The Only Good Indians

by Stephen Graham Jones

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.

It’s a long ragged scar up and down, not side to side and low like a C-section. It’s an open-heart-surgery scar, just, too low for the heart, and with an ugly, uneven ridge of scar tissue. Is this and whatever happened to her forehead and eye a matching pair? One really bad night instead of a lot of pretty sucky ones?

or is she the elk...........

When the Thunderball Express slams past at 2:12 in the morning, Lewis’s half-asleep mind turns those slamming wheels into thundering hooves, going up and down faster and faster into some muck, until he sits up hard from … what?

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.

Lewis closes his eyes against the screaming wheels and the sparks, but then a rock chip catches him on the arm and he falls away slapping at it, and that’s when he finally looks at the train rushing past. Not at the different-colored cars, not at the graffiti smearing past at sixty miles per hour, but at the space between the cars, that space that’s full full full full, then, for a flash, for a slice of an instant, empty. Only, it’s not.

This is a thing he did, a thing he’s definitely done. Planes are probably going to be crashing into the terminal for months now, and mail’s going to be piling up on the dock at the post office. In addition, two women are dead who probably didn’t have to be.

Using the same dull knife he used to pry Peta’s teeth out, the same one he used to carve open that young elk ten years ago, he slits the tight skin of Peta’s swelling-up belly. A thin brown leg stabs up and he grabs on to it, traces it to its terminus. A hoof, a tiny black hoof. Lewis nods about the rightness of this, pulls that leg gently, his other hand ready.

He’ll watch her grow for the rest of the year, keep the coyotes and wolves and bears away, and, when she can, he’ll let her go on her own, stand there crying from sadness, from happiness. And then it’ll all be over. Indian stories always hoop back on themselves like that, don’t they? At least the good ones do.

According to sources at the hospital, who were able to speak to the lone survivor before surgery, the four Shelby men had in the back of their truck both Clarke and the deer or elk calf he had apparently been carrying for reasons unknown. At some point in the drive back to town, according to this survivor, someone stood from the bed of the truck while it was moving. It was a girl of twelve or fourteen, Indian. Presumably she had climbed into the truck earlier, when it was going west.

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.

Right when he’s cranking his window down to see better, you raise your face, level your eyes at him through your black hair blowing everywhere, and this is the first time you’ve seen him since that day, the air full of sound, your nose breathing in just blood, your calf gasping inside you, your legs gone. Don’t look away. Make him be the one to break eye contact.

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.

Nate snickers, says, “Safest place in the Indian world? That means we’re only eighty percent probably going to die here, not ninety percent?” “Nobody ever dies in a sweat,” Cass says. “Not even the elders. I’ve never heard of it, anyway.”

“What the hell?” Gabe says, standing, looking out into the darkness instead of behind him, where you are, on the other side of the truck. If he just turned around, chanced a look into the passenger window, through the cab, there you’d be out the driver’s side, watching him.

“What if I win?” she finally says. “You won’t,” Shaney says. “You can’t.” “I was,” Denorah says. “I am. Eighteen-sixteen.” Denorah stands, staring into Shaney’s nightmare face the whole time. “I don’t care what you are,” she says. “When you’re on this court, you’re mine.”