world.

And at least she'll die with that, she knows: The world killing her. Not the Crow. Not Elk Woman. Not the thing that got her dad.

"I'm sorry," she says to the idea of him.

Not because he died however he died, but because she never told anybody to let him stay when they were dragging him from the gym. Because she pretended she didn't know him. Because she was embarrassed. Because-because she's still that girl standing on the bench seat of his truck beside him while he's driving, her hand on his shoulder, the cab full of his stories that were all true, she knows.

Because because because.

♥ His next shot slaps into the ground just in front of Elk Head Woman, like showing her he can shoot past her, and he can shoot just short of her. Translation: she's next.

Elk Head Woman understands this, resists all her instincts to run, instead turning to curl around her calf, give her back to the slope, hoping her body can be thick enough to keep her calf safe. Because that's what an elk mother does, isn't it? That's the only thing you've ever really wanted to do this whole time, ever since you found yourself suddenly back in the world. Just-your anger, your hate, it was coursing through you so hot, and you got lost in it, and-

Denorah looks up that long hill, into the winking scope and dead eye of her new dad, and then she looks at Elk Head Woman, to the calf, and she sees now that both her fathers have stood at the top of this slope behind a rifle, and the elk have always been down here, and it can stop... it has to stop, the old man telling this in the star lodge says to the children sitting all around him. It has to stop, he says, brushing his stubby braids out of the way, and the Girl, she knows this, she can feel it. She can see her real dad dead in that burned-down sweat lodge, the back of his head gone, but she can also see him up the slope ten years ago, shooting into a herd of elk that weren't his to shoot at, and she hates that he's dead, she loved him, she is him in every way that counts, but her new dad shooting the elk beside her isn't going to bring him back, and as long as she keeps dribbling behind her back when she doesn't have to, then her real dad won't even really be gone, will he? He'll still be there in her reckless smile. Because nobody can kill that.

So-this is where the old man looks from face to face of the children in the lodge with him, a blanket of stars spread out around them, this is where he says to all the children gathered around the fire that what the Girl does here, for Po'noka but also for her whole tribe, what she does is slide forward on her bloody knees, placing her small body between that rifle and the elk that killed her dad.

She holds her right hand up the slope, palm out, fingers spread-the old man demonstrates-and she says it clear in that cold air: No, Dad! No!

Is it the first time she's called him that?

"It is," the old man says. It is.

By slow degrees, the rifle raises, its butt settling down onto Denny Pease's right hip. He's just a silhouette all the way up there. Just another hunter.

For a long moment Elk Head Woman doesn't move, is just hunched there around her calf, but then her long head wrenches around, ready to flinch from that next shot boring into her back, to take her legs away again, to start this whole cycle all over.

Instead, the man-shape up there, he's sliding his right hand sideways, palm down, left to right like this, the old man says.

It's the Indian way of saying a thing is over. It's what he used to end every meeting with, when he was trying to pull Gabe and Cass and Ricky and Lewis back, keep them alive. It's what he would have told his grandson, if he could have.

It's over, enough, it can stop here if you really want it to stop.