Читать книгу Justice - Larry Watson - Страница 7

Outside the Jurisdiction

(1924)

WHEN Tommy Salter, Lester Hoenig, and the Hayden brothers left Bentrock, Montana, at dawn, only a gentle snow—flakes fat as bits of white cloth—fell from the November sky. But the spaces between those flakes filled in fast, and soon it became impossible to see more than fifty yards down the highway. Where the road dipped or was sheltered from the wind, snow lay so thick on the road that the bottom of the Model T, even with its high clearance, scraped the tops of drifts.

“We get high-centered,” Tommy Salter said from the backseat, “we’re done for. We ain’t going nowhere.”

Frank Hayden, the driver, said, “We’re all right.” He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and kept the car aimed for the tracks made by the last car that had passed that way.

“You bring a shovel?” Lester asked.

Frank glanced quickly at his brother then shook his head.

Wesley Hayden tilted his head until it rested against the window’s icy glass. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the car’s slow, wobbly motion down the highway. Goddamn, he had wanted so badly for this trip to go well. Next fall, Frank, two years older than Wesley, would be in college, seven hundred miles away at the University of Minnesota. This could be the last time the brothers took this trip together for years. For years? Wesley reconsidered. This could be the last time. Ever.

“Anyone want to turn around? Go back?” Frank asked.

Tommy laughed. “Where the hell you going to turn around?”

“It could let up,” Lester offered. “Down the road. I guess I’m for pushing on.”

Wesley kept his eyes closed. “It isn’t going to let up.”

“You know that, do you?” Frank asked his brother.

“You know it too,” Wesley answered.

“We ain’t going to freeze to death anyway,” said Tommy.

Wesley knew Tommy was referring to the three bottles of bootleg whiskey, purchased for them by Dale Paris, a hired hand on the Hayden ranch.

“What’s the nearest town?” Frank asked.

Lester asked, “Are we in North Dakota?”

“We’ve been in North Dakota since breakfast,” Tommy answered.

“You know damn well the closest town,” Wesley said to his brother. “McCoy.”

Frank nodded. “If it doesn’t let up I’m thinking we’ll head for McCoy. That’s got to be less than fifty miles.”

The plan had been to leave their home in northeast Montana, cross over into North Dakota, and head south. Eventually they would set up camp on the banks of the Little Missouri and from there hunt the red rocky bluffs, the dark wooded draws, and the sagebrush flats of the Dakota Badlands. They had hunted that region for years, and just last year they returned with four deer and over fifty pheasant and partridge. Lester had even shot a coyote. Of course last year the weather had been much different—three days of sunshine and uncommonly warm temperatures.

“I don’t hear you,” Frank said, cupping his ear to the group.

“What’s in McCoy?” asked Lester. “Anything?”

Tommy laughed. “It’s right off the reservation. You know what’s in McCoy.”

Lester looked down the road. “It sure as hell ain’t letting up.”

“What about you?” Frank asked Wesley.

“Do what you want. You don’t need my permission.” When they were first planning this trip, Wesley had hoped that he and his brother would go alone. But Frank invited friends, and now Wesley not only had to share his brother, but since Lester and Tommy were Frank’s age, Wesley was stuck being the youngest as well. He was the little brother; he didn’t have any influence with this group. Hell, Wesley had hoped they’d actually hunt. Just hunt. But this snow covered that hope too.

Frank said to Wesley, “I’m not taking anyone where they don’t want to go. If you don’t want to go to McCoy, say the word.”

“I’ll camp out in the snow,” Lester said. “Don’t bother me.”

“Go to McCoy,” Wesley said to his brother. “Fuck if I care.

Frank took his hand from the steering wheel and slapped his brother gently on the arm. “Hey—it’s outside the jurisdiction, right?”

Outside the jurisdiction. How many times had Wesley heard his brother use that phrase? They were the sons of Julian Hayden, the sheriff of Mercer County, Montana, and that fact made Frank’s and Wesley’s lives both easier and more difficult. They grew up knowing that if they ever got into trouble, their father, proud and protective of his sons, would bail them out. Yet knowing this, they felt they had to behave so it wouldn’t seem as though they were taking advantage of their father’s position. Only when they got out of town, out of the county, out of the jurisdiction, did they feel as though they could be other than the sons of Julian Hayden.

“Where we going to stay?” Lester asked. “I don’t mind sleeping in the car if we can find someplace to park it out of the wind. Shit, I’ll sleep in the tent for that matter.”

“We’ll get a room at the hotel,” said Frank.

“They got a hotel?” asked Lester.

“Hotel or a boardinghouse. I forget which.”

“It’s a hotel,” Tommy said. “I think.”

“You think they’ll give us a room?” Lester asked.

“Hell, yes,” Frank replied. “Why not? If we can pay they’ll give us a room.”

Wesley understood that Lester’s true concern was over money. A good many families in Mercer County were poor, but the Hoenigs were worse off than most. Their family was large (Wesley could never keep track——were there nine or ten kids?), and whether it was the land it sat on or Mr. Hoenig’s incompetence Wesley never knew for sure, but their farm, year in and year out, was one of the least productive in the area. Lester tried to cover their poverty by pretending not to care about what other boys cared about—new shotguns or rifles, cars, horses, pretty girls, baseball gloves. Frank and Wesley’s mother had stopped giving Frank’s hand-me-downs to Wesley; instead she had Frank give them to the shorter, slighter Lester.

“Me and Frank will pay for the room,” Wesley offered.

“You sure?” Lester said.

Frank picked up on his brother’s suggestion. “The trip’s our idea. Hell, McCoy’s my idea. It’s only fair.”

“Okay by me,” agreed Tommy.

“I still wonder if they’ll give us a room,” worried Lester.

“Frank’s right,” Tommy said. “If we got the money, we’re in. That’s McCoy.”

Frank shook his head. “Pop says it’s not as wide open as it used to be.”

“That’s not what you said last summer,” Tommy replied.

“What?” Lester asked. “What about last summer?”

“We had a baseball tournament over there,” Tommy said.

Wesley interrupted. “It’s hardly even cattle country around there now. Fucking wheat farmers.”

“Where were you?” Frank asked Lester. “How come you didn’t play?”

“Working,” Lester answered. “We was bringing in a crop of hay. Trying to. What there was.” He turned back to Tommy. “What happened in McCoy?”

Tommy leaned toward Frank. “You want me to tell him?”

Frank shrugged.

“How long has it been since we saw another car?” Wesley asked.

“You never see anybody on this road,” Frank said. “Even when the weather’s good.”

“You wonder why they put the money in a road nobody uses,” Wesley said.

Tommy tapped his fingers over his mouth in an imitation war chant. “Woo-woo-woo-woo! You didn’t hear? Frank got himself a little Indian gal in McCoy last summer. Got her good.”

Tommy had stolen a box of cigars from Douglas’s Rexall before they left, and he and Lester had been smoking since they drove out of town. The car was drafty, but cigar smoke still gathered so thickly in the backseat that when Wesley turned around it looked as though Tommy and Lester sat in their own little blizzard. Ahead or behind, Wesley thought, you can’t see a goddamn thing.

Lester leaned toward Frank. “Did you force her? Did you have to force her?”

Frank’s laugh sounded like a bark in the car’s close quarters. “Where did you get an idea like that? Force her. Such language. You read that somewhere?”

Tommy was laughing too. “Shit, she followed him around with her skirt over her head practically. She let him fuck her right by the ball field. In somebody’s truck, wasn’t it?”

“How come I never heard about this?” asked Lester.

Wesley wiped his nose on the back of his glove. “You should’ve. Seemed like everybody in the whole school knew about it.”

“Even Loretta?” asked Lester. Loretta was Loretta Gerber, the girl with whom Frank was supposed to be going steady.

