THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY
by
James Welch

James Welch is an American Indian-Blackfeet and Gros Ventre.  He
attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations in
Montana; he graduated from the University of Montana, where he studied
writing with the late Richard Hugo.  He is the author of two other
highly acclaimed novels Winter in the Blood (1974) and Fools Crow (1986)
both of which are available in the Penguin Contemporary American Fiction
series.

JAMES WELCH

PENGUIN BOOKS

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Zealand

First published in the United States of America by Harper & Row,
Publishers, Inc.  1979

Published in Penguin Books 1987

Copyright 0 James Welch, 1979 All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Welch, James, 1940   The death of Jim Loney.

(Contemporary American fiction)

1.  Title.  11.  Series.

[PS3573.E44D44 19871 813'.54 87-8613

ISBN 0 14 01.0291 4

Printed in the United States of America by R.  R.  Donnelley & Sons
Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia

this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, away to someone you loved
perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world;
was not that like the opportunity afforded man by life itself?

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Loney watched the muddy boys bang against each other and he thought of a
passage from the Bible: "Turn away from man in whose nostrils is breath,
for of what account is he?"

The boys stood up, some walking back to the huddle, others standing with
hands on hips and heads bent.  The rain fell, but more lightly now.
Beyond the arc lights the world was black.  The shiny helmets lined up
against each other and crashed again, this time a little farther
downfield.  A couple of car horns honked.  Loney could remember no other
passages and he was surprised that he had remembered that one.

It had been a good game until the rain came, somewhere in the third
quarter.  It was the second rain of the day and it had wiped out the
tender autumn field.

"That boy can run," said the man next to him.  "He's a regular horse,
that one!"

"No lie!" said another.  "Who is that?"

"I can't tell his number."

"It's Eckland," said the first man.

Loney stepped forward and squinted through the pale light.

The men were not talking to him but that was all right.  The rain was
not cold.

"How many time-outs we got left?"

A wispy little man pulled a note pad out of his pocket.  "We're out,
They've got two left."

"Goddamn it, Carl, what did you have to tell me that for?"

"We're shit out of luck.  What can you do in forty seconds?"

"That's a lot of time, Harve.  You'd be surprised."

Loney looked at the scoreboard: 13-6.  A touchdown and extra point would
tie it up.  It looked like Harlem would get the touchdown.  They were
near the goal line.  Then they were in and the car horns sounded and the
clock stopped.  Across the field the cheerleaders, holding a long piece
of plastic over their heads, kicked and danced.  A tall thin player
raced out onto the field holding a kicking tee.  He wore one black shoe
and one white shoe.  His uniform was spotless.

"Oh, my dying ass.  They're going to kick the goddamn thing."

"You'd be surprised, Harve.  I smell a fish in the barrel."

"Can it, pint-size.  I know,what I see."

"Who is that?"

"Young Cutler."

"Oh, shit--oh, dear."

But it was a fake kick.  The holder scooped the ball off the ground and
started to circle right.  The kicker followed him, dancing behind him
like a thin bird.  The Chinook players fell back from the line to cover
the end zone.  Suddenly the holder stopped and cocked his arm and the
thin player ran into him.

The ball seemed to hang in the air as both players fell to the muddy
field; then it, too, fell, landing on the thin player's back.

He rolled over, pulled the ball into his midsection and lay there
without moving.

Loney glanced at Harve, but Harve had one big farmer's hand covering his
face.  He hadn't seen a thing.  He looked like a man at a funeral.

Loney walked through the smoky night.  Away from the people and the
lights, the rain was colder.  He moved his shoulders up and down to make
them warm.  He stopped and lit a cigarette and glanced back toward the
field.  The banks of lights had been turned off and Loney could hear the
noise of car motors racing.  He lived two blocks from the football field
and he smelled the smoke from the wood stoves banked against the night
and the rain.

Four cars speeded by, horns honking, people yelling.  A girl leaned out
the window of a pickup and screamed, "Go, Big Orange"

It was the first week of October and the rain had been falling for three
days without letup.  Before that, there had been one clear day, and
before that, a long week of rain.  Loney had been working for a farmer
out north, helping with the summer fallowing, but the rain had wiped
them out and he didn't mind.

That one clear day the farmer had come to Loney's house and told him to
come to work the next day.  But when it rained again, Loney sat at his
kitchen table and watched it.  He had made enough from harvesting to
keep himself for a while.

His needs were few and not great in his mind.

It was early and Loney did not want to go home.  He wanted to go
downtown for a drink.  But because he didn't go out much anymore he had
to stop and decide where to drink.

He was a block from the bars and the rain had soaked through his shoes.
For a moment he thought of giving up the idea.

He had a bottle of wine at home, but he wanted a drink of whiskey, a
drink that would warm him inside and out.  He decided on Kennedy's, but
his father might be there, so he settled on the Serviceman's.

As he walked toward the lights, he thought again of the Bible passage.
He hadn't read the Bible in fifteen years.  He wondered why he had
remembered that particular passage.

Did it have to do with the players, the people around him, himself?  He
decided the passage was wrong, he had gotten it wrong.  There was no
sense to it.

He walked and he realized that he was seeing things strangely, and he
remembered that it had been that way at the football game.  It was as
though he were exhausted and drowsy, but his head was clear.  He was
aware of things around him-the shadowy trees, the glistening sidewalk,
the dark cat that moved into the dark.  The wood smoke had been with him
for days and he felt drowsy on it and he smelled the wet leaves in the
gutter.  He saw and smelled these things and his head felt light, and he
thought, I hear nothing, it is as quiet as death, and he did not hear
the rain.  The rain did not make a sound as it fell.  The night
glistened with the smell of wood smoke.

The bar was full but not packed.  And it was quiet for ten o'clock on a
Friday night.  Loney felt awkward as he made his way down the bar.  A
young couple glanced in his direction, their faces blank with
indifference.  He found an empty stool beside the man and slid onto it.

The bartender, a lanky Indian named Russell, looked at him while he
wiped his hands on a bar rag.  "The Lone Ranger,"

he said.

"What's up?" said Loney.

"Business as usual.  Trying to keep the women happy."

"It's tough," said Loney.

"What's your pleasure?"

"Bourbon-with a little water."

"You're coming up in the world."

Loney rubbed his forehead.  It was wet.  He settled down and waited for
his drink.  He hadn't been in the Serviceman's since last June, since
Chuckwagon Days, when the fat government worker got thrown through the
plate-glass window.  The window was still gone, replaced by a large
sheet of plywood.

Someone had scrawled in lipstick: SLOW ME DOWN LORD.

Russell set Loney's drink on the bar.  He had been a drinking
acquaintance a few years ago, but that was history.  Now is now, thought
Loney, and he drank half the drink.  It was almost pure bourbon.

"How's that?" said Russell.

Loney sat up straight and lowered his head, waiting for the burning knot
to settle in his stomach.  Then he swallowed and reached into his breast
pocket for his cigarettes.

Russell wiped his hands on the bar rag and watched him.

"You want some water?"

"It's fine.  Jesus Christ, it's all right now."

Russell laughed.  He didn't like Loney.  He had never liked him and he
could not say why.  Even when they used to drink together he hadn't
liked Loney and it always puzzled him.  If it had been a woman, if we
had fought over a woman, Russell thought, I could understand that.  But
it had never been a woman.  When they drank together, they drank as men
do who do not like each other.  They drank quietly but tensely, neither
of them wishing the other ill or well, only survival until next time.
The only time a woman had been involved Russell had won.  He took the
woman home and fucked her But even then he felt that he had been given
her, that Loney hadn't cared one way or another.  And maybe that was
what he hated in Loney, the fact that he didn't seem to care.  Russell,
it in his victory, had been made foolish.

But Loney had never really done anything to him, and right now Russell
could almost pity the poor bedraggled bastard trying to light a
cigarette with a book of wet matches.  He leaned over the bar and struck
his Zippo.  "You been to the football game?"

Loney sucked in his smoke and nodded.

"How bad was it?"

"Thirteen to twelve."

"Theirs?"

"Yes."

"Hell, that's a moral victory.  Your goddamn right."

"Skin you."

"Skin you too."

They both laughed.  It was an Indian joke.

"What have you been up to?" said Loney.  He wiped his wet hair back away
from his forehead.

"Eating the wife's cooking, getting fat." Russell bounced a fist off his
flat belly.  "You know I got married?  Estelle Pipe?

Almost a year now."

"Congratulations."

"You should try it."

"I just might."

"Keep your hands off your meat.  Best year of my life."

"Congratulations."

"You got a woman?"

"Yes."

"Really?"

Loney nodded.

"What's her name?  Do I know her?"

"No, you wouldn't know her."

"Why not?"

"She doesn't come in here."

"What's the matter with this place?"

"She's a schoolteacher."

"Ohhh." But Russell didn't believe him.  He didn't believe Loney had a
woman and it irritated him.  "I hear from Sylvester that you're working
for old Gronabeck."

"I was, until this rain got the best of us." Loney felt about ready to
try the bourbon again.

"You should get a real job."

"That's the truth."

"You should work it for a while instead of sitting on it."

"Maybe." Loney lifted his eyebrows.

And Russell felt a little sorry for him.  "Working for them farmers
ain't so bad.  You can't beat the hours."

Loney laughed and swallowed the whiskey.  Russell laughed too.  He could
buy him a drink now.  We're neither of us bad guys; just adversaries,
that's all.

In the Serviceman's that night, nobody was bad and the night turned
noisy and incidental to the long run.

Rhea rolled over onto her back and sighed, and the sun filled the room.
It took her a moment to realize that today was Saturday and she had made
it through another week.  She began to feel the possibility of spirit
again.  It had been a long time;

not a bad time, just a vaguely discontented time.  The malaise had
fallen over her like a patch of winter fog and she thought it had to do
with the onset of winter in a cold country.  But yesterday's snow had
lifted her and at the same time had prepared her for the unruly months
ahead, and today's sun burned away the traces of her malaise.  She felt
resolutely human.

She studied the picture on the wall above her bed.  It was a print of a
painting of a girl with orange hair and black dress.

She often glanced at it in the morning, but this early sun threw a rare
light on it and she decided it must be true.  The man who had presented
it to her had said the girl looked just like her.  Today, for the first
time, the long neck, the slender face, even the hair, although the wrong
color, seemed much like her own.  It was in the eyes that she found a
resemblance that mystified her.  There was something Oriental about the
eyes and she had never thought of her own eyes that way.  Moreover, the
eyes were dark, opaque, while her own eyes were green and deep.  Lively,
she thought.  Why do they always paint such passionless women?  But I
have been passionless the last few weeks.  Maybe that's the resemblance.
Two passionless women waiting for something to happen.

The clock/radio said 9:03.  She walked into the bathroom and turned on
the light above the mirror.  Without her lipstick, her eye shadow and
mascara, she looked less like the girl than she had imagined.  She began
to take off her nightgown to look at her body, but she thought, This is
silly; a girl on a piece of pasteboard is making me do this.  Still, she
moved her gown to one side so she could see her shoulder and it was
smooth and white and did look a little like the girl's one visible
slightly rounded shoulder.  She made a face.  At least I have passion in
me.  And big white teeth.  I could bite through a tree.  "Grrr," she
said.  It always surprised her when friends, men especially, told her
she had wonderful teeth.  She always felt they were much too large for
her mouth.  And a little crooked.  Sometimes when she listened to a
person talk directly to her, she felt her lips pulling apart and she
became conscious of her teeth and she couldn't concentrate on the words.
At best, she thought her teeth were eccentric.

"I'm twenty-nine years old," she said as she ran the washcloth over her
face.

She slipped into her robe and walked to the kitchen to put on her tea
water.  Then she went to the front door for the newspaper.  The street
was already black and drying in spots.

What a strange country.

And she thought of the day before.  That late afternoon she had been
visiting Loney in his house, scolding him really, for she had found him
drinking wine and half drunk.  He would say nothing to her and she had
decided to leave, perhaps for good, when she looked out the kitchen
window and saw the thick heavy flakes.  She had blurted, "Oh, look!" and
together they watched through the window the snow turning blue in the
dusk.  She heard again the ticking clock as she ran her fingers through
his hair.  And she remembered the yellow stucco Catholic church across
the street, as large and ominous as a ship on a swell.  And the four box
elders on the boulevard twisting darkly to the gray sky.  Rhea had
watched the first snow of the year drift and cover everything small and
she thought she had never seen anything lovelier.

Now she touched her blond hair, cut as short and almost in the same
style as Loney's, and the disappointment of seeing the first snow
running down the gutter was tempered by the brilliant sun and the raw
noise of a magpie in a tree across the street.

She fixed her tea and toasted an English muffin and carried them into
the living room, where she sat down on the rug in a square of sunlight.
She opened the paper to the weather section and ran her finger down the
column of cities until she came to Dallas: 820 and 630.  That was warm
for this time of year.  She tried to imagine what her parents were doing
right now.  They would have finished breakfast hours ago.  They got up
at dawn every day.  Saturday.  Her father would probably be out shooting
clay pigeons.  A dumb sport.  And her mother?

Perhaps sitting in the sun reading the newspaper, or working on one of
her splashy watercolors.

Most mornings when she read the Dallas weather, Rhea longed for those
hot dry days, those empty afternoons of sunning or shopping or driving
to Fort Worth and her grandmother's estate.

She loved Fort Worth.  It had a personality, with its old buildings, the
cattle yards and the museums.

Rhea sipped her tea and looked out the sliding glass doors that opened
onto a small deck.  She remembered the last exhibit she had attended in
an annex of the Amon Carter Museum.

It was an exhibition of modern cowboy art, mostly plastic art.

Most of the pieces were funny and quite serious, but she liked the
saloon the best.  It was a real saloon and you walked through the rough
swinging doors and found yourself in another world.

She smelled the manure and she stared at the red neon heart blinking in
the dark above the bar.  She heard the lonesome moan of a broken-hearted
cowboy on the jukebox.  There were bottles of Lone Star and Pearl beer
and ashtrays full of cigarette butts on the bar, and in the corner, a
rumpled bed with a big pile of dirt in the middle.  She and her friend,
whom she had thought she loved at the time, became silent as they
allowed the music and manure to fill their senses.  Then they looked at
each other and laughed.  They laughed until they were breathless, and
then they hugged and Rhea had thought her life was perfect in that
moment.

But when they walked out into the white light of the museum hall, an old
dissatisfaction hit her like a mistral wind and she felt quite empty.
She had felt it for some time, since receiving her M.A.  from Southern
Methodist that spring.  She had no idea what she was going to use it
for.

She looked at her plate.  She hadn't touched her English muffin and
the butter had made it soggy.  She stood and walked into the kitchen.
The carpet was warm from the sunlight.  She found some cigarettes in a
drawer and took one.  She hardly ever smoked, but her memories had made
her antsy.

Back in the living room she lit the cigarette with a large crystal
lighter.  And she remembered the professor, an assistant professor of
literature, who had told her all about Montana.

He had spent his summers in Montana since he was a kid.  At the family
place on Flathead Lake.  He had told Rhea about the blue mountains, the
green rivers, the small summer theater in Bigfork, and Glacier Park.  He
had given her an address in Helena where she could find out about
teaching positions.  Al though they were the most casual of
acquaintances, he had sensed her dissatisfaction.  And so she wrote. And
here she was.

And she had been here two years.  But instead of summer theaters and
mountains and Glacier Park, she found herself in country that was all
sky and flat land.  She was in Big Sky country.

With a vengeance.  If it weren't for the Little Rockies and the
Bearpaws, small mountains to the south of Harlem, there would be nothing
to break the tan and blue horizon.  As for summer theater, there was a
movie house that showed Walt Disney and adventure films.  It wasn't the
end of the world, her grand mother would have said, but you could see it
from here.  But she said that about Fort Worth.

Rhea lay back and closed her eyes.  The sun was grand and she hoped that
Loney would be in shape today.  She listened to the snow drip on the
small deck.  It was Saturday and sunny and Rhea felt the possibility of
spirit again, an anticipation of something about to happen.

Loney was combing his hair when he heard the knocking.

He put the hair oil in the medicine chest and turned out the light.  The
bathroom was on the dark side of the house.

He opened the back door and Rhea stood with her hands on her hips.
"What's the meaning of this?" she said, gesturing with her head at the
garbage can.  It had been tipped over and a trail of trash led around
the side of the house.

He frowned.  "Goddamn dogs," he said.

"You should speak kindlier of them, you beast."

"Turd hounds," said Loney.

"You're an ugly one."

"Come in." He stood aside and let her pass.

"Oh, my!  What have you done?  It's so spotless!" Rhea walked around the
kitchen, running her finger over the counters and shelves, looking into
corners and under the table.  "Oh, my, who's your decorator?  I must
have him!"

"Charles-Charles of Harlem." But Loney was happy and shy.  "Would you
like some coffee?  It's only instant."

But Rhea continued to walk a tight circle in the small kitchen.

She seemed to be searching for something.  At last her eyes lit on him.
"And look at you!  You combed your hair And shaved." She put her hand to
her chest.  "And did you bathe?"

Loney nodded.  Her soft Southern voice had become a song and it confused
him.  He didn't know whether she was mocking him or not.  Either way he
didn't mind, because he felt fine and he was glad that she had come.

"Do you think I might have a cup of coffee?" she said.  But she kissed
him instead.  The kitchen was quiet and sunny, Then she leaned away from
him and said, "Some of that good old fashioned coffee you're so famous
for?"

"You smell good."

"It's Charlie," she breathed.

"Charlie of Harlem?"

"Perfume," she sighed.

They drank their coffee on the back porch in the sun.  Swipesy lay
between them and slept.  Swipesy was Loney's dog.  He was very old and
deaf.  Rhea patted his head and they were silent for several minutes.
Then she looked at Loney and said.

"You're so beautiful today.  So doggone gorgeous."

"Thank you," said Loney.

"You're so damned lovely sometimes.  Sometimes I think I would just like
to take a bite of you."

"We could go inside," said Loney.

"I love your dark skin and your dark hair, your noble dark profile.
Sometimes you remind me of a dark greyhound.  Do you mind?"

"You want to gnaw on my arm?"

want to gnaw on your throat," she growled.

"Everything I have is yours."

"That's a song, show-off." She sipped her coffee.  It was half milk and
barely warm.  "I feel so perfect today.  Thank you for being so ...  in
shape."

"It's my pleasure."

"And so gallant.  I believe you're my Southern gentleman today."

Loney looked at her.  He looked at her eyes and he wondered at them.
Sometimes they were the color of turquoise and he wondered at their
coldness, but in that morning light they were the warm green of alfalfa
and he wondered at their depth and his own good luck.

"Let's go for a drive.  I know just the place," she said.

"Not Havre." Sometimes on Saturday they drove to Havre for a matinee.

"There." And she pointed to the Little Rockies.  From the porch they
could just see the small range.

"Do you really want to?"

"It will do us a world of good.  Let's feed old Swipesy here and then
we'll go to Buttrey's and pick out some cheese and then we'll get a nice
bottle of white wine.  You go put your jacket on.  I'll feed Swipesy.  I
know how.  Tomato soup, right?"

She stood and brushed the seat of her jeans.  For just this one day she
wanted it all.

They sat in Rhea's small station wagon in a grove of alders just out of
sight of the main road.  Three yellow leaves lay on the hood of the car.
They had eaten the small round of Camem AMO
bert cheese and drunk enough of the wine to feel lazy.

"How did those leaves get on my car?"

"They fell from that tree."

"In November?"

"They were waiting for us.  They sat and watched the dark clouds that
had appeared suddenly over the east rim of the canyon.  They were coming
fast and widening to the south.

"Do you think it will snow?"

"Something is blowing in.  I don't know."

"And what's the name of this canyon?"

"Mission."

"And what's the name of that mission back there?"

"St.  Paul's?  That's funny.  I don't remember.  I used to play
basketball against them."

"And did you win?"

"They weren't very good.  It's a small school."

"I love it out here.  It's so peaceful.  Do you think anybody ever comes
here?"

"Hunters, picnickers.  People gathering chokecherries."

"Let's build a cabin.  We can cut down these little old trees.

We'll build a log cabin and you can hunt.  Just like your ancestors.

You can dress me up in furs.  Are there any ermines here?"

"Weasels.  They turn into ermines in the winter."

"Do you ever think about your ancestors?"

"Which ones?"

"Whichever you claim.  Oh, you're so lucky to have two sets of
ancestors.  Just think, you can be Indian one day and white the next.
Whichever suits you."

The clouds had covered the sun while they were talking and the car had
begun to get cold.  Loney thought, It would be nice to think that, but
it would be nicer to be one or the other all the time, to have only one
set of ancestors.  It would be nice to think that one was one or the
other, Indian or white.

Whichever, it would be nicer than being a half-breed.

"What suits you now, Mr.  Loney?"

And Loney pulled her to him.  He was grateful that Rhea didn't want him
to be anything now but here.  He kissed her and he held her and he felt
her small breasts roll softly against his chest.  In the cramped front
seat he undressed her and she unbuttoned his shirt and unclasped his
belt.  Her cold deli cate fingers stroked his chest and he didn't think
about his ancestors.  He moved from behind the steering wheel and she
straddled him, her cheek pressed to his ear.  She felt contented, even
drowsy from the wine.  She closed her eyes and smelled his hair oil and
when she opened them she saw a deer through the rear window.  It was a
large deer, without antlers.  It stood broadside, its head turned
directly toward the car.  Rhea watched it flick its right ear, then lift
a hind hoof to scratch it.  She almost exclaimed, but she felt drowsy
and she felt Loney's hand urging her down onto his lap.  She closed her
eyes because she wanted to give herself to him and she closed her eyes
because she was drowsy and she wanted to keep this one secret.  She
kissed his neck and she felt him inside her and she thought, One day I
will tell him.  For that moment it was the best secret ever.

"I never really thought about it.  It was so long ago and I was just a
kid.  He just left.  It was really that simple-here today, gone
tomorrow.  I think it affected Kate more because she was older.  She was
old enough to expect something from him.  I guess he wasn't much of a
father.  I must have been nine or ten when he left.  He went out
drinking one night and didn't return for twelve years.  Kate was about
fifteen then and she'd been taking care of me for some time already."

"What about your mother?"

"She didn't exist.  She left when I was a year old.  Kate sort of
remembers her.  At least she says she does.  She was an Indian woman
from out around Hays, a West wolf maybe.  Kate thinks she went crazy
sometime after she left.  I didn't know her."

"Would you like a glass of wine?"

"No, I have to talk.  If I have a glass of wine I'll be on my way.  It
happens fast with me now.  I think I'd better talk.  Any way, our father
left when I was nine or ten.  To this day I don't know where he went,
but he was gone for twelve years.

"Then one day I saw him on the street.  I didn't know for a long time
that I had seen him.  There was something familiar about the man.  I
don't mean he looked familiar, but there was something about t he way he
moved.  No, that's not it either.

just a look, I guess.  The way you see somebody on the street who
reminds you of the way you think you must look.

"Anyway, I didn't see this man again for two or three weeks.

I thought he had been a stranger passing through.  I had almost
forgotten him when our paths crossed again.  He was drunk and was
walking down the same street, the one in front of the grade school, so I
decided to follow him.  We walked all over town.  I think we walked
every street in town, sometimes around the same block a couple of times,
then back downtown, then out the other way.  At first I thought he knew
I was following him and he was doing this to throw me off the track, but
he seemed too drunk.  He was really weaving around.  Once he stopped
under a street light and started coughing.  He almost coughed his lungs
out.  He was on one knee and almost choking to death and I almost ran to
him.  But he finally quit and took I kept following him and he finally
crossed the railroad tracks and turned east on that street across from
the grain elevators and walked to the end of it.  There was a little
green trailer out there.  He opened the door, then he turned

around and looked right at me, then he went inside and closed the door."

"Do you think he recognized you?"

"I don't know.  Twelve years had passed.  No, I mean yes yes, I think he
recognized me.  But I don't think he was sure.

So much time, I wasn't sure.

"What happened then?"

"I remember just standing there for a long time looking at the trailer.
I think I was trying to find an excuse to go up there and knock on the
door.  I don't remember.  I do remember walking away, mixed up,
thinking, I'll never know.  Then I got a bright idea.  I ran downtown
and started checking the bars.  I went to the Serviceman's first.
Sylvester Chase was tending bar.  I described this man to him and he
knew of him but he didn't know his name.  Same thing at Beanie's.
Finally I ended up at Kennedy's and Kenny Hart was behind the bar.

When I started to describe the man he cut me short and said, 'Sure.
That's Ike.  That's your old man."'

"You must have been stunned."

"That was fourteen years ago but I remember it as though it happened
this afternoon.  I remember sitting down and Kenny pouring me a shot of
something.  I remember looking into it for a long time.  Then I asked
Kenny what my father was doing back in town and he said, 'This is his
home, ain't it?"

"Fourteen years.  We haven't talked in all that time.  I was waiting for
him to make the first move.  I wanted him to think he had the drop on
me, that I still didn't know, but I guess he didn't think it was worth
it."

"This is Chablis.  It's very dry.  You might not like it."

"Kate talked to him once, three years ago, the last time she was out
here.  They had a real row.  She wanted him to admit that he was our
father and that he had abandoned us.  She wanted him to admit that.
She's funny that way, the way she wants things to be clear.

"But he wouldn't admit anything.  He just quit talking.  I think he
holds our mother against us.  We must remind him of her.

I think she must have run out on him.  That's how come he wont recognize
us.  And you know the worst of it?  I don't even know what she looks
like, or even if she's still alive."

"Do you hold it against her-I mean the fact that she wasn't a mother?"

"No.  She just wasn't, that's all."

"And your father?"

Loney shrugged.

Jim Loney didn't know how long he had been asleep, but when he awoke it
was close to 4 A.M.  Outside, the wind swirled and blew snow like grains
of sand against the kitchen window.

He looked down at his dog- and his dog was looking up at him.

"How you doing, old man?"

Swipesy twisted his head.

"You don't even hear me, but I think you understand every thing about
life.  And you know that you're a good old boy, don't you?  Yes, you're
a good old dog.  You live clean and you never abuse yourself.  You're an
example to me, Swipesy.  I just wish I was as smart as you.  I used to
be.  I was as smart as anybody."

Swipesy sat up and pushed his nose against Loney's knee

"That was before I realized I didn't know anything.  Not one damn thing
that was worth knowing.  Do you understand that?

Do I understand that?" Loney allowed himself a rueful smile that had
nothing to do with the dog.

He petted Swipesy until the dog slumped back to the floor.

Then the lamp on the table flickered and went out.  Loney sat for a
moment and listened to the wind.  From the dark room he could see the
sheet of snow blowing through the street lamp beside the Catholic
church.

He stood and walked the five feet to the refrigerator.  He felt around
on top of it until he found the candle.  It was a blocky red candle with
a plastic wreath around its base.  He couldn't remember where it had
come from.  He hadn't celebrated Christmas since he had lived with an
aunt for two years many years ago.  He remembered going to midnight mass
with her, then eating some kind of pudding., He tried, as always, to
remember how old he had been, but as always, it didn't come to him.  He
recalled the flavor of that pudding and it tasted like butterscotch, but
he knew it wasn't.  That aunt had died.  Her name was Sandra, or Susan,
or something that started with an S.  Sometimes he liked to think that
if she hadn't died, he would have lived with her forever.  She liked
midnight mass and she liked many men in those two years.  But he
remembered most that she liked him.

He lit the candle and picked up his sister's letter.  In the yellow
light he read, and it was full of the usual things-her job, her social
life, the men who turned out to be drips or lechers, a guided tour of
the places she had been to, and finally the offer to pay his way to
Washington, D.C., and to get him a job.  Loney had to smile because each
of her letters for the past three or four years had contained this
offer.  It was an offer made in earnest, but Loney could not conceive of
a life in the East.  She would have better luck trying to convince a
zebra to live in Washington.  And so he read the three pages with a kind
of guilty amusement until he reached the last para graph, which was
written in a hasty scrawl with a different colored ink, green:

Since you do not choose to answer my letters and because I consider you
my God-given burden in life, I have decided to take the week off at the
end of this month and fly out.  I would like to make it Thanksgiving,
but I will be in Arizona at a meeting, after which I will fly to Great
Falls, then to Havre.  I will let you know when you can pick me up.  Is
your car running?

Please be healthy.  And please don't tell Dad I'm coming.  It would only
lead to difficulties unimaginable.

And it was signed, "Affectionately, Kate."

Loney lit a cigarette from the candle and found his hand trembling.  It
was not a new thing; lately it happened quite often, and he didn't know
if it was a physical thing or if it was just because of the cigarettes
and wine and lack of sleep.

He made fists until the knuckles turned white, but still his hands
shook.  And again, as he had that night after the football game, he saw
things strangely, yet clearly.  The candle, the wine bottle, the letter
before him, all burned clearly in his eyes and they had no reality in
his mind.  It was as though there were no connection between his eyes
and his brain.  And he saw the smoke ring go out away from his face and
he saw the bird in flight.  Like the trembling, the bird was not new.

It came every night now.  It was a large bird and dark.  It was neither
graceful nor clumsy, and yet it was both.  Sometimes the powerful wings
beat the air with the monotony of grace;

at other times, it seemed that the strokes were out of tune, as though
the bird had lost its one natural ability and was destined to eventually
lose the air.  But it stayed up and Loney watched it until it reached
into the darkness beyond the small candlelight.

Loney picked up his glass.  It was half full of wine.  "Here's to the
bird, my bird," he said.  His mouth was dry and the wine did not taste
good.  He was restless.  He had been thinking of his life for a month.
He had tried to think of all the little things that added up to a man
sitting at a table drinking wine.

But he couldn't connect the different parts of his life, or the various
people who had entered and left it.  Sometimes he felt like an amnesiac
searching for the one event, the one person or moment, that would bring
everything back and he would see the order in his life.  But without the
amnesiac's clean slate, all the people and events were as hopelessly
tangled as a bird's nest in his mind, and so for almost a month he had
been sitting at his table, drinking wine, and saying to himself, "Okay,
from this very moment I will start back-I will think of yesterday, last
week, last year, until all my years are accounted for.  Then I will look
ahead and know where I'm going." But the days piled up faster than the
years receded and he grew restless and despondent.  But he would not
concede that his life had added up to nothing more than the simple
reality of a man sitting and drinking in a small house in the world.

And so he drank to the bird which came every night and he tried to
attach some significance to it, but the bird remained as real and as
elusive as the wine and cigarettes and his own life.

Swipesy whimpered in his sleep and Loney came back.  He picked up the
letter and turned again to the last paragraph.

The end of this month.  November.  But he had no idea what the date was.
He tried to think of something that had happened that would help, but
the only thing he could think of was snow.

And Rhea.  He hadn't seen her for several days, since the trip out to
Mission Canyon.  He would see her soon.  He would clean up again and he
would see her.  Like a first anniversary.  They had met almost a year
ago at a basketball game.  She had been selling tickets and she had been
curt with him because she did not consider it part of her duties as an
English teacher

,k to sell tickets to a basketball game.  But then she apologized and
they talked for a few minutes.  Loney had flattered himself thAt she
recognized him from his picture in the trophy case at school.  He had
been on the team that won Harlem's only state championship.  In the
picture he was kneeling beside My ron Pretty Weasel, who was holding the
basketball that read STATE B CHAMPS 1958.  But she hadn't seen the
picture; in fact, she hadn't even noticed the trophy case.

But a couple of weeks later she did recognize him in the grocery store.
On an impulse she invited him home for dinner and she slept with him
that night.  They were both surprised.

Loney couldn't believe that such a lovely classy woman would want him
and Rhea couldn't believe it either.  She had come north to escape
entanglements.  She told him this later.  She admitted that at first he
represented only warmth and sex.

He had settled for that, but now, a year later, they were lovers and he
was blowing it.  And he didn't know why.

November.  This month.  He picked up the envelope and read the postmark:
November 12.  It must be the fifteenth or sixteenth.

The candle flickered in a sudden draft of wind that rattled the back
door.  Kate would be here in two weeks.  Loney poured himself a glass of
wine.

He didn't know when they came, only that his father came first.  He had
been staring at the candle when he heard the scratching on the
windowpane and looked up to-see his father grinning through his
whiskers.  His pale face seemed even whiter as the snow whirled about
him.  He said, "Why are you weeping?"

And Loney looked at him and the hard snow pelted the glass between them.

"Come on, I'm your father," said his father.

"But I'm not weeping," Loney said.  "I'm laughing.  I'm drinking wine
and laughing.  This is a celebration."

"You are weeping."

"But don't you see how funny it is?"

"Nothing in this world is funny."

Then Loney was standing beside his father, looking in at the weeping
man.  "He is weeping," Loney said.

"Of course," said his father.  "Didn't I just say that?  Things are not
well with him."

"He is weeping for nothing, though.  That's the way with him."

"No," said the father.  "He is weeping for something.  I ought to know."

And the son said, "He is crying for himself.  He has no family."

And the father said, "That's impossible.  He's crying for me.

I'm his family and he pities me."

"But you have everything!  You have no children.  You're the best father
imaginable .  .  .  ...

