After the People Lights Have Gone Off (5 page)

“I like hunting,” he’d said.

They were picking up speed coming through Babb Flats.

Once Junior had seen a whole herd of elk there, pale in the moonlight like ghosts of themselves.

“How many horses do you think it was?” Denny asked then, and came around to face Junior. His face up close was just normal.

“How many’d that bear eat, you mean?” Junior asked, changing hands on the wheel.

Denny nodded.

“We should have counted the skulls, I guess,” Junior said, raising his eyebrows to Denny in halfway invitation.

Deezie wouldn’t be home for two more days.

Maybe counting skulls would get Denny over the hump of his fear.

“Grub in ten,” Junior called down the hall.

Denny’s door was closed. No sounds from in there.

Junior knocked, said it again, about food.

“Check,” Denny said, like they were still talking through the walkies.

Fifteen minutes later, the game was on and the couch was the couch and Junior was making his same joke to Denny about chili: that people shouldn’t eat stuff that looks the same going in as it does coming out. Even Deezie would laugh at that one, some nights.

Like had been happening more and more lately, Junior fell asleep somewhere in the third quarter, woke to an empty room, a flatlined television.

And—an open front door?

“Den-man?” he said out loud, on the chance.

No answer.

Junior crossed to the door, hoisting his rifle up on the way. On
that
chance.

There was nothing, though. Nobody.

Junior had already closed the door when it registered, that something had been different outside. Not wrong, just… not the same.

Because he was the dad and couldn’t afford to be scared, he hauled the door open and stepped out without looking first.

His eyes adjusted, fed him what was different.

Another cairn.

Out where the road to their house crooked over the creek.

Another cairn had been stacked out there.

Junior walked half the way there in sock feet then looked back to the house, sure it was going to be surrounded now by ghost elk, or that there was going to be a figure in the doorway, watching him.

It was just the house. The same one he’d walked out from twenty seconds ago.

“Deezie,” he said then, quiet, secret, because her name always reminded him who he was. And because maybe, six hundred miles away, she would hear, look his way, and that would be enough to keep him safe.

To show himself he could—because she might be watching—Junior walked all the way out to the cairn. With his heel, his gun in both hands, he dislodged the top rock, sent it clattering down the side, taking a couple of small pieces of slate with it.

Under that top rock was just another rock. Because it was rocks all the way down. That’s all it
could
be.

Cairn
was the wrong word, probably.
Pile
would have been better. Like what you end up with when you’re trying to plow a field but keep snagging on rocks, keep having to carry them over to the one fence post left from when there were corrals here.

That’s all it was.

Junior studied the trees all around, his rifle at port arms, and heard himself telling Denny again that he just had to walk toward Chief Mountain to find the road.

Chief was too far to even see from this side of Browning, though.

Junior shook his head and went inside without looking behind him even once.

Hours later in bed, his leg kicked deep into territory Deezie insisted was hers, Junior realized he was awake, and wasn’t sure how long he had been.

After that came the realization that he’d been listening. With his whole body.

Something was moving down the hall, and Junior couldn’t have said exactly why, but it was something big, something too big for the hall, but it was lumbering down it all the same.

“Six,” he heard himself say, like an offering.

It was how many skulls there had been at the bear’s dinner table.

He didn’t know if that was a lucky number or not.

He rolled over, away from Deezie’s side, and his burned arm crackled under him and he flinched, had to fumble for the light to see that he’d heard wrong. That his arm was just the same, that it wasn’t on fire anymore. That all the therapy had worked.

Still, instead of sleeping, he rubbed the lotion into his scar tissue, into the moonscape of his melted skin, and then higher, into his shoulder as well. Just to be sure.

•

“But I want to see,” Denny said.

The six skulls.

They were in the truck. The sun was just happening.

“Later,” Junior said, and hated himself for it but did it anyway, again: glanced over at Denny’s hands.

One of his gloves was safety-orange, but the other was Deezie’s wool one. It was white with red-thread stripes that always looked like they were going to catch on something, tear away.

“What about that—that pyramid of rocks yesterday?” Junior said then just real casual, after running it through his head a dozen times, a dozen ways.

In reply Denny looked out his window.

He had no idea about the gloves.

Or the chili still crusted on his lips.

Junior swallowed. It was loud in his ears.

“Who won last night?” he asked.

“Patriots,” Denny said.

“Good old Pilgrims,” Junior said, leaning forward to rest his forearms on the steering wheel.

It was another one of his jokes: of course the Pilgrims won. Look around, right?

“I want to go to the skulls,” Denny said, his voice flat.

“After this,” Junior said.

“After what?”

“Chief Mountain.”

“Chief Mountain,” Denny repeated.

