"What about Sally Dee?"
"You give me the motive, you put him in the house, I'll cut the warrant."
"You're making a big mistake, Sheriff."
"Tell me how. Fill me in on that, please."
"You're taking the easy choice, you're letting them slide. The Dios sense weakness in you, they'll eat you alive."
He opened a deep drawer in the bottom of his desk and took out a baton. The layers of black paint were chipped, and the grip had been grooved in a lathe and drilled to hold a leather wrist loop. He dropped it loudly on the desktop.
"The guy I replaced gave me this the day I took office," he said.
"He told me, "Everybody doesn't have to go to jail." And there's days when maybe I got that kind of temptation. I see Dio in the supermarket and I shudder. This is good country. He doesn't belong here. But I don't bust heads, I don't let my deputies do it, either. If that don't sit right with somebody, that's their problem." He mashed out his cigarette without looking at me.
"I guess I'll be on my way," I said, and stood up. Then, as an afterthought, I said, "Did the autopsy show anything else unusual?"
"Not to me or the medical examiner."
"What else?"
"I think we've ended this discussion."
"Come on, Sheriff, I'm almost out of your day."
He glanced again at his clipboard.
"What she had for supper, traces of semen in the vagina."
I took a breath and looked out the window at the electric blueness of the lake in the sunlight and the low green hills and pine trees in the distance. Then I pinched my eyes and the bridge of my nose with my fingers and put on my sunglasses.
"You were on the money about Cletus," I said.
"What are you talking about?"
"He didn't do it. He's impotent. She was raped before she was murdered." (He sucked his teeth, smiled to himself, shook his head slightly, and opened his newspaper to the sports page.
"You'll have to excuse me," he said.
"It's the only chance I get to read it."
I found out from the medical examiner's office that Darlene's family had picked up the body that morning and that the funeral was the next afternoon on the Blackfeet Reservation. The next day was Saturday, so Alafair drove across the mountains with me to Du-puyer, on the south end of the reservation. I found out from the local newspaper that the service was to be held at a Baptist church up on the Marias River at two o'clock. We had lunch in a clapboard cafe that was built onto the side of a grease-stained, cinder-block filling station. I had little appetite and couldn't finish my plate, and I stared out the window at the dusty street while Alafair ate her hamburger. The bars were doing a good business. Rusted pickup trucks and oversized jalopy gas burners were parked at an angle to the curb, and sometimes whole families sat listlessly in them while the old man was inside the juke joint. People who looked both devastated and broke from the night before sat on the curb, their attention fixed on nothing, their mouths open like those of silent, newly hatched birds.
Then I saw Alafair watching them, her eyes squinting, as though a camera lens were opening momentarily in her mind.
"What do you see, little guy?" I said.
"Are those Indians?"
"Sure."
"They're like me?"
"Well, not exactly, but maybe you're part Indian. An Indian Cajun from Bayou Teche," I said.
"What language they talk, Dave?"
"English, just like you and me."
"They don't know no Spanish words?"
"No, I'm afraid not."
I saw a question mark, then a troubled look slip into her face.
"What's on your mind, little guy?" I asked.
"The people in my village. They sat in front of the clinic. Like those people there." Her eyes were looking at an elderly man and woman on the curb. The woman was fat and wore army shoes and dirty athletic socks, and her knees were splayed open so that you could see up her dress.
"Dave, they ain't got soldiers here, have they?"
"You get those thoughts out of your head," I said.
"This is a good country, a safe place. You have to believe what I tell you, Alf. What happened in your village doesn't happen here."
She put her hamburger on her plate and lowered her eyes. The corners of her mouth were turned downward. Her bangs hung in a straight line across her tan forehead.
"It did to Annie," she said.
I looked away from her face and felt myself swallow. The sky had clouded, the wind had come up and was blowing the dust in the street, and the sun looked like a thin yellow wafer in the south.
The funeral was in a wood-frame church whose white paint had blistered and peeled into scales. All the people inside the church were Indians, people with braided hair, work-seamed faces, hands that handled lumber without gloves in zero weather, except for Clete and Dixie Lee, who sat in a front pew to the side of the casket. It was made of black metal, lined and cushioned with white silk, fitted with gleaming brass handles. Her hair was black against the silk, her face rouged, her mouth red as though she had just had a drink of cold water. She had been dressed in a doeskin shirt, and a beaded necklace with a purple glass bird on it, wings outstretched in flight, rested on her breast. Only the top portion of the casket was opened, so that her forearms were not visible.
The skin of Clete's face was shiny and stretched tight on the bone. He looked like a boiled ham inside his blue suit. I could see his cigarettes tight against his shirt pocket; his big wrists stuck out of his coat sleeves; his collar had popped loose under the knot of his tie; the strap of his nylon shoulder holster made a hard line across his back. His eyes had the glare of a man staring at a match flame.
I didn't hear, or rather listen to, much of what the preacher said. He was a gaunt and nervous man who read from the Old Testament and made consoling remarks in the best fashion he was probably capable of, but the rain that began clicking against the roof and windows, sweeping in a lighted sheet across the hardpan fields and river basin, was a more accurate statement of the feelings that were inside me.
I made a peculiar prayer. It's a prayer that sometimes I say, one that is perhaps self-serving, but because I believe that God is not limited by time and space as we are, I believe perhaps that He can influence the past even though it has already happened. So sometimes when I'm alone, especially at night, in the dark, and I begin to dwell on the unbearable suffering that people probably experienced before their deaths, I ask God to retroactively relieve their pain, to be with them in mind and body, to numb their senses, to cool whatever flame licked at their eyes in their final moments. I said that prayer now for Darlene. Then I said it again for my wife, Annie.
The cemetery, a windswept and weed-grown square of land enclosed by wire strung between concrete posts, was located a short distance from the edge of the river bottoms. The Marias basin was strange country; the bluffs and the gradated channelings of the river looked as if they had been formed with a putty knife, the clay and silt layered and smoothed in ascending plateaus. Even the colors were strange. The eroded bluffs on the far side of the basin were gray and yellow and streaked with a burnt orange that looked like rust. The water in the main channel was high and brown, and leafless cottonwood limbs floated in it. The sky was sealed with gray clouds from horizon to horizon; in the thin rain the countryside looked as if it were poisoned by the infusion of toxic waste. This was the place Darlene had told me about, the site of what was called the Baker massacre of 1870. On this afternoon, except for a solitary purple dogwood blooming by the cemetery fence, it looked as though the spring had never touched the land here, as though this place had been predestined as moonscape, a geographical monument to what was worst in us.