"That will be enough!  Enough to know he pities me, that's good enough
for me."

And a third voice, muffled and far away, said, "You think too much of
yourselves.  Anybody can tell he misses me already;

he uses his tears to good purpose." In the darkness of the room, beyond
the arc of the candle, beyond the weeping man, stood a small figure with
blond hair, with white teeth and green eyes.

"But I'm laughing." The man lifted his head and the tears streamed down
his cheeks.  "I have no one.  It's a celebration."

And Loney stood beside his father and said, "He weeps, all right."

"Then why?" His father sounded indignant.

"And why?" Rhea sounded impatient.

Loney rubbed his chin, lost in thought.  He lit a cigarette, lost in
thought.  Then he took a sip of wine and the wine exploded.

"I've got it!  He weeps for us, for all of us!"

"How so?"

"Because he can't have us."

"How so?"

"Because we are lost to him."

"No!" exclaimed a fourth voice.  "Can't you see the man wants only to be
left alone, to think?"

"But he is;alone," sniffed Rhea.

"Alone as that bird he would believe in," sniffed the father.

And the man sobbed, "No, no, I am not alone, but I weep for no one.  I
weep only to myself.  It's a simplicity I have learned."

"See?" said the son.  "He weeps only to himself.  He's a selfish one.

And Rhea and the father agreed.

"He's not selfish at all," said the fourth voice.  "He just ...

hurts."

"Don't we all!" exclaimed the father.  "Don't I hurt most of all?  This
man is a prince next to me."

"A prince!" exclaimed the son.

"And you brought it all on yourself," said the fourth voice.

"If you hurt, you deserve it."

And Loney recognized the fourth voice.

"That's the way you talk to your father," said the father.

"You deserve it and more," said the sister.  "You deserve to live."

"But why?  What have you got against me?"

"Ask him." And Kate pointed to Loney.

But the father didn't ask him.  He simply looked at Loney and Loney saw
the snow sticking to his whiskers.  Then that pale grin came back and he
pressed something long and heavy into Loney's arms.  "You might need
this," he said, "where you're going." Loney looked down and saw the dark
blue barrel and the burnished wood of a shotgun.  Then he looked up and
his father was gone.  Rhea was gone.  His sister was gone.  He looked
into the window and the man who had been crying or laughing only seconds
before was now wearily pinching out the candle with his fingers.

Rhea sat at the table in the dining nook and reread the letter.

There was something so clean about it.  For one thing, it had been typed
and there was not an error in it.  For another, the language was crisp,
businesslike, and pointed toward a particular conclusion.  And it was
this conclusion that Rhea marveled at.  It was the only one and yet it
was the one that Rhea had not expected: Kate wanted to take Loney back
to Washington with her.

Rhea fingered the sectioned ivory choker at her neck.  She wore it over
a black turtleneck.  She wasn't wearing makeup and she imagined that her
face looked as stark as the ivory.

Her first reaction to the letter was, Why on earth would she want to do
that?  But even as she read the letter she knew exactly why.  And she
knew that she had instigated it.  She had written Kate first.  She had
gotten Kate's address from one of the letters on Loney's table.  And she
had written Kate that she was becoming concerned about his drinking, and
even more about his desire to isolate himself.  Rhea had written that
she was the only one he saw anymore.  He had been this way for almost
two months.  He hardly ever left his house except when he needed things,
mostly wine and cigarettes.  She concluded that he seemed to be
suffering (and she remembered her own phrase) "a crisis of spirit." But,
she thought, it was exactly that, a crisis, something to be gotten over.
After all,
one doesn't simply lapse into malaise, never to rise again.  But she
had worried in the letter about how much good she could do him; he
seemed to be going away from her too. -1Y And so she had received this
answer, this conclusion that Kate had come to several years before.  And
now Kate wanted her help.  She wanted Rhea to prepare him for the big
move.

And that was what she marveled at.  That Kate knew she would be taking
her brother away from Rhea.  There was an assumption in the letter that
it would be to Rhea's own interest to help her.  And a further
assumption that Kate considered her brother incapable of steering his
own course.

Rhea stood and looked out the window above the table.  And she felt that
familiar anger every time she had to stand to see what the world was
doing.  The man must have thought he was building a house for giants,
she thought.  She watched the snow skitter low over the yard.  The pale
sunlight struck the snow and it reminded her of airplane trips above the
clouds.

And she discovered it, the thought that had been in the back of her mind
all morning: Kate was stealing her thunder, and that's what irritated
her most about the letter.  She almost smiled in recognition.  She had
been thinking of getting Loney away from Harlem.  But she did not have a
plan of attack.

The possibility of it had not really occurred to her.  It had all been
fantasy.

Rhea let her breath out and it fogged a small oval on the window.  She
felt that emptiness that came whenever she tried to imagine a life with
Loney.  Sometimes she imagined taking him home to Dallas.  She imagined
him meeting her father and mother, her friends, her grandmother.  She
couldn't think of anything more disastrous.

So her most common fantasy involved starting fresh in a place where
neither of them had been.  Lately that fantasy place was Seattle.  She
liked the idea of lush greenery, of mountains and salt water.  Her
friend Colleen was from Seattle and Colleen had painted a picture of
heaven on earth.  It did sound like the perfect place, and not far. They
could be there in two days.  Maybe he wouldn't feel so displaced.

Rhea walked over to the stove and turned the burner on beneath the
teakettle, and she thought of her own letter to Kate.  She must have
sounded desperate.  She had written it a couple of days before she and
Loney had driven out to the Little Rockies.  But the trip, and the fact
that Loney had put his house in order, made Rhea think that he had
reached, and passed, that crisis point and that he was on his way to
some purpose.  And it was up to her to give him that purpose..

Oh, God, I'm just like some high school girl planning to trap an
unsuspecting boy, she thought.  She had always hated that.

The sun was a high disk in a white sky.  Beneath it, every thing-the
trees, the butte to the south, the Little Rockies looked steel gray. The
houses of Harlem were bundled up and the snow squealed underfoot.  The
low brick buildings of down town reflected nothing of the sun and
nothing stirred.  The only color in the street belonged to a turquoise
and white Ford parked in front of the laundromat.  Its windows were
frosted over.

Loney pulled his parka tighter around his neck.  The zipper was broken
and only the drawstring around his middle held it together.  He walked
with his head down against a gusting wind out of the north which sent
the loose snow scurrying low in the street.  He walked past the
drugstore, the liquor store and the bank.  Then he crossed the old
highway and the railroad tracks.  He turned east on the street that
paralleled the tracks and walked to the end of it.

He stood in the road a hundred feet from the little green trailer.  A
narrow path up to the door had been drifted over.

The wind blew harder at this end of town and only a deeper blue in the
color of the snow betrayed the path.

"Hey!" he yelled.  "Hey!"

He stood very still and waited.  And nothing happened.  No one came to
the door, the curtain at the window didn't move.

He made a snowball and threw it in the direction of the trailer, but it
landed way short and exploded against a broken wagon wheel that was once
part of a fence.  "I know you're in there!"

He made another snowball, but this one disintegrated as soon as it left
his hand, the wind blowing the cold powder back into his face.  "Come
out here," he sputtered.

He stood on the edge of town, and the white fields behind the trailer
were broken only by fencelines and stacks of bales.

Beyond the fields, the prairies lifted and rolled toward Canada.

"I need to talk to you!" But nothing.  There was no sound except for the
quickening wind.  He put his hood up and looked around for something
else to throw, but the snow had covered everything.  He clenched his
parka tight around his middle and the wind entered his body and he felt
his eyes go wet.

He tried to look at the trailer, but it blurred into the white fields,
the prairies and the yellow-gray sky.  It was Sunday.

"You bastard!" he cried.

"What in the world

"I was walking around."

"You must be freezing.  Come in.  How about this wind?  Isn't it awful,
how it just came up?" She grabbed Loney's hand and pulled him through
the doorway.  "I can't get over it!"

"I think I might have something to do with it," he said.

"Well, of course!  You have everything to do with it."

Rhea sat him down on the rug in front of the fireplace.  A

couple of small cottonwood logs were smoking.  "Sit here by the fire.
Maybe you can do something with it.  I'll get you some thing hot."

Loney watched her walk away, her bare feet small and white against the
beige rug.  He glanced around the room.  He hadn't been to Rhea's house
very often and it seemed new to him each time.  He looked wistfully at
the furniture.  It was all leather and wood and graceful.  He had never
seen that kind before.

Real paintings hung on the walls, but they were the kind he couldn't be
sure about.

"I hope you like this tea," she called.  "It's very Oriental."

In spite of her gaiety, he sensed that certain formality he had come to
associate with Southern hospitality.  It perplexed him.  When they were
in his house they argued, joked, made love-sometimes they wrestled, and
once they ate canned stew off the same plate.  But here, in her
apartment, they were almost formal.  He knew he was not a good guest. He
never felt comfortable in other people's homes.  He hadn't been in many
and he touched as few things as possible.

He stood and walked to the sliding doors in the south wall.

A plant as tall as he glistened in the dying light.  He examined one of
the broad shiny leaves; then he looked at the glass but he didn't look
beyond it.

"Have you got that fire fixed?" she said as she entered the room.  "Oh,
you!" But she was happy.  She made a face and he saw her white teeth. He
would remember them long after she was gone.  And he felt bad for having
thought such a thought.  "Well, come here.  We'll try it together."

She set his cup of tea on a table near the fireplace.  He watched the
steam roll away and he thought briefly of the aunt he had lived with.
She and Loney always had cocoa together in the evening.  She gave him
all he wanted and he always wanted more.  He hadn't had cocoa since.

"Oh, look!" Rhea said.  She had put another log on and the fire flared
up.  "I guess it just takes an expert, Mr.  Loney."

He stood beside her and they were both still, watching the fire grow,
watching as their thoughts grew.  In the quiet of that darkening room,
Loney looked into the fire and he saw his dark bird.  Its long dark
wings moved slowly up and down just above the flames.  Tonight it was
graceful and he was grateful.

And he wanted her to see it too, but he knew she didn't.

She had her own thoughts.  And Loney felt like a beggar standing beside
her because her mind was rich, and he envied her.

"You must be very gentle," she said.  "This night, right now, you must
be a lam ." And she looked up at him.  "Won't you?"

He watched the bird getting smaller and he felt bad.  He had wanted to
share this moment.

As Rhea watched him sleep she thought two things: She thought that Loney
was a funny name and she thought she had never watched him sleep.  And
she thought that somehow the two thoughts were connected, that people
who were truly alone slept very little and that to watch one sleep was
like watching a hummingbird at rest.  Even in those early days when they
were new to each other and happy, she had never seen him sleep.  But
then she had interpreted this as a mark of strength, of consideration, a
funny manly think to do.  She remembered so many times falling asleep in
his arms and waking up in his arms, and he was always awake.  She had
loved this about him and she did not consider it a foolish thing.  She
was used to men doing foolish things for her; sometimes she made them do
foolish things, like the time she had made one of them swim out to her
even though she knew he couldn't swim, and he did almost drown.  But
that was years ago, that was Galveston, and she had been silly then. She
shuddered to think how silly, but more, to think that it had been only
two and a half years ago, the summer before she came up to this place,
and the man was the man she was engaged to.  He was a lawyer, just out
of law school, and he loved opera.  And he loved her.

He once introduced her to Beverly Sills and he told her later that it
had been the supreme moment in his life, introducing the two women he
loved.  She had been impressed with his family's connections but not
overwhelmed.  Her own family, while not being that close to Beverly
Sills, had gone to all the fund-raising dinners for the symphony and the
theater, and had contributed loads of money to the Southern Methodist
football team, and her father had met Don Meredith.  Rhea had only a
vague notion of Don Meredith's importance, but her father thought a few
minutes with him was worth a lifetime of making cardboard boxes and
pontoons for houseboats and acquiring land.  In fact, her father was a
millionaire, and because he was a millionaire, he got to meet Don
Meredith, just as other millionaires got to meet Beverly Sills.  Dallas
was full of millionaires dying to meet somebody famous.  More often than
not they met each other and decried Houston, where million aires met
astronauts.  And Presidents came to speak and meet astronauts.  And
millionaires.

Now, a million miles away from Houston, and Dallas, and Galveston,
watching Loney sleep, Rhea thought a third thing:

How strange.  How very strange.  To run away from things.

To run away from her family.  And a man she was engaged to.  It wasn't
like her to have the courage.  To run away.  To end up teaching school.
Here.  In this place away from any where.  And most of all, to end up
sleeping with this man who doesn't sleep but is asleep now.  A dark
hummingbird at rest.

She moved away from him and stood and walked to the sliding door.  The
fire had gone out and the room was dark.

She touched a slick leaf of the plant and looked up at the three-quarter
moon.  "Loney, Loney," she said, and she felt foolish.

She tiptoed into the kitchen.  The small light over the stove cast more
shadow than light, but she found the bottle of wine in the cupboard
under the sink.  She poured a stemmed glass half full and carried it
into the living room.  She found Loney's parka draped over the back of a
chair and searched its pockets until she came up with his cigarettes.
Such a tattered coat.

He hadn't smoked all night.  She lit a cigarette with the large crystal
lighter that her mother had given her.  And it struck her as an odd sort
of gift.  And it struck her odd that she had replaced it in its precise
position on the coffee table.  Southern womanhood, she thought, and that
seemed most absurd of all.

She sat on one of the low leather chairs and tucked her feet up under
her.  She wondered how she looked, drink in one hand, cigarette in the
other.  At the moment, even in her wondering, she didn't care.  She was
at home.  And not at home.

But at least, she thought, I am something wherever I am.  In my best
moments.

And so she drank and smoked and looked out at the stark houses draped in
stark moonlight.  Nothing moved in the street.

Around midnight Loney stirred and said, "I'm small," and she wondered if
he had been awake all along, or if he ever truly slept, but he said
nothing else, and she lost track of time.

Once during the early morning she awoke to a dog's bark and she could
feel its frosty breath.  And another time, near dawn, she heard a
solem voice, out of the crowd of her own thoughts, say, "Rhea, you're
the only friend I've got in the whole world."

"I know," she heard her own clean voice say, "and it frightens me." And
she watched dawn and thought about Seattle.

Loney dreamed long and he dreamed in detail.  Among his other dreams he
dreamed of a church and it was the Catholic church down in the valley
east of the agency.  It sat high on a knoll beside the highway and it
was pink, with four high windows on each side.  Above the rooftree a
metal cross glinted in the winter sun.  He was alone, standing on the
step and feeling small, looking up at the padlocked plank doors.  He
examined the heavy metal straps that held the doors in place.

Then he moved up and ran his fingers over the stucco beside the door. He
seemed to be searching for something, but it was not inside the church.
He started down the steps and when he reached the hard earth of the
knoll he heard a sound that could have been the wind had there been any.
The sound was far away and regular, as though a tree limb were rubbing
against the roof.  It came from behind the church and so he walked that
way.  He stopped at the corner and looked to where the knoll rounded off
to descend into the valley and he saw a woman.  He saw her back and she
was wearing a shawl up over her head.  He walked toward her.  Her
shoulders were slumped and her head was down.  He walked between the
graves, and the earth was hard and bare.  He stopped behind her.  And
she was weeping.  Rather, she was wailing, the way Indian women wail for
their lost ones.  He didn't disturb her.

He watched her until she became aware of his presence.  When she turned
he saw that she was young, and this surprised him.

Her face was beautiful and it was made up and her lipstick was a dark
red.  There was something old-fashioned about her makeup.  And Loney
noticed that her dress was old-fashioned, the way women dressed in
pictures thirty years ago.  She dropped her shawl to her shoulders and
smiled at him.  There were no tears in her eyes.  He had the feeling
that she was going to ask him to buy her a drink, but she said, "My son
is gone."

He looked down at the grave and said, "He's here."

The woman turned and made a sweeping gesture out across the dark
prairies behind them.  "My son is out there," she said.

Loney looked out across the prairies to the Little Rockies.

They were high and blue beneath the snowy peaks.  Then he said to the
woman, "Who are you?"

"A mother," she said.  "A mother who is no longer a mother."

"But you're more than that.  You're young and beautiful....

"And I have no son." The woman looked down at the grave.

"He's not here."

"Then you are not a mother."

"He is somewhere-out there.  But I will never find him because he will
not allow himself to be found."

Loney stared at her face.  Beneath the makeup her skin was dark and
smooth.  It was as though she wore the makeup as a mask, as though she
had disguised herself, but for a purpose that eluded him.  He found
himself attracted to that face be neath the makeup, but he couldn't see
it clearly enough to know why.  It was not a face that he was familiar
with, and yet it was a face he had seen before.

The woman put the shawl back up over her head and started walking toward
the church.  Loney glanced down at the grave, then after her.  "I'll
help you find him," he called.  And he saw the shawl tighten across her
shoulders.  As she turned the corner of the building, he called, "What
does he look like?"

And she disappeared.

Loney tried to drink his beer, but the drunk woman hit his arm again.

"Do you believe in astrology?"

"I don't read the newspaper."

"That's a dumbass answer if I ever heard one.  I don't even know why I
talk to you."

Don't, then, he thought.  But he said, "I'm not unintelligent."

"Well, la-di-da.  The man can rub a couple of words together."

She turned with great wonder to the man next to her and laughed.  But he
was not having any of it.  He appeared to be sulking about something. He
was an older man and he was wearing a denim shirt and Levi's.

"I'm not unintelligent," Loney said.

"Okay, Mr.  Brighteyes, maybe you'd know your own sign if you were that
smart."

"I have no reason to be smart anymore."

"What?  What?  No reason?  Since when does a body need a reason?" She
looked at Loney as though she might strike him if he gave the wrong
answer.  She was a white woman but she looked as though she might have
some Indian blood.  Her eyes were dark brown and she combed her long
brown hair the way some Indian women do.  "Oh, I get it-what you see is
what you get." She again turned to the sulking man.  "What you see is
what you get.  Isn't that right, Clancy?"

"Go fuck a dog," said Clancy.

"Pretty good," said the woman.  She leaned toward Loney and said in a
loud voice, "See, he doesn't even get what he sees.  This old boy don't
get nothin' anymore.  You know why?"

"I don't want to know."

"Cuz he has a teensy little problem.  I believe they call it impotence."

"Go fuck yourself," said Clancy.

"Be the best piece I've had in a long time." She touched Loney's hand.
"You know what else?  On top of that he has sugar diabetes."

"Pay no attention to her," said Clancy.  He hadn't looked at Loney once.
"She's a shit."

"Poopface," said the woman, but she settled back on her stool, satisfied
that she had made Clancy's life miserable.

Loney got up and walked back to the bathroom.  He had been sitting
beside the woman for over two hours and it had been the same rough talk
and he wondered what made some women so hard, especially bar women. When
they reached a certain age they just got hard.  Loney thought of the
women he had seen who could sit on a stool all night without getting
drunk, or at least visibly drunk, but when you looked into their eyes
you could see the hardness, as cold and hard as the January earth.  He
wondered what they were like at home, if they sent kids off to school in
the morning, if they made cakes, if they made love, if they loved
anyone.  He wondered if the woman loved Clancy or if Clancy loved her.
It seemed an odd relation ship, but he had seen it before, the
loud-mouthed woman, the sullen man.  It was only different because
Clancy seemed to have twenty or thirty years on her.  But Loney had seen
that too.  And he didn't like the way the woman treated the old man.  He
wondered why they were together, why people like that stayed with each
other.

What about himself and Rhea?  Every time he thought of her, he thought
how badly he had been treating her the past few weeks, how he had been
shutting her out, and how she had been willing to accept him when he
needed her.  He washed his hands and dried them on his pants.  He closed
his eyes and said, "I'm the one, not that woman out there, who's a
shit." And he didn't know how to change it.  The more he thought about
himself, his life, his family, the more he shut her out.  Until he
needed her.  And yet he could admit to himself that he did need her.  He
loved being with her.  He loved the weekend before, the trip out to the
Little Rockies, being in her house, sleeping with her on the rug.  He
loved those times, but always, afterward, he feared them.  He didn't
know how their lives could end up happily, how his life would end up.

He knew he couldn't be just himself with her forever, because he was
nothing.  She came from better things and she would need him to be
better.  And he couldn't think of a way in the world to be good enough.
And that's what frightened him.

He knew he shouldn't be thinking this way now because he was tired, and
drunk, although not as drunk as he had been the week before.  He had sat
that week at his kitchen table, drinking and smoking and trying to
think.  For the first time in his life he had tried to understand a
dream, the dream of the young woman in the graveyard behind the church.
He had tried day after day to recognize her and to remember if he knew
anybody buried in that cemetery.  He tried to figure out why she was
dressed that way and why she wore the makeup and why she insisted that
her son was gone and why she thought he would not allow himself to be
found.  But most of all he wondered whether, if he had followed her when
she turned the corner of the church, the dream would have ended.

But in his lucid moments he knew he didn't have a choice, that when she
disappeared she was gone to him for good.

He tried not to think of it now.  He should go home, he was tired, but
it was early yet.  It couldn't be much after nine.

He had come downtown at dusk, just after the shoppers had gone home.  He
had bathed and shaved and now he was out for drinks.  It sounded
innocent and natural to him when he thought of it like that.  Like ten
years ago, when he went out to find women.

He walked back up to the bar and he saw the pay phone on the wall beside
the pool table.  Four young Indians were shooting a game and joking
around.  He recognized one of them, a skinny kid who had been a
basketball star a couple of years ago.  His face had gotten a little
heavy.

Loney edged around the table.  He looked up Rhea's number in the phone
book.  He didn't have a phone and he had never called her.  It surprised
him to be dialing it and he felt a little tense.  Then he heard the
click of the phone being picked up and he heard her voice.

"This is Jim," he said.

A pause, then her voice said, "Jim?"

"I called you up.  Loney."

"Oh!  Oh!  Jim!  Oh, Jim.  You gave me such a start.  I almost had
kittens."

"I thought I would call you up."

"Oh, lord!" And then her voice changed.  "Are you all right?"

"Yes.  I was just worried.  I haven't heard from you .  .  .  ...

And she was silent again.  In the background Loney heard music and loud
indistinct voices.  Finally she said, "I'm having a party."

Loney watched the basketball star line up a shot.  He drilled it and the
cue ball jumped off the table.

Then he heard her voice.  "An impromptu party.  One of those kind that
happen when the weather changes."

"Thanksgiving party?"

"I suppose.  I hadn't thought of it, but that sounds reasonable."

"I just called you," Loney said and he realized his mistake.

"Will you come over?  Please?"

The basketball star had chased down the cue ball.  He had a silly grin
on his face, as though he didn't know his own strength.

"It's important," she said.  "Are you drunk?"

"No," he lied.

"Will you come over?"

"Yes," he said.

One of the boys yelled and held his cue stick high above his head.  He
had sunk the eight ball.  The star put a quarter in the pool table,
pushed a lever, and the balls came rolling out, clicking and clattering
along a track.  He wasn't grinning anymore.

Loney hung up the phone and walked toward the bar.  Kenny Hart was
waiting down at the dark end.  He was smiling.  He looked fat and puffy,
but beneath the spectacles, his nose was crooked.  "Hey, c'niere." He
motioned with his finger.  "Hey-"

He leaned over the bar.  "You know why a North Dakotan carries a turd in
his wallet?"

Loney looked at his wavy gray hair.

"Give up?" The smile stayed but he looked tense.  "No, c mere." He
gripped Loney's wrist.  "I'm serious.  For ID.  He carries a turd around
for ID.  Are you all right?  I've been watching you." His hand felt
soft, but Loney couldn't move his wrist.

"Listen-you stay away from those people.  That old man, he's a friend of
mine.  That woman, she ain't worth a shit.  Wait a minute." He was
talking more rapidly.  "See, he can't cut it anymore.  He used to be
worth more than you and me put together.  He was a pretty fair hand
once, he was the best, up until his wife left him.  Just like your old
man.  Now I want you to stay away from them.  That's all.  She gets to
showing off at his expense.  You know?  She's nothing but a bitch and
you can't get around that.  But we'll just leave them alone.

Why don't you sit down here?  Let me buy you one."

Loney tried to think about this.  He was very tired.

"How about another, pal?"

"I want a bottle to go."

"F-I?"

Loney thought of Rhea and her good wine.  "What else you got?"

"Thunderbird and Mogen David."

"Mogen David," said Loney.

"That's the idea.  You'll never regret it, partner."

Kenny Hart came back with a bottle in a sack.  "On the house.  Listen,
why the hell do you stay away so long?"

Loney walked by the old man and the woman.  She had her arm around him.
She was singing "Frosty the Snowman" to the bar.

Rhea met him at the door and took the bottle from him.

"I'll get you a drink.  Where in the world were you calling from?"

"Kennedy's."

She took his parka and threw it over a table in the hallway.

"Come into the kitchen."

Loney glanced into the living room and wished he hadn't come.  All of
the guests were white and respectable.  The men wore sweaters or sports
coats, or both, and the women w9re dresses or sweaters and slacks.  They
were all clean and they stood in groups and gestured with their drinks.
Loney recognized a couple of them.  One was the basketball coach, a big
slick-haired man with thin lips and sad brown eyes.  He had been the
coach for three years and he never seemed to get upset, just sadder as
his teams continued to break his heart.

And Loney recognized Rhea's friend Colleen, a slender woman with
wire-rimmed glasses and black hair parted in the middle.  She was Rhea's
closest friend because she, too, was an outsider, from the West Coast.
Before he met Rhea, he and Colleen had screwed outside the rodeo grounds
at the Phillips County Fair.  They didn't know each other and they were
drunk and it didn't count for anything, so they both forgot about it.
Later, in a bar in Dodson, she told him that he was no good and she
didn't like him.  Now she looked up.

In the kitchen Rhea said, "What's your pleasure, partner?"

"I should leave."

"No, please." She poured some bourbon into a glass.  "You're not drunk?"
she said.

"I don't know.  I don't think I should be here."

"It's important," she said.  Above'the music she said, "It's important,"
but she didn't know what she was going to tell him.  She thought of
Kate's letter and her.  own desires and she became nervous.

Then the basketball coach was standing in the doorway.  "Jim Loney," he
said and shook his head.

"I gather you two know each other," said Rhea.

The coach shook his head and turned and drifted away.

Loney wanted to tell Rhea that no one knew him anymore, not out of
self-pity but to set her mind at ease.  In the past several years he had
become something of a nonperson, as one only can in a small town, a
small town in Montana.

Rhea dropped two ice cubes in the glass of bourbon, then handed it to
him.  "Will you come meet some of the guests?"

Loney suddenly felt exhausted.  He had been temporarily revived by the
walk over in the cold air.  But the warmth of the room, the voices and
the music, his own tenseness, made him feel faint.

A young couple came into the kitchen to refill their drinks and Rhea
introduced them to Loney.  The woman said, "How do you do?" but the man
pushed past on his way to the bar.

The woman raised her hands and made a face; then she followed her
husband.

"Come with me," Rhea said.  And she led him down the hall to her
bedroom.  A small light burned on a table near the bed.  The bed was
piled high with coats.

Rhea looked at the coats and she said something Loney couldn't hear. She
led him to a room across the hall and closed the door behind them. It
was her study.  She took Loney's drink and set it on a table beside a
day bed.  Then she pushed him down and sat next to him.

"You look awful," she said.

But the room was cooler and Loney felt better.  Rhea massaged the back
of his neck and her fingers were cool and light.

Loney sighed.  He felt almost giddy with exhaustion and her touch.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I shouldn't have made you come."

"It doesn't matter-here or there.  I should have stayed home." He tried
to laugh and it sounded foreign to him.

"You're shivering." And she left the room.

Loney saw his drink on the table and it looked golden and cold, but he
didn't have the energy to reach for it.  Then he heard a voice.

"Well, Mr.  Loney, people are just dying to meet yqu-all.  He turned his
head and it seemed to take a long time.

Colleen leaned against the doorframe, holding a cigarette close to her
mouth.  Behind the round panes of her glasses, her eyes were dark and
drunk.

He looked at her and he couldn't think of anything to say.

Then Rhea was squeezing by her.  She had a sweater.  It was dark green
with red deer marching across the chest.  "Do you remember t I gave it
to you last Christmas.  You never took it home."

Loney didn't remember the sweater and for an instant he thought she had
taken it off one of her guests.  He tried to remember last Christmas.

Rhea stood over him and pulled the sweater down over his head.  His eyes
fixed on her face.  She pulled his shirt collar up and patted it.  Then
she ran her fingers through his hair, pushing it back into some kind of
order.  "Isn't he an angel?"

she said, but without conviction.

"Are you just going to keep him to yourself, Miss Davis?

There are all kinds of people out here just waiting for their chance."

"Let them wait."

"They want to see who it is you've been keeping company with, honey."

"Don't," Rhea warned.

"You might say Mr.  Loney here is the mystery guest."

"Please don't.  Please go away."

Colleen ignored her.  "It's cold out there, Mr.  Loney."

Loney tried to stand, but Rhea put her hands on his shoulders.

She turned to Colleen: "Why are you doing this?"

"I'm just trying to warm Mr.  Loney up to the atmosphere, sweetie."

"Get out," Rhea snapped.

For an instant Colleen looked nonplused.  Then she said, "I'd have
thought better of you." Then she was gone.

Rhea knelt before Loney and looked into his eyes.  They were flat and
out of focus.  Poor man, she thought.  My poor man.

She sat back on her heels.  She absently traced a star on his knee with
her fingernail.  Then she said, "Can you hear me?"

His eyes came back.

"Would you like to lie down?  I'll turn off the light."

"Yes."

And she lay down beside him.  She heard the throbbing music and the dark
and sudden laughter, but it was far away.  "Do you remember I said I had
something important to tell you?"

It was dark and she wondered exactly how she was going to phrase it.  In
fact, up until a few minutes ago she hadn't known what she was going to
tell him.  She had been vacillating between presenting his sister's
argument and presenting her own, which was quite simple.  And so she
said, "I've been thinking lately of leaving Harlem' for good.  I don't
think there's anything here for me.  I miss certain things-my family,
certain friends, city life, the South.  I miss them but I don't feel
compelled to return to them.  I do feel that I have to leave here.

And so I'm in something of a dilemma." She lay on her back and looked up
at the ceiling.  Their bodies touched on the narrow bed, yet they did
not touch each other.  Rhea gathered her breath.  "I've been thinking of
going out to Seattle.  I don't really know what's out there but trees
and rain.  I've heard that it's very beautiful and there will be things
to do.  I don't even know what I want to do yet, but there are options
there, maybe even a kind of salvation." She turned toward him, raising
herself to her elbow.  Her eyes had become accustomed to the dark and
she looked at his eyes and they were open.  "Do you think-would you like
Seattle?"

Loney tried to remember Seattle.  He had been sent to Fort Lewis for
basic training sixteen years ago and he had gotten up to Seattle a
couple of times.  He remembered the bus rides up and the bus rides back
and he remembered the trees and hills and the Boeing airfield.  He had
seen his first jet airplane on one of those trips.  And he saw in his
mind the suddenness beyond the last hill of the Seattle skyline, the
buildings and the bay and the ships.  The bus had let him and the other
soldiers off downtown and he spent much of his time wandering around,
walking into the pinball arcades, the movie houses, the cafes on First
Avenue.  He didn't drink then, so he didn't have any use for the bars.
Instead, he usually found himself down on the waterfront, looking at
ships, poking through the import shops, and watching ferries motor back
and forth to a land on the other side of the bay.  One clear day, he saw
the Olympic range and he wanted to go there, but the thought of riding a
ferry scared him.

He remembered more of Seattle than he would have thought and he
remembered that he liked it and it scared him.  He was older now.

"It's surrounded by mountains," he heard himself saying, "but they're a
long way off.  Some days you can't see them, but other days they're very
close and you can see the snow.

Sometimes the clouds hang down at the base of them and all you see are
the peaks.  They have ferryboats there and you can take your car and
drive to those mountains.  Or you can stay down at the waterfront and
browse in the shops.  They have everything from all over the world.  I
sent Kate some salt and pepper shakers that were bears and made of ivory
and they were carved by Eskimos.  I was in the army then."

Loney thought for a moment.  He remembered the gray days, the rain and
the chilly wind off the sound, and the couples that walked along the
breakwater.  "You can eat clam chowder there, or anything made of
clams." And he remembered the couples in the big restaurant on one of
the piers.  And he remembered himself eating a cup of clam chowder and
watching them.

He looked up at Rhea and he was almost surprised that she was there and
with him.  He smiled and he was grateful.

She grinned and her teeth glistened.  "Oh, Jim!  You never told me that
you had been there."

"That was years ago.  It must be different now."

"I bet it's just the same.  I'll bet we could eat all the clam chowder
we ever wanted .  .  .  ...

"And they have a big market there-it's full of vegetables and fish and
shops underneath it."

"We could eat all the fish and vegetables.

"It's beautiful, even in the rain." And when Rhea kissed him and lowered
her head to his Shoulder, he thought of the couples in the big
restaurant.  But that was sixteen years ago and he had been a soldier
with no place to go.  Maybe it would be different now, maybe it would be
different with someone.

