If All Else Fails by Craig Strete Page A

up a chair beside Horseboy. Leon was painfully thin, his thick black hair cut
close to his scalp, in military fashion. He had a broad scar across his forehead as wide as a
zipper. Stepping on a land mine in Nam had really mess him up.
    "How you feeling
boy? You look death," says the old woman and she came around behind him and felt his ribs through
his shirt. "Hungry? I got deer stew."
    1 just ate," says
Leon, dragging a crumpled pack of ciga­rettes out of his shirt pocket.
    She put a bowl of
deer stew in front of him anyway. "Well eat again skeleton or wind gone think you tumble-weed and
blowing you away."
    Leon, being polite,
eat a little, but he isn't hungry much.
    "They was a wreck
down along Pine Canyon. Remember Joseph Eagle from over to Schoonerton?"
    Horseboy
grunt.
    "Well they say his
pickup truck went off crazy like at the top of the turn and went down the cliff with him. Pieces of him scattered all over Pine
Canyon."
    "Drunk?" asks
Horseboy, knowing Joseph Eagle.
    "Stinking with it,"
says Leon. "You ever know him not to be stinking with, it. All the time drunk, that
one."
    "Yeah," says
Horseboy, who had gotten drunk with Jo­seph Eagle a couple times himself.
    "You ready to
leave?" asks Leon and then Nila comes into the room through the back door. Nila with the shoes
that hurts her in that restaurant down the way she works at.
    "Why he going?"
says the old lady. "You tell me, Leon Brokeshoulder, why this boy gots to go so far and away.
Tell me why this boy going away?"
    Nila open her eyes
wide at that and lean wearylike in that doorway. There is sweat in her face from the long walk,
but the way her face is made up, she stop at home before she wander along down here to see
Horseboy.
    "Where you going
away, Horseboy? Where are you going?" ask Nila, rubbing her hands nervously on her wait­ress
dress.
    "Away," says
Horseboy, not looking at her. "To a city, I guess, maybe Austin or maybe up to Denver,
Colorado."
    "No good. No good,"
says the old lady. "You don't know your heart, you don't . . ."
    "You leave me be,"
says Horseboy. "I ain't go there for fun. I ain't go there for a good time and that's all. I
looking for a job there . . . steady work ... a good wage. I can't stay here no more. I don't
want end like Joseph Eagle, drunk all the time and so stinking not knowing you killed
yourself."
    "You gone leave
being Indian then," says his old lady grandmother. "What you are wanting is not Indian, not
In­dian."
    "I can't help it.
If it takes that, that is what is," say Horse­boy. Leon has turned his back to the table, looking out the screen door past Nila's head.
He is embarrass to hear this that goes on.
    Nila comes in and
sets at the table across from Horseboy. She sits in the chair, uncomfortable, that waitress dress
too tight on her, other things too.
    The old lady comes
around the table to offer her some­thing to eat.
    "Nila," she say,
noticing how that girl is looking, "what you done to your hair? What you done to eyes? What is
eye blackness? Sick, maybe? Work too much, maybe?"
    "I just cut hair,
is all, like white girls at work cut it. Too hot in restaurant for long hair. Eye stuff is
makeup; all the white girls at restaurant wearing it now."
    "Shame," say the
old lady. "You not proud of the face Great Spirit gave you, putting that white man's stuff on,
shame. Cutting hair like them white women's. Think Horse­boy like you better that
way?"
    "I never think of
it," say Nila, but she has, and she looks over at Horseboy. Horseboy is still busy not looking at
her.
    "Do you like hair
cut this way, Horseboy?"
    Horseboy looks over
at Nila but it is hard for him to an­swer her question. He just shrugs and then look away
again.
    Leon gets up,
favoring his leg and looks around, like he is ready to go.
    Horseboy gets up
too.
    They move over to
the door, fast, like they trying to es­cape.
    The old lady pokes
Nila in the shoulder. Nila is kind of just sitting there,