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?

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

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?

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

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.

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

“Lewis wouldn’t,” Cassidy says. “Wouldn’t what?” the boy says. “Cheat on his wife, or kill two people?”