Coyote Blue

CHAPTER 1 Life Will Find You

Santa Barbara, California

While magic powder was sprinkled on the sidewalk outside, Samuel Hunter moved around his office like a machine, firing out phone calls, checking computer printouts, and barking orders to his secretary. It was how he began every business day: running in machine mode until he left for his first sales appointment and put on the right persona for the prospect.

People who knew Sam found him hardworking, intelligent, and even likable, which is exactly what he wanted them to find. He was confident and successful in business, but he wore his success with a humility that put people at ease. He was tall, lean, and quick with a smile, and people said he was as comfortable in a Savile Row suit before a boardroom of businessmen as he was lounging in jeans at Santa Barbara's wharf, trading stories and lies with the fishermen. In fact, the apparent ease with which Sam mastered his environment was the single disturbing quality people noticed in him. How was it that a guy could play so many roles so well, and never seem uncomfortable or out of place? Something was missing. It wasn't that he was a bad guy, it was just that you could never get close to him, you never got a feel for who he really was, which is exactly how Sam wanted it. He thought a show of desire, of passion, of anger even, would give him away, so he suppressed these emotions until he no longer felt them. His life was steady, level, and safe.

So it happened that on an autumn-soft sunny day, not two weeks after his thirty-fifth birthday, some twenty years after he had run away from home, Samuel Hunter stepped out of his office onto the sidewalk and was poleaxed by desire.

He saw a girl loading groceries into an old Datsun Z that was parked at the curb, and to the core of his being, Sam wanted her.

Later he would recall the details of her appearance — a line of muscle on a tan thigh, cutoff jeans, the undercurve of a breast showing below the half shirt, yellow hair tied up haphazardly, tendrils escaping to brush high cheekbones and wide brown eyes — but her effect on him now was like a long, oily saxophone note that started somewhere in that lizard part of the brain where the libido resides and resonated down his body to the tendons in his groin and back into his stomach to form a knot that nearly doubled him over.

"You want her?" The question came from beside him, a man's voice that startled him a bit, but not enough for him to tear his eyes from the girl.

The question came again. "You want her?"

Already off balance, Sam turned toward the voice, then stepped back in surprise. A young Indian man dressed in black buckskins fringed with red feathers sat on the sidewalk by the office door. While Sam tried to regain mental ground, the Indian dazzled a grin and pulled a long dagger from his belt.

"If you want her, go get her," he said. Then he flipped the dagger across the sidewalk into the front tire of the girl's car. There was a thud and a high squealing hiss as the air escaped the tire.

"What was that?" the girl said. She slammed the hatchback and moved to the front of the car.

Sam, in a panic, looked for the Indian, who had disappeared, and then for the knife, which had vanished as well. He turned and looked through the glass door into his outer office, but the Indian wasn't there either.

"I can't believe I manifested this," the girl said, staring at the flattened tire. "I've done it again. I've manifested failure."

Sam's confusion blossomed. "What are you talking about?"

The girl turned and looked at him for the first time, studied him for a second, then said, "Every time I get a job I manifest some kind of tragedy that ruins my chances of keeping it."

"But it's just a flat tire. You can't manifest a flat tire. I saw the guy that did this. It was…" Sam stopped himself. The Indian in black had triggered his fears of being found out, of going to prison. He didn't want to relive the shock. "It was probably some glass you picked up. You can't avoid that sort of thing."

"Why would I manifest glass in my tire?" The question was in earnest; she searched Sam's face for an answer. If he had one, he lost it in her eyes. He couldn't get a grip on how to react to any of this.

He said, "The Indian-"

"Do you have a phone?" she interrupted. "I have to call work and tell them I'll be late. I don't have a spare."

"I can give you a ride," Sam said, feeling stupidly proud of himself for being able to speak at all. "I was just leaving for an appointment. My car's around the corner."

"Would you do that? I have to go all the way to upper State Street."

Sam looked at his watch, out of habit only; he'd have driven her to Alaska if she had asked. "No problem," he said. "Follow me."

The girl grabbed a bundle of clothes from the Datsun and Sam led her around the corner to his Mercedes. He opened the door for her and tried not to watch her get in. Whenever he looked at her his mind went blank and he had to thrash around looking for what to do next. As he got in the car he caught a glimpse of her brown legs against the black leather seat and forgot for a moment where the ignition slot was. He stared at the dashboard and tried to calm himself, even as he was thinking, This is an accident waiting to happen.

The girl said, "Do you think that the Germans make such good cars to atone for the Holocaust?"

"What?" He started to look at her, but instead turned his attention to the road. "No, I don't think so. Why do you ask?"

"It doesn't matter, I guess. I just thought it might bother them. I have a leather jacket that I can't wear anymore because when I have it on I have to drive miles out of my way to avoid going by cow pastures. Not that the cows would want it back — zippers are hard for them — but they have such beautiful eyes, it makes me feel bad. These seats are leather, aren't they?"

"Vinyl," Sam said. "A new kind of vinyl." He could smell her scent, a mix of jasmine and citrus, and it was making driving as difficult as following her conversation. He turned the air-conditioning on full and concentrated on timing the lights.

"I wish I had calf eyes — those long lashes." She pulled down the visor and looked in the vanity mirror, then bent over until her head was almost at the steering wheel and looked at Sam. He glanced at her and felt his breath catch in his throat as she smiled.

She said, "You have golden eyes. That's unusual for someone with such dark skin. Are you an Arab?"

"No, I'm… I don't know. I'm a mongrel, I guess."

"I never met a Mongrel before. I hear they were great horsemen, though. My mother used to read me that poem: 'In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…. I don't remember the rest. Someone told me that the Mongrels were like the bikers of their time."

"Who told you that?"

"This person who's a biker."

"Person?" Sam knew there was some reality to grab on to somewhere, a position from which he could regain control, if only he could get a straight answer.

"Do you know where the Tangerine Tree Cafe is on upper State? That's where I work."

"Just tell me a block or so before we get to it."

Even after twenty years Sam found it impossible to distinguish one area of Santa Barbara from another. Everything was the same: white stucco with red tile roofs. The city had been partially destroyed by an earthquake in 1925, and since then the city planners had required all commercial buildings to be built in the Spanish-Moorish style — they even dictated the shade of white that buildings were painted. The result was a beautifully consistent city with almost no distinctive landmarks. Sam usually spotted his destination just as he passed it.

"That was it back there," the girl said.

Sam pulled the car to the curb. "I'll go around the block."

She opened the car door. "That's okay, I can jump out here."

"No! I don't mind, really." He didn't want her to go. Not yet. But she was out of the car in an instant. She bent back in and offered her hand to shake.

"Thanks a lot. I work until four. I'll need a ride back to my car. See ya." And she was gone, leaving Sam with his hand still extended and the image of her cleavage burned onto his retinas.

He sat for a moment, trying to catch his breath, feeling disoriented, grateful, and a little relieved, as if he had looked up just in time to slam on the brakes and avoid a collision. He took his cigarettes from his jacket and shook one out of the pack, but when he reached for the lighter he noticed the bundle of clothes still lying on the seat. He grabbed the clothes, got out of the car, and headed down the street to the cafe.

The doors to the cafe were the big, heavy, hand-carved, pseudo-Spanish iron-banded variety common to almost all Santa Barbara restaurants, but once through them the decor was strictly Fifties Diner. Sam approached a gray-haired woman in a waitress uniform who was manning the cash register at the head of the long counter. He didn't see the girl.

"Excuse me," he said. "The girl that just came in here — the blonde — she left these in my car."

The woman looked him up and down and seemed surprised at his appearance. "Calliope?" she said, incredulously. Sam checked his tie for spots, his fly for altitude.

"I don't know her name. I just gave her a ride to work. She had a flat tire."

"Oh." The woman seemed relieved. "You didn't look like her type. She went to the back to change. I guess she won't get far without these." The woman took the clothes from him. "Did you want to speak to her?" she asked.

"No, I guess not. I guess I'll let her get to work."

"It's no problem, that other guy is waiting for her too." The woman nodded down the counter. Sam followed her gaze to where the Indian was sitting, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke in four directions with each drag. He looked up at Sam and grinned. Sam backed away from the counter and through the doors, tripping on the step down to the sidewalk, almost falling, but catching himself on the wrought-iron railing.

He leaned on the railing feeling as if he had just taken a hard shot to the jaw. He shook his head and tried to find some sort of order to what was happening. It could be some kind of setup; the girl and the Indian in it together. But how could they know who he was? How did the Indian get to the cafe so fast? And if it was blackmail, if they knew about the killing, then why be so sneaky about it?

As he climbed back into the Mercedes he tried to shake off the feeling of foreboding that was creeping over him like a night fog. He'd just met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and shortly he would see her again. He had come to her rescue; what better first impression? Even if he hadn't planned it. The Indian was a coincidence. Life was good, right?

He started the car and put it into gear only to realize that he couldn't remember where he was going. There had been an appointment when he left the office. He drove several blocks trying to remember the appointment and who he was going to be when he got there. Finally he gave up and pressed the autodialer on his cellular phone. As the phone beeped through the numbers to his office it hit him: the source of his discomfort. The Indian had had golden eyes.

In the time it took for his secretary to answer, twenty years of his life, of denial and deception, was pulled away in a stinging black undertow, leaving him feeling helpless and afraid.

CHAPTER 2 Montana Medicine Drunk

Crow Country, Montana

Black Cloud Follows thundered across the dawn silence of a frost-glazed Little Bighorn basin, out of Crow Agency, under Highway 90, and into the gravel parking lot of Wiley's Food and Gas. A 77 ocher-colored Olds Cutlass rattletrap diesel, Black Cloud Follows stopped, coughed, belched, and engulfed itself in a greasy black cloud of exhaust. When the cloud moved on, wafting like a portable eclipse through the golden poplar and ash trees on the Little Bighorn's banks, Adeline Eats stood by the Cutlass twisting the baling wire that held the driver's door shut.

Adeline's blue-black hair was layered large and lacquered into a flip. A hot-pink parka over her flannel shirt and overalls added a Michelin Man concentric-circle symmetry to her oval shape. As the Cutlass chugged and bucked — the thing that refused to die — Adeline lit a Salem 100, took a deep drag, then delivered a vicious red Reebok kick to Black Cloud Follows's fender. "Stop it," she said.

Obediently, the car fell silent and Adeline gave the fender an affectionate pat. This old car had been indirectly responsible for getting her a husband, six children, and a job. She couldn't bring herself to be mean to it for long.

Walking around to unlock the back door, she noticed something lying in a tuft of frost-covered buffalo grass: something also frost covered, that looked very much like a body. If he's dead, she reasoned, he can wait until I've made some coffee. If he ain't, he'll probably want some.

She let herself into the store and waddled around turning on lights and unlocking doors, then started the coffee and went out to unlock the laundromat, another of the cinder-block buildings in the Wiley's Food and Gas complex, which also included an eight-room motel. Crunching back through the grass, she looked at the body again, which hadn't moved. But for the frost, Old Man Wiley would have been out at dawn setting gopher traps all over the grounds and would have taken care of the body problem. He would have also given Adeline no end of shit about Black Cloud Follows, which he had been doing for fifteen years.

It had been Wiley, a white man, who had named the car in the first place. It was not the Crow way to name cars or animals, but Wiley missed no chance to get in a dig at the people from whom he made his living. Maybe, Adeline thought, a morning of peace was worth dealing with a body.

When the coffee was finished, she filled two large Styrofoam cups (one for her and one for the body) and poured a generous amount of sugar in each. The body had long braids, so she assumed he was Crow and would probably take sugar if he was alive. If he was dead Adeline would drink his, and she definitely wanted sugar.

Back in the buffalo days, the Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine had seen a vision of men with hair on their faces who would come bringing a white sand that was poison to Indians. The prophecy had come true, the white sand was sugar, and Adeline blamed the white man for poisoning her right up to two hundred pounds.

She took the coffee, butt-bumped through the back door, and crunched through the grass to where the body lay. He was facedown and his Levi jacket and jeans were crystalline blue with frost. Adeline nudged him in the ribs with her foot. "You froze?" she asked.

"Nope," the body said into the ground; a little dust came up with the steam.

"You hurt?"

"Nope." More dust.

"Drunk?"

"Yep."

"You want coffee?" Adeline sat one of the cups by his head. The body — she was still thinking of him as the body — rolled over and she recognized him as Pokey Medicine Wing, the liar.

Creaking, Pokey sat up and tried to pick up the coffee, but couldn't seem to get his frozen hand to work. Adeline picked up the cup and handed it to him.

"I thought you was dead, Pokey."

"I might have been. Just had me a medicine dream." As he raised the cup to his lips the shakes set in and he had to bite the edge of the cup to steady it. "I died twice before, you know…."

Adeline ignored the lie and pointed to one of his braids, which had fallen into his coffee cup.

Pokey pulled the braid out and wiped the beaded band around it on his jacket. "Good coffee," he said.

Adeline shook a Salem out of her pack and offered it to him.

"Thanks," he said. "You gotta offer a prayer after a medicine dream."

Adeline lit his cigarette with a Bic lighter. "I'm a Christian now," she said. She really hoped he wouldn't use the cigarette to carry a prayer. She'd only been a Christian for a few weeks and the old ways made her a little uncomfortable. Besides, Pokey was probably lying through his tooth — he had only one — about the medicine dream.

Pokey squinted up at her and grinned, but did not pray. "I saw my brother Frank's boy, the one with the yellow eyes who threw that cop off the dam. You remember?"

Adeline nodded. She really didn't want to hear this. "Maybe you should tell a medicine man."

"I am a medicine man," Pokey said. "Just no one believes me. I don't need no one else to tell me about my visions. I saw that boy with Old Man Coyote, and there was a shade with 'em that looked like Death."

"I got to go to work now," Adeline said.

"I need to find that boy and warn him," Pokey said.

"That boy's been gone for twenty years. He's probably dead. You was just dreaming." Pokey was a liar and Adeline knew that there was no reason that she should let his ravings bother her, but they did. "If you're okay, I got to go to work."

"You don't believe in medicine, then?"

"Mr. Wiley will be coming in soon. I got to open the store," Adeline said. She turned and started back toward the store.

"Is that a screech owl?" Pokey shouted after her.

Adeline dropped her coffee, fell into a crouch, and scanned the sky in a panic. In the old tradition the screech owl was the worst of omens; vengeful ghosts lived in screech owls; seeing or hearing one was like hearing the sound of your own death. Adeline was terrified.

Pokey grinned at her. "I guess not. It must just be a hawk."

Adeline recovered and stomped into the store, praying to Jesus to forgive Pokey for his sins, but adding to her prayer a request for Jesus to beat the shit out of Pokey if He had the time.

CHAPTER 3 The Machines of Irony Bring Memory

Santa Barbara

After Sam's secretary gave him the address of his appointment he hung up the cellular phone and punched the address into the navigation system he'd had installed in the Mercedes so he would always know where he was. Wherever Sam was, he was in touch. In addition to the cellular phone he wore a satellite beeper that could reach him anywhere in the world. He had fax machines and computers in his office and his home, as well as a notebook-sized computer with a modem that linked him with data bases that could provide him with everything from demographic studies to news clippings about his clients. Three televisions with cable kept his home alive with news, weather, and sports and provided insipid entertainments to fill his idle hours and keep him abreast of what was hot and what was not, as well as any information he might need to construct a face to meet a face: to change his personality to dovetail with that of any prospective client. The by-gone salesman out riding on a shoeshine and a smile had been replaced by a shape-shifting shark stalking the sale, and Sam, having buried long ago who he really was, was an excellent salesman.

Even as some of Sam's devices connected him to the world, others protected him from its harshness. Alarm systems in his car and condo kept criminals at bay, while climate control kept the air comfortable and compact discs soothed away distracting noise. A monstrous multi-armed black machine he kept in his spare bedroom simulated the motions of running, cross-country skiing, stair climbing, and swimming, while monitoring his blood pressure and heart rate and making simulated ocean sounds that stimulated alpha waves in the brain. And all this without the risk of the shin splints, broken legs, drowning, or confusion that he might have experienced by actually going somewhere and doing something. Air bags and belts protected him when he was in the car and condoms when he was in women. (And there were women, for the same protean guile that served him as a salesman served him also as a seducer.) When the women left, protesting that he was charming but something was missing, there was a number that he could call where someone would be nice to him for $4.95 a minute. Sometimes, while he was getting his hair cut, sitting in the chair with his protections and personalities down, the hairdresser would run her hands down his neck, and that small human contact sent a lonesome shudder rumbling through him like a heartbreak.