Frank’s laughter stopped. “She better not. If Loretta found out, I’d know someone was telling tales out of school. Someone would get his ass whipped.”

“Hey, she ain’t going to hear anything from me,” said Tommy. “But it’s hard to keep a secret in Bentrock.”

Frank’s smile returned. “I don’t know about that.”

Wesley turned away from his brother and waited. He thought he knew what would come next.

Frank said, “You haven’t got the facts quite right.”

Wesley recognized those words as the same ones that came often from their father’s mouth. When asked about a crime in the county, their father loved to let people speculate on the incident and then to correct them, smiling slyly, with the phrase, “You haven’t got the facts quite right.”

“I’m surprised at you, Tommy,” said Frank. “What with you being there and all. I didn’t fuck that little Indian girl.”

“The hell.”

“I’m telling you.”

Lester punched Tommy in the shoulder. “Now who’s telling stories.”

Tommy cocked his fist but didn’t deliver a blow. “Goddamn it!”

“That’s right,” said Frank. “I didn’t just fuck that little squaw.... I fucked her mama too.”

Tommy fell back laughing. He kicked the back of the seat so hard Wesley could feel Tommy’s boots right through the springs and the horsehair.

“No shit?” said Lester. “The both of them? How did you.... Did you do ‘em at the same time?”

“At the same time, Lester? Fellow would have to have two peckers to do that. Besides, no mama and her daughter are that close.”

“What did the old one look like?” Tommy wanted to know.

“She wasn’t old. She was actually pretty young to have a daughter that age.” Frank took one hand off the steering wheel and rested it on the gearshift. “She wasn’t bad looking. But she was on the plump side. Like squaws can get.”

“Jesus,” said Tommy. “The both of them.”

“It wasn’t easy. Cost me three bottles of Ole Norgaard’s homemade wine. One for the daugher, two for her mama.”

When Wesley heard that he remembered a day the previous summer when he and his brother had ridden with their mother out to Ole Norgaard’s place, a little tarpaper shack just outside Bentrock. Ole, everyone agreed, had a gift for growing fruits and vegetables, and even people who had their own gardens bought produce from Ole. He also made homemade beer and wine, and a good many men in the county swore on the superiority of Ole’s products. Once Prohibition went into effect, their father made no effort to close down Ole. Furthermore, if any local man wanted to make a little home brew or buy a couple bottles of gin when he was in Minneapolis and bring it home with him, the sheriff would not object. However, if an outsider tried to come into the county and operate a still or if someone began to run large quantities of bootleg whiskey down from Canada, the sheriff would stop that in a minute. He did not object to a man taking a drink— he was as fond of Ole Norgaard’s beer as anyone—but he would not tolerate an outsider making a profit on the county’s residents.

On that day, Frank and Wesley waited by the car while their mother went out to Ole’s garden with him. Ole allowed his best customers—and certainly Mrs. Hayden qualified—to pick out their vegetables while they were still on the vine or the stalk or in the ground. Mrs. Hayden had come for sweet corn, and Ole would find a dozen of the best ears for her.

Once they were certain they weren’t being watched, Frank and Wesley went inside Ole’s shack. The interior was dim, musty, and cluttered with piles of yellowing Swedish newspapers, rows of ripening vegetables, and stacks of wooden crates. The boys knew exactly what they were looking for and found it quickly—the case of bottles of dandelion wine, their corks covered with sealing wax. Frank and Wesley each took two bottles—they had agreed that taking more would somehow escalate their crime into something that would deserve severe punishment if they were caught.

Weeks passed and no occasion arose that Wesley considered fitting to bring out his bottles of wine. Then the baseball team—of which his brother was the star—went to McCoy, North Dakota, to play in a tournament. While the team was gone, Wesley, on a hunch, checked his cache to see if the bottles were still there. They were gone. Now he knew what his brother had done with the wine.

Wesley Hayden had never even kissed a girl, unless you counted the quick little brush on the lips Esther Radner gave him at a skating party last winter. And Wesley discounted that incident, since Esther had kissed virtually every male at the party as part of an experiment she said she was conducting to see whose lips were coldest. Wesley was shy around girls, and in their presence being tongue-tied sometimes translated into what looked like anger. On more than one occasion a boy or girl came to him saying something like “Rebecca wants to know why you’re mad at her.” Ironically, Rebecca was probably the last person in the world he was mad at—why, he was as likely to be in love with her! Yet somehow in his ineptitude he would communicate exactly the opposite message.

Part of the problem was that he couldn’t decide what he wanted girls for. It could change within a day, an hour, a minute. One instant he could regard them as helpless creatures who needed his strength and protection. Around them you had to put on your best manners, your most chivalrous attitude. When he thought of girls in this way he wanted only to be with them, to walk down the streets of Bentrock with one of the pretty girls from his school on his arm. Yet in the next second he might think of performing the most obscene, degrading act with this very girl—she would have no more humanity or identity than the hand with which he masturbated daily.

That was why he was so angry to hear Frank’s story of the two Indians in McCoy. Damn it, Wesley thought, the wine was his, so the Indian girl should have been as well. The situation was perfect for him. He would have been in a strange community where he knew no one, and no one knew him. He could not have damaged his reputation there, because he had none. And he would not have to worry about facing the girl again.

But in his heart Wesley knew he was deceiving himself. The wine may have been Wesley’s, but the audacity to barter it for sex was Frank’s. In fact, the incident illustrated perfectly the difference between the brothers. Frank had put that stolen wine to use; Wesely could not think of a reason to take his bottles out of hiding. Wesley hated and loved his brother for being everything that Wesley could never be.

“So let’s not be too quick to get into that hooch,” Frank announced to the group. “You never know what we might be able to buy with it.”

“We ain’t going to get a taste?” Lester asked.

Tommy punched Lester again on the arm. “What would you rather have—a piece of ass or a drink of whiskey?”

Wesley turned around in time to see Lester hang his tongue from his mouth.

Tommy took his cigar from his mouth and said quietly to the Hayden brothers, “You know, I don’t care anymore if I don’t get off a shot this weekend. This is turning into my kind of hunting trip.”

Tommy fell back against the backseat, and Frank looked over at his brother and rolled his eyes toward the roof of the car. Wesley pretended not to see his brother’s gesture and turned quickly to the window.

Was the snow letting up? Wesley had been gauging its intensity all day by looking at the snow against a dark background, an occasional tree trunk or telephone pole or fence post, and as the snow came down harder it became harder to see any sharp, dark outlines. But now his vision seemed to clear slightly. Maybe the snow would stop or let up enough to let them spend these days as they had originally planned.

In his bedroom, tucked into the frame of his mirror, Wesley had a photograph taken on this trip two years earlier: Wesley, Frank, their father, Len McAuley, their father’s deputy, and Arnold Spence, a friend of their father’s, are standing in front of the camp tent. They are dressed in hunting gear, and since they have been gone for a few days their clothes are rumpled and dirty. The adults have three days’ growth of beard. They are all holding rifles in their gloved hands, and they are smiling widely. They are standing next to four freshly killed deer. The deer—two of them with impressive racks of antlers—are strung up from a tree limb. Their heads are tilted to the sky at such strange angles it looks as though they have been hanged to death. A dusting of snow covers the ground, and you can tell by the expressions on the men’s faces——their smiles are tight, their noses and cheeks are a darker gray in the photograph—that the day is cold. You can also tell that not a single one of them would rather be anywhere else in the world. Wesley had hoped that he would be able to take a similar photograph to commemorate this trip. He doubted now if he would even unpack his gun, much less his camera.

They drove into McCoy in early afternoon. The snow had subsided, but, as if to support their decision to stop, the wind had increased, clearing the highway of snow in one place and then piling it high with drifts in another. As the snow whipped across the road, the asphalt itself appeared and disappeared under those rolling, waving, ghostly snakes.

