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I’d seen coyotes go after a rabbit, when they didn’t have anything better to kill. They don’t just dig a bit and give up, they excavate until they find a beating heart.
If you can delay pain, you delay it, don’t you? Even when it’s inevitable. Especially when there’s teeth involved.
I kept looking from his hat to his head, like I didn’t understand they could separate.
Later, while Mom was warming spaghetti and then forgetting she was warming spaghetti, I told Dino to shut up so I could hear the television. He was playing with his trucks in front of the couch and making siren sounds with his mouth. Dino did stop, and then I had to watch the show I hadn’t even been watching.
He had no face, had a mass of bubbling red for a body. My chest sucked in, my whole body kind of undulating, and when I looked up, it was because the sheriff’s deputy was standing beside me, naked. A lot of grown men would have simply backhanded the upstart twelve-year-old punk who had taken a gun, unloaded it out the back door like that, just for attention. Not this sheriff’s deputy. His name was Larsen. Years later he would run for sheriff. His campaign speech probably didn’t include driving his knee into my side, so that I ragdolled over into the paneled wall. He probably didn’t put on any
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It didn’t make sense, but maybe glass doesn’t have its own taste. Maybe that’s why drinks come in it.
Mom would collapse into herself a hundred times a day, wouldn’t be able to work any shifts for a year, for two, and I would walk down to the bus stop with a two-by-four, and I wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left of any of them down there. And then the sheriff’s deputy would come for me like he’d always known he’d have to someday, and Mom would take off with me in the Buick, just driving straight across the pasture, for the mountains, for the memory of mountains, both her hands on the steering wheel, and this is already the way Indians have been dying for forever.