Rhea sighed and sat up.  She fluffed her hair.  "I have to see to my
guests.  I wish I could encourage them to just leave.

...  She sat with her back to him because she had thought of his
sister's letter and she felt a little guilty.  He has no idea we're
batting him back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball, she thought.  And I
have the advantage now because I'm here.

But she would let him think about it for a few days.  She didn't want to
press her advantage unfairly; she wanted him to be sure.  And she knew
by now that he scared off easily.  But she loved him.

Loney looked out the bedroom window and thought for an instant that he
had slept through winter.  Although there was no sun, a driving warm
wind bent the bushes in the yard next door.  A woman was hanging out a
wash.  She was wearing a thin cotton dress and cowboy boots.  The dress
was blown tight across her body and between her legs.  She brushed her
hair away from her mouth and hung up a small pair of blue jeans.

She had moved in during the summer and she had two small boys and no
apparent husband.  She wiped the line, then started hanging T-shirts.
She couldn't have been more than twenty feet away and Loney noticed the
blue veins behind her knees as she bent to her basket.  He had never
seen her downtown or on the street, just once or twice before in her
backyard and she had been hanging out clothes then.

Loney dropped the curtain and finished dressing.  He put a clean shirt
on inside out but he didn't notice until he tried to button the sleeves.
He fixed the shirt, then stepped into his boots.  He was still tired,
but the sight of the woman had both calmed and cheered him and he didn't
know why.  He opened the curtain again, but she was gone.  Her clothes
were flapping wildly and some of the T-shirts had twirled around the
line.  She had looked like a pleasant woman who had lived a great deal
for her years.

Loney put a pot of water on for instant coffee, then he opened the back
door.  Swipesy sat on the step, his nose high into the wind.  Loney
reached down and patted him on the shoulder and he jumped, startled at
the touch.  The dog never barked anymore and Loney thought this was too
bad.  "Easy, pal,"

he said and sat down beside him.  Swipesy didn't look at him but he
leaned against his knee.

The wind was blowing directly from the south and it filled Loney's body
with a sharpness it hadn't felt in some time.  He shivered, not from the
wind but from the sharpness.  Then he grew still and his eyes cleared
and he saw the rocky shadows of Snake Butte in the distance.  It was
flat on top and covered with grass.  The top looked just like the
prairies that surrounded it, but the sides were gunmetal gray and from a
distance they looked smooth and sheer.  They weren't, though; they were
made up of jagged columns of granite and shallow caves.  Loney knew this
from his childhood, and he also knew about the etchings on the flat
stones on top-the crude drawings of deer and fish and lizard.  Snake
Butte was a perfect fortress and it was assumed that Indian hunters had
made the etchings many years ago.  Loney used to fish the small
reservoir at the base of the butte when he was a kid and he never got
over the feeling that there were lives out there.  Even now it was not
good to think about it.

He breathed in the wind and he felt a sudden tightness in his chest. His
shoulders ached and his neck felt knotted up.

He hugged Swipesy to his knee and he remembered the drinking and smoking
and thinking he had done the week before.

And the party at Rhea's.  Had that been last night?  It must have been.
He remembered the people in the living room, then lying in the dark in a
small room, then Rhea lying beside him.  She had been talking and he had
been thinking of Seattle, the mountains and the ferryboats.  What did
clam chowder have to do with it?  The idea made him hungry.  He looked
into his neighbor's yard and he could see the end of the clothes line.

Two shirts had wrapped around each other as though they were desperate
friends.  Again he thought of Seattle and the whole memory came back:
She had wanted him to go to Seattle with her.  Just like that.  It was
beautiful there-trees, rain, the bay, the buildings.  He used to watch
the ferries.  Had he said yes?  What about her teaching; had they
decided when they would go?  Had he said yes?  He couldn't have.  He
couldn't make a decision like that.  He needed to think.  He wasn't
ready to do anything but sit on his step and think, and so he watched
the two shirts twist and knot around each other and he thought, not of
Seattle, but of the blue veins on the backs of his neighbor's legs.

The next day Loney sat up in bed and he felt better.  His muscles had
relaxed and he didn't think about thinking.  He thought about Swipesy.
As he swung his legs over the edge of the bed he was surprised to find
that he was stiff.  His joints ached, but almost righteously so, as
though he had done a day's work or had played a good game the night
before.  He hadn't felt this stiff and achy since his basketball days,
He dressed quickly and walked into the living room.  It was furnished
with a couch, an overstuffed chair and a glass cabinet.

And a dining room table that took up most of the space.  Swipesy slept
under the table, but he was not there now.  Loney glanced at the cabinet
and he saw his gold basketball pins, still on cards, and his letter
leaning against the back of the top shelf.  He had given one of the pins
to a girl-Myron Pretty Weasel's sister.  He hadn't seen her since one of
his furloughs from the army.  Margaret.  That was her name.  She had
moved to Billings with her mother while he was gone.  Loney wondered
what she looked like now.  He wondered if she still had his pin.  He
wondered if she was married and pretty.

He walked through the house, but the dog wasn't around.

He opened the back door and looked out into the yard.  Then he walked
around the house to the street and looked up and down and across to the
old apartment building that was being torn down.  The lawns were brown
and frosty.  It was a quiet day, a still day, and the clouds were high
and motionless.  He turned back to his own house, glancing in the yard
next door.

The clothes were hanging frozen on the line.

He washed his face and sat down at the kitchen table.  He stirred some
sugar into his coffee and he noticed the letter leaning against the red
candle.  It was from Kate, but there was some other writing on the
envelope.  It read: "I stopped by this morning but you were asleep.
Lazybones.  Please call me.  Love, Rhea."

Loney tore open the envelope and unfolded the paper.  "I will be in
Havre on the 25th.  On the 11:43 plane (Frontier)

from Great Falls.  You should get this letter in plenty of time to make
arrangements to pick me up.  If you don't, I'll kill

you." Loney glanced at the calendar, but as it happened so often now, he
had no idea what the date was.

He found a couple of dollars and some change on the table and put them
in his pocket.  Then he slipped into his parka and walked downtown.  The
south wind had died during the night and the ground had hardened up.
Loney hated the cold the way some people who had to live on it hated
deer meat, hopelessly and without emotions But today he needed the cold
to take away his breath and the ache in his body.

He looked in yards and alleys for Swipesy but without luck, and he knew
that Swipesy would not be back.

There was no traffic as he crossed the main street to the Buttrey's
store.  He got a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread and a quart of milk.  Then
he picked up two cans of tomato soup.

At the checkout stand he asked the clerk what day it was.

She stopped punching the cash register and looked at him.

She was small, with red hair and a cheery face, but she didn't seem
cheerful.

"It's important to me," Loney said.

"I should think so.  It's important to everybody," she said.

"How's that?"

"It's the twenty-fourth.  It's Thanksgiving."

Loney looked around the store.  Except for him and the checker, it was
deserted.  He gave her the two dollars and she gave him eleven cents
change.  She looked as if she was ready to cry.

Loney thanked her.  As he pushed open the glass door, she called after
him, "Thanksgiving!  And I have children!"

Thanksgiving and the streets were empty.  Loney walked slowly, eating a
piece of bread and trying to think what it had been like with his aunt.
In the two years he had lived with her, they must have celebrated
Thanksgiving, but the only holidays he could remember were Christmas and
Easter.

He remembered them because of church-midnight mass at Christmas, sunrise
service at Easter.  He wondered about her men friends because they never
seemed to be around on holidays, at least on Christmas and Easter.  But
maybe they were around on the other holidays; maybe that's why he
couldn't remember the other holidays; maybe they took her away with them
on Thanksgiving.

Then Loney saw himself and his aunt sitting on the floor, quietly
watching the lights on a small tree.  It was Christmas Eve and they were
drinking cocoa-no, he was drinking cocoa;

she was drinking water because she was going to take communion that
night--and she lowered her head and started to cry.

He was twelve and he put his hand on her hair.  He couldn't look at her,
but he held his hand there until she stopped.  She was good and he moved
his fingers through her hair until she stopped.  He had felt like a man,
and after mass they opened presents and he felt as happy as anyone in
the world.  She never told him why she had cried and he never asked.  It
had been enough to feel her hair and smell the Christmas tree.

She gave him a pen that wrote in three colors and he gave her a magazine
that had beauty secrets, and they ate the pudding that tasted like
butterscotch but wasn't.

As he nibbled at the bread, he felt a small regret that she had gone to
him.  It was no longer a question of a life with her, of a kind of
family, which used to fill him with pain; rather, it was a simple regret
that he did not get to know her.  He wanted to believe that she was
beautiful and he wanted to believe that he knew the color of her hair,
but he could not, for he didn't know either of these things.  The only
thing he was sure of was that of all the women in his life, she was the
one he had tried hardest to love.

Her name started with an S and she had left and he had been sent away to
a mission school in southern Montana.  Kate had already left.  She had
never lived with the aunt.  Instead, she had gone away to another
mission school, in Flandreau, South Dakota, right after their father had
left them.  Loney often wondered why she never lived with him and.  the
aunt.

It would have been better than any mission school.  He had hated his
school; he worked hard at his studies, but he hated the dormitory and
early morning mass and the pasty cereal.

He didn't like the fathers and the brothers--except for Brother Gerard,
who taught science and taught him how to play basket ball.

Loney always believed that it was Brother Gerard who got him sprung too.

It had been in the spring of his second year there.  Brother Gerard's
class had gone on a field trip to a slough to collect water bugs, and
Loney had left the group and followed a cattle trail to the far end of
the slough.  There, he sat on a beaver chewed log and stared at the
remains of a muskrat that had been trapped but never retrieved.  It had
crawled up on the bank from the entrance to its hole and its fur was
almost gone and its tail had been chewed off.  It was leather and bone
and past stinking, but it made Loney cry and he thought that he would
die, too, if he did not leave that school.

That evening he and Brother Gerard were taking a break after a
one-on-one game and Loney told him he had to leave.

The brother had sat there on the floor, his back against the folded-up
bleachers, in his T-shirt and khaki pants and white sneakers, and he
didn't say anything and Loney stood up and walked out on the court and
took a last shot-he believed it would be the last shot of his life-and
left the gym.  But he didn't go back to the dormitory.

They picked him up the next morning on the highway to Billings.  He got
into a lot of trouble over that, but a couple of weeks later the priest
who ran the school told him he had found Loney a place to stay in
Harlem.  Loney continued in Brother Gerard's science class until the end
of the spring term, but they were never close again.  Loney never went
to the gym and he did not say goodbye when he left.

He lived during his high school years in a boardinghouse run by a
minister and his wife.  He didn't know much about ministers and he
thought it strange that there was no church connected to the
boardinghouse.  He didn't believe that the man was a real minister.  He
had no church, and as far as Loney knew, no God.  No midnight mass, no
sunrise service.  Loney did remember saying prayers before meals, but
the minister It never ate with them.  He ate in the kitchen with his
wife, after she had served the food to the five or six boys at the table
in V_

the dining room.  Although the number of boys stayed about the same, the
faces changed frequently.  Loney outlasted all of them, living at the
boardinghouse until the day he graduated.

Then he packed his suitcase with his clothes, the small gold basketball
pins that he'd won in the three years he played, and the Bible that the
minister's wife had given him as a graduation present.  He caught the
bus up to Havre to enlist in the army and he never saw the minister and
his wife again.

As Loney ate his bread and thought about these things, he became aware
&t he had been watching a small boy squatting beside a rough shape at
the edge of an alley.  He crossed the street.

The boy stood and stepped back.

"What have you got there?" said Loney.

"Nothing," said the boy.

Swipesy lay on his side, his mouth open and his blind blue eye staring
up at nothing.  There was something odd in the way he lay, as though he
had been split lengthwise.  Then Loney saw that he was frozen into the
mud.

"What's your name?" he said to the boy.

"Amos," said the boy.

"Can you hold these, Amos?" And Loney handed him the sack of groceries.

Loney tried to lift Swipesy out of the frozen mud, but he had no luck.
As he moved his hands down the dog's body, he heard Amos rustling in the
sack for a piece of bread.  He grabbed two handfuls of Swipesy's fur and
tried to lift him.

Then he tried the two free legs.

"Can't do it," he said.  He stood and looked down at Swipesy, then at
Amos.  "Damn."

Amos set the groceries on the ground and dug into his coat pocket.  Then
he handed Loney a knife.  It was a fat old pocket knife with one blade
completely gone and the other broken off about half its length.

Loney worked with the broken knife, chipping away flakes of the frozen
mud.  Once he stopped to rest his hand and said, "How old are you,
Amos?"

"My name is Amos After Buffalo."

"This old dog of mine was ready to die, Amos.  He was ninety years old."

Loney went back to work.  He worked carefully, chipping away the mud
from around Swipesy's head, then his back, his belly, his legs.

"What are you going to do with him once you get him out?"

"That's a good question."

"Are you going to throw him away?"

"No-I guess I'll bury him."

"That's what I'd do." And Amos After Buffalo squatted to watch.  He
liked to watch the man work.  And he liked being the man's helper.  "I'd
bury him out there," he said, pointing in the general direction of the
Little Rockies.

"Maybe that's just what I'll do."

"That's where I live.  I live way out there." He thought for a moment.
"Do you know where I live?"

Amos After Buffalo stood with the sack of groceries in his arms and
watched the man walk away from him.  The man cradled the dog the way
Amos carried firewood.  But today was Thanksgiving and he didn't have to
carry logs or anything if he didn't want.  He was visiting his aunt and
uncle in town and his aunt was cooking a big venison roast.  Amos didn't
understand Thanksgiving.  It was a holiday, but it wasn't like Christmas
or Easter or the Fourth of July.  It was a time to eat.  He wished they
had a turkey.  A turkey seemed more like a holiday.  He had never eaten
turkey, but he thought it might be sweet.

Amos After Buffalo watched the man turn the corner at the end of the
street.  Then he set the groceries down and started back-, to run home.
He ran and he thought it was funny that the man didn't seem to be sad
about his dog.  He had wanted to watch the man bury the dog.  But he
remembered that his aunt had made a roast and he had been gone for a
long time.

He would have to break his old record to get home in time.

Loney stood behind the old woman and the girl.  They were looking out
the large windows at the airplane about to land.

It came in so slowly and quietly that it seemed to be gliding.

Loney could read the letters on the fusilage above the
windoWS-FRONTIER-and he felt a kind of panicky excitement.

The right wheel touched the ground first, sending up a spray of blue
smoke; then the left wheel touched, and finally the nose wheel settled
on the runway.  Suddenly the roar of the engines shook the windows of
the little terminal and the old woman took a step back, almost bumping
into Loney.  She wore an old cloth coat and a black silk scarf and
moccasins and leggings.

Loney guessed that she was from Rocky Boy, because the old women still
dressed that way out there, The girl was wearing a blue parka and
checkered slacks and white sneakers.

She looked to be about fifteen or sixteen.  She stared with awe at the
airplane, which was taxiing toward the gate.  She hadn't noticed that
her grandmother was now standing directly behind her, between her and
Loney.  The grandmother was frightened at the sight of the large plane
bearing down on the terminal, but she didn't show it.

She seemed impassive, and as Loney looked down at her shoulders and her
silver, yellowing hair, he thought, That's the way old Indian women get;
they've seen so much in their years, so many of these winters.  .  .  .

The left engine came to a stop and a door behind the cockpit opened.
Metal stairs slowly unfolded and lowered to the pavement.

Loney patted his hair down.  He had got it cut that morning in Harlem
and it felt slick and neat.  He had also shaved and put on his best
white shirt.  He was excited because he knew that Kate would be perfect.
He always loved to look at her and her beauty always affected him and he
knew it was because he hadn't seen much of her since he was ten and she
was fifteen.  Now she was like a beautiful stranger to him until they
got reacquainted.  He had seen her only four or five times, all in the
last ten years, since they parted as children.  He had last seen her
three years ago and he remembered how she looked-tall, willowy, maybe a
little skinny, but no skinnier than some of the magazine models Loney
had looked at.  And he remembered the high wide cheekbones, which gave
her face a soft diamond shape that he found lovely and strong.

Again he wondered why she had never married.  He wondered that a lot, at
odd moments.  Sometimes he thought it was because of her job: she was
just too busy flying around the country, telling people what to do and
how to do it.  At other times he thought it was because she was too
strong.  He couldn't imagine any man being equal to her.  He smiled
because he had been dreading this moment all morning for just that
reason.  But now he was excited.  He knew that they would get
reacquainted and everything would be fine.  She would be his sister
again.

A man carrying a briefcase emerged first, hurrying down the stairs
without looking up, as though he expected to be taken for a celebrity.
An elderly couple followed him, waving toward the terminal, but as far
as Loney could tell, only he and the old woman and the girl were
waiting.  Then a young Indian in a green army uniform got off.  His hat
was back on his head and his tie was loose.  He looked as if he had been
traveling for days.  The girl said something in Creed to the old woman
and they moved toward the boarding area.  Loney continued to stare at
the door behind the cockpit.  Nobody appeared for a few moments. Then a
stewardess emerged from the darkness and descended the stairs.  She was
carrying a clip board, holding it up to shield her hair from the slight
wind.

Loney could see a gold bracelet on her slender wrist.

He waited a while longer.  Then he walked over to the Frontier counter,
but there was no one around.  He read the schedule board: FLIGHT 71,
11:43 A.m.  The clock at the far end of the building said 11:48.  It
had to be the right plane.

The stewardess had walked up to the counter and was writing something on
the clipboard.

"Excuse me," said Loney.  "Did everybody who was supposed to get off
that plane get off?"

The stewardess glanced out the window at the plane.  Then she looked at
her clipboard.  "Four passengers .  .  .  Urn hum, yes.

"But my sister .

"Was she by any chance coming from the south?"

"Arizona."

"Okay, urn hum, I understand.  It's been happening all day.

Sir, the Denver airport has been closed because of blizzard conditions.
I assume she would have had to change planes in Denver.  But she was
probably rerouted to Salt Lake, in which case"-she squinted at the
schedule board--she'll probably catch a later flight to Billings and
connect up with our flight forty-three, which comes in here at
five-thirty."

"You mean she'll be here later today?"

"Unless her plane landed in Denver.  Some planes landed there earlier
this morning.  But all traffic is grounded now and likely will be for
the rest of the day.  I wouldn't worry.  She probably went on to Salt
Lake.  You just be here at five-thirty."

She smiled and walked briskly toward the boarding gate.

Loney watched her until she passed the soldier and the girl and the old
woman.  Then he watched them.  They had their arms around each other;
rather, the soldier had his arms around them and the girl had her arms
around him.  They both had their heads bowed as though they were saying
a prayer.  The old woman had her arms at her sides, accepting the
soldier's hug.  She was thinking that it was a bad world when her grand
son comes home to her on a machine that flies.  Later, when he told her
stories of where he had been and what he had seen, she would realize
that she had lost him.  She sensed this now and it filled her with
sadness, for she knew that what he had gained would never make up for
what he had lost.

She had seen the other boys come home.  And she stared past her soldier
at Loney's wolfish face and she thought, That's one of them.

Loney sat in his car in the parking lot all afternoon.  The morning
clouds had dissipated and the sky was a brilliant blue and the sun
warmed the car.  The car was a '64 Chevy and it had started that morning
without hesitation, much to Loney's surprise.  Having forgotten almost
everything of small consequence, he couldn't remember when he had driven
it last.

He had put a blanket over the seat to hide the holes that mice had
chewed in the fabric.

The sun came through the windshield and it made him drowsy and he dozed
off, but he didn't know for how long.

Once he started the car and began to drive toward town for a bite to
eat, or a bottle of wine, or just the drive-he didn't know which-but he
had turned around and driven back to the airport.  He didn't like Havre
and he knew he had better not drink.  Thinking of Kate, he grew excited
again.

She was not on the five-thirty plane.  The man behind the counter was no
help.  He thought maybe the Salt Lake City airport had been closed too,
but he didn't know.  He just knew there was a blizzard in the southern
Rockies.  He began to switch off the lights.

Loney thought of calling Rhea because she would know what to do, she was
good the way, but he thought better of it.

There was a chance that she might bring up the Seattle business and he
couldn't handle it.  He wasn't ready.  And for the time being, Kate was
the only important woman in his life.  He didn't have enough of himself
to give to both of them.

He felt weak.  He knew he should eat, but the only thing he wanted was a
bottle of wine.  And some cigarettes.  In truth he desired neither, but
he thought he did, and the thought was enough.  He started the car and
drove down to the main highway that would take him into Havre, and he
hoped to some sort of controlled oblivion, if such a state existed.

Painter Barthelme stepped between the two Indians and pushed the smaller
one back over a stool.  The stool fell and the man fell with it, hitting
his head hard on the floor.  He moaned and rolled over and held the back
of his head.  The fight had gone out of him for the moment.

Painter turned to the other man and said, "Now what the hell is this all
about?"

"He attacked me," said the other man.  He was big and drunk, but not
drunk enough to take chances with.

Painter kept his hand on his holster and tried to gauge the man's eyes.
"Come on," he said.  "Tell it to me straight."

"I mean it.  Pepion tried to kill me," said the big Indian.

"Jesus, two drinks and he turns into Superman.  Look at the bastard."

Pepion was pulling himself up by the rungs of a bar stool.

Painter grabbed him by the arm and jerked him to his feet.

"Are you all right?" he said.

"Where is that fucker?" said Pepion.  His right eye had closed and his
face was red and puffy.  His lip was split right under his nose.

Painter turned to the big Indian.  "Did you do this?" It was a silly
question and Painter almost sighed.

"He came after me.  I don't know what the hell came over him.  I was
just sitting here with Waker.  He'll tell you.  Ain't it, Waker?"

Waker laughed.  "We was just sitting here." Waker was still sitting
there.  "We was just talking about our careers."

"That's right, officer.  We've been thinking of starting up our own
bowling alley.  We'd just got to the part about the cocktail lounge-see,
we want to have our own cocktail lounge right in the bowling alley-and
this damn Pepion goes berserk."

"Any idea why?"

"We was just saying that we didet think we should allow Indians in.
High-class, you see." Waker winked at the big Indian.

"It's not that we're prejudiced," said the big Indian.  He turned to the
bar and reached for his bottle of beer, but it lay on its side, its
contents still moving like lava down the bar.

"Goddamn you, Pepion," said the big Indian.  He made a fist and stepped
forward.

Pepion fell backward over the stool that lay on the floor.

This time he grabbed his left elbow and moaned as though his heart would
break.

"Now look at that!  You saw it-I didn't touch him.  Ain't it, Waker? See
what I mean?"

Painter again helped Pepion to his feet.  He held him up and turned to
the big Indian.  "That's enough.  Now get the hell out of here.  Take
that other ignorant bastard with you."

"But it's a free country," protested Waker.

"Not for you it isn't.  Now go on.  You've got five seconds before I run
you across the street.  Goddamn your hides."

Painter watched them hurry out the door.  He knew it wasn't because they
were afraid of him.  It was Friday afternoon and they wanted to remain
free men for the night ahead.  He would probably see them again.  He
turned to Pepion.  "I'd better get you over to the agency hospital.  Get
that lip sewed up."

I "Look at my fingers." Pepion held out his hand.  "I can't even move
'em.  I'm gonna sue those fuckers."

Painter helped Pepion out the door and into his cruiser.

He closed the door and looked at his watch.  Jesus, two o'clock and I've
already got my first casualty.  What a country.  He walked around the
car and got in.  Pepion was already nodding off.  "Now don't go to sleep
on me, Pepion.  I thought you were going to sue those fuckers." But
Pepion's head jerked and hit the window.  He slumped down in the seat
and was gone.

Just like a baby, thought Painter.  Goddamn country.  He should have
stayed in California .  .  .  he shouldn't have let that woman run him
out.  It was always women with him.  He watched his face in the
rear-view mirror as he clasped his shoulder harness.  It was a handsome
face, a real California-rugged cowboy face with crow squints and droopy
mustache.  He smiled and shook his head.  His face always made him feel
better.

He started the car and backed out onto the street.

Kate Loney walked briskly across the tarmac apron toward the terminal.
She strode past the other passengers, each of whom turned to look at her
with upstaged curiosity, but she seemed unaware of them.  In her
thick-soled boots she was six feet tall, lean and striking as a dark
cat.  Her black hair was pulled back from her face and clasped neatly
behind her head with a beaded roach.  Her necklace was squash blossom,
turquoise and silver, and her earrings were silver hoops.  She wore a
turquoise blouse and a black skirt that came halfway down her calves,
and over that, a sheepskin jacket.  She looked as if she couldn't decide
what to wear and so she wore a bit of everything.  And in truth, she had
been a little deliberate about choosing each piece of clothing.  She
didn't want to intimidate her brother with one of her city outfits, so
she had bought the sheepskin jacket in a Western boutique in Phoenix.
She how----A

was a little disgusted with herself for that move, but the squash
blossom was authentic, right from the heart of Navaho country.

She had bought it directly from the woman who made it.  She was the only
woman silversmith in the Canyon de Chelly area.

No middleman.  Kate felt righteous about that one.

She was a day late and she hoped her brother knew about the snowstorm in
Denver.  The plane from Phoenix had been able to land but no flights got
off the ground after that, so she had spent the night in a Ramada Inn
next to the airport.

She had been annoyed at first, but after she got settled in she had
found herself enjoying the night's isolation.  It always surprised her,
when she was on the road, how pleasant it could be without people, to
lie half naked on a queen-size bed and watch a couple of hours of silly
shows on the television.  It seemed to her at those moments that her
life had been drained from her body, and last night it was all she could
do to turn back the sheet and crawl into bed.  She had poured a glass of
Scotch from her traveling flask, but she hadn't the energy to drink it.
Usually a Scotch revived her, but last night it didn't have a chance.

As she strode toward the terminal she felt good, renewed, joyful and
annoyed.  She loved her brother more than anything, but she had gotten
used to hiding this feeling, not out of awkwardness or reserve, but
because it almost broke her heart to think of him.  And thinking this,
she was annoyed because she knew from past experience that he wouldn't
be there.

She looked at the terminal window for the first time and felt her heart
lift as she looked into her brother's wolfish face, so hungry and shy
that she became giddy.

And as she hugged his thin body, she breathed in the sour, smoky odor of
bars and booze and she didn't care.  She heard him say, "I waited for
you," and she said, "Yes, you did, didn ,t you?"

And he said, "I thought about going home but I waited for you.

When he said it a third time, she realized that he was absolutely
smashed, but she didn't even mind that much.  She was here and she knew
what to do.  She sat him down and put her leather briefcase on his lap.
Then she walked over to the car rental counter.  She didn't bother to
ask him if he had brought his.  She handed the girl her American Express
card and she looked out toward the airplane which was taxiing to ward
the runway and she thought, Perhaps by this time next week both of us
...  gut she didn't allow herself to complete her thought.  Bad luck;
she didn't need it.

"What shall we do today?"

Kate watched the soapy water swirl down the drain.  The breakfast dishes
glistened in a rack beside her.  She was happy and at peace with this
small world.  It seemed so simple and logical-no planes, no
appointments, no calls to return, no stacks of paper.  It was just
this-breakfast dishes and a free day.  She looked out the window to the
yard next door and she smiled.  I'm the one who's supposed to convince
him that he should come back to Washington with me, and all I can think
of is how peaceful his life is.

And it had been a perfect three days.  The morning after their drive
down from Havre, Loney had got up and gone to the store for groceries.
By the time Kate staggered into the kitchen, still exhausted from the
accumulation of her life, he had cleaned it and was starting breakfast,
He hadn't seemed to be hung over at all.  He had been fresh, and a
little apologetic.

Until she hugged him.

Now she looked at the frozen clothes on the line next door and she
wished they could both have a life like this, but she knew they
couldn't.  She needed her work and he needed some thing.

He would start drinking again as soon as she left, and so it was
important that she keep her goal fixed.

But she was happy and she felt her brother's eyes on her, and she knew
that for a change a man, a young man, was watching her without a trace
of desire or lust or whatever.

He was simply watching her.  She had become used to the men in
Washington and the men she met on the road.  Most of them were business
associates in one way or another, but when the business was done and the
inevitable cocktails flowed, they became randy and full of themselves.
The men on the road were the worst.  They seemed to think of her as a
sex starved gypsy and imagined they were there to satisfy her as no
other man could.  She had become an expert at recognizing that precise
moment when the good fellowship ended and the lust began.  And she knew
that she was asking for it, not by innuendo or suggestion but by the
nature of things, a woman in a man's world and so on and on.  If you
were the least bit attractive you became the object of their fuck game.
And you became cynical.

"What shall we do today?"

She turned from the sink and wiped her hands on a dish towel.  She
pretended to be trying to make up her mind, but she really didn't care.
If they just sat at the table and talked all day, that would be good
enough with her.  But she did have to call her office sometime.  She
frowned as though she were thinking hard.  "Let's see.  What if we had a
cigarette and a cup of coffee, then went downtown-I have to call in-and
we could just walk around for a while.  I want to see if Harlem has
changed in my absence.  Then .  .  .  we could go meet your girl. That's
it.  We'll go meet Rhea.  I want to know who you've been hanging around
with."

Kate poured the coffee and she became thoughtful.  She had been watching
and listening to Loney very carefully during the past three days to see
if he had any idea that she had come to take him back to Washington with
her.  But nothing he said indicated that he knew or even suspected.
Which meant that Rhea hadn't mentioned it to him.  And this disturbed
her.

She had made it clear that she wanted Rhea to soften him up.  Why hadn't
she?  She couldn't want him to stay here, knowing that he was on his way
to self-destruction.

There were several things about Rhea Davis that Kate wanted to find out.
What did she look like?  How did she conduct herself?  Why had she come
all the way up here from Texas?

But Kate wanted to know most of all what Rhea had found in her brother.
Why would a "respectable" schoolteacher find Loney significant, not to
mention worth saving?

The sun had appeared for the first time through the broken morning
clouds and it came in the window and bathed the small white table.  Kate
set the coffeepot back on the stove and she looked at her brother, and
she thought, There is some thing about that face like a wolf, so canny
and innocent, that is attractive, and she wondered if Rhea's experiences
with men weren't something like her own.  She didn't like herself to
think like this, so she thought instead of the sunlight on her brother's
hand.

Rhea opened the door and she touched her heart and said, "Oh, my," for
the resemblance of the two people was unmistakable.

Later, when she had a chance to study them, she would find the sister
beautiful and the brother fascinating in comparison , as if she hadn't
really looked at him before, but now she gasped, "Oh, my!"

"I'm Kate." And Kate extended her hand.

Rhea took the hand and did a little dip and said, "You must forgive me.
I'm Rhea." Then she looked at Loney and laughed.

"Hi there.  Oh!"

"Hello," said Loney, smiling and feeling far off.  He felt far off and
he realized that he had missed her, and as he looked into her turquoise
eyes, as deep and flat as a cat's, he knew that she had missed him.  His
hands trembled and he held them against his thighs.

And Rhea was saying, "Isn't it a lovely day, come in, I was just sitting
by the window," and Kate was saying, "You have a wonderful view of Snake
Butte, don't bother, and look, the Bearpaws.

Loney sat down on the graceful leather couch and watched the two women
at the window.  He was a little stunned.  He had never thought that the
three of them would one day be together.  Why that seemed so momentous
he couldn't say, but as he looked at them he felt like a third party. He
lit a cigarette with the big crystal lighter and his hands were
trembling.

Kate turned from the window and said, "You beast, you don't even care
about the view."

And Rhea laughed and said, "Oh, Jim!"

"Isn't he awful?"

"The pits."

Loney smiled at the two women, one tall and dark, the other small and
fair, both wonderfully pretty, and he thought, It is a fine view, I'm
happy enough.  And he was suddenly quite happy.

"I just got home myself-from school.  I was just going to put on some
tea water.  Or would you rather have wine?"

"No," Kate said.  "The tea will be fine.  Are you sure we're not
disturbing you?"

"How could you?  I've been dying to meet you."

"Well, I've heard all manner of things about you from this one here."

"All bad, I'm sure."

"Hardly."

After Rhea left the room, Kate said, "She's lovely.  Oh, and that
Southern drawl!  Miss Scarlett O'Hara." She rolled her eyes the way she
imagined a Negro mammy might, but she was troubled more than ever.  Rhea
was lovely and well-bred.  So why Harlem?  And why her brother?

"She is lovely," Loney said, looking into the fireplace and thinking of
his dark bird and the night it had appeared there.

"How long have you known her?  I forget."

"I don't remember.  I didn't know her for a long time."

"But how did you meet?"

Loney thought of the basketball game.  That seemed like years ago.  "She
was selling tickets and I bought one from her.

She hates basketball."

Rhea returned with a small silver plate.  "I'm afraid these are just old
store-bought cookies.  I never seem to get around to baking."

Kate said, "You have a very distinctive accent.  It didn't come through
in your letter."

Rhea laughed.  "That's what my students tell me.  Sometimes I just hate
it.  It sounds awful to me."

"But it's lovely," Kate protested.

"Letter?"

Both women looked at him.  Then Kate glanced at Rhea and she knew that
Rhea hadn't mentioned her letter or her plan.