They parked in front of the Overland Hotel, a square two-story building of unevenly laid reddish orange brick. Two rows of windows, unnaturally small for the building’s size, stared down at the snowy street.

The old woman at the desk regarded the boys suspiciously when they came in. She was short and squat and had tiny dark eyes. The blanket she kept wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl dragged on the floor as she moved around behind the desk. She gave them the key to a room but warned them, “You boys. I got other guests. Make trouble and you go.” Her accent was thick, Germanic.

Frank asked her, “Where should we put the car?”

“Where you got it now?”

“Out in front.”

“What’s the matter with there?”

Their second-floor room had a bed with an iron bedstead, a dresser with a porcelain pitcher and washbowl, a straightbacked chair, and a small table beside the bed. Over the bed hung a small framed picture of the Last Supper that looked as though it had been cut from a magazine. The window shade was up and the lace curtains tied back, but the window looked out on nothing but a snowy field.

Lester lifted the hem of the chenille bedspread and peered under the bed. “Is there a slop bucket or somethin’? As long as there isn’t a biffy.”

Wesley recalled that Lester’s family did not have indoor plumbing.

“Bathroom’s down the hall,” Frank said.

Tommy pointed at Lester and laughed. “You never stayed in a hotel before, have you?”

“What the hell for?” Lester answered angrily. With his boot he shoved his canvas duffle against the wall. “Don’t bother me to sleep outside. I’ll do it tonight if you like.”

“Nobody has to sleep outside,” said Frank. “But we do have to set up a plan.”

Tommy bounced up and down on the edge of the bed, making the springs whine. “What kind of plan?”

“Let’s say one of us wants to bring a guest up here,” Frank explained. “The others are going to have to clear out for a spell.”

“A guest?” asked Lester.

Wesley felt sorry for Lester. He stood in the middle of the room, still wearing his coat with the dirty matted sheepskin lining and with the earflaps on his fraying wool cap tied down. Lester was the most skilled outdoorsman of the group, a crack shot with a rifle and a shotgun and a fisherman who could land a cast within inches of a lily pad. If they brought down a deer Lester would be invaluable; he could field dress a deer with a speed and efficiency that a butcher might envy. Yet if a tree were growing up through the floor of the hotel room it would not look more out of place in these surroundings than Lester.

Tommy stopped bouncing on the bed. He looked up at Lester. “You know, you’re so fucking dumb sometimes it hurts. You know that—it hurts.”

Lester looked to Frank like a dog appealing to its master.

“If one of us gets a girl,” Frank said slowly, “we’ve got to have a plan so he can have the room to himself.”

“If he wants to keep her to himself,” said Tommy.

Lester snorted. “You ain’t too cocky, are you. Where the hell you going to find you a girl?”

Tommy started bouncing on the bed again. “You know her name, don’t you,” he said to Frank. “Goddamn. You know her name!”

Frank shrugged his shoulders. “I remember her first name. That’s all.”

With a bound Tommy was off the bed and at Frank’s side. “Come on. Get her over here. Her and her mama both. We’ll have us some red meat for supper.”

Frank shoved Tommy aside. “You wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

Tommy put his head and shoulders down like a football lineman and pretended to run into Frank. He stopped his charge short and came up grinning. “You try me. Get her up here. Try me.”

“Get your own.”

Lester was searching through the pile of duffels and packs. “Where’s those fucking cigars.” He came up with one in his mouth. “You’re going to look for girls. Don’t make me laugh. You ain’t going to find any. In the meantime we ain’t supposed to get into that liquor. Shit. We’ll end up taking it back home. Three days and I won’t get off a shot or pull a cork. Shit.”

Wesley suddenly felt ill. After those long hours in the cold car the hotel’s warmth was too much for him. There didn’t seem to be enough air, and he couldn’t take a deep breath because of the strong smell of camphor in the room. He tried moving away from the chest of drawers but the odor followed him. He knew he wouldn’t be able to take the smell of Lester’s cigar.

“I’m going down to the lobby,” he announced.

“What for?” asked Frank.

“Not for anything. I’m just going down there.”

“Suit yourself.”

As he left the room, Wesley heard Lester say with disgust, “You want ‘em, you go get ’em.”

Wesley sat in the lobby on a hard, oil-stained horsehair sofa. There were smells here too—cigar smoke again and something like creosote. He kept himself turned to the side so he could look out the window and monitor the storm. He was certain now; yes, the snow had stopped falling, but the wind continued to rise and as much snow filled the air from the ground up as it had earlier from the sky down. He didn’t know why he still cared. He knew he wasn’t going hunting. There was nothing to do but wait out the hours and days until it was time to return to Montana. Maybe they’d go back tomorrow. Tonight they’d look for girls, find none, get drunk, and drive home early tomorrow. The hotel had presented them with an expense none of them had planned on.

While Wesley stared out the window the old woman from behind the desk approached him. She walked slowly, taking tiny steps and listing from side to side. She stood in front of Wesley a long time before she spoke.

“Where’s your family?”

The question was simple, yet Wesley had trouble understanding what she meant. Did she want to know how near his family was, if he had relatives around McCoy?

“My brother’s upstairs.”

She twisted her mouth as though she were trying to dislodge something from her teeth.

“You got more than a brother, don’t you.”

“In Bentrock, Montana. Like we wrote on the register.”

She snorted. “If I could read that I could read it for myself.”

“It’s in Montana.” Wesley realized he had already said that, and he began to explain where in Montana. “Northeast Montana. Not far from the Canadian border. Bentrock is the county seat.” His voice softened and trailed off until, like snow falling, it was barely there. “My—I mean, our—parents live there.” The old woman turned and walked away, but Wesley could not stop. “We go on this hunting trip every year, but this is the first year none of our folks came along. My brother’s going to be in college next year. He’s got offers from all over....”

The day had gotten colder, but the boys walked down the wooden walkway of McCoy’s main street with their coats flapping open in the wind. They had brought along knit caps and wool caps with earflaps, but now all of them but Lester had switched to Stetsons. They wore them pulled down low and held onto them to keep them from blowing off. They walked four abreast but no one had to step aside for them because no one else was on the street. They were going to the Buffalo Cafe, an eatery the woman at the hotel recommended. The cafe was, she said, “where most of the guests eat. Families too.”

As they entered the cafe, a bell attached to the door announced their arrival, but no one came forth to greet them. They stamped the snow from their boots, brushed flakes from their sleeves, and slapped their hats on their trousers.

The skin under Lester’s nose was raw from his jacket’s rough wool, but he wiped his nose one more time on his sleeve. “And you were going to find you some girls. Hell, there’s nobody out today. We ain’t even going to get a hot meal.”

“They’re open,” said Frank. “The door wasn’t locked.”

The cafe reminded Wesley of someone’s home. The walls were covered with peeling, yellowing wallpaper, the windows with lace curtains, the floor with mismatched rag rugs. If it weren’t for the fact that there were four oilclothcovered tables instead of one, Wesley believed he could have been in the dining room of a neighbor back in Bentrock. Then he noticed two more differences hanging on the walls: a blackboard listing the day’s menu and the prices, and, in place of a family photograph, a massive buffalo head, horned and glossy-eyed, its shaggy, matted fur the darkest presence in this brightly lit room.

Tommy pretended to sight a rifle at the buffalo and then squeezed the imaginary trigger. Deep in his throat he imitated the muffled sound of a gunshot and then rocked back on his heels as if the gun had a tremendous recoil.

At that moment a tall, gray-haired woman came through a curtained doorway and into the cafe’s bright interior. She wore a man’s faded plaid flannel shirt over her print dress. The sleeves of the shirt were rolled to the elbow revealing her muscular forearms. She was wiping her hands on a dish towel.

