Attack of the 50 Foot Indian

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “This is a novel of profound insight and horror, rich with humor and intelligence. The Only Good Indians is a triumph.”

  —Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling

  “Jones boldly and bravely incorporates both the difficult and the beautiful parts of contemporary Indian life into his story, never once falling into stereotypes or easy answers but also not shying away from the horrors caused by cycles of violence.”

  —Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling author of Trail of Lightning

  “Stephen Graham Jones is a literary master who happens to write horror, and you’ve never read a book quite like The Only Good Indians.”

  —Tananarive Due, American Book Award winner and author of The Good House

  “Stephen Graham Jones is one of our greatest treasures. His prose here pops and sings, hard-boiled poetry conspiring with heartbreakingly alive characters.”

  —Sam J. Miller, Nebula Award–winning author of Blackfish City

  “The Only Good Indians is the most American horror novel I’ve ever read.”

  —Grady Hendrix, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Paperbacks from Hell

  Keep reading for a preview of

  The Only Good Indians

  by

  Stephen Graham Jones

  WILLISTON, NORTH DAKOTA

  The headline for Richard Boss Ribs would be INDIAN MAN KILLED IN DISPUTE OUTSIDE BAR.

  That’s one way to say it.

  Ricky had hired on with a drilling crew over in North Dakota. Because he was the only Indian, he was Chief. Because he was new and probably temporary, he was always the one getting sent down to guide the chain. 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.

  Ricky Boss Ribs.

  He’d split from the reservation all at once, when his little brother Cheeto had overdosed in someone’s living room, the television, Ricky was told, tuned to that camera that just looks down on the IGA parking lot all the time. That was the part Ricky couldn’t stop cycling through his head: that’s the channel only the serious-old of the elders watched. It was just a running reminder how shit the reservation was, how boring, how nothing. And his little brother didn’t even watch normal television much, couldn’t sit still for it, would have been reading comic books if anything.

  Instead of shuffling around the wake and standing out at the family plot up behind East Glacier, everybody parked on the logging road behind it so they’d have to come right up to the graves to turn their cars around, Ricky ran away to North Dakota. His plan was Minneapolis—he knew some cats there—but then halfway there the oil crew had been hiring, and said they liked Indians because of their built-in cold resistance. It meant they might not slip off in winter.

  Ricky, sitting in the orange doghouse trailer for that interview, had nodded yeah, Blackfeet didn’t care about the cold, and no, he wouldn’t leave them shorthanded in the middle of a week. 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. He also didn’t say that, first paycheck, he was gone to Minneapolis, bye.

  The foreman interviewing him had been thick and windburned and sort of blond, with a beard like a Brillo pad. 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.

  This had been happening more and more to him the last few months. Ever since hunting went bad last winter and right up through the interview to now, not even stopping for Cheeto dying on that couch.

  Cheeto hadn’t been his born name, but he had freckles and orange hair, so it wasn’t a name he could shake, either.

  Ricky wondered how the funeral had gone. He wondered if right now there was a big mulie nosing up to the chicken-wire fence around all these dead Indians. He wondered what that big mulie saw, really. If it was just waiting all of these two-leggers out.

  Cheeto would have thought it was a pretty deer, Ricky figured. He had never been a kid to get up early with Ricky to be out in the trees when light broke. He hadn’t liked killing anything except beers, probably would have been vegetarian if that was an option on the rez. His orange hair put enough of a bull’s-eye on his back, though. Eating rabbit food would have just got more dumb Indians lining up to put him down.

  But then he’d died on that couch anyway, not even from anybody else, just from himself, at which point Ricky figured he’d get out as well, screw it. Sure, he could be this crew’s chain monkey for a week or two. Yeah, he could sleep four to a doghouse with all these white boys, the wind rocking the trailer. No, he didn’t mind being Chief, though he knew that, had he been around back in the days of raiding and running down buffalo, he’d have been a grunt then as well. Whatever the bow-and-arrow version of a chain monkey was, that’d be Ricky Boss Ribs’s station.

  When he was a kid there’d been a picture book in the library, about Heads-Smashed-In or whatever it was called—the buffalo jump, where the old-time Blackfeet ran herd after herd off the cliff. Ricky remembered that the boy selected to drape a calf robe over his shoulders and run out in front of all those buffalo, he’d been the one to win all the races the elders had put him and all the other kids in, and he’d been the one to climb all the trees the best, because you needed to be fast to run ahead of all those tons of meat, and you needed good hands to, at the last moment after sailing off the cliff, grab on to the rope the men had already left there, that would tuck you up under, safe.

  What had it been like, sitting there while the buffalo flowed down through the air within arm’s reach, bellowing, their legs probably stiff because they didn’t know for sure when the ground was coming?

  What had it felt like, bringing meat to the whole tribe?

  They’d almost done it last Thanksgiving, him and Gabe and Lewis and Cass, they’d meant to, they were going to be those kinds of Indians for once, they had been going to show everybody in Browning that this is the way it’s done, but then the big wet snow had come in and everything had gone pretty much straight to hell, leaving Ricky out here in North Dakota like he didn’t know any better than to come in out of the cold.

