So the executive committee stayed in session until the false dawn and then adjourned with little resolved. As always when I was weak and drained and absolutely burnt-out with my own failed attempts at reasoning through a problem, I turned it over to my Higher Power; then I cooked sausage and eggs for our breakfast, walked Alafair to school, made arrangements for her to stay with the baby-sitter, put my.45 and an extra clip under the truck seat, and headed over the Divide for the Blackfeet Reservation.
My fan belt broke ten miles south of the reservation, and I hitched a ride with an Indian feed grower to a filling station at a four-corners four miles up the road. I bought a new fan belt, then started walking on the shoulder of the road back toward my truck. It was a mistake. Rain clouds drifted down over the low green hills to the east, shadowing the fields and sloughs and clumps of willows and cotton-woods; suddenly the sky burst open and a hard, driving rain stung my skin and drenched my clothes in minutes. I took cover against the rock face of a small hill that the road cut through, and watched the storm shower work its way across the land. Then a paint less and battered school bus, with adhesive tape plastered on its cracked windows, with bicycles, collapsed tents, shovels, and two canoes roped to its sides and roof, came high balling around the corner like a highway-borne ghost out of the 1960s.
When the driver stopped for me I could hear screws scouring into brake shoes, the twisted exhaust pipe hammering against the frame, the engine firing as if all the spark plug leads had been deliberately crossed. The driver threw open the folding door with a long lever, and I stepped inside of what could have been a time capsule. The seats had all been torn out and replaced with hammocks, bunks, sleeping bags, a butane stove, a bathtub, cardboard boxes bursting with clothes. A woman nursed a child at her breast; a white man with Indian braids sat on the floor, carving an animal out of a soap bar; another woman was changing an infant's diapers on the backseat; a bearded man in a pony tail slept facedown in a hammock, so that his body looked like a netted fish's suspended from the ceiling. I could smell sour milk, reefer, and burnt food.
The driver had dilated blue eyes and a wild red beard, and he wore leather wristbands and a fatigue jacket open on his bare chest, which was deeply tanned and scrolled with dark blue jailhouse tattoos. He told me to sit down in a wood chair that was located next to him at the head of the aisle. Then he slammed the door shut with the lever, crunched the transmission into gear, and we careened down the road in the blowing rain. I told him where I was going, and held on to a metal rail to keep from bouncing out of the chair.
"That's a bad place to stand, man," he said.
"There's fuckers come around that curve seventy miles an hour, crazy sonsobitches in log trucks think they own the fucking road. What one of them needs is somebody to wind up a brick on a string and put it through his window. You live around here?"
"No, I'm just a visitor."
"That's a weird accent. I thought maybe you was a Canuck."
"No, I'm from Louisiana."
His eyes were curious, and they moved over my face. The bus drifted toward the shoulder.
"Say, there's a cafe up on the right. I think I'll get off and get something to eat," I said.
"I said we'd take you to your truck. You'll get there, man. Don't worry about it."
The woman who was breast-feeding the child wiped his chin with her shirt, then put his mouth on the nipple again and looked impassively out the window. Her face was without makeup, her hair dull brown, long, and stuck together on the tips.
"You keep looking in the back of the bus. Something bothering you?" the driver said.
"Not at all."
"You think we're spikers or something?"
"What?"
"Spikers. You think we go around driving railroad spikes in trees?"
"No, I don't think that."
"Cause we don't, man. A tree is a living thing, and we don't wound living things. Does that make sense to you?"
"Sure."
"We live up on the reservation. We're a family. We lead a natural way of life. We don't get in nobody's face. All we ask is nobody fuck with us. That ain't a lot to ask, is it?"
I looked out the streaked windowpanes of the folding door. The countryside was green and wet and covered with a gray mist.
"Is it?" he said.
"No, it's not."
"Cause a lot of people won't let you alone. They're at war with the earth, man. That's their fucking problem. You don't do it their way, they try to kick a two-by-four up your ass."
The ride was becoming increasingly more uncomfortable. I figured it was three more miles to my truck.
"Do you know a girl named Darlene American Horse on the reservation?" I said.
"I don't know her."
"She's from there."
"That might be, man, but I don't know her. Check with my old lady." He nodded backward toward the woman with the child at her breast.
I asked her about Darlene. She wore large wire-rimmed glasses, and she looked at me quietly with no expression in her face.
"I don't know her," she said.
"You've lived there long?"
"A year."
"I see."
"It's a Blackfeet reservation," she said. Her speech had that flat quality of quasi-omniscience that you hear in women who have reached a certain gray plateau in their lives from which they know they'll never escape.
"Yes?" I said.
"They're all Blackfeet. The Sioux live over in South Dakota."
"I don't understand what you mean."
"American Horse is a Sioux name," she said.
"He fought with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse against the whites."
It's her married name, I thought.
"You know how they bought it, too?" the driver said.
"Dealing with the Man under a flag of truce. They went into the fort and got their asses shot. That's what happens when you trust those fuckers."
My God, why didn't I see it, I thought.
"Hey, you're looking a little gray," the driver said.
"What?"
"You want some food? We got extra," he said.
"No. Thank you. Did y'all know a guy by the name of Clayton Desmarteau?"
"You better believe it. Same outfit as me. First Cav."
"Did he have a sister?"
"What d'you mean 'did'?"
"You haven't seen him around in a while, have you?"
He thought for a moment.
"I guess not," he said.
"Do you know if he had a sister?"
"I don't know nothing about his family. He don't live on the reservation. He used to come on it to organize for AIM against them oil and gas companies. They're gonna mess up the East Front, try to build pipelines and refineries and all kinds of shit." ' "What color were his eyes?"
"His eyes?" He turned and grinned at me through his red beard. His teeth were missing in back.
"I look like I go around looking at guys' eyes?"
"Come on, were they turquoise?"
"What the fuck I know about a guy's eyes? What kind of stuff are you into, man?"
"He's a policeman," the woman with the child said.
"Is that for real?" the driver said.
"No."
"Then why you asking all these questions? You trying to give some shit to Clay ton's people?" The hair on his forearms grew like red metal wires on the edges of his leather wristbands.
"No."
"Cause the Indians don't need no more hassle. These are native people, man, I mean it was their place, and whites been taking a dump on them for two hundred years."