Women with Men

Jealous

IN THE LAST DAYS that I lived with my father in his house below the Teton River, he read to me. Seated at the kitchen table after work or on the cold mornings when I dressed in front of him by the stove, he read out loud to me from the Havre or the Conrad newspapers or from magazines—Life s or Geographic s— or from old schoolbooks that had been bound in twine and abandoned in the back rooms by some previous, unknown family who'd left behind the things they couldn't take.

We were alone there. These were the months following my mother's first departure, and we had lived out from Dutton since my school year began. My mother had left the summer before, at the end of a long period of troubles between them, and almost immediately after that my father quit his job in Great Falls and moved us up to Dutton, where he took a new job, working on farm machinery. He had always liked a drink, and so had my mother, and they had had friends who drank. But in Dutton he quit drinking altogether, quit having any whiskey around the house. He worked long days in town, and trained his bird dogs in the evening, and I went to high school. And that was what life was like.

It may have been, of course, that he was expecting some important event to take place, some piece of new news to suddenly reach him. Possibly he was waiting, as the saying goes, for lightning to strike, and what he wanted was to be in the right place and in the right frame of mind to make a decision when it happened. And it may have been that he read to me as a way of saying, “We don't know all there is to know. There's more order in life than seems to be. We have to pay attention.” That is all another way of saying that he was at a loss. Though my father had never been a man who stood by and watched things get the better of him. He was a man who acted, a man who cared to do the right thing. And I know that even on the day these events took place he was aware that a moment to act may have come. None of it is anything I blame him for.

ON THE DAY before Thanksgiving, it rained an hour before daylight, when I was waking up, then rained through the afternoon, when the temperature fell and snow began and the front of the mountains disappeared into a bluish fog, so that it was no longer possible to see the grain elevators in Dutton, ten miles away.

My father and I were waiting for my mother's sister to arrive to take me to the train in Shelby. I was going to Seattle to visit my mother, and my aunt was going with me. I was seventeen years old then. It was 1975, and I had never ridden on a train before.

My father had come home early, taken a bath, dressed in a clean shirt and slacks, then sat down at the kitchen table with a stack of Newsweek s from the town library. I was already dressed. My bag was packed, and I was standing at the kitchen window watching for my aunt's car.

“Are you familiar with Patrice Lumumba?” my father said after reading to himself for a while. He was a tall, bony-chested man with thick black hair and thick hands and arms, and the table seemed small in front of him.

“Was she a singer?” I said.

“He,” my father said, looking out the lower lenses of his glasses as if he were trying to read small print. “He was the African Negro Eisenhower wanted to poison in 1960. Only Ike missed his big chance. His other enemies blew him up first. We all thought it was mysterious back then, of course, but I guess it wasn't that mysterious.” He took his glasses off and rubbed them on his shirt cuff. One of the setters barked out in the pen. I watched it come to the fence by the corner of the granary, sniff through the wires, then walk back in the misting snow to its house, where its sister was in the doorway. “The Republicans always have secrets,” my father said, holding his glasses up and looking through them. “A great deal goes on before you wake up to life.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“But you can't change it,” he said, “so don't let it eat at you.”

Through the window I saw my aunt's big pink Cadillac appear suddenly up on the horizon road, rushing ahead of its snow cloud, still a mile out.

“What're you going to tell your mother about living out here out-of-sight-of-land all this fall?” my father said. “That there's an atmosphere of mystery on the open prairie?” He looked up and smiled at me. “That I've been neglecting your education?”

“I hadn't thought about it very much yet,” I said.

“Well, think about it. You'll have time on the train if your aunt will leave you alone.” He looked back at the Newsweek and laid his glasses on the table.

I had hoped to say something to my father before my aunt arrived, something about my mother, that I was happy I was going to get to see her. We had not talked about her very much.

“What do you think about Mother?” I said.

“With respect to what?”

“Do you think she'll come back out here after Thanksgiving?”

He drummed his fingers on the metal tabletop, then turned and looked at the clock on the stove. “Do you want to ask her about it?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Well. You can. Then you can tell me.” He looked at the window as though he was checking the weather. One of the dogs barked again, and then the other one barked. Sometimes a coyote came into the yard out of the wheat fields and set them off. “Eventually the suspense falls out of the story,” he said. He closed the magazine and folded his hands on top of it. “Who's your best friend now? I'm just curious.”

“Just my ones in the Falls, still,” I said.

“Who's your best one in Dutton?”

“I don't have one now,” I said.

My father put his glasses back on. “That's too bad. It's your choice, of course.”

“I know it,” I said, because I had already considered that and decided I didn't have time to get to know anybody there.

I watched my aunt's car turn onto our road and the pale beams of her headlights burn through the snowy air.

A mile farther down the road, a blue mobile home sat out in the fields, unprotected from the wind. The farmer in town who owned our house owned it, too, and rented it to the civics teacher at the high school. Joyce Jensen was her name. She was in her twenties, and was a heavyset woman with strawberry-colored hair, and my father had slept some nights down there in the last month. “Yoyce Yensen,” he called her, and always laughed. I could see a new car parked in front of her trailer, a red one beside her dark one.

“What do you see out there?” my father said. “Have you caught sight of your aunt Doris?”

“She's got her lights on,” I said.

“Well,” my father said, “then you're gone, you just haven't left yet.” He reached in his shirt pocket and took out a little fold of bills with a rubber band around it. “When you get to Shelby, buy your mother a bijou,” he said. “She won't expect it. It'll make her happy.” He handed the money up to me, then stood to watch my aunt drive to the house. “There's a moment in the day when you miss having a drink,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I could smell soap on his skin. “That's the old life. We're on to the new life now. The lucky few.”

MY AUNT honked her horn as she came past the caragana row into the house lot. She drove an Eldorado Cadillac, a ’69, faded pink with a white vinyl top. Her wipers were on, and the windows were fogged. She had parked that car in front of our house in Great Falls, and I had given it a good inspection then.

“Let me step out and tell your aunt Doris a joke,” my father said. “You go lock the shutters on the pigeons. I'll forget about them tonight, and snow'll get in. I won't be but a minute.” My aunt's window came down as my father started to the door. I could see her looking at our little farmhouse as if she thought it was abandoned.

My aunt Doris was a pretty woman and had a reputation for being wild, which my mother didn't have, or so my father had told me. She was my mother's younger sister, and was thirty-six and blond and thin, with soft, pale arms you could see her veins in. She wore glasses, and the one time I had seen her without them, a morning when I woke up and she was in the house, she looked like a girl to me, somebody younger than I was. I knew that my father liked her, and that they'd had something between them in Great Falls after my mother left, even though Doris was married to a Gros Ventre Indian man, who wasn't in the picture anymore. Twice she'd driven up and cooked dinner for us, and twice my father had gone down to the Falls to visit her, and there were a few times when they talked on the phone until late at night. But I thought it was finished between them, whatever it was. My father talked about Doris in a way that made it seem like some tragedy might've happened to her — he didn't know what — and I really thought he only liked her because she looked like my mother.

“There's something winning about Doris, you know,” he said once, “something your mother could use.” The day he said that, we were working dogs east of the house and had stopped to watch them cast into the wheat stubble. It was gold all the way down to the river, which was shining, and the sky above the mountains was as blue as I had ever seen blue.

“What's winning about her?” I said.

“Oh, she's sympathetic,” he said. “One of these days that might seem important to you.” And then we quit talking about it, though it was already important to me to be sympathetic, and I thought my mother was, and knew he thought so too.

My father walked out onto the gravel, still in his shirtsleeves. I saw Doris stick her arm out the window and wag her hand back and forth to the pace of my father's walking. I saw her smile and begin to say something, but I couldn't hear what it was.

I put on my wool jacket and took my bag and went out the back door into the yard toward the pigeon coop. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and the sun — just a white light behind white clouds — was above the mountain peaks beyond Choteau, and it was already colder than it had been when I came out on the school bus at noon. The yard around the house had old farm implements sitting useless, except for the tank truck we hauled our water in, and snow was beginning to collect on their rusted surfaces and in the grass. I could see my father bent over, leaning on his elbows against the windowsill of Doris's Cadillac. She had her hand on his arm and was laughing at something. And I must've stopped, because Doris quit laughing and looked at me, halfway out to the pigeon house. She blinked the lights on the Cadillac, and I went on. It occurred to me that they might go inside.