Junior moved his mouth in that way he used to do when his brother was torturing him and he was promising himself not to cry this time.

He cranked his window down.

“I saw a young bear here once,” he said, hooking his chin down the road they weren’t taking, the other way through Babb.

Denny looked down that road and Junior held his breath, waited for Denny to call him out: this wasn’t Junior’s story, it was one of his uncle’s. Junior was stealing it.

Denny just looked over, waited for the rest.

“I had that little Toyota then, the hatchback. Jace drives it now. The one with the primered hood?”

Junior could feel his face heating up, even with the window down.

“You were, like, papoose size,” he said, and waited for Denny to lodge his objection about that not being a Blackfeet word.

Instead, he just sat there with his one orange hand, his one white hand. Six skulls in his head.

“I was looking for this one old bull I knew had come over from the park,” Junior said. “I was just married to your mom then, and we needed meat, yeah?”

No nod.

Just the eyes.

“So I was just cruising along, and this young bear he just comes trotting right up the yellow stripes, his feet flapping like flippers they were so big. Like he was a cartoon of himself. When he stopped beside me to put his paw print on the flank of my trusty steed”—not even a blink of disgust—“I could see his collar, the one that told he was crossing the Line here, that he was on
Indian
land now.”

The rest of the story was his Aunt Lonnie, using her favorite nail polish to trace the bear’s paw print in the Toyota, but Junior didn’t have the heart, and Deezie didn’t wear nail polish anyway.

This story had been doomed from the start.

“I miss that Toyota,” he said. “It was one of the magic ones, I think.”

“Papoose,” Denny finally said.

Five minutes later Junior turned them up toward Chief Mountain.

The truck coughed like there was air in the line, but it caught, pulled them up the black ribbon of road, the clouds cold enough that they were skimming the trees.

There was nobody else.

In the summer, people would come up to tie ribbons to certain branches, to trunks that felt right, but in the winter those ribbons were all faded and frozen, their prayers trapped.

“There’s where I came out,” Junior said, slowing to show his tracks crunching through the crust of snow in the ditch.

Denny was looking higher, though.

Junior slowed to a stop two hundred yards farther up the road, where the next pair of boots had crossed the ditch. And the handprints beside the boots.

Because he’d
fallen
, Junior told himself.

Because he was
twelve
.

“This is you,” he said, and Denny looked over to him, then back out into the trees.

“You don’t remember, do you?” Junior said, the lump in his throat cracking his voice up.

“We were here yesterday,” Denny said.

“We were here yesterday,” Junior said, and, because that’s what you do, Denny stepped down.

“It’s loud in there,” he said, pointing with his face into the trees.

“Scare something good my way,” Junior told him, instead of everything else.

Denny kept looking.

“There’s a restaurant out there somewhere,” Junior said then, having to close his eyes to get it said, his chin trembling. “There’s no tabletops, but it used to be a—a place.”

“A restaurant,” Denny said, looking back to Junior, not seeming to care he was sitting there behind the wheel crying.

“They served venison,” Junior said, and looked hard the other way, toward Chief Mountain, stationed up in the clouds like a sentinel.

Junior prayed it was watching right now.

After a thirty-count, he looked back to the other side of the road.

Denny was gone, into the trees.

Junior turned around, pulled down to where he’d gone in yesterday—everything had to be the same—and stepped in all his same footprints as close as he could, and, crashing through the trees like he was, he could almost feel his uncles on the rise behind him, waiting for what he was about to flush out.

If they were still around, they could have told him what’s buried in the cairns, he knew.

Or told him not to look.

But it was too late now. He was already doing it.
They
were already doing it, him and Denny, Den-man, father and son out in the woods, in the cold, trying to undo the day before, and Junior only realized it was too late when he opened his mouth to call to Denny and static from the walkie came out.

From deeper in the trees, his real son opened his mouth, answered with that same open-air hiss, and like that they felt toward each other in the new darkness.

I was twenty-two, still flashing my high-school diploma at job interviews. Still doing stuff like stealing an extra bag of ice from the cooler if the clerk’s not eyeballing me. Hiding a litter of mismatched puppies for the weekend for my friend Dell, and not asking any questions. Bumming smokes outside the bars, but sometimes having my own pack.

I was just getting into tattoos, too. Not on me—my arms had been choked blue not four months after I moved into my own place—but from me. That was the idea, anyway. I wasn’t officially apprenticing anywhere, and nobody’d offered their skin to me yet, but I’d always been drawing. My notebooks from junior high are like a running autobiography in doodles, and I’d worked one summer applying decals and pinstriping at my uncle’s bodyshop, and finally graduated to window tint before he trusted me with the front-door keys.