She was momentarily confused.  Then she said, "We exchanged letters,
just to get to know each other," and saying it, realized that they'-she
and Rhea-were in competition and they had been competing since that
exchange.  What had seemed so clear to Kate before was becoming clouded
by this idea of competition.

Long-distance, no less.  And what a funny competition, him.

the prize being her brother.  She couldn't believe that Rhea would want
him.  She had her own world, back there in Texas, and she couldn't
possibly want Jim Loney.  She will leave here, thought Kate, probably at
the end of the school year; she can't take this place, this life.  And
what will become of my brother?

Rhea can't wish this life on him.  She must know I've got to get him
away.

Her thoughts were interrupted by her brother's voice.  "I might have a
glass of wine, if that's okay."

Rhea looked at Kate and Kate nodded.  "I'll have some too."

She thought it would be best to drink with him.

"Then we'll all have wine.  It is a celebration, isn't it?"

Kenny Hart watched Ike try to strike up a conversation with the young
Indian woman.  She was small and dark and she wore too much makeup.
Beneath that paint and powder, her face was calm and graceful, almost
pious, and Kenny thought that she looked an awful lot like Ike's
ex-wife.  And Kenny thought it remarkable that this girl would come in
on a random winter night and make him think of Ike's wife.  After forty
years, more or less.  Eletra.  That was her name.  She drove them wild
until she left Ike and then they drove her crazy.  Kenny was half in
love with her himself.  He and Ike worked together then, for ranchers
and farmers up and down the valley, and so he saw a lot of her.  But
Kenny had always been an honorable man and he never joined the crowd
that flocked around Eletra.

Not even after she and Ike split up, none too gracefully.  A

A couple of years later she just went crazy.  A combination of booze and
an excess of men.  Kenny heard that she was still down in the state
hospital in Warm Springs.  He also heard that she was in prison in
Nebraska.  And he heard she went up to Alaska to work with the Eskimos.
She had been a nurse before she met Ike.

The young woman looked away toward the pool table, where the two men she
had come in with were having a game.  Kenny didn't know them.  From
their slacks and tight shirts he guessed that they were from Great Falls
or Billings.  Christ, the shorter one was even wearing a necklace.  But
he looked mean and Kenny figured he'd better warn Ike off.  He polished
his glasses on his apron, then reached under the bar for the brick he'd
found that day.  It was red and had three holes in a line.  He threw it
On the bar in front of Ike.

"Know what this is?"

Ike Loney stopped in mid-sentence and glared at Kenny.

"Take a chance." Kenny picked the brick up and held it before Ike's
eyes.

"A brick?" said Ike.

"A North Dakota bowling ball." Kenny waited for Ike to catch on.

But Ike frowned and turned to the woman again and said, "Let me just buy
you one drink, a friendly drink.  What's the matter with that?"

Kenny sighed and threw the brick under the bar.  Poor old bastard.  She
probably reminds him of Eletra too, although his memories of her can't
be too fond.  Kenny had watched Ike change from a young rowdy to a
bitter man.  Eletra started it, but his kids finished it.  When she ran
off and left him with those kids, that finished it.  He had become mean,
and then bitter.  And then he took off.  That was the one thing Kenny
could never forgive Ike.  How he left those kids.  But they were still
friends of a sort, or at least Kenny pitied him enough to support his
drinking, and Ike had once been a good man and a hell of a companion.

Kenny had an old candy box full of pictures at home and sometimes after
a rough shift, he would drag it out and remind himself that once there
was a future for the likes of Ike Loney and Clancy Peters.  One photo
that he was especially fond of showed Clancy, him and Ike standing in
front of the bucking chutes down at the fairgrounds in Dodson.  There
was nothing in the world that those three rowdies couldn't do, from
fighting to riding, to drinking, to loving.  Now Clancy had sugar
diabetes and a loud-mouthed woman and Ike had nothing, except a couple
of kids he didn't know.  And I've got a bar, thought Kenny, and he was
grateful for that.  Most of the time he didn't need any more than that.

He popped another Oly and set it in front of Ike.  "Putting it on your
tab, old-timer." He walked back to the till and made an imaginary
notation on a piece of paper.

The two Great Falls men had finished their game and were sparring with
the wall.

"I like it hot!" one said.

"I like it shiny!" said the other.

"I like it hot and shiny!"

Goddamn, thought Kenny, it could have been a good peaceful night.

And he hoped to hell that Ike would quit fooling around with that girl.

One of the Great Falls men slammed his palm on the bar.

"Hey, what the fuck?" he yelled.  "You running a bar here or not?"

Kenny opened the beers and he thought, Thirty-five, forty years ago, me
and Ike would have given these punks all they wanted.  He pushed his
glasses up on the hump of his mostly flattened nose.

"Hey, what the fuck?" yelled the other Great Falls man.

"You running a drinking establishment or not?"

Kenny set the beers on the bar.  His numbing stick was by his knee,
within reach.  "That'll be one-eighty, boys," he said.

Painter Barthelme pulled his cruiser to the curb and switched off the
engine.  He zipped up his jacket.  He was feeling good.

His lecture to the high school students that afternoon had gone off
without a hitch.  Sometimes it pays to be a cop.  That after noon it had
paid.  He could see just the right amount of fear in their eyes and he
had made sure it stayed there with stories of high-speed chases and
desperate shoot-outs.  Of course, it was against the department's policy
to talk of such things.  He was supposed to be a goodwill ambassador,
not a messenger of death and destruction.  But he had passed his badge
around and he had handcuffed the teacher to the radiator and he had told
them that he could be their friend, he wanted to be their friend.  But
he just couldn't help putting a little fear into them.

And the siren had been a stroke of genius.  By the time he pulled up to
the school there were twenty people running out the door to see what was
up.  lie had got their attention.

Painter thought again of the teacher he had handcuffed to the radiator.
He'd been thinking of her all evening.  He couldn't believe that they
hadn't crossed paths before and she hadn't worn a wedding ring and that
was a novelty in this town.  It was the first thing he noticed about
her.  He had a good eye when it came to women.  But what was really
unique about her was her accent, that Southern drawl.  It was unexpected
and thrilling the way she'd said, "Oh, you," when she realized she was
his prisoner.  It was like the students weren't there, the way she'd
said it, as though they'd shared an intimate joke.

She was small and blond and his prisoner.  Painter had had a number of
women since he came up from California four years ago.  Some of them
were women he could lose his job over, pillars of society, and that was
a laugh.  But this one was different.

He got out of the cruiser and walked down the sidewalk toward the
Serviceman's.  It was a cold clear night.  He touched his holster and
smiled.  He'd kept her cuffed to the radiator longer than he'd planned,
at least ten minutes, and the students loved it.  They'd had no idea how
much he loved it.

Rhea put the last of the evening's dishes into the dishwasher.

She was sad and elated.  So many things ran through her mind that she
couldn't catch any of them.  She tried to remember exactly that
evening's conversation.  She tried to remember the various looks on
Kate's face as the evening and the wine wore on.  And she tried to
remember if Loney had given any indication that he had decided to go to
Seattle with her.  And she wondered if she had decided to go to Seattle.
She probably would-she would-if he came with her.  But alone?  Without
knowing a soul?

She remembered the bath water and she ran down the hall to her bedroom.
She got there just in time.  The water was an inch from the rim of the
tub and scalding hot.  My God, she sighed.  And as she undressed she
thought of a prayer that a friend had taught her when she was seven:
"Angel of a God, my guardian dear, whom God sent to protect me here,
ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide."
Rhea had said this every day for five years, until her mother found out
it was a Catholic prayer.  It was a lovely prayer, but henceforth
forbidden.  Now she said it.

And she hung her suit on a hanger, then slipped off her half slip, her
panties and bra.  In a way, she felt that she was in a forbidden
situation again.  She sought to throw herself between brother and
sister.  That's a mighty dramatic verb, she thought.  Insinuate is more
to the point.  And she didn't like the sound of it.  She needed to talk
to Kate.  But she didn't know how to arrange it.  Kate was leaving in
three days.

She drained some of the water from the tub and turned on the cold water.
She waited a few seconds, then she stepped into the water, feeling the
hot and cold mix around her leg.

She liked Kate.  She loved the way she looked, the way she wore jewelry,
her long fingers.  Sometimes when she was around beautiful women, she
felt small and awkward, but Kate was different-she was earthy, talky,
even a little wicked, and Rhea felt that they could be friends.  After
all, they had the same goal, to get Loney away from there.  If either of
them won, they should both be happy.

As Rhea lowered herself into the water, she felt her breasts get light,
and she thought, But it goes a little beyond the corn mon good.  It goes
to the heart.  She watched her toes turn pink in the hot water and she
wondered if she was justified in trying to keep Loney.  She remembered
her feelings about him that night a year ago when they first made love.
She had been surprised that he was so quiet and gentle, yet strong.

Not like the men she had made love with before.  Maybe it was a Texas
trait, she thought as the water.  made her arms weak, that need to
display aggression as though they were roosters pinning down a hen.
Silly, she chided herself, one of the men was a Jew from New York. Maybe
she had just been unlucky.  And she wondered when her relationship with
Loney had changed from simple sex to love.  Had it?  Yes, she was sure
of that.  She did love him and she was quite sure that he loved her.
Sometimes they were perfect lovers-the trouble was Rhea never knew when
those times would occur.  Complications.

And to think I came north to escape them, she thought.

She ran the washcloth over her face and smiled.  Maybe those Texas men
weren't so bad after all.  Oh, lord.  And she laughed out loud.

"I don't understand you."

"I know.  I don't understand myself They walked on in silence.  They
were on the last street on the eastern edge of town.  They could see the
lights of the agency four miles away through the trees that marked the
Milk River.

The stars were bright and severely patterned and Loney remembered the
summer nights that Kate had taught him stars and constellations.  In
those days he could never quite see the order.  It was all high chaos to
him.

"Did you know I came all the way out here to take you back with me?"

"I guess not.  I mean, I should have guessed.  I guess I'm not very
smart.  I should have known from your letters."

"I can't believe you didn't know."

"I'm not as smart as some people,"

"Don't say that!" Kate snapped.  "Don't ever say that.  You're as smart
as anybody." Then she added: "Unfortunately, you don't seem to know it."

They were walking beside a barbed-wire fence.  Out in the field Loney
could see the cattle.  They were black Angus and they looked like
similar dark stones.  None moved.

"I don't understand what you expect to happen to you here.

Do you think that one day you're going to wake up and things will be
different?  You'll suddenly have something, be some thing?"

"What would I have there?"

Kate stopped and touched his arm.  "Everything.  Some good and some bad.
But you would have things worthwhile.  I could be modest but I won't:
you would have me, your sister.  And other things-things you can't
imagine: beautiful country, a city, the North, the South, the ocean.  .
You need that.  You need things to be different, things that would
arouse your curiosity, give you some purpose.  For God's sake, I've been
here four days and I've seen how you live.  Don't misunderstand I've had
a wonderful peaceful time-but you can't go on day after day sitting at
that table, looking out that window.  What will you do when I'm gone?
I'm afraid to even think about it.  Loney looked down at his sister's
chest and he wanted to say that it wasn't that bad, that he had been
thinking and it was going to take some time.  After that he would be
free.

One of the cattle started walking away from the others, farther out into
the field.  And the other cattle moved as one heartbeat to follow.

Loney said, "I've got Rhea." He hoped his sister would accept this as a
kind of solution.

But Kate said, "For how long?  God, sometimes I envy you.

You live in a fool's paradise."

"That's okay," said Loney.  "She loves me."

"And she'll take care of you?  Listen, she has her own world.

I don't know anything about her background, but you can damn well bet
that she comes from a world as foreign to you as Mars.  What happens to
you when she decides to go back, when she decides that her little fling
with Harlem is over?  Oh, I hoped that you would at least be able to see
that." Kate started walking again.  She walked fast and Loney had to
trot to catch UP.

"She cares for me," he said.

"We all care for you, and that's the trouble." Kate stopped again. Loney
almost bumped into her.  "God, I wish we'd grown up differently,
together.  When we were kids I taught you things and you learned them.
You were so smart then." She turned her head away and Loney knew she was
crying He put his arm around her and patted her shoulder, but she
wouldn't come close.  He knew she wouldn't.  They were both awkward now.

"Look! Did you see that?  A shooting star."

He felt Kate's shoulder jump beneath his hand, then again, and he heard
her laugh.  "You didn't see anything, you dope."

"I did.  I swear it.  Over there." And he pointed to the southern sky.
It was an old joke.  When they were kids and Kate pointed out the stars
to him, he would suddenly see a shooting star.

It was the only way he could get to her.  They used to argue violently
over his sudden sightings.

"Oh, let's go home.  I have a flask of Scotch.  Tonight I need a drink
worse than you do." Kate wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sheepskin
jacket.  "Will you promise me one thing?

Promise me that you won't say positively no yet.  Will you give me these
last three days to try to convince you to come with me?"

Loney said, "Yes," but he didn't understand his sudden popularity.  He
had lived most of his life in Harlem, and now two different people
wanted him to leave with them.  He had been stupid.  Every one of his
sister's letters had ended with the offer to pay his way back to
Washington, D.C., but he had always considered that a refrain, a way to
end the letters politely, the way some people ended conversations by
saying

"Take care of yourself."

Loney looked back toward the field, but a street light flattened his
vision and he couldn't see the cattle like stones.

"I promise," he said.  And he wondered if he should tell Kate about
Rhea's plans for him.

'Jesus Christ, you're just in time."

Painter stood inside the door and unzipped his jacket.  He raised his
head and he could see his breath.  "In time for what?"

"To avoid all the trouble.  You timed it perfectly."

"You had some trouble?"

"Did we have some trouble, Ike?  Did I just kick two assholes and their
woman the hell out of here?  Did I just threaten them with extinction?
Or was that all my imagination?  Tell him, Ike."

"Aw, hell," said Ike.  He was down in the dumps.

"No-there were two guys from Great Falls in here.  Tried to get fresh. I
gave them the bum's rush, couldn't have been more than three minutes
ago.  Isn't that right, Ike?"

But Ike stared at the beer, before him.

"He's just being moody.  Pay no attention to him.  He tried to put the
make on their woman.  Can you imagine that?  You should be ashamed of
yourself, Ike, an old fart like you."

Painter sat down at the bar.

"You off shift?"

He looked at his watch.  It was twelve-ten.  He smiled sweetly at Kenny
and said, "You fucking'A."

"That's the idea.  Here, let me pour you one.  This is my private stock.
Let me know what you think."

Painter picked up the shot,glass, sniffed it, then threw it back.  When
he recovered, he said, "Holy shit!  What the hell is that?  I'd hate to
see what you serve to ordinary citizens."

"Jesus.  Ordinary citizens.  How about that, Ike?"

Painter looked around the bar.  "Give me another." The place was empty
except for him and Kenny and Ike, but he wished he had changed out of
his uniform.  And there was the cruiser.

He wasn't used to working the swing shift, but that fucking Myers was
sick again.

"How about a little cribbage?  Dime a point.  I'll spot you anything you
want, you name it."

"What is this stuff?"

"Rum.  One-eighty proof.  Take the chill off the balls of a brass
monkey.  Hey, you know the definition of an Eskimo with a hard-on?  A
frigid midget with a rigid digit."

"Wouldn't have to be an Eskimo.  Cold enough out there to freeze a
witch's tit."

"Ha ha.  That's a good one, Barthelme.  You should have been a comedian.
I'll have to remember that one.  I haven't heard that one since the
sixth grade.  Dime a point.  I need to get a little of that tax money
back."

"Kenny, I ought to run your ass in.  Every time you open your mouth
you're disturbing the peace."

"Whoops.  Okay.  I'm not even smiling now.  Hey, Ike, am I smiling?" .

But Ike wasn't listening to them.  He picked at the label on his beer
and thought of the woman he had just talked to.

For a few moments he had been taken back to a time he had spent forty
years forgetting.  Eletra.  Usually the thought of her made him sad,
then agitated, then outraged.  But that young woman--even with her
makeup and her aloofness, she re minded him of Eletra in the good days
before the kids came, when they spent all their time in bars.  And the
thought made him sad, but those few moments with the girl had made him
happy and just a little goofy, like he was a young man again.

Then Kenny came along with that goddamn brick.  He should have asked her
her name.  It wouldn't have surprised him if it was Eletra.  Nothing
would surprise him.  Those two punks she was with-that was Eletra all
over again.  And now he felt the rage build inside him and he blocked
out the rest of it and he tried to hang on to a memory the girl had
evoked of Eletra when times were good and there was just the two of
them.  He had seen it for a few shaky moments.

"Here you go, old man." Kenny set a cold beer before Ike and he watched
him.  Ike lifted his eyes.  "Are you all right?"

Kenny said, and Ike said, "You and that goddamn brick."

Loney stepped from the alley and hurried half a block to the liquor
store.  Myron Pretty Weasel watched him from the cab of his pickup.  He
had the heater going and Hank Williams's

24 Greatest Hits on the tape deck.  He was still as lean and powerful as
the day he played his last basketball game down in Wyoming.  That was
fifteen years ago.

Pretty Weasel was doing very well for himself.  He had made the right
decision to give up college and come home to go in with his dad.  Now
they had the biggest spread on the reservation and he had been
responsible for that.  He had learned enough business in college to run
the ranch right, and he had learned about ranching, not from his father,
but from some of the bigger operators, the white men from down the
valley.

He had learned about pregnancy testing and selling off the drys and
buying heifers; he had learned about leveling his hay fields, diking and
ditching for irrigation; and he had learned how to manipulate a couple
of the tribal councilmen, which made many things possible, including
leases and loans to expand his holdings.  It was Pretty Weasel's aim to
take the guess work out of ranching.  The only problem he had was with
the cattle market itself, which was as low as it had been in fifteen
years.  But they weren't in trouble yet.  He ran a tight operation and
his father left him alone.

He and his father lived by themselves.  His mother and two older sisters
had pulled out a long time ago and gone to Billings to live.  He saw
them occasionally, about once a year when he went to Billings on
business, but the divided family stayed pretty much apart.  His mother,
who was a grade school principal now, had never asked for money, and his
father (lately Myron himself) had never offered any.

It had been in his junior year in college, just before basketball
season, that the women had left.  And he made up his mind in the course
of one rambling afternoon to come home.  He told no one at Wyoming that
he was leaving.  He had a car by this time and he packed it with his
clothes and hi-fi-set and drove home.  It was during this drive, just at
the Montana border, among aspens and pines, that it occurred to him to
feel free, to feel that he had made his first decision and it had been
the right one.  It didn't matter that the decision was just to come
home-now, when he looked back on it, he realized that it hadn't been a
decision at all, it was more an automatic response, the way a sheepdog
returns to camp in the evening.  What mattered was that he did it.  As
he descended the pass into Montana, he realized how childish his life
had been and the act of leaving it behind became as irreversible as
death in his mind.  To put a ball through a steel hoop with a net
hanging from it: that life had ended at that moment.

Loney walked into the liquor store, first looking up and down the street
as though someone was after him.  Pretty Weasel turned down the tape and
smiled in the dark of the cab.  There was something about Loney that
hadn't changed and it had to do with that quick animal glance, always
alert, yet seeming to see nothing.  He had been the best ball handler
and passer that Pretty Weasel had played with or against.  He never
looked at you but he always got the ball to you, even when you didn't
expect it.  Sometimes when you saw him just right, his face was exactly
that of a mongrel, hungry and unpredictable, yet funny-looking.  Once in
a game Pretty Weasel had broken to ward the free-throw line and Loney
had looked right at him before passing and Pretty Weasel fell in love
right on the spot.

He started laughing and the ball went through his hands and hit him in
the face.  He had gotten a bloody nose out of it, but he always
considered that moment one of the high points of his career.

He had almost seen that look just now and he wondered how he and Loney
could have drifted apart so absolutely.  Loney was the last friend he'd
had.  Now he was gone, into the liquor store, into some kind of
desperado life that had nothing to do with Myron Pretty Weasel.  And he
saw the irony in the fact that he had become the solid citizen and Loney
the derelict.

All through high school Loney had been the smart one, the one they all
got their answers off, the one who lived in that proper boardinghouse
run by the preacher.  What happened?

Pretty Weasel turned up the tape.  Hank Williams was singing

"I'm so lonesome I could die."

Rhea opened her locker in the teachers' lounge and she was mildly
surprised to find so little in it.  She had two weeks until the end of
the term, but she had been thinking all day about leaving.  And she
thought she should start cleaning out her locker.  She would do it
little by little to escape attention.  She wasn't ready yet to tell Mr.
Gaetano, the principal.  He would raise hell.  He was an old tyrant.

But after two years her locker was virtually empty.  The contents were
pitiful and she almost laughed.  An umbrella, a box of Tampax, a gym
suit and a pair of white sneakers.  She put on her coat and stocking cap
and she dropped the gym clothes

and Tampax in her briefcase.

"What kind of a day did you have?"

Rhea turned as Colleen closed the teachers' lounge door.

Then she bent down and snapped her briefcase shut.  "Exasperating," she
said.

"Don't let the bastards wear you down.  What's the Latin for that,
anyway?"

Rhea laughed.  "I don't know.  Right now my mind is a bog.

What about you?"

"Yuck.  I could depress Mr.  Chips with my war stories.  Here, look what
I found on my desk after lunch." Colleen opened her locker and felt
around the upper shelf.  She turned and she had a small foil packet in
her hand.  "Can you believe it?"

"What is it?"

Colleen held it closer and Rhea could see the word TROJAN

in large blue letters.

"That's obscene!" Rhea said.  But she felt her throat tighten and she
had to strain to keep from laughing.

"That ain't exactly the word I'd have chosen, Oh, well.

And Colleen threw it back in her locker.  "It might come in handy one of
these days.  Listen, what are you doing now?

You want to come over for a drink?  I'll play my new Linda Ronstadt for
you."

"I'd love to, but I have an errand to run."

"Errands.  I haven't paid my power bill for two months.  I keep buying
these stupid records."

"That drink sounds nice.  If I get through in time I will come by."

"I'm sorry I ruined your party the other night."

"That was a week and a half ago and you didn't ruin it."

"I must have-I get so drunk."

"You were pretty high."

"I knew it."

"But you didn't ruin anything."

"Are you being nice?"

"No."

"Then I must be slipping.  Thanks, kid.  Drop by if you can."

Then Colleen whispered, loudly: "Can you believe that fucking rubber?"

"You're leaving tomorrow," said Rhea.

"Tomorrow morning," said Kate.

"It will be a long exhausting trip."

"I get a lot of work done on planes.  I find it relaxing, a good place
to think."

"I just daydream," said Rhea.

Kate poured the tea.  They were sitting in Loney's living room.  It
looked quite nice.  Kate had moved the dining table to a corner.  In the
late afternoon shadows the room looked comfortable and even snug.  Rhea
glanced out the tall narrow window at the bright gray sky and she
thought she could day dream easily in this room.  She smelled something
cooking in the oven, a roast perhaps, and she thought she had never been
so warm and comfortable in this house.  It had become a home.

"I couldn't let you get away," she began, "without talking-"

"Sugar?"

"No, thank you.  I couldn't let you go away thinking that I didn't want
to help Jim .  .  .  ...

"I never gave it a thought."

Rhea sighed.  "I hope you won't misunderstand.  I know you wanted me to
help you-to get him away from here.  I know you wanted him to come to
Washington with you."

"It's a little late.  He won't.  He has already informed me that he's
happy right here."

"I don't think that's true.  But I guess I knew he wouldn't go with you.
I knew that from the beginning."

Kate looked at Rhea.  She could have liked her.  "And you did nothing to
help.  In a way, I can understand why you would want him to remain here.
He is something of a toy.  I understand that.  But I can't believe you
wouldn't want something better for him.  You're going to leave, maybe
not tomorrow, but soon, the end of the school year perhaps.  You and I
are going to go away to better things, but what about him?  He'll still
be here, in this house, drinking at that kitchen table and looking
forward to nothing.  I wanted-no-I needed your help.  I thought I made
that clear in my letter.  I thought I conveyed a sense of urgency.  I
honestly thought you would help."

Rhea set her tea down.  They were sitting side by side on the
overstuffed couch, but Kate had turned away from her.

"I don't think you're being fair to me when you say I only want a toy.
He's never been that to me.  I know you've thought about him and his
life a lot longer than I have, but I think we've both come to the
conclusion that he is a human being.

And we both love him and want what's best for him.  Please don't think
he's a toy to me." The soft steadiness in her voice surprised her.  She
hadn't expected herself to remain so calm.

"You're right about me leaving Harlem, but it will be sooner than you
think.  I'm leaving right at the end of this term.  And I want to take
Jim with me."

Kate sat back on the couch and looked at Rhea.  Her dark eyes narrowed
and she couldn't help the mistrust that filled them.  She had become
used to dealing with people in terms of bluffs, of power plays and
trade-offs, and she never took words at face value, as though they were
meant.  But as she looked at the small blond woman beside her, she
wondered as she had upon arriving at the simplicity of this life.  Yet a
doubt persisted.  "I hope you won't take this wrong, but it's been
troubling me since we met-what exactly do you see in my brother? Besides
his being a human being with potential?

I can see that you are a woman of quality, and he is a man almost devoid
of tangible qualities.  I say this as his sister, as much as it hurts."

Rhea smiled.  "I know it must seem strange.  Sometimes it seems to me
that we are the odd couple.  We do come from completely different
backgrounds.  As you say, I have had ad vantages-more than I've taken
advantage of, I'm afraid.  But I came to Harlem to get away from all
that and to find some thing.

I wasn't at all proud of myself or my life.  I had never really worked
at anything.  I'm twenty-nine and this was my first job.  I thought
coming up here would be a complete break with my past.  It has been; not
always pleasantly, I might add.

I met Jim and I was just curious about him.  No more.  I found out who
he was, that he had been a bright student, a basketball player, and I
was intrigued.  He was shy, yet charming, and he was totally different
from any man I knew.  The others were what you might expect in a city
like Dallas-lawyer types, rich types, ambitious types.  At first, with
Jim, I thought it would be a-you'll hate me-a diversion, a chance to be
frivolous."

Rhea stopped for a moment and thought.  "I guess you're right-in the
beginning he was a toy.  Not now.  To get back to your question, I love
him.  For what he is and for what he might become.  I would like to
convince you that I'm not doing
this out of any need for charity or social work.  I'm doing it for
myself, which I suppose raises another question."

Kate pressed her lips together.  Then she stood and walked to the
window.  She was wearing a black silk shirt, black slacks, and with her
black hair, she looked almost like a shadow in the darkening room.  She
clasped her hands behind her and stood without saying anything.  A light
snow had begun to fall.

Each flake fell clean and dry, and she thought about Washing ton
winters, the grit of those wet winters.  She had chosen them and she
could live with them.  Still, she envied this crisp snow and the way it
covered everything with a feeling of permanence.

She turned from the window.  "I'm going to feel awful about this in the
morning, but right now I believe you and I want what is best for him.  I
think you are." And she said, "Will you try to take him to Dallas with
you?"

"Seattle.  Don't ask me why I chose Seattle.  I guess it just seems like
a place to escape to."

"And do you think he will go with you?"

"I hope so.  I mentioned the idea one night, in an oblique sort of way,
and he seemed interested.  At least, in Seattle.

He said he had been in the army out there."

"That's right." Kate rubbed her upper arms.  It was getting chilly.  "He
sent me some ivory polar bear salt and pepper shakers."

"He told me." Rhea stood and slipped into her coat.  "He said they were
lovely.  He loves you very much."

"I still have them." Kate seemed distracted for a moment.

Then she said, "I suppose he does, doesn't he?"

"You're very important to him."

"That's nice of you." Kate stepped toward Rhea and hugged her,
perfunctorily.  "I hope we get to know each other.  I hope we get the
opportunity."

"We will.  I'm just sure of it."

"I'm sorry Jim wasn't here."

"I'm not."

"Will you stay for dinner?"

"I'd love to, but I have several things to do."

On the morning of the day Kate was to leave, she and Loney drove out to
Snake Butte.  It was early dawn and the sky to the east had started to
turn a fresh pink.  A thin snow on the raised road squealed beneath the
tires of the rented car.  Loney drove the rutted miles away from the
dawn.  And when they reached the butte he switched off the beams and
crawled an other quarter mile until they were opposite the small
reservoir.

He stopped the car but left the motor running.

"This is the last time," Kate said again, her voice as formal and dark
as the suit she was wearing.  "I will never come back here."

"We were close this time, except for-"

"I have a life of my own," Kate interrupted.  "You are not a part of it
anymore, by your own choosing.  You have nothing left.  Anything you do
from now on you will do without conviction, without spirit.  You reject
me.  You reject Rhea.  You have nothing."

Loney leaned back and put his hands on his thighs and studied them.  "I
can't leave," he said, and he almost knew why.

He thought of his earlier attempts to create a past, a back ground, an
ancestry-something that would tell him who he was.  Now he wondered if
he had really tried.  He had always admired Kate's ability to live in
the present, but he had also wondered at her lack of need to understand
her past.  Maybe she had the right idea; maybe it was the present that
mattered, only the present.  But even as he thought this he saw the
woman that Christmas Eve, his hand in her hair.

He looked out his window.  The fissured gray walls of the butte were
beginning to lighten and cast shadows.  He didn't like the butte.  Even
as a kid, when he and Pretty Weasel and Yellow Eyes rode out on Pretty
Weasel's father's horses before dawn to fish, he had felt the dim walls
watching him and he didn't like it.  There were faces in the walls.  He
had discovered them then, and he saw them now.  He had never looked
closely because he didn't want to recognize any of the faces, and
certainly not his own.

But there was one face that haunted him, and he knew the time was wrong,
but this was to be his last chance to know.

"That woman," he said, not knowing, "that woman .  .  ."

And he looked up at the gray walls changing into faces.  "When you left
the very first time, I stayed with her, she said she was our aunt and
her name started with an S.  I remember Christmas when she started
crying and I put my hand in her hair.  .  .  ." He wanted to say that
she was the woman he had tried hardest to love, throughout the years,
and now, but he saw the cruelty of it, and he said, "Where is she?"

And the car was empty of voices.  Only the white whir of the car's
heater broke the silence.  The gray light fell across Kate's face and
she thought, I am a failure even at this.  I can't even pretend to be a
good sister.  And she thought that her love for her brother was that of
a lover seeking a perfect love.

She had not thought it before.  Now she knew that she was crushed as a
rejected lover might be.  And she thought that somewhere in his
cluttered mind, he knew it too.

The ice on the small reservoir was beginning to shine and when she
looked up at the butte her eyes were dazzled by the streaks of yellow
and she said, "Dead." Simply.

And he said, "Dead." He said it as though he were learning a new
language.  And then he said, "What was she?"

And Kate said, "She was your poor father's lover."

"She wasn't just a woman," Loney said.

"She and your father-"

"Our father." -were lovers for a good many years.  When he left us that
dark night, he left her too.  You were ten.  She-her name was
Sandra-took you in.  You hadn't had a mother since you were a year old
and she must have thought you needed looking after."

"What about you?  Why didn't she take you in too?  You were my sister."

Kate looked at the far foothills of the Bearpaws.  In the dawn fight
they rose, a golden toast, against the gray of the western sky.  From
the warmth of the car they looked summery and she wished for summer and
sweat and thirst."

"You were my sister," Loney said again.

"I wouldn't live with her."

"Didn't you like her?"

"I don't know."

Kate thought of the summers of their youth, the hot quiet days, the
flies thick and slow against the screens.  She thought of the small
cottonwood in the backyard and the afternoons she had spent teaching him
to read and write and add.  She taught him the things she learned in
school, and although he was five years younger than she, he picked much
of it up.  It had started out as a game, something to do to pass the
summer afternoons, but soon she found herself obsessed with teaching
him.  Even in those days she thought of learning as a kind of salvation,
a way to get up and out of being what they were, two half-breed kids
caught in the slack water of a minor river.

Now as she sat in the car watching the sky lighten behind the Bearpaws,
she thought it ironic that she was given the opportunity to teach her
brother because they lived with a father who ignored them.  It was only
after he abandoned them.  .  .

"Why wouldn't you live with her?"

"I had a chance to go away-to go to a better place."

"A boarding school?"

"A better place.  But Kate had known back then that she couldn't compete
with Sandra, she didn't know how to compete with a woman.  It was
because Sandra was a good woman who loved them that she left.  She had
felt she would lose her brother and she couldn't take that.  She had
lost her mother and father, but neither of them meant much to her and so
their separate leavings were bearable, even welcome.

For a few exhilarating days after their father left, she thought that
she would raise her brother herself.  But then the agency people started
coming around, and finally Sandra offered to take them in.  Kate had
seen her brother's reaction to Sandra and she knew that she would lose
him.  So she chose to go away herself.  Now she wondered if that had
been a mistake, whether if she had stayed with her brother things would
be different now.

"How did she die?" Loney said.

"I don't remember-an accident, something.  Don't you re member?

You should," Kate said impatiently.  "We'd better leave.  I don't want
to miss my plane."

But Loney sat for a moment.  Strangely, he didn't remember.

