Light of the World

Chapter 12

At first light Tuesday morning, Wyatt Dixon woke from a nightmare, one that left his armpits damp and turned his heart into gelatin. For Wyatt, the dream was not about the past or the present; nor did it have a beginning or an end. Instead, the dream was omnipresent in Wyatt’s life, and it waited for him whenever he closed his eyes, whether day or night. In the dream, the man he grew up calling “Pap” was walking toward him bare-chested in his strap overalls, his skin as shriveled and bloodless as a mummy’s, his bony hand knotted into a fist. “You touch your sister again, boy? Your mother seen you,” Pap was saying. “Don’t lie. It’ll go twice as hard if you lie. You worthless little pisspot. The best part of you run down your mother’s leg.”

Wyatt got up and put on his jeans and went outside barefoot and shirtless into the cold morning and the mist that was a ghostly blue in the cottonwoods and as bright as silver dollars on the steel swing bridge over the river. The current was dark green and swirling in giant eddies around the boulders and beaver dams on the edges of the main channel, and wild roses were blooming along the banks. The dawn was so soft and cool and tangible, Wyatt believed he could taste it in the back of his mouth and breathe it into his lungs. He pulled a tarp off a woodpile and threw it on the grass and lay on his back with his arm over his eyes, his chest rising and falling slowly, the world once again a place of leafy trees and a breeze blowing down a canyon and German brown trout undulating in the riffle. Just that fast, Pap had gone away and become the bag of bones that someone finally dropped in a hole in a potter’s field.

When Wyatt awoke, the sun had just broken above the canyon, and he could hear footsteps clanging on the steel grid of the swing bridge and the cables creaking with the tension created by weight. He sat up and saw a heavyset woman in a suit and heels trying to work her way down the slope without falling, a notebook in her hand.

Where had he seen her? At the revival on the rez?

“Could I have a word with you, Mr. Dixon?” she asked.

The breeze was at her back. He closed and opened his eyes. “What the hell is that smell?” he said, looking around.

“I guess that’s my perfume.”

“Who are you?”

“Bertha Phelps. I’m doing an article on charismatic religions among Native Americans.”

“I was about to fix breakfast.”

“I don’t mind,” she replied.

You don’t mind what? he thought. He took her inventory. “I’ve seen you before.”

“Could I ask you some questions?”

He broke off a blade of grass and put it in his mouth. “Whatever blows your skirt up,” he replied.

She followed him into the house. He put on a long-sleeved shirt without buttoning it and started a fire in the woodstove. There was so much clutter in his kitchen that there was hardly a spot to sit down. He went into the living room and returned with a straight-back chair and set it beside her. “Take a load off,” he said.

“I heard you speaking in tongues Sunday afternoon,” she said.

“You were the woman talking to Mr. Robicheaux.”

“That’s right. Were you raised Pentecostal?”

“I didn’t have no raising, unless that’s what you call breaking corn and picking cotton from cain’t-see to cain’t-see.”

“Would you say you found your religion through the Indians?”

“I never give it much thought.”

“You had a hard life, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Other people say you did.”

He cracked four eggs and plopped the yolks in a skillet and set the skillet on one of the stove lids. “Maybe other people ought to mind their own goddamn business.”

She leaned over her notebook to write in it. She rubbed her pen back and forth on the paper, trying to make ink come out of it. “Drat,” she said.

“That’s them kind Walmart sells. They’re about as good for writing as tent pegs.”

“I have another one in my purse,” she said.

He looked at her with increasing curiosity. “You’re not here to ask me about the revival, are you?”

“I’m also doing an article on the local Indians.”

“You know where I saw that kind of ballpoint before?”

“You just told me. At Walmart.”

“There was a cop here’bouts named Bill Pepper. He carried ballpoints just like that one in your hand. He was the kind of man who did things on the cheap. Did you happen to know Detective Pepper?”

“The name is familiar.”

“While I was in his custody, I heard him talking on his phone to Love Younger. I think the good detective was on a pad for Mr. Younger.”

“A what?”

“Detective Pepper was taking money on the side. That’s what cops call being on a pad.”