"I'm here to see Mr. Cable," he said to the secretary, an attractive woman in her forties. "Sam Hunter, Aaron Assurance Associates. I have an appointment."

"Jim's expecting you," she said. Sam liked that she used her boss's first name; it confirmed the personality profile he had projected. Sam's machines had told him that James Cable was one of the two main partners who owned Motion Marine, Inc., an enormously successful company that manufactured helmets and equipment for industrial deep-sea diving. Cable had been an underwater welder on the rigs off Santa Barbara before he and his partner, an engineer named Frank Cochran, had invented a new fiberglass scuba helmet that allowed divers to stay in radio contact while regulating the high-pressure miasma of gases that they breathed. The two became millionaires within a year and now, ten years later, they were thinking of taking the company public. Cochran wanted to be sure that at least one of the partners could retain controlling interest in the company in the event that the other died. Sam was trying to write a multi-million-dollar policy that would provide buy-out capital for the remaining partner.

It was a simple partnership deal, the sort that Sam had done a hundred times, and Cochran, the engineer, with his mathematical way of thinking, his need for precision and order, his need to have all the loose ends tied up, had been an easy sale. With an engineer Sam simply presented facts, carefully laid out in an equationlike manner that led to the desired answer, which was: "Where do I sign?" Engineers were predictable, consistent, and easy. But Cable, the diver, was going to be a pain in the ass.

Cable was a risk taker, a gambler. Any man who had spent ten years of his life working hundreds of feet underwater, breathing helium and working with explosive gas, had to have come to terms with fear, and fear was what Sam traded in.

In most cases the fear was easy to identify. It was not the fear of death that motivated Sam's clients to buy; it was the fear of dying unprepared. If he did his job right, the clients would feel that by turning down a policy they were somehow tempting fate to cause them to die untimely. (Sam had yet to hear of a death considered "timely.") In their minds they created a new superstition, and like all superstitions it was based on the fear of irony. So, the only lottery ticket you lose will be the winning one, the one time you leave your driver's license at home is the time you will be stopped for speeding, and when someone offers you an insurance policy that only pays you if you're dead, you better damn well buy it. Irony. It was a tacit message, but one that Sam delivered with every sales pitch.

He walked into Jim Cable's office with the unusual feeling of being totally unprepared. Maybe it was just the girl who had thrown him, or the Indian.

Cable was standing behind a long desk that had been fashioned from an old dinghy. He was tall, with the thin, athletic build of a runner, and completely bald. He extended his hand to Sam.

"Jim Cable. Frank told me you'd be coming, but I'm not sure I like this whole thing."

"Sam Hunter." Sam released his hand. "May I sit? This shouldn't take long." This was not a good start.

Cable gestured for Sam to sit across from him and sat down. Sam remained standing. He didn't want the desk to act as a barrier between them; it was too easy for Cable to defend.

"Do you mind if I move this chair over to your side of the desk? I have some materials I'd like you to see and I need to be beside you."

"You can just leave the materials, I'll look them over."

Technology had helped Sam over this barrier. "Well, actually it's not printed matter. I have it in my computer and I have to be on the same side of the screen as you."

"Okay, I guess that's fine, then." Cable rolled his chair to the side to allow Sam room on the same side of the desk.

That's one, Sam thought. He moved his chair, sat down beside Cable, and opened the notebook computer.

"Well, Mr. Cable, it looks like we can set this whole thing up without any more than a physical for you and Frank."

"Whoa!" Cable brought his hands up in protest. "We haven't agreed on this yet."

"Oh," Sam said. "Frank gave me the impression that the decision had been made — that this was just a meeting to confirm the tax status and pension benefits of the policy."

"I didn't know there were pension benefits."

"That's why I'm here," Sam said. It wasn't why he was there at all. "To explain them to you."

"Well, Frank and I haven't gotten down to any specifics on this. I'm not sure it's a good idea at all."

Sam needed misdirection. He launched into the presentation like a pit bull/Willy Loman crossbreed. As he spoke, the computer screen supported his statements with charts, graphs, and projections. Every five seconds a message flashed across the screen faster than the eye could see, but not so fast that it could not nibble on the lobes of the subconscious like a teasing lover. The message was: BE SMART, BUY THIS. Sam had designed the program himself. The BE SMART part of the message could be modified for each client. The options were: BE SEXY, BE YOUNG, BE BEAUTIFUL, BE THIN, BE TALL, and Sam's personal favorite, BE GOD. He'd come up with the idea one night while watching a commercial in which six heavily muscled guys got to run around on the beach impressing beautiful women presumably because they drank light beer. BE A STUD, DRINK LIGHT.

Sam finished his presentation and stopped talking abruptly, feeling that he had somehow forgotten something. He waited, letting the silence become uncomfortable, letting the conversation lay on the desk before them like a dead cat, letting the diver come to the correct conclusion. The first one to speak loses. Sam knew it. He sensed that Cable knew it.

Finally, Jim Cable said, "This is a great little computer you have. Would you consider selling it?"

Sam was thrown. "But what about the policy?"

"I don't think it's a good idea," Cable said. "But I really like this computer. I think it would be smart to buy it."

"Smart?" Sam said.

"Yeah, I just think it would be a smart thing to do."

So much for subliminal advertising. Sam made a mental note to change his message to: BE SMART, BUY THE POLICY. "Look, Jim, you can get a computer like this in a dozen stores in town, but this partnership policy is set up for right now. You are never going to be younger, you'll never be in better health, the premium will never be lower or the tax advantage better."

"But I don't need it. My family is taken care of and I don't care who takes control of the company after I'm dead. If Frank wants to take a policy out on me I'll take the physical, but I'm not betting against myself on this."

There it was. Cable was not afraid and Sam knew no way to instill the fear he needed. He had read that Cable had survived several diving accidents and even a helicopter crash while being shuttled to one of the offshore rigs. If he hadn't glimpsed his mortality before, then nothing Sam could say would put the Reaper in his shaving mirror. It was time to walk away and salvage half of the deal with Cable's partner.

Sam stood and closed the screen on the computer. "Well, Jim, I'll talk to Frank about the specifics of the policy and set up the appointment for the physical."

They shook hands and Sam left the office trying to analyze what had gone wrong. Again and again the fear factor came up. Why couldn't he find and touch that place in Jim Cable? Granted, his concentration had been shot by the morning's events. Really, he'd done a canned presentation to cover himself. But to cover what? This was a clean deal, cut and dried.

When he climbed back into the Mercedes there was a red feather lying on the seat. He brushed it out onto the street and slammed the door. He drove back to his office with the air conditioner on high. Still, when he arrived ten minutes later, his shirt was soaked with sweat.

CHAPTER 4 Moments Are Our Mentors

Santa Barbara

There are those days, those moments in life, when for no particular reason the senses are heightened and the commonplace becomes sublime. It was one of those days for Samuel Hunter.

The appearance of the girl, the wanting she had awakened in him, had started it. Then the Indian's presence had so confused him that he was fumbling through the day marveling at things that before had never merited a second look. Walking back into his outer office he spied his secretary, Gabriella Snow, and was awed for a moment by just how tremendously, how incredibly, how child-frighteningly ugly she was.

There are those who, deprived of physical beauty, develop a sincerity and beauty of spirit that seems to eclipse their appearance. They marry for love, stay married, and raise happy children who are quick to laugh and slow to judge. Gabriella was not one of those people. In fact, if not for her gruesome appearance, an unpleasant personality would have been her dominant feature. She was good on the phone, however, and Sam's clients were sometimes so relieved to be out of her office and into his that they bought policies out of gratitude, so he kept her on.

He'd hired her three years ago from the resume she had mailed in. She was wildly overqualified for the position and Sam remembered wondering why she was applying for it in the first place. For three years Sam had breezed by her desk without really looking at her, but today, in his unbalanced state, her homeliness inspired him to poetry. But what rhymed with Gabriella?

She said, "Mr. Aaron is very anxious to talk to you, Mr. Hunter. He requested that you go right into his office as soon as you arrived."

"Gabriella, you've been here three years. You can call me Sam." Sam was still thinking about poetry. Salmonella?

"Thank you, Mr. Hunter, but I prefer to keep things businesslike. Mr. Aaron was quite adamant about seeing you immediately."

Gabriella paused and checked a notepad on her desk, then read, "'Tell him to get his ass in my office as soon as he hits the door or I'll have him rat-fucked with a tire iron. "

"What does that mean?" Sam asked.

"I would assume that he would like to see you right away, sir."

"I guessed that." Sam said. "I'm a little vague on the rat-fucked part. What do you think, Gabriella?"

Gabriella, Gabriella,

As fair as salmonella.

"I'm sure I don't know. You might ask him."

"Right," Sam said.

He walked down the hall to Aaron Aaron's outer office, composing the next line of his poem along the way.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least

If you were mistaken for a beast.

Aaron Aaron wasn't Aaron's real name: he had changed it so his insurance firm would be the first listed in the yellow pages. Sam didn't know Aaron's real name and he had never asked. Who was he to judge? Samuel Hunter wasn't his real name either, and it was certainly less desirable alphabetically.

Aaron's secretary, Julia, a willowy actress/model/dancer who typed, answered phones, and referred to hairdressers as geniuses, greeted Sam with a smile that evinced thousands in orthodontia and bonding. "Hi, Sam, he's really pissed. What did you do?"

"Do?"

"Yeah, on that Motion Marine deal. They called a few minutes ago and Aaron went off."

"I didn't do anything," Sam said. He started into Aaron's office, then turned to Julia. "Julia, do you know what rat-fuck means?"

"No, Aaron just said that he was going to do it to you for sucking the joy out of his new head."

"He got a new head? What's this one?"

"A wild boar he shot last year. The taxidermist delivered it this morning."

"Thanks Julia, I'll be sure to notice it."

"Good luck." Julia smiled, then held the smile while she checked herself in the makeup mirror on her desk.

Walking into Aaron's office was like stepping into a nineteenth-century British hunt club: walnut paneling adorned with the stuffed heads of a score of game animals, numbered prints of ducks on the wing, leather wing-back chairs, a cherry-wood desk clear of anything that might indicate that a business was being conducted. Sam immediately spotted the boar's head.

"Aaron, it's beautiful." Sam stood in front of the head with his arms outstretched. "It's a masterpiece." He considered genuflecting to appeal to the latent Irish Catholic in Aaron, but decided that the insincerity would be spotted.

Aaron, short, fifty, balding, face shot with veins from drink, swiveled in his high-backed leather chair and put down the Vogue magazine he had been leafing through. Aaron had no interest in fashion; it was the models that interested him. Sam had spent many an afternoon listening to Aaron's forlorn daydreams of having a showpiece wife. "How was I to know that Katie would get fat and I would get successful? I was only twenty when we got married. I thought the idea of getting laid steadily was worth it. I need a woman that goes with my Jag. Not Katie. She's pure Rambler." Here he would point to an ad in Vogue. "Now, if I could only have a woman like that on my arm…"

"She'd have you surgically removed," Sam would say.

"Sure, be that way, Sam. You don't know what it's like to think that getting a little strange could cost you half of what you own. You single guys have it all."

"Stop romanticizing, Aaron. Haven't you heard? Sex kills."

"Sure, suck the joy out of my fantasies. You know, I used to look forward to sex because it was fifteen minutes when I didn't have to think about death and taxes."

"If you do think about death and taxes it lasts half an hour."

"That's what I mean, I can't even get distracted with Katie anymore. Do you know what someone with my income has to pay in taxes?" The question came up in every one of their conversations. They had worked together for almost twenty years and Aaron always treated Sam as if he were still fifteen years old.

"I know exactly what someone with your income is supposed to pay in taxes, about ten times what you actually pay."

"And you don't think that that weighs on me? The IRS could take all this."

Sam rather liked the vision of a team of IRS agents loading large dead animal heads into Aaron's Jag and driving off with antlers out every window while Katie stood by shouting, "Hey, half of those are mine!" No matter how much Aaron attained, he would never let go of his fear of losing it long enough to enjoy it. In his mind's eye, Sam imagined Aaron mournfully watching as they carried the wild boar head out by the tusks.

"This thing is gorgeous," Sam said. "I think I'm getting a woody just looking at it."

"I named it Gabriella," Aaron said proudly, forgetting for a moment that he was supposed to be angry. Then he remembered. "What the fuck did you just pull over at Motion Marine? Frank Cochran is talking lawsuit."

"Over a little subliminal advertising? I don't think so."

"Subliminal advertising! Jim Cable fainted after that stunt you pulled. They don't even know what happened yet. It could be a heart attack. Are you out of your fucking mind? I could lose the agency over this."

Sam could see Aaron's blood pressure rising red on his scalp. "You thought it was a great idea last week when I showed it to you."

"Don't drag me into this, Sam, you're on your own with this one. I've pulled some shit in my time to push the fear factor, but I never had a client attacked by an Indian, for Christ's sake."

"Indian?" Sam almost choked. He lowered himself very gently into one of the leather wing-backs. "What Indian?"

"Don't bullshit me, Sam. I taught you everything you know about bullshitting. Right after you left his office Jim Cable walked out of the Motion Marine building and was attacked by a guy dressed up as an Indian. With a tomahawk. If they catch the guy and he tells that you hired him, it's over for both of us."

Sam tried to speak but could find no breath to drive his voice. Aaron had been his teacher, and in a twisted, competitive way, Aaron was his friend and confidant, but he had never trusted Aaron with his fears. He had two: Indians and cops. Indians because he was one, and if anyone found out it it would lead to policemen, one of whom he had killed. Here they were, after twenty years, paralyzing him.

Aaron came around the desk and took Sam by the shoulders. "You're smarter than this, kid," he said, softening at Sam's obvious confusion. "I know this was a big deal, but you know better than to do something desperate like that. You can't let them see that you're hungry. That's the first rule I taught you, isn't it?"

Sam didn't answer. He was looking at the mule deer head mounted over Aaron's desk, but he was seeing the Indian sitting in the cafe grinning at him.

Aaron shook him. "Look, we're not totally screwed here. We can draw up an agreement signing all your interest in the agency over to me and backdate it to last week. Then you would be working as an independent contractor like the other guys. I could give you, say, thirty cents on the dollar for your shares under the table. You'd have enough to fight the good fight in court, and if they let you keep your license you'll always have a job to come back to. What do you say?"

Sam stared at the deer head, hearing Aaron's voice only as a distant murmur. Sam was twenty-six years and twelve hundred miles away on a hill outside of Crow Agency, Montana. The voice he was hearing was that of his first teacher, his mentor, his father's brother, his clan uncle: a single-toothed, self-proclaimed shaman named Pokey Medicine Wing.

CHAPTER 5 The Gift of a Dream

Crow Country — 1967

Sam, then called Samson Hunts Alone, stood over the carcass of the mule deer he had just shot, cradling the heavy Winchester.30–30 in his arms.

"Did you thank the deer for giving its life up for you?" Pokey asked. As Samson's clan uncle, it was Pokey's job to teach the boy the ways of the Crow.

"I thanked him, Pokey."

"You know it is the Crow way to give your first deer away. Do you know who you will give it to?" Pokey grinned around the Salem he held between his lips.

"No, I didn't know. Who should I give it to?"

"It is a good gift for a clan uncle who has said many prayers for your success in finding a spirit helper on your vision quest."

"I should give it to you, then?"

"It is up to you, but a carton of cigarettes is a good gift too, if you have the money."

"I don't have any money. I will give you the deer." Samson Hunts Alone sat down on the ground by the deer carcass and hung his head. He sniffed to fight back tears.

Pokey kneeled beside him. "Are you sad for killing the deer?"

"No, I don't see why I have to give it away. Why can't I take it home and let Grandma cook it for all of us?" Pokey took the rifle from the boy, levered a cartridge into the chamber, then let out a war whoop and fired it into the air. Samson stared at him as if he'd lost his mind.