The two years with Sandra were like a dream.  Kate lit a cigarette and
rested her head on the back of the seat, exhaling the smoke as though
she were emptying her body of air.  A

bird lifted from the cliffs of the butte and drove high into the sky.
Loney watched it, the steady rhythm of its wings as it got smaller and
smaller.

"Why haven't you married?" he said.

"I never met a man who could stand me."

"Do you ever think about your past-our past?"

"I gave it up a long time ago.  We have no past.  What's the point in
thinking about it?"

"I don't know." Loney leaned forward and put the car in gear.  "No point
really." He turned the car around and headed it toward the main highway.
He pulled the visor down against the sun.  "I love you," he said, and he
felt oddly cheerful.

There was something determined about Harlem as it readied itself for the
Christmas season.  Except for a few decorations a red cellophane wreath
with an electric candle in the Coast to-Coast store, children's cutouts
of snowflakes in the laundromat window, and a cardboard Santa pointing
out Buttrey's holiday items (hard candy 59, tinsel 290, hot buttered rum
batter 890)-and the fact that the stores stayed open until nine every
evening, it was hard to tell that a season of joy had visited itself on
the community.  But the weekly Harlem News proclaimed the event with a
notation beside the weather box:

"Only 12 More Shopping Days Till Christmas, Joyeux Noel."

And there were kids on the streets.

Kenny Hart was shaking Christmas trees in the Lions Club A lot beside
the Texaco station, He had read somewhere that if you could shake the
needles loose, then that tree was too dry.

And so he strolled through the lot, shaking needles off the trees.

"Don't damage the merchandise, Kenny," said a dry little man in a red
plaid Scotch cap.

"You bastards have got it sewed up, don't you?"

The little man laughed.  He was tickled.  "There ain't another tree lot
in forty miles-least none where you'll get trees as good as these."

"If I served drinks as bad as these trees, they'd have my license within
the hour.  My balls.  No, listen, c'mere.

The little man sidled up to Kenny.  He was already laughing.

He knew what was coming.

Kenny leaned down.  "How many North Dakotans does it take to eat a
rabbit?"

The little man shook his head and laughed.  He pulled his ear flap up.
He knew it was going to be a good one.

"Give it a try, Harold."

But the little man shook his head.  He had heard it before but he
couldn't remember the answer.

"Two.  One to watch for cars."

Harold said, "Ah, ah, ah." He slapped himself on the side of the head
and said, "Ah, ah, ah." Then he said, "I'll have to remember that one.
That ain't too shabby."

Kenny held up a tree.  "I'll give you two bucks for this one."

"Oh, no you don't." And Harold grew shrewd.  "That's one of our
six-footers.  One dollar a foot."

"But look at all these goddamned needles on the ground,"

Kenny protested.

"That one there came all the way from the Rocky Mountains.

That one there's one of our favorites."

Kenny talked the little man down a foot,,gave him a five and threw the
tree into the back of his pickup.  He loved Christmas. He drove down to
Kennedy's, listening to Bing Crosby on the radio.

Business was good this evening and that was one of the things Kenny
loved about Christmas.  It was good for business and he made a lot of
money.  But he loved even more to see his bar filled.  It always
reminded him of the way he had envisioned his bar when he bought it back
in '59.  A bar full of good people having themselves a real good time.
And he recognized most of them-a couple of ranchers, several townies and
a bunch from the agency.  He noticed a group of white people sitting at
a table near the jukebox.  He hadn't seen them before, but he figured
them to be schoolteachers or maybe BIA people from the area office down
in Billings.  Christmas made for strange barfellows.

George LaMere was tending bar.

"Georgie, gimme a hot one, huh?" Kenny said and watched him turn to fix
the drink.  LaMere was the quietest man Kenny had ever known.  It had
taken the better part of a year for Kenny to learn that LaMere had spent
fifteen years down in Deer Lodge for killing a woman.  He never did find
out where this had happened or why.  All Kenny knew was that LaMere
hadn't done anything wrong in the two years he had worked for him.  He
had no complaints about LaMere.

"Georgie, c'mere.  Kenny watched him bring the hot whiskey.  One thing
was certain-LaMere was imperturbable.  He worked around liquor with the
stoicism of a recovered alcoholic.  And Kenny was certain he was just
that.

"Buy those white folks a drink.  Over there.  No, wait.  Wait a minute.
Buy everyone a drink." As LaMere turned, Kenny whispered after him,
"Don't tell them who it's on.  No, say

'On the house."'

Kenny looked around.  He figured he would set the tree up after the bar
closed tonight.  He usually set it up in the corner on the other side of
the jukebox, but it never seemed the right place.  He wanted it to be
the first thing people noticed when they came through the door.  Maybe
back by that partition that sheltered the pool table.  They ought to let
kids in bars on Christmas.  Kenny had had two wives but no kids.  He
always regretted that.  He could have had grandchildren by now, a whole
houseful of kids.  Jesus Christ, they'd be just right, full of piss and
vinegar.

"Hey, Kenny!"

It was Ike.  He was sitting with a young Indian halfway down the bar.
His thin white shirt made him look even scrawnier than he was.

"What the hell was the name of that woman in here the other night?"

"Carloada," said Kenny.

Ike turned to his partner and winked.  "Carloada?" he said.

"Carloada Shit," Kenny called.  "I hear she's looking for you."

The two ranchers at the bar turned to Kenny and laughed.

Goddamn that Ike, Kenny thought, always earning a drink.

And goddamn me for being a sucker.

Pretty Weasel was waiting for Loney when he stepped out of the liquor
store.  Loney knew it when he saw him, but Pretty Weasel had his Scotch
cap pulled down over his eyes.  He was leaning against the wall of
Merle's Confectionery.  For an instant Loney thought of dashing up the
street the other way.

He used to be able to outrun Pretty Weasel in high school.

But he could think of no graceful way.  He started to walk by Pretty
Weasel.

"Same time, same place."

Loney turned.

"I saw you here last week.  Same time, same place."

Loney clutched his wine.  "I'm not very original."

Pretty Weasel laughed and pushed himself away from the wall.  "Long
time, no see," he said.  "Where have you been, my friend?"

Loney gestured helplessly at the street with his free hand.

"I'm going hunting tomorrow.  Pheasant.  Down by Strike's."

Loney knew the place.  He knew what Pretty Weasel was talking about.
They had hunted there as kids, in high school, Pretty Weasel with his
twelve-gauge and Loney with his single shot .22.

The grainfields down there were thick with pheasants, even in winter, if
the winter wasn't bad, if the snow had blown or melted off.  Loney
hadn't thought of those days in years, but now the sudden vision of them
bumping across the fields in Pretty Weasel's father's pickup, slamming
on the brakes when the pheasants scrambled to the ditches and the dry
slough, the thick blast of the twelve-gauge, followed by another, and
another, made Loney's head light with unquiet memories.

"You want me to come get you?"

Loney held his bottle close to his chest.  One on the fly and two on the
ground.  Two on the fly.  Once all three on the fly.

Loney remembered his frustration as he squeezed off his single shot at a
running cock, then the whir of his wings as Loney struggled to reload.
Once he even carried his shells in his mouth so he wouldn't have to dig
in a pocket, but his tongue turned gray and he thought he had lead
poisoning.

"We'll have a drink.  We'll talk about it."

Then it was dark and Pretty Weasel led the way across the street to
Kennedy's.  He had been six feet two in high school, but he looked
taller than that now.  In his down vest he looked dark and massive.
Loney glanced away at the hardware store and he saw the red cellophane
wreath with its electric candle in the window.  "Christmas," he said, as
though he had just thought of it.

"That's right, son-Christmas." And Pretty Weasel waited and put his arm
around Loney's shoulder and laughed.

Colleen was drinking the tequilas almost as fast as the bartender could
bring them.  She had no drinking buddies in Harlem and so she usually
drank at home alone.  The few times she had been out on her own she had
got into terrible messes, the kind that took days to recover from,
physically and emotionally.

But this-this was just like college all over again, except there wasn't
any lemon and salt.  She felt reckless; she had already called Rhea a
pussy-"Don't be such a pussy"-when Rhea declined a shot of tequila. Rhea
had given her a disgusted look, but the three men loved it because they
felt reckless too.  They had driven fifty miles to feel reckless, all
the way from Havre.  Two of them taught in the high school there and the
third was a student at the college.  The two teachers had met Colleen at
a convention down in Great Falls a couple of months earlier and she had
promised to line them up if they ever got to Harlem.  So she had talked
Rhea into it.  She hadn't counted on the college student and she
couldn't find him a date.  She and Rhea were the only single women she
knew in Harlem.

"Do yourself a favor," she murmured in Rhea's direction.

"I'm having a ball," Rhea said.  "An absolute ball."

Colleen knew she was going to be shitty.  "All right, Miss Puss," she
said.

"If you call me that again I'll leave."

"What part of the South you from?" said the college student.

He had a lazy attractiveness about him with his lean, almost pretty face
and long sandy hair parted in the middle.  He was eating peanuts off the
table.

"Dallas.  Texas."

"I love the way you say'Dallas."We don't get many Southern belles around
this part of the country.  What brought you all the way up here?" He had
a small red pimple just below his left nostril.

"A mistake, a dreadful mistake."

The college student chuckled.  He had been aware of the pimple all day.
He turned to one of the teachers and said, "Your turn, Herbert."

But Rhea had turned her attention to the two men who had just walked in
the door.  She didn't recognize the first one.

The second was Loney.

It had been a week since Kate left and in that week Rhea had lost all
her confidence.  She had seen Loney twice, early on, and she had
mentioned Seattle twice and each time Loney had gone blank, as though he
had never been to Seattle, as though Seattle had no importance to him.
She hadn't asked him point-blank if he wanted to go to Seattle with her
because she didn't want to be hurt point-blank.  And so this past week,
for the first time since coming to Harlem, she had felt absolutely
alone.

And now she felt awkward.  She couldn't just sit there and she couldn't
walk up to him and say, "Well, Mr.  Loney, this is a coincidence." She
was confused and she felt that she didn't know him, had never known him.
And she felt a kind of anger work its way up through her confusion.

"Oh, God," said Colleen.  "Oh, my God," she said, for she had seen
Pretty Weasel and hated him even worse than Loney.

He had been one of her early bad experiences.

Kenny stood at the far end of the bar, drinking his hot whiskey and
watching the women's reactions to Loney and Pretty Weasel.  He didn't
quite know what was going on, but it wasn't pleasant, especially with
the dark-haired one.  He figured she was liable to get mean.  She was
drunk enough.  And she had those white boys with her.  Kenny had
developed an eye for trouble and he saw the potential now.  And he
wasn't about to allow a racial incident to happen in his bar.  He knew
he was overreacting-things like this happened rarely-but he also knew
Pretty Weasel could be violent when disturbed.  Five or six years back,
Kenny had watched him punch out a couple of Malta boys at a football
game.  It was quick but brutal.

And then there was the business of Loney senior and Loney junior.  They
hadn't become aware of each other yet, but they would.  Ike was such a
miserable old fart that he might start badgering his son just for the
sport in it.  Ike was harmless, but Kenny wasn't sure about his son.  He
had never been sure of Jim Loney.  He was not geared for survival like
his old man.

He had gotten along so far, but Kenny felt in his guts that Jim Loney
would go off someday.  If he were pressed, he could only offer, "I've
seen it in his eyes." But he would never be pressed because a man like
Loney just wasn't that important to anyone.

Kenny walked around the counter and tied on his apron.

He felt he could handle things better from there.  George La Mere was
staring at him from the other end of the bar.  Kenny wasn't due to start
his shift for another hour and a half.  "Take a break, Georgie," he
called.  LaMere finished wiping the bar, then sat down on the end stool,
his eyes never leaving Kenny.

"What do you say, gentlemen?"

"Couple of Luckys," said Pretty Weasel.

"Merry Christmas," said Loney.

"That's the spirit.  Merry Christmas.  Hey." Kenny leaned over the bar.
"What's the state bird of North Dakota?"

Pretty Weasel dropped a couple of dollars on the counter.

"The housefly," Kenny said.

The two ranchers laughed.  They were from up north.

Ike craned his neck and looked around the ranchers to see who Kenny was
talking to.  He saw Pretty Weasel's chest and he saw his son's thin
face.  In a way it was his own face: the profile that he had never seen,
the identical slightly large ear, the horizontal jaw line and the dark
eye set back a ways from the straight nose.  He had his mother's hair,
Ike thought, black, almost blue.  And her dark skin.

He tried not to think about his wife because it did no good.

He didn't hold her leaving him against her anymore because

that, too, did no good.  But he didn't like the fact that he and his son
lived in the same town.  Her son was always there to remind him of
Eletra and a part of his past that he had walked away from.  If he held
anything against his wife it was the fact that she had left first.  She
had beaten him to it.  So he was left with two kids and no desire to be
a father.  But he had stuck with them for ten years, off and on, until
Kate was sixteen or seventeen.  She was taking care of her younger
brother by then, so he didn't feel bad when he caught a ride up to Havre
one night after the bars closed.  After a year of bumming around, he
worked his way down to Great Falls, and then to Butte, where he put in
eleven years in the Mountain Con mine, working for the Company.  He
enjoyed the money and the women and he once drank all night with Eve!
Knievel before he became famous and an asshole.  Then it ended when a
crawl space between tunnels collapsed on him and crushed three
vertebrae.  When he got out of the hospital, he settled up with the
Company and moved back to Harlem.  The settlement was long gone but he
did get a monthly disability check and he could live on that, most of
the time in peace.  Except for those unavoidable times when he saw his
son, who reminded him of Eletra.  It didn't occur to him to feel guilty
for abandoning his children.

He settled back on his stool.  Be cool, he thought, cool as a cucumber.
This is still your town.  You own it..  And he turned to the young
Indian beside him.  "You're a good man, Willard.

I knew your father, and his father, and his father's father.  You're the
last of a long line of good men."

"What do you mean, 'last'?"

"Hell, you know as well as I do you're going to marry one of these
goddamn white women and that'll be the last of that pure strain.  You're
as good as a white man already.  Or as bad."

Willard turned around on his stool and looked at the white women behind
him and thought about this.

The college student looked up at Willard and followed his gaze down to
Rhea.  Fucking Indian, he thought, fucking pimple.

He had gone back to the bathroom to squeeze it and now it was bleeding.
He dabbed at it with his handkerchief.  He hated Kennedy's and he
couldn't believe that a woman like Rhea lived in this town.  She was
something else.  But so was he.  Not like these turkeys he'd come down
with.  He figured if he could get her away from there, alone, she would
see that.  He was fascinated by her, not because she was good-looking
(she was that), but because she was different-Southern, older and aloof.
He decided he liked these qualities.  And he was determined to strip
them away.

He crossed his legs and looked at her breasts and small, almost sloping
shoulders.  She was vulnerable and he thought of her large white teeth.

"You don't talk much anymore.  Used to be we couldn't shut you up.  What
the hell's the matter with you?"

"Cat's got my tongue."

"Well, something's sure funny here.  When I saw you coming out of the
liquor store, I thought, Hey, what the hell's going on, me and Loney
used to be the best of friends, he used to be the best friend I ever
had.  Pretty Weasel shook a cigarette out of Loney's pack.

"Times have changed," Loney said and he said it deliberately, for his
own benefit.  He felt small beside Pretty Weasel, as though they had
been growing physically apart, he smaller, Pretty Weasel bigger.

"We can remedy that in a damn hurry."

"Yes," said Loney and he almost laughed.

Pretty Weasel lit the cigarette from Loney's and watched the smoke go
away from him.  He didn't smoke, ever, but he thought of the cigarette
as a kind of offering.  "I'm in with the old man.  You knew that, didn't
you?" He would start with this.

And Loney said, "That's what you came back for."

"Naw-you think that?  I'll tell you why I came back-because I couldn't
stand those people down there.  You know why.  Because they put the
pressure on me, all this Indian bullshit.

You know what they called me in the newspaper?  Super Chief." -That's
what we used to call you."

"That was different.  Up here it didn't mean anything."

"What did it mean down there?"

"Indian play basketball good, Indian friend of the white man.

I don't mean maybe, either."

Loney thought about this.  In the service they had called him Chief and
he was only half Indian.  It always startled Loney that when he stepped
out of his day-to-day existence he was considered an Indian.  He never
felt Indian.  Indians were people like the Cross Guns, the Old
Chiefs-Amos After Buffalo.

They lived an Indian way, at least tried.  When Loney thought of
Indians, he thought of the reservation families, all living under one
roof, the old ones passing down the wisdom of their years, of their
family's years, of their tribe's years, and the young ones soaking up
their history, their places in their history, with a wisdom that went
beyond age.

He remembered when the Cross Guns family used to come to town.  The car
would be full of adults and kids, and when they scattered to their
various appointments, only old Emil Cross Guns would be left, sitting in
the back seat in his black suit coat and black hat, black neckerchief
knotted around his ropy old neck.  Loney recalled going up to the window
and touching his hand and the old man saying something in Gros Ventre.
All the kids used to touch his hand because he was a medicine man.  It
was Pretty Weasel who had told Loney that Emil had cured his older
sister of infantile paralysis.

Emil was dead now and those days were gone to Loney.

Everything was changed and the old ones did not exist.  Even Pretty
Weasel came from a different kind of family.  Both his father and his
mother had gone to college, back in the days when Indians didn't go to
college.  And his father had been tribal chairman for a number of years.
There was a picture in their house of him shaking hands with President
Eisenhower.

Now he was old, but in a white man way, thrown away.  Not like Emil
Cross Guns.

Loney thought this and he grew sad, not for Pretty Weasel's father, nor
for Emil Cross Guns, but for himself.  He had no family and he wasn't
Indian or white.  He remembered the day he and Rhea had driven out to
the Little Rockies.  She had said he was lucky to have two sets of
ancestors.  In truth he had none.

"Pheasant, my man," said Pretty Weasel.  "We're going after those wily
ones tomorrow."

Loney looked up and beyond Pretty Weasel and was astonished to see Rhea
harry by him.

Once outside, Rhea ran the half block to her car.  The stores were still
open but the street was virtually deserted.  She ran and the air was
cold and she felt her eyes fill with tears.  For a brief practical
moment she felt that she should have said goodbye, but to whom?  This is
crazy, she thought, and she started her car and backed out into the
street.  She put the car into forward gear and it jumped forward, then
stalled.

"Damn you," she said.  "Damn you." She glanced toward Kennedy's and she
saw a figure standing in the light.  At first she thought it was the
college boy, but when the figure stepped off the curb and walked toward
the car, she recognized Loney.

She wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes with a gloved hand.

She rolled down her window and said, "Hello." Then she said, "Get in."
She said it almost coyly and the anger returned.

She didn't need to be coy anymore.

Loney walked around the car and got in.  He seemed wary and he closed
and locked the door behind him as if to shut out a threatening crowd.
But the street was virtually deserted as Rhea started the car and put it
in gear.  Neither of them looked in the store windows and she felt as
though they were the only souls out in Harlem.  She drove past her
street and then past his'street and soon they were on the outskirts of
town where the main street met the new highway.  Rhea turned left onto
the highway and drove slowly toward the agency and the reservation.  She
didn't know what else to do.

Finally she said, "What is it that troubles you?"

Loney looked down at his hands and he discovered that he still had the
bottle of wine in the paper sack.  Without thinking, he twisted the top
and he heard the paper tear and the metal cap break free.  "I've been
bad to you", he said.  "Partly that I've been very bad to you." He
tightened the cap and he looked out the window and saw the lights of the
agency twinkling through the dark cottonwoods along the Milk River.  "I
think you should never have met me." The fields were covered with an old
snow.

"But what is it that really troubles you?  For pity's sake, don't you
know I want to help you?"

"It's not something .  .  .  I don't even know myself.  It has to do
with the past." But Loney realized this wasn't good enough.  He had
thought and said it too often to believe it

"It has to do with certain things.  I know it has to anymore.

do with my mother and father, but there are other things.  It has to do
with an aunt I lived with when I was a kid.  I loved her and she died.
That's okay.  It was enough to love her.  But I would like to know who
she really was and how she died and why.  I don't know."

Rhea felt her hands loosen on the steering wheel.  She hadn't realized
how tense she had been.  But Loney was talking finally and she held her
breath, in her mind urging him on.

"I know this is kind of strange, but I see a bird-I don't know what kind
of bird it is-but I see it every night.  Sometimes it flies slowly
enough so that I can almost study it, but even then .  .  .  it is a
bird I've never seen in real life.  I don't know.

It comes and I look at it and then it fades away."

"Is it a dream?"

"It comes when I'm awake, but late at night when I'm tired or drunk."

Loney was silent for a moment.  Then he said, "I don't know what this
has to do with anything, certainly it has nothing to do with my aunt. It
just comes every night, and every night I think, This must have some
meaning.  Sometimes I think it is a vision sent by my mother's people. I
must interpret it, but I don't know how."

Loney paused again, then sighed.  "There is a Bible phrase.

It's crazy.  It popped into my mind a couple of months ago at a football
game.  'Turn away from man in whose nostrils is breath, for of what
account is he?" I haven't looked it up because I'm afraid I will find it
and it will be bad."

"It's from Isaiah," said Rhea.

Loney looked at her.  "I think of it quite a bit.  It just pops into my
mind and I don't know how I know it.  I went to a Catholic boarding
school, and then I lived in a minister's house-it must come from one or
the other.  The minister was kind of a screwball.  Maybe he put it in my
mind.  The point is, it's there and it bothers me.  I want to make a
little sense out of my life and all I get are crazy visions and Bible
phrases.

They're like puzzles."

By now they were almost to the bridge that spanned the Milk River.  A
few hundred yards beyond stood the entrance to the agency.  Rhea had
never actually been to the agency, but she knew there was a hospital
back in there, along with some office buildings and a community of
government houses.

One of her best students, Arlene Small, lived out here with her mother.
Arlene, like most of her Indian students, was shy, and Rhea had often
wished she could take the girl home with her, to get to know her, but
there were barriers.  There were always barriers, some artificial, some
natural.

She heard the tires hum as they crossed the bridge and she heard herself
say, "You have decided not to come to Seattle."

"I can't.  Not yet."

And Rhea heard herself again: "Did it ever occur to you that if you left
you would leave these ...  visions behind?  You might become so involved
with a new life that your past would fade away-that bird would fade away
for good."

"I don't know that I want that to happen."

Rhea slowed the car and turned off at the entrance to the agency.  She
held her wrist close to the illuminated dash panel.

Her watch said 8:30.  It felt more like midnight.  She drove the lane
back into the agency and as she neared the hospital, she said, "I'm
going home first.  I'll gather myself together, then I'll make a
decision." She watched a dog trot past them on the other side of the
road.  Its tongue was hanging out and it ignored them.  Rhea said, "What
did you offer me?  No, I'm talking to myself.  What did you offer me?"
She turned right at the hospital, toward some buildings.  There was a
moon, a half moon, and it struck the snow and the white buildings and
Rhea could see the small rectangular houses beyond.  "I think you
offered me love.  Is that correct?  Not an all-consuming love, by any
means, but a love I wasn't familiar with, without obligation, without
pretense.  An unpretentious love.  A year's worth.  More than I
deserved, less than fulfilling.  But love."

Loney wasn't used to that word.  He said, "Yes," but he looked out his
window.

Rhea looked past him and they were in the small housing project.  Most
of the picture windows were bare, without curtains, without lamps or
light.  But a couple had Christmas trees in them; the blues and reds and
yellows of their ornaments and lights seemed festive and otherworldly.
She wondered vaguely which house Arlene Small lived in.  "It's almost
Christmas," she said softly.  And she thought, Why am I off the track?

What is there about us that puts me off the track so easily?

And she said, "We're finished.

"It would be for the best."

"It seems so simple."

"It's not."

"No, of course not.  This is your country, isn't it?  It means a great
deal to you."

Loney thought for a moment.  "I've never understood it.  Once in a while
I look around and I see things familiar and I think I will die here.
It's my country then.  Other times I want to leave, to see other things,
to meet people, to die elsewhere."

"Why must you think of it in terms of dying?" Rhea turned the car around
the small square.  "Is it just a matter of dying?

Don't you want other things?  It seems so limiting."

For the first time in a long time Loney laughed.  "I'm sorry,"

he said.  "I'm sorry."

"Don't be.  Please laugh some more.  It sounds so good after so long. It
was a dumb thing to say, wasn't it?"

"I wish it was.  It wasn't, though.  Dying is limiting.  Thinking about
it is even more soi in a way."

"I hate to think of me leaving and you thinking about dying.

It seems so pointless, our having been together."

"I won't think of it anymore." Loney looked at Rhea in the half light of
the moonlit car.  "It was the wrong thing.  I don It want you to go, but
I don't have enough in me to make you want to stay."

The hospital was dark brick and serene and Rhea turned again onto the
lane that led to the entrance to the agency.

"I won't stay," she said.  The moonlight got brighter off the snow and
she said, "I will not stay here." She felt dry inside and she said,
"Nothing can make me stay here without you."

Loney couldn't sleep because if he slept he would dream, so he stared
into the blackness of the small bedroom.  From time to time he would
roll over onto his side and grope for the bottle of wine beside the bed.
He tried to think of nothing, but many thoughts came out of the dark and
left him bewildered.  He thought he had not blinked in a long time and
so he blinked.  He thought he heard Swipesy moan in the kitchen but the
dog had been dead since Thanksgiving.  And he thought it strange that he
hadn't missed Swipesy at all, and yet he never thought of him as being
dead.  Just as he didn't think of Sandra as being dead.  Or Kate as
being gone for good.  Or Rhea as leaving for good.  He had wiped the
slate clean, but it didn't occur to him.

He lay in bed and dreaded dawn.  Pretty Weasel would come to take him
hunting and he had no desire to hunt or to' see Pretty Weasel.  And he
thought, After tomorrow I will have no future.  Everybody and everything
will be gone out of my life.  Kate was right-I have nothing left, no
conviction, no spirit.  After tomorrow's slim purpose I will simply
exist.

He lit another cigarette and smoked for a moment without thinking.
Suddenly an image of his father as a younger man drifted into his mind.
He saw the slick hair and the slightly too large ears and the white
shirt.  He was carrying a shotgun and Loney recognized it as his
father's sixteen-gauge.  He carried it against his chest as though he
were posing for a picture and Loney remembered that picture from out of
his past.  Then the vision Loney had had a month before exploded in the
darkness and his father was covered with snow and ice and he was
grinning as he pressed the gun into Loney's hands.

Loney sat up and swung his legs off the bed.  He was sweating and he
felt sick.  His father was still here.  He was the last one left to
Loney.

He hurried into the kitchen, across the cold linoleum, and switched on
the light above the sink.  He looked at the clock beside the
refrigerator.  Three thirty-five.  Swipesy growled and Loney whirled
around, but there was no dog.

He turned on the lamp on the kitchen table and then he looked out the
window and he saw his father grinning in at him.  He wasn't covered with
snow and ice, but his face was blue.

Loney opened his mouth.  Then he motioned for his father to come in, but
his father only grinned.  "Get out of here, you sonofabitch!" he yelled.
And his father moved back into the darkness.  Loney ran outside and
stood at the corner of the house.  He looked toward the street but he
saw no movement.

He saw nothing until he looked toward his window and he saw the large
flakes failing against the yellow light.  His feet began to burn and he
realized he was barefoot.

Three or four inches of new snow lay on the frozen ground.

As his eyes adjusted, Loney found that it was not dark; the snow had fit
the night to a dull clear gray.  He looked out into the backyard toward
the garage and he saw Swipesy sniffling the base of a cottonwood tree.
He whistled and the dog looked up.  For an instant it seemed to
recognize Loney.  Then it took off, disappearing beyond the garage.

"No pheasant today!" Loney called after the dog.

Back in his bedroom, he dressed himself.  As he pulled the warm socks
over his burning feet he wondered why Pretty Weasel would want to hunt
together after all these years.  When Pretty Weasel first suggested it,
Loney thought it must be a test.  But a test of what?  Guts?  Ability?
It didn't make sense.

Pretty Weasel had the drop on him in both departments.

Friendship?  How could that be?  Pretty Weasel didn't need friends.
Loney reached for his wine and his eyes got wet.  A

kind of hopelessness burned through the early morning hang over.

He was hung over most of the time now.  It had nothing to do with
headaches and bad stomach.  It was more a general numbness and a general
forgetfulness of all but the most whimsical detail, the most random
thought.  Now he thought of the day Pretty Weasel went away to college.
Loney and George Yellow Eyes had driven him to Billings to catch the
plane to the University of Wyoming.  They missed his plane because they
were two days late.  They had spent the days in Lewistown with some
girls they had met during the state tournament the winter before. Later,
at the airport, Pretty Weasel had said to Loney, "You should be going to
college instead of me."

Then he said, "You're my best friend," and Loney and Yellow Eyes watched
him get on the plane to Laramie.

Myron Pretty Weasel walked around to the back of Loney's small
asbestos-brick house.  Although it was still snowing a little, there was
a hint of yellow on the eastern horizon.  Pretty Weasel didn't drink
much anymore and the five or six beers he had had with Loney the night
before had thickened his mind.  He didn't like that.  Mornings were his
best time and he didn't like his mind to be fucked up.

He pounded on the back door, his leather mittens muffling the noise in
the false dawn.  Then he pushed the door open and he saw Loney leaning
over the table, his head raised 'as though he had just woken up.  And he
heard Loney say, "But it's snowing." And as he stepped into the kitchen
he smelled the faint sourness of a man who lives alone.

"I've changed our plans," he said, glancing around the wreck of the
kitchen.  He walked to the sink and turned on the water.

The fact that the tap worked seemed to interest him.  "You got any
coffee?"

"Not made."

"Then I'll make some.  Where is it?"

Loney pointed to a cupboard to the left of the sink.  Pretty Weasel
opened it and took out a jar.  "Instant," he said.

"Flavor crystals," said Loney.

Pretty Weasel found on the stove a saucepan that had never been scoured.
The mineral deposits on the bottom resembled a satellite picture of the
moon.  But it looked faintly sanitary.

As he waited for the water to boil, he rinsed two cups and -AMMON set
them on the table.  He looked at Loney and was about to ask for sugar,
but Loney shook his head.

II Pretty Weasel walked through the hallway to the front of the house.
To his surprise, the living room was orderly and clean.  The furniture
was tawdry, but there were pictures on the walls and curtains on the
windows.  There was a photograph in a gold frame on a knickknack shelf
in one corner of the room.  Pretty Weasel studied it in the light from
the hallway.

Although he had never seen her grown up, he figured it must be Kate. She
was a beautiful woman, but she had been a beautiful, if skinny, girl. He
looked around the room again and decided that Loney was a kitchen drunk.

As he poured the coffee he said, "We're going after deer.

Get us a couple of those whitetails down by McFarland's.  The snow's
perfect."

"Why don't we hunt at your place?"

"No sport."

"Are you feeding them?"

"My private stock."

"I don't have a gun."

"I've got two.  You can use my old thirty-thirty.  I brought it."

"Get yourself a glass," Loney said, nodding toward the wine bottle.

"You always were a horse's ass.  Have you had anything to eat?  No, you
wouldn't have.  We'll drive into Dodson when we're done and eat lunch at
Irene's." He circled the kitchen.

"What the hell am I looking for?" Then he said, "What's Kate up to these
days?"

"She's a big shot-education-in Washington, D.C.  She was back here a
couple of weeks ago.  She asked about you."

"I doubt that." Pretty Weasel found a glass in the cupboard over the
sink and poured himself some wine.  He had had a crush on her as a boy,
even though she was five years older.

She was cold to him.  She was cold to all of Loney's friends.

They called her Ice Woman.  She couldn't have been more than fifteen at
the time.  He hadn't seen her since.  "I doubt it very much."

Loney said, "Shithead."

Pretty Weasel took a swallow of wine, then grimaced.  "This stuff is
real bad for you.  Are you aware of that?"

"How do you propose to get to McFarland's?"

"We'll cross the river from the reservation side."

"But it's not frozen."

"Where have you been?  Besides pickling your fucking brain with this
stuff."

"Where have you been?" said Loney, and he was serious.

Pretty Weasel laughed suddenly and loudly.  In the yellow kitchen the
laughter seemed disjointed, as out of place as Lo they's soundless bird.
He laughed again, this time the bird turning gray in the chill beyond
the walls.

"Where have you been?"

"Staying away from you juicers.  Don't worry about it."

And in the next quiet seconds Loney realized that Pretty Weasel had come
back only for this hunt.  He had left the sad same life of Harlem, but
he didn't know that Loney had left it too.  They had gone opposite
directions, Pretty Weasel to his father's ranch, Loney to his life of
more absolute isolation.

And now they were to hunt together.

For those seconds Loney felt a sense of knowledge without knowing what
he had learned.  Or the worth of it.  Then it was gone.

The sun broke over the eastern horizon and they were riding in Pretty
Weasel's new pickup.  In the gun rack behind them a 30-06 and an old
Winchester 30-30 filled the cab with the smell of oil.

"Dirty bastard," said Pretty Weasel, and he meant the sun.

They were late.

Loney felt nothing but the warmth of the wine and a mild regard for the
country they passed.  It was a shallow country, filled with hayfields,
thickets, stands of willow, and leafless cottonwoods that marked the
course of a river without movement.

