If All Else Fails by Craig Strete

face. He lets her do it but he feel too
grown-up for her doing that.
    "Maybe I eat just a
little," says Horseboy, knowing it make her happy if he do it.
    So the old lady
smile, crooked teeth and all, and put her arm around him and they walk back inside and that hole
in the ground, ain't nothing, just a hole back there.
    He's sitting down
in front of that beat-up old table his uncle found at the dump. He's sitting there and she fixing
for him and she talk. "You ain't bother to go leave us? Leave your grandmother and where your
father and mother buried, buried right here behind the house and you ain't bother going? Where
you be not having your peoples?" say the old woman, waving her finger at him. "This reservation
here, maybe you don't care about your peoples no more?"
    "I care," he say
and his face look hurting. There is a rat, under the floor by the table, making noise and
Horseboy lis­tening to that rat moving down there like it important. He trying not to look at the
old lady and listening, that rat there, yes, rat.
    The old lady comes
away from the old woodstove with a pot, walking careful like so she don't step in that hole in
the floor Horseboy never got around fixing. The steam rises up off that stew, smelling good. She
set it down on the table in front of Horseboy and dishes out some in an old cracked bowl for him.
Horseboy is looking away.
    "Don't your belly
hurt inside thinking how you going away? What about Nila? What about Nila girl? Don't you hurt in
the belly?" The old lady won't let up on him.
    "I get there on a
wage and soonest time I'm sending for Nila. Send for you Grandmother. This ain't a fit living place," says Horseboy.
    "I was here born
and here die," says the old woman. "I don't give damn all time talking about wage."
    "Well, not me," say
Horseboy. "Not this one. I want to see places."
    "What places?" she
ask.
    "I don't know. Just
places."
    "You just like that
Brokeshoulder, that Leon Broke-shoulder. Off to fight in that damn Vietnams. What for he doing
that? Who am them Vietnams? I ask you who they am. Ain't they brownskin like us and living on
land like our fathers and we over there killing them short brownskin peo­ples. Why for we do
that?"
    "For America," says
Horseboy. "It was done for America."
    "Oh, that's lie. A
lie and you knowing it. Them brownskin peoples like us Indians. They never do us harm. What right
that Leon Brokeshoulder got leaving reservation and going over there killing peoples never hurt
him?"
    "It's different
when you're in Army," says Horseboy. "You have to do what they tell you."
    "If they tell you
jump off mountain, if they tell you swal­low glass, you fool enough and do it? Ain't that the way
of it?"
    Horseboy push away
from the table, disgusted, almost knocking wobbly old table over. "Aw, you don't understand
nothing. You just so old, old woman, and things has passed you by. Things is different
now."
    The old lady wave
her bony fist in his face. "You respect your elders!"
    Horseboy look at
her, sharp, kind of sad, not so angry; then ashamed, he look away. "Sorry," he mutter.
    "Ain't you gone
eat?"
    "Not hungry now,"
says Horseboy.
    The old woman
pushed the steaming bowl of deer stew closer to him on the table. "Where you get food like that?
Only word food you gone hear when you leave here is ham­burger. Crazy white man and his
hamburger, you mind what I say. You eat this once so you remember what eating good
is."
    Horseboy pull
himself reluctantly back to the table and stir the stew listlessly with a fork. He less hungry
now than before. He eats a biteful anyway, just 'cause she watching.
    There was a knock
on the old screen door and Leon Brokeshoulder was leaning against the screen. Resting.
    "Car's ready. Got
the transmission fixed," he says.
    Horseboy look up
and wave him in. He come through the door slowly and awkwardly. The artificial leg of his never
seemed to fit him just right.
    He come into the
kitchen and pull