When interviewed on whether that was a sustainable traditional diet, a Shoshone elder looked into the camera and shrugged, said it had kept him going for eighty-eight years so far, hadn’t it?
The snapshot of Two Moons that went the widest was of course the one showing the war paint he had dragged across his face. Because it was plundered from a highway crew’s supplies, half his face was bright yellow, half of it tar black, and there were reflective bursts of white all over his torso and arms and thighs—probably, the ethnographers opined, in keeping with a hard-earned vision that had great personal meaning to him.
“Either that or it looks cool,” the world said back, sloping out the door to the skate park, the mall, the malt shop.
By this point every Indian nation in America was painting themselves like Two Moons and piling into cars of every make and model to caravan to the Northwest. Gas stations replaced their hot dog carousels with fry bread displays, and quietly moved their pouches of Red Man to under the counter, and taped up signs about having to pay before you pump, please.
Not many Indians did. They were in too much of a rush—the story was that Two Moons was going to force his great fingers down into the base of a certain holy mountain, grab on hard, and flip the whole thing over, releasing all the salmon or all the buffalo or all the maize and squash and beans, and it would wash across America from sea to shining sea, re-Indianing it up once and for all, the way it always should have been.
The non-Indians wore the same paint, though they drove nicer cars usually. The real Indians waved them into the convoy.
This was for everyone.
The big clock hand of history was about to dial back, wasn’t it?
Not if the government had its say.
The first tactic they tried to stop Two Moons in his tracks was to commandeer the sound system of a sports arena miles ahead of him, and, when he lumbered into its blast radius, playing a low and steady moan through it.
It was a buffalo’s bellow, amplified by about five hundred. It went for miles, made salt jump in its shaker two counties away.
Two Moons was carefully stepping over a bridge at the moment, but this sound, it did stop him. His fingers opened as if he were using his hands to aid his hearing, his loincloth and his hair the only things on him moving.
“His traditional food source,” the anthropologist on call assured the generals standing in the sports arena, their shooting-range ear protection on tight.
Nobody heard him.
“What if he comes here and there’s no giant buffalo to hunt?” the custodian at the sports arena said, to the same deaf ears.
It didn’t matter.
Two Moons was intrigued by this long, deep moan for sure, maybe even captivated for a moment, but then the second bellow came, exactly like the first in tone, timbre, and volume, and Two Moons shrugged this oddly robotic buffalo out of consideration, stepped the rest of the way over the bridge, continued on his way.
Fifteen miles closer to Seattle, a shiny fleet of tanker trucks was parked in his path.
The top of each tanker was cracked open, the beer within fizzing with invitation, its yeasty scent already intoxicating. But Two Moons just stared at all the trucks as if he were standing in a bed of snakes, and picked his way through them.
“I knew we should have used actual firewater,” the governor of Washington hissed behind her hand to her aide.
“I quit,” the aide said, and walked away, his fingers dragging yellow paint across half his face, the other half of his face already black.
Because there were too many cameras trained on Two Moons now to blast any more craters into him, and because a nuclear reaction on home soil would for sure be an international incident now, with the whole world watching, the military pulled out its truly big gun: a hastily made blow-up doll fifty feet tall, and blond. When Two Moons crested the last hill into Seattle, she was there waiting, standing kind of hipshot into the wind, her painted-on eyes very come-hither.
If the military could just get Two Moons to stand still long enough, the helicopters circling far above could drop their weighted cargo nets. Once he was tangled and on his knees, they could dart him again—tranquilizing him now, while he was standing, his fall would flatten civilians on national television, and already the French president had held a press conference in yellow and black war paint, and the rest of the world leaders were scheduling their own press conferences, offering safe harbor, asylum, all-you-can-eat ribs, whatever it would take to keep Two Moons safe from the American government.
“We should have made her Indian like him,” the dating expert the generals had sequestered whispered to himself, gnawing at his fingernails.
“What if he starts, actually… you know,” the televangelist on all the channels right then said.
“This is going to be epic,” the DJs assured their audiences.
Two Moons was just standing there, stopped in his tracks by the tall blond woman staring at him from a quarter mile ahead, his loincloth neither tenting out nor teepee’ing out. She was backlit by the setting sun—a vision.
They’d dressed her in a suggestive petticoat, of course. Nothing modern, just what could be in loose keeping with “loincloth.”
Two Moons breathed in, held it, held it, waiting for an explanation, but there was none, not until a bronze Peterbilt ran the barricade behind the giant doll, the driver’s stacks belching black smoke when the truck geared up, the trucker’s left hand tight on the wheel even when the soldiers were shooting the windshield into the cab, their shots turning the trucker into a puppet in the driver’s seat.
Their bullets couldn’t stop the big rig’s last dive ahead, though. The nose of the Peterbilt smushed into the fifty-foot woman’s right heel and she folded forward under the tires, and this trucker’s name was Mary Spotted Tail, and everybody knows this name now, and forever.
