"You mean you live off presents?"
"I didn’t say they were small presents." She smiled slyly.
He frowned. "Just give me some idea. I want to be fair."
He was such a ... man. Things had to be decided, nailed down and certified. He probably wanted to have each of them say it and then shake on it, give her hand one of those single, hard shakes. She turned toward him and said, "Okay, I’ll tell you how it’s going to work. When this is over, you’re going to sleep for a day or so, and then you’ll take a week or two getting used to a new place, and then a month getting used to being somebody different. One day—maybe then, maybe a year from then—you’ll sit down and think about how it happened, and you’ll send me a present."
She let him think about that, and stared past him at the river. The road was good and fast, through the quiet old towns that had grown up along the Niagara in the 1790s, after the Revolutionary War. From the beginning of time, all of this land had been a place where people lived. As a little girl she had walked along the river and found arrowheads, and they were still finding them, three hundred years after the metal brought in by the fur trade had replaced them.
As they crossed city lines, a stranger like Felker probably didn’t even know he wasn’t in Deganawida anymore, because the distinctions between these little towns were subtle and had to do with things that had happened through time. They weren’t boundaries, they were stories.
As they passed the long grassy strip on the way out of North Tonawanda and the brush began again, she caught herself watching for the marker along the river, where the river widened and she could see past the tip of Grand Island. The marker was old, almost invisible thirty feet from the road in the grove of trees that had grown up around it, so she tried to look fast, but it was too dark to spot it. That didn’t matter, because what was worth looking at was something that couldn’t be seen with the eyes anymore.
On this spot one summer in the 1670s the Frenchman La Salle had built the Griffon, the first ship to sail the Great Lakes. It must have looked strange to the Seneca staring at it from the dense forest beyond the stumps of the trees the Frenchmen had cut for lumber. The keel and ribs of the half-finished hull would have loomed just at the shore like the skeleton of an enormous fish, and the Seneca, who were still invincible in this part of the world, must have been more curious than threatened.
Beyond the town named after La Salle, the road grew into a parkway that took them past the congestion that had grown up around the Falls. Hennepin, the Jesuit priest on La Salle’s expedition, had been the first white man to blunder out of the woods and lay eyes on them, so people remembered his name. That had always struck her as funny. Here were these falls, well over a half mile wide and 180 feet high, so loud you could barely hear anything else and throwing big clouds of mist far into the sky that you could see for miles. In the 1670s every Indian from Minnesota to the Atlantic knew all about them, because they were the only serious interruption in the ancient trade routes. And those were the days when gods still had addresses. Heno the Thunderer lived in a cave right behind that wall of water.
As they continued on up the parkway, she glanced at Felker again. He was doing pretty well, considering the fact that his whole life had been destroyed in a couple of days and he had been on the run ever since. There was no whining, no questions she couldn’t answer. She supposed that if he had lasted eight years as a cop, the least he could be was tough. She had felt a little alarm when she had seen that he had searched her room, but he was a cop and that was the way cops were trained to find out who they were dealing with. And he had, at least once, been in the position she was in. He had seen a harmless little guy like Harry, with enemies closing in on him, and he had thought about it and decided to save him. She would do her best for him.
She tried to prepare herself. This was one of the hard ones, and she was tired. It was one thing when two social workers were at a convention and they were sitting at a bar in a city strange to both of them and confiding in each other, and one of them said she had a case that was horrible and the system just couldn’t be made to work, and the other one looked down into the bottom of her glass and said, "I know a woman..." But it had long ago grown into something else. She had been out six times in the past year. She forced herself to forget what had gone before. She needed to keep thinking ahead.
She could see they were only a couple of miles from Ridge Road, where the Tuscarora Reservation started. She looked at the signs, watching for the garage, built outside the border of the reservation so people couldn’t watch its proprietor too closely. Finally, she saw it and said, "Pull in up here, away from the gas pumps." Felker drove the car up onto the cracked blacktop and kept the engine running.
"Want me to fill the tank?" he asked.
"No," she said. "Just wait for me." Jane walked to the little lighted building beside the garage and went inside, away from the sounds of the cars flashing by on the road.
The man sitting on the stool behind the counter was watching a small television set next to the cash register. He smiled when he looked up to acknowledge that he had seen her, and his eyes returned to the television set. He said to it, "Hi, Janie."
"Hello, Cliff," she answered. "Nice night."
"You come to watch the game with me?" Clifford Tarkington smiled his special smile, and his broad Tuscarora face seemed to widen and his dark eyes narrowed, but his mouth didn’t move. "Big night. The Indians are playing the Yankees."
The Tuscarora all had names like Wallace or Clifford or Clinton, just the way the Seneca did. The Seneca had never given children the names of Christian saints. The Mohawk at Caughnawaga, on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence, had been called the Praying Indians. There had never been any praying Seneca, and if there had been any praying Tuscarora, they would have gotten cured of it in 1712. That was the year when a Swiss mercenary had led an army of South Carolina colonists and enemy tribes to take their homeland in North Carolina. The winners had feasted on the body of a dead Tuscarora and then sold their prisoners at the slave markets. The survivors had been taken in by the Seneca and given the village of Ga-a-noga to live in.
"I came to relieve you of one of those old junkers you keep around here," said Jane. "I can see you need the space."
"I might be able to part with something elegant yet understated," said Clifford. "What kind?"
"Mid-size," she said. "Nothing eye-catching, not just out of the box."
"But not too old either?" he guessed. "I got a ’ninety-two Ford. Cherry, runs good, low miles."
"What color? I don’t want one of those cars put together in the Ford plant in Hamilton with Canadian two-tone colors on it so everybody thinks I just came out of the woods."
"Pearl-gray. Hell, they’re all gray now, or white. Five a week if it comes back the same color."