The Medicine Show (pt 3).

Stay with me, the Indian begs him; he is crying, shaking; Kyle has never seen anything like this before. Stay, the Indian says.

But I can’t do anything, Kyle says to him, I can’t stay here and just watch you die.

The Indian takes a huge breath and blows it out, and he says weenswiaani niila naapiši myaamia, his eyes wide and white and rolling up into the back of his head. It’s so beautiful, the way he speaks. The river is touching the bullfrog bulge of his throat and the cold looks like it’s getting to him, tinting him blue and making slur his words. Aalime maacaani kinšimi, he says, aalinta kiihkeelimakiki eeweemaciki. The car is bobbing, hanging on to the shore by its back tires; Kyle tries to pull on the bumper with his good hand. What are you doing with a car like this, he says. There’s garbage floating in whirlpools inside the car, hamburger bags and soda cups and cardboard boxes that are splitting down the sides and jars that are falling out of them filled up with what looks like flowers and spices, though some of them have snakes and spiders in them.

The Indian is grabbing at his shirt, tearing at it, sobbing, long strings of snot hanging off of his nose; Kyle thinks he’s having a heart attack but it’s what’s under his shirt that he’s pulling at, and he realizes that the Indian isn’t fat at all, or at least not as much as he pretends – he’s got some kind of canvas vest on padded to make him look three times the size. Get it off, he gasps, tugging at the buckles that won’t release; the thing is like concrete now that it’s soaked, holding the guy rock steady in his seat.

You fool, Kyle says, though he never uses words like that. You absolute fool.

Cut it, the Indian squeals. Cut it with something, cut it –

The Pinto slips; it’s floating now, turning. The Indian howls. The Pinto starts to tilt.

The water touches his chin and Kyle realizes he has been following the car out into the river, spellbound; the rocks under his feet roll apart and he’s floating, and the Indian reaches out and grabs his hair and won’t let go. Stay with me! he shouts, spittle flying from his lips. Stay! Stay! Stay!

The Pinto is starting to roll; Kyle bites the Indian on the arm, disgusted at the way his tongue feels the skin tear, and when he’s let go the bumper hits him in the thigh hard enough to make his entire leg go numb. But he is not dying today like the Indian; he finds his way back onto shore, rubbing his eyes with shaking hands while the Pinto, kept afloat by the air escaping through the hatchback, starts to float away. Help, the Indian calls to him. He’s not moving anymore. Can’t you help.

Kyle stands, turns, and walks away. His mind is a white veil where there is no thought; he refuses to hear the day, the birds, the Pinto bubbling as it sinks. He is going to get help. It doesn’t matter that it is too late. It doesn’t matter that he can hear the Pinto bubbling as it sinks, and the Indian’s last sounds. He is going for help; that’s the period on the end of that sentence, not that he watched some faker hapless bastard drown in the river for no good reason. No, not that he jumped in the river, you don’t get anything for that unless you save the day. Nope, he saw the crash and he went for help, that’s what he did, because that’s what good people do. And while a man who was not fat and not an Indian drowned upside down in the Smoke River on a clear and blameless day beneath the CrissCross Bridge, Kyle ran. He ran for help.