"We won it all once-remember that?" Pretty Weasel said this without
passion.

They drove on in silence.  Once Loney passed the bottle to Pretty Weasel
and he took it, held it for a moment, then passed it back.  "Fucking
Yellow Eyes," he said, again without passion.

Loney was watching the river in his mind, the loops and bends as
gracefully etched in the winter cover as a blue racer snake frozen in
the grass.  Loney always wondered how that river knew where to bend, why
it wandered with such feckless purpose.  He wondered if it always sought
the lowest ground, or was his mind such a shambles that he assumed there
was a reason behind its constant shifting?  From the highway it looked
aimless and vaguely malevolent and Loney thought there was something of
that river in his own life and he didn't think about it.

By now the sun was well up over the horizon and they were still twenty
minutes from McFarland's.  They passed the pink church of Loney's dream
and he glanced back through the rear window and saw a scaffolding with a
large bell on top.

It hadn't been in his dream.

"Boy, that fucking Yellow Eyes."

"What about that fucking Yellow Eyes?" said Loney.

"Well, don't you remember-how he almost blew it?  Nine seconds?  For
Christ's sake?"

"He played a good game."

"Good game, he says.  How many shots did he take-thirty, forty?"

"He made a lot of them," said Loney, gradually realizing that he was
thinking about Yellow Eyes for the first time in years.

"How about that last shot from half court.  Nine seconds.

He could have worked it down.  He just choked."

"Well, all's well that end's well.  You tipped it in and saved our ass.
You ought to be grateful.  That's probably what got you that scholarship
to Wyoming."

"I'm grateful enough to bust his ass the next time I see him."

Loney was a little surprised that they were talking about that game.  It
had been the championship game, but it was only a speck of history now.
And he was surprised and annoyed that it should be so important to
Pretty Weasel.

"He was a glory hound, no two ways about it."

"He's dead," said Loney.

Pretty Weasel swung his head as slowly and deliberately as a cow in open
country.  "How?" he said.

"I don't know-some war."

"What war?"

"I don't know.  Spanish-American maybe."

Pretty Weasel fixed his eyes on the road ahead of them and drove for
several minutes.  Then he said.  "I'm sorry to hear that."

Loney took a small sip of wine.  He was starting to feel good.

.1W

hat war was that?" Pretty Weasel's voice was small and low.

Loney laughed.  He looked out the window at the rising sun.

He shook his head as though to clear his mind, but the laughter came
from an old source, another time, when he was always one jump ahead of
Pretty Weasel, Yellow Eyes, all of them.

"You fucker," said Pretty Weasel.  "You horse's ass."

Loney laughed and Pretty Weasel joined him.  He hit Loney on the arm and
grabbed the wine away from him.  "You bastard." He laughed, and they
both laughed, and the pickup jerked as Pretty Weasel made a grab for
Loney's nuts.

Loney retrieved the bottle and took a good swallow.  As he screwed the
cap down, he said, "He is dead." He felt almost human.

Pretty Weasel stood beside the pickup with his head lowered.

Loney on the other side thought he was taking a leak.  Then Pretty
Weasel made a sign of the cross, just like in high school before he shot
a free throw.

And then they were down beside the Milk River, looking at the shiny skin
of ice.

"Wait," said Pretty Weasel.  He slung the 30-06 across his back, got
down on his belly and began to slither across.  The ice was heaved up on
the edges, slanting down toward the center.  In the middle a shallow
layer of slush glistened dully.

Pretty Weasel got up on his hands and toes as though he were preparing
to do a few push-ups, but he moved forward, one hand at a time, pulling
his body over the slush.  Then he dropped to his belly and continued his
slow crawl until he stood up on the other side.

Okay," he murmured.

"What am I going to do with this gun?" The 30-30 had no sling.

"Tuck it up under your coat." He sounded disgusted.  "Make sure it's
unloaded.  I put some shells in this morning."

Loney levered the shells out, then shoved the rifle in the front of his
parka.  He got down on his hands and knees and looked across to Pretty
Weasel.  The distance seemed farther from this position.  He was about
to get up, but Pretty Weasel motioned him across with an impatient swing
of his arm.

The ice was thick on the edge, but as Loney approached the center, he
could see the water and the air bubbles.  It seemed as though he were
sliding across a mud puddle on a pane of morning ice.  The water didn't
look to be moving and yet the air bubbles moved off to his right,
downstream.  He got up on his hands and toes and started to pull himself
across the slush.  It had looked easy but it wasn't.  He couldn't get a
grip with his toes.  Then the gun began to slide from his parka.

He tried to walk on his hands, but his toes kept slipping.  The butt of
the rifle was dragging in the slush.  He heard Pretty Weasel curse, so
he lifted his left hand to shove the gun back up and he went down, his
cheek striking the grainy slush.  He got to his hands and knees almost
as fast as he went down and he crawled the rest of the way at a fast
amble.

"You all right?" Pretty Weasel was sitting on a windfall cottonwood,
laughing and trying to appear concerned.  "You looked like a porcupine."

Loney wiped his cheek with his coat sleeve and swore.

"Well, you'd better load up.  No telling what's going to happen from
here on out." Pretty Weasel giggled and turned and walked back into the
trees and brush that grew along the river.

After a few minutes of trotting a cattle trail, they came upon the
fields.  They lay down behind a clump of teasers and scanned the
cut-over wheat stubble.  Pretty Weasel was intent as he squinted through
his scope.  Loney's eyes began to water from the sun's glare on the
snow, so he looked beyond the fields to the prairies.  Thirty miles to
the north lay Canada.  It occurred to him that he had never been to
Canada.  Once in high school they had scheduled a game with a Canadian
town.  They had joked all that week about whether the Canucks knew what
a basketball was, but they didn't get to make the trip.  The road north
out of Harlem had been drifted shut.  As Loney looked at the prairies he
thought of the name of that town-Vale Marie.

It still sounded so foreign that he couldn't help wishing, even now,
that they had made the trip.

"Remember that time we were going to play those Canucks?"

"Shhh.  Over there."

And Loney followed Pretty Weasel's sightline to a stand of cattails that
marked a slough two hundred yards away.  A thick dark animal stood at
the edge, its nose high in the air.  It dropped to all fours and moved
its head up and down rapidly.

It seemed disoriented, perhaps blinded by the sun-struck field.

"Oh, yes," said Pretty Weasel.  "I believe it is.  I believe it is what
I think it is."

They watched for a few more seconds as the animal continued to move its
head up and down.  Then it turned and entered the cattails.

Pretty Weasel jumped up and ran back into the trees.  Loney caught up
with him and said, "Was it a bear?"

"Oh, yes," he breathed.  And he took off running down the treeline, just
out of sight of the field.

Loney ran after him.  He wanted to ask why that was a bear.

There were no bears anymore.  They had been driven out of the valley
years ago by settlers and hunters.  But Pretty Weasel was far ahead.

By the time Loney reached the point in the treeline opposite the stand
of cattails, Pretty Weasel was in a shallow draw between the two.  He
was crouched low to the ground, moving slowly, his rifle close to his
chest.  Loney decided to wait.  He wasn't anxious to go into the
cattails, so he squatted with his back against a box elder that grew
apart from the cottonwoods and peered through the slim willows that
flanked the draw.

He put his hands in his pockets and determined not to think about Yellow
Eyes.

Instead, he thought that his sister loved him and that he was cold.  In
the back of his mind, the part he seldom touched, he knew that they
would get along better when the weather warmed.  People always got along
better when the days were hot and the nights cool.  The nights took the
meanness out of people.  He thought of the nights he and Kate had sat on
the back porch watching stars appear, one by one, until the mosquitoes
drove them indoors.  Kate had always found the first star and Loney
never caught on until she left that she knew the position of the evening
star.  She didn't like his friends.  Some times she didn't like him. But
at night, those long summer nights, she loved him and he loved her.

And he thought of Yellow Eyes.  Struck by a train, killed beyond
recognition, in February of 1963 somewhere in the south of Montana
between Bozeman and Butte.  Loney had been in Great Falls that winter
working for the county and he had read an account of it in the Tribune,
a small article in one of the back pages which referred to him as the
"unidentified man." A couple of days later an even smaller article
called him by his real name, George Yellow Eyes.  Loney had never
mentioned it to anybody and it had apparently not appeared in the Harlem
News.  It was as though Yellow Eyes had disappeared without a trace.
Nobody ever said, "Whatever happened to Yellow Eyes?"

And Loney had never volunteered p his information to anyone, except to
Pretty Weasel that morning.

Now Loney wondered why he had kept it to himself, but even as he
wondered a vague memory touched his mind and he saw this: A late fall
evening, two boys walking home from basketball practice, their hair
still wet, one of the boys talking earnestly in low rapid tones and the
other silent, falling loose at the joints, as he listened to the first
boy.  And the second boy, when he reached the boardinghouse, was
dreadfully tired and went straight to his room and to bed.  And he
didn't go to school the next day; instead he lay in bed (pretending to
be sick) and thought about what the first boy had said.  He lay there a
long time until it was almost dark and the preacher's wife brought him a
bowl of soup and some crackers; then he said to her, "I'm not an
orphan," and he allowed himself to admit that the first boy was right.
They had a mother in common, Loney's natural mother and Yellow Eyes'
stepmother.

Even Kate didn't know that their mother had left their father for Yellow
Eyes' father.  And Loney never told her.  And he had never sought out
his mother, nor she her natural son.  It had been enough for Loney in
those days to know that she existed.  He and Yellow Eyes never talked of
it again and she eventually left Yellow Eyes' father and she became a
dream that one wishes to forget.  Loney realized that now; more
importantly, he realized that it had not been a dream at all, yet it was
the stuff of which dreams are made.  A real dream made of shit.  Loney
thought this.  And George Yellow Eyes was dead.

A sudden pop!  then another pop!  lifted him from his heels.

He tried to see through the willows but they were too dense.

Then he was running down the draw, levering a shell into the chamber of
the 30-30.

When he reached the cattails he hesitated.  They were taller than they
looked from the treeline.  He thought to call out to Pretty Weasel, but
what if he had missed, what if he was still hunting the bear?  He stood
and listened for the rustle of the cattails or the sound of footsteps.
He tried to look through the blond stalks, but they were too thick.  So
he began to circle to his left, toward the point where they had seen the
bear enter.  For the first time that day Loney became aware of his own
footsteps, the grinding crunch of the grainy flecks of snow as he
brought his foot down, then the squeak, like the sound of leather
rubbing, as he pushed off.  Each step seemed louder than the last in a
day'that had no other sound, just a brilliant sun and sparkling snow.
Now he knew that the bear had been almost blinded by the combination of
the two.  He tried to keep his eyes focused on the cattails, but even
their dull yellow seemed too much in the blinding field.

Loney whistled and it startled him, for it was the whistle they had used
when they were kids hunting pheasants and J

rabbits, a quick wheat wheat, then a pause, and in that pause, he forgot
the rest of it.  There was one other sound they had made to complete the
signal, but those days were so long ago and gone.  He thought, If I
could remember, if I could complete it, Pretty Weasel would either say,
"Come ahead," or whistle back that the hunt was still on.

Then he heard the brittle crashing of the dry stalks and he saw the
darkness of it, its immense darkness in that dazzling day, and he thrust
the gun to his cheek and he felt the recoil and he saw the astonished
look on Pretty Weasel's face as he stumbled two steps back and sat down
in the crackling cattails.

Loney lowered the 30-30 and whistled to him.  Wheet wheat.

But Pretty Weasel just sat there, one hand around his neck, the other
holding his rifle upright.  Then Loney saw the blood seeping between
Pretty Weasel's fingers.  The cattails behind him gave way and he fell
back, his rifle falling across his face.

He lay fifteen feet away but Loney could smell the blood, faintly
metallic, in the crystal air.

He didn't know how long he had been sitting, but he found himself
looking at the sun in the western sky, his back to the cattails.  It had
turned cold and the sun barely made the blue snow glisten.  Loney knew
he had to get up and run away from there.  Before him he saw the wide
depressions in the crust filled with grains of snow.  Unless you had
seen it, he thought, you'd never know they were bear prints.  That was
the trouble with hunting in dry snow-the track was obscured.

as quickly as it was made.  Sometimes you could blow into the track,
blow the snow out and see what it was you were tracking;

that is, if it had warmed up a little, and the track itself was firm.
Once he had seen his father lick his hand and feel in the track, then
lift his hand gently and wipe off the sticky snow grains, and the track
had been that of a bobcat.  They weren't even hunting-they had never
hunted together.  His father had just shown him for a reason neither
understood.

His father had never instructed him in anything.  In this in stance he
had simply said, "Bobcat." Loney remembered the day, but he knew neither
time nor place nor why.  He wiped his eyes on his coat sleeve and
thought, But the light was just like this, blue going on gray, the sun
just a light on the evening star.  And Loney felt cold.

He tried to stand and he felt the pain in his shins and the tops of his
feet.  He squatted and felt the blood sting its way down through his
legs.

He found the 30-30 and picked it up by the barrel and tossed it as far
as he could into the cattails.7hell he started running north toward what
was called the Old Highway, a raised dirt road about a quarter of a mile
away.  He ran hard, once looking up at the prairies that swelled toward
Canada.  And he thought of Vale Marie.  He thought if he continued north
he would reach Vale Marie.  Maybe it would take all night, maybe a week,
but it was there and the people there were different.  Their lives were
good and their farms were the biggest in the world and who cared if they
could play basketball?  Then he thought, There are no Indians there 'or
even half-breeds, and he became frightened.  He knew he was marked,
it was a matter of time.  But for the moment he had all the time in the
world and he settled down.  Maybe he would make it to Vale Marie
someday.  Those Canucks, they were different.  They said "a boot"
instead of "about" and the men combed their hair up away from their
ears.  Sometimes in the summer they stopped for gas in Harlem. Sometimes
they even ate lunch at the Chuck T wagon.

Loney crawled through a fence and he was on the Old High ,W way.  If
only they could have played Vale Marie, Loney would know what was up
there.  The only thing he knew was that the streets were clean in
Canadian towns.  He had heard this from different people and he was glad
to think it.

Loney was on the Old Highway running hard toward Harlem, thinking of
Vale Marie, his body empty and light.  He was conscious of nothing those
first several miles but his shuddering breath and the impatient beat of
his heart: Vale Marie, Vale Marie, Vale Marie, Vale Marie.

It had been dark for two or three hours by the time Loney raised the
lights of Harlem.  At first they seemed hazy and run together, but as
his eyes adjusted he saw each one a dull blue star against the black
horizon that was there.  Somewhere behind him the dirt road had changed
to pavement.  He was still running, his body still light, and the steps
came with such ease that he couldn't tell if he was touching the earth.
Before him the dark pavement glistened with a stubble of winter frost.

He ran past the sign that said WELCOME TO HARLEM, HOME

OF THE 1958 cLAss B CHAMPs.  He couldn't see it but he knew it in his
mind.  And he knew that the top left corner of it had warped so that the
sign looked like a strange kite about to lift into the sky.  But he was
afraid to look up, for he was afraid that he would see his imaginary
bird among the stars.

"I told him this morning."

"How did the old fart take it?"

"He was very good about it.  He yelled and screamed and tried to
strangle me."

"He's right, you know.  I hate to agree with the old bastard, but in
this case he's right."

"Of course.  I accept total and absolute blame.  But I doubt that he
will have much trouble replacing me.  The woods are full of unemployed
teachers."

"You could have told me."

"Colleen, it hasn't been that long!  I just made up my mind myself two
days ago.  I mean, for certain."

Colleen rested her head on the back of the leather and wood sofa.  She
felt miserable but she determined to be nice.  It wasn't easy for her.
"I don't blame you," she said.  "Living here is like being in exile.
Siberia couldn't be a hell of a lot worse.

Christ, I feel as if I hadn't a friend in the world." She took a quick
sip of her beer.  She didn't want to explore the truth in that.  "Lucky
Lager.  Yuck.  "I could get you some wine."

"No, don't bother.  Don't waste the good stuff."

"Don't be silly.  I love you."

"Do you have any whiskey left over from that party?"

"Would you like some?"

"Get me some, will you, honey?  just a water glass will do, nothing
fancy." Colleen closed her eyes.  Now she was to be really alone.  She
hadn't counted on this.  Six more months of school.  But she would get
out of Harlem herself next June.

Then she would haul her ass back to the coast, maybe back to Seattle,
maybe even to grad school at the University of Washington.

But she would probably have to live in her parents'

home.  The thought depressed her.  She had a sister in San Fran cisco
and she got all the ass she wanted.  Colleen hated her.

But she could go down and live with her for a while.

"Here you are."

Colleen took the drink and studied it.  "What is it?"

"Scotch."

"Yowie." She raised the glass.  "To all those mean Texas mothers.

Rhea watched her drink.  In a way she did love Colleen.  In spite of her
occasional boozy screw-ups, she had been a loyal friend, perhaps the
only friend Rhea had had the past two years.  She's been selfish and
rude and self-pitying, but I think I do love her.  When you get past
those defenses she's defense less.

That thin wall of bravado comes tumbling down and she's a little girl. I
wonder why she had to build it.  And Rhea thought, I know so little
about her, after two years.  I have learned so little.  .  .  .

"What are you smiling about?  Don't you know this is a solemn moment?"

"I had no idea I was smiling." Rhea laughed.  "I am going to miss you,
Colleen."

"Well, don't.  We don't want to set a precedent, now, do we?"

"Now you're the one who's smiling."

"I'm just thinking of all this furniture.  Are you sure you want to give
it to me?"

"I can't take it with me and I'm certainly not going to leave it for the
landlord."

"Couldn't you give it to an orphanage?  Isn't there an orphan age around
here?"

"Would you like me to?"

"No."

"Okay."

Colleen poked at the ice cube in her drink.  "Are you ready for the
sixty-four-dollar question?" she said.

"Where am I going, right?"

Colleen sucked on her wet finger and nodded.  "That's the first
sixty-four-dollar question.  They get more lucrative later on."

"Well, first I'm going to go home, stay with my parents for a while,
perhaps look up a few friends, take advantage of the cultural climate..
I don't know.  I might go down to Galveston.

I love it down there.  I used to go there in the spring and lie in the
sun and sweat and eat shrimp.  .

"Oh, God-stop it!  Don't you know you're driving me crazy?"

"I probably won't do any of those things, except stay with my parents
and try to figure things out."

"Do they live in a mansion?"

"Sort of.  .  ."

"Oh, I envy you.  You're so petite, so pretty, so rich, so .

Southern!"

"Colleen, everybody there is Southern." Rhea laughed.

"They're so Southern they would drive you crazy in a week."

"Well, I wouldn't mind strapping on one of those Texas mothers, if
you'll pardon my French."

"I hate to say it, but I think you have the wrong impression of Texas
men, at least the ones I know."

"I have a hunch you and I would hang out with different crowds down
there.  Me and Willie and Waylon, singin' the sad ones."

Rhea had been sitting on the carpet.  Now she lay back and looked up at
the sparkly stucco of the ceiling.  She tried to think of something good
about going home and she thought of Allen Kauffman, her thesis adviser
at SMU and the first man she'd ever had an affair with.  There had been
a lot of "playing around" and sometimes it ended in bed, but she had
never had an affair, with its games, its loveliness, its desperate bad
moments, until Allen Kauffman, her intense dark man.  She was his
empty-headed belle, and they played at this game until it became
ordinary and difficult.  It ended badly and bitterly, but he had given
her her freedom, not from him (although that, too, happened) but from
her pretty life.  And he had taken her innocence.  She had never been
empty-headed, but she had a kind of willed innocence that he observed
and destroyed.

She would not see him when she returned, because they had nothing to
give to or take from each other.  How awkward it would be, she thought.
She felt something like a pioneer woman returning, from the wilderness.
Yet she was fearful.

"Do you mind if I fix myself another drink?  I must confess, I'm getting
schnockered.  Must have been that beer.  Jesus, it, s not even four
o'clock.  But it is-was-the last day of school.

Yowie." Colleen stood and patted Rhea on the head.  "It's going to be a
blue, blue Christmas without you, babe."

"And without you."

"Why don't you let me fix you one?"

"Would you?"

"A bomber.  We need it.  Which reminds me-you've answered question
number two.  I think you'll stay in Dallas.  You'll become some rich
cat's pretty little wife, sending her kids off to school, making sure
the hors d'oeuvres are perfectamente and the drapes diviner can see it
all now.  And you know something?  I don't even envy you.  Which is a
revelation about myself." Colleen picked up her glass.

"As a matter of fact, I'm thinking about Seattle."

Colleen spit the ice cubes back into her glass.  "Seattle!" she said.
"Oh, Christ.  If you think those Texas men are bad, wait'll you get to
Seattle.  They're all pale and balding and they drive Volvos.  They have
full beards and half of them are architects.

You'll love it.  You'll be up to your ass in salal, and you'll have your
own dream home, all cedar and glass, perched on a hill overlooking the
Space Needle.  You'll end up looking out at the cold fog on Elliott Bay
and thinking you should get involved.

The American Dream moves west.  Rhea Davis rolling bandages.  Horse
shit."

"Why are you talking like this?  A month ago you made Seattle sound so
attractive.  What's changed?  You can't imagine that I would live that
kind of life."

Colleen shrugged.  "No, I'm sorry.  You must forgive me.  I'm just upset
that you're leaving.  It was so sudden." She looked at the ice cubes in
her glass.  "You'll do all right, kiddo.  You have a wonderful grace
about you.  just consider these past two years as your bad experience. I
sure as hell am."

Rhea watched Colleen walk toward the kitchen.  She was walking very
steadily and seriously, the way she always did just before she came
apart.  Poor Colleen.

And poor Rhea.  She looked at the three rectangles on the wall above the
sofa.  She had taken the paintings down, but the rectangles were like
apparitions, whiter than the white wall.

Whatever am I going to do with myself?

Rhea looked quickly toward the kitchen and she heard Colleen putting ice
in the drinks.  She closed her eyes and tried to block out the past two
years.  She tried not to think of Loney.

Then she did say it: "Whatever am I going to do with my self ?"

Loney stood in the lobby of the New England Hotel and listened to the
operator dial the number he had given her.

The old phone booth had given way to a new green phone hung on the wall,
and so Loney was naked and nervous.  From where he stood he could look
into the Chuckwagon Cafe, which adjoined the lobby, separated by a glass
door.  He saw the desk clerk sitting at the counter talking to a
waitress, a high school girl whose mother owned the cafe.  The desk
clerk was wearing a brown shirt, brown slacks and black Wellington
boots.  He had his legs crossed and Loney could see a skinny bare leg.

His name was Alf and he was almost retarded.

Loney heard the phone ringing far off in the wires.  He had a handful of
quarters and dimes and one nickel.  He wished he had got more nickels.
Then he heard a click and he said

"Hello," and the operator started to say something, but his sister's
voice cut them both off.

"This is Katherine Loney.  I will be out of town until Friday the
twenty-third of December."

And Loney said, "Kate?"

"At the tone please leave a message or your name and number and I will
return your call."

"Kate, it's Jim."

"I'm afraid she's not in, sir.  Do you wish to leave a message?"

"Wasn't that her?"

"That was a recording.  Do you wish to leave a message?"

Loney looked out the large north window and he saw a police car sitting
a -Hundred feet from the intersection of the two streets fronting the
hotel.

"Just speak into the telephone, sir.  Your voice will be re corded."

Loney studied the police car and he said, "What is today?"

"The twenty-third."

"Shouldn't she be there?"

The operator sighed.  "Sir, she said the twenty-third, it is the
twenty-third, and that's all I can tell you.  She's apparently not
there."

Loney carefully placed the receiver on its hook and eased the change
into his pocket.  His face felt hot and heavy and he leaned against the
wall for a moment.  It occurred to him that he had shot Pretty
Weasel-what was it, two days ago, three?-he had killed a man and had
smelled his blood in the winter air.  And he knew that he couldn't live
as though it hadn't happened.  The smell was too strong and the killed
man would be with him forever.  Eventually, inevitably, he would be
caught and sent to the prison down in Deer Lodge, likely for the rest of
his life.  People had seen him in the bar with Pretty Weasel the night
before his death.  Maybe that cop across the street didn't know anything
now, but it would come out

"i someday, someday when Loney wouldn't expect or want it.

It might be in the spring when the snow melted, when McFarland went out
to work his fields.  It might be sooner-a poacher perhaps, or one of the
light airplanes that flew up and down the valley.  Somebody would find
Pretty Weasel and it would probably happen when Loney least wanted it.
They would call it murder.  Loney thought how easy it would be to walk
over to the car and tell the cop that he had killed a man.  It would be
almost as simple an act as killing.

Loney saw the bear in the field, its head bobbing as though it beckoned
to them.  The image spooked him and he thought of the bear not as a bear
but as an agent of evil-how else explain the fact that there hadn't been
a bear in that valley for years and years?-and on Loney's last
purposeful day he had succumbed to that evil.

That it was an accident did not occur to Loney.  That the bear, as rare
and inexplicable as its appearance had been, was simply a bear did not
occur to him either.  And so he was inclined to think that what had
happened happened because of some quirky and predictable fate.  He knew
that it could only end badly and he also knew he wanted to postpone it.

Because his consciousness had dimmed in the past couple of months, along
with his thinking, he didn't know that he had in that moment devised an
end of his own.  And so he slipped out a side door and hurried down the
street toward Kennedy's.

The cop sat in the warm car and watched the figure hurrying down the
street.  Before it turned into Kennedy's Bar it was the only sign of
life on the street.  Now there was nothing.

One of those rare moments on any given day when the two main blocks of
town were completely devoid of human sign.

The cop had become an expert on the traffic patterns of Harlem.

Without looking up he knew that it was between four and four-thirty.  He
guessed that it was four-twenty, To complete the game he looked at his
watch.  Four-twenty on the nose.

Shit.  He glanced up at the rear-view mirror and bared his teeth.  He
leaned forward over the steering wheel and grinned.

He had noticed that morning the small gray dot on one of his front teeth
near the gum.  It had depressed him, and as if that wasn't enough, he
found out when he reported for duty that he would have to work a double
shift, all because of that fucking Myers.  All the shifts were screwed
up, all because that goddamned Myers came down with hepatitis.  He was
as yellow as chicken fat and he probably wouldn't be back for another
couple of weeks.  On any normal day, Painter could go home in forty
minutes.  He found his off-duty ritual pleasant enough a shower, a
couple of drinks, a TV dinner and TV.  Some nights he worked on his
model planes and some nights he drank and made long-distance telephone
calls to California and old friends.  He no longer tried to reach his
ex-girlfriend, but he was pretty much over her anyway.  She was mostly
just a confusing memory four years old.  All of the good times were gone
and Painter was a cop in Harlem, a pretty good cop who kept the town
reasonably secure without alienating too many people.

The one persork he knew when he came up here, the uncle who got him the
job, had gotten himself killed in a traffic accident out north.  And so
Painter never felt close to, or a part of, the town.  The closest he
ever came was arresting drunks and sleeping with some of the women.  He
was proud of neither.  He needed a woman, and not just any woman.

He sat back and lit a cigarillo.  He had learned the night before that
the teacher's last name was Davis.  His next-door neighbor, Leo Phipps,
taught physical education and coached football at the high school and he
had had his eye on Rhea Davis for two years, but she had given him
nothing, no encouragement, not even the time of day.  But that was okay.
She wasn't much in the tits department and he was a tit man.  If you
were an ass man or a leg man, she would drive you crazy.

From the waist down she was stacked.

They had been drinking in the coach's basement, which was paneled and
decorated with very small trophies.  Leo was drunk and Painter was just
tight enough to want to pull on his face.

He liked Leo-they hunted and drank together and just lately Painter had
turned him on to model airplanes-but in his boozy self-righteous way, he
wanted to hurt the coach for talking that way about the woman who
enriched his fantasies.

But he restrained himself.  He chalked it up to the coach's ignorance.
Besides, the coach's wife was one of the first women he had screwed when
he came to town.  Even though she had long since left Leo, Painter still
felt guilty enough to let him run off at the mouth.

He watched a car turn off the main highway on the south end of town.  It
would be the first of the agency employees.

He looked at his watch.  Four forty-five.  In another couple of hours
the town would come alive.  Friday night.  Tomorrow night was Christmas
Eve.  And he was going to have to work

it.  He thought of Rhea Davis's firm legs and he got excited.

He rubbed his crotch.  "Love," he mouthed to the mirror.  In his mind
she was still handcuffed to the radiator.

Loney stood on the hill listening to the wind that came down from the
Arctic Circle.  Below, the street lamps were clear and cold.  And
beneath their blue arc Loney could see the shiny tops of cars and he
thought he saw a small knot of people standing in the light from the
movie marquee.  The figures were like black ants and they moved
regularly but slowly, like ants picking over a dead thing.  A pair of
headlights moved up the street toward the movie house.  Two of the ants
moved away from the carrion.  The car stopped for a moment, then drove
on, turning at the corner and speeding off toward the Legion Club.  When
Loney looked back the marquee lights were out.

He opened the barbed-wire gate to the cemetery and stepped through.  He
closed it behind him, slipping the wire loop back over the post.  It
wasn't a very big cemetery-there didn't seem to be more than a hundred
graves-and Loney wondered where the rest of the dead were buried.  He
had passed the cemetery countless times in his years but he had never
realized how small it was.

There were only about a dozen headstones.  Loney lit a match at each
one, shielding the flame with his hand, reading each name.  But they
were the vaguely familiar names of merchants and prominent citizens.
When the wind blew out his match at the last headstone, Loney
straightened up and glanced around at the other graves.  Most of them
had either concrete or wooden crosses.  A few were marked only by a
small hump in the brown weeds.

Loney squatted with his back to the wind and lit a cigarette.

He wasn't disappointed, because he hadn't expected 'to find it.  He felt
only a small virtue that he had looked for her grave.

Her name was Sandra and she had sheltered him.  Loney knew now that he
would never find her and he was grateful that he hadn't reached his
sister that afternoon.  He had wanted to ask her if she knew Sandra's
surname and where she was buried, but the questions would have been
cruel.  Kate was suffering enough because of him.

Loney smoked and allowed himself to explore the intricacies of the
relations of the people in his life.  His own life was not complicated
but his mind became confused when he tried to understand what all these
people meant to each other and to himself.  His mother left his father
for Yellow Eyes' father.

That's what Yellow Eyes had told him that day years ago after basketball
practice.  As stunning as the news was, he had accepted it, finally. But
he couldn't accept the idea that she had never tried to see him.  She
had remained in Harlem for some time-why hadn't she tried to see him? Or
Kate?  He had heard that his mother had gone crazy and he never felt
responsible or guilty about it, but he had felt that maybe he could have
prevented it if they had only known each other.  If they could have
talked and looked at each other, maybe she wouldn't have needed to go
crazy.  And what about his father?  What had he done to prevent it?  He
had taken a lover and her name was Sandra.  And after he left, Sandra
had taken Loney in.

And Kate had refused to live with Sandra.

Loney dropped his cigarette on a mound before him.  It skittered away in
the harsh wind, its orange glow disappearing behind the mound.  I really
did try to love Sandra, he thought, but I don't.  I didn't know her and
it's impossible to love some body you don't know.  He wondered if his
father had loved her; or if he had loved Loney's mother.  As he tried to
strike another match to light a cigarette, he realized that his hands
were trembling.  He wanted to believe that they trembled because of the
cold, but he knew without thinking it that they trembled because there
was no real love in his life; that some how, at some time, everything
had gone dreadfully wrong and although it had something to do with his
family, it had everything to do with himself.

Rhea sat in the armchair and watche Colleen sleep.  S

wanted to feel high but she just felt worthless.  She wanted to be gone,
to be on the road, in Denver, Amarillo, anywhere but here.  She had
loaded her car that afternoon before Colleen showed up.  Thank God for
that, she thought.  It made her a little giddy to think that all she had
to do in the morning was get in the car, start the motor and drive away.
But with her pictures gone, her clothes and books and stereo set packed
and her small things in an overnight bag, she felt lost and strange, as
though she were a stranger in this town she had spent two years trying
to live with.

She walked into the kitchen to fix herself another drink.

She wanted to get drunk.  She wanted to pass out like Colleen.

She wanted mostly to be gone.  I want so many things, she said to the
refrigerator.  I didn't find them here.  I won't find them in Dallas. As
she put the ice in her glass, she thought how wonderful it would be to
be in a motel room in Billings or Cheyenne, somewhere on the map, in
transit.

She tiptoed back into the living room.  She had changed into her
nightgown.  Fortunately she had had the presence of mind to leave out
her best gown, a peach-colored silk, and as she felt the thick carpet
beneath her bare feet, she thought of herself as a nymph, so delicate
and light that the moss scarcely stirred.  And she thought, Oh, I'm
thinking in a Dallas way already.

Colleen had rolled over onto her back on the rug, her gangly legs spread
beneath the hiked-up skirt.  Rhea put her drink on the coffee table and
carefully removed Colleen's glasses.

Before she turned away she looked down at Colleen's legs.