The pigeon pen was an old chicken coop my father had boarded up the sides of to keep foxes and coyotes out. He kept pigeons to train his setters, and he had an idea he could make money training bird dogs if word got out he was good at it, which he was. There were plenty of birds in that part of Montana — pheasants and partridge and grouse — and he thought he'd have time for all that when the harvest was over. He and I would drive out into the cut fields in the evening with two dogs, and four pigeons stuck head-down in our coat pockets. My father would lead a dog out two hundred yards on a check cord, and I would tuck a pigeon's head under its wing and shake it and blow on it, then stash it in a wheat-straw tuft, where it would stay, confused, until the dog found it by its scent and pointed. Then my father or I would walk up and kick the bird flying, a red ribbon and a stick tied to its leg so it wouldn't fly far.

There was never any shooting involved. My father didn't like to shoot birds. There were not enough of them left, he said — what other people did was their business. But he liked to work dogs and see them point and for the birds to fly. He had grown up in western Minnesota — he and Mother both — and he liked to be out on the plains.

I heard the birds thumping inside their coop, cooing and fluttering. I peeped through the chicken wire and could see them, thirty or forty, gray and stubby and thick-chested, their smell thinner because of the cold. My father caught them in barns, using his landing net, standing in the middle of the barn floor with the door shut in the half-dark, swinging his net on a cord as the birds, excited by the motion, flew from rafter to rafter. He snared them one or two or three at a time and handed them out to me to put in a potato sack. I never knew about things like this before I lived alone with him. We had never done that. But he liked it, and I would stand outside in the daylight, peeking through the cracks in the boards, watching the pigeons, their wings flashing in the light that entered through the other walls, and my father making a humming noise in his throat—hmmm, hmmm, hmmm, a sound I've heard prizefighters make — as his net went around and the pigeons fluttered into the webbing.

I let the shutters down over the wire coops and latched them. Then I stood with my suitcase and watched my father. He was still leaning on Doris's car in the snow. She still had her hand on his wrist. As I watched, she put her cheek against his hand, and my father stood up straight and looked toward the road in front of the house beyond the caraganas. I thought he looked over Doris's car in the direction of Joyce Jensen's trailer. He said something into the window and pulled his hands back and stuck them in his pockets. Then he looked at me and waved his arm in a wide way for me to come on.

“THAT'LL CURL your hair, I'll tell you what,” I heard Doris say when I got close to the car.

“Your aunt Doris is worried about getting stuck in the snow in her limo,” my father said. He stood back a couple of feet from the car and was smiling. Snow was in his hair. “Get her to tell you her joke about Japanese cars. That'll amuse you.”

Doris looked at my father as if he'd surprised her. “We'll wait a couple of years on that,” she said. “I want your dad to ride up to Shelby with us tonight, Larry,” she said through the window. “He claims he has other plans he doesn't care to discuss. I'm sure you'll explain it all to me.”

“I'd have a hard time getting home tonight,” my father said, still smiling. “I'd get in some kind of trouble.”

It was now snowing harder. My father's arms looked cold, and I was cold myself and eager for Doris and me to get going. I went around and put my bag in the backseat and climbed in front, where the heater was on and it was warm and smelled sweet and the radio was turned on low. If my father had plans, he hadn't told me about them, though I thought he would probably go down to visit Joyce Jensen.

“You only get so many of these invitations, then people quit asking,” Doris said. She was smiling, too, but I knew she wanted him to come with us. She patted me on the knee. “How're you, honey bunch?” she said. “Did you take a little happy pill today? I hope so.”

“I just took one,” I said. I could smell her perfume. She had on bright-red earrings and a brown wool coat, under which I could see the hem of a red wool dress. She always wore a lot of red. My father took a few steps farther back from the car.

“You ought to put a sign on your mailbox, Donny,” Doris said out her window. “‘N.H.Y.’—Nothing's Happened Yet. That'd be the truth.”

“We're moving cautiously,” my father said. He leaned down without touching the car and looked in at me. “Explain to your aunt about the atmosphere of mystery out here on the Great Plains.” He was smiling. “She'll get a kick out of that.” Doris pulled the car down into gear. “Say Happy Thanksgiving to my old friends in Seattle,” my father said, looking in at me then, and he had an odd expression, standing in the snow by himself, as if he thought what he'd just said was silly but he hadn't meant it to be.

Doris started the window up as she turned the wheel. “You think you can't make life better, Donny, but you can,” she said. “You two've been out here too many nights alone. It's making you squirrelly.”

“We're working on that, too,” my father said, and he shouted it for some reason. I didn't know what he meant, but what I wished then was that we could get the hell out of there and get on the road to where we were going.

DORIS DECIDED to have a drink before we got to the interstate. She had a little bottle of schnapps under the windshield visor and told me to pour some into a Styrofoam cup from a stack on the backseat floor. On the wet floor with the cups was a cardboard for sale sign, a drinking glass, a padded snow glove, a hairbrush, a bunch of postcards — one showing a bear dancing on a beach ball — and some snapshots of Doris sitting at a desk in an office, wearing a short skirt and smiling up at the camera. They'd been taken at the police department in Great Falls, where Doris worked. Part of a man's sleeve with sergeant's stripes on it was visible in the corner of one of the pictures.

“Those are my glamorous mug shots,” Doris said, holding her schnapps bottle in the hand she held the steering wheel with, “in case I forget who I am — or was — or in case somebody ever found me dead and wondered. I wrote my name on the backs.”

I turned over one of the photographs, and Doris's name was written in ink that had faded. There were other things on the floor — a copy of a magazine called World Conflict, and two or three paperback books with their covers torn off. I took a cup from the stack and gave it to her. “Who do you think'll find you?” I said.

We were going up onto the interstate, and I was pouring schnapps in her cup. The little town of Dutton, where I had been in school since September, sat just on the other side of the highway. Ten streets of houses, two bars, a Sons of Norway, three churches, a grocery, a library, three elevators, and a VFW with an old Sabre jet from Korea mounted as if it were taking off into the snowy sky. All around everywhere else was plow ground being covered in snow.

“Never can tell who'll find you,” Doris said, watching her rearview mirror as we got out onto the highway. “I don't really like Montana,” she said, “and I particularly hate the roads. There's only one way to get anywhere. It's better seen from an airplane.” She straightened her arms toward the steering wheel as if she were taking off in a jet herself. We picked up speed and shot slush behind us. A bead of water entered the windshield through a crack at the top, then froze before it could drip in. “So. What's it about this atmosphere of mystery?”

“He was just reading to me out of a magazine,” I said. “He made it up.”

“I see.” She had a sip of schnapps. “And do you think you understand what the trouble is between your mom and your dad?”

“They don't get along enough right now,” I said. “My mother decided to go to school.” That had been what my mother told me when she left. She was in school in Seattle, learning how to make out income tax forms. She'd be finished by Christmas.

“They know too much about each other,” Doris said. “They have to figure out what the hell difference that makes. Sometimes it's good, but not always.”

“Isn't that supposed to happen?” I said.

“Certainly is,” Doris said and looked up in the mirror again. There were no other cars on the highway, only big tractor-trailers going north, running to get someplace by Thanksgiving. “When I was living with Benny as man and wife, he had many, many things I never understood inside his head. Indian things. Spirits. He believed they came to our house. He believed you had to give your valuables away — or gamble them away, in his particular case. He told me once that he wanted to be buried on a wood platform on a high hill. He believed in all that Indian medicine — which was fine, and I mean it. It was.” Doris rubbed her nose with the heel of her hand, then just stared at the highway, where white mist was collecting like fog.

“What did you say about it?” I said, and looked at her.

“About the wood platform?” she said. “I said, ‘Fine, a wood platform's all right with me. But don't expect me to build it or get you up there, because I'm a Seventh-Day Adventist and we don't believe in platforms.’”

“What did Benny say?” I had only met Benny once, and remembered him as a big, quiet man with black-rimmed glasses who smelled like cigarettes.

“He laughed. He was a Lutheran, of course. Converted by missionaries in Canada or North Dakota someplace. I forget. It might've all been a joke. But he was a tribal member. He was that. Spoke the Indian tongue.”

“Where is he?” I said.

“That's the sixty-four-dollar question.” Doris reached forward and turned down the heater. “Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, is my guess, where Thanksgiving comes later or earlier, one or the other. I still wear a wedding ring.” She held up her ring finger. “But I was on about Don and Jan knowing each other so well. I never had that problem with Benny, and we're still married. In a sense we are, anyway.”

“In what sense?” I said, and I smiled at her because something in that seemed funny. I could remember her and my father talking in the living room until late, and then everything getting quiet and finally the sound of lamps being clicked off.

“In a distant sense, Mr. Genius,” Doris said, “and in the sense that if he comes back we'd start back right where we left off. Or try to. Though if he's intending to stay gone, I wish we could get divorced so I could begin to pick up the pieces.” She laughed. “That wouldn't take a lifetime.”

