"I don't think he's human," Full Moon said.
"We killed the other two, we can kill him. Whatever he is, he can die."
Lone Cloud had not even finished the sentence when the knife sliced open his upper arm. He screamed, dropping the gun.
Patch-Eye stood unmoving, arms still raised.
Full Moon jumped back, startled. His grip on the rifle tightened, and he glanced quickly to the left and the right. Who had thrown the knife? Beard and Mustache were still lying on the ground. And Patch-Eye had had his arms up the entire time.
Or had he?
Full Moon had been half looking at Lone Cloud as he spoke. Could Patch-Eye have moved that fast, throwing the knife and then immediately putting his hands back up in the air?
"Why are you trying to kill us?" Full Moon asked.
Patch-Eye looked at him, smiling. "Why are you trying to kill us?"
"Why did you come looking for me?"
"Why did you come looking for me?"
"You killed my father."
"And you killed my friends."
"You killed my father's father. And his father." Full Moon swung the rifle over. "And now I'm going to kill you."
"This isn't part of the deal," Patch-Eye said.
"What deal?"
"This wasn't in the bargain."
Before Full Moon could ask another question, the man's face exploded in a spray of red.
Lone Cloud dropped the shotgun and fell to his knees. He rolled over on his left side, clutching his wounded right arm and closing his eyes. "Got the fucker," he said.
The wind was now completely gone. Full Moon looked from one body to another, then glanced down the street. Behind the windows of the buildings, he saw faces. The faces of the dead. Some were faces he knew, others were familiar but not immediately recognizable, related to faces he knew. One by one, they disappeared, winking out of existence like lights that had been switched off. The faces were still troubled as they stared at him, still frightened or in pain, as though their owners did not realize what had happened, but in the instant before they winked out of existence, an expression of gratitude passed over each.
Full Moon bent down next to Lone Cloud, and as he helped his friend stand and saw the dirt of Death Row blur and shift in his sight, he realized that he was crying.
He left Lone Cloud at the hospital in Rojo Cuello.
He'd planned to stay, to wait around until his friend's arm was patched up, but that was going to take several hours, and because it was a knife wound, the hospital was required to inform the police, and there would probably be several more hours of questioning.
Lone Cloud told him to leave, to drop him off and go.
To return and confront Black Hawk.
There was an ambulance in front of the casino when he arrived back at the reservation. Inside, a huge crowd had gathered around one of the blackjack tables, and Full Moon pushed his way through the gawkers until he reached the front.
"Jesus," he breathed.
John and Tom Two-Feathers moved next to him, and he turned toward them. "What is it?" he asked.
John licked his lips. "Black Hawk," he said.
Full Moon looked down again at the floor. All that was left of the council leader was a brown spiderlike thing that walked lamely around in a closed circle, hissing and spitting at those who looked upon it. The two paramedics, who had obviously arrived some time ago, stood with their stretcher, unsure of what to do.
This wasn't in the bargain.
Full Moon climbed onto the top of the blackjack table, raising his arms for silence. He glanced around the casino, making sure everyone could see him, and he told them what had happened. He told them of his father and his father's father and all of the other tribe members who had been killed on Death Row over the years, their deaths blamed on either outlaws or cowboys, whites or Mexicans. He told them what he had seen, what he had heard, what he had learned, and there was silence in the casino.
The thing that had been Black Hawk screamed, a high, piercing, almost birdlike sound, and Full Moon jumped off the table.
"This is for my father," he said.
He lifted his leg, brought his boot down hard on the creature's body. There was a loud crack and a lower squelching sound, and the hairy brown legs protruding from beneath his boot jerked once and then were still. Red blood spread outward in uneven rivulets, slowly pushing a gum wrapper and cigarette butt across the cement floor.
"What was he?" someone asked, and everyone looked around, searching the faces of the older people, who shook their heads, confused.
"Traitor!" White Dog yelled, and spit on the dead body of the Black Hawk thing.
The other council members, gathered behind the paramedics, were backing up, frightened by the mood of the room.
"Kill them, too!" someone yelled. A woman.
Jimmy Big Hands and White Dog grabbed Ronnie, the nearest council member.
"Let him go," Full Moon said quietly.
"What?"
"Let him go. Let them all go."
"But they knew!" White Dog yelled.
"They knew, but they are still here. They are not like him. They are like us."
He didn't like using words like us and them. It made him uncomfortable, and he thought of the whites on the Row who had stood and watched and laughed as his grandfather had been murdered in the street. But, like it or not, it was true, and once again he held up his hands. "It's over!" he announced. "Death Row is dead. It's over."
He looked around the room at the members of the tribe, the eyes, old and young, that were trained on him, and suddenly he felt like crying. Other people were crying already. Older people mostly. People who remembered. He saw the faces of the men and women he'd grown up with, his friends and family. He scanned the crowd for Rosalie but didn't see her.
"She's at home," John said, touching his elbow.
He nodded, and the crowd parted before him as he started to walk. The people were silent as he headed toward the door, and he walked out of the casino, outside, and into the sunlight.
He looked up at the sky, the sun, the clouds, breathing deeply, the tears beginning to flow.
His father, he knew, would have been proud.
The Show
In high school, a student in my class claimed to have seen a snuff film. No one thought he really had, but he traded on that story for our entire senior year. I didn't believe him either, but the idea haunted me, and when I was in college I decided to write a story about a teenage boy who watches a snuff movie. I had just seen Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on TV, and it occurred to me that maybe snuff films were not murders staged specifically for the camera but were, like Sweeney Todd, filmed plays, events produced for live audiences that also happened to be recorded. I liked the idea of the boy going to a snuff "show," and wrote this story.
***
My parents were fighting again in the front of the house, my dad calling my mom a stupid boring bitch, my mom calling my dad a cheap insensitive bastard. I closed the door to my room and cranked up my stereo, hoping it would drown out the screaming, but their words ran as an angry undertone to my music, the meanings clear even if the words weren't. I lay on the bed, reading a Rolling Stone, forcing my mind to concentrate on something else.
When the phone rang, I answered it immediately. I half hoped it would be for one of my parents, which would at least provide a momentary break in the battle, but it was only Jimmy. "Hey," I said. "How's it going?"
"Parents fighting again?"
"What else?"
He cleared his throat. "How'd you like to do something different tonight? I mean really different?"
"What?"