Two Indian girls, teenagers, came out of the back room behind the tall woman. When Wesley saw the girls he almost gasped out loud. Jesus, there they were. Frank and Tommy wanted girls and there they were. The sons of bitches didn’t even have to go looking for them.

One of the girls was almost as tall as the gray-haired woman, while the other girl was short and overweight. The shorter girl had a pretty face though, and something about the way she never stopped smiling made Wesley think she was a friendly, good-natured person who would be easy to talk to. Her black hair hung loose, past her shoulders. Under her unbuttoned wool coat she wore a dark blue dress with a small white collar. Her black rubber overshoes were too big for her; she had to slide her feet to keep the boots from slipping off. With every step she took, the overshoe buckles jingled and the wet rubber squeaked on the wooden floor.

But of the two, the taller girl was the real beauty. She was slender and graceful and carried herself confidently. Her hair was plaited in two long braids that hung down her chest. She wore an unbuttoned coat and dress identical to the other girl’s, but on her feet instead of galoshes were high buckskin leggings that whispered across the floor when she walked. Then, as she came closer, Wesley saw the scar. It was a pale diagonal seam that extended from near her nose to her upper lip, and whatever had happened to her must have cut through muscle because her lip curled up slightly.

Because of her stern expression and the haughty look her curled lip gave her, Wesley felt that he and this Indian girl were somehow similar, both slightly disapproving of the company they were in, both present and yet not present in every room they entered. Then Wesley caught himself. This was just an Indian girl; he had no good reason to think she was anything like what he imagined.

The gray-haired woman spoke over her shoulder to the girls. “Your ride doesn’t come, that’s it. You’re out of luck. That’s a private phone.”

The short girl kept smiling. “We know. Thank you.”

The woman saw the four boys standing by the door. “You here to eat? Or just come in out of the snow?”

Frank spoke for them. “We’d like to get something to eat. If it’s no bother.”

“Oh, it’s a bother all right. That’s why I make people pay me.”

Tommy was the only one who laughed.

“But you got to sit down, boys. That’s the way it works. You sit down and I bring the food to you on a plate.”

Lester began to walk toward the back of the cafe, but Frank caught him by the hem of the coat. “Over here.”

They hesitated like a flock of birds that take an instant to understand the direction they’re heading, then turned and followed Frank to a table by the window. The girls were already seated at an adjoining table.

As soon as they sat down, Tommy began to talk to the girls. “You gals need a ride somewheres? Is that what I heard?”

The tall girl stared out at the blowing snow, but the plump girl looked over at the four boys.

“How about it?” Tommy asked again. “We got a car. We can take you.”

“Someone’s coming for us,” the shorter girl answered.

Tommy ignored her reply. “Out to the reservation? Is that where you’re going?”

The tall girl cast a withering look their way. “We go to Sacred Heart.”

The other girl nodded. “We live here in town.”

“Sacred Heart,” Frank said in a voice so soft Wesley barely recognized it as his brother’s. “The high school, right?”

The plump girl kept smiling that smile that never seemed to increase or decrease in its intensity. “We’re seniors,” she said.

“We are too,” Frank replied. “Well, three of us. My brother’s a sophomore.”

Wesley winced. At least Frank hadn’t said which one was his brother.

Tommy leaned over the table. “Where do you want a ride to?”

Frank waved his hand over the oilcloth, a small, quick gesture that looked as if he might have been brushing crumbs away, but Wesley knew what his brother was doing: Frank was trying to tell Tommy to shut up, to tell all of them that they should allow him to do the talking.

“We’re sort of stuck here,” Frank said to the girls. “We were heading down toward the Badlands to do some hunting. When it started snowing and blowing we decided we better get into town and hunker down. We’re staying at the Overland Hotel.”

“Where did you come from?” the shorter girl asked.

“We come a ways,” said Frank. “We’re from Montana. From Bentrock. You know where that is?”

Wesley thought he heard the tall girl sniff derisively at Frank’s question.

The other girl giggled. “Montana. My uncle says Montana’s nothing but cows and cowboys.”

Frank smiled at her. “He’s not too far off. It’s the Wild West, that’s for sure.”

Tommy almost came out of his chair. “Yeah? You know what we call North Dakotans?”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Lester put in. “There ain’t a restaurant in the whole damn state of Montana where you have to wait this long to get waited on.”

Frank changed the subject. “How’s the food here? She’s not going to try to poison us, is she? Just because we’re from Montana.”

Without looking in their direction the tall girl said something that sounded to Wesley like “Ah-nish-ah-pahn-ta,” and her friend laughed.

“What the hell was that about?” Lester asked.

“She said—” she had to wait until her laughter subsided—“she said it’s good enough for cowboys.”

“What was that?” Frank asked. “Sioux?”

The tall girl turned their way once more. “Lakota,” she said sharply.

Lester asked, “Is she ever going to take our order?”

Frank slid his chair over to the girls’ table. “Say something else,” he said. “In Lakota, I mean. I like the way it sounds.”

Wesley was amazed. He couldn’t believe how gentle, how soft-spoken his brother was. He had seen Frank around girls before, at school, at football games, at the drugstore counter, and Frank was always louder and funnier and bigger and bolder than anyone else. Girls couldn’t stay away from him—because he was handsome, yes, but also because there was something dangerous about him. They had to keep an eye on him. And they were right. Wesley had heard the way his brother talked about girls, as if he could tear chunks from them, get “a piece of ass,” “a little tail,” “some tit,” or how he could punish them with sex, make them “moan” or “squeal” or “beg for more,” or how he’d reduce them to animality and have them “crawling on their hands and knees.” Now Wesley saw this courtly young gentleman who seemed more interested in the Indian language than ... than what Wesley knew his brother wanted from these girls.

The girl did say something else in Lakota, another phrase that sounded to Wesley like a little run of soft sighs punctuated with sudden stops of consonants. She did not speak to Frank, however. She addressed her friend.

“What is it? What did she say?” asked Frank.

The plump girl scowled. “Not for you, she said. We don’t speak our tongue for you to listen.”

Lester pointed to his companions. “Do you know what you want to eat? Should I just go back there and tell her what we want? Me, I’m going to have a fried ham sandwich. Maybe some soup.” He leaned toward the plump girl. “Hey. How about that tomato soup. Is it the kind made with milk?”

She looked at Lester as if he were the one speaking a foreign tongue.

Tommy nudged Frank’s chair with the toe of his boot. “You going to ask ’em?”

Frank ignored him. “I wasn’t making fun of your language. Really. I just like to hear you talk it.”

Tommy kicked Frank’s chair again. “Tell them about the whiskey.”

“What’s he talking about?” the plump girl asked.

Frank gave Tommy a dark look and mouthed the words “shut up.”

“What?” she asked again.

“My partner here was hoping—I mean, we were all hoping—since our hunting trip is all fouled up we were hoping you could cheer us up.”

The plump girl turned to her friend with an expression that seemed to Wesley to be beseeching. She wanted to, Wesley knew, but her friend wouldn’t have anything to do with them.

“I was going to ask you to show us around town,” Frank said. “But I better not. You’re just too damn unfriendly.”

Tommy squirmed in his chair and began to protest over what Frank said. Didn’t Tommy know? thought Wesley; didn’t he know what Frank was doing?

“Who’s unfriendly?” the plump girl asked indignantly.

“You haven’t even told us your names,” Frank answered. He said it as though he were pouting.

The plump girl looked around as if she were afraid of the punishment that might come to her if she gave their names to these four boys from Montana.

“I’m Anna. This is Beverly.”

Lester got up and angrily pushed his chair back to the table. “Enough of this shit. I’m going to see if we can’t get some food out here.”

“Last names,” said Frank. “What are your last names?”