There was a run in her panty hose that started at the left knee and
continued up her thigh.  Oh, lord.  Rhea stepped back and giggled.  We
are sad women.  And she laughed aloud and she put her hands to her face
and continued laughing.  I shouldn't laugh, she thought, and she thought
of something else and she did stop.  She dabbed at her eyes with a
Kleenex and listened a moment and heard Colleen say, "What's up, hon?"

"Nothing.  Go back to sleep." But she knew that Colleen had not wakened.

Then she heard the wind rattle the glass doors.  She had become used to
the north wind in her two years, but tonight it meant something.  After
tonight she would never know that particular wind again.

Ike Loney poured the oil into the reservoir behind the small stove.  He
hated the smell of heating oil.  He wished he had an electric blanket to
wrap around himself.  Then he wouldn't have to heat the whole goddamn
trailer.  But there wasn't much to the trailer-a table and two benches
in front, a galley in the middle and a bed in the rear.  Beside the bed,
a cubicle contained a toilet and a shower nozzle.

The radio on the table was tuned to Havre.  He hated the Havre station,
but until late night, it was all he could get.  He wanted to hear voices
talking, but all he heard from Havre were voices singing and
advertising.  Later he would be able to get a Salt Lake station and an
all-night talk show.  Then he would get into bed and listen and scoff at
the amateur experts.

Everybody had an opinion and it made him laugh.  But he never missed the
program and the voices made him feet normal.

Ike sat down and cut himself a slice of American cheese.

He wished he had himself a television.  To actually see people would be
a hell of a lot better than just listening to them.

He would love to see that talk show host.  Sometimes he envisioned him
as fat and kind of bald; at other times as wiry, with wiry black hair.
Kind of a testy little runt.  Jesus, what kind of home life does he
have?  Probably one of them goddamn Mormons.  Naw, they wouldn't be
talking about abortions as if it was the same thing as going down to the
drugstore for an ice cream cone.  I'll bet he's a Jew, Ike thought, Be
just like them.  Rattle on for hours about cutting a baby out of its
poor mother's womb.  Then go home in the morning for some bacon and
eggs.  Ike had grown to recognize some of the callers, like the cookie
woman, who was always calling up to ask if the host had got those
cookies she sent him.  Or that so-called expert on clouds.

Ike chewed his cheese for a long time.  He wasn't as broke as some of
the folks around there thought, and that knowledge contented him.  He
was getting $162 a month disability for screwing up his back.  The pain
hardly bothered him anymore and it had allowed him to come back to
Harlem and live all right.  Once or twice, in the beginning, he had felt
a little guilty about sponging drinks off of Kenny, but the feeling
passed.

What the hell, he thought, a few beers.  What's that worth to a
friendship as long as ours?  Maybe it wasn't a real friendship anymore;
maybe it never had been; but Ike and Clancy Peters used to let Kenny tag
along when they went out to raise hell.

That was worth something.

Poor old Clancy.  He ain't nothing anymore.  All busted up from
rodeoing, sugar diabetes.  Be hard to tell some of these kids around
here that in his day he was tops.  Now he gets his ass chewed off by
that loudmouth woman he's living with.

Ike glanced at the clock on top of the refrigerator.  Nine thirty-five.
At ten o'clock he would go downtown to help Kenny close the place up. He
continued to chew the American cheese.

Loney stood at the end of the street and stared at the trailer.

At night it looked even more remote, as though it had never been
intended to be a part of the town.  And its teardrop shape suggested
that it should be moving, that it was not meant to be still.  But there
was a life to it, lights in the window and smoke blowing directly south
from the chimney.  Loney struck a match, cupping both hands around it,
and stuck his cigarette into the opening between his thumbs.  Then he
opened his hands and the flame disappeared.  He wanted to stay there and
smoke the cigarette, but he was desperately cold.  He touched his face
and it felt like rubber.  He couldn't tell if the feeling was gone from
his hands or his face or both.  He flicked the cigarette into the wind
and walked across the small field to the trailer.  When he knocked he
couldn't feel that either.

And when the door opened Loney recognized the white shirt and baggy suit
pants.  The face was in the shadows above him, away from the lamp over
the kitchen table.  Loney smelled the oil stove and he heard the music.
Then he heard his father's voice: "What the hell's going on out here?"

And Loney said, "I'm cold."

The old man left the door open and walked back to the table.  He sat
down facing Loney.  As cold as he was, Loney thought of closing the door
and walking away.  He smelled the oil and it made him feel sick.  But
because he was cold and because the door was open, he stepped up into
the trailer.

"Close the door," his father said.  "Close it tight."

Loney pulled the door until he heard it latch behind him.

He glanced around the inside of the trailer and he felt gigantic.

His father said, "You want some cheese?" And Loney said, "Yes." Then he
squeezed into the booth opposite the old man.

Ike cut a thick slice off the loaf of pasteurized cheese, stuck it with
the knife blade, then shook it off on the table before Loney.  Loney
tried to pick it up but his fingers felt big and clumsy.  It's the cold.
He felt foolish.  He put his hands under the table and flexed them,
trying to regain the feeling.  His face became hot.  He wanted to tell
the old man how cold it was outside, but he couldn't presume too much.
He watched his father fiddle with the station selector on the radio and
he heard the bits and snatches of music as it made its way across the
lighted dial.  "All I get's this goddamn music.  It's no good."

Then Ike picked up a station that was delivering the news.

"You know how many times I've heard the news today?  Twelve times.  Why
did you come here?"

"To talk."

"About what?"

Loney thought a moment, "About the last thirty-five years."

Ike stopped fooling with the radio.  He looked at the man across the
table and his eyes narrowed.  "How old are you?"

"Thirty-five."

Ike picked the knife up from the table.  He leaned back and ran his
thumb over its edge.  "How old am I?`

"Around sixty, I think."

"Sixty-two.  Now why did you come here?"

"I want you to tell me some things."

"What do I know that you'd want?  I'm an old man.  I was born to buck
and broke to ride.  It's all over."

"I want you to tell me about my mother-who she was, what she was like
and where she is.  You can tell me that for now."

Ike set the knife on the table.  "Damn," he said.  "Damn you."

For he had thought of his wife again, the second time in the past few
days.  Something's at work here, he thought.  Here I go half my life
without a thought of her and now I'm not only thinking about her, but
so's this kid.  Maybe there was something to it.  "She was a whore," he
said.

"What do you mean?"

"Just that.  She was a whore." Ike stood up and walked a couple of steps
to the stove.  He removed the cap and looked down into the reservoir.
"Goddamn it.  I fill this thing up half an hour ago and it's down by
half already." He walked another two steps into the kitchen and opened
one of four tiny cup boards hanging from the roof of the trailer.

Loney watched him take a bottle from the cupboard.  It was a pint of
whiskey.  It had no label and the whiskey was the color of rust.  The
fact that his father had an undrunk pint around surprised him.  The fact
that the old man had two glasses in his other hand surprised him even
more.

"Now we'll see how tough you are.  I got this off a Polack down in
Butte, only Polack left in Butte.  Now they're all Micks and Finns.  He
called this stuff Polish vodka.  Truth is, I've been a little afraid to
drink it.  Truth is, I'm afraid it's poison."

"What if it is?" said Loney as he watched his father pour.

"Well then, I guess you and me will perish together."

Ike made a gesture as if to toast his son; then he threw the whiskey
down.  It was strong but smooth.  He had his son's number.

Ike felt it all the way down and it was good.  "You know I'm not
supposed to drink this stuff?  Yeah, supposed to kill me.  I don't give
a shit, though."

"Did she run around?  Is that what you mean?"

"What the hell are you asking these questions for?  Christ, he hasn't
seen me for twenty years and he has to know every thing all of a sudden.
We'll get there, don't worry.  What the hell's the hurry, anyway?"

"I've seen you lots in the last fourteen years.  You've seen me too."

"Was that you?" Ike laughed and he felt good and reckless.

He had felt it coming on and the drink of whiskey set him up.

Loney looked at his father.  He was older now, and scrawnier,.

but he was the same man who had walked out the door twenty five years
before.  It was only at this moment that Loney remembered he and Kate
had been terrified of him.  He had been a bully then and it seemed he
had not changed.  And Loney felt an old hatred stirring within him, as
though the twenty five years had been nothing more than a bird
disappearing in the night.  Loney was not terrified anymore.

"She left you because you were no good."

"Who's to say she didn't leave because of you?  She left just after you
were born.  Hell, she hardly even suckled you and that was too long.
Besides, who's to say I didn't kick her out?

I should have kicked the whole works of you out, but I was different
then.  I had a soft heart in those days."

Loney declined to be drawn into a fight.  He hadn't come to fight.
"Where did she go then?"

"She stuck around town, kept begging me to take her back."

"She went to live with George Yellow Eyes' father."

"As a last resort.  When she saw I wasn't going to give in, she went
over and shacked up with him.  She was like that."

Loney took a sip of his whiskey.  He listened to the north wind whistle
over the stovepipe above them.  He didn't believe his father.  She
wouldn't have begged him.  "What did she look like?"

"Oh ho ho-when I first laid eyes on her she was the prettiest damn girl
you ever saw.  Jesus, she was fresh in from Lodgepole and she didn't
know shit from Shinola.  She was working over at the agency in the
hospital-I don't know, some kind of nurse's helper.  She was maybe
seventeen, eighteen at the time.

I used to drive over there, me and Clancy Peters-he had one of the first
automobiles in this county-and we were both sort of courting her.  Well,
to make a long story short, I won out..  Ike watched his hand guide the
knife blade through the loaf of cheese.  He cut the loaf in half.  "She
was as pretty as you please, full-blooded Gros Ventre, didn't hardly say
a word in those days.  She was kind of like a sleek animal.  First time
I saw her was at a powwow over on the other side of the agency.  Jesus,
it was hot and dusty, me and Clancy were about half drunk on that
bootleg stuff old Forgie used to sell, and I just couldn't take my eyes
off of her.  She was like an animal, all dressed up in doeskin-dress,
leggings, the whole works.  She danced real slow, the way the women used
to in those days, just one foot in front of the other, never turning her
head left or right, never letting on there were others in the circle.
Between dances she would sit alone under a lodge pole shelter.  The
other girls would be giggling and flirting with some of the young bucks,
but not Eletra.  She didn't engage in that kind of stuff, not in those
days.  Clancy and me, we decided to go over there and get a better look
at her, but those goddamn bucks run us out of there.  We thought about
engaging them, but it was a religious ceremony and every thing-you
seldom saw a white man on that reservation in those days.  Anyway, I
found out a couple of days later that she worked in the hospital and I
started going around there.

She stole my heart.  And I won out too."

Loney smoked a cigarette and watched the old man slice the loaf of
cheese into pieces, then slice the pieces into ribbons.

He sipped at his drink and wondered if it was all a fantasy him sitting
with his father, his father telling a story about a woman he had never
met but who bore him.  He wondered if his father hadn't made up this
woman.  She wasn't the crazy woman Loney had heard about.

But his father said, "I don't know what happened after those first
couple of years.  She just sort of went to hell.  Started drinking,
running around, lost her looks.  .  .  ."

"It was because you made her that way.  You ruined her if she was as
good in the beginning as you say."

"Like hell."

"You couldn't help yourself.  You can't help the way you are."

"Bullshit."

"Don't take it personally."

"Don't take it personally, he says.  Calls me a horse's ass and says,
Don't take it personally."

"Don't be mad.  I want you to tell me other things.  Here, T have
another drink."

we

"Offers me a drink of my own booze."

"Here, we'll toast: To the way we are."

"Now what's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"You've got tears in your eyes.  Jesus, you're crying, just like a
baby."

"No, I'm not crying.  Now you must tell me more.  Tell me what was my
mother's name before you married her?"

"I thought that sister of yours would have told you.  She seems to have
the line on everything."

"She didn't.  Yes, yes, she said our mother was a West wolf."

"West wolf, hell.  There aren't even any West wolfs out in that part of
the country."

L "Then what was her name?"

"Eletra.  Eletra Calf Looking."

"Eletra," said Loney.

"She was as good a goddamn woman as the good lord ever put on this poor
earth," said Ike.

Loney laughed.

"What's so funny about that?"

"Nothing." Loney laughed.

"You have a mighty peculiar way of respecting other people's feelings.

"I'm not laughing about that.  I'm sorry.  I'm just laughing it's the
way I am these days.  And now-where is she now?

No, I'm not laughing.  Where is she right this minute?"

"First he's bawling like a baby and now he's laughing like a hyena," Ike
said to the radio.  "Now he wants to know where his mother is after all
these years."

"I want you to.tell me."

"If you think I know, then why don't you?  You always were.

kind of a smartass kid."

"I'm not that way anymore."

"Last I heard she was down in New Mexico.  She's a nurse or something in
one of them reservation hospitals."

"A nurse!"

"What's so unusual about that?  She was practically a nurse when I first
met her."

Loney looked at his father.  He wanted to know if his father was joking,
but his expression hadn't changed.  He continued to slice the cheese
into small squares.  He actually looked miser able.

"I'd have thought she'd be on the skids," said Loney.  "Like us.  Like
you and me."

"I'd watch whose reputation I was tarnishing if I was you.

One of us isn't quite as bad off as the other thinks.  That's my advice
to you." And Ike allowed himself a small grin.

"Is she happy?" said Loney.  "Is she happy down there in New Mexico?"

"That I couldn't tell you.  I don't make it my business to go around
opening old cans of worms."

"She must be happy.  I'll bet she's very happy.  And why shouldn't she
be-she's rid of us.  I'll bet she's got a boyfriend down there.  I'll
bet he's a doctor.  I'll bet she helps him give shots and examine teeth.
What a secretly" Loney laughed.

"You're crazy," said his father.

"And what about Sandra?  Is she a nurse too?"

Ike swallowed his drink.  He looked at the radio, but he didn't talk to
it.  "You really know how to stick it to your father, don't you?" he
said.

"Here, let me pour you another.  After all, this is a reunion, a
celebration of sorts.  Okay, we're all set, you and me.  Now we'll talk
some more.  If she wasn't a nurse, what was she to you and me?  Kate
said she was your lover.  But how?  How did she love you?  Maybe she was
an angel.  Tell me, was she an angel?"

A gust of wind made the damper on the oil stove hum.  From somewhere far
off a dog barked, and its bark was carried away.

And Ike realized that every night of his life he had heard a dog bark.
Some summer nights the dogs barked until dawn.

I shouldn't have lied to him, he thought.  I shouldn't have told him
that his mother was a nurse in New Mexico.  Damn, now he's got the drop
on me.  He knows I lied.  That's why he's acting so goddamn smart.  He
knows his mother is crazy.  He thinks I put her in that damn bughouse.

"If she wasn't an angel, what was she?"

"Who?"

"Sandra.  Who else were we talking about?"

"She came along at the right time.  I guess you could call her something
of an angel."

"How so?"

Ike laughed, but there was no joy in it.  "She was a social worker.  She
was a white woman but she worked for the agency.

She came over to the house one day, had this idea I wasn't taking care
of you kids.  Well, before she left I had poured the coals to her.  She
wasn't thinking about you kids then, I'll tell you.  Oh, I don't mean I
changed her whole way of thinking;

I just gave her a new set of priorities."

Loney suddenly felt sick from the cheese, the smell of oil and the,
whiskey.  The light from the lamp above the table had begun to hurt his
eyes and he felt overwhelmed by the closeness of the trailer.  He didn't
want to go on with this talk he wanted to get out into the cold air-but
it was necessary that they finish.  "Then you ran out on her," he said,
and his voice sounded weary to him.

"I wasn't ready to get trapped again.  I'd already been trapped by one
woman', saddled with a couple of kids....  You can understand that." Ike
looked into Loney's face for the under standing he deserved, and he
found nothing.  "I'd already been through a bum marriage-Jesus, I was
just about your age.  I had nothing left to give a woman.  So I decided
to get away.

That's when I left for Butte." Again he looked into Loney's face.  "Try
to put yourself in my shoes.  I was just about your age.

But Loney couldn't put himself in his father's shoes.  He was confused
and he felt like a child again, and he remembered as a child he had run
his fingers through Sandra's hair and had felt like a man.  But he
hadn't been a man.  His father had been a man and had "poured the coals
to her," That ability was what made a man.  Loney felt a kind of distant
shame for having thought up until now that he had been a kind of lover
to Sandra.  He had deluded himself all these years.

"Why did she take me in after you left?"

Loney's father laughed again, "She was a social worker, w't she?  Didn't
I just tell you that.

Loney picked up a small cube of cheese.  He studied its perfection.
It had dried to the consistency of putty.  He squashed it and four small
fissures appeared where the corners had been.

"Was that the only reason?" he said.

"Far as I know.  Like I told you, I left for a new life."

"Then you don't know what happened to her?"

"Kate said she's dead.  Maybe a car accident.  You don't know?"

But his father was fiddling with the dials on the radio.

Loney poured himself another drink of the rusty booze.  He wiped the
sweat from his forehead and thought briefly of taking his parka off, but
the act seemed too much like a commitment.

He had come as a stranger to a stranger for information, he hadn't come
as a son.  So he sipped his whiskey and watched Ike tune in a reluctant
station.  It was a talk show, a long way off.

"Here's this sonofabitch now," Ike muttered.

But Loney wasn't listening.  His thoughts had turned a corner and he no
longer thought or cared about his mother or the social worker.  He had
felt when he entered the trailer that there had to be an explanation to
their existences, and his father had given him nothing.  In a way, Loney
thought, this old man is innocent.  He knows nothing, he cares nothing,
and that makes him innocent.

And Loney knew who the guilty party was.  It was he who was guilty, and
in a way that made his father's past sins seem childish, as though
original sin were something akin to stealing candy bars.

"I killed a man," said Loney.  His mother and the social worker were
gone now, wiped clean from his mind.

Ike looked up from the radio.

"I killed Pretty Weasel," said Loney.  "I shot him with*a thirty thirty.
I thought he was a bear."

Ike frowned, as though he didn't know whether those words were coming
from the radio or his son.

"Pretty Weasel," his son said.  "Myron."

"You what?"

"With a thirty-thirty.  I thought he was a bear.  The sun blinded me."

Ike turned down the radio.  He was irritated.  He didn't believe his
son, but he said, "Do the cops know?"

"Not yet.  I suppose that's next."

"Shouldn't you tell them?"

"I suppose."

"Are you on the run?"

"I suppose."

"Was it an accident?  It must have been an accident."

"I don't know.  I think it was, but I don't know for sure."

"You mean you might have done it on purpose?"

"Yes."

Ike looked at the radio, then at his son.  His eyes narrowed.

"Are you on the level about the whole business?"

"As God is my witness."

I.You and God don't travel in the same circles." But Ike was definitely
thrilled.  "Holy Jesus."

"Should I tell them?"

"Wait a minute.  Let me think.  It was an accident, you say?"

"Maybe."

"Great.  For the sake of argument, let's say it was an accident.

What's the worst they can do to you?"

"Throw me in jail."

"They could hang you.  I heard on the radio they're going to start
hanging men again.  Fuck the Supreme Court.  Who can blame them?"

Loney squashed another piece of cheese between his fingers.

He wondered if he had really meant to tell his father this thing.

He wondered if that was really why he had come here.

"Self-defense.  He was coming at you with a gun-did he have a gun?  You
had no choice.

"I think I killed him on purpose," said Loney.

"Then you must run.  That's it.  You must run away from here, lose
yourself in a city-Seattle, Portland, California!" Ike was excited by
the prospect.  He had only gotten as far as Butte.

But he hadn't killed a man.  He watched his son light a cigarette.

Jesus, he's a pretty cool customer.  Shoots a man and acts like
nothing's wrong.  He stood and emptied the ashtray into a paper sack
beside.the stove.  "Sit there," he said, and walked back into his
bedroom.

Loney watched him drop stiffly to all fours and rummage around under the
bed.  He watched his father sit back on his haunches and do something
close to his chest.  Then the old man slid halfway under the bed again.

He returned to the kitchen and dropped three new twenty dollar bills on
the table before Loney.  All three curled cylindrically, as though they
had been wrapped around something for some time.  "You take this," Ike
said.  "Get on the bus and don't stop until it runs out.  It'll get you
to the coast."

Loney looked at the money.  His father's generosity bewildered him,
first with the whiskey, now with the money.  He wondered if this was a
virtue his father had always possessed.

"I don't think I'm going to need it."

"What?  You're so goddamn rich?" Ike was surprised and hurt.  "It's
good, it's real." He snatched up the bills and put a lengthwise crease
in them.  "How's that?"

And Loney said, "I'm not going away." Then he added, as the thought
struck him, "I'm going to the Little Rockies." Then he added again, "Up
Mission Canyon.  I'm going to think."

"Why there?  It's winter, for Christ's sake."

But Loney couldn't answer.  He had been to Mission Canyon twice in his
life: once with the minister and his wife on a picnic, and once with
Rhea.  But he thought, That's where I'll go, that's the best place.
"Mission Canyon," he said again to make sure that his father knew.  It
was part of a dim plan that he didn't understand.  "Mission Canyon," he
said, and he watched his father fold the bills and put them in his shirt
pocket.  The shirt was so thin that the pocket turned the green of the
money.

Ike stood without a word and walked back again to the bed room.

He opened a tall narrow closet and took out a long object wrapped in an
army blanket.  Then he reached higher in the closet and he had a box in
his hand.  Loney saw the shells first, and when his father sat down, the
army blanket fell away and the object was his father's sixteen-gauge.
"You might need this," said his father.  "There might be some grouse up
there."

And Loney watched a familiar grin stretch itself across the old man's
face.

He took the gun.  It was a Remington pump and it looked and felt just as
it had in his dream, the cold blue barrel, the smooth grip of the
forearm and stock.  For a moment everything went away and Loney said,
"It's a perfect bird gun," and he felt foolish and triumphant in saying
it.

And his father said, "You might see some grouse,",and he grinned.  He
felt a part of something bigger than his life.

Loney took four shells out of the box and pushed them up into the
magazine.  Then he closed the flap of the box and sat with the gun
against his left thigh.  Under the glaring lamp he saw that much of the
bluing had worn off the barrel.  It was an old gun, probably twenty-five
or thirty years old.

Ike poured the remaining whiskey into their glasses, then threw the
empty bottle into the garbage sack.  "I guess it ain't poison," he
said.

They sat and drank slowly, silently.  Once Loney said, "Don't you think
we could have done something together-if you had stuck around, if we had
stuck together?" And Ike said, "Shit, what would we have done but drink
ourselves to death?"

Loney walked across the yard to where the road began.  His head was very
clear and the night was clear and cold.  The wind had died to an icy
breeze on his cheek.  The shotgun lay in the crook of his arm and he
nibbled a piece of tired cheese.  As he walked, he found himself longing
for summer and the evening breeze that brought with it the odors of
dusty growing things.  Winters were too harsh and unremitting, and
caused people to behave badly.

When he reached the road he pumped a shell into the chamber and turned.

He put the gun to his cheek and sighted at the small yellow window.  He
felt the recoil and his eyes snapped shut.  When he opened them, the
window was dark and he could see the tattered curtains blowing
aimlessly.  He pumped another round into the chamber and when the porch
light in a house fifty feet away came on, he threw the gun to his
shoulder and blew it out.  For just an instant he smelled the gunpowder
before the wind carried it away.  He had heard neither explosion and he
knew that the wind had blown the noise toward town.  He turned in that
direction and hurried down off the road and up over the railroad tracks.
He stopped in the lee of a grain elevator and lit a cigarette.

She had just gotten into bed.  Her thoughts had tired her and she felt
she could sleep now.  Nothing resolved, she thought, but sleep.  And
sleep will work.  It is magic to close one's eyes and die for just a
little while.  A crazy thought.  And tomorrow I will be gone.

That's when she heard the doorbell, the quick bing bong.

It was a civilized noise of intrusion, unlike wind or the rattle of
trains.  Again, bing bong.  She had packed her robe, a dumb thing, so
she hurried down the hall to the closet by the door.

She quietly removed her coat from a hanger and put it on over her
nightgown.  "Who is it?" she called, and she half expected to hear the
voice of the school principal, miserable old Gaetano, who had been
enraged by her leaving that morning.

But there was no answer.  She opened the door as far as the chain lock
would allow and she saw Loney's thin face in the moonlit night.  His
nose and cheekbones were silver and his eyes were dark caves.  She took
the chain off the door and opened it.

Loney looked back toward the street.

"Come in," she whispered.  But she didn't want him to.  Lord, she
didn't want him to.  "Come into the bedroom." And she saw the shotgun,
which he held pointed down against his leg.

She closed the door behind them, glanced into the living room, where
Colleen still lay sleeping, then led him down the hallway.  In the
bedroom she said, "Why do you have that gun.

And he said, "It's my father's."

And she said, "Why?"

"I'm going hunting," he said.  Then he said, "I came to say goodbye."

Rhea looked into the dresser mirror and ran her hand through her hair.
Her eyes looked small to her without mascara.

For an instant she thought of putting some on.

But Loney had been glancing around the room.  It was bare, except for a
beauty bag on the dresser and a shirt and pants hanging in the open
closet.  "You're leaving too," he said.

"Forever.  For all time.  But you're not going hunting." Rhea suddenly
felt her shoulders twitch violently, as though she had just understood
the implications of the gun, which she had, and she expected the worst.
She couldn't take her eyes off the barrel, which glistened sharply in
the yellow light.  "Why the gun?" And her voice trembled.

But Loney turned and leaned the gun against the wall by the door.  "It
belonged to my father.  He gave it to me.  He wanted me to have it."

"You talked to your father?"

"Yes."

"You went to see him?"

"We had a good time.  We split a bottle of whiskey and talked and
laughed.  We had a fine time."

Rhea sank to the edge of the bed and sighed with relief.

She couldn't have believed that he would use the gun.  She couldn't have
believed that of him.

"Everything's okay now," said Loney.

"Oh, good," said Rhea.  "Oh, good for you." She reached for his hand and
pulled him down beside her.  "I'm so pleased."

Loney looked at her and she was pleased.  He was glad he had lied.  Her
eyes were bright with pleasure and she touched him on the cheek.  She
looked cool and perfect to him.  If I could have been someone else,
Loney thought, if I had some sort of peace, perhaps we could have done
it.  This room, so clean and warm, we could have slept here every night,
and in the morning, in the morning we would wake up and see each
other....  He clutched her hand and he knew it was too late, they would
both be gone in the morning, and his heart sank as he thought the
morning, too, would be gone forever.

Rhea pulled her hand free and put her arm around him and pulled his head
down to her small breasts.  She felt his cheek, still cold, against the
peach-colored gown.  She held him A

and she was glad he had lied to her about his father.  In spite of the
gun, it had made her feel for a moment that something good could happen
in this town.

"Have you eaten anything today?" She sat cross-legged on the bed.  She
was naked, and content for the first time in two weeks to be where she
was.  She would leave in the morning, nothing had changed, but now there
was none of that dreadful anticipation.  She felt warm and free of it.

Loney, too, was naked and moonlight touched his body with silver.  He
was standing, looking out the small high window toward the Little
Rockies.  He had been thinking he should leave, but he wanted to be with
Rhea for a while longer.

"I have a confession to make," she said.

Loney lay back down on the bed and touched her knee.

"Colleen is passed out in the living room.  She came by this afternoon
and started drinking.  Now I'm afraid she's dead to the world-and to
us." Rhea giggled.

Loney smiled in the dark.  He touched her ribs and she fell top of him,
giggling into his neck, and he loved her breasts on on his chest.  "You
should choose your friends more carefully,"

he said.

"Don't I just know it.  And you, Mr.  Loney, are a case in point."

"I do know," he said.

She bit his neck.

"I would have given more to you if I could," he said.

"Oh, Jim, you've been wonderful," she said, her voice soft and Southern.
"We've been wonderful."

Loney stared up at the ceiling.  He felt he was in a dream and he was
conscious only of Rhea's weight on his chest.  He heard nothing and he
saw nothing and he liked it like that.

"I do love you," she said, her voice drifting.

And he almost said it too, but there was no place to take it.

"I must make you something to eat.  You must be so hungry."

Her voice came from a long way off.  He held her tight and he knew that
she had loved him.  He kissed her hair and closed his eyes.  I have to
leave, he thought, but he held her as though to prevent her from
slipping away.

He woke up and it was still dark and he was very hungry, but the idea of
food made him sick.  Except for a piece of cheese, he hadn't eaten in
the two or three days since killing Pretty Weasel.  He lay on his back
and felt a pale sweat tingle on his forehead and his upper lip.  He
would have to try to eat something.

He slipped into his pants and shirt and then, remembering Colleen in the
living room, he pulled his socks on.  He didn't feel much toward her,
but she made him uncomfortable.  He couldn't believe that they had once
made love in her car down at the Dodson fair.  But it hadn't really been
an act of love, just a quick coming together, and he had left her
sprawled in the back seat while he went to drink beer with his cronies
under the rodeo stands.  That had been three years ago.  He had been a
different man then.  He never really had friends, but he had cronies,
and a couple of women he saw every once in a while, whenever he needed
to.  And whenever he needed money, he worked, putting up hay for
ranchers, fighting fire with an Indian crew, laboring for the railroad,
the highway.

It wasn't much of a life, but he had done those things, and when he
bathed he had felt clean, and when he walked down town he had looked
forward to something.  Maybe that was it.  The "something" never
happened and he had ceased to look for it.  But why couldn't he have
gone on with that life?

The others, his cronies, did, and given the wear and tear of years, had
survived.  Somewhere along the line he had started questioning his life
and he had lost forever the secret of survival.

The light above the sink was on.  He steadied himself against the
counter and looked down into the white basin.  He was very weak and he
didn't want to be.  He held his hands against the sink and his arms
twitched.  His knees collapsed forward against the cupboard door beneath
the fixture.  He stood that way until his arms stopped twitching, and
then he found a glass and he drank water.  He drank three glasses of
water and he felt his stomach tighten and he thought he could eat
something.  He found a half loaf of bread in the refrigerator.

He took a slice and brought it to the light and he remembered the
sandwiches he and Kate had made as kids-mustard sandwiches, mayonnaise
sandwiches, butter sandwiches, pepper sandwiches-but he remembered most
the doughballs.  Now he crushed the bread in his fist, kneading it,
until it was small and round and moist.  He and Kate used to pretend
that the doughballs were cookies.  Once they ate a whole loaf of dough
balls.

He put the doughball in his mouth and chewed, but it tasted like
nothing.  He needed it to be a game, to pretend that it was something,
but it tasted flat and gummy.  He washed it down with water.  Then he
got another slice of bread.  The only other thing in the refrigerator
was a bowl of eggs.  They were large and brown.  One of them had a small
feather stuck to its shell.  Loney pulled the feather free and thought,
She gets her eggs from the Hutterites.  Many people in town did because
the eggs were better and cheaper than store-bought eggs.  It didn't
surprise him that Rhea bought her eggs from the Hutterites, but it did
interest him and faintly hurt him that he hadn't known.  There were so
many simple things about her that he didn't know, and yet he knew her
eyes, her voice, her body.  He knew her but he didn't know much about
her.

He glanced around the kitchen and he saw two hotpads hanging beside the
stove and he realized that he hadn't seen them before.  Of course they
had always been there.  In many ways, he hadn't.

And he saw the bottle of Scotch.  It was a half gallon with three or
four inches left.  He poured out his water and poured some of the Scotch
into the glass.  It tasted harsh and good and he felt it descend and
warm him as his wine never had.

He had left doughballs and make-believe far behind.

Back in the bedroom he pulled his shoes on and tied them.

Then he shrugged into his parka.  Suddenly Rhea said, "Tomorrow the
world!" She said it clearly and dramatically, the way she did when she
was being pompous for him.  He looked to ward the bed, but she hadn't
moved.  Her shoulder and back were satiny in the moonlight.  She had
been dreaming.  Loney smiled as he pulled the covers over her body.  He
didn't touch her.  He couldn't let himself touch her again.

He stood in the doorway with the shotgun in the crook of his arm, and in
an odd way he felt that he was sparing her life.  And more than that, he
felt that he was giving her her life.  "Goodbye," he whispered, and he
-didn't weep and he didn't feel corny.

He hurried down the hallway to the kitchen, where he screwed the cap on
the Scotch bottle.  Then he tucked it up under his parka and left, out
of the warmth and into a cold moony night.

"You want to tell these fellows exactly what you told me, Mr.  Loney

"Who are they?"

"Well, we have Chief Hanson of the Harlem police department, a couple of
fellows from the Montana highway patrol, and Mr.  Doore of the
reservation police."

Ike Loney had a large bandage over his eyes.  Beneath the bandage his
eyes were open.  He couldn't shut them because of the glass splinters.
The public health doctor had removed most of the glass from his face,
but he was reluctant to work on Ike's eyes, so they were waiting for
someone to wake up the ambulance driver to take him to Havre.

"You just tell it like it is, Mr.  Loney," said Painter.  He had finally
calmed down.  He had taken the call from the old man's neighbor that a
madman had been shooting up the street with a shotgun.  When he got to
the scene he found Ike wandering around outside his trailer.  His face
was a mask of blood, and Painter had thought that the madman had blown
it away.  He had actually jumped back into his car when the old man
approached.  He had lost his cool completely.  He just wasn't cut out
for the real bad stuff.

