The Only Good Indians

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.

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

The land claims what you leave behind.

When the whole world hurts, you bite it. Don't you?

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.

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.

It's soft at the end. Not just the pain, but the world.

For them, ten years ago, that's another lifetime. For you, it's yesterday.

These are the kind of wrong thoughts people have who are spending too much time alone. They start unpacking vast cosmic bullshit from gum wrappers, and then they chew it up, blow a bubble, ride that bubble up into some even stupider place.

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

She’s got some Cross Guns in her veins, too. What this means, Gabe knows, it’s that she’s going to reach an age where she’ll want to take the world in her teeth and shake until she tears a hunk of something off for herself. And then, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s a scholarship or a five-year bid in state or two kids in as many years, she’ll sit in the corner by herself and chew it down, dare anybody to say this isn’t exactly what she wanted.

Lewis made sure Shaney left with an armload of books, a whole series, to prove to Peta why she’d been there, but the whole time, stacking them up, it felt like an overcorrection, like trying to hide a body on the lawn by covering it with eight other bodies.

Denorah hates that she’d believed that, once upon a time. And she wants to cry for not getting to believe it anymore. Yes, the deer drank milk, and that left their mouths ringed white. Fuck it. Run, run.

That’s how they were supposed to be. It’s what they, at fifteen, were supposed to have been doing. They’d been fired into adolescence and were swerving to each side now like crazy, trying to find the straight and narrow.

Peta reaches up to his forehead, delicately removes a flake of paint from the basketball pole, and then pulls him to her chest, her palm to his cheek, and this, her, it's home, and it's not haunted, not even a little.

The ladder tilts the opposite way, like it doesn’t want to be involved in anything this ugly, and all of this is in the slowest possible motion for Lewis, his head snapping as many pictures as it can on the way down, like they can stack up under him, break his fall.

Each time he came back with all his fingers he would flash thumbs-up all around the platform to show how he was lucky, how none of this was ever going to touch him.

White girls know the names of everything.

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?

Lewis finds the fourteen-foot aluminum ladder under boxes in the garage, Three Stooges in into the backyard...

The way whitetails got that white ring around their mouth and nose, according to him, it was because they were always sneaking into Browning to drink from the bowls of milk everybody used to leave out, from back when there weren’t any reservation dogs, only reservation cats. That was why the whitetail could come into town like that: no barking. But the cats were too good, they got the mice all so scared that the mice got smart, started living so deep in the walls of the houses that the cats couldn’t get to them, so one day all the cats just left. It was two, maybe three days after that the first dog trotted into town with a stupid grin on its face, looked around for what it could pee on. Denorah hates that she’d believed that, once upon a time. And she wants to cry for not getting to believe it anymore. Yes, the deer drank milk, and that left their mouths ringed white. Fuck it. Run, run.

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

He didn’t so much get there as just never leave.

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?

That, he claimed all reverentially, was what each person there in group had already done: rushed up to overdoses, to freezing while doped up, to crashing a car because of impaired reflexes, to vomiting in their sleep and drowning—addictive behavior was the big-time enemy, couldn’t they see? And the fact that they were all here meant they’d already ran up to it, had already counted coup on it, and gotten away with their lives. The question now was whether they would come back to the tribe proud of how close they’d got, or if they’d go back again and again, until the enemy got its hook into them all the way, left them in a ditch somewhere.

For recycling,” his dad says, about the plastic bottle Gabe just banked into the white trash can by the back door. “Oh yeah,” Gabe says, casing the interior of the fridge some more, “Indians use every part of the V8, don’t we?

Names are stupid, though. Pretty soon he won't even need his.

It’s soft at the end. Not just the pain, but the world.

The pages gather in his left hand, thin out in his right.

Some games, you are Reggie Miller. And, if you're really good, you're maybe even Cheryl.