Anna pointed to her friend. “Tuttle.” She put her hand up by her throat. “Tall Horse. Anna Tall Horse.” Wesley noticed a blush rising to her cheeks when she said her name. Only when she spoke her name did her smile diminish, as if the act of naming herself required all the seriousness she could summon.

Tommy said, “Tall Horse, huh. I believe I could ride a tall horse. Get those stirrups adjusted and it don’t matter how high or low the horse is.” He burst into laughter. Then he lifted his boot high enough for everyone to see. “But I ain’t wearing spurs. You got nothing to worry about.”

“Jesus, Tommy,” Wesley said.

“Jesus yourself. You ain’t getting us anywhere. Why don’t you go with Lester and see about getting the grub.”

Wesley looked over at Beverly Tuttle. If she heard him try to intercede on behalf of her and her friend, she gave no sign. She kept right on staring out the window, though Wesley knew there was nothing for her to see but blowing snow and a late afternoon that couldn’t hold its light against all the forces that wanted to shut it down.

I’m not like them, he wanted to say. They’re just after you to see what they can tear off you or stick in you. They don’t even see how beautiful you are; they don’t even care. But I—I’d be happy to just stare at you. I don’t want to hurt you or take advantage of you. You can trust me. You can talk to me.... But hot on the heels of those thoughts came these: Wesley knew he wasn’t going to speak to Beverly. And he knew she wouldn’t see him as any different from his brother and his friends. Why should she? For although he held these noble impulses toward Beverly he also wished that she would come back to the hotel with them, that she would drink so much of their whiskey that she would let them—Wesley included—do what they wanted to her. Wesley closed his eyes and dropped his head into his hands, wishing he could squeeze from his mind all but the nobler thoughts.

When he lifted his head and opened his eyes, Tommy was putting the matter directly to Anna. “You come back to the hotel with us and we’ll give you a drink of whiskey. What do you say to that?”

She was shaking her head no, but Wesley thought her smile said she was not entirely averse to the proposal.

By now Frank had slid his chair over so that he was sitting closer to the girls’ table than his own. “What are you saying?” he said to Tommy. “These are Sacred Heart girls. Sacred Heart girls don’t drink whiskey.” He smiled wickedly at Anna. “Do they?”

“You got a moving picture here?” asked Tommy. “We could take you to the moving picture.”

Anna shook her head. “There’s one over in Henton.”

“You been?”

She shook her head again.

“Want to go? How far’s Henton? We can drive over to Henton to see a moving picture. You gals come on over to the hotel with us and we’ll take you to Henton.”

“Tonight?”

“Or don’t Sacred Heart girls go to the moving pictures either?” asked Tommy.

“In the snow?”

“We drove in, didn’t we? How far’s Henton?”

“She’s got a boyfriend,” Anna said, nodding in Beverly’s direction.

Tommy looked to the right and the left. “Where? I don’t see him.”

Anna lowered her voice. “They’re going to get married.”

“Well, they’re not getting married tonight, are they?” said Frank.

“I’d think she’d want to be with a cowboy before she was married,” Tommy said. “Once anyway. Find out what she was missing.”

“Jesus Christ,” Wesley said. “She’s sitting right there.”

“You better watch your mouth there, brother. These are Sacred Heart girls.”

“Watch my mouth? Did you hear what he said?”

Anna wagged her finger in Tommy’s direction. “If her boyfriend heard you talk....”She shook her head gravely.

“Am I supposed to be scared?” asked Tommy.

Anna’s voice shifted and became like a little girl’s. “He’s coming to pick us up.”

“In a car?” asked Frank. “Or a wagon?”

Without taking her eyes from the window, Beverly spoke up. “He’s got a truck.”

In a falsetto, Tommy said, “A truck. He’s got a truck.”

“As soon as she graduates,” Anna volunteered. “That’s when they’re getting married.”

Tommy reached into his coat pocket. “We got to do something about this boyfriend.”

Frank leaned toward Beverly. “You’re awful young to be an old married woman.”

Tommy dropped the pistol on the tabletop and gave it a spin. The gun rumbled on the wood like far-off thunder. As it slowed, Anna and the boys watched to see where the barrel would finally point. It stopped—aimed just to the left of Tommy—and Wesley saw it clearly.

It was a .38 revolver, nickel plated, but the plating had worn off in so many places the gun was as black as it was silver. The black checkered grip was partially broken off and exposed the steel and the screw of the handle.

Wesley had seen it before. It was Tommy’s pistol—he had won it in a poker game from a classmate—and a sorry one at that. The cylinder wobbled and didn’t always line up the cartridge just right, and the action was so balky that the hammer might not fall with sufficient force to fire the gun. Frank had warned Tommy about the gun, telling him that it might blow up in his hand someday or send lead spraying out that loose cylinder.

All of them except Lester had handguns, and occasionally they brought them on a hunting trip so they could do a little target shooting with them or practice drawing and shooting from the hip. But they did not carry them into town, and they did not bring them into cafes.

Tommy picked up the pistol and held it loosely by his ear. “Now where’s this boyfriend?”

“How long you been carrying that?” asked Frank.

“Right along.”

Wesley twisted around in his chair, trying to get a better look at the gun. He wanted to see the end of the cylinder, to see if there were nothing there but black empty chambers or if there were the dark glinting nubs of bullets.

Anna said, “You better not let Mrs. Spitzer see you with that.”

Tommy sighted the gun out the window. “Do I wait for him to come in or should I drop him as soon as he drives up?”

“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” Frank said. There was a pitch of nervousness in his brother’s voice that Wesley hadn’t heard before.

Wesley didn’t want to look away from Tommy but he stole a glance at Beverly. She was sitting as still as ever, her hands on her lap, her eyes fixed on the street. She reminded Wesley of an old woman in Bentrock, Mrs. Gamble, who spent so many long hours in her porch swing—just sitting, not reading or sewing or shelling peas or counting rosary beads—that sitting came to seem an act of great endurance.

Tommy swung the pistol away from the window, and, just as he had earlier with an imaginary rifle, sighted in on the buffalo. “What do you bet I can take out one of those glass eyes?”

“You fire that thing in here,” said Frank, “and we’ll never get waited on.”

At that moment Lester returned to the table. He had seen Tommy waving the gun about. “Yeah, shoot up the place. That’d be real fucking smart.”

“Come on,” said Wesley. “These girls.”

Then, as though neither gun nor girls were there, as though he were simply speaking to his three hungry friends, as in fact he was, Lester said, “I ordered you all fried ham sandwiches and tomato soup. If that ain’t what you want, you go tell her. She’s back there making pies. The other lady didn’t come in today because of the weather. That’s how come she didn’t take our order right away. She’s doing it all herself.”

Frank had slid even closer to Anna, and, hunched over in his chair, he was talking softly to her, low and steady, and while he spoke he flicked his finger up and down on the hem of her dress. The motion looked idle, playful, unconscious, but each time he moved his finger her dress rode a fraction of an inch higher on her brown leg and then fell again. “Maybe you could show us your school,” he said. “Or where do you like to go? I’d like to see. Or we can go back to the hotel.... Keep us company. Tell us what it’s like in this part of North Dakota....” He nodded in Beverly’s direction. “She doesn’t have to come. If she’s worried about her boyfriend getting jealous. I understand. I don’t have a girlfriend myself right now, but I know how it is....”

Something moved outside. Wesley turned his head and saw the truck, suddenly there in front of the Buffalo Cafe, the smoke of the exhaust whipping away in the wind. The truck’s side window was frosted over, and Wesley couldn’t see the driver.

Beverly saw the truck too, and she jumped from her chair with amazing speed. She grabbed her friend’s arm and tried to pull her from her chair. “Let’s go!” Beverly said.

But her friend didn’t get up fast enough, and as Beverly went past, Tommy reached for her. He caught her by the coat, pulling it halfway off one arm. She tried to twist away from him, and her own grasp on her friend gave way just as Tommy released her.