  Fuck it.

  All he was going to hunt in Minneapolis was tacos, and a bed.

  But, until then, this beer would work.

  The bar was all roughnecks, wall-to-wall. No fights yet, but give it time. There was another Indian, Dakota probably, nursing a bottle in a corner by the pool tables. He’d acknowledged Ricky and Ricky had nodded back, but there was as much distance between the two of them as there was between Ricky and his crew.

  More important, there was a blond waitress balancing a tray of empties between and among. Fifty sets of eyes were tracking her, easy. To Ricky she looked like the tall girl Lewis had run off to Great Falls with in July, but she’d probably already left his ass, meaning now Lewis was sitting in a bar down there just like this one, peeling the label off his beer just the same.

  Ricky lifted his bottle in greeting, across all the miles.

  Four beers and nine country songs later, he was standing in line for the urinal. Except the line was snaking all back down the hall already, and the last time he’d been in there there’d already been guys pissing in the trash can and the sink both. The air in there was gritty and yellow, almost crunched between Ricky’s teeth when he’d accidentally opened his mouth. It wasn’t any worse than the honeypots out at the rig, but out at the rig you could just unzip wherever, let fly.

  Ricky backed out, drained his beer because cops love an Indian with a beer bottle in the great outdoors, and made to push his way out for a br
eath of fresh air, maybe a fence post in desperate need of watering.

  At the exit the bouncer opened his meaty hand against Ricky’s chest, warned him about leaving. Something about the head count and the fire marshal.

  Ricky looked past the open door to the clump of roughnecks and cowboys waiting to come in, their eyes flashing up to him but not asking for anything. It was the queue Ricky would have to mill around in to wait his turn to get back in. But it was starting to not really be his decision anymore, right? Inside of maybe ninety seconds, here, he was going to be peeing, so any way he could up the chances of being someplace where he could do that without making a mess of himself, well.

  He could stand in a thirty-minute line to eyeball that blond waitress some more, sure. Ricky turned sideways to slip past the bouncer, nodding that he knew what he was doing, and already a roughneck was stepping forward to take his place.

  There wasn’t even any time to stiff-leg it over beside the bar, by the steaming pile of bags the dumpsters were. Ricky just walked straight ahead, out into the sea of crew cab trucks parked more or less in rows, and on the way he unleashed almost before he could come to a stop, had to lean back from it because this was a serious fire-hose situation.

  He closed his eyes from the purest pleasure he’d felt in weeks, and when he opened them, he had the feeling he wasn’t alone anymore.

  He steeled himself.

  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?

  Stupid, Ricky told himself. Stupid stupid stupid.

  He looked ahead, to the hood he was going to hip-slide over, the bed of the truck he hoped wasn’t piled with ankle-breaking equipment, because that was his next step. A clump of white men can beat an Indian into the ground, yeah, no doubt about it, happens every weekend up here on the Hi-Line. But they have to catch his ass first.

  And now that he was, by his figuring, about three fluid pounds lighter, and sobering up fast, no way was even the ex–running back of them going to hook a finger into Ricky’s shirt.

  Ricky grinned a tight-lipped grin to himself and nodded for courage, dislodging all the rifles he couldn’t keep stacked up in his head, rifles that were actually behind the seat of his truck back at the site. When he’d left Browning he’d taken them all, even his uncles’ and granddad’s—they were all in the same closet by the front door—and then grabbed the gallon baggie of random shells, figuring some of them had to go to these guns.

  The idea had been that he was going to need stake-money when he hit Minneapolis, and rifles turn into cash faster than just about anything. Except then he’d found work along the way. And he’d got to thinking about his uncles needing to fill their freezer for the winter.

  Standing in the sprawling parking lot of the roughneck bar in North Dakota, Ricky promised to mail every one of those back. Would he have to pull the bolts, though, mail them in separate packages from the rifles, so the rifles wouldn’t really be rifles anymore?

  Ricky didn’t know, but he did know that right now he wanted that pump .30-06 in his hands. To shoot if it came to that, but mostly just to swing around, the open end of the barrel leaving half-moons in cheeks and eyebrows and rib cages, the butt perfect for jaws.

  He might be going down in this parking lot in a puddle of his own piss, but these grimy white boys were going to remember this Blackfeet, and think twice the next time they saw one of him walking into their bar.

  If only Gabe were here. Gabe liked this kind of shit—playing cowboys and Indians in all the parking lots of the world. He’d do his stupid war whoop and just rush the hell in. It might as well have been a hundred and fifty years ago for him, every single day of his ridiculous life.

  When you’re with him, though, with Gabe… Ricky narrowed his eyes, nodded to himself again for strength. To fake it anyway—to try to be like Gabe, here. When Ricky was with Gabe, he’d always want to give a whoop like that too, the kind that made it where, when he turned around to face these white boys, it’d feel like he was holding a tomahawk in his hand. It’d feel like his face was painted in harsh crumbly blacks and whites, maybe a single finger-wide line of red on the right side.

