Don't Fear the Reaper (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #2)

by Stephen Graham Jones

As Karl Marx says, History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce, which is to say: all these episodes of violence eventually become cartoons. Time mollifies, multiple tellings codify, and then history repackages.

But, pre-death? “That’s just life, girl,” she mumbles in the cage of her teeth.

Jade pulls Letha closer, tries to take all those icy daggers herself, and for the thousandth time she wonders how the old-time Blackfeet did it. Them and all the other Indians back then. Before Gore-Tex, before car heaters, before bags of beef jerky. On a day like this? Every day, wouldn’t have it just been easier to die? Except—they didn’t. They pushed through. They insisted. They fought. Fifty thousand ancestors, going back and back, each of them a final girl. But, that’s just it, isn’t it? They were plural, not singular, that’s where horror movies have it all wrong, that’s where the slasher lies: it’s not about a lone girl carving her way to daylight, is it? It’s about two girls making it across the ice together. It’s not fifty thousand ancestors in a single-file line, it’s clumps of survivors fighting off saber tooth cats and dire wolves and other clumps of people. It’s about putting the children and the old people in the middle and then making a circle around them, pointing out with every spear and shaking your head no, saying not this day. Not this day.

Pater noster, qui es in caelis

I’m six years old. It’s 1978. I’m either living at my grandparents’ house five miles south of Stanton, Texas, or I’m there for a weekend, a week, the month, that year—I don’t know. Their place was home base for my mom and my brothers and me. It was where we always fell back to. Back then you could stand on the porch at night and not see a single light in any direction. Just darkness, maybe a butane pump popping out there somewhere, and the coyotes yapping. The house was on a ten acre plot, and way at the corner of it, my uncle and his new wife were living in a little trailer. They were either still in high school or just out of it, and to a six-year-old kid, they were the most amazing people ever, just… titans on my landscape, able to do no wrong. I think I’m still trying to be my uncle from back then, even: down-at-heel boots, pearl snap shirts, faded jeans, shaggy hair, old trucks, a looking-away smile—Darren from Mongrels, pretty much. But also Gabe from The Only Good Indians. Anyway, I’m sleeping on the floor of the living room one night when a knock comes on the door. I stay wrapped in my blanket, shuffle over all bleary-headed, and haul the door open. Standing there wrapped in their own blanket are my aunt and uncle. This is winter, so it’s cold. “Hey, Stevie,” they say, “we come sleep on the floor with you, maybe?” I shrug sure, but have to ask: “Why? What’s wrong with your trailer?” They kind of look at each other then smile embarrassed smiles, tell me they just we...