The Only Good Indians

by Stephen Graham Jones

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?

So it was all on accident, him and Jo, but at the same time it feels like it was meant to be. It’s like he walked into the best thing ever, and all he was doing was screwing around at the powwow. But maybe that’s the way it works when it’s real?

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.