Simon scuttled back to his father’s head and looked at the blood trickling slowly from his mouth. One eye popped out of the socket and hung on his father’s cooling cheek. Simon said it again—dad dad dad—but it was all over. Simon stood and the woods took on a comforting indifference. Simon strapped his snowshoes on and began the walk back to town where he sat numb and unblinking next to the crackling barrel stove. He told Betty, and explained it again to his uncles who gathered there to hear it. Afterward they patted him on the shoulder and went out with a tarp and rope to bind and drag the crushed body of Simon’s father back to town, trussed like an oversized package from the butcher shop off the reservation.

7

One-Two showers and squeezes himself into a clean pair of jeans and a flannel shirt. He runs his hand through his brush-cut hair, a style he hasn’t been able to abandon since the fifties, and pulls on his Dan Post cowboy boots. He takes the bread from the oven, bangs it out on the makeshift counter in his basement room and smokes a cigarette while it cools. Carefully now, he wraps it in tinfoil and without gloves or coat he takes the steps and crosses the slick road with the heels of his boots spinning on chunks of ice until he stands on Betty’s porch.

The air is cold on his still-wet skin but the bread is warm, like the blanketed form of a small animal held softly between his fleshy fingers. Betty opens the door.

“Hmmmm.”

“Got some bread for you Betty.”

“Get outta the cold.”

One-Two ducks his head from habit and walks in. He clicks his boots together to dislodge the snow.

“Got some bread here.”

“You said that,” says Betty, taking the offered loaf.

“Fresh.”

“Yeah, you always was.”

“Come on, Betty. Play nice.”

She laughs. “You hungry? Got some mac on the stove.”

“Got enough?”

“Not for an Indian your size. But I can spare some.”

“That’d be nice, then. Real nice. Should I take off these here boots?”

“Leave them on. Leave them on. Christ, don’t know why all you men want to go around lookin like cowboys. You take them off you might have an identity crisis.”

One-Two shakes his head as he follows Betty into the kitchen. The floor shudders with each step. Lincoln sits at the small table copying out his homework in the pinched cursive he is learning in the fourth grade.

“Long time no see, Delivery.” One-Two eases into one of the chairs, which groans under his weight. Lincoln looks up and smiles.

“Howdy, One-Two.”

Betty ladles the macaroni into a bowl and sets it in front of One-Two. He waits while she cuts the heel off the loaf he brought over.

“Heel okay?”