"You are a hunter now!" Pokey cried. "Samson Hunts Alone has killed his first deer!" he shouted to the sky. "Soon he will be a man!"

Pokey crouched down to the boy again. "You should be happy to give the deer away. You are Crow and it is the Crow way."

Sam looked up, his golden eyes shot with red and brimming with tears. "One of the boys at school says that the Crow are no more than thieves and scavengers. He said that the Crow are cowards because we never fought the white man."

"This boy is Cheyenne?" Pokey said.

"Yes."

"Then he is jealous because he is not Crow. The Crow gave the Cheyenne and the Lakota and the Blackfoot a reason to get up in the morning. They outnumbered us ten to one and we held our land against them for two hundred years before the white man came. Tell this boy that his people should thank the Crow for being such good enemies. Then kick his ass."

"But he is bigger than me."

"If your medicine is strong you will beat him. When you go on your fast next week, pray for warrior medicine."

Samson didn't know what to say. He would go to the Wolf Mountains next week for his first vision quest. He would fast and pray and hope to find a spirit helper to give him medicine, but he wasn't sure he believed, and he didn't know how to tell Pokey.

"Pokey," the boy said finally, very quietly, his voice barely audible over the hot breeze whistling through the prairie grass, "a lot of people say that you don't have no medicine at all, that you are just a crazy drunk."

Pokey put his face so close to Samson's that the boy could smell the cigarette-and-liquor smell coming off him. Then, softly, in a gentle, musical rasp he said, "They're right, I am a crazy drunk. The others are afraid of me 'cause I'm so crazy. You know why?"

Sam sniffed, "Nope."

Pokey reached into his pocket and pulled out a small buckskin bundle tied with a thong. He untied the thong and unfolded the buckskin on the ground before the boy. In it lay an array of sharp teeth, claws, a tuft of tan fur, some loose tobacco, sweet grass, and sage. The largest object was a wooden carving of a coyote about two inches tall. "Do you know what this is, Samson?" Pokey asked.

"Looks like a medicine bundle. Ain't you supposed to sing a song when you open it?"

"Don't have to with this one. Nobody ever had medicine like this. I ain't never showed it to anyone before."

"What are those teeth?"

"Coyote teeth. Coyote claws, coyote fur. I don't tell people about it anymore because they all say I'm crazy, but my spirit helper is Old Man Coyote."

"He's just in stories," Sam said. "There isn't any Old Man Coyote."

"That's what you think," Pokey said. "He came to me on my first fast, when I was about your age. I didn't know it was him. I thought it would be a bear, or an otter, because I was praying for war medicine. But on the fourth day of my fast I looked up and there was this young brave standing there dressed in black buckskins with red woodpecker feathers down his leggings and sleeves. He was wearing a coyote skin as a headdress."

"How did you know it wasn't just somebody from the res?"

"I didn't. I told him to go away and he said that he had been away long enough. He said that when he gave the Crows so many enemies he promised that he would always be with them so they could steal many horses and be fierce warriors. He said it was almost time to come back."

"But where is he?" Samson asked. "That was a long time ago and no one has seen him. If he was here they wouldn't say you were crazy."

"Old Man Coyote is the trickster. I think he gave me this medicine to make me crazy and make me want to drink. Pretty Eagle, who was a powerful medicine man then, told me how to make this bundle and he told me that if I was smart I would give it to someone else or throw it in the river, but I didn't do it."

"But if it is bad medicine, if he is your spirit helper and doesn't help you…"

"Does the sun rise just for you, Samson Hunts Alone?"

"No, it rises all over the world."

"But it passes you and makes you part of its circle, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Well maybe this medicine is bigger than me. Maybe I am just part of the circle. If it makes me unhappy then at least I know why I am unhappy. Do you know why you are unhappy?"

"My deer…"

"There will be other deer. You have your family, you are good in school, you have food to eat, you have water to drink. You can even speak Crow. When I was a boy they sent me off to a BIA school where they beat us if we spoke Crow. Next week, if your heart is pure, you will get a spirit helper and have strong medicine. You can be a great warrior, a chief."

"There aren't any chiefs anymore."

"It will be a long time before you are old enough to be a chief. You are too little to be unhappy about the future."

"But I am. I don't want to be Crow. I don't want to be like you."

"Then be like you." Pokey turned away from the boy and lit another cigarette. "You make me angry. Give me your knife and I will show you how to dress this deer. We will throw the entrails in the river as a gift to the Earth and the water monsters." Pokey looked at Samson, as if waiting for the boy to doubt him.

"I'm sorry, Pokey." The boy unsnapped the sheath on his belt and drew a wickedly curved skinning knife. He held it out to the man, who took the knife and began to field-dress the deer.

As he drew the blade down the deer's stomach he said, "I am going to give you a dream, Samson."

Samson looked away from the deer into Pokey's face. There were always gifts among the Crow — gifts for names, Sun Dance ceremony gifts, powwow gifts at Crow Fair, naming ceremony gifts, gifts for medicine, gifts to clan uncles and aunts, gifts for prayers: tobacco and sweet grass and shirts and blankets, horses and trucks — so many gifts that no one could ever really be poor and no one ever really got rich. But the gift of a dream was very pure, very special, and could never be repaid. Samson had never heard anyone give a dream before.

"I dreamed that Old Man Coyote came to me and he said, 'Pokey, when everything is right with you, but you are so afraid that something might go wrong that it ruins your balance, then you are Coyote Blue. At these times I will bring you back into balance. This dream that I dreamed I give to you, Samson."

"What does that mean, Uncle Pokey?"

"I don't know, but it is a very important dream." Pokey wiped the knife on his pants and handed it to Samson, then hoisted the deer up on his shoulders. "Now, who are you going to give this deer to?"

CHAPTER 6 A Malady of Medicine

Santa Barbara

"Look, Sam," Aaron said. "I can see that you're not thrilled about the buy-out. So be it. I understand that you've put a lot into this agency. I can give you forty cents on the dollar, but you'll have to take a note. I'm a little cash poor since Katie made me put that trophy room on the house."

Sam looked down from the deer head. "Aaron, I didn't hire an Indian to attack Jim Cable. I still had half of the deal wrapped up with Cochran, which would have put me in the door at any time in the future to close Cable. I wouldn't have jeopardized that."

Aaron took two hand mirrors out of his desk drawer and began to juxtapose them to get a glimpse of the back of his head. Sam was used to this — it was Aaron's hourly balding check. "Cochran's secretary saw the Indian get out of your car," Aaron said matter-of-factly. Then, looking back to the mirrors, he said, "I've been mixing Minoxidil with a little Retin A and that stuff the Man from U.N.C.L.E. sells on TV. Do you think it's working?"

Sam thought of the feather on the car seat. He was sure he'd locked the car; there was no way the Indian could get in without setting off the alarm. "I don't care what anyone saw, I didn't hire the fucking Indian to attack Cable and I can't believe you bought their story without asking me." The anger felt good. It cleared his head a little.

Aaron put the mirrors down on the desk and smiled. "I didn't buy it, Sam. But if it was true you can't blame me for taking a shot at your shares."

"You greedy little fuck."

"Sam." Aaron lowered his voice and took his «fatherly» tone. "Samuel." A little wink. "Sammy, hasn't my greed always been in your best interest? I'm just trying to keep you sharp, son. Would you have had any respect for me if I hadn't tried to make the best of a bad situation? That's the first thing I taught you."

"I don't know any Indian. It didn't happen, Aaron."

"If you say it didn't, it didn't. You've always been straight with me. I don't even remember the time you cut all the cords off those smoke alarms we were selling because that lady wanted cordless models."

"You told me to do that! I was only seventeen years old."

"Right, well, how was I to know she smoked in bed?"

"Look, Aaron, I'll find out what happened at Motion Marine and take care of it first thing in the morning. If they call back while I'm out, try not to sign a confession for me, okay? I've had an incredibly shitty day and I've got to meet someone on upper State Street in a few minutes, so if that's all…"

"You really like the new head?"

Normally Sam would have lied, but with so many questions filling his head his highly developed lying center seemed to have shut down. "It sucks, Aaron. It sucks and I think you should sue the Man from U.N.C.L.E." He walked out as Aaron was snatching up his hand mirrors.

Gabriella was just hanging up the phone when Sam walked in. "That was the security director from your condominium association, Mr. Hunter. He'd like to talk to you right away. The association is holding an emergency meeting tonight to discuss what they are going to do about your dog."

"I don't have a dog."

"He was very upset. I have his number, but he insisted upon seeing you in person before the" — she checked her notepad — "'lynch mob gets hold of you. "

"Call him back and tell him that I don't have a dog. Dogs aren't allowed in the complex."

"He mentioned that, sir. That seems to be the problem. He said that your dog was on your back patio howling and refused to let anyone get near it and if you didn't get up there he would have to call the police."

All Sam could think was Not today. He said, "All right, call them and tell them I'm on my way. And call the garage down the street and have them come up and fix the flat tire on that orange Datsun out front. Have them bill it to my card."

"You have a three o'clock appointment with Mrs. Wittingham."

"Cancel it." Sam started out of the office.

"Mr. Hunter, this is a death claim. Mr. Wittingham passed away last week and she wants you to help fill out the papers."

"Gabriella, let me clue you in on something: once the client is dead we can afford to be a little lax on the service. The chance of repeat business is, well, unlikely. So reschedule the appointment or handle it yourself."

"But sir, I've never done a death claim before."

"It's easy: feel for a pulse; if there isn't one, give them the money."

"I am not amused, Mr. Hunter. I try to maintain a businesslike manner around here and you continually undermine me."

"Handle it, Gabriella. Call the garage. I have to go."

It was only five minutes from Sam's office to his condo in the Cliffs, a three-hundred-unit complex on Santa Barbara's mesa. From Sam's back deck he could look across the city to the Santa Lucia Mountains and from his bedroom window he could see the ocean. Sam had once rented the apartment, but when the Cliffs went condo ten years before he optioned to buy it. Since then the value of his apartment had increased six hundred percent. The complex offered three swimming pools, saunas, a weight room, and tennis courts. It was restricted to adults without children or dogs, but cats were allowed. When Sam first moved in, the Cliffs had a reputation as a swinging singles complex, a party mecca. Now, after the rise in real estate prices and the death of the middle class, most of the residents were retirees or wealthy professional couples, and the cooperative agreement they all signed set strict limitations on noise and numbers of visitors. A team of security guards patrolled the complex in golf carts twenty-four hours a day under the supervision of a hard-nosed ex-burglar named Josh Spagnola.

Sam parked the Mercedes by Spagnola's office in the back of the Cliffs' clubhouse, which, with its terra-cotta courtyards, stucco arches, and wrought-iron gates, looked more like the casa grande of a Spanish hacienda than a meeting place for condo dwellers. The door to the office was open and Sam walked in to find Spagnola shouting into the phone. Sam had never heard the wiry security chief shout. This was a bad sign.

"No, I can't just shoot the damn dog! The owner is on the way, but I'm not going into his townhouse and shooting his dog, rules or no rules."

Sam noticed that even in anger Spagnola remembered to use the word townhouse to refer to the apartment. No one wanted to pay a half-million dollars for an apartment; a townhouse was another thing. People were touchy about how one referred to their homes. When Sam was selling to people who lived in trailers he always referred to them as mobile estates. The term added a certain structural integrity; you never heard on the news of a tornado touching down and ripping the shit out of a park full of mobile estates.

"I am listening, Dr. Epstein," Spagnola continued. "But you don't seem to understand my position on you missing your nap. I don't give a desiccated damn. I don't give a reconstituted damn. I don't give a creamed damn on toast. I don't give a damn. I'm not entering Mr. Hunter's home until he arrives."

Spagnola looked up and gestured for Sam to sit. Then he grinned, mimed a mimic of the caller he was listening to, looked bored, feigned falling asleep, gestured the international sign language for being jerked off, then said, "Is that so, Doctor? Well, as far as I know I have no superiors since the Crucifixion, so give it your best shot." He slammed down the phone.

Sam said, "Got something on Dr. Epstein?"

Spagnola smiled. "He's porking the Cliffs' highly ethical Monday-Wednesday-Friday masseuse."

"Everybody's porking her."

"No, everybody's porking the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday masseuse. Monday-Wednesday-Friday is very exclusive."

"And highly ethical."

"Says so in the brochure." Spagnola grinned, then casually picked up a legal pad from his desk and looked it over. "Samuel, my friend, your puppy has kept me on the phone with charming folks like Epstein all day. Shall I read you the log?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Josh. I don't have a dog."

"Then you will want to notify security about the large canine that is currently on your back deck disturbing Dr. Epstein's nap."

"I'm not kidding, Josh. If there's a dog on my deck I don't know anything about it." Sam suddenly remembered that he'd left the sliding door to the deck open. "Christ!"

"Yes, the door is open. I've told you about that before, it's an invitation to burglars."

"That deck is twenty feet off the ground. How did a dog get up there? How did it get in my apartment without setting off the alarm?"

"I was wondering that same thing. If it isn't your dog, how did it get up there? It looks bad. The other association members are having an emergency meeting tonight to discuss the problem."

"There isn't a problem. Let's just go get the damn dog and take it to the pound."

"Yes, let's. I'll read the log to you while we walk over." Spagnola rose, picked up the legal pad, and led Sam out the door, then paused, locked the office, and set the alarm. "Can't trust anyone," he said.

They walked brick paths shaded with arbors of pink and red bougainvillea while Spagnola read. "Nine A.M.: Mrs. Feldstein calls to report that a wolf has just urinated on her wisterias. I ignored that one. Nine oh-five: Mrs. Feldstein reports that the wolf is forcibly having sex with her Persian cat. I went on that call myself, just to see it. Nine ten: Mrs. Feldstein reports that the wolf ate the Persian after having his way with it. There was some blood and fur on her walk when I got there, but no wolf."

"Is this thing a wolf?" Sam asked.

"I don't think so. I've only seen it from below your deck. It has the right coloring for a coyote, but it's too damn big. Naw, it can't be a wolf. You sure you didn't bring home some babe last night who forgot to tell you that she had a furry friend in the car?"

"Please, Josh."

"Okay. Ten fourteen: Mrs. Narada reports that her cat has been attacked by a large dog. Now I send all the boys out looking, but they don't find anything until eleven. Then one of them calls in that a big dog has just bitten holes in the tires on his golf cart and run off. Eleven thirty: Dr. Epstein makes his first lost-nap call: dog howling. Eleven thirty-five: Mrs. Norcross is putting the kids out on the deck for some burgers when a big dog jumps over the rail, eats the burgers, growls at the kids, runs off. First mention of lawsuit."

"Kids? We've got her right there," Sam said. "Kids aren't allowed."

"Her grandkids are visiting from Michigan. She filed the proper papers." Spagnola took a deep breath and started into the log again. "Eleven forty-one: large dog craps in Dr. Yamata's Aston Martin. Twelve oh-three: dog eats two, count 'em, two of Mrs. Wittingham's Siamese cats. She just lost her husband last week; this sort of put her over the edge. We had to call Dr. Yamata in off the putting green to give her a sedative. The personal-injury lawyer in the unit next to hers was home for lunch and he came over to help. He was talking class action then, and we didn't even know who owned the dog yet."

"You still don't."

Spagnola ignored Sam. "From twelve thirty to one we had mass sightings and frequent urinations — I won't bore you with details — then one of my guys spotted the dog and followed it to your building, where it disappeared for a minute and reappeared on your deck."

"Disappeared? Josh, aren't you screening these guards for drug use?"

"I think he meant that he lost sight of it. Anyway, it's been on your deck for a couple of hours and all the residents are convinced that it's your dog. They want to boot you out of the complex."

"They can't do that. I own the place."

"Technically, Sam, they can. You own shares in the whole complex, and in the event of a two-thirds vote by the residents they can force you to sell your shares for what you paid for them. It's in the agreement you signed. I looked it up."

They were about a hundred yards from Sam's building and Sam could now hear the howling. "That apartment's worth five times what I paid for it."

"It is on the open market, but not to the other residents. Don't worry about it, Sam. It's not your dog, right?"

"Right."

Outside Sam's front door thirty of his neighbors were waiting, talking in heated tones, and glancing around. "There he is!" one shouted, pointing toward Sam and Spagnola. For a moment Sam was grateful that Spagnola was at his side, and at Spagnola's side was a.38 special.