“What do you think'll happen?” I asked, referring to my father and mother. I'd never asked anybody but my father about that before, and when I'd asked him the first time, he said my mother was going to come back — this was before we left Great Falls. Though one time in the car, on the ride home from a baseball game, he'd suddenly said, “Love's just what two people decide to do, Larry. It's not a religion.” He must've been thinking about it.

“What do I think's going to happen?” Doris said. She adjusted her glasses upwards on her nose and took a deep breath, as though this was not an easy question. “It depends on timing and the situation of third parties,” she said very seriously. “If your mom, for instance, has a young pretty boyfriend out in Seattle, or if your dad has a girlfriend back there where Jesus left his ankle shoes, then that's a problem. But if they can hold out long enough to get lonely, then they'll probably do fine — though they don't want to hold out too long. This is my opinion, of course, based on nothing.” Doris looked over at me and reached and adjusted the collar of my coat, which was turned up. “How old are you?” she said. “I should probably know that kind of thing.”

“Seventeen,” I said, thinking about my mother's having a pretty boyfriend in Seattle. I'd thought about it some in the months she'd been gone and decided she didn't have one.

“Then you've got your whole life in front of you for worrying,” Doris said. “Don't start now. They ought to teach that in school instead of history. Worry management. Would you, by the way, like to know something about yourself?”

“What?” I said.

She didn't look at me, just kept driving. “You smell like wheat!” Doris said and laughed. “Ever since you got in this car it's smelled like a silo in here. Won't Don let you sleep in the house with him?”

And I was shocked to hear that, because I didn't like living out on the farm or in that house and I knew already I might smell that way, because I could smell it in all the rooms and in my father's clothes. And I felt angry, angry at him, though I didn't want to let Doris know. “They stored grain in our house before we moved in,” I said, and didn't want to say anything else.

“You're a real hick,” she said. “You better check your shoes.” She laughed again.

“We're just out there for this year,” I said. And I felt even angrier about the whole subject. Out the clouded window, the first dark rows of tilled winter wheat began just beyond the road verge and the fence line — snow crusting between the new rows. What I wanted to do, I thought then, was stay in Seattle with my mother and start in at a new school after Christmas even if it meant beginning the year over. I wanted to get out of Montana, where we didn't have a TV and had to haul our water and where the coyotes woke you up howling and my father and I had nobody to talk to but each other. I was missing something, I thought, an important opportunity. And later, when I would try to explain to someone how it was, that I had not been a farm boy but had just led life like that for a while, nobody'd believe me. And after that it would always be impossible to explain how things really were.

“I was depressed, myself, for a long time after Benny left,” Doris said. “Do you know what that means — to be depressed?”

“No,” I said gloomily.

She reached up and put her finger on the hole in the windshield where water had come in and frozen. She looked at the tip of her finger, then looked at me and smiled. “You're way too young for turmoil,” she said, “because I'm too young for it myself.” She licked her finger. “Tell me about your dad. Has he got a girlfriend out there in Siberia? I'll bet he has. Some little diamond in the rough.”

“He does,” I said, and I didn't care if she told my mother. “There's a teacher down the road from us.”

“Well, good for him,” Doris said, though she didn't smile about it. “What's her name?”

“Joyce.”

“That's a cute name. I guess your mother doesn't know about this.”

“I don't know if she does.”

“I'm sure she doesn't, not that it matters,” Doris said. I wondered if my father was down at Joyce Jensen's trailer right then. I remembered the red car sitting in front.

Doris took her bottle of schnapps and handed it and her cup to me. “I'd have another, please.”

I thought maybe she was going to get drunk because I'd told her my dad had a girlfriend. It was nearly dark and snow was building up and it was colder, and even though we were close to Shelby it was still three hours until the train. And I had a fear that we'd miss it, that Doris would get drunk and go to sleep someplace where I couldn't wake her up and I'd end up back at home that night, going in the front door after midnight and finding no one there.

I poured less than I'd poured before. The schnapps was gluey on my fingers and tasted like root beer. I had been in bars with my father and seen that schnapps before, but I hadn't actually seen someone drink it.

“You know,” Doris said, and she sounded indignant about something, “you certainly understand you don't belong to your dad, don't you? Nobody belongs to anybody. Some people think they do, but that's ridiculous.”

“I know that,” I said. “I'll be on my own when the school year's over.”

“You're on your own right now. School doesn't determine that,” Doris said. “And I'm not your mother. You know that, too, don't you? I'm your aunt. A technicality. It doesn't matter to me what you do. You can move right back to Great Falls tomorrow if you want to. You can live with me. That'd be an innovation.” Doris cut her eyes at me, still indignant. I thought she might invite me to have a drink of schnapps, but I didn't want it. I remembered a little tattoo she had on her shoulder, a blue-and-red butterfly I'd seen the summer before, when she was around the house and spending time with my father. “You're like a bird in a glass cage, aren't you?”

“I won't stay there much longer,” I said.

“We'll see about that,” Doris said, staring out into the snowflakes. “Did you buy your mother a nice present?”

“I'm going to,” I said.

“Did your dad give you a lot of money, now that he's collecting a big check?”

“I had some already,” I lied, thinking that nice stores would probably be closed in Shelby. I pictured the main street, where I'd only been once, with my father, when my mother had taken the train back from the Cities, and all I could remember was a row of bar and motel signs with Route 2 running through the town toward Havre. “I worked at the elevator in the harvest,” I said.

“Is Don still off the drink?”

“Yes, he is,” I said.

“And you two get along just great?”

“Yes,” I said, “we do.”

“Well, that's wonderful,” she said. Out in the snow and fog haze I could see faint yellow lights all in a string at the bottom of a hill. It was Shelby. “I used to think your father'd married the wrong sister, since we all met at the same time. You know? I thought he was too good for Jan. But I don't think so now. She and I have gotten a lot closer than we used to be since she's been out in Seattle. We talk on the phone about things.” Doris let her window down and poured out the schnapps she had left. It hit the back window and froze. “She's pretty wonderful, did you know that? Did you know your mother was wonderful?”

“I knew that,” I said. “What do you think about Dad?”

“He's fine,” Doris said. “That's how I feel about him. I don't particularly trust him. He's not equipped to care for things very much — he's like a cat in that way. But he's fine. You can't go back on your important decisions.”

“Are you sorry you didn't marry him?” I said. I thought she was wrong about my father, of course. He cared about things as much as anybody did, and more than Doris did, I felt sure.

“Put it like this,” Doris said, and she smiled at me in a sweet way, a way that could make you like her. “If I had married him, then we wouldn't have you here, would we? Everything'd be different.” She tapped me on the knee. “So there's good to everything. That's a belief Seventh-Day Adventists hold.” She scratched her fingernails on my knee and smiled at me again, and we drove on into town, where it was snowing still, and almost dark except for lights down the main street.

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS were already up in Shelby, strings of red and green and white lights hung across the three intersections, and little Christmas trees on top of the traffic lights. Plenty of cars and trucks were on the streets in the snow, and all the stores looked open. We drove past a big lighted Albertson's, where the parking lot was full of vehicles and people carrying packages. I saw a drugstore and a card shop and a western-wear on the main street, all with their lights on and customers moving around the aisles inside.

“Something's physically odd about Shelby, don't you think?” Doris said, driving slowly along and looking out at the business signs and Thanksgiving cutouts in the store windows. “It has a foreignness. It just seems pointless somehow up here. Maybe it's being so close to Canada. I don't know.”

“Maybe I can get out and go buy something now,” I said. I'd seen a Redwing store and thought about buying my mother a pair of shoes, though I didn't know her size. I remembered some green high heels I'd seen her wear, and it surprised me that I didn't remember more than that.

“You want to eat Chinese food in town, or dine in the dining car?” Doris said.

“I'd rather eat on the train,” I said, because I wanted to get out of the car.

“I want you to enjoy yourself when you're under my protection.”

“I'm enjoying myself,” I said. We were stopped at a light, and I turned and looked back. I wanted to get back to the card store before it got too far away.

“Can you find the train station by yourself?” Doris glanced at the traffic in the rearview mirror.

“I'll ask somebody,” I said, and opened the door and slid out onto the snowy pavement.

“Don't ask an Indian,” Doris said loudly. “They lie like snakes. Ask a Swede. They don't know what a lie is. That's why they make the good husbands.”

“I will,” I said, and closed the car door while she was talking.

People were on the sidewalk and going in and out of stores. There were plenty of cars and noises for a small town, although the snow had softened everything. It was like a Saturday night in Great Falls, and I walked in a hurry down the block in the direction we'd just come from. For some reason, I didn't see the card shop where I thought it would be and didn't see the western-wear shop, though there was a Chinese restaurant and a bar, and then the drugstore, where I went in to look.

The air was warm and smelled like Halloween candy inside. A lot of customers were in the store, and I walked down the three aisles, looking for something my mother might like to receive from me and trying to think of what I knew she liked. There was a section that had pink and blue boxes of candy, and a wall that had perfume, and a long row of cards with Thanksgiving messages. I went around the center section twice, then looked at the back of the store, where the pharmacist was and where there were footbaths and sickroom articles. I thought about something for her hair — shampoo or hair spray, but I knew she bought those for herself. Then I saw there was a glass display of watches with mirrored shelves you rotated by pushing a silver button at the bottom. The watches were all around thirty dollars, and what my father had given me was fifty, and I thought a watch would be better than perfume because my mother wouldn't use it up, and I liked the way the watches looked revolving behind the glass, and I was relieved to have almost decided so fast. My mother had a watch, I remembered, but it had been broken since sometime in the spring.

I walked around the store one more time to look at anything I'd missed or to find something else I wanted, but I didn't see anything but magazines and books. Some boys my age, wearing their maroon-and-gold Shelby jackets, were standing looking at magazines and talking to two girls. They all looked at me when I went by but didn't say anything, though I knew I wouldn't have played football against them in Great Falls, because Shelby was too small. My own football jacket was at home in a back room in a box, and wouldn't have been warm enough for that night. The girls said something when I had gone by, though none of them seemed to register seeing me.

I passed a section with ladies’ bedroom slippers in clear plastic cases. Pink and yellow and red. They were ten dollars, and one size fit all. But they looked cheap to me. They looked like something Doris would put on. And I went back down to the watch case and pressed the button until I saw one come by that was gold and thin and fine-appearing, with a small face and Roman numerals, which I thought my mother would like. I bought it from a saleslady and had her wrap it in white tissue paper. I paid for it from the bills my father had given me, and put it in my coat pocket and felt that I'd done the right thing in buying a watch. My father would've approved of it, would've thought I had good instinct and had bought a watch for a good price. Then I walked back outside onto the cold sidewalk to begin looking for the train depot.

I remembered from the time I'd been in Shelby with my parents that the train station was behind the main street, in an older part of town, where there were bars they'd visited. I wasn't sure where this was, but I crossed Main and went between two stores, down an alley away from the Christmas lights and traffic and motel signs, and walked out into a gravel back street, beyond which was the little switchyard and the depot itself on the far side, its windows lit yellow. Down the rails to the right I could see a row of grain gondolas and a moving engine light and, farther on, a car crossing the double tracks. The yard was dark, and it was colder and still snowing. I could hear the switch engine shunting cars, and as I stepped on the ties I looked both ways, east and west, and could see the rails shining out away from me toward where yellow caution lights and, farther on, red lights burned.

The station waiting room was warmer than the drugstore, and there were only a couple of people sitting in the rows of wood benches, though several suitcases were against the wall, and two people were waiting to buy tickets. Doris wasn't in sight. I thought she might be in the bathroom, at the back by the telephone, and I stood by the bags and waited, though I didn't see my suitcase or hers. So that after the other people had finished buying tickets, I decided she wasn't there and walked to the ticket window and asked the lady about her.

“Doris is looking for you, hon,” the lady said, and smiled from behind the metal window. “She bought your tickets and told me to tell you she was in the Oil City. That's across the street back that way.” She pointed toward the rear door of the building. She was an older woman with short, blond hair. She had on a red jacket and a gold name tag that said Betty. “Is Doris your mom?” she asked, and began counting out dollar bills in a pile.

“No,” I said. “She's my aunt. I live in Dutton.” And then I said, “Is the train going to be on time?”

“Yes, indeed,” she said, still counting out bills. “The train's always on time. Your aunt'll get you on it, don't worry.” She smiled at me again. “Dutton rhymes with Nuttin’. I been there before.”

Outside on the concrete platform, I saw Doris's Cadillac in the little gravel lot and, across the street, a dark row of small older buildings that looked like they'd been stores once but were empty now except for three that were bars. They were bars my mother and father had gone into the time I'd been here. At the end of the block a street began, with regular-looking houses on it, and I could see where lights were on in homes and cars were in the driveways, the snow accumulating in the yards. Beyond the corner, a fenced tennis court was barely visible in the dark.

The bars looked closed, though all three had small glass windows with lighted red bar signs and a couple of cars parked outside. When I came across the street I saw that the Oil City was the last one before the empty stores. A cab was stopped in front with its motor running, its driver sitting in the dim light reading a newspaper.

I hadn't been in too many bars, mostly just in Great Falls, when my father was drinking. But I didn't mind going in this one, because I thought I'd been in it once before. My father said a bar wasn't a place anybody ever wanted to go but was just a place you ended up. Though there was something about them I liked, a sense of something expected that stayed alive inside them even if nothing ever happened there at all.

INSIDE THE OIL CITY it was mostly dark and music was playing and the air smelled sweet and thick. Doris was sitting at the bar, talking to a man beside her, a small man wearing a white plastic hard hat and a canvas work suit and with a ponytail partway down his back. Drinks were in front of them, and the man's work gloves and some dollar bills were on the bar. He and Doris were talking and looking at each other straight in the eyes. I thought the man looked like an Indian, because of his hair and because there were two or three other Indians in the bar, which was a long, dark, almost empty room with two poker machines, a booth, and a dimly lit jukebox by itself against the wall. Chairs were scattered around, and it was cold, as if there wasn't any heat working.

Doris looked in my direction but didn't see me, because she turned back to the Indian in the hard hat and picked up her drink and took a sip. “That's entirely different,” she said loudly. “Caring and minding are entirely different concepts to me. I can care and not mind, and also mind and not care. So fuck you, they're not the same.” She looked toward me again, and she did see me. She was drunk, I knew that. I'd seen her drunk before. “You could be a private dick the way you come sneaking up,” she said, and glanced at the man beside her. “You just missed the Shelby police on a sweep through here. They said they were looking for you.” Doris smiled a big smile, then reached out, took my hand, and pulled me close to her. “The two of us were just discussing absolute values. This is Mr. Barney Bordeaux. We've only been informally introduced. He's in the wine-tasting business. And he's just told me a terrible story about his wife being robbed at gunpoint right here in Shelby, sad to say, and all her money and rings stolen. So he favors honesty as an absolute value under the circumstances.”

Barney frowned at her as if what she'd just said was stupid. He had narrow, dark eyes and a puffy dark Indian face under his white hard hat, which had a green Burlington Northern insignia on the front. “What's this cluck want?” he said, and squinted at me. One of his teeth in front was gone, and he looked like he'd been drinking a long time. He was small and thin and sickly, and had a little mustache at the corners of his mouth that made him look Chinese. Though he also looked like he could've been handsome at one time but had had something bad happen to him.

“This is my sister's child — Lawrence,” Doris said, letting go of my hand and putting hers on Barney's arm as if she wanted him to stay there. “We're going to Seattle on the train tonight.”

“You forgot to mention that,” Barney said in an unfriendly way.

Doris looked at me and smiled. “Barney just got out of Fort Harrison. So he's celebrating. He hasn't said what he was ill with yet.”

“I'm not ill with anything,” Barney said. He turned straight and looked at himself in the mirror behind the back bar. “I can't see where this is taking me,” I heard him say to himself.

“It's not taking you anywhere,” Doris said. Fort Harrison was the government hospital in Montana. My father had told me crazy Indians and veterans went there and saw doctors free of charge. “I had just said,” Doris went on, “that loyalty was more important than honesty, if honesty meant always having to tell only the strict truth, since there're always different kinds of truth.” She had taken her car coat off and piled it on the stool beside her. Her red wool dress was up above her knees. Her purse was on the bar beside her keys and the dollar bills.

Barney suddenly turned and put his hand right on Doris's knee where her legs were crossed. He smiled and he looked right at me. “You're in trouble when people younger than you are seem smart,” he said, and his smile widened so his missing tooth was evident. I could smell sweat on him, and wine. He laughed out loud then and turned back to the bar.

“Barney's starring in his own movie,” Doris said.

“Where's my suitcase?” I asked, because all at once I thought about it and couldn't see it anywhere. I wanted to put my mother's watch in it.

“Oh, let's see,” Doris said, giving Barney a look to make sure he was paying attention. “I gave that away. A poor penniless colored man came through who'd lost his suitcase and I gave him yours.” She picked up her car keys off the bar and dangled them without even looking at me. Then she reached in her purse, brought out my ticket, which was just a little white card, and handed it to me. “Hold your own,” she said. “That way, you're responsible for yourself.” She took a sip of her drink. She had switched from schnapps to something else. “What about your absolute values?” she said to me. “What do you think? I'm not sure loyalty's a good one to stay with. I may have to choose something else. Barney thinks honesty. Now you choose one.”

I didn't want to choose one. I didn't know what an absolute value was or why I needed one. Doris was just playing a game, and I didn't want to play it. Though when I thought about it, all I could think of was cold. It was cold in the Oil City, and I thought the temperature was still going down outside, and cold was on my mind.

“I don't know one,” I said and thought about leaving.

“Well,” Doris said, “then I'll start for you. You could say ‘love,’ okay? Or you could say ‘beautiful,’ or ‘beauty.’ Or you could probably even say the color ‘red,’ which would be strange.” Doris looked at her lap, at her red dress, then at me standing beside her. “‘Thought,’” she said. “You could say that, even though you probably don't do much of it. You just can't say nothing. And you can't say ‘marriage’ or ‘adultery’ or ‘sex.’ They're not absolute enough.” She glanced at Barney and laughed a nasty little laugh.

The poker machine clicked and dinged back in the dark. A man was talking on the pay phone by the bathroom, and I heard him say, “That's in Lethbridge. That's an hour and a half away.” The bar felt empty to me, and I realized I was wrong about ever being in it before. I turned around and looked at the one window. Beyond the neon sign, snow was coming harder, and I saw headlights of cars going by slowly. I wondered if the snow could make our train late. I heard two car doors close outside and looked at the door, expecting it to open, but it didn't.

Barney motioned to the bartender, who was a very small, thin girl who looked like she might be a Chinese too. She poured Barney a glass of red wine out of a bottle on the back bar, then picked a dollar out of the pile in front of him.

“Oh, choose one, God damn it, Lawrence,” Doris said suddenly and glared at me. “I'm tired of fucking around with you. I wish I'd left you at home.”

“Cold,” I said.

“Cold?” Doris looked stunned. “Is that what you said? Cold?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you hear that, Benny?” Doris said to Barney.

Barney looked up at me from his glass of wine and said, “Don't let her confuse you. I been there before.”

“Cold isn't one,” Doris said in an aggravated way. “Try to be smart.”

“Brave, then,” I said. “I mean, bravery.”

“All right, then.” Doris picked up her glass without drinking. Only ice was left in it. She sat for a few seconds without saying anything, as if she was thinking about something else. “What have you been so brave about?” she said, and turned the glass up to her nose.

Barney leaned over and whispered something in her ear, which Doris ignored.

“Nothing,” I said.

“It's an abstraction to you, then,” she said. “Is that it?”

“Mutts fuck mutts,” Barney said, and he said it seriously and to me. He suddenly grabbed my arm tight and high above the muscle. “When I get back, Lawrence, I'll show you what I mean.” He pulled himself off the stool, using my arm, and started toward the dark end of the room, where the rest-room hallway was and where the man was still talking on the pay phone. He didn't walk steadily at all, and when he got to the entrance of the hallway he held the corner of the wall and turned and looked at us. “Don't confuse love with pain, you two,” he said, and he stood for a moment, staring in our direction. I noticed his silver belt buckle was pushed off to the side in a way I'd seen some men do. Then he just disappeared down the little hall.

“Don't confuse me with your wife,” Doris said loudly, then motioned for another drink. “All boats seek a place to sink is what I believe.” And I stood closer to the bar, wanting to think of a way to get her to leave and wondering what Barney was going to show me when he came back. “I told him Esther was my given name,” Doris said in a whisper. “It's my least favorite name. But it's biblical, and Indians are all so religious, he likes it. He's pathetic, but he's a hoot.”

Doris was staring at a door behind the bar. There was a little circular glass window in the door, like a kitchen door in a restaurant. A man's large white face was in the window, looking all around inside the bar from the back room. The man had on a big hat you could see part of the brim of. “Look at that,” Doris said. She was staring right at the window, and the man's face was staring right at her. “What party is he looking for, do you suppose?”

The face was there another moment, then went away. But slowly the door opened and the man we'd just seen, with another one right behind him in the dark, looked out into the bar. He had on a sheriff's uniform. He looked one way and then the other. He was holding a big silver pistol with a long barrel out in front of him, and was wearing a heavy coat with a badge, and heavy rubber boots with his pants tucked in the tops. The man behind him was a sheriff too, though he was younger and didn't look much older than I was. He had a short-barrel shotgun he was holding with two hands and high in front of him, with the barrel pointed up.

Neither one of the men said anything. They just stepped slowly into the room, looking around as if they expected to be surprised by something. The little bartender saw them and went completely still, staring at them. And so did Doris and I. I heard one of the two or three Indians in the other part of the room say, “This machine loves me.” Then I heard the front door of the bar push open and felt cold air flood in. There were three more deputies outside, all wearing hats and heavy coats, all carrying short-barrel shotguns. None of the men looked at me or at Doris. They looked at all the Indians, then around the room at each other, and suddenly they seemed nervous, as if they didn't know what was about to happen.

One of the men — I didn't know which — said, “I don't see him, Neal, do you?”

The man with the pistol said, “Look in the bathroom.”

And then Doris, for no reason at all, said, “Barney's in the bathroom.” She pointed at where Barney had gone a few moments before.

And immediately, as if that had been their signal, two of the deputies at the front door moved across the room on their tiptoes to the head of the little dark hallway where the pay phone and the rest-room door were. One deputy grabbed the man who had been talking on the phone but had stopped talking and was just standing, holding the receiver at his side, and pushed him out of the way. Both deputies got on either side of the hallway entrance and pointed their shotguns down toward where I guessed the rest-room door was. And then the two other deputies started whispering to us and motioning with their shotguns. “Get down on the floor, get down on the floor no w!” they said.

And we all did, all of us. I got on my belly and put my cheek on the wet floorboards and held my breath. Doris got down beside me. I could hear her breathing through her nose. She made a grunting noise, and she grabbed my hand. Her glasses had come off and were lying on the floor, but she didn't say anything. Her eyes were shut, and I pulled myself close to her and put my arm over her, though I didn't see how I could protect her if something bad happened.

Then someone, and it must've been the man with the pistol, shouted in the loudest voice I'd ever heard, “Barney. God damn it. Come out of the bathroom. It's Neal Reiskamp. It's the sheriff. I've got people out here with guns. So just come on out. You can't get away from me.”

The deputy who was closest to me moved quickly, almost jumped, over to where he could get behind the two in the doorway, and he pointed his shotgun into the hallway too.

“Give me some light,” the man who was the sheriff shouted. “I can't see anything down there.”

Another deputy ran out the front door. It had been standing open, with cold and snow blowing in. I heard his boots on the snow, then the sound of a car door opening. I didn't want to look up, but I could hear feet shifting and scuffling on the floor. The wood was hard against my cheek, and I tightened my arm around Doris until she made another little grunting noise, but didn't open her eyes. The rotating beer sign over the jukebox flashed little stars across the floor.

There were no sounds from Barney in the bathroom. And I wondered if he was even in there, or if he'd gone out a window or out another door, or even — and this felt like a dream I was dreaming — if he might've gone up through a trapdoor in the ceiling and into the attic and was on the floor above us all, in some deserted room in the dark, pacing around, trying to decide what to do, how to escape, how to come out of this in good shape. I even thought about his wife, about her being robbed of her money and her rings. Then I heard a noise like more feet scuffling, and the sound of something or somebody beating on something, a wall maybe. The deputy who'd gone outside ran back in with a long black flashlight.

“Shine the son of a bitch down there,” the sheriff said. “No. Up. Up more, God damn it.” The pounding kept going on somewhere. Bang, bang. First it sounded like metal, and then I heard glass break. Then more banging. “Barney!” the sheriff yelled very loud. “Barney!” The banging kept on. The little bartender, who must've been on the floor behind the bar, began to make a high-pitched sound—eeee, eeee, like that. I thought the banging had made her afraid, because it was making me afraid. I could feel my jaw closed tight, and both my fists were clenched. There was more of it — bang, bang, bang — and then I looked up and saw that the two deputies were still pointing their shotguns down the hallway at what I still couldn't see. Their legs were spread way apart, and the man with the flashlight was squatting behind them, shining his light between one man's legs.

