Bring it, Denorah says in her head, and drops another through the net. If the only good Indian is a dead one, then she’s going to be the worst Indian ever.
The Only Good Indians is classified as “horror”, and it is that, but it’s also one of the finest novels I’ve ever read about the modern Native American experience — both on and off the rez — written in oddly-tempoed prose that, while kind of hard to get in to, definitely says, “This is not your whitebread fiction.” Told over four sections of unequal length, I did think that the middle part went overlong (as other reviewers have noted), but ultimately, I loved this.
Sure, yeah, he wanted an elk and wanted it bad, but all the same, this was what hunting is about: you and some buds out kicking it through the deep snow, your breath frosted, your right-hand glove forever lost, your Sorrels wet on the inside, Chief Mountain always a smudge on the northwest horizon, like watching over all these idiot Blackfeet.
At least until they got to where it happened.
The fun of any horror novel would be ruined by unnecessary spoilers, so I’ll carefully recap for the aid of my own memory: In their youth, four Blackfoot buddies committed an act that broke with the traditions of their ancestors, and ten years later — as two of the young men have moved off the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and two have stayed behind in a place where the elders like to watch a livefeed of the IGA parking lot on their TV screens for excitement — all these years later, comes a reckoning. There’s plenty of gore and tension, monsters right out of Blackfoot mythology, and with complicated characters who definitely acted immorally as young men, it’s hard to know who to root for. History circles back upon itself, time is porous, the sins of the father are visited upon the son...and life and death hinges upon a pick up game of basketball? With sections of unequal length, we spend an uneven amount of time with the characters — and as they are unique individuals with believable lives, a reader may be more or less disappointed to move on — but I absolutely loved the build up and final showdown.
As noted, author Stephen Graham Jones has a quirky writing style that takes some time to get into, but I actually liked how often I had to go back over sections to figure out what he was talking about. I don’t know anything about winches and pickups, so this was confusing to me:
Four separate times at least, certain death loomed, but either that wobbly, high-lift sliced down into fluffy snow instead of crunchy skull, or the come-along hook snapped back over the cab of the truck, instead of through any faces.
And I don’t know anything about motorcycles, so this took me far too long to crack:
Duckwalking backward on his stripped-down, double-throaty Road King that’s about to find its lope, Lewis clocks Jerry already at the edge of the post office’s parking lot, hanging his right hand down by the rear wheel of his custom Springer, his index and middle fingers waggling in an upside-down peace sign before they curl up into his fast fist.
And I also don’t know anything about basketball — and there’s a lot of basketball in this novel — but like I said, I liked being challenged by Jones; I like it when an author writes without condescension, trusting me to figure it all out (*this one quote is spoilery*):
“You’re far from home,” Denorah says, her face lowering into triple-threat, leading with her face. In practice, Coach will put a big hand on Denorah’s forehead while she slashes the ball back and forth and all around to pass, to shoot, to dribble. Now Shaney does the same thing, her rough palm right between Denorah’s eyebrows. It’s a violation, would be a foul in any game with a whistle, but, too, it slows the whole world down, lets Denorah sort of see this not from her triple-threat position, but from the side, in ledger art, like this battle between the two of them is so epic that it’s been painted on the side of a lodge, and inside that lodge, an old man with stubby-thin braids is recounting the story of that one time the Girl played a game for the whole tribe. How each dribble shook the ground so hard that over in the Park great mountainsides of snow were calving off, rumbling down, shaving the foothills of trees. How each time the ball arced up into the sky it was merging with the sun, so that when it came down it was a comet almost, cutting through the orange circle of a rim. How each juke was so convincing that the wind would come in to take that player’s place but then would get all scrunched up because the player was already back in that space, cutting the other way, her path as jagged and fast as a bolt of lightning.
And this last passage kind of captures the whole essence of The Only Good Indians: The story starts with four young guys, none of them have been “raised traditional” — so they don’t embrace tradition — but they do what they do and ten years later, they’re maturing and trying to forge new traditions; understanding that intent is more important than specifics. But history is circular, time is porous, and you’re as likely to have your vision telescope into the past and see yourself counting coup on a sleeping soldier as have your vision telescope into the future where an elder is telling the legend of your own life. It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe the myths, they’ll be coming for you all the same. And that is what "traditional" means. Loved it.