The ex-burglar leaned to Sam and whispered, "Don't say anything. Not a word. This could get ugly — I see at least two lawyers in that bunch."

Spagnola raised his hands and walked toward the crowd. "Folks, I know you're angry, but we need Mr. Hunter alive if we're going to deal with the problem."

"Thanks," Sam said under his breath.

"No charge," Spagnola said. "It never occurred to them to kill you. Now they'll be embarrassed and go home. Lynchings are so politically incorrect, you know." Spagnola stopped and waited. Sam stayed beside him. As if the security chief had choreographed it, the people in front of Sam's door began to look around, avoiding eye contact with one another, then shuffled off, heads down, in different directions.

"You're amazing," Sam said to Spagnola.

"Nope, it's just that for a lot of years my living depended on the predictability of the professional class. Now it depends on the predictability of the criminal class. Same skills, less risk. You want me to go in first?"

"You have the gun."

"Okay, you wait here." Spagnola unlocked the door and palmed it open slowly. When the door was open just enough for him to pass, the thin security guard snaked through the opening and closed the door behind him.

Sam noticed that the howling had stopped. He put his ear to the door and listened, forgetting for a moment that he had installed a soundproof fire door. A few minutes passed before the latch clicked and Spagnola poked his head out.

"Well?" Sam said.

"How attached are you to that leather sofa?"

"It's insured," Sam said. "Why, did he tear it up? Is he in there?"

"He's in here, but I was wondering if you had some sort of — well — sentimental attachment to the sofa."

"No. Why? What's going on?"

Spagnola threw the door open and stepped out of the way. Sam looked through the foyer into the sunken living room, where a large tan dog had his teeth dug into the arm of the leather sofa and was humping away on it like a furry jackhammer.

"Josh, shoot that animal."

"Sam, I know how you feel. You go through life thinking that you're the only one, then you walk in on something like this — it's a blow to the ego."

"Just shoot the damn dog, Josh."

"Can't do it. California law clearly states that a firearm may only be discharged in city limits in cases of imminent physical danger. Doesn't say a word about protecting the honor of someone's couch."

Sam ran down the steps into the living room, but as he approached the dog turned and growled at him. The dog laid its ears back against its head, narrowed its golden eyes, and, still growling, began to back Sam into the corner of the living room.

"Josh! Does this qualify as imminent physical danger? Please say yes."

"Getting there," Spagnola said, very calmly, as he drew his weapon. "Don't let him see you're afraid, Sam. Dogs can sense fear."

"This isn't a dog, this is a coyote. This is a wild animal, Josh." Sam was flattened against the fifty-two-inch screen of his television and was still pushing so that the television was tilting back, ready to fall. He could smell a foul, musky odor coming off the animal. "Shoot it, please. Now, please."

"Quiet, Sam. I'm aiming. You can't shoot them in the head. They need that to see if it's rabid. Coyotes aren't normally aggressive. I saw it on PBS."

"This one didn't see the program, Josh. Shoot him."

"It might take two shots to drop him. If he leaps, cover your throat until I get the second one into him."

Spagnola fired and the TV shattered behind Sam. The coyote stood its ground unaffected. Sam backpedaled over the destroyed television as Spagnola fired again, taking out a vase on the mantel. The coyote looked at Spagnola quizzically. The third shot shattered the sliding glass door, the fourth and fifth punctured a stereo speaker, and the sixth ricocheted off the fireplace and out over the city.

When Spagnola's revolver clicked on an empty chamber he turned and bolted out the front door. Sam climbed off the broken television and braced for the coyote's attack. His ears rang with residual gunfire but he could hear laughing from across the room. The coyote was gone, but sitting on his couch, dressed in black buckskins trimmed with red feathers, was the Indian, his head thrown back in laughter.

"Hey!" Sam shouted. "What are you doing?"

In an instant the Indian leapt up and ran through the shattered glass door onto the deck. He looked over his shoulder and grinned at Sam before vaulting over the railing and dropping out of sight.

Sam ran to the deck and looked over the rail. The Indian was gone, but he could hear his cackling laugh echoing down the canyon into town.

Sam stumbled back from the rail and into the house, where he sat down on the couch and cradled his head in his hands. There had to be an explanation. Someone was screwing with his life. He riffled through his past as far as he would allow himself, looking for enemies he might have made. They were there — competing salesmen, angry customers, angrier women — dotting his life like dandelions on a lawn, but none would have gone to such elaborate measures to cause him trouble. In an honest assessment of himself he realized that he had never really been passionate enough about anything to really make that big a difference to anyone, good or bad. Since he'd run from the reservation he couldn't afford the high profile of passionate behavior. Still, there had to be an answer somewhere.

Sam thought about prayer, then faith, then remembered something that lay tucked away in the back of his sock drawer. He ran up the stairs to his bedroom and threw open the drawer. He removed a small buckskin bundle and untied the thong that held it together. Objects he had not seen in twenty years — teeth, claws, fur, and sweet grass braids — spilled out on the dresser. Among them lay a red feather that he had never seen before.

Sam looked at the coyote medicine and began to tremble.

Coyote Makes the World

A long time ago there was water everywhere. Old Man Coyote looked around and said, "Hey, we need some land." It was his gift from the Great Spirit that he could command all of the animals, which were called the Without Fires Clan, so he called four ducks to help him find land. He ordered each of the ducks to dive under the water and find some mud. The first three returned with nothing, but the fourth duck, because four is the sacred number and that is the way things go in these stories, returned with some mud from the bottom.

"Swell," said Old Man Coyote. "Now I will make some land." He made the mountains and the rivers, the prairies and the deserts, the plants and the animals. Then he said, "Guess I'll make some people now, so there will be someone to tell stories about me."

From the mud he made some tall and beautiful people. Old Man Coyote liked them very much. "I will call them Absarokee, which means 'Children of the Large-Beaked Bird. Someday some dumb white guys will come here and get the translation all wrong and call them Crow."

"What are they going to eat?" one of the ducks asked.

"They have no feathers or fur. What will they cover themselves with?" asked a second duck.

"Yes," said a third duck. "They're pretty, but they won't be able to stay out in the weather."

Old Man Coyote thought for a while about how much he disliked ducks, then he took some more mud and made a strange-looking animal with a thick coat and horns. "Here," he said. "They can get everything they need from this animal. I'll call it a buffalo."

The fourth duck had been standing by watching all this and smoking a cigarette. "It's a big animal. Your people won't be able to catch it," he said, blowing a long stream of blue smoke in Old Man Coyote's face.

"Okay, so here's another animal that they can ride so they can catch the buffalo."

"And how will they catch that one?" asked the fourth.

"Look, duck, do I have to work out everything? I made the world and these people and I've given them everything they need, so just back off."

"But if they have everything they need, what will they do? Just sit around telling stories about you?"

"That would be good."

"Boring," said the duck.

"I'll make them a bunch of enemies. They'll be hopelessly outnumbered and have to fight all the time and do all kinds of war rituals. How's that?"

"They'll get wiped out."

"No, I'll stay with them. The Children of the Large-Beaked Bird will be my favorites, although some of their enemies can tell stories about me too."

"But what if the buffalo animals all get killed?"

"Won't happen. There's too many of them."

"But what if they do?"

"Then I guess the people are fucked. I'm tired and dirty and cold from standing in all that water. I'm going to invent the sweat bath and warm up."

So Old Man Coyote built a sweat lodge out of willow branches and buffalo skins. He heated the rocks in a fire and put them in a pit in the middle of the sweat lodge, then he and the ducks crawled inside and closed the door, making it completely dark inside.

"Hey, put out that cigarette!" Old Man Coyote said to the fourth duck.

The duck threw the cigarette on the hot rocks and smoke filled the lodge. "That smells pretty good," Old Man Coyote said. "Let's throw some other stuff on the fire and see how it goes." He threw on some cedar needles and they smelled pretty good too, then he threw on some sweet grass and some sage. "This stuff will be part of the sweat ceremony, too. And some water — we need some water so it will really get hot and miserable in here."

"And we can get truly purified and clean?" asked the third duck.

"Right," said Old Man Coyote. "First I'll pour four dippers of water on the rocks for the four directions."

"And the four ducks."

"Right," said Old Man Coyote. "Now I'll pour on seven dippers for the seven stars of the Big Dipper. Then ten more because ten is a nice even number."

He handed each of the ducks a willow switch to beat their backs with. "Here, wail on yourself with these."

"What for?" asked the second duck.

"Tenderize… er… I mean… it brings up the sweat and purifies you."

Then, when the ducks were beating their backs with the willow branches, Old Man Coyote said, "Okay, now I'm going to pour a whole bunch of dippers on the rocks. I'm not even going to count, but we are going to be really hot and really clean and pure." Then he poured and poured until it was so hot in the lodge that he could not stand it and he slipped out the door, leaving the ducks inside.

Later, after he had plunged into the river to cool off, he ate a big meal and laid down to rest. "That was plumb swell," he said to himself. "I think I'll give the sweat to my new people. It can be their church and sacrament and they can think of me whenever they go in. It is my gift to them. I guess no one really needs to know about the ducks." Then Old Man Coyote picked up a willow twig and picked a bit of duck meat from between his teeth. "The sage gives them a nice flavor, though."

CHAPTER 7 The Children of the Large-Beaked Bird

Crow Country — 1967

Samson Hunts Alone sat on a bench by the sweat lodge behind his grandma's house, watching as Pokey carried the hot rocks with a pitchfork from the fire to the pit in the sweat lodge. Samson was supposed to be paying attention to the ritual that Pokey was performing and preparing himself to pray to the Great Spirit to bring him good medicine on his fast, but more than anything he wanted to be inside with the little kids and the women watching «Bonanza» on television. Grandma had cooked up a big batch of fry bread for the meal after the sweat and Samson's stomach growled when he thought about it.

Pokey, straining under a pitchfork full of red-hot rocks, said, "Can't nobody cross my path between the fire and the sweat during the first four trips."

Uncle Harlan, who was sitting next to Samson, let out a sarcastic snicker. Pokey looked up at him, his brow lowered in reproach.

"The boys have to learn, Harlan," Pokey said.

Harlan nodded. On the other side of Samson sat his two older cousins, Harry and Festus, thirteen and fourteen, who had been through the sweat for purification and prayer for their success on the basketball court at Hardin Junior High School. They had come the fifteen miles down to Crow Agency with Harlan, their father, to participate in Samson's sweat.

Uncle Harlan didn't believe in the old ways. He often said that he didn't want his boys to grow up with their heads full of ideas that didn't work in the modern world. Still, because of the obligations he felt to his family he often drove down for sweats, participated in ritual gift giving, and never missed the Sun Dance in June. He lived in Hardin, north of the reservation, where he rebuilt truck engines during the day and drank hard in the bars at night. He fought often and lost seldom. When he was drinking with Uncle Pokey, the two of them lying on the bed of Pokey's pickup staring into the limitless stars of Montana's big sky, passing a bottle of Dickel Sour Mash between them, Harlan would talk of his time in Vietnam, of the two brothers he lost there, and of the warrior blood that was part of the Hunts Alone family. Pokey would answer Harlan's painful pride with parables and mystical references until Harlan could stand it no longer.

"Damn it, Pokey, can your medicine fix a Cummins diesel? Can it fill out a tax form? Can it get you a job? Fuck medicine. Fuck fasting. Fuck the Sun Dance. If I thought I could do it, I'd take Joan and the kids and go a thousand miles from here."

"You'd be back," Pokey would say. Then the two of them would lie there drinking in silence for long minutes before one of them would bring up basketball, hunting, or truck engines — some topic safe and far away from Harlan's anger.

Some of those nights Samson would crawl out of his cot, sneak past the six cousins that slept in his room and out into the yard, where he would lie by the wheel of the old truck and listen to the two men talk.

Harlan was the only adult Samson knew who would talk about the dead, so the boy would lie there with his face against the cold grass hoping to hear something about his father or his mother, but mostly he heard about his two uncles, dead in the jungles, or his grandfather, who died piece by piece in a white hospital of diabetes. His father had died too young to leave many stories or a strong ghost. Not that Harlan would admit to believing in ghosts. "If I'm haunted," he would tell Pokey, "it's not by my unrevenged brothers, it's by you and your back-assward ways."

After time and hangovers passed, Samson would ask Pokey about Harlan and always get the same answer. "Poor Harlan, he is out of balance. I should dance for him at the Sun Dance." It was no answer. Samson remained confused.

Samson watched as Harlan rose from the bench and undressed for the sweat. He was tall and lean, his skin deep red-brown in the firelight, his eyes and hair black as an obsidian arrowhead: pure Crow brave. But as Samson undressed he wondered why his uncle seemed so unhappy with his heritage. He treated his Crow blood like a curse, while Pokey seemed to see it as a blessing. They were half brothers, sharing the same mother, belonging to her clan, growing up in the same house; why were they so different? Why did neither one seem to be able to live comfortably in his own skin?

Naked, they all entered the low dome of the sweat lodge and sat in a circle around its perimeter. Pokey placed a bucket of water by the fire pit, then he pulled down the door flap. He added sweet grass and cedar to the hot rocks and fragrant smoke filled the lodge as he sang a prayer song. His prayers were in English, which Samson knew embarrassed him some. Pokey, like Grandma, had gone to a boarding school run by the BIA where Indians were forbidden to speak or learn their own language or religion. In this way the BIA hoped that the Native American culture would disappear into the larger white culture, assimilated. Harlan, on the other hand, was ten years younger than Pokey and, like Samson, had been taught Crow in school as part of the BIA's move to preserve Indian culture.

Pokey poured four dippers of water onto the rocks and Samson lowered his face to avoid the steam. As Pokey sang, Samson let his mind wander to the Ponderosa. He would like to live on that big ranch in that big house and have his own room and two guns like Little Joe Cartwright. Until Grandma had taken all their per capita money a year ago and bought the big black-and-white television at the Kmart in Billings, Samson thought that everyone lived in a small house with twenty cousins and five or six aunts and uncles and their grandma. Everyone on the reservation seemed to. Before the television arrived Samson did not know he was poor. Now he spent every evening piled in the front room with his family watching people he did not know do things he did not understand in places he could not fathom, while the commercials told him that he should be just like those people. None of those people ever took a sweat.

Pokey had poured the seven dippers and the sweat lodge was so hot that Samson's mind went white. He lay down on the floor to breathe some cooler air. Someone lifted his head and asked him if he was okay. He answered yes and passed out.

Water was being splashed on his face. Samson came to and realized that he was being held in Harlan's strong arms.

"We did a naming ceremony for you, Samson," Harlan said. "From now on you shall be called Squats Behind the Bush. And you owe each of us a carton of cigarettes and a new Ford truck."

Samson saw that Harlan was grinning at him and he smiled back. "If I don't take the name, do I have to give you the gifts?"

Harlan laughed and set the boy on his feet by a fifty-five-gallon drum where Harry and Festus were pouring dippers of water over their heads.

After they were dried off and redressed Pokey moved the rocks out of the pit and replaced them with hot ones from the fire so the women could take their sweat.

Pokey finished and led them into the house, which was surprisingly quiet. The little kids were in bed and the women filed out to the sweat silently as soon as the men entered. The cheap Formica table was set with five plastic bowls around a big pot of venison-and-cabbage stew and a basket of fry bread. Harlan poured them all coffee from a big black urn on the counter while Pokey dished up the stew. Samson attacked a piece of fry bread and was tearing away at its stretchy, donutlike crust when Harlan sat down next to him and said, "So, Squats Behind the Bush, what are you gonna do tomorrow if you see Old Man Coyote in your vision like your Uncle Pokey did?"

Festus and Harry giggled. Samson answered the sarcasm in earnest. "Pokey's the only one with Coyote medicine. Pretty Eagle said so."

"Good thing, too," Harlan said. "Some of us have to live in the real world."

"Harlan!" Pokey shouted. "Let it go."

"It's gone," Harlan said. "It's as gone as can be, Pokey."

They finished their meal in silence, Samson wondering what Harlan meant by "It's gone." Later, as he fell asleep listening to the soft breathing of his cousins, he imagined himself living on the Ponderosa; sleeping in his own room, herding cattle on his own black horse, carrying two shiny six-guns, practicing his fast-draw, and always staying on the lookout for Indians.

