“There he is!” a roughneck bellowed, and his voice was far enough off that Ricky knew he was wrong, that they were about to pile onto somebody else for ten or twenty seconds, until they realized this was no Indian.
Ten trucks between him and them finally, Ricky stood to his full height to make sure it wasn’t that Dakota dude catching the heat.
“I’m right here,” Ricky said to the roughnecks, not really loud enough, then turned, stepped through the last line of trucks, out into the ditch of the narrow ribbon of blacktop that had brought him here, that ran between the bar’s parking lot and miles and miles of frozen grasslands.
So it was going to be a walking night, then. A hiding from every pair of headlights night. A cold night. Good thing I’m Indian, he told himself, sucking in to get the zipper on his jacket started. Cold doesn’t matter to Indians, does it?
He snorted a laugh, flipped the whole bar off without turning around, just an over-the-shoulder thing with his smoldering hand, then stepped up onto the faded asphalt right as a bottle burst beside his boot.
He flinched, drew in, looked behind him to the mass of shadows that were just arms and legs and crew cuts now, moving over the trucks.
They’d seen him, made his Indian silhouette out against all this pale frozen grass.
He hissed a pissed-off blast of air through his teeth, shook his head once side to side, and straight-legged it across the asphalt to see how committed they might be. They want an Indian bad enough tonight to run out into the open prairie in November, or would it be enough just to run him off?
Instead of trusting the gravel and ice of the opposite shoulder, Ricky took it at a slide, let his momentum stand him up once his boot heels caught grass, then transferred all that into a leaning-forward run that was going to have been a fall even if he hadn’t caught the top strand of fence in the gut. He flipped over easy as anything, the strand giving up its staples halfway through, just to be sure his face planted all the way into the crunchy grass on the other side.
Ricky rolled over, his face to the wash of stars spread against all the blackness, and considered that he maybe should have just stayed home, gone to Cheeto’s funeral, he maybe shouldn’t have stolen his family’s guns. He maybe should have never even left the rez at all.
He was right.
When he stood, there was a sea of green eyes staring back at him from right there, where there was just supposed to be frozen grass and distance.
It was a great herd of elk, waiting, blocking him in, and there was a great herd pressing in behind him, too, a herd of men already on the blacktop themselves, their voices rising, hands balled into fists, eyes flashing white.
INDIAN MAN KILLED IN DISPUTE OUTSIDE BAR.
That’s one way to say it.
Continue Reading…
The Only Good Indians
Stephen Graham Jones
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen Graham Jones
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First Saga Press ebook edition April 2020
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ISBN 978-1-9821-5783-8 (ebook)
Attack of the 50 Foot Indian Page 4