The tribal chairman was a nice man who wore braids, jewelry, a. western vest, green-striped trousers, and yellow cowboy boots. On his office wall was an associate of arts degree from a community college. He was polite and listened well, his eyes staying focused attentively on my face while I spoke; but it was also obvious that he did not want to talk about AIM or the oil business with a white man whom he didn't know.
"Do you know Harry Mapes?" I said.
This time his gaze broke. He looked out the window onto the street, where three Indian men were talking in front of a poolroom. The neon sign above the door said only Pool.
"He's a lease man He's around here sometimes," he said.
"Most of the time he works on the edge of the reservation."
"What else do you know about him?"
He unwrapped the cellophane from an inexpensive cherry-blend cigar.
"I don't have any dealings with him. You'll have to ask somebody else."
"You think he's bad news?"
"I don't know what he is." He smiled to be pleasant and lit his cigar.
"He killed his partner, Dalton Vidrine, down in Louisiana."
"I don't know about that, Mr. Robicheaux."
"I think he killed two of your people, too."
"I don't know what to tell you, sir."
"Do you know of two guys from AIM who disappeared?"
"Not on the reservation. And that's what I'm elected to take care of- the reservation."
"What do you mean, 'not on the reservation'?"
"I'm not in AIM. I don't mix in their business."
"But you've heard about somebody disappearing?"
He gazed out the window again at the men in front of the poolroom and breathed cigar smoke out his nose and mouth.
"Just south of here, down in Teton County. Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin," he said.
"I don't remember the cousin's name."
"What happened?"
"I heard they didn't come home one night. But maybe they just went off somewhere. It happens. Talk to the sheriff's office in Teton. Talk to Clayton's mother. She lives just off the reservation. Here, I'll draw you directions."
A half hour later I was back off the reservation and driving down a narrow gray dirt road by the edge of a stream. Cottonwoods grew along the banks, then the ground sloped upward into thick stands of lodgepole pine. Ahead I could see the plains literally dead-end into the mountains. They rose abruptly, like an enormous fault, sheer-faced and jagged against the sky. The cliff walls were pink and streaked with shadow, and the ponderosa was so thick through the saddles that I doubted a bear could work his way through the trunks.
I found the home the tribal chairman had directed me to. It was built of logs and odd-sized pieces of lumber, up on a knoll, with a shingled roof and sagging gallery. Plastic sheets were nailed over the windows for insulation, and coffee cans filled with petunias were set along the gallery railing and the edges of the steps. The woman who lived there looked very old. Her hair was white, with dark streaks in it, and her leathery skin was deeply lined and webbed around the eyes and mouth.
I sat with her in her living room and tried to explain who I was, that I wanted to find out what happened to her son, Clayton Des-marteau, and his cousin. But her face was remote, uncertain, her eyes averted whenever I looked directly at them. On a table by the tiny fireplace was a framed photograph of a young Indian soldier. In front of the picture were two open felt boxes containing a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.
"The tribal chairman said maybe your son simply left the area for a while," I said.
"Maybe he went looking for other work."
This time she looked at me.
"Clayton didn't go off nowhere," she said.
"He had a job in the filling station in town. He came home every night. They found his car in the ditch, two miles from here. He wouldn't go off and leave his car in the ditch. They did something to him."
"Who?"
"People that want to hurt his organization."
"AIM?"
"He was beat up one time. They were always trying to hurt him."
"Who beat him up?"
"People that's no good."
"Mrs. Desmarteau, I want to help you find out what happened to Clayton. Did he ever mention someone's name, somebody who gave him trouble?"
"The FBI. They came around the filling station and called up people on the phone about him."
"How about Harry Mapes or Dalton Vidrine? Do you remember his using" those names?"
She didn't answer. She simply looked out into space, took a pinch of snuff out of a Copenhagen can, and put it between her lip and gum. Motes of dust spun in the light through the windows. I thanked her for her time and drove back down the road toward the county seat, the shadows of the cottonwoods clicking across my windshield.
The sheriff was out of town, and the deputy I spoke to at the courthouse soon made me feel that I was a well-meaning, obtuse outsider who had as much understanding of rural Montana and reservation life as a seasonal tourist.
"We investigated that case about four months ago," he said. He was a big, lean man in his khaki uniform, and he seemed to concentrate more on the smoking of his cigarette than on his conversation with me. His desk was littered with papers and manila folders.
"His mother and sister filed a missing-persons report. We found his car with a broken axle in the ditch. The keys were gone, the spare tire was gone, the radio was gone, somebody even tore the clock out of the dashboard. What's that tell you?"
"Somebody stripped it."
"Yeah, Clayton Desmarteau did. It was going to be repossessed. Him and his cousin were in the bar three miles up the road, they got juiced, they ran off the road. That's the way we see it."
"And he just didn't bother to come home after that?"
"Where are you from again?"
" New Iberia, Louisiana."
He blew smoke out into a shaft of sunlight shining through the window. His hair was thin across his pate.
"Believe it or not, that's not uncommon here," he said. Then his voice changed and assumed a resigned and tired note.
"We're talking about two guys in AIM. One of them, Clayton's cousin, was in the pen in South Dakota. There's also a warrant out on him for nonsupport. Clayton's had his share of trouble, too."
"What kind?"
"Fights, carrying a concealed weapon, bullshit like that."
"Has he ever just disappeared from his home and job before?"
"Look, here's the situation. There's one bar on that road. They were in there till midnight. It's five miles from that bar up to Clayton's house. Three miles up the road they wrecked the car. Maybe they walked up to Clayton's house without waking the old lady and took off before she got up. Maybe she doesn't remember what they did. Maybe they hitched a ride with somebody after they stripped the car. I don't know what they did. You think a bear ate them?"
"No, I think you're telling me Desmarteau was an irresponsible man. His mother says otherwise. The guy had the Silver Star. What do you make of that?"
"I don't guess I'm communicating with you very well. What you don't understand is the way some people live around here. Come back on a Saturday night and take your own tour. Look, when a white person hires Indians to work for him, he hires six so maybe three will show up in the morning. They cut up their own relatives at wedding parties, they hang themselves in jail cells, they get souped up and drive into the sides of trains. Last winter three kids climbed in a boxcar with a gallon of dago red and a tube of airplane glue. The train went on up into Canada and stopped on a siding in a blizzard. I went up with the families to bring their bodies back. The RCMP said they were frozen so hard you could break their parts off with a hammer."
I asked him to show me where Clayton Desmarteau's car had gone off the road. He was irritated, but he consented and drove me down the same dirt road I had been on earlier. We passed the bar where Desmarteau and his cousin had been last seen, a wide, flat log building with neon Grain Belt and Great Falls beer signs in the windows; then we curved up the road through bare, hardpan fields and finally picked up the creek, the cottonwoods, and the sloping stands of lodgepole pine that began on the far bank. The deputy stopped his car on the shoulder and pointed.