CHAPTER 8 Meet the Muse, Mr. Lizard King

Santa Barbara

Calliope Kincaid waited on the steps of the Tangerine Tree Cafe thinking about the past lives of lizards. A small, brown alligator lizard was sunning himself on the planter box by the steps and his lidless eyes, glazed but seeing, reminded Calliope of a picture of Jimi Hendrix that her mother had kept next to the bed when she was growing up. She wondered if this lizard really could be an incarnation of Jimi, and what he must feel like living in the planter box in front of a cafe, eating bugs and hiding, after being a rock star.

Between the ages of seven and nine Calliope had been raised a Hindu, and during that time she had developed an acute empathy for other creatures, never sure what bird or beast might just be Daddy or Grandma working off some karma. She had taken the concept almost to the point of agoraphobia — she was afraid to go out of the house for fear that she might crush some relative doing time as a stinkbug — when her mother moved into NSA Buddhism and Calliope's spiritual focus was changed to sitting before a gong with her mother, the two of them chanting for prosperity until the apartment's heater ducts began to vibrate. Evicted for disturbing other tenants, Calliope's mother turned to goddess worship, which Calliope liked because she didn't have to wear clothes to the rituals and there were always lots of flowers. When Calliope blossomed at thirteen and began to attract too much attention from neopagan males, her mother turned to Islam, changed her daughter's name to Akeema Mohammed Kincaid, and equipped her with a veil. Calliope, who had easily grasped the concepts of karma and reincarnation, of transcendentalism and oneness, of harmony with nature and the goddess within, was completely thrown by the concepts of guilt, self-flagellation, and modesty set down in Islam. She promptly shaved one side of her head, dyed the remainder of her waist-length blond hair hot pink, and began taking hallucinogenic drugs and sleeping with awkward, pimpled tough-boys with mohawks. Men replaced religion, and Calliope accepted their seductive lies with the same open wonder she had given the gods.

In an attempt to pull her daughter out of a spiritual tail-spin, Mom turned Unitarian, but Calliope had already slashed the ecumenical apron strings and Mom was left to hopscotching religions on her own. Currently she lived in an ashram in Oregon where she acted as the spirit channel for a four-thousand-year-old, super-enlightened entity named Babar (no relation to the elephant).

As a child exposed to so many religions, Calliope had developed a malleability of faith that stayed with her into adulthood. Through the assimilation of many spiritual beliefs, without science or cynicism to balance them, Calliope was able to define everything in her world, accept the highs and lows of life with resolve, and never be burdened by the need to understand. Why understand when you can believe? For Calliope, every event was mystical and every moment magical; a flat tire could be a manifestation of karma, or a lizard might be Jimi Hendrix. If she fell in love too easily and got hurt too often it wasn't bad judgment, it was just faith.

She was humming "Castles Made of Sand" to the lizard when Sam's Mercedes pulled up to the curb. She looked up and smiled at him, not the least bit concerned that he was thirty minutes late. It had never occurred to her that he might not show. No man had ever stood her up.

She ran to the car and tapped on the passenger window. Sam pushed the button and it whirred down. "Hang on a second, I have to do something," she said.

She went around to the front of the car and searched the grille until she found a moth that had met its end with minimal damage. She plucked the moth from the grille, took it to the planter box, and wiggled it in front of the lizard while singing a few bars of Hendrix's "Little Wing." The lizard snapped at the moth halfheartedly and slithered away under the geraniums to sulk. Calliope had been correct in guessing that this particular lizard had, indeed, been a rock star in a previous life, and if she had sung a chorus of "L.A. Woman" or "Light My Fire" the lizard would have been delighted, but how could she have known?

She dropped the moth into the planter box and returned to the car.

"Sorry I'm late," Sam said.

"It's only time," she said. "I'm always late."

"I had them fix your car." He was trying not to look at her. He'd just gotten enough control of his nerves to drive and he wasn't ready to be rattled by the girl again, but he wouldn't have thought of not picking her up. During the whole debacle at the condo, the urgency to see her again had hovered in the background of his mind and finally snapped him out of his confusion over the Coyote medicine. Was she connected to the Indian?

"That's sweet of you," she said. "Did you look at the car?"

"Look at it? No. I just had the garage come down."

"It's a great car," Calliope said. "It has over three hundred horsepower, a six-pack of Weber carburetors, competition suspension and gearing — it'll do over a hundred and eighty on a straightaway. I can blow most Porsches off the road."

Sam didn't know what to say, so he said, "That's nice."

"I know that women aren't supposed to care about things like that. My mother says that I'm obsessed with vehicles because I was conceived in the back of a VW microbus and spent most of my childhood in one. We moved around a lot."

"Where does she live?" Sam asked. He would ask her about the Indian, really, when the time was right.

"Oregon. I didn't build the car myself. I used to live with this sculptor in Sedona, Arizona, who built it for midnight drives in the desert. One day I was telling him that I thought that cars had replaced guns as phallic symbols for American men, and I thought it was interesting that he had one that was so small and fast. The next day he gave me the Datsun and went out and bought a Lincoln. It was very sweet."

"Very sweet," Sam echoed. Now or never, he thought. "Calliope — that is your name, right?"

"Yes," the girl said.

Sam put on his salesman's this is a serious matter voice. "Calliope, do you know who the-"

"My name wasn't always Calliope," she interrupted. "Sherman — he was the sculptor — started calling me Calliope, after the Greek muse of epic poetry. He said that I inspired men to art and madness. I liked the way it sounded so I took it as my real name. My mom even calls me Calliope now."

Sam had brought thousands of sales interviews back into control when the client tried to wander, he wouldn't let this girl sidetrack him. "Calliope, who was the Indian-"

"You know, the Indians used to change their names as they grew up and their personalities changed or when they did certain things, like Walks Across the Desert and stuff like that. Did you know that?"

"No I didn't," Sam lied. "But I really need to know-"

"Oh, there's my car!"

Sam slowed and pulled the Mercedes in behind the Z. "Calliope, before you go-"

"We can't have sex tonight," she said. "I have some things to do, but I can cook you dinner tomorrow if you want."

Sam turned to her, his mouth hanging open. She was smiling at him, waiting for his answer with her eyes wide, as if she'd just been surprised. He realized that every time he had looked at her she'd worn that same expression of wonderment, and each time it had thrown him. Dammit, he wouldn't be distracted. She was sharp, but he was sharper. He was in control here.

"Okay," he said.

"Terrific. I live at seventeen and a half Anapamu Street — that's upstairs. Whatever you do, don't go to the downstairs door. Six o'clock, okay?" Without waiting for his answer, she was out of the car and away.

Sam rolled down the window and shouted after her. "My name is Sam."

She looked back at him and smiled, then got into the Datsun and fired it up. Sam watched the little sports car tilt with the torque of the engine as she revved it. She burned off the back tires, filling the air with squeals and blue smoke as she pulled away.

CHAPTER 9 Quitting Now Greatly Reduces the Chance of Visions

Crow Country — 1967

It was well before dawn and no lights burned in the houses and shops of Crow Agency as Pokey piloted his old truck through town, a sleepy-eyed Samson wobbling on the seat next to him.

"How far is it to the fasting place?" Samson asked.

"About two hours, but only fifty or so miles as the Crow drives. Get it, as the Crow drives?" Pokey grinned at Samson and took a swig from a pint bottle of whiskey. He and Harlan had talked and drunk all night after Samson's sweat. Now he was using the road like a buttered harlot — he was all over the place while trying to stay in the middle — and scaring Samson, whose head whacked the window when Pokey got too much shoulder and had to yank the truck's retreads back onto the asphalt.

"Could we slow down, Pokey?"

"We're not going that fast."

Samson peeked at the speedometer, which registered zero, as did all the broken gauges in the truck. Pokey caught Samson looking and grinned again.

"I ain't in any danger at all, you know. I seen my death in a medicine dream. I get shot, and it ain't nowhere near this old truck. Nope, I'm plumb safe in this truck, no matter what I do."

"What about me?" Samson asked.

"Don't know? What's your death dream?"

"I didn't have one."

Pokey looked down at Samson with a worried expression. "You didn't?"

"Nope," Samson said with a gulp.

"Well then, if I wreck you could be plumb fucked." He began to weave more radically, leaning hard into Samson as the truck slipped off the shoulder again. "Oh, shit! These tires are bald too! Don't worry, son, I'll dance for your ghost at the Sun Dance!"

"Pokey, stop it!" Samson had begun to giggle as his uncle leaned into him.

"Quick, go to sleep fast, and dream of dying on top of a pretty woman, Samson. It's your only chance."

"Pokey!" Samson was doubled over with laughter now as Pokey fishtailed the truck back and forth in the road while pumping the brakes and the clutch, causing Samson's head to jerk around like a rag doll's.

Pokey shouted, "Blacken your face, Samson Hunts Alone, this is a good day to die." Then he slammed on the brakes and brought the truck to a skidding stop in the middle, of the road. Samson was thrown to the floor of the truck among a collection of old beer cans and soda bottles. Still giggling, he climbed back up onto the seat and began pounding on Pokey's shoulder. Pokey grabbed his hands and shushed him.

"Look," Pokey said, nodding to the front of the truck. Samson turned to see a huge buffalo bull crossing the road in front of them.

"Where did he come from?" Samson asked as he watched the bull lumber out of the headlights.

"Must of wandered off the Yellowtail's place. They got a few head of buffalo."

"Good thing you saw him in time."

"I didn't see him. Them things are so dark they just eat up your headlights. I was just fooling with you when I stopped."

"We were lucky," Samson said gravely.

"Nope, I told you we was safe. Now you quit being afraid of things that ain't happened yet. That's why I gave you that dream."

Pokey geared up the truck and they rode in silence for a while, listening to the rattling grind of the old Ford's engine. The sky was just getting light and Samson could see the new leaves coming on the trees and the blossoms on the cotton-woods. He was glad his fast was to be in the time of the first grass. The days would be mild and warm, but not hot.

"Pokey," Samson said. "What do I do when I get thirsty?"

Pokey took a long pull on the pint before he answered. "You must pray that your suffering is accepted and you are given a spirit helper."

"But what do I do? What if I die?"

"You won't die. When your suffering is too much you must go to the Spirit World. You must see yourself traveling into a hole in the ground and down a long tunnel. You will come out into the light and you will be in the Spirit World. There you will not be hungry or thirsty. Wait there and your spirit helper will come to you."

"What if my spirit helper doesn't come?"

"You must go back down the tunnel again and again, looking for him. In the buffalo days you had to have a spirit helper to go into battle or people thought you were a Crazy Dog Wishing to Die."

"What's that?"

"A warrior who is so crazy, or so full of sadness, that he rides against the enemy just so they will kill him."

"Was my dad a Crazy Dog Wishing to Die?"

Pokey smiled and looked wistfully ahead. "It is bad luck to speak of it, but no, he did not wish to die. He just got too drunk and drove too fast after his basketball games."

They drove south through Lodge Grass, where the only activity was that of a few dogs trying to clear their throats for the day's barking and a few ranchers cadging free coffee at the feed and grain store. Once through town, Pokey turned east on a dirt road into the rising sun to the Wolf Mountains. In the foothills the road became deeply rutted, and washed out in places. Pokey shifted into low and the truck ground down to a crawl. After a half hour of kidney-jarring bumps and vertiginous cutbacks, Pokey stopped the truck on a high ridge between the peaks of two mountains.

From here Samson could see all the way to Lodge Grass to the west, and across the green prairies of the Northern Cheyenne reservation to the east. Lodgepole pines lined the mountain on both sides, as thick as feathers on a bird, thinning here, near the peak, where the ground was arid, strewn with giant boulders, and barren but for a few yucca plants and the odd tuft of buffalo grass or sage.

"There." Pokey pointed east to a group of car-sized boulders about fifty yards from the road. "That is the place where you will fast. I'll wait for you on this side of the road if you need me, but you must only come up here if you have a vision or if you are in trouble." Pokey grabbed a bag from the floor of the truck and handed it to Samson through the window. "There's a blanket in there and some mint leaves to chew when you get thirsty. Go now. I will pray for your success."

As he walked down the hill toward the boulders, Samson felt a lump rising in his throat. What good is medicine if you die of thirst? What good is medicine, anyway? He'd rather be in school. This was no fun, this was scary. Why did Pokey have to be so strange? Why couldn't he be more like Harlan, or Ben Cartwright?

Once on the downhill side of the boulders Samson could see the place where he would sit through his fast: a small stone fire ring under the overhang of one of the boulders. Samson sat down facing the sun, which was now a great orange ball on the eastern horizon.

He thought of Grandma at home. She would be pouring Lucky Charms in everyone's bowls about now, getting his little cousin Alice's insulin out of the refrigerator and filling the syringe, making sure everyone was dressed and ready for school. Uncle Harlan would be sitting in the living room drinking coffee and telling all the kids to be quiet because of his hangover. Samson's aunts would be pulling the blankets off the sweat lodge and loading them into the back of Harlan's truck so they could take them to the laundromat. Normally, Samson would be trading punches in the arm with Harry and Festus and lying to Grandma about having his homework done. He wanted to be at home with everyone else, not sitting by himself up here on a mountain. He had never been by himself before. He decided he didn't like it. For the first time in his life he was lonely.

He tried to think of the Spirit World. Maybe he could go there really fast, find a spirit helper and go back up to the truck so Pokey could take him to Lodge Grass and get a Coke: thirty minutes, tops. Get in, get out, and nobody gets hurt, as Uncle Harlan always said, something he picked up in Vietnam.

Samson tried to imagine the hole he would enter the Spirit World through. He couldn't do it. Maybe a prayer.

"O Great Spirit and Great Mother," Samson prayed in Crow. "Hear my prayer. Please let me find my spirit helper so I can go home."

He waited a moment. Okay, that didn't work, back to the hole in the ground.

After two hours he grew bored and his mind wandered to the Ponderosa, then to school, home, the planet Krypton, the snack bar in Crow Agency, the McDonald's in Billings, the damp basement of Lodge Grass High School, where Harlan had taken him and shown him old black-and-white films of his father playing basketball. He wondered what his father had been like. Then wondered about his mother, who had died when he was only two. Her liver quit, Harlan said. No one else would talk about the dead. He tried to remember her, but could remember only Grandma and his aunts. The new feeling of loneliness was getting worse.

Maybe he could make up a vision. He could go tell Pokey that he had a vision and found his spirit helper and Pokey would tell him how to make his medicine bundle and he could go home. That would work. He thought for a moment about what animal he should pick for his spirit helper and decided on a hawk. He didn't know what hawk medicine was, but it was probably pretty good for you unless you raised chickens or something.

Samson ran up the hill and just as he was cresting the ridge he began to shout. "Pokey! Pokey! I had my vision! I saw my spirit helper!" When he reached the road the truck was nowhere in sight. He looked up and down the road, then crossed it and looked down the other side of the ridge. Pokey was gone.

Samson felt his lip begin to quiver and water fill his eyes. He sat down in the dirt as the first series of chest-wrenching sobs escaped him and echoed down the ridge. He buried his face in his knees and cried until his throat hurt. When finally he found the bottom of his sadness he looked up and wiped his eyes on his forearm.

Why would Pokey just leave him? Maybe he just went to buy some beer. Maybe he would bring back a Coke. Samson suddenly realized that he really was thirsty. The sun was moving higher in the sky and it was starting to get hot. He stood and looked around for a shady place to wait, but the closest shade was down by the boulders, and from there he wouldn't be able to see the truck coming. He sat on a small rock by the road in the full sun.

During the next two hours Samson chewed all his mint leaves and took to sucking pebbles to keep his mouth from getting dry while he drew pictures in the dust with a stick. He heard a car engine and looked up to see a cloud of dust coming off the road about two miles away. That would be Pokey.

Samson stood on the rock to see if he could make out the truck. As the cloud approached, however, he noticed that it wasn't Pokey's truck at all, but a big powder-blue car unlike any he had seen before. He sat back down on the rock and was fighting back another fit of sobs when the car skidded to a stop beside him, bringing with it a choking cloud of dust. There was a whirring sound and the car window slid down, revealing the big, round face of the driver, a white man, who seemed to have four or five spare chins under his first one.

