“That was such a goddamn unlucky thing it just makes me sick,” Doris said, and bunched her shoulders and pulled her elbows in. “Of course it's not what happens, it's what you do with what happens.” She looked around at the two other bars on the block, which looked exactly like the Oil City — dark wood fronts with red bar signs in the windows. “I've got snakes in my boots right now,” she said, “which is what the Irishman says.” And she spit. She spit right in the street in the snow. I had never seen a woman do that. “Did you ever hear your dad say he had snakes in his boots when he was drinking?”
“No,” I said.
“It means you need another drink. But I don't think I can approach another bar tonight. I need to go sit in my car and regain my composition.” In the Oil City the jukebox started up, loud music bursting into the street. “Can you stand to sit with me? You can go wait in the depot if you want to.” She smiled at me, a smile that made me feel sorry for her. I thought she must've felt bad about Barney, and must've thought she was responsible for what happened.
On the platform beside the depot two men in heavy coats were standing talking, shifting from foot to foot. A switch engine moved slowly past them. I wanted to go inside there and get warm. But I said, “No, I'll come with you.”
“We don't have to stay very long,” Doris said. “I just don't want to see anybody for a while. I'll calm down in a minute or two. Okay?” She started walking up the middle of the street. “Everyday acts of heroism are appreciated,” she said as she walked, and she smiled at me again.
Doris's pink car was covered with snow and was down among the other cars that had arrived behind the depot. She started the motor right away and turned the heater up, but didn't wipe the windshield, so that we sat in the cold while the heater blew cold air on our feet, and couldn't see out, could only see the blurred lights of the depot as if they were painted on the frosted window.
Doris put her hands in her lap and shivered and stamped her feet and put her chin down and blew ice smoke. I just sat. I put my hands in my pockets and tried to be still until I could feel the air start to blow warm. The front of my coat was still wet.
“Double shivers,” Doris said, pushing her chin farther down into her coat. She looked pale, as if she'd been sick, and her face seemed small and her eyes tired. “You know when you watch TV on New Year's Day and all the soap-opera characters stop in the middle of their programs and turn to the camera and wish you Happy New Year's? Did you ever see that?”
“No,” I said, because I had never watched soap operas.
“Well, they do it. Take my word for it. But it's my favorite moment of the whole year for the soaps. They just step out for a second, then they step right back in and go on. It's wonderful. I watch it religiously.”
“We watch football that day — when we have a TV,” I said, and clenched my toes down, because I was cold and couldn't help wondering if exhaust fumes were getting inside. I tried to feel if I was getting sleepy, but I wasn't. My jaw was still stiff, and I could feel my heart beating hard in my chest as if I'd been running, and my legs were tingling above my knees.
“Is that what you care about — football?” Doris said after a while.
“No,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“You're just ready to start life now, I guess.”
“I already started it,” I said.
“You certainly did tonight.” Doris reached for the schnapps bottle, where she'd left it on the floor, and unscrewed the cap and took a drink. “I've got a sour taste,” she said. “You want to drink a toast to poor old Barney?” She handed the bottle to me, and I could smell it.
“No, thanks,” I said, and didn't take it.
“Honor the poor dead and our absent friends,” she said, then took another drink. The heater was blowing warmer now.
“Why did you say to the police that he was in the bathroom?” I said.
Doris held the bottle up to the depot lights. “I didn't mean that to happen. If they'd spoken to him in the Indian tongue, none of it would've ever taken place. They just didn't speak it. It was a matter of mutual distrust.” She said something then in what must've been the Indian tongue — something that sounded like reading words backward, not like something you heard wrong or mistook the meaning of. “Do you know what that means?”
“No,” I said.
“It means: ‘Come out with your hands up and I won't kill you,’ in the Gros Ventre language. Or it means something like that. They don't really have a word for ‘hands up.’ Barney could've understood that if he'd been a Gros Ventre.”
“Why'd you tell them that, though?” I said, because I thought Barney might've survived if he hadn't gotten trapped in there and maybe gotten scared. He could be in jail now, asleep, instead of dead.
“I didn't mean him to get shot.” Doris looked at me as if she was surprised. “Do you think I'm rotten because I did that?”
“No,” I said, though that wasn't exactly the truth.
“He murdered his wife. I'm sure about that. They'll find her someplace over in Browning tonight, beat to death or stabbed or burned up in a ditch. That's what happens. She probably had a boyfriend. The police were already looking for him, I knew that the instant he sat down beside me. People get a smell on them.” She blew more ice breath in the air. “I don't think the heater's working.” She turned the knob around and back. “Feel my hands.” She put her small hands together and shoved them toward me, and they were cold and hard-feeling. “They're my prettiest feature, I believe,” Doris said, looking at her own hands. She looked at my hands then, and touched the place where her wedding ring had worked into my knuckle. “Your skin's your nicest feature,” she said, and looked at my face. “You look like your mother, and you have your father's skin. You'll probably look like him eventually.” She pushed closer to me. “I'm so cold, baby,” she said, holding her two hands still clasped together against my chest and putting her face against my cheek. The skin on her face was cold and stiff and not very soft, and the frames of her glasses were cold too. There was a smell of sweat in her hair. “I feel numb, and you're so warm. Your face is warm.” She kept her cheek against my cheek, so I could feel that mine was warm. “You need to warm me up,” she whispered. “Are you brave enough to do that? Or are you a coward on that subject?” She put her hands around my neck and below my collar, and I didn't know what to do with my hands, though I put them around her and began to pull her close to me and felt her weight come against my weight and her legs press on my cold legs. I felt her ribs and her back — hard, the way they'd felt when we'd been on the floor in the bar. I felt her breathing under her coat, could smell on her breath what she'd just been drinking. I closed my eyes, and she said to me, almost as if she was sorry about something, “Oh, my. You've just got everything, don't you? You've just got everything.”
“What?” I said. “What is it?”
And she said, “No, no. Oh, no, no.” That was all she said. And then she didn't talk to me anymore.
ON THE TRAIN, I sat facing Doris as the empty, dark world went by outside our compartment in a snowy stream. She had washed her face and cleaned her glasses and put on perfume, and her face had color in it. She looked nice, though the front of her red dress had stains from where we'd had to lie down on the bar floor in the wet. We sat and looked out the window for a while, not talking, and I saw that she had taken off her stockings and her earrings, and that her hands were pretty. Her fingers were long and thin, and there was no polish on her fingernails. They looked natural.