  The years can just fall away, man.

  “So,” Ricky said, his hands balled into fists, chest already heaving, and turned around to get this over with, his teeth clenched tight so that if he was turning around into a fist it wouldn’t rattle him too much.

  But… no one?

  “What the—?” Ricky said, cutting himself off because there was something, yeah.

  A huge dark form, clambering over a pearly white, out-of-place 280Z.

  Not a horse, either, like he’d knee-jerked into his head. Ricky had to smile. This was an elk, wasn’t it? A big meaty spike, too dumb to know this was where the people went, not the animals. It blew once through its nostrils and launched into the truck to its right, leaving the pretty sloped-down hood of that little Nissan taco’d up at the edges, stomped all down in the middle. But at least the car had been quiet about it. The truck the elk had slammed into was much more insulted, screaming its shrill alarm loud enough that the spike grabbed onto the ground with all four hooves. Instead of the twenty logical paths it could have taken away from this sound, it scrabbled up across the loud truck’s hood, fell off into the between space on the other side.

  And now that drunk little elk was banging into another truck, and another.

  All the alarms were going off, all the lights going back and forth.

  “What is into you, man?” Ricky said to the spike, impressed.

  The feeling didn’t last long. Now the spike was turned around, was barreling down an aisle between the cars, Ricky right in its path, its head down like a mature bull—

  Ricky threw himself to the side, into another truck, setting off another alarm.

  “You want some of me?” Ricky yelled to the elk, reaching over into the bed of a random truck. He came up with a jawless oversized crescent wrench that would be a good enough deterrent, he figured. He hoped.

  Never mind he was outweighed by a cool five hundred pounds.

  Never mind that elk don’t do this.

  When he heard the spike blow behind him he turned already swinging, crashing the crescent wrench’s round head into the side mirror of a tall Ford. The big Ford’s alarm screamed, flashed every light it had, and when Ricky turned around to shuffling hooves behind him, it wasn’t hooves this time, but boots.

  All the roughnecks and cowboys waiting to get into the bar.

  “He… he—” Ricky said, holding the wrench like a tire beater, every second truck in his immediate area flashing in pain, and showing the pounding they’d just taken. He saw it too, saw them seeing it: this Indian had got hisself mistreated in the bar, didn’t know who drove what, so he was taking it out on every truck in the parking lot.

  Typical. Momentarily one of these white boys was going to say something about Ricky being off the reservation, and then what was supposed to happen could get proper-started.

  Unless Ricky, say, wanted to maybe live.

  He dropped the wrench into the slush, held his hand out, said, “No, no, you don’t understand—”

  But they did.

  When they stepped forward to put him down in time-honored fashion, Ricky turned, flopped half over the 280Z he hadn’t trashed, endured a bad moment when somebody’s reaching fingers were hooked into a belt loop, but he spun his hips hard, tore through, fell down and ahead, his hands to the ground for a few overbalanced steps. A beer bottle whipped by his head, shattered on a grille guard right in front of him, and he threw his hands up to keep his eyes safe, veered what he thought was around that truck but not enough—his hip caught the last upright of the guard, spun him around, into another truck, with another stupid a
larm.

  “Fuck you!” he yelled to the truck, to all the trucks, all the cowboys, just North Dakota and oil fields and America in general, and then, running hard down a lane between trucks, hitching himself ahead with more mirrors, two of them coming off in his hands, he felt a smile well up on his face, Gabe’s smile.

  This is what it feels like, then.

  “Yes!” Ricky screamed, the rush of adrenaline and fear sloshing up behind his eyes, crashing over his every thought. He turned around and ran backward so he could point with both hands at the roughnecks. Four steps into this big important gesture he fell out into open space, kind of like a turnrow in a plowed field, caught his left boot heel on a rock or frozen clump of bullshit grass, went sprawling.

  Behind him he could see dark shapes vaulting over whole truck beds, their cowboy hats lifting with them, not coming down, just becoming part of the night.

  “White boys can move…” he said to himself, less certain of all this, and pivoted, rose, was moving again, too.

  When the footfalls and boot slaps were too close, close enough he couldn’t handle it, knew this was it, Ricky grabbed a fiberglass dually fender, used it to swing himself a sharp and sudden ninety degrees, into what would have been the truck’s long side, what should have been its side, but he was sliding now, he was going under, leading with the slick heels of his work boots.

  This was the kind of getting away he’d learned at twelve years old, when he could slither and snake.

  The truck was just tall enough for him to slide under, through the muck, his momentum carrying him halfway across. To get across the rest of the truck’s width, he reached up for a handhold, the skin of his palm and the underside of his fingers immediately smoking from the three-inch exhaust pipe.

  Ricky yelped but kept moving, came up on the other side of the truck fast enough that he slammed into a beater that didn’t have an alarm. Two truck lengths ahead, the dark shapes were pulling their best one-eighty, casting left and right for the Indian.

  Duck, Ricky told himself, and disappeared, ran at a crouch that felt military, like he was in a trench, like shells were flying. And they might as well be.