"Excuse me, son." The driver smiled. "I seem to have gotten myself turned around here. Would you know the way to get to Highway Ninety?"

"It's a long way," Samson said. "You have to go down the mountain into Lodge Grass, then go to Crow Agency. That's where the highway is." The white man wasn't really white, he was more of a bright pink, and he smiled with his voice, like Samson was his best friend.

"You lost me, son. Lodge Grass?"

"You have to stay on this road down the mountain, then you have to turn."

"I got you there, son, but which way did you say I should turn?"

Samson pointed down the mountain and the driver's eyes followed his finger, then he turned back to Samson looking confused. "I don't suppose you are heading that way, are you, son?"

Samson thought for a minute before he answered. If this man would take him to the highway in Crow Agency he could walk home from there. Never trust a white man who wants to give you something, Pokey had said. Soon as you think you got it he will take it away and take everything you got along with it. But Samson couldn't figure out how the driver would take away a ride, and all he really owned was his hunting knife. If the white man tried to take that, Samson would cut his gizzard out. "I'm going to Crow Agency," the boy said. "I can show you the way."

"Well, jump in quick, partner. It's hotter than blazes out here and it's gettin' in the car."

Samson walked around the back of the car, remembering what Pokey had told him about not trusting white men. It was the biggest, bluest car he had ever seen. Maybe it was the heat, but it seemed to take a long time to walk around it. When he opened the door a blast of cold air hit him that instantly brought goose bumps to his arms and back: He jumped into the car and stared in amazement at the vents in the dashboard where the cold was coming from. He'd never experienced air-conditioning before.

"Close the door, son. You want to bake us?"

Samson closed the door as the car started moving. "It's cool in here, and it smells good."

The driver, still smiling, looked down at Samson and tipped the straw skimmer he was wearing. He was the fattest man Samson had ever seen and he was wearing a powder-blue suit the same shade as the car; he filled the driver's seat like a bagful of sky. Up close Samson could see that the man's skin was pink from little veins that ran through it like road maps.

"Thank you kindly, son. Name's Commerce. Lloyd Commerce, purveyor of the world's finest cleaning apparatus, the Miracle."

He held out a fat hand to Samson. Samson shook two of the giant fingers with his right hand. He let his left drop near the handle of his hunting knife. "I don't know what that is," Samson said. "I'm Samson Hunts Alone."

"You don't know about the Miracle? Well, Samson Hunts Alone, let me tell you: in a few years the Miracle will be the standard by which all vacuum cleaners will die. In a few years, if you don't have a Miracle in your broom closet you might as well just hang a sign outside your house saying 'We live in filth. The Miracle is just the most advanced machine for the elimination of household dirt, dust, and disease that the world has ever known!"

Samson was amazed at how excited Lloyd was — it seemed that the more Lloyd talked, the pinker he got. Even if it was rude, Samson thought he should interrupt before Lloyd hurt himself. "I know what a miracle is. One of my aunts is a Christian. I don't know what a purveyor is."

Lloyd took a deep breath and shot a smile at Samson. "I am a salesman, son, one of the last truly free individuals on this planet. I sell miracles, son. Not just vacuum cleaners. I sell real loaves-and-fishes miracles." He paused for a moment and waited. Samson was hugging the car door, his hand on his knife thinking that this was the craziest talk he had ever heard from anyone besides Pokey.

"I know what you're thinking," Lloyd continued. "You're thinking, Lloyd, what kind of miracle do you perform? Am I right?"

"Nope," Samson said. "I was thinking about a Coke."

"There's some in a cooler in the backseat," Lloyd tossed off, trying to get back to his point. "Grab me one too, would you, son?"

Samson scrambled over the seat and dug into a cooler where a dozen Cokes lay in the ice around a fifth of rum. He grabbed two and slithered back over the seat. Lloyd took the Cokes and opened them. He handed one to Samson, who drank half the bottle in one pull.

"Miracles," Lloyd said.

Samson didn't care how crazy Lloyd was — life was fine! The car was cool and quiet and smelled like spices. He wasn't thirsty and he was going home. Even on the rough mountain road the car rode like a cloud. He closed one eye and rested, keeping the other eye on Lloyd. "Miracles?" Samson said.

"That's right! I can make dreams out of nothing, wants out of dreams, needs out of wants, and leave a dream in your hand. You know how I do it?"

Samson shook his head. This man was just like Pokey: if he wanted to tell you something he would tell you even if you dropped dead and rotted right before his eyes.

"Well, son, it all starts with a smile at the door. When you hit that door people ain't been sitting there waiting for you. They been sitting around thinking about how miserable they are. They got nothing to hang on to, nothing to go on for. When they answer that door they're as sour as green oranges, but I don't give it back to 'em. I give a smile of pure honey, and words just as sweet. I tell them what they want to hear. If they're ugly, I tell 'em they're looking fine. If they're a failure, I marvel at their success. Before they got the latch off the screen door I'm the best friend they ever had. And why? Because I see them as what they would like to be, not what they are. For once in their life they are living their dream, only because I make them think they are.

"But then they look around and get a little uncomfortable. If they got what they wanted, how come they ain't feeling it? How come they still feel empty? Well, son, between you and me, there ain't no contentment, no satisfaction, this side of the grave. You ain't never going to be as pretty or as rich as you want to be. No one ever has, no one ever will. Folks don't know that, though. Folks think that there's an answer to that scary feeling that keeps riding them no matter what they do."

"Coyote Blue," Samson said.

"Don't talk nonsense, boy, I'm trying to teach you something. Where was I? Oh, yeah, they think that there's an answer. So I give it to them. I watch their eyes while I'm telling them how damn good they're doing, and when they get right to the edge of panic 'cause they can't see it, I tell them about the Miracle.

"Suddenly a clean rug is all that stands between them and all they could ever be. I take out my machine, and I vacuum up their beds into a little black bag. Then I have them boil that bag on the stove until the whole house smells like a sun-ripe battlefield. You see, all that dead skin that falls off you in your sleep is in the mattress; when you boil it the smell is disgusting. There is filth in these folks' houses. How the hell you gonna be beautiful and successful with filth all around? You can't. Filth is the problem and the Miracle is the solution. Now they want it.

"So we talk some more and I make like I'm gonna leave, but they want the machine. I understand that, but they already got a vacuum cleaner. They don't need my machine. I guess a little filth never hurt no one. But they do need it, they say. They need it. And why do they need it? Because now it's all they got standing between them and their dream. So I write them up. I take their money and I leave them holding that dream in their hand while I drive away. Wants, to needs, to dreams — usually in forty-five minutes or less. Now that's a damn miracle, son."

"So you trick them," Samson said.

"They want to be tricked. I just provide a service. It ain't no different than going to the movies or seeing a magician. You don't want to see that the pirates are using rubber swords, do you? You don't want to see the secret pockets up the magician's sleeves, do you? You want to believe in something that you know ain't true, just for a while. People spend a lot of money and time to get tricked. And I get to drive a nice car, stay in good motels, eat in restaurants, and see the country in style."

Samson thought about that for a while. Driving around in a big, cool, good-smelling car would be almost as good as living on the Ponderosa. Maybe better. Nobody on the reservation drove a car like this, and they hardly ever ate in restaurants, except the burger stand in Crow Agency. Maybe tricking people was the way to go. It sure sounded better than baling hay or fixing truck engines.

"Do you think I could sell miracles?" Samson asked.

Lloyd laughed. "You got some growing to do first. Besides, it takes a man of character to handle freedom. Do you have character, Samson?"

"Is that like medicine?"

"It's better than medicine. You get yourself some character and come see me in a few years. Then we'll see."

That settled it. Samson was going to get himself some character and sell himself some miracles. He lay back on the seat and closed his eyes. Lloyd started talking again. The words were soft and rhythmic and soon Samson Hunts Alone, full of Coca-Cola and miracles, fell asleep.

"Samson, wake up."

Someone was shaking his shoulders. He opened his eyes and saw Pokey holding him at arm's length.

"What are you doing up here by the road?" Pokey asked.

"What?" Samson looked around. He was on the ridge where he had sat down before the big blue car had come along. "Where's Lloyd?"

"Who's Lloyd?" Pokey asked. "I've only been gone a couple of hours. Why did you come up here? Did you have your vision?"

"No, I went for a ride. I took a ride home with a man who sold Miracles."

"Samson," Pokey said. "I don't think you took a ride anywhere. I think you better tell me what the man said to you."

Samson told Pokey about Lloyd Commerce, about the car as long as a house, about selling miracles and tricking people and living the good life. When he was finished Pokey sat staring at the boy for a long time before he spoke. "Samson, you had your vision. I'm sorry."

"Why are you sorry, Pokey? Because I didn't find my spirit helper?"

"I wish you saw a squirrel or a flicker, Samson, but you saw a vacuum cleaner salesman," Pokey said forlornly.

"But he was just a fat white man."

"He only looked like a white man. I think you saw Old Man Coyote."

CHAPTER 10 Over Easy, Politically Correct

Santa Barbara

Sam spent most of the night cleaning up the debris from Josh Spagnola's shooting exhibition. Exhausted from the overall strangeness of his day, he went to bed early, but lay awake until well after midnight, first worrying, then trying to understand what was happening to him, and finally fantasizing about the girl. Amid the misery he retained hope, although he could not logically figure out why. She was, after all, just a girl — the goofiest girl he had ever met. Still, the thought of seeing her again made him smile, and he was able to escape into dreamless sleep.

When he awoke the next morning, the world seemed a much kinder place, as if during the night the calamities of the previous day had become distant and harmless. Order had returned. At one time he might have met such a day by looking to the rising sun and thanking the Great Spirit for returning his harmony with the world, as Pokey had taught him. He would have looked for rain clouds, felt the promise of the day's winds, smelled the dew and the sage, listened for the call of an eagle, the best of good-luck signs, and in that short time he would have confirmed that he and the world were of one spirit, balanced.

Today he missed the rising sun by three hours. He met his day in the shower, washing his hair with shampoo that was guaranteed to have never been put in a bunny's eyes and from which ten percent of the profits went to save the whales. He lathered his face with shaving cream free of chlorofluorocarbons, thereby saving the ozone layer. He breakfasted on fertile eggs laid by sexually satisfied chickens that were allowed to range while listening to Brahms, and muffins made with pesticide-free grain, so no eagle-egg shells were weakened by his thoughtless consumption. He scrambled the eggs in margarine free of tropical oils, thus preserving the rain forest, and he added milk from a carton made of recycled paper and shipped from a small family farm. By the time he finished his second cup of coffee, which would presumably help to educate the children of a poor peasant farmer named Juan Valdez, Sam was on the verge of congratulating himself for single-handedly saving the planet just by getting up in the morning. He would have been surprised, however, if someone had told him that it had been two years since he had set foot on unpaved ground.

He was writing a note to himself to put a new subliminal message on his computer, SAVE THE WORLD, BUY THIS POLICY, when Josh Spagnola called.

"Sam, did you hear what happened at the association meeting last night?"

"No, Josh, I've been cleaning up my place."

"The place, Sam. I think this will be an easier transition if you start referring to it as the place."

"You mean they voted to buy me out? Without even asking me? I can't believe it."

"I was actually very surprised myself. People seem to dislike you in the extreme, Sam. I think the dog was just their excuse for a general fuck-over."

"You told them it wasn't my dog, didn't you?"

"I told them, but it didn't matter. They hate you, Sam. The doctors and lawyers hate you because you make enough money to live here. The married guys hate you because you're single. The married women hate you because you remind their husbands that they aren't single. The old people hate you because you're young, and the rest just hate you because you aren't Japanese. Oh, yeah, one bald guy hates you because you have hair. For a guy that maintains a low profile, you've built quite a little snowball of resentment."

Sam had never given his neighbors a second thought, never even spoken to most of them, so now the realization that they hated him enough to take away his home was a shock. "I've never done anything to hurt anybody in this complex."

"I wouldn't take it personally, Sam. Nothing brings people together like hate for profit. You didn't have a chance against the clay tennis courts."

"What does that mean? We don't have clay tennis courts."

"No, but when they buy your townhouse for what you paid for it, then sell it to someone more suitable at the market rate, the association will have enough profit to build clay tennis courts. We'll be the only complex in Santa Barbara with clay courts. Should raise the value of the property at least ten percent. Sorry, Sam."

"Isn't there anything I can do? Can't I bring legal action or something?"

"This isn't an official call, Sam. I am calling as your friend and not on behalf of the association, so let me give you my best advice on taking legal action: it's suicide. Half the guys that voted you out are lawyers. In six months you'd be broke and they'd be drinking your blood over backgammon. The time for legal advice was eight years ago when you signed that agreement."

"Great. Where were you then?"

"I was stealing your Rolex."

"You stole my Rolex? That was you? My gold Rolex? You dick!"

"I didn't know you then, Sam. It was a professional thing. Besides, the statute of limitations has run out. It's time to forgive and forget."

"Fuck you, Josh. You'll get a bill for the damage you caused."

"Sam, do you know how concerned I am about your bill? I don't give a decaying damn, I don't-"

Sam hung up on the security guard. The phone immediately rang and Sam stared at it for a minute. Should he let Josh get the satisfaction of the last word? He looked at the shattered remains of his television, picked up the phone, and shouted, "Look, you wormy little fuck, you're lucky I don't come down there and pop your head like a pimple!"

"Sam, this is Julia, down at the office. I have Aaron on the line for you."

"Sorry, Julia, I was expecting someone else. Hang on a second." He sat down on the couch and held the receiver to his chest while he tried to regain his composure. Too much change, too fast. He couldn't let Aaron catch him with his guard down. His good friend Aaron, his partner, his mentor. And Josh Spagnola was supposed to be his friend, too. What was the deal with Josh? He'd turned on Sam overnight. Why?

Sam lit a cigarette and took a long drag, then blew the smoke out in a slow stream before speaking into the phone. "Julia, you caught me in the shower. Tell Aaron I'll be in the office in an hour. We'll talk then." He hung up before she could respond. He dialed the number of the Cliffs' security office. Josh Spagnola answered.

"Josh, this is Sam Hunter."

"Very rude, Sam. Hanging up when I am telling you how little I care is very rude."

"That's why I'm calling, Josh. I've heard your little speeches before. I want to know what you've got on me."

"Then you haven't seen the paper this morning?"

"I told you before, I've been patching holes all fucking morning. What goes?"

"Seems that Jim Cable, the diving mogul, was attacked by an Indian outside of his office and had a heart attack. They said he had just finished an appointment with an insurance agent."

"So, what's your point, Josh?"

"The point is, Sam, that after I ran out of your place yesterday, I went through the apartment next door and ran out on the deck. I thought I could come in from behind the dog and get a shot at it. But when I got there I saw an Indian vaulting over the rail of your deck. The Indian was wearing black, just like the one they described in the paper. Interesting coincidence, huh?"

Sam didn't know what to say. Spagnola had half the complex under his thumb for one reason or another, but Sam didn't know how the burglar used his information other than as a license to be rude. Sam didn't want to bring up blackmail when Spagnola might just be in this to watch him squirm. Sam had watched a thousand clients squirm under his own manipulation, but he wasn't sure how to go about it himself. He decided to take a direct approach. "Okay, Josh," he said. "I'm squirming. Now what?"

"Sammy, I love you, kid. You and I are like peas in a pod. You, me, and that Aaron guy at your office."

"You know Aaron?"

"Just spoke to him this morning when I called your office. Your secretary said that you were no longer with the firm and Mr. Aaron was taking all your calls from now on. Aaron and I had a long talk."

"Did you tell him about the Indian?"

"No, he told me. Strange thing, Sam, he seems to want you out of the business pretty badly, but not just for the profit. I think he's afraid of the attention you're going to get if it turns out that you're associated with the Indian who attacked Cable. Who do you think has more to lose: you or Aaron?"

"Neither of us is losing anything, Josh. This whole thing is a mistake. I don't care what you saw, I don't know anything about any Indian, and I resent the veiled threat."

