"I'll get off here," I said.
"You bothered by something I said?"
"Not in the least, partner. The rain's stopping now, and I need to walk. My truck's just over the rise."
"Cause we got no beef with nobody. We thought we were helping you out. You gotta watch out for a lot of people in this state. I ain't blowing gas, Jack. It's the times," he said.
I stood on the side of the road in the damp, sunlit air, a green pasture behind me, and watched the bus disappear over the rise. My truck was still a mile down the road.
The old woman was hoeing in a rocky vegetable patch behind her house. She wore laced boots, a man's oversized wool trousers, and a khaki shirt, and a shawl was wrapped around her head. In the distance the wet land sloped toward the Divide, where the mountains thrust up violently against the sky, their sheer cliffs now purple with shadow. Up high it had snowed, and the ponderosa was white on the crests and through the saddles. The old woman glanced sideways at me when I opened her wood gate and walked into the yard, then continued chopping weeds in the rows as though I were not there.
"Darlene American Horse is your daughter, isn't she?" I asked.
She didn't answer. Her white hair bunched out under her shawl, and the corners of her eyes were creased with concentration on her work.
"Mrs. Desmarteau, believe me, I'm a friend," I said.
"I want to find out what happened to your son. I want to help Darlene, if I can."
She thudded and raked the hoe in the dirt and stones and notched out weeds between the cabbages without ever touching a leaf.
"I think Darlene lives among some bad people. I want to get her away from them," I said.
She pulled back the door of an abandoned, dilapidated privy, put away the hoe and took out a shovel. In the back of the privy a calico cat was nursing her Utter on top of a pile of gunnysacks. Mrs. Desmarteau laid the shovel across a wheelbarrow loaded with manure and began pushing it toward the edge of the vegetable patch. I took the handles out of her hands and wheeled it across the dirt yard, then began spreading the manure at the end of each row. The clouds were purple on top of the mountains, and snow was blowing off the edges of the canyons. Behind me I heard the plastic sheets of insulation rattling on her windows.
"She's your daughter, isn't she?" I said again.
"Are you one of the FBI?" she said.
"No, I'm not. But I used to be a policeman. I'm not any longer. I'm just a man who's in some trouble."
For the first time her eyes looked directly at mine.
"If you know Darlene, why are you asking me if she's my daughter?" she said.
"Why are you here and asking that question? You don't make sense."
Then I realized that perhaps I had underestimated this elderly lady. And like most people who consider themselves educated, I had perhaps presumed that an elderly person like someone who is foreign-speaking or unschooled could not understand the complexities of my life and intellect.
"I didn't relate the name to yours," I said.
"But I should have. She wears her brother's First Cav army jacket, doesn't she? She also has turquoise eyes. Your family name is French-Canadian, not Indian. Darlene and Clayton's father was part white, wasn't he?"
"Why do you say she lives among bad people?"
"The man she stays with isn't bad, but the people he works for are. I believe she should come back home and not stay with these people on the lake."
"You've been there?"
"Yes."
"Are they criminals?"
"Some of them are."
Her hand slipped down over mine and took the shovel. Her palm was rough and edged with callus. She was motionless, the shovel propped against her wool trousers, her eyes fixed on the jagged outline of the mountains against the sky. The clouds on the high peaks looked full of snow.
"Are they the ones that killed my boy?" she said.
"Maybe they were involved in some way. I don't know."
"Why is she with them?"
"She thinks she can find out what happened to Clayton and his cousin. She worked in a bar. Where is it?"
"Five miles down the road. You passed it when you came here."
"Do you know a man named Dixie Lee Pugh?"
"No."
"Do you see Darlene?"
"She comes one day a week and brings groceries."
"Talk to her, Mrs. Desmarteau. She's a good girl. Between the two of us we'll get her back home."
I saw her breathe through her mouth. Her lips moved without sound.
"What?" I said.
"Clayton never did no harm to anybody. They said he carried a gun. If he did, they made him. They wouldn't let him alone. They were afraid of him because he was brave."
It was turning cold. I helped her finish spreading manure in her vegetable patch, then said good-bye and latched the wooden gate behind me. The sky was overcast and gray now. She looked small and alone with her hoe, in her dirt yard, in the wind that blew down off the backbone of the world.
I drove back down the dirt road and stopped at the place where Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin had put their car in the ditch. Did Mapes and Vidrine kidnap and drive them someplace, or did it all happen here? I asked myself. I jumped across the stream that bordered the far side of the road and walked up the slope into the lodgepole pine. The ground was thick with pine needles. Chipmunks played in the rocks, and red squirrels chased each other around the tree trunks. I walked about a quarter of a mile through the pines, then intersected a trace of a road that somebody had used at one time to dump garbage. The road dead-ended in a pile of rusted box springs, tin cans, mattresses, beer and wine bottles, and plastic soap containers. I went on another four hundred yards or so through the pines, then the trunks thinned and I came out on a tea-colored stream coursing over gray rocks. The stream cut along the edge of a low, rock-faced hill that rose abruptly into box elder, wild rosebushes, and thick scrub brush. I walked up and down the stream bank, crossed the sculpted tracks of deer, the delicate impressions of turkey and grouse in the wet sand, found the rotted, soft logs of an old cabin, tripped over the half-buried remains of a wood stove, and flushed a white-tailed buck that must have had ten points on his rack; but I saw nothing that was out of the ordinary or that could be helpful in discovering the fate of Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin.
Finally I came to a spring that flowed out of the hillside on the far bank of the stream. The spring dripped over rocks, and had eroded away the dirt and exposed the gnarled roots of small pines on the hillside. The water drained over a wide area of wet pine needles and black leaves, and the ground there was spongy and bursting with mushrooms and dark fern. I could smell the water, the coolness of the stone, the dank humus, the exposed tree roots that trailed like brown cobweb in the current. It smelled like the coulee on my property back in Louisiana. I wondered when I would be going back there, or if in fact I would be able to. Because I had decided that if I did not develop a better defense than the one I presently had, I was not going to deliver myself up for trial and a sure jolt in Angola pen.
I was tired. After hiking back to my truck, I drove up the road in the gray light between the wet fields, then I glanced in the side mirror at a black Willys Jeepster, a remake of the classic model manufactured right after World War II. Because the road was wet and there was no dust, I could see the driver's tall outline behind the steering wheel. Then he accelerated and closed on my rear bumper, as though he wanted to see my reflection in the side mirror or some detail of my pickup the dealer's name, a bumper sticker that read Mulate's, Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.
Up ahead was the wide, squat log tavern where Clayton Des marteau and his cousin had probably spent the last night of their lives, where Darlene had waited tables, and where she had probably met Dixie Lee Pugh while he was in a drunken stupor, saved him from getting his head kicked in, and driven him over the mountains to Sally Dio's on Flathead Lake. It was starting to mist, and a purple and orange neon war bonnet was lighted on the roof against the gray sky.