“You’re saying this police officer was corrupt?”

He looked through the back window at a doe and a fawn crossing through the shadows, their hooves stenciling the damp grass. They looked back at him, flipping their tails, theirs noses twitching. “I’m saying you got something on your mind, lady, and it ain’t religion.”

“I wondered if you knew the murdered Indian girl.”

“The Youngers sent you here?”

“No, sir, I’m here on my own.”

“You from down south?” he said.

“I’ve lived there.”

Wyatt opened the window and picked up a magazine from the drainboard and fanned his face with it.

“Does my perfume bother you?”

“I guess I’ve smelled worse.”

She seemed to concentrate on a reply but couldn’t think of one.

“If you see the Youngers, I want you to tell them something for me.”

“I’ve already told you I don’t work for them. I’m a freelance journalist.”

“Right. Tell Mr. Younger I know what he can do to me if he takes a mind. But I’ll leave my mark on him before we get done. He’ll know when it’s my ring, too.”

“If you want to make threats, Mr. Dixon, you’ll have to do that on your own.”

“It ain’t no threat.”

“I think maybe I should leave.”

“Suit yourself.”

She stood up, then looked out the window at the deer. “There’s corn on the grass,” she said.

“The doe’s got a hurt leg. I put it out at night for her and the fawn.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“I didn’t check.”

“Maybe you are a kinder man than you pretend to be, Mr. Dixon,” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’re a right handsome woman, if a little on the heavy side,” he said.

“That’s supposed to be a compliment?”

“I’d call it a statement of fact. You’re a nice-looking lady. I get out of sorts sometime. You already ate breakfast?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Stick around.”

“I’m not sure for what purpose.”

“My huevos rancheros ain’t half bad. I got coffee and biscuits, too. There’s a bowl of pineapple in the icebox I chopped up. I learned cooking in the army before they kicked me out.”

“You do have manners,” she said.

“You’re working for Love Younger, though, ain’t you?”

“I most certainly am not. I do not care for Mr. Younger. I do not care for his ilk, his progeny, or the industries he owns.”

“What was that second one?”

“His offspring. They’re like their father. They’re notorious for their lack of morality.”

He snapped the buttons into place on his cowboy shirt, the tails splaying across his narrow hips. He pulled on his boots and filled the coffeepot under the spigot, his mouth a slit, his eyes as empty as glass.

“Is there some reason you’re not speaking to me now?” she asked.

“There’s something you hid from me. I just ain’t figured out what it is,” he replied. His eyes rested on the ballpoint in her hand. “You like ham or a chunk of steak with your eggs?”

Wyatt Dixon had never been on the property of a wealthy man and had always assumed that the geographical passage from the world of those who ate potatoes and those whose bread was served on a gold plate would involve rumbling over a drawbridge and a moat, not simply driving up a maple-shaded road through an open gate and cutting his engine in front of a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion overlooking the Clark Fork of the Columbia River.

The gardens were bursting with flowers, the lawn a blue-green mixture of fescue and clover and Bermuda grass. Three men who looked like gardeners were watering the flowers and weeding the beds, hummingbirds hanging in midair above them, the sun a yellow flame through trees that grew higher than the roof.

One of the gardeners snipped a rose and set it in a bucket of water and walked toward Wyatt, sticking his cloth gloves in his back pocket, smiling behind a pair of Ray-Ban wraparounds. His hair was gold and braided in cornrows, his tanned scalp popping with perspiration. A red spider was tattooed on the back of one hand. “You the plumber?” he said.

“I look like a plumber?” Wyatt replied.

The gardener gazed up the driveway at the road and at the sunlight spangling in the canopy, his smile never leaving his mouth. His lips had no color and seemed glued on his face. “You’re lost and you need directions?”

“I got a message for Mr. Love Younger. Is he home?”

The gardener took a two-way phone from a pouch on his belt. “I can ask.”

Wyatt glanced at an upstairs window from which an elderly man was looking back. “Is that him yonder?” he said.

“What’s your name, buddy?” the gardener said.