Doris said, “I'm all wet, Lawrence.” She opened her eyes and stared at me, and wrinkled her nose up in a strange way. Then, from the hallway where the deputies were looking and pointing their shotguns, there was a very loud crashing, breaking sound, as if a door had been broken in or out. There was more noise I couldn't identify, and I couldn't even say now what it was, though for some reason I thought Barney was kicking something, even though it was like a noise made by metal. But whatever it was, the deputy holding the flashlight suddenly jumped back out of the way, his light going crazy across the ceiling, the long black barrel hitting the floor. And then two of the men who were holding shotguns shot almost at the same instant, right down into the little hallway, into the dark. And the noise of those two guns going off inside the barroom was an awful noise. My ears went deaf and there was pressure on my brain, and my eyeballs felt like air was pushing on them. The shots made a yellow flash and dust was all in the air and falling out of the ceiling, and there was the thick, sour smell of burned gunpowder. When the guns went off I felt Doris jump, and she squeezed my hand until her wedding ring cut down into my knuckle, and I couldn't get it free.

“Okay,” I heard Barney say to the policemen in a loud, odd voice. “I'm all shot up now. You shot me up. You shot me. I don't feel good now.”

Two other deputies, ones who hadn't shot, ran into the little hallway, right in front of Doris and me, though a third one knelt beside the man who'd held the flashlight. “I'm all right,” that man said. “I'm not shot.” His white hat was on the floor. I heard the bartender say, “Oh, my heavens,” though I couldn't see her.

Then Barney — it must've been him — said, “How are you?” almost in a casual voice, then he yelled, “Ohhhhhh,” and then he said, “Stop that! Stop that!” And then he was quiet.

The two men who had shot Barney stayed where they were, pointing their guns into the hallway. They had each ejected a shell, both of which were on the floor.

The sheriff, who was standing behind everybody, said even louder, as if he was even more afraid now, “Careful. Be careful. He's not dead. He's just hit. He's just hit.” One more deputy, who had been across the room, suddenly moved into the hallway in front of the men holding guns. “Barney, you son of a bitch,” I heard him say, “stay down there now.” But Barney didn't make a noise. I heard footsteps behind me, and when I looked, the Indians and the man who'd been talking on the phone were going out the front door. I saw headlights outside, and from a distance I heard a siren, then the noise of a two-way radio and a woman's voice saying, “It probably is. But I can't be sure. You better check that out. Ten-four.”

I looked at Doris, and her eyes were wide open, her cheek flat against the wet wood. Her mouth was drawn tight across, as if she thought something else might happen, but she had begun to loosen her grip on my hand. Her ring came off my knuckle, and she breathed very deeply and she said, “They killed that man. They shot him all to pieces.” I didn't answer, because my jaw was still clenched and my ears hollow, but I thought that what she said was probably true. I was close to what had happened, yet I wasn't a real part of it. Everything had happened to Barney and the policemen who shot him, and I was better off, or so I felt, to stay as far away from it as I could and not even discuss it.

IN A FEW MINUTES one of the sheriff's deputies came and helped us to stand up and go sit in the booth against the wall. There were a lot of police in the room all of a sudden. The front door stayed open, and two Montana highway patrolmen and more sheriff's deputies and two Indian policemen all came in and out. I could hear the voices of other people outside. More cars drove up with two-way radios going, and an ambulance arrived. Two men in orange jumpsuits came inside and went down the little hall carrying equipment in black boxes. I heard someone say, “No problema aquí.” And then the sheriff said, “Go ahead, I'll just sign all that now.” Barney never said anything else that I heard. After a couple of minutes, the men from the ambulance left. One of them was smiling about something, but I didn't think it had to do with what had happened. It had to have been something else.

“I'm freezing,” Doris said across the little table. “Aren't you freezing?” She had found her glasses and put them back on, and she was shivering. Almost immediately after she'd said it the same deputy came in and brought her a blanket and one for me too, though I wasn't so cold, or didn't know I was. My nose was running, that was all, and the front of me was wet from the floor.

For some reason, two deputies took the bartender away with them. I could hear them put her in a car, and heard it drive away. And then the ceiling lights in the bar were turned on, and a man came in with a camera and took pictures in the hallway, using a flash. He came out afterwards and took pictures of the room itself, one of which Doris and I were in, wrapped in our blankets.

In about ten minutes, while we sat waiting, two more ambulance men came in the door with a folding stretcher on wheels. They pushed it into the hall, and I guess they picked Barney up and put him on, because when they pushed it out through the bar he was on it, covered up by a sheet with blood soaking through. One of the men was holding Barney's white Burlington Northern hard hat, and I could actually see part of Barney's ponytail out under the edge of the sheet. I had to turn to see all that. But Doris didn't look. She sat with her blanket around her and stared down at the cup of coffee the deputy had brought. When the cart had gone by she said, “Was that him?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought so,” she said.

After a few more minutes, a big man wearing a light-gray suit and western boots and a western hat came in and looked around the room. He appeared very clean and neat and had pale white skin and thin hair and a bad complexion, and at first he only glanced at us before he looked behind the bar and into the back room, where the sheriff had come from. He stepped down the hall where Barney had been and into the bathroom — though I couldn't see him do that. When he came out he said something to the sheriff, who had put his hat on again, then he brought a chair over to the booth and sat down at the end of the table in front of us.

He took out a little spiral pad and wrote something in it with a ballpoint pen. Then he said, still writing, “I'm Walter Peterson, I'm the lawyer for Toole County. I'd like to find out some things from you people.”

“We don't know anything,” Doris said. “We don't live here. We're on our way to Seattle. We just stopped in.” She had her blanket clutched up to her neck, and her fists were holding the edges together.

“Did you know the deceased man?” the lawyer said without answering Doris. I realized that was what they were calling Barney now. The lawyer had a tiny pin on his lapel — a pair of silver handcuffs — and when he sat down I saw he was wearing a leather holster under his coat. He didn't take off his hat when he was talking to us.

“No,” Doris said, “we didn't.”

“Did you know him?” he said to me.

“No, sir,” I said.

“Did either of you talk to him?” the lawyer said, writing something in his little notebook.

“I tried to talk to him,” Doris said. “Just practically by accident. But he didn't care to say much.” She looked at me and then looked all around the barroom, which seemed larger and even dirtier with the ceiling lights on. “Was he carrying a gun of some kind?” she said. “I had the feeling he was.”

“He didn't say anything about his wife?” the lawyer said, still not answering her.

“He said she'd been robbed at some point. He admitted that.”

The lawyer stopped writing and looked at Doris as if he expected her to talk some more. Then he said, “Did he say anything else about that?” He began writing again, and I saw that he wrote with his left hand and in the regular way, not turned backward.

“No, sir,” Doris said. “He didn't. Lawrence, of course, wasn't here then. He came in just toward the end.”

“The end of what?” the man said. He had short thick hands with a big gold-and-red ring on one finger.

“At the end of the time we were sitting at the bar beside each other. Before he went to the bathroom.”

“What's your name?” the lawyer said to me, and I told him. He asked Doris her name and wrote it down along with our addresses. He asked us what relation we were to each other, and Doris said she was my aunt and my mother was her sister. He looked at me as if he wanted to ask me something, then he ran the blunt end of his pen across his cheek, where his complexion was bad, and, I guess, changed his mind.

“Did the deceased say anything to either of you after he went to the bathroom?”

“He didn't have time after that,” Doris said. “They shot him.”

“I see,” the lawyer said, though I remembered Barney had said he intended to show me something when he got back. But I didn't mention that. The lawyer wrote something else down and closed his notebook. He nodded and stuck his pen inside his coat. “If we have to call you, we'll call you,” he said. He started to smile at Doris, then didn't. “Okay?” he said. He took two business cards out of his pocket and laid them on the tabletop. “I want you to keep my card and call me if you think of anything you want to add to your statements.”

“What was the matter with him?” Doris asked. “He said he'd been in Fort Harrison, but I didn't know whether to believe that or not.”

The lawyer stood up and put his notepad in his back pocket. “Him and his wife got in a set-to. That's all I've heard about it. She's missing at the moment.”

“I'm sorry that all happened,” Doris said.

“Are you both going to Seattle?” he said, and he didn't smile, though he said it to me.

“Yes,” Doris said. “His mother lives there.”

“It'll be warmer over there. You'll like that,” he said. He looked around at one of the deputies, who had been waiting for him to finish with us, then he just walked away, just walked toward that man and began talking beside the bar. Once, he looked over as if he was saying something about us, but in a minute he went outside. I could hear his voice, then I heard a car start up and drive away.

DORIS AND I sat in the booth for ten more minutes while the deputies and a highway patrolman stood at the bar and talked. I thought I might go look at the place where Barney had gotten shot, but I didn't want to get up by myself and I didn't want to ask Doris to go with me. Though after we'd sat there for a while longer Doris said, “I guess we're free to go.” She stood up and folded her blanket and laid it on the table, and I stood up and folded mine the same way. She went to the bar and gathered up her money and her coat and her purse and keys. Barney's work gloves and wine were still on the bar, and I noticed a pint bottle of whiskey on the floor under the stool Barney had been sitting on. One of the deputies was picking up the empty shotgun shells, and he said something to Doris and laughed, and Doris said, “I just stopped in for a drink, that's all,” and laughed herself. I walked quickly over to where the men with shotguns had aimed down the hallway. And what I saw was the bathroom door knocked off of its top hinge and hanging on the bottom one, and bright light shining out of the bathroom. But nothing else. No holes in the wall or any marks anywhere. There wasn't even any blood I could see, though I was sure there must've been blood someplace, since I'd seen it on the sheet when Barney had been taken out. It was just empty there, almost as if nothing had happened.

Doris walked over to me, putting things in her purse. “Let's break out of this place,” she said and pulled my arm, and then the two of us walked out of the Oil City without saying anything to anybody else, and right out into the cold night, where there was new snow and more still sifting down.

Outside, all the sounds were softened and I could hear better. Across the railroad yard were the dark backs of stores on the main street of Shelby, and through the alleys I could see hanging Christmas lights and a big yellow motel sign and the lights of cars cruising. I could hear car horns blowing and a switch-engine bell ringing in the dark. Two police cars sat parked in front of the bar with their motors running and their lights off, and two women stood in the snow across the street, watching the door to see what would happen next. One of the boys I'd passed in the drugstore when I'd bought my mother's watch was talking to the women, his hands stuck in his jacket pockets. Maybe they thought there would be some more excitement. But what I thought was that someone would come and close the bar soon and that would be all. I thought it might not ever open again.

Doris stopped on the sidewalk then and didn't say anything. She crossed her arms and put her hands under them to get warm. Her chin was down, her red patent-leather shoes were covered with snow. She seemed to be considering something that hadn't occurred to her until she was outside. We were facing the depot, farther down the street, its windows lit. The taxi that had been in front of the Oil City was parked there now, its green roof light shining. Other cars had arrived, so I couldn't see Doris's car. My own feet were starting to be cold, and I wanted to go on to the depot and wait inside for the train. There was only an hour left until it would come.

“That was such a goddamn unlucky thing it just makes me sick,” Doris said, and bunched her shoulders and pulled her elbows in. “Of course it's not what happens, it's what you do with what happens.” She looked around at the two other bars on the block, which looked exactly like the Oil City — dark wood fronts with red bar signs in the windows. “I've got snakes in my boots right now,” she said, “which is what the Irishman says.” And she spit. She spit right in the street in the snow. I had never seen a woman do that. “Did you ever hear your dad say he had snakes in his boots when he was drinking?”

“No,” I said.

“It means you need another drink. But I don't think I can approach another bar tonight. I need to go sit in my car and regain my composition.” In the Oil City the jukebox started up, loud music bursting into the street. “Can you stand to sit with me? You can go wait in the depot if you want to.” She smiled at me, a smile that made me feel sorry for her. I thought she must've felt bad about Barney, and must've thought she was responsible for what happened.

On the platform beside the depot two men in heavy coats were standing talking, shifting from foot to foot. A switch engine moved slowly past them. I wanted to go inside there and get warm. But I said, “No, I'll come with you.”

“We don't have to stay very long,” Doris said. “I just don't want to see anybody for a while. I'll calm down in a minute or two. Okay?” She started walking up the middle of the street. “Everyday acts of heroism are appreciated,” she said as she walked, and she smiled at me again.

Doris's pink car was covered with snow and was down among the other cars that had arrived behind the depot. She started the motor right away and turned the heater up, but didn't wipe the windshield, so that we sat in the cold while the heater blew cold air on our feet, and couldn't see out, could only see the blurred lights of the depot as if they were painted on the frosted window.

Doris put her hands in her lap and shivered and stamped her feet and put her chin down and blew ice smoke. I just sat. I put my hands in my pockets and tried to be still until I could feel the air start to blow warm. The front of my coat was still wet.

“Double shivers,” Doris said, pushing her chin farther down into her coat. She looked pale, as if she'd been sick, and her face seemed small and her eyes tired. “You know when you watch TV on New Year's Day and all the soap-opera characters stop in the middle of their programs and turn to the camera and wish you Happy New Year's? Did you ever see that?”

“No,” I said, because I had never watched soap operas.

“Well, they do it. Take my word for it. But it's my favorite moment of the whole year for the soaps. They just step out for a second, then they step right back in and go on. It's wonderful. I watch it religiously.”

“We watch football that day — when we have a TV,” I said, and clenched my toes down, because I was cold and couldn't help wondering if exhaust fumes were getting inside. I tried to feel if I was getting sleepy, but I wasn't. My jaw was still stiff, and I could feel my heart beating hard in my chest as if I'd been running, and my legs were tingling above my knees.

“Is that what you care about — football?” Doris said after a while.

“No,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“You're just ready to start life now, I guess.”

“I already started it,” I said.

“You certainly did tonight.” Doris reached for the schnapps bottle, where she'd left it on the floor, and unscrewed the cap and took a drink. “I've got a sour taste,” she said. “You want to drink a toast to poor old Barney?” She handed the bottle to me, and I could smell it.

“No, thanks,” I said, and didn't take it.

“Honor the poor dead and our absent friends,” she said, then took another drink. The heater was blowing warmer now.

“Why did you say to the police that he was in the bathroom?” I said.

Doris held the bottle up to the depot lights. “I didn't mean that to happen. If they'd spoken to him in the Indian tongue, none of it would've ever taken place. They just didn't speak it. It was a matter of mutual distrust.” She said something then in what must've been the Indian tongue — something that sounded like reading words backward, not like something you heard wrong or mistook the meaning of. “Do you know what that means?”

“No,” I said.

“It means: ‘Come out with your hands up and I won't kill you,’ in the Gros Ventre language. Or it means something like that. They don't really have a word for ‘hands up.’ Barney could've understood that if he'd been a Gros Ventre.”

“Why'd you tell them that, though?” I said, because I thought Barney might've survived if he hadn't gotten trapped in there and maybe gotten scared. He could be in jail now, asleep, instead of dead.

“I didn't mean him to get shot.” Doris looked at me as if she was surprised. “Do you think I'm rotten because I did that?”

“No,” I said, though that wasn't exactly the truth.

“He murdered his wife. I'm sure about that. They'll find her someplace over in Browning tonight, beat to death or stabbed or burned up in a ditch. That's what happens. She probably had a boyfriend. The police were already looking for him, I knew that the instant he sat down beside me. People get a smell on them.” She blew more ice breath in the air. “I don't think the heater's working.” She turned the knob around and back. “Feel my hands.” She put her small hands together and shoved them toward me, and they were cold and hard-feeling. “They're my prettiest feature, I believe,” Doris said, looking at her own hands. She looked at my hands then, and touched the place where her wedding ring had worked into my knuckle. “Your skin's your nicest feature,” she said, and looked at my face. “You look like your mother, and you have your father's skin. You'll probably look like him eventually.” She pushed closer to me. “I'm so cold, baby,” she said, holding her two hands still clasped together against my chest and putting her face against my cheek. The skin on her face was cold and stiff and not very soft, and the frames of her glasses were cold too. There was a smell of sweat in her hair. “I feel numb, and you're so warm. Your face is warm.” She kept her cheek against my cheek, so I could feel that mine was warm. “You need to warm me up,” she whispered. “Are you brave enough to do that? Or are you a coward on that subject?” She put her hands around my neck and below my collar, and I didn't know what to do with my hands, though I put them around her and began to pull her close to me and felt her weight come against my weight and her legs press on my cold legs. I felt her ribs and her back — hard, the way they'd felt when we'd been on the floor in the bar. I felt her breathing under her coat, could smell on her breath what she'd just been drinking. I closed my eyes, and she said to me, almost as if she was sorry about something, “Oh, my. You've just got everything, don't you? You've just got everything.”

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

And she said, “No, no. Oh, no, no.” That was all she said. And then she didn't talk to me anymore.

ON THE TRAIN, I sat facing Doris as the empty, dark world went by outside our compartment in a snowy stream. She had washed her face and cleaned her glasses and put on perfume, and her face had color in it. She looked nice, though the front of her red dress had stains from where we'd had to lie down on the bar floor in the wet. We sat and looked out the window for a while, not talking, and I saw that she had taken off her stockings and her earrings, and that her hands were pretty. Her fingers were long and thin, and there was no polish on her fingernails. They looked natural.

