1. Crow Guts Anonymous CROW GUTS ANONYMOUS Nurse Seine Plenty Wolf wasn''t a junkie anymore. Except for other people''s things. It was why, for a few graveyard shifts, she''d been spending her breaks in the dead kid''s room. That was what the staff had taken to calling Sebby Spear Woman--he''d taken the front bumper of that big truck right in the left side, and that truck had been moving . All that was keeping him alive now was the breathing machine. The first thing she spirited away from his room, wearing the strap right across her chest, was a beaded parfleche. The two-hundred-year-old strap held until she got to her car, when the bag dropped into her hands exactly like fate, like this was what she was supposed to have done.
The pipe that had been wrapped in some throwaway hide was gravel and dust now, from the wreck, so she left it, and the bustle had exploded into the Indian version of pick-up sticks. All the same, Seine lined the bottom of the parfleche with those quills, didn''t know yet what she might do with them. But: something. The dead kid certainly wasn''t going to have any use for them. Most of the rest of the stuff in the white trash bag had just been junk: an ice cream scoop with a handle you could pour hot water in if you thought that far ahead and could tolerate dairy, two or three videotapes with ragged-out cardboard sleeves that she dutifully shelved in the patient library, an unopened blister pack of SPF lip balm, and a clutch of those cartoon horses with the flowy manes it was hard not to be jealous of. Were there Spear Woman little sisters, maybe? Little cousins? Seine had only made it back to Browning a few years ago, had missed a lot of births, even more deaths. She left the pink and purple ponies in the trash bag by the dead kid''s bed. If those sisters or cousins came visiting and found them, that could be good, could be something they''d remember their big brother or older cousin for.
Little girls wouldn''t care about the notebook under the ponies, though. Seine flipped through the blocky writing, tucked it in with the rest of her books at her station and patted it four times, making it hers, then she made her scuffling rounds, waiting for the last two ibuprofen to kick in--fifty-eight wasn''t ancient, but tell that to her hips, her ankles. You don''t live hard on the streets of Seattle for two decades without your body remembering those cold, wet nights. Seine lifted her chin, pressed on, changing sheets and emptying colostomy bags, assuring and consoling, until, finally, she was leaning over to peer into the living boy''s room, the one the medics hadn''t left the white trash bag with, since charges could still stick to him. It had been four months since the wreck that would eventually kill his friend down the hall--that, really, already had--but this one was a Yellow Tail, and Seine remembered that family from before she left the reservation the first time, how they were always walking away from things that should have killed them, walking away smiling that smile of theirs like they were charmed and knew it. "Cig swa?" she said into his room for probably the twentieth time since he got stable enough. Nate, watching cartoons in his bed and gnawing on the straw of his second shake of the day, looked over to her, his lips pressed together, and nodded once in a way that almost made her cry right there. Because he was set to be released in two days, she didn''t have to help him into his wheelchair.
He was moving normal, even if he''d never look like he used to--that nest of scars on his right cheek made Seine hiss the first time she saw them, when they were inflamed with layers of stitches. The emergency room doctors at Blackfeet Community Hospital weren''t on the cosmetic surgery track, so she supposed she couldn''t blame them, but still, the kid''s face looked like someone had popped a melon with a .410, then tried to suture that hole shut with yarn. It hadn''t puckered as bad as Seine had thought it would, but for the rest of his life he was going to be catching people sneaking guilty looks. "Poia Poia Poia." she said to him, lifting the old-timey white football helmet from the wooden hook for visitors'' jackets and handing it off to him. Poia was Scar Face in the old stories. The one who brought the sweat lodge down to the Blackfeet.