Wyatt pulled the walkie-talkie from the gardener’s hand and pushed the talk button. “Howdy-doody, Mr. Younger. This is Mr. Dixon. You got yourself a little-bitty teensy-weensy pissant down here deciding who talks to you and who don’t. I need to have a word with you about the death of your granddaughter. You want to come down here or not?”

“You’re the rodeo man who sold her the bracelet?” a voice replied.

“Yes, sir, that would be yours truly. I sold it to her in the biker joint she didn’t have no business in.”

“Stay right there,” the voice said.

A moment later, a man with a broad forehead and vascular arms and a glare emerged from the front door. When Wyatt extended his hand and stepped toward him, the man with the cornrows and another gardener grabbed his upper arms, struggling to get their fingers around the entirety of his triceps.

“Let him go,” Younger said.

“Thank you, kind sir. Breeding shows every time,” Wyatt said, straightening a crick out of his neck. “A journalist named Bertha Phelps come to see me this morning. I think maybe she’s working for you, but she says that ain’t true.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Younger said.

“The cops are trying to put your granddaughter’s murder on me. The one who tried hardest was Bill Pepper. I bet you know who he is. Or rather, who he was.”

“I do.”

“You were paying him?”

“Why have you come here, Mr. Dixon?”

“To find out why y’all are trying to do me in.”

“I have no interest in you at all, except for the fact that you were the last person to see my granddaughter alive.”

“That’s a lie, Mr. Younger. Every biker in the Wigwam saw her. Except I’m the only man there what got pulled in.”

Younger held his gaze on Wyatt’s face. “I understand you have quite a history. You ever kill anyone, Mr. Dixon?”

“They say I busted a cap on a rapist.”

“But you didn’t do it?”

“I’m just telling you what they say. In prison you don’t ever ask a man what he done. You ask, ‘What do they say you did?’ ”

“I think you’re a dangerous and violent man.”

“Not no more, I ain’t. Not unless people fuck with me.”

“You can’t use that language here,” Younger said. “State your purpose or leave.”

Wyatt folded his arms on his chest and looked at the Tudor-style house and the beige walls and the purple rockwork around the windows and entranceways and the flowers blooming as big as cantaloupes in the beds. “I just wondered why a man who owned all this would hire a small-town flatfoot and general loser like Bill Pepper to give grief to a man what ain’t done him nothing. You must be pretty goddamn bored.”

“I’ve done you no harm. Don’t you dare say I have.”

“What do you call tasing a man?”

“I don’t even know what the term means.”

“You have a reason for staring into my face like that?” Wyatt said.

“Where’d you grow up?”

“Northeast Texas, just south of the Red.”

“You have unusual eyes.”

“What’s my place of birth have to do with my eyes?”

“Nothing. I have a feeling you want trouble. I don’t think you’ll be happy until you get it.”

Wyatt peeled the paper off a lollipop and stuck the lollipop in his jaw. “There is one other thing you can tell me, because it’s perplexed me for years. It’s got to do with the unpleasant subject of incest and such. I heard this tale about a mountain boy in Kentucky who married a girl from the next hollow and learned on their wedding night she was a virgin. In the morning he sent her back to her folks. When his daddy asked him how come he kicked her out, the boy said she was a virgin. His pap said, ‘You done the right thing, son. If she ain’t good enough for her own family, she ain’t good enough for ours, either.’ Is that story true?”

“Get him out of here,” Younger said.

The next day the sheriff called Albert’s house. By chance I answered the phone. I wished I hadn’t. “Where is the Horowitz woman?” he asked.

“I think she went to the airport early this morning,” I said.

“She did what?”

“She’s making a documentary,” I said. “Can I help with something?”

“The abandoned truck that woman shot up is registered to an old man in a remote place in West Kansas. The locals found him in his barn yesterday. The coroner said he’d been dead for months. Where did Horowitz go?”

“I don’t know. What do you want her for?”

“Last night we pulled a floater out of the Clark Fork. He was peppered with rounds from a nine-millimeter.”

“The guy Gretchen shot?”

