The Only Good Indians

by Stephen Graham Jones

When he’d reached across the table to shake Ricky’s hand and look him in the eye while he did it, the modern world had fallen away for a long blink and the two of them were standing in a canvas tent, the foreman in a cavalry jacket, and Ricky already had designs on that jacket’s brass buttons, wasn’t thinking at all of the paper on the table between them that he’d just made his mark on.

She doesn’t want kids, was up-front about that even those first couple of weeks in East Glacier. Not because Lewis is Indian, but because she thinks her pre-Lewis self made enough bad decisions of the chemical variety that any kids she had would have to pay that tab, so they’d be starting out with the world stacked against them already.

The headline kicks up in Lewis’s head on automatic, straight out of the reservation: not the FULLBLOOD TO DILUTE BLOODLINE he’d always expected if he married white, that he’d been prepping himself to deal with, because who knows, but FULLBOOD BETRAYS EVERY DEAD INDIAN BEFORE HIM. 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?

saves the book from the scratchy concrete,

only what this skin is tattooed with is a storm so bad it eats the world. “Little late,” Lewis says down to the young elk. Could have used this kind of warning about 1491 or so.