"No threat, Sam. Just information. It's the cleanest commodity, you know? No fingerprints, no fibers, no serial numbers. It's kind of ethereal — religious in a way. People will pay for something that they can't smell, or taste, or touch. It's fucking glorious, isn't it? I should have been a spy."

Sam listened to Spagnola sigh, then to the breathing over the line. Here it was again, the standoff. How many times had he backed down over the years? How many times had fear of discovery caused him to lie low and play the role of the victim? Too damn many. He always seemed to be running from the past and avoiding the future, but the future came anyway.

Very softly, barely speaking over a whisper, Sam said, "Josh, before you become too enraptured, remember the information you don't have."

"What's that, old buddy?"

"You have no idea who I am or what I'm capable of."

There was a silence on the line, as if Spagnola was considering what Sam had said. "Good-bye, Josh," Sam whispered.

He hung up the phone, grabbed his car keys, and headed out the door to the Mercedes. As he disarmed the alarm and climbed in the car he realized that he also had no idea who he was or what he was capable of, and for the first time in his life it didn't frighten him. In fact, it felt good.

Coyote Gets His Powers

One day, a long time ago, before there were any men or televisions, and only animal people walked the Earth, Great Spirit, the first worker, decided that he would give everyone a new name. He told the animal people to come to his lodge at sunrise and he would give each one a new name with all the powers that went with it. "To be fair," Great Spirit said, "names will be given on a first-come, first-served basis." The Earth was a pretty fair place in those days as long as you showed up on time.

Coyote had a problem with this method, however. He liked to sleep until lunchtime and lie around thinking up tricks until late afternoon, so getting up at sunrise was a problem, but he really wanted to get a good name. "Eagle would be good," he thought. "I would be swift and strong. Or if I take the name of Bear I will never be defeated by my enemies. Yep, I got to get me a good name even if I have to stay up all night."

When the sun went down Coyote looked all over for a good espresso bar, but even in those days they were full of pretentious pseudointellectual animal people who sat around in open-toed moccasins and whined about how unfair the world was, which it wasn't. "I don't have the stomach for that," said Coyote. "I think I'll just score some magic wake-up powder and stay wired that way."

Coyote went to see Raven. It was well known among the animal people that Raven had a connection with a green bird from South America and was always good for some wake-up powder.

"I'm sorry Coyote, my friend, but I cannot extend you any credit. I'll need three prairie dogs, up front, if you want the product. And remember, I like my prairie dogs squashed real flat." Raven was a greasy little prick who thought he was cool because he wore sunglasses all the time, even at night. Who was he to act so high and mighty? Coyote was insulted.

"Look, man, I'll have a new name tomorrow. I'm going to go for Eagle. Just advance me the gram now and I'll give you six prairie dogs in the morning."

Raven shook his head. Coyote slunk away.

"I can stay awake without magic," Coyote said. "I just have to concentrate."

Coyote tried to stay awake, but by the time the moon was high in the sky he started to doze off. "This isn't working," he said. "I can't keep my eyes open." Talking to himself often gave Coyote ideas, which was a good thing, because hardly anyone else would talk to him. He broke a couple of thorns from a cactus and used them to prop his eyes open. "I'm a genius," he said. Then he fell asleep anyway.

When Coyote finally awoke the sun was directly overhead. He rushed to Great Spirit's lodge and burst through the door flap. "Eagle! I want Eagle," he said.

His eyes were dry and cracked from being propped open and his fur was matted with blood where the thorns had pierced his eyelids.

"Eagle was the first to go," Great Spirit said. "What happened to you? You look like hammered shit."

"Bad night," Coyote said. "What's left? Bear? Bear would be good."

"There's only one name left," Great Spirit said. "Nobody wanted it."

"What is it?"

"Coyote."

"You're shitting me."

"Great Spirit is not a shitter."

Coyote ran outside where the other animal people were laughing and talking about their new names and powers. He tried to get them to trade names, but even Dung Beetle told him to get lost. Great Spirit watched Coyote from his lodge and felt sorry for him.

"Come here, kid," Great Spirit said. "Look, you're stuck with a lousy name, but maybe I can make up for it. You have to keep the name, but from now on you are Chief of the Without Fires. And from now on you can take on any shape that you choose and wear it as long as you wish."

Coyote thought about it for a minute. It was a pretty good gift; maybe he should work this pity angle more often. "So that means that everyone has to do what I say?"

"Sometimes," Great Spirit said.

"Sometimes?" Coyote asked. Great Spirit nodded and Coyote figured he'd better leave before Great Spirit changed his mind. "Thanks, G.S., I'm outta here. Got to see someone about some sunglasses." Coyote loped off.

CHAPTER 11 The God, the Bad, and the Ugly

Santa Barbara

During the short drive to his office Sam decided that if Gabriella gave him the least little bit of shit he would fire her on the spot. If his life was going to fall apart before his eyes there was no reason to suffer the slings and arrows of ungrateful employees. There were also twenty younger agents who worked under him, and as long as he held partnership in the agency he held the power to hire and fire. Let one of them mouth off, he thought. Let one of them look sideways at me and they're going to be a distant memory, taillights on the horizon, gone, out, shit-canned, pink-slipped, instantly unemployed.

He walked into his office with his temper locked, loaded, and ready to fire, but was immediately disarmed when he saw Gabriella tilted back in her chair, skirt thrown up around her waist, her legs spread wide and high heels alternately pumping in the air and digging into the back of the naked Indian, who was on his knees in front of her, wheeling her chair back and forth, thrusting into her with greedy abandon and yipping with each stroke as counterpoint to the monkey noises that escaped Gabriella in rhythmic bursts.

"Hey!" Sam shouted.

Gabriella looked over the Indian's shoulder at Sam and held one finger in the air as if marking a point, then pointed to the message pad on the desk. "One call," she gasped. The Indian pulled her to him in a particularly violent thrust and Gabriella grabbed his shoulder with both hands, popping her press-on nails off and across the room like tiddlywinks.

Sam shook off his shock, ran forward, and caught the Indian around the neck in a choke hold. The Indian pumped wildly in the air as Sam dragged him off Gabriella and across the outer office. He fell over backward into his office with the Indian still squirming in his grasp and it occurred to him that unless things turned quickly to his advantage he was in serious danger of being humped. He rolled the Indian over on the carpet and pinned him, facedown, while he looked around for a weapon. The only thing in reach was the big multi-line phone on his desk. Sam released the choke hold and lunged for the phone, catching it by the cord. He swung around with it just in time to hit the Indian in the face as he was rising to his hands and knees. The phone exploded into a spray of electronic shrapnel and the Indian fell forward onto his face, unconscious but twitching against the carpet in petit-mal afterhumps.

Sam looked at the broom of colored wires at the end of the cord where the phone used to be, then dropped it and staggered to his feet. Gabriella was standing by the door, smoothing her skirt down. Her lipstick was smeared across her face and her hair was spiked into a fright wig of hair spray and sweat. She started to speak, then noticed that one of her breasts was still peeking out of her dress. "Excuse me." She turned and tucked herself in, then turned back to Sam. "I'll hold your calls," she said officiously, then she pulled the door closed, leaving Sam alone in the office with the unconscious, naked Indian.

"You're fired," Sam whispered to the closed door. He looked down at the Indian and saw a bloodstain spreading around his head on the carpet. He didn't seem to be breathing. Sam fell to his knees and felt the Indian's neck for a pulse. Nothing.

"Fuck, not again!" Sam paced around the desk four times before he fell back in his leather executive chair and clamped his hands on his temples as if trying to squeeze out a solution. Instead he thought of police and prison and felt hope running through his fingers like liquid light, leaving him dark with despair.

A growling noise from the floor. Sam looked over the desk to see the body of the Indian moving. He started to breathe a sigh of relief when he realized that the body wasn't moving at all, it was changing. His eyes went wide with terror as the arms and legs shortened and grew fur, the face grew into a whiskered muzzle, and the spinal column lengthened and grew into a bushy tail. Before Sam could catch his breath again he was looking at the body of a huge black coyote.

The coyote got to its feet and shook its head as if clearing its ears of water, then it leapt on the desk and growled at Sam, who rolled his chair back until it hit the wall behind his desk.

Sam pushed himself up by the chair arms until he was almost standing against the wall, desperately trying to put even a millimeter more between himself and the snarling muzzle of the coyote. The coyote crawled forward on the desk until its face was only inches from Sam's. Sam could feel the coyote's moist breath on his face. It smelled of something familiar, something burnt. He wanted to turn his head away and close his eyes until the horror went away, but his gaze remained locked on the coyote's golden eyes. He wanted to scream but there was no breath for it and he found his jaw was moving but no sound was coming out.

The coyote backed away and sat on the desk, then raised its lowered ears and tilted its head to the side as if perplexed. Sam felt himself take a breath and the strange urge to say "Good doggie" came over him, but he remained rigid and quiet. The coyote began to shake and Sam thought it would attack, but instead it threw back its head as if to howl. The skin on the coyote's neck began to undulate and surge and took on the shape of a human face. The fur receded from the face, then away from the front legs, which became arms, then down the back legs, which lengthened into crouching human legs. As the fur peeled it lost its black color, turning the burnt tan of a normal coyote. It was as if a human was literally crawling out of a cocoon of coyote skin, the black color becoming black buckskins trimmed with red feathers. A minute passed in what seemed a year as the transformation took place. When it was finished the Indian was crouched on Sam's desk wearing a coyote-skin headdress that had once been his own skin.

"Fuck," Sam said, falling back into the chair, his eyes trained now on the golden eyes of the Indian.

"Woof," the Indian said with a grin.

Sam shook his head, trying to get the image to go away. His mind was still rattling around in chaos trying to put this into some sort of meaningful context, but all he could do was wish that he would pass out and that his kneecaps would stop jumping with adrenaline.

"Woof," the Indian repeated. He jumped from the desk, adjusted the headdress that moments ago had been his skin, then sat in the chair opposite Sam. "Got a smoke?" he said.

Sam felt his mind lock on to the request. Yes, he understood that. Yes, he could do that. A smoke. He reached into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes and lighter and fumbled them out, lost his grip, and sent them skittering across the desk. He was scrambling for them when the Indian reached out and patted his hand. Sam screamed, the high-pitched wail of a little girl, and jumped back into his chair, which rolled back until his head snapped against the wall.

The Indian turned his head to the side quizzically, the same way the coyote had, then took the cigarettes from the desk and lit two with the lighter. He held one out to Sam, who remained pushed back in the chair. The Indian nodded for Sam to take the cigarette, then waited while Sam inched forward, snatched it out of his hand, and quickly retreated to his position by the back wall.

The Indian took a deep drag on the cigarette, then turned his head and blew the smoke out in rings that crept across the desk like ghosts.

Sam had curled into the fetal position in his chair and looked up only to cast a sideways glance at the Indian when he took a drag from his own cigarette. It occurred to him that he should feel silly, but he didn't. He was still too frightened to feel silly. When his cigarette was half gone he started to calm down. His fear was draining away, being replaced with indignant anger. The Indian sat calmly, smoking and looking around the office.

Sam put his feet on the floor, scooted the chair back under the desk, and set what he hoped was a hard gaze on the Indian. "Who are you?" he asked.

The Indian smiled and his eyes lit up like an excited child's. "I am the stink in your shoe, the buzz in your ear, the wind through the trees. I am the-"

"Who are you?" Sam interrupted. "What is your name?"

The Indian continued to grin while smoke trickled between his teeth. He said, "The Cheyenne call me Wihio, the Sioux, Iktome. The Blackfeet call me Napi Old Man. The Cree call me Saultaux, the Micmac, Glooscap. I am the Great Hare on the East Coast and Raven on the West. You know me, Samson Hunts Alone, I am your spirit helper."

Sam gulped. "Coyote?"

"Yep."

"You're a myth."

"A legend," the Indian said.

"You are just a bunch of stories to teach children."

"True stories."

"No, just stories. Old Man Coyote is just a fairy tale."

"Should I change shapes again? You liked that."

"No! No, don't do that." Sam had guessed the Indian's identity the day before when he'd opened the medicine bundle, but he had hoped it would all go away and he would find himself the victim of a childhood superstition. Religion was supposed to be a matter of faith. Gods were not supposed to jump on your desk and snarl at you. They weren't supposed to sit in your office smoking cigarettes. Gods didn't do anything. They were supposed to ignore you and let you suffer and die having never known whether your religion was a waste of time. Faith.

Sure, the gods were a badly behaving lot in stories — jealous, impatient, selfish, vengeful, smiting whole races of people, raping virgins, sending plagues and pestilence — and even as gods went, Coyote was a particularly bad example, but they were supposed to stay in the damn stories, not show up and hump your homely secretary until she made monkey noises.

"What are you doing here?" Sam asked.

"I'm here to help you."

"Help? You ruined my business and got me kicked out of my home."

"You wanted to scare the diver so I scared him. You wanted the girl so I gave her to you."

"Well what about all the cats at my condo complex? What about my secretary? How did that help me?"

"If I was not meant to have ugly women and cats they would not be so easy to catch."

It was the kind of backward, perverse logic that had irritated Sam as a child. Pokey Medicine Wing had been a master at it. It seemed to Sam at times as if the entire Crow Nation was trying to define a silicon-chip world with a Stone Age worldview. Sam thought he had escaped it.

"Why me? Why not someone who believes?"

"This is more fun."

Sam resisted the urge to leap over the desk and choke the Indian. It was still "the Indian" in his head. He hadn't yet accepted that he was talking to Coyote, Chief of the Without Fires. Even with the overwhelming evidence of the supernatural, he searched for a natural explanation for what was happening. A lifetime of disbelief is not easily shed. He tried to find some parallel experience that would put things in order, something he'd read or seen on PBS. Nothing was forthcoming, so he speculated.

How would Aaron react if faced with this situation? Aaron didn't acknowledge his Irish heritage any more than Sam admitted his own Crow roots. What if a leprechaun suddenly appeared on Aaron's desk? He'd affect a brogue and try to talk the little fucker into putting his pot o' gold into tax-deferred annuities. No, Aaron was not the person to think of in a spiritual emergency.

Coyote smiled as if he had read Sam's thoughts. "What do you want, Samson Hunts Alone?"

Sam didn't even hesitate to think. "I want my old life back to the way it was before you fucked it up."

"Why?"

Now Sam was forced to think. Why indeed? Every time Sam hired a new agent he glorified his and Aaron's lifestyles. He would take a bright, hungry young man for a ride in the Mercedes, buy him lunch at the Biltmore or another of Santa Barbara's finer restaurants, flash cash and gold cards and expensive suits — plant the seed of greed, as Aaron called it — then give the kid a means to pursue his germinating dream of material bliss while Sam collected ten percent on everything he sold. It was part of the show, one of the many roles he played, and the car, the clothes, the condo, and the clout were merely props. Without the props the show could not go on.

"Why do you want your life back?" Coyote asked, as if Sam had forgotten the question.

"It's safe," Sam blurted out.

"So safe," Coyote said, "that you can lose it in a day? To be safe is to be afraid. Is that what you want: to be afraid?"

"I'm not afraid."

"Then why do you lie? You want the girl."

"Yes."

"I will help you get her."

"I don't need your help. I need you gone."

"I am very good with women."

"Like you're good with cats and couches?"

"Great heroes have great horniness. You should feel what it is like to pleasure a falcon. You lock talons with her in the sky and do it while you both are falling like meteors. You would like it; they never complain if you come too fast."

"Get out of here."

"I will go, but I will be with you." Coyote rose and walked to the door. As he opened it he said, "Don't be afraid." He stepped out of his office and closed the door. Suddenly, Sam leapt to his feet and headed after him. "Stay off my secretary!" he shouted. He ripped open the door and looked into the outer office where Gabriella, her composure regained, was typing up a claim form. Coyote was gone.

Gabriella looked up and raised a disapproving eyebrow. "Is there a problem, Mr. Hunter?"

"No," Sam said. "No problem."

"You sounded frightened."

"I'm not frightened, goddammit!" Sam slammed the door and went to the desk for a cigarette. His cigarettes and lighter were gone. He stood there for a moment, feeling a flush of anger rise in him until he thought he would scream, then he fell back into his chair and smiled as he remembered something Pokey Medicine Wing had once told him: "Anger is the spirits telling you that you are alive."