“How would I know? One in the head, one in the throat, one in the chest. Is that the way she does it? Let me share my feelings with you, Mr. Robicheaux. You guys are starting to be a real nuisance.”

“Why us?”

“We didn’t have this mess on our hands until you and your friends arrived.”

“Run your bullshit on somebody else, Sheriff.”

“What did you say?”

“Bill Pepper was a dirty cop and on a pad for Love Younger, and you didn’t do anything about it. You turned over the investigation of a young girl’s death to a bum. In the meantime, somebody put an electronic bug in Clete Purcel’s cabin.”

“When did this happen?”

“Probably a few days ago. What’s the deal on the floater?”

“His name was Emile Schmitt. He was a private investigator in Fort Lauderdale and Atlantic City. He got his license yanked when he was charged with battery involving the apprehension of a female bail skip.”

“How did the owner of the pickup die?”

“The decomposition was too great. The coroner couldn’t be sure. There was a strand of looped fence wire close by.”

“Do you believe we’re dealing with Asa Surrette?” I asked.

“Why would a Kansas sex pervert and serial killer be mixed up with a PI from the East Coast?”

“Maybe they have a shared agenda.”

“Like what?” the sheriff said.

“If I knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. What do you want me to tell Gretchen Horowitz, Sheriff?”

I could hear him breathing against the receiver. “I want her to ID the body. I want her to look at the man she killed.”

“For what purpose?”

“Maybe it’s time she becomes accountable for some of her deeds.”

How about accountability from the society that produced her? I thought. “Clete and I will come with her to your office,” I said, and hung up.

I hoped I was through with Elvis Bisbee, at least for the day. I wasn’t. Five minutes later, he called back. “I didn’t tell you something. There was a stink in the abandoned truck,” he said. “It wasn’t motor oil or dried blood or decayed food or a creel of fish somebody left under the seat. The stink didn’t come from anything we could find.”

“I’m not tracking you, Sheriff.”

“It smelled like excrement. Like somebody had rubbed it into the upholstery. Except the lab tech couldn’t find any. This guy Asa Surrette has a hard-on about your daughter, so maybe you and your family are part of the problem. Frankly, I wish you and your daughter had stayed in Louisiana.”

“Yeah, and maybe you’re in the wrong line of work,” I said. This time I pulled the phone out of the jack.

At five-fifteen A.M., Gretchen climbed inside the two-engine plane volunteered by a Sierra Club member and took off two minutes later from the Missoula airport, rising out of the predawn darkness into a breathtaking view of the mountaintops that surrounded the city, the streets below streaked with night-damp and car lights, the Clark Fork wending its way into the mystery and vastness of the American West. As the plane gained altitude and banked east toward the Grand Divide, she wondered if the pilot, a nice boy by the name of Percy Wolcott, had any idea who his passenger actually was, even though she had known him for several months. She wondered what his comfort level would be if he were privy to the thoughts and memories she could never free herself of. Would he be repelled? Would he be afraid?

He was good-looking, about twenty-five, with thick dark brown hair he had let grow long without affectation. He was a good pilot and soft-spoken and considerate. When they first met at a Sierra Club function in West Hollywood, she thought he was gay. When she decided he was heterosexual, she wondered why he didn’t try to put moves on her, since most men did. Then she decided he was like two or three boys she had known in Miami who were shy and private and respectful toward women and nothing like their peers, most of whom were visceral and loud and, when they got her in the backseat, had a way of moving her hand down to their nether regions.

What a drag, she thought, realizing she had been guilty of falling into the national obsession of classifying human beings in terms of their sexual behavior. Do Europeans and Brits do that? Nice to meet you, gay guy. Thank you, but I’m trans. How about you? You look like you might be hetero. Actually, I’m more of an across-the-board premature ejaculator, thank you very much.

At five thousand feet, they hit turbulence that shook the plane and caused Percy to look at her in a protective and reassuring way, and in that moment, in the gentleness of his expression, she knew that her great concern was not about bigotry and obsession and the limited thinking of others; it was her fear that her friend Percy would be horrified if he knew the history of Gretchen Horowitz, that his kind validation of her would be withdrawn.

