The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
- Publish Date: July 14, 2020
- Language: English
- Genre: Native American Literature, Supernatural Thrillers, Horror Literature & Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Pages: 320
- Price: Free
- ISBN-13: 978-1982136451
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 ngers he
would ash 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 shuing 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 o 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, rst 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.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB