There’s Idaho City, there’s Boise, there’s the whole rest of the world waiting for her. Anywhere but here.
But that, like the hypothermia, is all later.
Right now it’s just rubbing her hands together over the fire, never mind the sparks swirling up. If she flinches from them, she’s a girl, she won’t deserve to be here at this hour.
“You all right there?” Shooting Glasses asks.
“Excellent,” Jade says back, giving him a sliver of a grin.
“You?”
Instead of answering, Shooting Glasses tries to make subtle eye contact with the other grunts, except quarters are too close for “subtle.”
“I interrupting something?” Jade says all around.
Mismatched Gloves shrugs, which means yes.
“Feel like I just barged into a wake, I mean,” Jade says, going from face to face.
“Good call,” Cowboy Boots says while wiping at his nose.
“I’m not Catholic,” Jade says, pulling back with all of them from a long swirling exhalation of sparks, “but isn’t there usually more drinking at a wake?”
“You’re thinking Irish,” Mismatched Gloves says with a sort-of grin.
“Let me guess,” Jade says. “Your name… McAllen?
McWhorter? Mc-something?”
“That’s Scottish,” Shooting Glasses says, staring into the fire. “Irish is O’Shaunessy, O’Brien—think luck O’ the Irish, that’s how I remember it.”
“Which of them has leprechauns?” Cowboy Boots asks.
“Shh, shh, you’re Indian, man,” Shooting Glasses tells him.
“We’re talking Europe stuff here, yeah?”
“Me too,” Jade says.
“You’re a leprechaun?” Mismatched Gloves asks, smiling now as well.
“Indian,” Jade says, and, by way of formal introduction to Cowboy Boots, “Blackfoot, my dad tells me.”
“Isn’t that Black feet?” Shooting Glasses asks.
“Montana or Canada?” Mismatched Gloves adds in.
Jade doesn’t tell them that, in elementary, until she caught the Montana return address on what turned out to be a Christmas check, she’d always thought she was Shoshone, because those were the Indians her social studies class said were in Idaho. So, being in Idaho, that’s what she must be. But then that return address, and that tribal seal by the address— she’d saved it, kept it hidden alongside her Candyman tape.
Too, back in those days she’d had the idea that, since she was starting out half Indian, that as she got bigger and taller—got more and more physical actual blood—someday she’d be full-blood like her dad.
“Black feet,” she says back with faked authority. “What the fuck do you think I said?”
“Yeah,” Mismatched Gloves says, holding his different-colored hands high and away, not touching this anymore, “she sounds Blackfeet all right.”
“Adopted,” Cowboy Boots says about himself, by way of introduction. “Could be anything.”
“What he’s saying is he’s a mutt,” Mismatched Gloves says.
“Mutt your ass,” Cowboy Boots says back, and Jade files that away: on this job-site, “your ass” is the add-on way of turning anything around. Her kind of place.
“So who died?” she says to whoever’s answering.
“He didn’t die,” Cowboy Boots says, blinking something away.
“Depends on what you consider dead,” Mismatched Gloves adds.
“Greyson Brust,” Shooting Glasses says, being respectful with the name.
“Hired on with us,” Mismatched Gloves tells Jade, then shrugs an exaggerated shrug, like trying not to think of something.
“Zero days since the last accident?” Jade asks, aware of the eggshells she’s walked onto here.
Shooting Glasses chuckles kind of humorlessly.
“Place is cursed,” Jade says, which gets all of their attention, a few more unsubtle glances among them.
“Probably, I mean,” she adds.
“So where you headed?” Cowboy Boots asks, trying to get Jade’s eventual exit started.
Jade, not a poker player, accidentally sneaks a glance in the direction of the great void in the night Indian Lake is, shrugs.
“She’s not going to,” Mismatched Gloves says, watching Jade hard. “She’s going from, right?”
“Killer name,” she says back to him, the answer to a question he hadn’t even been asking a little.