In junior college she had read an autobiographical account written by a white man who was kidnapped as a child from a sod house in Oklahoma and raised among Comanche Indians. He grew up in the shadow of Quanah Parker and participated in atrocities that were the worst she had ever seen described on a printed page. The lines she remembered in particular were the elderly frontiersman’s depiction of himself as a white teenage boy, smeared with war paint and sweat and the dust of battle, a boy who, in the old man’s words, “thirsted to kill” and did things that were depraved and cruel beyond comprehension. When she read the descriptions, she realized she had found a kindred spirit, one who lived with thoughts and desires that might forever separate her from the rest of the human family.

Bill Pepper had robbed her in every way possible. He had lied to her and turned her charity into a sword he drove into her breast. He had drugged her and bound her and systematically degraded her and mocked her while he did it. Then he escaped into the Great Shade at the hands of another and now lay safe in a stainless steel drawer inside a refrigerated room that smelled of formaldehyde. Where do you put your bloodlust now? she asked herself.

Why did people give so much importance to drug and alcohol addiction? The day you gave up dope and booze was the day you got better. The day you gave up bloodlust was the day you allowed a succubus to devour the remnants of your self-respect.

“There’s coffee in a thermos and an egg sandwich in the canvas bag behind your seat,” Percy said.

“I’m fine,” she replied.

“I can get us into Canada today if you want,” he said.

“I’ve got too much footage on the shale operation. In some ways, it’s not effective.”

He glanced sideways at her, not understanding.

“The areas that are most damaged up there are already totally destroyed,” she said. “People don’t see what the area used to look like. They only see it after it’s been turned into a gravel pit. They’re also depressed by the fact they can’t do anything about it, so they don’t want to look at it or think about it anymore.”

“I bet you’re going to be famous one day,” he said.

“Why would I be famous?”

“Because you’re the real thing.”

“What’s the real thing?”

“You think the work you do is more important than you are,” he said. “Hang on. There’s some weather up ahead. Once we’re over Rogers Pass, we’ll be in the clear.”

She drifted off to sleep as the plane bounced under her, the rain spidering and flattening on the glass. When she awoke, they had just popped out of the clouds, and she saw the sharp gray peaks of mountains directly below her. They made her think of sharks clustered inside a giant saltwater pool with no bottom. “Who was that guy this morning?” Percy said.

“Which guy?”

“The one who dropped you at the airport.”

“There wasn’t any guy. I drove myself. My pickup is parked in the lot.”

“There was an older man in the waiting room. I thought maybe he was your father, the way he was looking at you.”

“No,” she said. “My father is probably still asleep at Albert Hollister’s ranch. What did he look like?”

“Long face, high forehead. I don’t remember. Can you get the thermos for me?”

“Think hard, Percy.”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember. Just a guy, about fifty-five or so. Older guys never look at you?”

“I scare them away.”

“You? That’s a laugh.”

“You said I was the real thing. That’s kind of you, but you’re assigning me a virtue I don’t have. I love movies. I’ve loved them all my life. I never knew why until I read an interview with Dennis Hopper. He grew up poor in a little place outside Dodge City, Kansas. All he remembered of Dodge City was the heat and the smell of the feeder lots. Every Saturday he went to town with his grandmother and sold eggs. She gave him part of the egg money to go to a cowboy movie. Hopper said the movie theater became the real world and Dodge City became the imaginary one. When he was in his teens, he went out to Hollywood. His first role was in Rebel Without a Cause, with James Dean. His second movie was Giant, with James Dean again. Not bad, huh?”

“People like you.”

“What?”

“The Sierra Club people like you.” Percy leaned forward, seeming to stare at a point beyond the starboard wing. “Check out the Cessna at three o’clock.”

“What about it?”

“He’s been with us awhile. Is anybody following you around?” His eyes crinkled.

“Maybe I upset a few people in Florida and Louisiana.”

“You’ll never make the cut as a villain, Gretchen. Here comes the Cessna. I didn’t tell you I used to drop fire retardant for the United States Forest Service. Let’s go down on the deck and see if he wants to stay with us.”

They had just flown through clouds above a mountain peak into sunlight and wide vistas of patchwork wheat and cattle land. Percy took the twin-engine down the mountain’s slope like a solitary leaf gliding on the wind, the plane’s shadow racing across the tips of the trees. Gretchen felt as though she were dropping through an elevator shaft. Percy leveled out at the base of the mountain and began to gain altitude again, the engines straining, a barn and a white ranch house couched inside poplar trees miniaturizing as Gretchen looked out the window. “Where’d that red Cessna go?” Percy said.

“I don’t know. Just don’t do that again,” she said.

“Everything’s cool,” he replied. He touched a religious medal that hung from a chain on his instrument panel. “What can go wrong when you have Saint Christopher with you?”

“I don’t find your attitude reassuring,” she said.

They flew along the edges of the Grand Divide and Glacier National Park, where the flat plains seemed to collide with the mountains. On the western end of the Blackfoot Reservation, Gretchen saw several test wells, one close to the border of the park. The plane climbed higher into the mountains and made a wide turn over Marias Pass. She could see snow packed inside the trees on the crests and the slopes, and deep down in the canyon, an emerald river that wound through boulders that were as big as houses.

She pulled open her window. “Get down as close as you can,” she said.

“What are you doing?”

“Filming. That’s why we’re here.”

“You want to fly through that canyon?”

“You’ve got to do something for kicks.”

He blew out his breath. “I underestimated you,” he said.

You can say that again, she thought.

He made another turn and headed straight at Marias Pass, dropping lower and lower, the trees standing out individually on the peaks, snow melting on rocks, a train trestle glinting above a gorge, Gretchen hanging out the window with her camera, her hair whipping in the wind.

Her face and hands were cold, her shirt was ballooning, her ears were deafened by the wind stream and the roar of the engines. None of that mattered. Through the lens of the camera, she was capturing topography whose geological age could only be guessed at. Even when the train trestle sped by and she could smell the trees and the coldness of the snow down below and see a canyon wall approaching the plane, she never took her eye from the lens.

She felt the plane lift violently, the engines shuddering, the wings stressing, as Percy took them along the edge of a cliff and over a mountain crest where the tips of the Douglas fir were probably no more than ten feet below the plane’s belly. Percy turned in to the sun and flew toward the plains, his hands opening and closing on the yoke. She sat back down in the seat and shut the window. “Thanks,” she said.

“Thanks?”

“Yeah, that was very nice of you.”

“We came within about three seconds of pancaking into that cliff. Where have I heard that line ‘You’ve got to do something for kicks’?”

“Rebel Without a Cause.”

He smiled, his expression like a young boy’s. “You ever read a biography of Ernest Hemingway?”

“Probably not.”

“He used to say his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, had legs that were six feet long. That’s what you look like, Gretchen. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. On top of it, you’re a beautiful person.”

“Maybe there are some things you don’t know about me. Maybe you shouldn’t be telling me about your feelings.”

“Gay guys hit on you all the time?”

“You’re gay?”

“What did you think I am?”

“A gorgeous man.” She got up on her knees and put her hand on the back of his neck and kissed him on the cheek. Then she did it again.

“Jesus Christ, Gretchen.”

“What?”

“Cut it out or I’ll have to stop being gay,” he said.

They landed on the rez at an airstrip mowed out of a pasture, a windsock at the far end straightening in the breeze. The sky was full of dust and pollen and chaff blowing from a field where a farmer was harrowing. It was a bleak place devoid of trees or shade, the ground studded with rocks, and tangles of mustard weed were bouncing across it like jackrabbits. At the crossroads was a general store with two gas pumps in front and a collapsed barn in back. One of the pumps had been vandalized and was powdered with rust. Gretchen looked at the sign over the door. It said DEER HEART ONE STOP.

“You’ve been here before?” she said.

“A couple of times. To gas up and hire a driver.”

“Deer Heart was the name of a teenage girl who was murdered outside Missoula. She was the adopted granddaughter of Love Younger.”

“That bastard adopts Indian kids?”

“His son did. The one called Caspian.”