Whatever the cause—her own momentum, or a wet spot on the floor where snow from someone’s shoe or boot had melted into a puddle, or a kinked corner of a rug, or Tommy’s foot thrust out to trip her up—Beverly fell, and fell hard. One arm had been occupied grabbing her friend and the other tangled in her coat, so she didn’t have time to get her hands under her to break her fall. She landed headfirst. The thud was as loud as a chair toppling over, and Wesley felt the floorboards vibrate.

Anna bent to help her friend, but before she could touch her Beverly was on her feet again and running toward the door, towing Anna behind her.

With both Frank and Tommy shouting after them, the girls ran from the cafe, slamming the door behind them. The glass rattled in the door, and the bell continued to ring nervously long after they went out.

Wesley watched them run to the truck. Anna stumbled in the street and almost slipped under the front of the truck, but Beverly jerked her upright and both of them scrambled into the cab of the truck. Their door wasn’t even shut before the truck began to move off.

They were out of sight before Wesley felt the chill that had entered the cafe when the door opened.

“Lookit!” said Lester. “Look what you did waving your goddamn gun around.” He pointed over by the door. One of Anna’s oversized galoshes stood there, right where the girl must have stepped out of it in her haste to get out of the cafe.

“You scared her right out of her fucking boots,” Lester said and laughed.

Then it was Frank’s turn to point. His finger was aimed at the floor where Beverly had fallen. A six-inch smear of blood glistened against the wood.

Wesley stood. He had no idea where he was going or what he was going to do; he just knew he needed to move.

“She might as well be gone then,” Tommy said. “We got no use for her if she’s on the rag.” He couldn’t hold his straight face any longer, and he broke up with laughter.

Frank looked up at his brother. “Where you going this time?”

“I don’t know. . . .”

“Sit down then. I told you before. We’re not in the jurisdiction.”

Lester had gotten up too. He went over to the blood spot, bent over, and stared closely at it. “Do you think that’s what it is?”

“Where the hell’s the food?” asked Tommy. He picked up the salt shaker, sprinkled salt over his gun, and pretended to take a bite from the barrel. He chewed for a while then slipped the pistol back into his coat pocket.

“You can still fuck ’em when they’re on the rag,” Frank said.

“Kind of messy,” Tommy said as if he were wise in these matters.

“Hey, I’m having the tomato soup,” protested Lester.

“My dad arrested a man for murder a few years back,” Frank said. “Or manslaughter or something. Fellow busted in on this woman, an old girlfriend or maybe she used to be his wife. He was planning on screwing her but then he found out she had her period. He flipped her over and did her up the ass. Then someone found her dead. Big mystery. Dad figured it out. When this fellow had her pinned down he pushed her face into the pillow. Smothered her. Maybe they got him for rape and murder. Some such.”

“Was this an Indian gal?” asked Tommy.

“I don’t believe so. They sent him up for life in Deer Lodge.”

Lester couldn’t stop shaking his head. “Who was the fellow?”

“Some Frenchy. Down from Canada, I believe. Wasn’t from Montana.”

Tommy moved his coat to shift the weight of the gun in his pocket. “That’s probably how them Canucks like it.”

“Dad told you that story?” Wesley asked his brother.

“Yep.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. A year or two ago. We were going somewhere in the car. I don’t remember.”

“He never told me.”

“So? I just did.”

Wesley couldn’t be sure what shocked him more, the story with its mingling of sex and murder, overlaid with sodomy, an act whose existence was known to him and his friends but rarely spoken of, even in their willingness, their eagerness, to discuss almost all matters sexual, or the fact that the story came from his father.

Julian Hayden was a man who swore freely and made no attempt to rein in his tongue in the presence of his sons, but his talk—overrun as it was with profanity—was free of sexual references. As Frank himself once said, their father’s speech was shit-covered but fuck-free.

Now this story. Wesley felt he had to readjust not only his view of his father and his work, but also of his father’s attitude toward him. Why could his father tell this story to Frank but not to his younger son?

The gray-haired woman came out from the kitchen carrying a platter of food. “I wasn’t sure,” she said as she approached their table, “if you boys got so tired of waiting you up and left. Or if maybe you just dried up from hunger.”

Wesley looked again at the blood on the floor. Would she see it?

She put the soup bowls down first, then the small crockery plates holding the sandwiches of fried ham between slices of diagonally sliced white bread. Finally she put down spoons.

“I’ll get you some milk,” she said but made no move to walk away. “As soon as the pies are done I’ll bring you each a piece. Free, for making you wait so long.”

They began to eat while she stood there, watching them intently as though her pleasure depended upon seeing others consume her fare.

She crossed her arms. “Them girls’ ride come?” Without waiting for an answer, she nodded. “I just don’t like for them to use my phone like that.”

They sat quietly on the floor of their hotel, smoking cigars and sipping whiskey. They were pleased with their behavior, and often in the last two hours, ever since they arrived back in the room, one of them had commented on their maturity, on how they were able to enjoy a glass of whiskey for its taste rather than simply drinking to get drunk as many of their peers would do. Wesley, however, had begun to feel shivery and unsteady from the drink. He knew if he closed his eyes he might topple over into sleep.

They had long since stopped discussing the Indian girls. The argument finally ended when Frank, conceded as the authority on such matters, announced that it was not Tommy bringing out the gun that ruined their chances with the girls but the fact of Beverly’s boyfriend. As long as she insisted on remaining loyal to him, she could not be persuaded to come with them. And Anna would not come without her friend. “Sacred Heart didn’t help either,” Wesley added.

“No, it sure didn’t,” agreed his brother.

When the knock came, it was so soft—three taps almost like brush strokes—Wesley thought, and he was sure the others did too, that they had been wrong. The girls had decided to come after all! Tommy jumped to his feet to answer the door, while Lester had the presence of mind to cork the whiskey and roll it under the bed and to throw his coat over their glasses.

Standing in the doorway was a portly man of average height wearing a wool overcoat with a black mouton collar. Visible beneath his open coat was a three-piece suit of heavy salt-and-pepper tweed, white shirt, and tie. He wore a fedora tilted back. His large moon face was split by a wide smile.

As soon as the door opened, the man lifted his hand in a casual salute. “Howdy, boys.” His voice was as high pitched and soft as a woman’s.

Wesley could see why the knock on the door was so faint. The man wore bright yellow buckskin mittens with fur-lined cuffs that came halfway up his forearms. Wesley had seen similar mittens, designed especially for hunters, but the ones he had seen had the trigger finger cut free. The man’s rimless spectacles were well down his nose; no doubt he had tilted them down when he came in out of the cold and they steamed up in the sudden warmth of the hotel. “I’m Sheriff Cooke,” he said. “And might you be the boys from Montana?”

In the silence that followed only Wesley was able to find his tongue. “That’s us,” he said. As soon as he spoke he felt as though he had already admitted to some guilt.

Sheriff Cooke stepped into the room alone, but Wesley felt as though others were with him. Once Wesley got to his feet and looked into the hall he saw his intuition was right.

Two men in wool caps waited a few yards down the hall. They faced the open door and stood with their legs spread wide as if they were prepared to block the way. One of the men wore a long belted overcoat that looked as though it might at one time have been military issue. The other man wore a short wool jacket, and he was carrying a rifle or shotgun. Wesley didn’t know for certain because the gun was in a cloth scabbard. He cradled the gun loosely in his arms.

Sheriff Cooke waved his hand in front of him as if to clear the air. “Better pull on your boots, boys. I’m going to have you come with me.”

“What’s the trouble, sir?” Frank asked.

The sheriff kept waving his hand, and now he began to sniff the air as well. “You suppose you could spare one of those cigars?”