CHAPTER 12 Cruelly Turn the Steel-Belted Radials of Desire

Crow Country — 1973

In the six years since his vision quest Samson had endured almost daily interpretations of the vision by Pokey Medicine Wing. Again and again Samson insisted that it wasn't important, and again and again Pokey forced the boy to recall his experience on the mountain in detail. It was Pokey's responsibility as a self-proclaimed medicine man to bring meaning to the symbols in the vision. Over the years, as Pokey read new meanings, he tried to change his and Samson's lives to fit the message of the medicine dream.

"Maybe Old Man Coyote was trying to tell us that we should turn our dreams into money," Pokey said.

With this interpretation, Pokey dragged Samson into a series of entrepreneurial ventures that ultimately served no purpose except to confirm to the people of Crow Country that Pokey had finally gone full-bore batshit.

The first foray into the world of business was a worm ranch. Pokey presented the idea to Samson with the same blind faith with which he told Old Man Coyote stories, and Samson, like so many before him, was captivated with the idea of turning religion into money.

Pokey's eyes were lit up with liquor and firelight as he spoke. "They are building that dam up on the Bighorn River. They tell us that we will prosper from all the people who will come to the reservation to fish and water-ski on the new lake. That's what they told us when they put the Custer Monument here, but whites opened stores and took all the money. This time we will get our share. We'll grow worms and sell them for fishing."

They had no lumber to build the worm beds, so Pokey and Samson went to the Rosebud Mountains and cut lodgepole pines, which they brought down by the pickup load. Through a whole summer they hauled and built until the Hunts Alones' five acres was nearly covered with empty worm beds. Pokey, convinced that their success depended on getting a jump on other prospective worm ranchers, instructed Samson to tell everyone who asked that they were building corrals to hold tiny horses that they were raising for the Little People that lived in the mountains. "It's easier to keep a secret if people think you're crazy," Pokey said.

With the beds finished, they were faced with the problem of filling them. "Worms like cow shit," Pokey said. "We can get that for free." Indeed, had Pokey asked any of the ranchers in the area, they would have let him haul away all the manure he needed, but because most of the ranchers were white and Pokey did not trust them, he decided, instead, that he and Samson would steal the cow pies in the dead of night.

So it began: sunset, Samson and Pokey driving the old pickup into a pasture, Pokey driving slowly along while Samson followed on foot with a shovel, scooping piles into the bed of the truck, then the two of them stealing away with their reeking load to dump it in the worm beds, then out again. "The Crow have always been the best horse thieves, Samson," Pokey said. "Old Man Coyote would be proud of the trick we have played on the ranchers."

Pokey's enthusiasm mystified Samson, who couldn't muster the same self-satisfaction at stealing something that nobody wanted. Nevertheless, after a month of pasture raids the beds were full and they drove to the bait store in Hardin to buy their breeding stock: night crawlers and red worms, five hundred each.

Pokey burnt sage and sweet grass and prayed over the beds and they released the worms into the beds of manure. Then they waited.

"We shouldn't disturb them until spring," Pokey said, but many nights Samson spotted him sneaking out to one of the beds with a trowel, turning over a patch, then skulking away. One night Samson was sneaking out with his own trowel when he saw Pokey on his knees with his face pressed to a bed. He stood up when he sensed the boy behind him.

"You know what I was doing?" Pokey asked.

"No," Samson said, hiding his trowel behind his back.

"I was listening to the sound of money."

"You have shit on your ear, Pokey."

From that time forward they were both more careful about their nocturnal progress checks, but neither found worm one. They waited through the cold Montana winter, sure that come spring they would be waist deep in worms and money. Never mind the fact that Yellowtail Dam wouldn't be completed for two more years.

After the thaw they marched to the beds together, shovels in hand, to turn over their squirming horn of plenty, but shovel after shovel turned up empty. Into the third bed they began to panic and were wildly slinging shit in the air when Harlan pulled up.

"Digging for horses?" he asked.

"Worms," Pokey shouted, lifting the veil of secrecy with a single word.

"Where did you get the manure?"

"Around," Pokey said.

"Around where?"

"The ranches on the res."

Harlan began to laugh and Samson was afraid for a moment that Pokey would brain him with the shovel. "You were trying to grow worms?"

"Old Man Coyote told us to," Samson said defensively.

"We let go a thousand worms in here to breed so we could sell 'em to fishermen."

"I guess Old Man Coyote didn't tell you that cattle ranchers put a wormer in their cattle feed, huh?"

"Wormer?" Pokey said.

"That manure was poison to your worms. They were probably dead ten minutes after you put them in there."

Samson and Pokey looked at each other forlornly, the boy's lower lip swelling with disappointment, the man's temples throbbing with pain.

Some people believe that hard work is its own reward and a job well done is a tribute to a man's character; fortunately, none of those people were around or they would have been ducking shovel blows. Pokey and Samson decided to get drunk. Harlan stayed on to coach the boy through his first hangover and run interference with Grandma, who would have skinned the two men had she known they were giving liquor to a twelve-year-old.

It was the end of summer, a summer spent in sulking and speculating, before Pokey brought home the goats. He'd obtained the pair, a male and a female, from a dubious source in a Hardin bar by winning a bet that had something to do with a pineapple, a throwing knife, and a waitress named Debbie. Samson had difficulty putting the story together from Pokey's drunken ravings, but he gathered that because Debbie had survived, and the pineapple had not, Pokey had two goats on his hands.

"We could breed 'em and sell 'em for meat," Pokey said. "But I got a better idea. Them lawyers and doctors are flying into Montana from the city and paying a thousand bucks a head to shoot bighorn sheep. I say we go to the airport in Billings and wait for one of them to get off a plane, then tell 'em they can come to the res and shoot one for two — three hundred. I can be the faithful Indian guide and lead them all over hell and back, and you can take the goats up into the mountains and tie them up where they can shoot 'em."

Despite Samson's objections that even a city lawyer might know the difference between a bighorn sheep and a nanny goat, Pokey insisted that come morning they would be on the road to riches. Come morning, however, when Samson went outside to look at the goats he found them lying on their backs, legs shot stiff to the sky with rigor mortis, dead as stones. In his excitement Pokey had tied the goats next to a patch of hemlock, and the goats, perhaps sensing what was planned for them, munched their last meal and joined the ranks of Socrates.

Not all of Pokey's quests for spiritual capitalism were complete failures. He and Samson made a little money with the «authentic» Indian fry-bread taco stand they set up outside of the Custer Battlefield National Monument, until the health department objected to the presence of marmot and raccoon meat in their all-beef tacos. And they did make forty dollars selling eagle feathers to tourists (actually the feathers of two buzzards that had dined on tainted goat carcass), which they used to buy marijuana seeds that produced a respectable crop of grape-sized casaba melons. (Harlan referred to this as the magic beans incident.) And finally, while Samson was busy with school and basketball and a developing obsession with girls, Pokey turned to prostitution and made five bucks from the owner of the Hardin 7-Eleven who paid the shaman to take his sandwich sign and go stand somewhere else.

Samson was fifteen by the time Pokey decided that perhaps they were not meant to turn their dreams into money. Once again he sat the boy down in the kitchen to recount the vision.

"Pokey, I don't even remember much of the vision, and besides, how important could it be? I was only nine." Samson's friend Billy Two Irons was waiting outside to drive them to a «forty-nine» party at the Yellowtail Dam and Samson was not in the mood to be cross-examined about an event that he was trying desperately to leave behind, along with the rest of the trappings of childhood.

"Do you know why the Crow never fought the white man?" Pokey asked gravely.

"Oh, fuck, Pokey, not now. I've got to get going."

"Do you know why?"

"No. Why?"

"Because of the vision of a nine-year-old boy. That's why." As much as Samson wanted to leave, he had spent too many years listening to the Cheyenne and Lakota call his people cowards to walk out now.

"What boy?" he asked.

"Our last great chief, Plenty Coups. When he was nine he went on his first fast, just like you. He cut pieces from his skin and suffered greatly. Finally, his vision came, and he saw the buffalo gone and then he saw the white man's cattle covering the plains. He saw white men everywhere, but he saw none of our people. The medicine chiefs heard his vision and said that it was a message. The Lakota and the Cheyenne had fought the white men and lost their lands. The vision meant that if we fought the white men we would lose our land and be wiped out. Our chiefs decided not to fight and the Crow survived. We are here because of the vision of a nine-year-old boy."

"That's great, Pokey," Samson said, having gained nothing useful from the story. He was not going to quell any ridicule from non-Crows by telling them that his people had changed their way of life over a mystical vision. It was hard enough trying to live down the reputation of his crazy uncle as it was. "I have to go now."

He grabbed the drum that Pokey had made him and took off through the living room, high-stepping over his eight younger cousins, who were sprawled on the floor watching cartoons on televsion. "'Bye, Grandma," he tossed over his shoulder to his grandmother, who sat in a tattered easy chair among the kids, adding the final touches to a beaded belt she was making for him.

In front of the Hunts Alone house a tall, acne-speckled Billy Two Irons was pouring a jug of water into the radiator of a twenty-year-old Ford Fairlane. Most of the water was draining out of the bottom of the engine onto the ground at his feet.

"That thing going to make it up to Yellowtail?" Samson called.

"No problem, bro," Billy said without looking up. "I got twenty milk jugs of water in the backseat for the trip up. Coming home's downhill most of the way."

"You fix the exhaust leak?"

"Yep, tomato can and a hose clamp. Works fine as long as you keep the window down."

"How about the brakes?" Samson was staring over Billy's shoulder into the greasy cavern of the engine compartment.

Billy capped the radiator and slammed the hood before he answered. "You let it coast down to about ten miles an hour and throw it in reverse it'll stop on a dime."

"Then let's do it." Samson jumped into the car. Billy threw the empty milk jug into the backseat, climbed in, and began cranking the engine. Samson looked back to the house and saw Pokey coming out the front door waving at them.

"Hit it, man," Samson said. "Let's go."

The car finally fired up just as Pokey reached the window. He shouted to be heard over the din of the damaged muffler. "You boys watch out for Enos, now."

"We will, Pokey," Samson said as they pulled away. Then he turned to Billy Two Irons. "Is Anus working nights again?" Anus was the name they used for Enos Windtree, a fat, meanspirited half-breed BIA cop who liked nothing better than to terrorize kids partying at some remote spot on the res. Once, at a forty-nine party near Lodge Grass, Samson and Billy and nearly twenty others were drinking and singing with the drums when Samson heard a distinct, sickening series of mechanical clicks right by his ear: the sound of a twelve-gauge shell being jacked into a riot gun. When he turned to the noise Enos hit him in the chest with the butt of the gun, knocking him to the ground. Then Enos shot the lights and windshields out of two cars before sending everyone on their way. When Samson told the story, people just said he was just lucky Enos hadn't hit him in the face, or shot somebody. There were rumors that it had happened before. And people were dying on the Lakota reservation at Pine Ridge, killed by the tribal police in what amounted to a civil war.

"Enos works whenever he can find someone to fuck with," Billy said. "I'd like to hang that fat fuck's scalp from my lodgepole."

"Oooooo, brave warrior, heap big pissed off," Samson chided in pidgin — speaking Tonto, they called it.

"You telling me you wouldn't want to see Anus's head through a rifle scope?"

"Yeah, if I thought I could get away with it. But a rifle would be too quick."

For an hour and a half, between stops to add water to the radiator, they theorized on the best way to do away with Enos Windtree. When they finally arrived at the party it had been decided that Enos should have his entire body abraded with a belt sander and a two-inch hole saw slowly driven through his skull with a drill press. (Samson and Billy had just finished with their first year of shop class and were still fascinated by the macabre potential of every power tool they had used; this fascination, of course, was fed by their shop teacher, a seven-fingered white man who described in detail every accident that had mangled, mutilated, or murdered some careless shop student since the turn of the century. The teacher had been so successful in instilling respect for the tools in the boys that Billy Two Irons had taken to skipping two classes after shop to mellow out and would have had a nervous breakdown had Samson not finished building his friend's birdhouse for him.)

Billy pulled the Fairlane slowly onto the dam and up to a dozen cars that were parked haphazardly on the three-hundred-foot structure. He threw the car into reverse and gunned the engine until the transmission screamed in protest and the car stopped in a jerking, squealing mechanical seizure.

Samson was out of the car in an instant and a warm wind coming off the newly formed reservoir washed over him with the scent of sage. Twenty people were gathered at the rail of the dam, beating drums and singing a song of heartbreak and betrayal in Crow. Samson scanned the faces in the moonlight, recognizing and dismissing each until he spotted Ellen Black Feather, and smiled. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Her long hair was blowing in a black comet tail behind her, her shirt was wrapped tight around her in the wind, and Samson noticed, to his delight, that she was braless. She saw Samson and returned his smile.

It was perfect. Just as he had envisioned it on a dozen nights while he lay in the dark with his cousins sleeping around him. They would sing and drink for a while, maybe smoke a joint if somebody had one, then he and Ellen would finish the evening in the backseat of the Fairlane. He walked to Ellen and sat beside her on the rail of the dam, oblivious to the three-hundred-foot drop behind him. As he started to beat his drum and sing he looked back to the car to see Billy adding water to the radiator. It suddenly occurred to him that if he were going to enjoy the favors of Ellen Black Feather in the back of Billy's car, it would be a good idea to move the twenty jugs of water first. He excused himself with a pat on her knee and returned to the car.

"Billy, help me get these jugs into the trunk."

"They're all empty, don't worry about them."

"I'm going to need the space. Just open the trunk, okay?"

Billy handed him the car keys. "Hunts Alone, you are a hopeless horndog."

Samson grinned, then took the keys and ran around to the back of the car. He was loading his first armload of jugs into the trunk when he heard a car pass by and the singing abruptly stopped. Samson looked up to see the green tribal police car stopping in the middle of the partiers, some thirty yards away.

"Fuck. It's Anus," Billy said. "Let's get out of here."

"No, not yet." Samson eased the trunk lid down and joined Billy at the front of the car. They watched Enos Windtree climb out of the car and reach back in for his nightstick. The partiers stood stock-still, as if they were standing near a rattlesnake that would strike at the first movement, but their eyes were darting around looking for possible lanes of escape. All except for Ernest Bulltail, the biggest and meanest of the group, who met Enos's gaze straight on.

"This is an illegal gathering," Enos rasped as he swaggered up to Ernest. "You all know it, and I know it. The fine is two hundred dollars, payable right now. Cough it up." Enos punctuated his demand by driving the end of his nightstick into Ernest's solar plexus, doubling the big man over. Ernest made an effort to straighten up and Enos hit him across the face with the nightstick. One of the other men stepped forward but froze when Enos dropped his hand to the Magnum strapped to his hip.

"Now for my fine," Enos said.

"Fuck you, Anus!" someone screamed, and Samson's heart sank as he realized that it was Ellen. Enos turned from Ernest and started for the girl.

"I know how you're going to pay up," Enos said to Ellen with a leer.

Samson knew he had to do something, but he wasn't sure what. Billy was tugging on his sleeve, trying to get him to go, but he was fixated on Enos and Ellen. Why hadn't they brought a weapon? He moved to the back of the car and opened the trunk.

"What are you doing?" Billy whispered.

"Looking for a weapon."

"I don't have a gun in the car."

"This," Samson said, holding up a tire iron.

"Against a three fifty-seven? Are you nuts?" Billy grabbed the tire iron and wrenched it out of Samson's hand.

Samson was almost in tears now with frustration. He looked back up the dam to see Enos, his gun at Ellen's head, putting his free hand under her shirt.

Samson pushed Billy aside, then reached into the trunk and pulled out the spare tire. He began creeping up the dam, cradling the heavy spare in his arms. The others watched him, eyes wide with fear. Ten yards away from Enos he started running, the tire held out in front of him.

"Enos!" Samson shouted. The fat policeman pulled away from Ellen and was bringing up his gun to fire when the tire hit him in the chest and drove him back over the railing. Samson followed, tumbling halfway over the rail before someone caught the back of his shirt and tugged him back. He didn't turn to see who it was, he just stared over the railing at the dam wall that disappeared into the darkness two hundred feet below.

The others joined him at the rail and several minutes passed before the stunned silence was broken by Billy Two Irons. "I just had that spare fixed," he said.