“These people have enough trouble without the Youngers taking their kids. I wonder if there’s a curse on this country. You ever hear of the Baker Massacre?”

“No.”

“In 1870 an alcoholic army major by the name of Eugene Baker murdered two hundred and seventy Piegan Blackfeet up on the Marias River. Most of them were women and children. It was January, and the survivors were driven into freezing water or out on the plains to die. They hadn’t committed a crime against anyone. I know a wildlife photographer who camped on the Marias to take some pictures at sunrise and said he heard the sounds of women and children wailing in the wind. It scared him so bad he couldn’t start his truck.”

“What’s the story on the Deer Heart family?”

“There aren’t many good stories on the rez. Check out the jail in Browning on Saturday night.”

A bell tinkled on the door when they went inside. The proprietor was an old man with steel-gray braids and blue eyes and skin that looked as soft as tallow. He said if they wanted to hire a car and a driver to tour and photograph the area, he would call his nephew, who lived a short distance away. Gretchen studied a framed photograph on the wall beside an ancient refrigerator. “Is this your family?” she asked.

“That’s us, ten years back. Ain’t many of us still around,” the old man said. He was sitting on a stool behind the counter, surrounded by shelves of canned goods, his shoulders stooped.

In the photo, several elderly people were standing under a picnic shelter. In front were a young couple and three small children. “Is Angel Deer Heart in this picture?” Gretchen asked.

“You know Angel?” the old man said.

“Just by name. She was adopted by the Younger family, wasn’t she?”

“Her mother and father were killed on the highway north of Browning. They got drunk and went straight into a truck. The children were taken by the adoption agency. Angel is the only one left.”

“Pardon?” Gretchen said.

“I heard her brother and sister died of meningitis in a hospital in Minnesota. You heard something about Angel? Is she doing okay?”

Gretchen didn’t answer.

“We don’t want to take a lot of your time,” Percy said. “Can you call your nephew for us?”

“If you ever see her, tell her to write home and tell her great-uncle Nap how she’s doing,” the old man said.

Gretchen looked blankly at the canned goods on the shelves. She opened the refrigerator and took out two bottles of pop. “How much are these?” she said.

“A dollar each,” he said. “Are you all right, miss?”

“I get airsick sometimes,” she replied.

She and Percy went out on the porch to wait for the nephew. A grass fire was crawling up a row of brown hills in the distance. The dust and smoke had turned the sunlight into pink haze, more like evening than morning. “You really think this place is haunted?” she said.

“That’s what the Indians want to believe.”

“Why should they want to do that?”

“As bad as the past was, they were probably better off then,” he replied.

A plane came out of nowhere and flew above the store and made a turn over the airstrip, then climbed into the smoke rising off the hills. “There’s our friend in the Cessna,” she said. “I think those are Love Younger’s people up there.”

“Forget it. We’re on the right side of history,” Percy said, watching the plane grow smaller inside the smoke. He looked at her. “You don’t agree?”

“The ovens at Auschwitz were full of people who were on the right side,” she said.

It was almost sunset when they landed in Missoula. She was tired and dirty, her clothes smelling of smoke, her body stiff from sitting in the plane’s passenger seat without enough room for her legs. Percy was going to refuel and take off for Spokane, where he was supposed to meet his partner. “Can I buy you dinner?” he said.

“I’m going to use the restroom and head home. Thanks for a great day.”

“If I ever decide to cheat on my partner, could I give you a call?”

“That’s not funny.”

“I don’t think before I speak sometimes.”

“Percy?”

He waited. She looked at the youthfulness in his face, the moral clarity in his eyes, and wanted to tell him something but didn’t know what.

“You worried about me?” he said.

“Sometimes I think I’m a jinx. Is your plane okay?”

“Did it seem okay when we flew through the canyon above the Marias?”

“Take care of yourself. Call me on my cell when you get to Spokane.”

“You’re a worrywart,” he said.

Later, on her way to use the women’s room, she felt rather than saw a man standing at the corner of her vision, his eyes dissecting her. It was a sensation she could compare only with a spider crawling across her face in her sleep as she lay helpless inside a dream from which she couldn’t wake. She shifted the weight of her backpack from one shoulder to the other, her expression flat, turning her head slightly to get a look at a figure silhouetted against the entranceway.

