The Only Good Indians

by Stephen Graham Jones

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 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.

“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.

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 FULLBOOD 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 wobbly-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?

Moving there like an afterimage, like it was left behind, is just trying to creep past without being seen, he’s ninety percent sure there’s the shadow of a person up against that wall. A thin shadow, just for a flicker of a moment. A woman with a head that’s not human. It’s too heavy, too long. When it turns as if to fix him in its wide-set eyes, he raises his hand to block her vision, to hide, but it’s too late. It’s been too late for ten years already. Ever since he pulled that trigger.

“To spend with him,” Shaney says back, going to Harley now that the door’s open. She cups his wide head in her hand, draws her nose to his, and squeezes her eyes shut, keeps them like that. “You smell it, don’t you?” Lewis says. “He’s dying,” she says, massaging his notched ears. She rolls into a sitting position on the unassembled sweat, says about Harley and all his scars, “He’s an old warrior, isn’t he?” “You come just to see him?” Lewis asks, trying not to make it sound confrontational. She hears it anyway. “Your wife wouldn’t want me here, right? White girls of red men are always the most jealous of my kind.” “Your kind?” Lewis says, though he kind of already knows. “Indian, unattached, an ass like this,” Shaney goes on. “I know Jerry says I’m bad news.”

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

Four separate times at least, certain death loomed, but either that wobbly high-lift sliced down into fluffy snow instead of crunchy skull, or the come-along hook snapped back over the cab of the truck, instead of through any faces. It was so funny even Lewis was laughing. 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. At least until they got to where it happened.

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.

“We’re the police asking to see your dog,” the first officer says, that thing rising in his voice that isn’t so much saying this call can go bad, but that he’s kind of hoping it will. “You really want to see him?” Lewis asks. Where he leads them is the tamped-down grave on the back side of the fence, close to the tracks. He explains to them that he buried Harley there because he liked to bark at the train. They ask what happened to him. Instead of telling them that an elk from back home followed him all the way down here, is apparently on this big revenge arc, and instead of telling them option two, which is that there was something in this house before he even got here, and it’s using his own memories and guilt against him, Lewis just shrugs.

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

Of course an elk can’t “inhabit” a person. That person would fall over onto all fours and probably instantly panic. Unless she’s like that shadow he saw in the living room. Woman body, elk head, no horns. That’s all he’s really got, though: a shadow he probably saw wrong, and something he thought he saw through the spinning blades of a fan. Those two cops would love him to come in with that for evidence, or as explanation.

What process had Lewis broken by popping this elk back in illegal country? “You’re thinking crazy,” he tells himself, just to hear it out loud. He’s right, though. These are the kind of wrong thoughts people have who are spending too much time alone. They start unpacking vast cosmic bullshit from gum wrappers, and then they chew it up, blow a bubble, ride that bubble up into some even stupider place.

then was a no-show for the first half of book four. He wasn’t pulling a Gandalf, though, was just trapped in the fizzy world inside the fountain drink dispenser, waiting for the right set of circumstances to get born into the world again—which turned out to be a mammoth one of his ancestors had driven over a cliff, except

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.

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.

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.

Knowledge of this day lodged 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.

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.

First, though, one of their calves is sitting in eighth-grade geography—girl, girl girl girl, not “calf.” And this girl has this certain father you remember, and that father, he has a friend you remember as well, from looking up a long snowy slope, their monstrous forms black against the sky. For them, ten years ago, that’s another lifetime. For you it’s yesterday.

Her name is Denorah. Her dad used to tell her she was supposed to have been Deborah, since that was the name of one of her dead aunts, but his handwriting had never been so good, and then he’d smile that sharp-at-the-right-side smile that had probably been killer in high school, a hundred thousand beers ago. Her dad is Gabriel Cross Guns. He’s the one who shot the hole in your back, took your legs away.

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.

Cassidy takes it. Good thing about aluminum is it doesn’t heat up in a sweat. What’d they use in the old days, wood? Horn? A bladder? The skullcap of a wolverine, because the old days were metal as hell?

he loses it to coughing again. Cassidy shrugs to Nathan like, Yeah, that. “Aren’t we supposed to be singing and praying and all that?” Nathan says, looking

Only, Cassidy shot her with a 7.62mm round before she could even announce herself, had shot her so clean that it hadn’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 about inside. Exactly, you say back to him.

“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 breathe ever again.

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.

Down the slope the herd is already waiting for you, drifted in like ghosts, not even one of them bleating or calling. The ground under them is churned and dark and raw. The smell is so wonderful. You can’t breathe it in deep enough. “The kid saw you, didn’t he?” Gabriel says, laughing it true. “P-Po’noka, right?” “Ponokaotokaanaakii,” you say down to him. Elk Head Woman.

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. You nod to the rifle he’s holding, say in his bitter English, “Do it or I go after your calf for real.”

Elk Head Woman is just standing there, her ungainly head cocked a bit to the side, the boxcar locked in her glare. Denorah smiles. You’re afraid of trains, she doesn’t say out loud. But it’s true. Elk, which is what Elk Head Woman must be in there somewhere, maybe more and more with each step, they’re train-shy. Her dad told her this.

“Choo-choo, crazy lady,” Denorah says, tossing a middle-finger salute off her forehead—another thing she learned from her dad, every time they’d just passed a cop.

“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.

It’s a field of … not spikes of snow, no, there’s no such thing. Bones. “What?” she says. She—she can’t be that far out, can she? Marias, that massacre or whatever? The bones from that wouldn’t still just be lying out there, would they? Bones don’t last that long. Unless. Unless she already died a few steps back, and is walking forward through her people’s past now, maybe. Is that how dying works?

No, this is something different, something worse. Elk. Denorah nods to herself, puzzling the bones together in her head. Elk, definitely. There’s one side of a rack tilted up over there, even, unbleached and frozen, and—she looks around faster now, more desperate. This can’t be that place, can it? The place her dad would never tell her about, where him and his friends blasted all those elk ten years ago? But it is that place.

That’s when she knew it was a true story. Because that’s exactly the kind of thing her real dad would have asked for: the horns. But, that story being true, it also means—it means her dad really and truly did this, doesn’t it? Instead of being the one down in the encampment, bullets raining down all around, punching through the hide walls of the lodges like she knows happened to the Blackfeet, to Indians all over, her dad was the one slinging bullets, probably laughing from the craziness of it all, from how, this far out, they could do anything, it didn’t even matter.

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 to 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 ...

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.

It’s her collapsing into the snow, her legs and arms kicking and reaching, twisting and creaking. Finally her right leg kicks through its human skin, is coarse brown hair underneath. Then an arm pushes through, has a clean black hoof at the end of it. An elk cow stands up from the snow and lowers her face to her calf, licks its face until it wobbles up, finds its feet, and that’s the last anyone ever sees of those two, walking off into the grass, mother and calf, the herd out there waiting to fold them back in, walk with them through the seasons.

Because it’s the end of the story, the old man holds his right hand up again, like the Girl did that day, and all the children do as well, and then, just like the Girl does four years later, when her team loses State in double-overtime, he balls that hand into an upraised fist. What the Girl will be doing with that held-up fist at

the end of that forever game, it’s honoring the Crow team that finally figured out how to shut her down—the first defense to ever do that, and one of the last. That show of sportsmanship, of respect, of honor, it’s what gets silhouetted on thousands of posters all through high school sports, all across the land that used to be hers. It’s not the end of ...