Wesley wondered if this might be a trick of some kind—first they would admit to smoking cigars and next he would inquire about the whiskey.

Tommy, however, had already reached into the box and was handing a cigar to the sheriff.

Sheriff Cooke held the cigar to his nose and inhaled deeply. “You won’t need your coats. We don’t have that far to walk.” He put the cigar in his coat pocket and led the way out of the hotel room.

Wesley had a momentary impulse to hang back and then slam and lock the door behind the sheriff’s back. Then—then what? Leap from the window? Wait for the sheriff and his deputies to crash through the door and drag him out? Frank followed the sheriff, and Wesley fell in behind his brother.

The sheriff’s office was not at all what Wesley expected. Their own father’s office was in the basement of Mercer County courthouse, a large stone building fronted by a long flight of steps leading to heavy glass doors between massive fluted columns. The Great Northern depot was the only public building in Bentrock older than the courthouse.

McCoy, North Dakota, had its sheriff’s office and county jail in a small, simple one-story building made of the same orange brick as the hotel.

The boys had walked coatless the length of McCoy’s main street, and though the snow had stopped and the wind died down, the temperature had continued to drop. The windpacked snow crunched underfoot, and their breath formed great clouds of steam. They thrust their hands deep into their pockets or wrapped their arms around themselves trying to make smaller targets for the cold. Once inside the jail they relaxed their shoulders and raised their eyes to examine their surroundings.

The jail’s interior was as plain as the exterior. There was a desk and swivel chair, a long bench that could at one time have been a church pew, and a coal stove with its pipe extending sideways through the wall. An empty electric light socket hung from the ceiling, and the room’s only light came from two kerosene lamps with soot-blackened chimneys. A telephone and a gun rack hung on the wall by the door. As Sheriff Cooke led them into his office he asked cheerfully, “What do you think, boys—down below zero yet?”

“Ten below, I bet,” Tommy said.

“Wouldn’t doubt it. Wouldn’t doubt it one bit.”

The two men from the hotel had filed into the jail behind the boys. The one in the jacket leaned his gun against the wall by the door. Wesley hadn’t heard either man speak, and now they stood by the door as if awaiting orders.

Sheriff Cooke pointed to the bench across from his desk. “Why don’t you boys sit yourselves down right over there.” He dropped his weight into the swivel chair, which gave out a rusty whine.

Sheriff Cooke nodded to the men by the door. “You can go take care of matters back there.” They left the jail immediately, and the shorter man left his gun behind.

Wesley could see inside a back room the bars of jail cells.

“They’re not both deputies,” Sheriff Cooke explained. “Just Mr. Rawlins in the overcoat. Mr. Rozinski lends us a hand now and then.” He chuckled in a way that caused the loose flesh of his jowls to vibrate. “When we’ve got more outlaws on our hands than we can handle.”

“Maybe you could tell us what you think we did,” said Tommy.

The sheriff didn’t answer for a long time. He reached into his desk drawer and took out a tin of Velvet tobacco and a packet of rolling papers. He took his time rolling his cigarette, as if he were a man who did not smoke often and so wanted each cigarette to be as well made as possible. He moistened the paper not by drawing it the length of his tongue but by flicking out his tongue in tiny licks.

When the wooden match flared, Wesley jumped. He knew then that he was not simply frightened but still a little drunk.

“You have pie over at the cafe?” Sheriff Cooke asked them.

“Yes,” answered Frank.

“What’s she serving today?”

“We had apple.”

Sheriff Cooke nodded as though Frank was merely verifying something the sheriff already knew. “If there’s someone on the face of this earth who bakes a better pie than Florence Spitzer, I’d like to know who. You did right having pie at the Buffalo Cafe. . . .”

Wesley thought the sheriff was going to go on and say, “But you did wrong when you—” but his soft high voice just faded away and he fell silent, rocking in his squeaking chair, smoking, and eyeing the boys seated on the bench in front of him.

Tommy broke the silence. “How long do we have to stay here?” His question was straightforward, without any note of pleading or whining that Wesley could detect.

Sheriff Cooke answered with a gesture. He swiveled around in his chair and motioned for them to come near. “I want to show you something.”

They stepped over to the wall Sheriff Cooke was facing. There, along with a Soo Line calendar and some Wanted circulars, were photographs and clippings from newspapers. The sheriff tapped one of the pictures. “Look right here at this one.”

In the yellow newspaper photograph a group of fifteen or twenty people, mostly men in suits and ties, stood or sat around a table set up outdoors for a ceremony of some sort. In the center of the group was a broad-shouldered, darkskinned, bareheaded Indian in deerskin leggings and a beaded shirt. The Indian had a bow pulled back to full draw and his nocked arrow was aimed at the sky. A few of the people in the photograph looked at the Indian but most stared at the camera.

Sheriff Cooke stood behind the boys so they could get a better look at the clipping.

The caption under the photograph read, “Sioux warrior Iron Hail became an American citizen at Fort Duncan, North Dakota. As part of the ceremony, Iron Hail released an arrow into the air and said, ‘I shoot my last arrow.’”

The sheriff tapped the photograph in the vicinity of the table. “Yours truly.” He straightened up and Wesley felt the sheriff’s hand rest on his shoulder. “And do you recognize that old warrior?”

Wesley and his friends leaned in, as though any face there could be known to them if they only stared hard enough. Every man and woman in the photograph stared impassively at the camera, their eyes as blank and dark as stones. Only because he had been told that Sheriff Cooke was in the picture could Wesley see any resemblance between the full-moon face in the picture and the man behind him.

Frank was the first to turn away from the wall. “I don’t know anybody there.”

The sheriff chuckled softly, a sound a little like footsteps creaking on snow. “Well, you might say you do. Yessir. You do.”

He tapped the photograph again. “Iron Hail is now George Tuttle. Took an American name when he became a citizen. Or they gave it to him. Whichever. Is there a date on there? This was in the Bismarck Tribune. Back in 1917. Of course they’re all citizens now, whether they want to be or not. You boys can go sit back down.”

The sheriff returned to his chair and fell into another long pause. Wesley was most uneasy during these silences. He was afraid one of them would blurt out a confession. His father had often told them how, when some people were arrested, they would simply begin talking, even admitting to crimes with which they were not going to be charged. “They can’t carry all that guilt,” his father would say, “and first chance they get they dump the whole load.”

Wesley understood. He felt that ache for release, and he had to clamp his jaw down hard. Talking was all he could do in this situation, and that was something he felt he could do tolerably well. Hadn’t he been told for years, by his mother, his teachers, his grandmother, that he was a good boy, bright, polite, and well spoken? If he simply started talking he could explain everything—with a half-truth, half-lie concoction the sheriff would surely swallow—how they had the whiskey, where they got the cigars, why Tommy had a pistol in the Buffalo Cafe, what they wanted with those girls. But his father’s words kept coming back. “If they’d keep their goddamn mouths shut, half these people would get off scot-free.”

Those girls! Oh Jesus! Beverly Tuttle. George Tuttle.

As if he were reading Wesley’s thoughts, Sheriff Cooke said, “Yessir. Mr. Tuttle. That’s the papa of the girl you knocked down over at the cafe.”

Tommy was quick to defend himself. “She, fell!”

“Bloodied her up pretty good. Chipped a tooth. Cut her lip bad. Almost bit right through it.” Sheriff Cooke shuddered a little as though the thought of Beverly Tuttle’s injury chilled him.

“How’d she get the scar?” The question sprang out of Wesley before he even knew it was near his tongue.

“She didn’t need any more problems in that area, did she?” said the sheriff. “Poor gal. As I recall, she got that in a sledding accident. Went flying down a hill headed right toward a barbed wire fence. Tried laying back so she could squeak under it and a strand caught her by the lip.” He shuddered again. “Such a pretty gal.”