His face was shadowed by the sunlight shining through the front of the building. She pretended to study a stuffed grizzly bear in a giant showcase, its upraised paws and bared teeth looming above her. In the reflection of the glass, she watched the man walking toward the waiting room. She turned slowly and saw a late-middle-aged man about six feet, with a tapered waist and hair combed in ducktails like a 1950s hood’s. He wore an unpressed white shirt and Roman sandals and black socks and a cheap brown belt and rumpled slacks with dirt on the cuffs. A tobacco pipe was stuck through one of his belt loops. For just a moment she smelled an odor that didn’t belong inside an air terminal.

Then she lost sight of him in the concourse. He had gone into either the men’s room or the lounge. She walked through a crowd in front of the souvenir store and stood at the entrance to the lounge and studied the people eating at the tables or drinking at the bar or playing the video poker machines. If he was in there, she didn’t see him.

She waited in front of the men’s room for two minutes, then pushed the door open and went inside. A man at a urinal grinned at her. “One of us is in the wrong place,” he said.

She dropped her backpack on the floor and put a hand inside her tote bag. “You see a rumpled-looking guy with a duck ass in back?”

“A what?”

“Zip up and get out.”

A fat man came out of a stall, tucking in his shirt with his thumbs. “You, too,” she said. “Beat it.”

“Who do you think you are?” the fat man asked.

“I think there’s a bad guy in one of these stalls. Now get the fuck out, unless you want to catch a stray bullet,” she said.

Both men rushed out, looking over their shoulders at her. She walked the length of the stalls but saw no feet under the doors. She began kicking open each door, slamming it back against the partition, the Airweight .38 special in her right hand.

They were all empty. As she kicked open the last stall, an odor rose into her face that made her gag.

She backed away from the stall and blew out her breath and dropped the Airweight in her tote bag just as the front door opened and a tall man in a Stetson entered the room.

“Come on in. I went in the wrong room. I’m on my way out,” she said.

“No problem,” he said. He cleared his throat loudly and pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth. “Good Lord!” he said.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “You see a guy in Roman sandals with ducktails out there?”

“Come to think of it, I did.”

“Where?”

“Going out the front. Is there something a little strange going on here?”

She went back into the concourse, expecting to see security personnel heading toward her. The concourse, the souvenir shop, the waiting area, and the lines at the counters were as they had been when she entered the restroom.

She went through the revolving door onto the sidewalk. The air was warm, the sun little more than a spark between the hills, the clouds in the west orange against a blue sky. She felt a wave of exhaustion wash through her. Was the man with the 1950s hairstyle the same one she had seen at the bar in the Depot, the same one who had tried to kill her below the Higgins Street Bridge?

Was the abominable odor in the men’s room his? Was she losing her mind? She was too tired to answer her own questions. She started walking toward her pickup. Percy Wolcott’s twin-engine flew overhead into the sun’s afterglow, its propellers spinning with a silvery light, almost in tribute to the day. As the drone of the engines faded, she walked farther into the parking lot, the equipment in her backpack knocking against her side.

Then she heard a sound that was like dry thunder, a rumbling that had no source, a reverberation that seemed to bounce off rock walls and the trunks of trees, as though magnifying itself, refusing to be gathered into the sky.

She stared at the hills, dark with shadow on the slopes and lit from behind by clouds that were as orange as Halloween pumpkins. Don’t think those thoughts, she told herself. Do not look in his direction. Do not become the jinx you called yourself.

Others in the parking lot were pointing toward the west. At what? How can you point at a sound? Before she could think about the denial in her question, she saw a fire burning inside the trees on a distant hill and a dark mushroom cloud rising from it.

She thought of the twin-engine parked unguarded on the airstrip, the elderly Indian man in the general store, perhaps asleep behind the counter; a red Cessna circling above, radioing to someone else the location of Percy’s plane.

She had to sit down on the bumper of a truck, her eyes tightly shut, to keep from losing her balance.