The Only Good Indians

by Stephen Graham Jones

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.

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?

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?

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Damn

If the only good Indian is a dead one, then she’s going to be the worst Indian ever.

This 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.