Two Moons moved forward hesitantly, skirting the deflating woman and then walking sideways to keep her in sight until he could turn, run for Seattle.
All the seismographs could hear his footfalls now. Every glass on every counter for miles was trembling, every window rattling in its pane.
In less than two minutes, Two Moons was to the shore, was back to Elliott Bay, but…
Arrayed there in formation just past the blue ball of the old newspaper building was the line of battleships that had been scrambled, and between each of them a submarine glared up out of the water, daring Two Moons to try to swim under, out to open sea.
Two Moons dug his heels in, stopped just short of tipping over into the water, close enough he had to wave his arms for balance, and then he was turning around, already running hard. Not to any place specific, it didn’t look like. Just away. That’s one of the main things history’s taught all Indians big or small.
There were people on his side this time, though.
In an effort to distract any spotting or targeting sensors on the ships and subs, the homeless Indians of Seattle had, instead of being part of the parade welcoming Two Moons to town, stationed themselves in all the deserted high-rises, at every light switch.
Each to his or her own beat, they started flipping their assigned switch up and down, turning downtown into a blinking beacon, a wall of random distraction.
Two Moons, perhaps reading a Native code from the blinking, ran directly for it, and that’s one of the most iconic of the postcards: his crisp silhouette against all those blurry yellow and white squares. You can’t even tell he’s giant in the photograph. He’s just another Indian running from the cavalry, and running for all he’s worth, because he’s going to be the one from his whole tribe who gets away, he’s going to be the one to make it to the future.
Still, the battleships fired, and the lights blinking on and off didn’t matter at all to their targeting sensors.
But Two Moons knew about these arrows now.
When he heard them whistling in, he dove forward into the lower floor of a parking garage, such that, when the missiles hit,
they crashed into the levels above him.
The parking garage fell down all around him, entombing him.
The world held its collective breath. All the homeless Indians high up in the downtown buildings let their lights go dark, their already broken hearts breaking again, into even smaller pieces.
“That’ll teach them,” a war hero said, stubbing his cigar out on a subordinate’s mouse pad, the subordinate watching that ash crumble and thinking of his lung-cancer father.
“End of the trail, bub,” a senator said, accidentally-on-purpose into the mic he was standing at, hoping he could use a recording of this timely utterance for his next campaign.
“Bam,” the president said, blowing smoke from his fingergun, then reaching forward to click the feed off but stopping with his hand on that switch.
One of the concrete slabs of the fallen-down parking garage was tilting, was lifting, was sloughing off.
Two Moons rolled over, was on his back, bleeding all over, breathing heavy and deep.
“His war paint protected him…” a Seattle baseball announcer said to his ex-wife, the edges of their hands finding each other.
“You can’t kill him…” a ten-year-old Flathead boy said, inches from his television, pouring as much of himself across to Two Moons as he could.
“Go, man,” that conn officer in one the submarines said, right before his crewmates began trying to pummel the Anishinaabe out of him.
Above Two Moons, six hundred feet straight up, one rounded square of yellow light glowed on, started to flicker down, then held. It was a homeless man stepping into the elevator on the Space Needle to come back down, but he was holding the door for his friend, who was standing on the clear floor of the platform, looking down between her feet to Two Moons, still pushing huge slabs of concrete off himself.
“Wait, wait, don’t—” the homeless woman said to the homeless man halfway into the elevator, “I think he—”
She never got to finish.
I think he sees us, she’d been going to say.
She was right.
Two Moons fixed on that rounded square of light that seemed to have come on specially for him, and he followed that light up, and up, his great hands crashing into the Space Needle’s laddery sides, pulling him higher and higher, and the battleship captains were awaiting permission to fire—Do we take down a monument? Can we lose Seattle and still win the day?—and one of the submarines was drifting out of formation, and all over the world people were screaming and stomping in their living rooms.
It was only because Two Moons was as tall as he was that he was just able to reach around the head of the Space Needle, pull himself up onto the round disc, stand unsteadily on it, his left hand clamped onto the spire.
“Yeah, where can you go now?” the secret, actual president said, scowling in the privacy of his bunker, a wall of monitors arrayed before him.
Two Moons was on all of them.
He stood unsteadily, concrete crumbling and tumbling from the Needle, the firing ports on the battleships ratcheting up to get him in their sights, and then, when he looked over to the west, across the water, just cresting over Olympus—
Something was coming.
The battleships tried to swing around but they were too close.
It was… what was it? It didn’t make any sense.
A cigar? A blimp?
No, it was made of wood, wasn’t it?
When one of the battleships was able to crank its rear guns back enough to get a shot off, which burst just beside the approaching mass, the thing’s true shape was revealed for a flash.
A canoe, nearly twice as long as Two Moons was tall.