"We're police officers," said Chief Hanson.

"We're here to enforce the law," said one of the highway patrolmen.

"One of you fellows got some chewing gum?" said Ike.

Painter studied the old man's face.  It wasn't so bad now, except for
the white welts where the doctor had removed the shards.  He recognized
the face.  He had seen it several times down at Kennedy's when he made
his bar rounds.

"How about a cigarette?" said Mr.  Doore.

"Aw, shit," said Ike.

"Okay, let me see if I've got this straight, Mr.  Loney-"

"Not so loud, Painter.  It's his eyes, not his ears," said Chief Hanson.

"Your boy came to visit you, you gave him a couple of drinks, he got
rowdy, stole your shotgun and shot the shit out of your trailer."
Painter waited.  He knew that Hanson wouldn't like that little
profanity, but it was the old man's word.  Vivid as hell, thought
Painter.  He had grown to admire old Loney.  He hadn't complained once,
hadn't even said ouch.

Ike had told Painter the whole story during the ride over to the agency
hospital, or almost the whole story.  He had left out the best part.  He
was waiting to spring it on them at the right time.

"And then he took off.  Where was it, Mr.  Loney, that you said he was
heading?"

"I don't know.  He said something about the mountains."

Ike felt crafty.

"Did he say which mountains-the Little Rockies, the Bear paws?"

"Yeah, I think he mentioned something about the Little Rockies." Ike
straightened and shifted his buttocks on the metal examination table. It
was cold.  "Doc?  Is that goddamn doctor around?  I need something for
the pain, Doc."

"In a minute," said Painter.  "Now could you be more specific, Mr,
Loney?"

"Let me think?  For Christ's sake?" Ike acted disgusted.  He liked this
game.  He had never been seriously interrogated before.

Painter stepped back and glanced at the other men.  The two highway
patrolmen were standing against the wall by the door.  They were a
couple of grim-looking customers.  Their chocolate-colored coats were
covered with emblems and badges.  One of them wore a Western hat with a
pencil roll.

Painter stroked his drooping mustache and winked at them, but neither
responded.  Talk about a couple of grim sonsa bitches, thought Painter.

Quinton Doore was leaning against a file case, staring at the scale in
the corner.  He had a sudden desire to weigh himself officially, but he
would have to let the silence pass before he could do it.  His only
interest in the business at hand was that they brought the old man to
the reservation hospital because there was no hospital in Harlem.  He'd
been down at the tribal office manning the radio.  When the call came
in, he'd decided to wander up to check it out.  The funny part of it was
he'd gone to school with Jim Loney.  He'd even been on the same
basketball team.  He'd only been a seldom-used substitute, but he was in
the state championship photograph in the trophy case over at the high
school.  He was standing right behind Jim Loney.

"Are you ready, Mr.  Loney?" It was Hanson this time.

"Oh, yeah, it's all coming back to me." Ike drew the words out, long and
carefully.  "Yeah, I remember now, he said some thing about Mission
Canyon.  He said something about going out there to think for a while."

"Think?"

"Yeah, he had a little item to think about."

"Is he armed?" Hanson had become brusque, as though he was tired of the
old man's game.

"I guess to hell.  He's got my shotgun, don't he?"

Chalk one up for the old man, thought Painter.  His admiration
increased.

Quinton Doore had been inching his way toward the scale, but when he
heard the old man say Mission Canyon, he paused.

The idea didn't dawn on him right away, but the more he thought about
it, the more he understood the significance of the old man's words.
"That's on the reservation," he said quietly.

The others looked at him.

"That's on the reservation," he said.  "That's my jurisdiction."

One of the highway patrolmen, the one without the hat, pushed away from
the wall and walked up to Ike.  "Mission Canyon.  Are you sure about
that?"

"Sure as I'm sitting here-bleeding and in pain because that fucking
doctor isn't around."

"That's that," said Hanson.  He had been gotten out of bed and he wasn't
anxious to pursue the matter.  He knew that Doore could request
assistance, but he also knew that the reservation police didn't like to
have his men on the reservation.

The highway patrolmen were thinking the same thing.  They were
responsible only for the state highways that ran through the
reservation, and there wasn't one that ran up Mission Canyon.

Ike heard the cops shuffling around as they prepared to leave.

He wished he could see them.  He would have loved to see their faces.
"Oh, there is one other thing," he said.  "I don't know if it's too
important."

The shuffling stopped.

He waited for a few seconds.  He didn't think twice about it.  "My son
killed a man." Damn, he wished he could see their faces.  "Myron Pretty
Weasel.  In a hunting accident.  Only he said it wasn't no accident, if
you catch my meaning."

Ike Loney sat on the examination table.  He was naked and his small
drooping breasts almost reached his tight little paunch.  Below the
heavy gauze bandage, his lips curved into a-smile and he wished he could
see the faces of these so-called lawmen.

"Goddamn it!" Hanson bawled.  His fat face tightened with anger.  Now it
wasn't just a family squabble.  Now it was real trouble.  And
furthermore: "Old man Pretty Weasel came into the station this
afternoon, said his son hadn't been home for three days.  Three days!"

"Is that the basketball player?" said Painter.

"One and the same." Hanson turned to Doore.  "Did you people get a
report on him?"

But Quinton Doore was dialing a number.  He dialed slowly, making sure.
He was perched on the small desk, one foot flat on the floor, the other
dangling.  He was a tall scrawny man of thirty-five.  He was the only
person in the room, besides Ike, who didn't have a uniform on.  His
Levi's were faded and thin on the thigh; his Wellington boots didn't
appear to have heels; and his sheepherder's coat had a big bleach spot
on the forearm.  He looked like any Indian man you might see walking
down the highway on a winter's day.  Yet there was something about his
face, a kind of cruelty around the eyes, that set him apart from
everybody, Indian and white.  He was given to impulses at odd moments,
but he was not impulsive.

Those moments were serious and deliberate.  "We've got a little
trouble," he said into the receiver.  "A shooting." He listened a
moment, eyeing the scale in the corner.  "No.  Three days ago.  Myron
Pretty Weasel.  That's the one.  Jim Loney.  His old man just told us.
Hanson and Barthelme.  And a couple of HP.  Mission Canyon.  That's
where he said he was heading.  I don't know.  We have to check it out.
I'll get Lefthand and take a run out." Quinton Doore listened for a long
moment.

He didn't like what he was hearing, but his expression didn't change.

Painter Barthelme watched Doore and he thought, I should be tired,
exhausted, but I'm not.  He glanced up at the big clock above the door.
Three-thirty.  Two and a half hours to go.  I'm going to quit, he
thought.  I don't like this job.  I can't deal with it.  He wished that
he were at home, drinking beer with the football coach, or working on
one of his model planes, but most of all, being with Rhea Davis.  He had
made up his mind that he was going to call on her after Christmas.  But
now that seemed like such a long way off.  He wanted desperately to be
with her right at this moment.  He had never in his life felt his life
so isolated and barren as he did in that room full of men and the smell
of medicine.  Rhea Davis represented to him the safe, the civilized,
side of society.  Although he still hadn't talked to her in a personal
way, he loved her for that and for what she would offer him-her safe,
warm life.

"Well?" It was one of the highway patrolmen.

Painter jerked his head.  His eyes had stuck on the clock.

He was more tired than he thought.  But the HP was addressing Doore.

"That was the superintendent," said Doore.  "You're in."

"What about us?" Hanson tapped his chest with one hand and gestured
toward Painter with the other.

Doore looked at Hanson.  The superintendent had said to get all the help
he could.  Doore said, "You're out."

Painter almost moaned with relief, but Hanson said, "Just a darn minute
here.  How do you think it's going to look if we're not there?  The
whole ruckus started in our town.  We've got to be there; otherwise it's
going to look like we couldn't handle it.  Some crazy bastard shoots up
the town, we've got to be there!"

Doore lit a cigarette with his disposable lighter.  He had owned the
lighter for almost a year and it still worked.  It was one of the best
bargains of his LIFE.  He blew the smoke toward the scale.  He was
mildly irritated but he said, "Just stay out of the way."

"Damn right," said Hanson.  He was breathing hard.  He had never much
liked Indians and he was damned if he was going to take any crap off one
now.  He turned to Painter.  "You go with them," he said.  He looked
around the room, first at the highway patrolmen, then at Doore.  "You're
one of them now,"

he said to Painter.  And he brushed by Ike Loney's dangling legs on his
way to the door.  "You're a part of this," he called back to Painter.
His jacket and shirt had worked up over his roll of fat.  Painter wished
he were back in California.  He'd have given his left nut to see a
lovely wet eucalyptus tree in the hills behind Berkeley.

Loney turned south at the agency onto 376.  It was a good highway,
straight and true to the Little Rockies.  The first few miles it dipped
in and out of deep wide gullies that carried the spring runoff down to
the Milk River valley.  After that it climbed up onto the prairies and
rolled gently south.

The Chevy ran well for having been driven so seldom in the past three or
four months.  Loney kept it at a steady 55 mph and checked the gauges,
which seemed to be functioning and normal.  He had the defroster opened
up, but only a breath of warm air reached the windshield.  The side and
rear windows were thick with frost, but Loney didn't mind at all.  He
only needed to see straight ahead.

He was still a little surprised that his house hadn't been staked out,
that he hadn't walked into a trap when he went there to get his car.  It
could have been all over by now, he thought, and then he put that
thought away.  Perhaps his father hadn't squealed, perhaps his father
felt some loyalty, if not love, and this trip was all for nothing.  But
he knew his father was the worst type of dirt-he would squeal and he
would enjoy the attention.  If Loney had him pegged right, the past
three hours would have given him a chance to be something.  Loney felt
almost sorry for the old bastard.

Kate sat on the window seat in the living room of her George town
apartment and waited for her cab.  She glanced at her watch and it was
almost six.  She hated to catch a plane from Dulles because it was so
far out of the city, but the only flight to Seattle at that hour left
there.  And she had to be in Seattle that afternoon in order to catch a
ferry across to Bainbridge Island.  She had to speak to a group of
education specialists from the reservations in the area.  She wouldn't
have minded so much if she hadn't just got back to town the day before.

It's a miracle that I don't have an ulcer, she thought.  And she thought
again of the strange conversation she had heard on her answering
machine.  It was between her brother and a telephone operator.  The
operator kept trying to get her brother to leave a message and he
apparently didn't know how.  Now Kate wondered if he was in some kind of
trouble, or if he had finally decided to come to Washington, D.C.  It

't be that, she thought, it just can't be.  And yet she couldn't can
think what else it could be.  He had never tried to call her before.

She watched a pair of yellow lights cut the thick gray air down the
block.  She started to put her coat on, but the car swished by, turned
left at the corner and started up the hill.

It was a shiny foreign car and it had a left-over look about it, as
though the party had just ended and it was reluctantly making its way
home.

Kate walked down the hallway to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of
coffee.  It was warm and bitter.  She checked to make sure all the
burners on the stove were off, then she turned out the light and walked
back to the living room.  She sat on the window seat and drank her
coffee.  The room was austere but warm-spare Danish furniture, a couple
of flokatis on the bare hardwood floor, and three framed paintings by an
Indian artist she had met in South Dakota.  Two of the paintings were of
Indian dancers, "fancy dancers," and their movements were kinetic and
exaggerated.  The third was of a dancer

walking home along a highway, still in full regalia but lonely and
tired.  The land was a series of browns and yellows leading to an ocher
sky.  The painting had always inspired Kate.  She felt that her purpose
was to create something for him to go home to.  In all her years in
education, she had never grown cynical about it.  It had gotten her up
and out of a dismal existence and she expected that it could do the same
for others.

Now she wondered if that was true.  She had been slowly and sadly
heading toward the conclusion that it took quite an extraordinary person
to make the attempt to rise above his life.  Most were resigned to
survival on that level of existence they were born to.

I will call Rhea from Seattle, she thought.  I will leave a number where
I can be reached.  She will at least deliver that message.  Then she
thought it would be funny if they both were in Seattle right now, if
things had worked out.  But then a feeling of dread came over her and
she knew things were not right and she felt, as,she watched the fancy
dancer walk

'home, that she would not see her brother again.

She put her cup on the ledge beside her and hugged herself.

The room was cold and she rocked back and forth and hugged herself.  The
cab sat in the street below, its exhaust a plume that rose and
dissipated in the gray light.

The car coasted to a stop about a quarter mile from the Hays cutoff.
Loney turned off the lights and climbed out.  He had the bottle of
Scotch in one hand and the shotgun in the other.  The wind had died
completely and he could see the Little Rockies, black and silent, about
three miles distant.  Below the mountains he could make out the lights
of Hays, and he heard a dog bark.  He looked up at the sky and he had no
idea of time.  It had been a long night and the sky gave no indication
that it was about to end.

Loney unscrewed the cap from the bottle of Scotch.  Then he popped the
plastic pourer out of the neck and threw it away.  He took a long drink,
his eyes on the mountains, and the Scotch didn't taste as good as he
would have liked, but it warmed him.  That was the main thing now.  Stay
warm.  He wanted to run, but it would have been awkward with his bur
den, so he walked a fast pace.  He took the Hays cutoff and he felt the
gravel through the thin soles of his shoes.

Half an hour later he was walking through the small town and a dog was
walking silently behind him.  It was a rangy black dog and it was
neither friendly nor unfriendly.  Once Loney stopped and took a drink
and the dog stopped and sat alertly waiting.

Loney decided it must be very early because all the houses were dark.
And he remembered the boy who had watched him chip Swipesy out of the
frozen mud and he wondered which house was his.  Amos After Buffalo, and
he came from o t there." Loney saw him standing on the bleak Harlem U

street, pointing south to these mountains and his country.  That had
been on Thanksgiving Day, almost a month ago.  Amos After Buffalo will
grow up, thought Loney, and he will discover that Thanksgiving is not
meant for him.  It will take him longer because he lives in Hays and
Hays is on the edge of the world, but he will discover it someday and it
will hurt him, a small wound when you think about it, but along with the
hundred other small cuts and bruises, it will make a difference, and he
will grow hard and bitter and he might do something bad, and people will
say, "Didn't we tell you, he's like all the rest,"

and they will think Indians do not know the meaning of the word
"Thanksgiving."

Amos, if I could, I would take you with me, right now, and spare you
sorrow.  I might survive.  Oh, God, we might survive together, and what
a laugh....

Loney turned to the dog.  "You tell Amos that Jim Loney passed through
town while he was dreaming.  Don't tell him you saw me with a bottle and
a gun.  That wouldn't do.  Give him dreams.  Tell him you saw me
carrying a dog and that I was taking that dog to a higher ground.  He
will know."

Loney was standing outside an abandoned store.  Its windows had been
boarded over.  A faded red gas pump stood close to the door.  Loney
could just make out the flying red horse and he couldn't remember which
gas it belonged to.  The village was dark and quiet.  The dog was gone.

Loney started to run.  He thought he could see the sky becoming opaque
and he thought he could feel a change in the air, the comfortable chill
of dawn.  He had a mile to go, and as he ran, he heard the Scotch
sloshing wildly in its container.

When he reached the mouth of Mission Canyon, it was coming dawn and the
tall gray walls seemed more a barrier than an entrance.  He stopped and
caught his breath and took one last look at the world.  And it was the
right light to see the world, halfway between dark and dawn, a good way
to see things, the quiet pleasure of deciding whether the things were
there or not there.

And Loney saw the dark shape of the stone mission school where it should
have been and he remembered the time he had played basketball against
its team.  There was a small gym out back, a court not much smaller than
the building, a court about three quarters the size of a normal court.
The others had laughed at the priest who coached the team because he
wore a long black skirt and he had a way of waggling his ass.

They slaughtered the mission school and in the team bus they laughed all
the way back to Harlem at the priest in the skirt.

One of the players wrapped a towel around his waist and minced up and
down the aisle like a fairy and everybody laughed and tried to grab him.
Then they talked about sticking it to the cheerleaders who sat in the
first two rows behind the driver.

Loney closed his eyes and tried to laugh at the tough priest in
the black skirt, but he remembered Brother Ger and and there was no
laughter in him, not then, not now.  He was tired and his mind was full
of flickering images, of scenes just past and scenes a long time past.
He stood with his eyes closed and tried to black out the images, but
they kept coming like dark birds, one following another, in and out of
his mind, simple memories of trivial times.  But they brought me here,
he thought, to this place, to this time.  Presently he opened his eyes
and the birds were gone, and he turned and entered the canyon.

The entrance was just wide enough for a small stream and a two-track
road.  The creek hissed and clattered beneath a crust of snow and Loney
could hear the snow break beneath his step.  It was night again, but
when he looked up between the looming walls he saw a narrow strip of
gray light.  There were no stars anymore.  If it had been any other
night Loney would have been a little frightened by those towering cold
walls, the darkness and his step.  He thought about the Indians who had
used the canyon, the hunting parties, the warriors, the women who had
picked chokecherries farther up.  He thought of the children who had
played in the stream, and the lovers.  These thoughts made him
comfortable and he wasn't afraid.

Twenty minutes later he reached the point where the road cut across the
creek.  Although the creek was only six feet wide, a distance Loney
could jump with ease, the road was solid wet ice on either side.  It was
risky, so Loney sat down and took off his shoes and socks and rolled his
pant legs up.

He waded carefully, for the creek bed at the ford was slick His legs
ached and he could feel his calves begin to knot up'

He knew that he wouldn't be able to negotiate the small incline to the
other side, so he waded upstream a few feet until he was off the ford.
He felt the small stones beneath his feet and he took three steps and he
was standing on the crusty bank.

He put down the gun and the bottle and rubbed his legs.  He had a cramp
in his left instep and he tried to move his foot to get the circulation
going.  He took off his parka and wrapped it around his lower legs. Then
he picked up the bottle of Scotch and drank.  He stamped his foot and he
moved his toes, but the cramp wouldn't go away.  It was painful, so
painful that he thought the bones in his foot were bending.  He dropped
to the ground and held his foot close and beat at the instep with his
fist, trying to loosen the muscle.  Whether it was the whiskey or the
beating, the pain subsided a little.  He put his socks and shoes on;
then he stood and got into the parka.  He breathed deeply and the air
caught in his chest, paralyzing his body for an instant with the
suddenness of the chill.  He decided it must be below zero, how much
didn't matter.  But his skin felt warm and his feet, so cold only
seconds before, now were stinging with warmth.  He picked up his bottle
and the gun and limped up the road.

And the canyon opened out into a small valley filled with alder,
chokecherry bushes, willow and buckbrush.  The ground was bare again
from the few hours each day that the sun struck the meadow in the center
of the valley.  It had been a mild early winter, bright days and a
couple of good chinooks.  The snow hadn't had a chance to build up and
most of the surrounding peaks were bare.  Loney thought it would be a
bad year for the farmers if they didn't get more snow, and then he
realized that he was thinking of a future that didn't concern him.  He
glanced up at the sky and it was turning from gray to light blue.  They
could come anytime, he thought.  He had figured they would wait for
daybreak to hunt him down.  Now he recognized a clearing beside the road
as the place he had picnicked with the minister and his wife.  They had
had a surprisingly good time.  The minister had even hit him some fly
balls.  It had been the only time Loney could remember that the minister
had acted as if he was having a good time.

Loney looked off to his left at the ridge and he saw the rocky
outcropping that he had climbed that day.  It didn't seem so far away
now, and .t didn't appear as menacing as it had that day he climbed it
and spied on the minister and his wife.

They never touched in the house in Harlem, but that day Loney had caught
them holding each other.

He left the road and bushwhacked his way through a stand of chokecherry
bushes.

Painter Barthelme stood beside the car in the cold gray light.

He stamped his feet and flexed his fingers.  Every now and then he
glanced back at the tribal office.  He couldn't under stand what was
taking Doore so long.  It seemed clear to Painter that they had to get
to Mission Canyon at first light, and it was already past that.  He
didn't need to look at his watch.

He knew it was very close to six-thirty.

Doore was a funny man.  Painter was impressed with his procedure: he had
the highway patrol and the Blaine and Phil lips County sheriffs' people
blocking off the highway at both ends of the Little Rockies.  In
addition, a couple of deputies were already in place in Zortman and
Landusky, two villages on the other side of the mountains.  The fugitive
would almost have to come out at either place if he tried to cross over.
So the small mountain range was sealed off.  The only thing left was to
flush Jim Loney.  And that was the trouble.  Only three of them were
going in-Painter, Doore and Lefthand.  How could three men hope to find
one man in all that area?  It would take forever and Painter wanted it
all to be over.  The thought had occurred to him again that he could
quit anytime.

He was going to quit and he could quit now.  Nobody had a gun to his
head.  But it was important to him to clean up this loose end, to end
this awful business for his own sake, to end with a little honor.  He
thought of the small hand-lettered sign above the radio back at the
station: DO ONE THING TODAY

THAT YOU DO NOT WANT TO DO.

He heard the door slam behind him and when he looked back, he saw Doore
and Francis Lefthand descending the stairs.

Doore had strapped on his gun and he didn't look any more official. From
the way it rode on his narrow hip, Painter guessed it to be a short .38.
Lefthand also had a pistol, the butt sticking out of the pocket of his
blanket coat.  Over his shoulder Left hand had a rifle with a capped
scope that made Painter realize they were actually going to hunt Loney.

"Hey, Barthelme, how's it going?" called Lefthand, and Painter felt a
little better.  He liked Lefthand, but more than that, he knew that
Lefthand didn't know any more about police work than he did.  He
couldn't have been much over twenty three or twenty-four.  Painter had
seen him a few times over in Harlem in the bars, but he never got drunk.
Off duty he was just a cheerful kid who liked to rib Painter.  Now they
were both on the official side of the law and neither of them knew a
damn thing about it.  Not about this, Painter thought.

Running in drunks is one thing, but this ...  He wondered how Doore
felt.

But Quinton Doore was cold.  He got in the car on the passenger side and
he stared straight ahead.  Lefthand raised his eye brows at Painter and
walked around to the driver's side.  Painter got in back behind the mesh
screen.  He heard the thunk of the door locks.  The seat smelled of
booze..

"Sirens, flashers?" said Lefthand, after they turned out onto the
highway.

"No," said Doore.

"That's right." Lefthand laughed.  "Who the hell we going to encounter
at this time of morning?"

But dawn wasn't far away.  The sky to the east had lightened enough so
that Painter was almost sure it was clear.  There was no color to it
yet, but neither could he see the ragged edges of clouds.  He longed for
the smell of dawn, but in winter in this country there was nothing but
changing light.  In this country.  In California, in the Bay area, there
was always an odor, even in winter.  Sometimes it was rain, sometimes a
breeze off the bay, sometimes green things-bougainvillaea, magnolia,
rhododendron, a sweet dawn smell.  Here, only in summer did one smell
things-sagebrush, alfalfa and once in a while, from the mountains, jack
pine.  But the smells were never exotic, never sharp, as though it were
the dust one smelled.  Now Painter smelled the boozy back seat and the
sour odor of his own guts and he leaned back and closed his eyes.

"How we going to go about it?" he heard Lefthand say.

"We'll go up the Canyon and get him," said Doore.

"Yeah.  I mean, how?"

And Painter felt himself drifting off and he smelled the brackish water
at the lower end of the Bay.  He saw the flats and the industries, the
hillside houses beneath the roily clouds, and he thought of the girl he
had met, lived with and left in Palo Alto.  That had been four years ago
and she had been a political science major and a part-time artist.  He
could barely remember what she looked like beyond the long brown hair
and the pale prettiness of her face.  He did remember her lithe body
(they had lived together for six months) and he remembered the wild
things she did with that body in wild moments.  She delighted in
shocking him with her imagination and her athletic ability.  Now he
almost laughed (as she had then).  It was funny to think that those
things which he had disapproved of were the very things which mildly
excited him now.  But it hadn't been funny then.  She had called him a
serious romantic because he wanted to take rides to Carmel, to make love
to her in quaint motels, to sit in seaside bars and drink margaritas and
think of a career beyond that of a security patrolman.  But she was too
immediate and worldly.  She was a rich kid and she had no desire to
dream.  Painter could not remember the color of her eyes or whether her
fingernails were long or short.

That's some kind of revenge, he thought, but he had never wanted to hurt
her, even when she had called him a boob and kicked him out of the house
on New Year's Eve after they had played Monopoly and drunk champagne. It
had been such a silly thing to do, he had left.  A few months later, he
quit his job and came to Harlem.  Now he was quitting this job and he
would probably return to California.  Fuck the tundra, he said to his
eyelids.  He was warm and he thought of his Palo Alto girl and Rhea
Davis and the smell of the brackish water of the Bay.

The first thing Painter saw was a boarded-up store and a gas pump with a
flying red horse on its bulb.  Then he heard Lefthand say, "I still
think we should stop and see if St.  John is around.  He knows this
country."

"So do I.  Painter sat up and saw the last of Hays.  Then he looked
through the wire mesh and he saw the Little Rockies.  He had never been
this close.  They were bigger and wilder than they looked from Harlem.
He looked straight ahead and he could see no entrance.

"Hey, there's the mission." Lefthand sounded excited but not nervous.
"My cousins go there."

"What do you think?" Painter said to the back of Doore's head.

"What kind of shoes you got on?" said Doore.

Painter didn't even hear him.

Loney tried to remember how many shells he had left.  He had used two
shots, but he couldn't remember how many he had pushed up into the
magazine.  He looked at the magazine and he tried to estimate how many
shells it held.  Five?  Six?

Did he fill it?  He must have at least a couple of shots left.

He was getting drowsy.  From his position on the rocky outcrop ping he
could see down to the foot of the valley where the road forded the
creek.  But sometimes he forgot to look; other times he forgot what he
was looking for.  The ford seemed important.  He drank from the green
bottle and for a few minutes he was warm and in control.  They were
coming.  Any minute now.  How many?  But that wasn't important.  They
could send the whole U.S.  Army after him.  It didn't matter.  He rocked
back and forth on his heels and the balls of his feet.  The rocks were
frosty and he couldn't sit down.  His ass was numb.  He must have
frostbite of the ass by now.  His foot still ached from the cold water
but he only noticed it when he thought about it.  Or he thought about it
when it ached.  He was cold clear through.  He had never been this cold.
He thought he should stand up and run in place.  Or just run.  Across
the mountains.

He could make it.  They weren't that big.  He could come out at Zortman.
He could steal a car there.  Zortman.  Or Landusky.

Landusky was a ghost town.  Gold town.  Which was it?  Off the
reservation, anyhow.  Reservation used to include all the mountains
until the white men discovered gold.  Then they moved the reservation
line north so they could dig it up.  Indians didn't need it.  Now
everybody needed it and there was no gold.  Ran out and Landusky died. A
ghost town.  But they never moved the line back.

Then Loney remembered his dream, the dream about the young woman who had
lost her son.  Again he saw her face beneath the makeup and the black
shawl and it was easy this time.  He did recognize her and he knew who
the lost son was.  She was not crazy-not now, not ever.  She was a
mother who was no longer a mother.  She had given up her son to be free
and that freedom haunted her.  All the drinks, all the men in the world,
could never make her free.  And so she had come back to him in his dream
and told him that her son would not allow himself to be found.  He was
not in that churchyard grave-he was out here in these mountains,
waiting.

And he wondered if he would be found, if he would see her again, if a
heaven or hell existed.  But there had to be another place where people
bought each other drinks and talked quietly about their pasts, their
mistakes and their small triumphs; a place where those pasts merged into
one and every thing was all right and it was like everything was
beginning again without a past.  No lost sons, no mothers searching.
There had to be that place, but it was not on this earth.

Loney tried to stand but he couldn't.  His legs were frozen.

He looked across the valley and he saw the gold line of sunrise on the
opposite mountain.  Where the fuck are they?  He was breathing hard and
he realized that his lungs were frozen too.

The harder he breathed the less air he got.  And he thought of his
cigarettes.  But he saw the crumpled pack on the ledge five feet away.
He had run out, but that didn't matter either.

How could he need a cigarette?  He drank some more of the Scotch and it
didn't taste like anything.  Again he looked across the valley and the
gold line had descended.  A mountain of gold.

He heard the car before he saw it, the noise of the engine magnified by
the canyon walls.  It was the first sound he had heard in two hours.
Then he saw the black tribal police car rolling slowly over the
two-track road.  It stopped on the other side of the ford and sat for a
moment, its exhaust rising high above it.  It must be warm in there,
Loney thought, but he't cold anymore.  The car backed up thirty feet;
then Loney wasn heard the whine of the tires as it moved forward,
picking up speed until it hit the ford.  The car bounced through the
water and up the incline on the other side, its tires shrieking as it
neared the top; it reached the level bare ground and it shot forward,
then slowed, and began to creep slowly up the valley.

Loney glanced back to the narrow part of the canyon, but no other
vehicles were in sight.  One car.  But it would do.

The car was nearing the wide place in the road.  Loney's craggy perch
was a couple of hundred yards from the road and about a hundred feet up.
They would never see him.  But he was counting on them to stop at the
wide place to get their bearings.

He wondered who it would be.  He knew all three of the tribal cops.  He
was certain that one of them would be Doore.

The thought frightened him, but it interested him as well.

When they were kids playing basketball, Doore had had an intensity about
him, a cold hostility that made the others wary.

Even Pretty Weasel.  Doore had been a substitute, not very good, but in
scrimmages he punished his man with a grim indifference.  No one on the
team liked him, and he seemed to prefer it that way.  Loney had seen him
several times since, but Doore had never acknowledged any familiarity.
He had always been a thug.  Now it seemed ironic to Loney that he was
the fugitive and Doore the lawman.

The car pulled off the road and Loney pumped a shell into the breech. He
couldn't hope to reach the car from his position, but he didn't mean to.
He grabbed a ledge behind him and pulled himself to his feet.  Then he
aimed the gun a little ahead of the car and pulled.  the trigger.

Painter heard the distant boom and he watched Doore glance out the
windshield, then open his door and slide out.  He knelt in the V of the
open door and scanned the ridge to the east of the valley.  Then Painter
was squatting beside Doore and watching Lefthand dive to the ground
behind them.  He motioned Lefthand in close behind the car and he saw
that Left hand had his gun drawn.  It was a .45 automatic.  Painter had
never seen a pistol that big.  And he looked down and he saw his own gun
in his hand.  He hadn't remembered drawing it from its holster.

"See anything?" Lefthand whispered, and Painter shook his head.  Doore
had not moved from his position, he hadn't moved an inch, and his gaze
seemed to be riveted on something on the ridge.  Painter looked up-he
had to look through the windshield-and he saw the small figure on an
outcropping.

The figure did nothing to hide or to run off.  It simply stood
motionless.

"Is that him?" said Painter.

Doore turned his face and grinned.  "That's the great Loney."

And Painter realized what, was going on.  He felt stupid.  All the clues
were there.  Loney telling his old man exactly where he was going, then
making a scene at his old man's place to draw the police, then leaving
his car beside the road on the other side of Hays.  It was very simple:
Loney wanted to be found and Doore had known this all along.  That was
why Doore didn't want a whole party to go into the mountains to flush
Loney.  Loney would be there, just as he was now.  Painter read the
signs, but he didn't know why Loney would do this.

There are odd things that people do, he thought, things done out of a
need that defies an ordinary man's reasoning.  Lefthand gave him a pair
of binoculars and he watched Doore take the caps off the scope mounted
on the rifle.  Then he watched Loney through the glasses and he
recognized him.  For some reason he had thought they were hunting a
total stranger, a faceless stranger who had committed the act of murder.
In those terms this manhunt had been a game, the natural counteraction
to the man's actions.  But as he watched the man he realized that he had
seen him just the other day, slipping out of the hotel and hurrying down
to Kennedy's; moreover, he had seen him a few times before, once in a
bar close enough to touch.  In fact, they had touched shoulders, a small
contact that meant nothing.

Then he heard the blast beside him and he saw the figure spin and
disappear.

The slug spun him around and he sat down hard on a flat rock.  His
shoulder felt wet and cool.  He looked at it and he saw the small hole
in his parka, the fabric feathered and slightly funneled where the slug
had entered.  At first he thought that he was mistaken, that the hole
had been there, and that he hadn't really been shot.  But when he looked
down at the hot torn of his sleeve, he saw that his hand was turned
outward away from his body.  And when he tried to move his fingers
nothing happened and he knew that his shoulder had been shattered.  It
was numb but curiously warm.  He felt the coolness run down his arm and
his brain grew tangly.  He thought there was nothing in the world but
that arm with the fingers turned away at an awkward curve.  He watched
the wristband of his parka turn dark, and then he saw the rivulet of
blood break free and run down his hand to the end of his little finger.

The drop clung and grew, then it fell, and he watched the blood
spattering the stones.

This is what you wanted, he thought, and that was the last thought left
to him.  He stood and he felt a dimness in his head and he took two
steps and he felt something sharp in his stomach as though someone had
jabbed him with a stick.

And he fell, and as he was falling he felt a harsh wind where there was
none and the last thing he saw were the beating wings of a dark bird as
it climbed to a distant place.

A