The Only Good Indians

by Stephen Graham Jones

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.

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

Instead, what he can’t stop thinking, it’s why now? Why did this elk, if it is an elk, why did she wait so long to come for him? Was it so he could have time to cobble a life together, get people and things he cares about, so she could take them away the same way he took her calf from her?

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.

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.

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.

The best jokes are the ones that have a kind of message to them. A warning. This one’s warning would be to stay home. To not go postal.

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.

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 Head Woman. Not the thing that got her dad. “I’m sorry,” she says to the idea of him.