Two Moons raised his right hand in greeting and stood on his tiptoes to be seen, the Space Needle trembling and creaking under his great weight.
From above, a paddle dipped down into the sky and the canoe surged ahead of the next volley, crossing the Sound in a single deep pull, coasting in a line that would nearly hit the Space Needle.
The battleships still angled toward downtown fired with or without permission, their bombs bursting all around Two Moons and the Space Needle, and it was thanks to those flashes that everyone could see Two Moons reaching up, up even higher, and a great hand—a hand that matched his own—reaching down for him, grasping onto his forearm the same as he was now grasped onto a forearm.
Like that he was hauled in, catching the side of the canoe with his belly, his brown ass to America for a second time, the paddles dipping in immediately, the canoe threatening to tip over, but Indians have been doing this for centuries, since forever.
In three more pulls of those great paddles, the canoe lifted deeper into the sky, into mystery, into legend, and in the iron belly of one of those submarines, a conn officer smiled through bloody lips, and his hands formed into fists, even though his arms were currently being held down.
“Go, brother,” the best part of him said.
And so Two Moons did.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote this standing up at a high shelf at a laundromat in Rancho Mirage, California, three or four days after nearly killing myself on my mountain bike in the 120-degree sun. I was still electrolyte-poor, I mean, my head kind of swimmy, my muscles slack. But maybe that helped? What didn’t help was that I only had so many quarters—I’d forgotten that some of them would have to be for detergent—and I’d just slopped my big pile of wet clothes from the washing machine to this unit on the wall that looked like it could dry this whole load in about five minutes. So I fed it the last of my quarters, then watched through the little porthole as… water and bubbles poured in? I ran to the attendant asking her what was going on, what wrong button had I pushed. Could a machine be a washer and a dryer both? Is that the world we live in now? She came, looked, told me in her most bored voice that I’d put my wet clothes into the big washer, and now that the door was locked, all I could do was wait it out. What this meant for me was that, first, I wasn’t making it to the place I was supposed to be in half an hour. Which is pretty much the usual story. The second thing it meant was that I was going to have to drive around real fast all over Palm Springs and Palm Desert and all of those crazy Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Gerald Ford Streets with the windows down to try and dry all these clothes I very much needed dry, but I was going to have to somehow not get a ticket doing that, too. So, to hide from having to think about all of that—fiction’s just a fort I build wherever I am—I set my laptop up on the high shelf, tried to stand tall enough to actually type. All I really had in mind was some giant Indian dude with tanks and planes trying to bring him down. But I knew they couldn’t. Thanks to the workshop I was teaching that week at UCR-PD, who let me sneak this into the rotation. Not sure I can say all their names here—schools have rules—but theirs were the first eyes to cross this. Next was Mackenzie Kiera, then my agent, B. J. Robbins, and, after that… I guess I read it at Readercon, and it took thirty-two minutes, and I was going so fast because I thought I had an only thirty-minute slot. Turns out I had an hour. But my new editor, Joe Monti, was there in the front row next to Darcie Little Badger. I didn’t know him yet, hadn’t met him in person, so Two Moons here kind of facilitated that meet, which was soon followed, as all good things are, by hamburgers. And thanks as always to my wife. When I talked to her on the phone from California after I wrote this, probably while speeding down Dinah Shore Drive, no blue-and-red lights in my rearview yet, socks and shirts floating all through the cab with me, I told her about Two Moons a bit, and—this is really all that matters—she listened, and said that sounded like something I’d write, yeah, she was glad I was making the time, and did I find a laundromat like I said I was going to? Instead of telling her I was currently in the dryer, I’d guess I just slipped through a light, kept going faster and faster.
More from the Author
The Only Good Indians
The Mythic Dream
Echoes
Praise for THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS
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�One of 2020’s Buzziest Horror Novels.”
—Entertainment Weekly
A Publishers Weekly “Most Anticipated” Book for Spring 2020
Starred reviews from: Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly
“Subtly funny and wry at turns, this novel will give you nightmares. The good kind, of course.”
—Buzzfeed
“The book is full of humor and bone-chilling images. It’s got love and revenge, blood and basketball. More than I could have asked for in a novel. It also both reveals and subverts ideas about contemporary Native life and identity. I’ll never see an elk or hunting, or what a horror novel can do, the same way again.”
—Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author of There There
“What Stephen Graham Jones does for me, is create new possibilities for Indigenous story makers.”
—Terese Marie Mailhot, New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries
“The Only Good Indians is a masterpiece. Intimate, devastating, brutal, terrifying, yet warm and heartbreaking in the best way. Stephen Graham Jones has written a horror novel about injustice and, ultimately, about hope.”
—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World
“An emotional depth that staggers, built on guilt, identity, one’s place in the world, and what’s right and what’s wrong.”
—Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and A House at the Bottom of a Lake
Attack of the 50 Foot Indian Page 2