Frank added quickly, as though, the door finally open, everyone could contribute an explanation or excuse. “We didn’t mean for her to get hurt.”

“She slipped,” Tommy repeated.

Sheriff Cooke leaned forward and twined his fingers as if he were going to pray. “Course you didn’t mean for her to get hurt. Pretty gal like that. I’m sure you had other ideas.”

Frank interrupted him. “We didn’t want that—”

“—and I believe you. I know where you’re from. Montana’s full of good people. But here you are now. In my jurisdiction. Waving guns around. Drinking whiskey. Bothering the gals here in town. Indian or not. What do you suppose the boys here think about you coming around after their gals? They’d like to chase you down, I bet. You’re lucky I got you here where they can’t get to you.”

Lester spoke for the first time since they had entered the jail, and his voice had a pace and sonority that Wesley hadn’t heard before. “We ain’t scared.”

“Course you’re not. No. You wouldn’t be here if you were. But I’m thinking about another matter right now. Trying to figure out what I’m going to do.”

“You could just let us go,” suggested Tommy.

Wesley stared at the floor. He wished Tommy would keep quiet.

“Could. I could.” He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling as if he were deep in thought.

Frank was staring at Wesley, and Wesley raised his eyebrows to question what his brother wanted. Frank did not move, speak, or change his grave expression. Wesley mouthed the word, “What?” Frank looked away.

Sheriff Cooke carefully placed his palms on his desk and pushed himself up. “Tell you what. You boys go back there.” He pointed toward the jail area. “Wait on me back there. Just shut the door behind you. That’s right. Right through there.”

The door they closed behind them was thick wood, so dark it looked fire blackened, and its heavy brass latch clicked shut like the lock on a gate. Each of the three open cells had an iron bunk and an overhead light socket in a wire cage, but there were no bulbs in any of the fixtures. The only light came from a corner in the back where a floor lamp stood. With its crenellated pedestal and opaque glass shade it looked like something that belonged in a parlor.

“Shit,” Lester said. “Now what?”

Wesley’s father’s jail usually smelled of disinfectant, but this area stank of urine and mold. The cement walls had large dark spots, permanent sweat stains from seeping moisture. “Feels like we’re underground,” said Wesley.

“Why didn’t you tell him who your old man is?” Tommy asked.

“What for?” Frank replied.

“Jesus. Maybe Sheriff Cooke might let us go, that’s what for.”

“I don’t think that would cut it with Mr. Cooke.”

“You don’t think. You could tell him and see what happens.”

Lester wandered into one of the cells. “Fucking Indian bitches. What do you suppose they did? Hightail it over here first thing?”

“What would your old man do to us?” Tommy asked Wesley and Frank. “If we was in his county.”

Frank turned to his brother. “What do you think? Just shoot us and bury us, don’t you reckon?”

“Probably wouldn’t even bother with the burying.”

“I bet it was the boyfriend,” said Lester from the cell. “Couldn’t fight his own battles so he runs to the sheriff.”

“Can you imagine,” Tommy said, “what your dad would do if we came to him to take care of our problems?”

Lester found a slop bucket, an enameled pot that he dragged out into the middle of the cell. He lifted the lid, spread his legs and urinated, the stream hissing and ringing off the metal. “But if he heard someone was waving a gun around in Roller’s Cafe he’d sure as hell come running.”

“That he would,” agreed Frank.

Lester covered the pot and slid it back under the bunk. He kept staring down at his fly, as if he weren’t quite convinced he had buttoned it correctly. “Maybe you should’ve told him who your pa is though.”

Frank nodded at Tommy. “Maybe he should’ve kept that gun in his goddamn pocket.”

Wesley weighed in on his brother’s side. “Maybe he should’ve left it in the goddamn room.”

Tommy aimed a listless kick in Wesley’s direction, and as he did, Frank shoved him, sending Tommy stumbling into the wall. Tommy let himself be carried further than the push’s actual force warranted. “Fine,” said Tommy. “I don’t give a good goddamn. Go ahead and put this on me.”

“Nobody’s putting it all on you,” Frank said. “We’re just saying, you’re the one had the gun.”

“Well, the sheriff didn’t say too much about a gun.”

“Figures though, don’t it,” added Lester.

Tommy rubbed the floor with the toe of his boot and then spit toward that spot. “Shit ass.”

Frank squatted against the wall, leaning his head back and trying to make himself as comfortable as he could. “And you can leave off that business, telling him who our dad is. We’re not going to do it.”

Wesley sat next to his brother and looked at his companions.

Each stared at a far wall or into a dark corner as though he was waiting for something in the room’s shadows to take shape and lead them out of their predicament.

On the floor in front of Wesley was a small dark stain. He wondered if blood could have made that mark, and then he tried to push that thought away by concentrating on the stain’s shape. Iowa? Was that its shape? Like the state of Iowa on a map of the United States? Their father originally came from Iowa, and whenever he looked at a map Wesley liked to estimate the distance between Iowa and Montana. Or maybe rust made that stain.

Wesley held his head very still, trying to determine if he was still feeling the whiskey. The stain didn’t move, and neither did his head, even when a drop of icy nervous sweat fell from his armpit to his ribs. He was sober, for all the good it did him.

His shoulder still held the memory of Sheriff Cooke’s hand resting there. His hand had felt warm, tender, and for the few seconds it rested on his shoulder Wesley could allow himself to believe that the sheriff meant them no harm.

None of the cells had windows, but there was a small high window at the other end of the jail. Wesley considered going down there, hoisting himself up, and looking out. What would he see? Another wall? Snow, certainly. Snow, snow, and more snow.

Three years ago in late December, right before Christmas, warm chinook winds rolled down the Rockies’ eastern slopes, pushing temperatures into the forties and fifties. For five days the western winds blew, and when they stopped there wasn’t a patch of snow left in northeast Montana. Women went coatless, men gathered in the streets in their shirtsleeves, and the town skating rink turned into a pond of slush. Boys threw baseballs in the streets and their fathers went out to the golf course.

That Christmas Wesley was in love with Martha Woods, a girl in the class ahead of him at school. Martha didn’t know of Wesley’s feelings for her; in fact, they had no relationship at all beyond saying hello on the streets or in the halls of their school. Nevertheless, as that warm, gusty, snowless Christmas approached, Wesley felt he had to do something to declare his feelings for Martha. At Douglas’s Rexall he bought her a gift, a perfumed powder puff and mirror set, and he took it to her house on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.

As Wesley stood on the porch of the Woods home and waited for Martha to appear, he could hear the warm wind rattling the house’s rain gutters and humming through the window casements. Snowmelt ran through the streets like bright new rivers.

At last Martha appeared, but she was with a friend, and the small speech Wesley had prepared could not be delivered in front of another listener. He thrust the package out to Martha, and he saw now how sloppily he had wrapped it—the uneven ends, the crumpled and creased paper, the drooping ribbon. He said, “For you, a Christmas gift”—a phrase that sounded ridiculously formal. No one talked that way! At least no one in Bentrock, Montana.

Martha took the package and she smiled at Wesley, a smile that told him in an instant exactly how she felt about him. She thought he was a foolish boy, and though she thanked him extravagantly, it was plain she received this offering the way a mother or older sister would accept a gift from a five-year-old son or brother.

As soon as the package was out of his hands Wesley backed away, and he got off the porch quickly so he would not have to hear the laughter of Martha and her friend.

He trudged home, soaking his boots in the water and slush that filled the gutters and streets of Bentrock on Christmas of 1921.

He thought that day that he would never again experience a Christmas like those of his childhood—stealing his mother’s cookies, opening the expensive gifts from his father, pushing through the crowd of friends and neighbors who often filled the house, listening to his mother play the piano and sing carols, sledding and skating with his brother—all that innocence and joy seemed to vanish with the melting snow.