"Still?" Nate said about the helmet. "Dodgeball game breaks out out there," Seine tsk-tsked, chucking her chin to the wide hallway, "there needs to be some sign telling who has a skull fracture, who doesn''t, think?" Nate settled into the chair, leaning forward to guide his hair from behind his back. When that was done, he held the old-timey helmet there on his lap, studying it like it was a skull he''d just dug out of a cutbank. "Now you''re Jim Thorpe on break," Seine leaned down to whisper to him. "Jim who?" Nate asked, but not in a way where he wanted an answer. More like to tell her she was old and he wasn''t. Seine wheeled him out into the hall, knew that Dr. Rodge was still drinking from his flask in the parking lot, wouldn''t be on the floor for another twenty minutes, giving them time to burn one--two if they were fast.
"First, please?" Nate said, when she had him at what counts as speed with a wheelchair. Seine slowed, both glad he remembered and sad that he did, and turned him into the doorway of his dead friend''s room, kicked the brake on. Nate stood, hung the old-timey helmet on the wheelchair''s handle and crossed the room to the bed. Seine stepped back not so much to give him his privacy as to watch for what other nurses might be clocking this, for ammunition later: "Cover my Friday shift?" "Deal with 9B for me, just this once?" The only sound from the dead kid''s room was the breathing machine. Seine peeked in and Nate was just standing by the bed, head lowered, muttering. it wasn''t any of her business, she told herself. And: this is part of it . This is how you start to let go--not all at once, but little by little, day by day.
Except, another way to say that is that you hold on until the last possible moment, until you can''t anymore. Finally, Nate shuffled out, eased back into the chair, folded the footrests down one by one. "I don''t want you getting your hopes up," Seine said to the top of his head. "He''s tough," Nate said back. "Crow Guts Anonymous?" she said like an invitation. "Isaputsists," Nate translated back like it was such a drag having to--she was trying to make him remember the old words, the old ways. He''d gone into a coma one kind of Indian, but she was going to pull him up a better one. Crow Guts was an old-time traditional Blackfeet meal, but, for her and the kid, it was Group, it was Recovery, it was picking through the past to find the bits they could do something with.
Just, because this was Browning, Group was only Seine, the leader, and Nate, the reluctant participant. Which is why the cigarettes, of course. There''s got to be some enticement to show up, some bait. Nobody wants to come to Group just to get better. Seine had to use her card for the side door, the one with the little cubby out of the wind, complete with a craggy brass spittoon for ashes and butts. "I owe you," Nate said about the pack she was working up from her sock. "You know what that costs," Seine said right back to him, about the cigarette he''d already taken, was packing against his wrist bone. Nate flicked his eyes over to her, said, about the name tag she''d only just unearthed from a kitchen drawer this morning, "Plenty Wolf? That a name from around here?" He knew it wasn''t, was being polite.
"First husband," Seine said after her first drag, closing her eyes to feel the smoke rush out. "Lakota man. I ran away to get married, divorced to come back home, kept the name so I''d at least have something good left over." "Kids?" "You''re stalling, Yellow Tail," she told him. "You really occupied Wounded Knee?" he said then all the same, doubt in his voice because the math on her age didn''t look to be adding up for him--she''d only dropped this little piece of history on him yesterday, when they were talking about what was happening over at Standing Rock. "Told you, I was fifteen," Seine said back with a dismissive shrug. "That was old enough, back then." "But what was it like, being, you know, part of history, all that?" Seine just shrugged, tongued her cheek out a bit.
"You going again this time?" Nate pressed. "See if the FBI finally shoots you?" Seine narrowed her eyes, imagining herself standing at a barricade, helicopters hanging overhead, cameras drinking all these dangerous Indians in. That had been her sole desire back then: to be dangerous, properly hostile. That girl was still coiled up in her, too, still ready to fight, to give it all up if that''s the way it had to be, but the woman on the outside of that girl sort of just wanted a place to call her own, these days. "I think it''s national guard, now," she said. "Feds are feds, yeah?" the kid said, flashing his eyes up to her. "My rez pony''s water pump''s going bad," she said. "Don''t think she''ll take me all the way over to the Cannonball.
" "Cannonball?" Nate asked, squinching his whole face up. "A river--forget it," Seine told him. "You think you can get me distracted, like I''ve.