"You believe in these spirits?"
"I've been on the Marias at night. I've heard them. The sound comes right off the edge of the water, where the camp was. It happened in the winter of 1870. An army officer named Baker attacked an innocent band of Blackfeet under Heavy Runner. They killed a hundred and thirty people, then burned their robes and wickiups and left the survivors to freeze in the snow. You can hear people weeping."
"I guess I don't know about those things. Or the history of your people."
She ate without answering.
"I think maybe it's not a good idea to keep things like that alive in yourself, though," I said.
She remained silent, her face pointed downward, and I gave it up.
"Look, will you give Clete a message for me?" I said.
"What is it?"
"That he doesn't owe me, that he doesn't need to feel bad about anything, that I don't sweat a character like Sally Dio. You also tell him to take himself and a nice girl to New Orleans. That's the place where good people go when they die."
She smiled. I looked at her eyes and her mouth, then caught myself and glanced away.
"I have to go now," she said.
"I hope you're feeling better."
"I am. You were a real friend, Darlene. Clete's a lucky guy."
"Thank you, but he's not a lucky guy. Not at all."
I didn't want to talk about Clete's problems anymore or carry any more of his load. I walked outside with her to her Toyota jeep and opened the door for her. The sidewalks were still drying in the sunlight, and the pines on the mountains were sharp and green against the sky.
"Maybe you all would like to come into town and have dinner one evening, or walk up one of those canyons in the Bitterroots and try for some cutthroat," I said.
"Maybe. I'll ask him," she said, and smiled again.
I watched her drive past the school yard and turn toward the interstate. It was one of those moments when I did not care to reflect upon my own honesty or to know in reality what I was thinking about.
I washed the dishes, put on my running shoes, shorts, and a sweatshirt, and did two miles along the river, then circled back through a turn-of-the-century neighborhood of yellow- and orange-brick homes whose yards were dotted with blue spruce, fir, maple, birch, and willow trees. I was sweating heavily in the cool air, and I had to push hard to increase my speed across an intersection; but my wind was good, the muscles tight in my thighs and back, my mind clear, the rest of the day a bright expectation rather than an envelope of grayness and gloom and disembodied voices.
Ah, voices, I thought. She believes in them. Which any student of psychology will tell you is a mainline symptom of a schizophrenic personality. But I had never bought very heavily into the psychiatric definitions of singularity and eccentricity in people. In fact, as I reviewed the friendships I had had over the years, I had to conclude that the most interesting ones involved the seriously impaired the Moe Howard account, the drunken, the mind-smoked, those who began each day with a nervous breakdown, people who hung on to the sides of the planet with suction cups.
When I rounded the corner on my block by the river, I heard the bell ring at the elementary school and saw the children burst out of the doors onto the sidewalks. Alafair walked with her lunch box among three other children. I ran backward when I passed her.
"Meet you at the house, little guy," I said.
I shaved and showered and took Alafair with me to an AA meeting three blocks from our house. She drank a can of pop and did her homework in the coffee room while I sat in the nonsmokers' section of the meeting and listened. The members of the group were mostly mill workers, gyppo loggers, Indians, waitresses, tough blue-collar kids who talked as much about dope as they did about alcohol, and skid-row old-timers who had etched the lines fn their face a shot glass at a time. When it was my turn to talk, I gave my name and passed. I should have talked about my nightmares, the irrational depression that could leave me staring eviscerated and numb at a dying fire; but for most of them their most immediate problem was not psychological or in the nature of their addiction they were unemployed and on food stamps and my own basket of snakes seemed an unworthy subject for discussion.
Alafair and I ate an early supper, then we walked up on a switchback trail to the big white concrete M on the mountain overlooking the university. We could see out over the whole valley: the Clark Fork winding high and yellow through town, the white froth over the breakers, the tree-filled neighborhoods, the shafts of sunlight in the canyons west of town, the plume from the pulp mill flattening out on the river's surface, the bicyclists and joggers like miniature figures on the campus far below. Then as the sun dimmed behind a peak and the air became more chill and the valley filled with a purple haze, house and street and neon lights came on all over town, and in the south we could see the sun's afterglow on the dark stands of ponderosa high up in the Bitterroots.
Alafair sat beside me on the concrete M. She brushed dirt off her knees; I saw her frown.
"Dave, whose hat that is?" she said.
"What?"
"In the chair. By the fireplace. That black hat."
"Oh," I said.
"I think a lady must have left that there."
"I sat on it. I forgot to tell you."
"Don't worry about it."
"She won't be mad?"
"No, of course not. Don't worry about things like that, little guy."
The next day I made arrangements for Alafair to stay with the baby-sitter if I had to remain out of town that night, and I headed for the Blackfeet Reservation, on the other side of the Divide, east of Glacier Park. In the early morning light I drove up the Blackfoot River through canyons of pink rock and pine, with woodsmoke drifting through the trees from the cabins set back in the meadows. The runoff from the snowpack up in the mountains was still high, and the current boiled over the boulders in the center of the river. Then the country opened up into wider valleys and ranch-land with low green hills and more mountains in the distance. I started to climb into more heavily wooded country, with sheer rock cliffs and steep-sided mountains that ran right down to the edge of the road; the canyons and trees were dark with shadow, and by the time I hit the logging town of Lincoln the air had turned cold and my windows were wet with mist. I drove into clouds on the Divide at Rogers Pass, my ears popping now, and rivulets of melted snow ran out of the pines on the mountainside, bled across the highway, and washed off the dirt shoulder into a white stream far below. The pine trees looked almost black and glistened with a wet sheen.
Then I was out into sunlight again, out on the eastern slope, into rolling wheat and cattle country with no horizon except the Rocky Mountain Front in my rearview mirror. I made good time into Choteau and Dupuyer, and a short while later I was on the Black-feet Indian Reservation.
I had been on or through several Indian reservations, and none of them was a good place. This one was not an exception. Ernest Hemingway once wrote that there was no worse fate for a people than to lose a war. If any of his readers wanted to disagree with him, they would only have to visit one of the places in which the United States government placed its original inhabitants. We took everything they had and in turn gave them smallpox, whiskey, welfare, federal boarding schools, and penitentiaries.
At a run-down filling station I got directions to the tribal chairman's office, then drove through several small settlements of clapboard shacks, the dirt yards littered with the rusted parts of junker cars, old washing machines on the porches, chicken yards, privies, and vegetable patches in back, with seed packages stuck up on sticks in the rows.