Nate felt a sudden dark pang as he looked over the cemetery when he thought of Alisha, his lover. He had left her body on scaffolding of his own construction just two months before. He hadn’t been back to the canyon where she’d been killed. He’d never go back.
All that remained of her except for his memories was the braided strand of her hair tied to the barrel of his .500 Wyoming Express revolver.
As Nate slid down the roads in the dark, he glanced at still-life scenes of the residents through their windows. For some reason, the Indians seldom closed their curtains. He saw families gathered for dinner, people watching television, and in the lit-up opening of a single-car garage, a pair of young men in bloodied camo skinning a mule deer.
Alice Thunder’s faded white bungalow was located just off Black Coal Road, and Nate cruised by it without slowing. Muted lights were on inside, and her GMC Envoy was parked under a carport on the side of her house. She lived alone there, and it appeared she didn’t have company.
He did a three-point turn in the road and came back and turned onto a weedy two-track behind her house and parked where his Jeep couldn’t be seen from the road.
Nate padded up the broken concrete walk to her back entrance and tapped on the metal screen door. Dogs inside yipped and howled, but through the sound he could feel her heavy footfalls approach. She didn’t turn on the porch light but stood behind the storm door and squinted at him. Small mixed-breed dogs boiled around and through her stout legs.
“Is that you, Nate Romanowski?” she asked.
He nodded and leaned his head against the peeling doorframe. His legs felt suddenly weak from his injury.
“If I invite you in this house, am I committing a federal crime?”
“Maybe,” Nate said.
She yelled at her dogs to get away from the door, then cracked it open. He smelled a waft of warm air mixed with the smell of baking bread and wet dog hair.
“Get in here before someone sees you,” she said. “You’re hurt, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, letting her lead him into the kitchen. Four or five dogs sniffed at his pants and boots. Alice Thunder was not a hugger or a smiler or an open enthusiast.
“Do you want to sit?” she asked, gesturing toward the table. She’d not yet set it for her evening meal.
“I brought you some ducks,” he said, handing over the burlap sack.
“I love duck,” she said.
“I remember you saying that. Careful, they’re live.”
“I’ll twist their heads off in a minute,” she said, ushering him to the table. “We can eat two of them. Do you want to eat duck?”
He sat heavily. His shoulder pounded at him, each pulse of blood brought a stab of pain. “Duck would be good,” he said.
Alice Thunder was short and heavy, and her face was the shape and size of a hubcap. She had thick short fingers and a flat large nose and warm brown eyes. As the receptionist for the Indian high school for twenty-two years, she knew everyone and everyone knew her. She’d befriended Nate’s lost lover Alisha when she’d moved back to the reservation to teach, and after Alisha’s grandmother died, Alice Thunder had stepped in. Alisha’s high school basketball photo was balanced on the top of her bookcase. Nate knew the two of them were related in some way, but he wasn’t sure of the details. It was often the case on the reservation.
Her house was small, simple, and very lived-in. There were few pictures on the walls and a noticeable lack of gewgaws. Unlike some of the other Indian homes Nate had been invited into, there were no romantic portrayals of noble Plains Indians or rugs depicting maidens or warriors. Only the doll made of bent, packed straw and faded leather clothing on a shelf hinted at sentimentality. She’d once told Nate that her grandfather, an important tribal elder, had made it for her when she was a child.
“First I’ll kill the ducks,” Alice said, “then I’ll see what’s wrong with you. And I’m telling you now I want to eat most of the duck fat. I hope you don’t want any.”
“I already know what’s wrong with me,” Nate said. “I just need some help with the dressing. And you can have all the duck fat.”
“So why are you bleeding?”
“I got shot with an arrow.”
“Where’s the arrow?”
“I pulled it out.”
Alice Thunder paused at the back door with the sack of ducks and looked Nate over slowly. He couldn’t tell whether she was amused at him or puzzled, or both. She had a way of making her face still while her eyes probed.
“Did you think an Indian woman would be able to help you more than the docs at the clinic because you were shot with an arrow?”
He said, “I can’t go to the clinic.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “You’re an outlaw, I almost forgot.” Then she bumped the back door open with her big hip and went outside to kill and clean the birds.
The little dogs gathered at the back door to whine and watch.
He sat without saying anything when she came back into the kitchen with three bloody duck breasts. She dipped them into a bowl of buttermilk, dredged them in flour and cornmeal, and dropped them into a cast-iron skillet bubbling with melted lard. She covered bits of bright-yellow fat in the flour as well and dropped them into the lard to create rich cracklings.
“Take off your shirt and let me take a look at your wound,” she said over her shoulder. “Was it an Indian who shot you?”
“No,” Nate said. “A redneck.”
“There are Indian rednecks.”
“This wasn’t one of them,” he said, rising painfully and reaching up with his right hand to unzip his vest.
Alice never said “natives” or “Native Americans.” She always said “Indians.”
While the duck breasts sizzled, she turned around and put her hands on her hips and closed one eye as she observed the bloody compresses he’d taped on himself.
“Sloppy,” she said. “But keep it on until after we eat. Then I’ll change it.”
Nate looked away as she stripped the old bandage and bathed the wounds with alcohol swabs and taped them.
“Does it sting?” she asked.
“It does,” he said, and chinned toward her ticking woodstove. “Make sure to burn the old bandages and everything you’re using to clean me up. Don’t leave a trace of it in your house.”
She paused, then continued cleaning. “You don’t want to leave your DNA?”
“That’s right.”
“But you’ve been here in the past. I can’t get rid of everything you might have touched.”
“You don’t need to,” he said. “Just the blood.”
“I don’t think there’s any infection,” she said, shuffling her feet so she could get a good look at the holes in front and back, “but I’ve got some antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs I’ll send with you. I’m not a doctor. You may need to go see one.”
He grunted his thanks. Finally, he asked, “Don’t you want to know what happened?”
She said, “I think I know. I heard about the boat they found in Saddlestring. Everybody’s heard about that.”
“I suppose so.”
“There is one thing I want to know,” she said.
He waited.
“Why did you come to me? Why didn’t you go to see your friend, the game warden, and his wife?”
“Too risky,” Nate said.
“But you don’t mind risking me?” she asked. It was a flat statement, and not accusatory.