In the depot I had called my father. I thought I should tell him about Barney and what had happened and say that I was all right, though I knew I could explain it wrong and he could decide to come and get me, and I wouldn't get to Seattle, or ever get to see my mother.

The phone rang a long time, and when my father answered it he seemed out of breath, as if he'd been running or had come in from outside. “It's snowing in Montana, bud,” he said, catching his wind. I heard him stamp his feet on the floor. “It feels like you've been gone a long time already.”

“We're still in Shelby,” I said. “It's snowing here too.” Doris was at the ticket desk, talking to the woman I had talked to — Betty. I knew they were talking about Barney. There were other people in the waiting room now, with suitcases and paper packages, and it was noisy. “We saw a man get shot up in a bar tonight,” I said to my father, just like that.

“What is it?” my father said, as though he hadn't heard me right. “What's it you said?”

“The police did it.”

“Where's Doris?” my father said. “Put her on.” And I knew that what I'd said had shocked him. “Where are you?” he said, and his voice sounded scared.

“In Shelby,” I said. “In the depot. I was on the floor with Doris. Nothing happened to us.”

“Where's she now, son?” my father said and suddenly seemed very calm. “Let me speak to her now.”

“She's talking to somebody,” I said. “She can't come to the phone.”

“Are the police there?” my father said, and I knew he was thinking right then about coming up and getting me and taking me back. But it was snowing too hard, and the train would get there before he could.

“We were in the Oil City bar,” I said, and I said it calmly. “It wasn't somebody we knew. It was an Indian.”

“What in the world's going on now?” my father said, and he said this loudly, so that I wondered if he'd had a drink. “Was she with somebody?”

“No,” I said, “she wasn't. It's all right now. It's finished.”

And then there was a long time on the line during which my father didn't say anything but I could hear his feet moving on the floor and hear him breathing hard, and I knew he was trying to think of what he should do at that moment.

“I can't save you from very much, can I?” he said softly, as if he didn't care if I heard it or maybe didn't even want me to. So I didn't answer, and waited for him to say something he wanted me to hear. I tried thinking of something to ask, but I didn't want to know anything. Telling him what had happened had made anything else not important.

And then he said, and he said it more loudly, as if he had a new idea, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He waited for a moment. “Your mother called up here tonight.”

“What did she say?”

“She wanted to know if you'd gotten away all right and how you felt. She asked me if I wished I was coming with you, and I told her she'd need to ask me earlier if she wanted that to happen. I said I had other plans.”

“Is Jensen there?” And I called her by her last name. I don't know why.

My father laughed. “Yoyce? No, Miss Yensen's got different visitors tonight. It's just us hounds in the house. I let them both in. They're searching around for you right now.”

“You don't have to worry about me,” I said.

“All right, then, I'll quit.” And he paused again. “Your mother said she might try to keep you out there. So don't be surprised.”

“What did you say to her about it?”

“I said it was up to you. Not me.”

“What did she say then?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Not about that.” And I decided then that he hadn't had a drink. “Before you called I was just sitting thinking about when I was your age. My parents had several big dustups — yelling and everything. Fighting. My dad once got my mother up against a wall in the house and threatened to hit her because he'd invited over some friends of his from Moorhead, and she didn't like them and told them to get out. I had a good seat for that. Nobody moved away, though. That was better than all this foolishness. I don't know what you're supposed to do about it, of course.”

Doris looked at me across the waiting room and smiled and waved. She pointed her finger at herself, but I didn't want her to talk to my father. “Do you remember when you said Doris was sympathetic?” I said, watching her. “You were talking about her one day. I wondered what you meant by that.”

“Oh,” my father said, and I heard one of the dogs bark, and he shouted out, “Hey now! Dogs!” Then he said, “I must've meant she was generous with her affections. With me she was. That's all. Why'd you think about that? Is she nice to you?”

“Yes,” I said, “she is.” Then I said, “Do you think it'd be better if I stay out with Mother?”

“Well, only if you want to,” my father said. “I wouldn't blame you. Seattle's a nice place. But I'm happy to have you come back here. We should talk about that when you've been there. You'll know more about it.”

“Okay,” I said.

I heard a dog's collar jingling, and I thought he was probably petting one of them. “Are you sure you're all right?” my father said.

“I'm fine,” I said. “I am.”

“I love you, Larry. I forgot to tell you that before you left. That's important.”

“I love you,” I said.

“That's good news,” he said. “Thank you.”

And then we hung up.

AFTER AN HOUR of watching the night go by — the town of Cut Bank, Montana, some bright headlights behind a flashing, snowy barricade and a road sign toward Santa Rita and the Canada border, then a long, dark time while the train ran beside the highway and there were no cars, only a farm light or two in the distance and a missile site off in the dark and a few trucks racing to get home by Thanksgiving — after an hour of that, Doris began talking to me, just saying whatever was in her mind, as if she thought I might be interested. Her voice sounded different in the compartment. It had lost a thickness it'd had, and was just a plain voice that only meant one thing.

She remarked again that the town of Shelby had felt very foreign to her, and that it reminded her of Las Vegas, Nevada, where she and Benny had gotten married. She said both were remote from anyplace important and both were unpredictable — unlike Great Falls, which she said was too predictable. She said she knew the sheriff had not intended to shoot Barney, that they would've done anything to avoid it but that they didn't know enough. Then she said again that she was the wrong person for my father, and that there were important things she'd always wanted to say to my mother, things she thought about her — some good, some not — but that she could never express them, because my mother had locked on her as a rival years before. Then she talked about how it would feel to be divorced, that the worst part of that would be your thinking, not being able to control what went through your mind, and that the next day, Thanksgiving Day, she was going to tell my mother to come home right then, or else run the risk of being on her own forever. “Your life'll eat you.” Those were the words she used. And then she leaned back in her seat and looked at me.

“I was involved with another woman for a while. Quite a while, in fact. It was very fulfilling,” she said. “Though I'm not now. Not anymore. Does that shock you? I'm sure it does.”

“No,” I said, although it did. It shocked me very much.

“It shocked me,” Doris said. “But you couldn't admit that. It's not how you're made. You don't really know how to trust people with the truth. You're like your father.” She took her glasses off and smoothed under her eyes with the tips of her fingers.

“I can tell the truth,” I said, and I wanted to be able to. I didn't want to be a person who couldn't tell the truth, though I didn't want to tell Doris I was shocked by what she'd said.

“It doesn't matter,” she said, and smiled at me in a way she had earlier that day, as though she liked me and I could trust her. She put her glasses back on very carefully. “Did you buy a nice present for your mom? I bet you have good taste.”

“I bought her a watch,” I said.

“You did?” Doris leaned forward. “Let me see it.” She seemed pleased.

I reached in the pocket of my coat, which was beside me on the seat and also had the lawyer's card in it, and took out the little clear-plastic box wrapped in white tissue, and unfolded it so Doris could look. She took the box and opened it and picked up the watch with its tiny moving hand ticking seconds by — I could almost hear it — and she looked at it very closely, then put it up to her ear. “Okay,” she said, and smiled at me. “It works.” She put it back in my hand. “Jan'll love that,” she said as I folded it away. “It's the perfect gift. I wish somebody would give me a watch. You're such a sweet boy.” She took my cheeks between her warm hands and squeezed me, and I thought she was going to kiss me, but she didn't. “Too bad there aren't sweet boys like you everywhere,” she said. She sat back on her seat and put her hands in her lap and closed her eyes, and I believe she might've gone to sleep for a minute. Though after a while she said, with her eyes still closed and the snowy night flashing by outside, “I wish there were Thanksgiving carols so we could sing a song now.” And then she did go to sleep, because her breath slowed and evened, and her head sank over her chest, and her hands were still and limp.

And for a long time after that I sat very still and felt as though I was entirely out of the world, cast off without a starting or a stopping point, just shooting through space like a boy in a rocket. Though after a while I must have begun to hold my breath, because my heart began to beat harder, and I had that feeling, the scary feeling you have that you're suffocating and your life is running out — fast, fast, second by second — and you have to do something to save yourself, but you can't. Only then you remember it's you who's causing it, and you who has to stop it. And then it did stop, and I could breathe again. I looked out the window at the night, where the clouds had risen and dispersed and the snow was finished, and the sky above the vast white ground was soft as softest velvet. And I felt calm. Maybe for the first time in my life, I felt calm. So that for a while I, too, closed my eyes and slept.