THE DEAD MAN had been a Marine Corps veteran and inveterate gambler from Elko, Nevada. He had no criminal record, but he had gone into debt to moneylenders in Vegas and disappeared from the computer five years before. The insides of his arms and thighs were laced with scar tissue from repeated hypodermic injections. The most recent ones were infected.
The investigation into the homicide behind Wyatt’s house cleared Wyatt of any culpability, but not Darrel McComb. He was suspended from the department without pay, pending a determination by Internal Affairs regarding the general deterioration of both his private and professional life. He had now shown up in the middle of two firefights without adequate explanation, been witness to the death of a federal agent he was following without authorization, and broken into the house of an ex-felon. To make matters worse, Darrel had been on the premises while the ex-felon killed a man. One of the investigators from Internal Affairs, dead serious, asked Darrel if he had been recently tested for syphilis of the brain. Humorous insiders at the courthouse suggested that Darrel resign his job now and consider a career as a mortician’s assistant in a town that had never heard of him.
The following week I saw him on a steel bench on the walk by the river, feeding pigeons from a bag of caramel popcorn. In his scuffed, boxlike shoes, white socks, ill-fitting dark suit, and pale blue necktie printed with trout flies, he was probably the saddest-looking plainclothes cop I’d ever seen.
“Wyatt Dixon told me everything that happened,” I said.
“So?” he replied.
“If you’d been a little creative in your report, you could have skated and jammed up Dixon at the same time. I think you’re a stand-up guy, Darrel.”
“Fay Harback ratted me out with Internal Affairs.”
“Doesn’t seem like Fay’s style.”
“Yeah? Well, she dimed me good. Those I.A. guys think I’m having a nervous breakdown. They say it’s been a concern to the D.A.’s office for months. Ever try proving to people you’re not nuts?”
“Why were those guys trying to break into Wyatt Dixon’s potato cellar?”
“I spread the word the goods from the Global Research robbery were in there.”
“Through Greta Lundstrum?”
“Maybe.”
“You told the sheriff all this?”
“I don’t trust anyone in that courthouse. You want justice, you got to get it yourself.” He felt the inside of his swollen jaw with his tongue, his eyes slitted.
“Why do you hate Wyatt Dixon?” I asked.
“It’s enough I hate him. He’s a psycho. What do you care, anyway?”
“Sometimes we hate the people who remind us most of ourselves. It can flat eat you up.”
He nodded his head. “You a churchgoing man?” he asked.
“I guess.”
“Keep doing that. It looks good on you,” he said. He dumped his popcorn on the cement, then walked across the lawn of a Holiday Inn to a cul-de-sac where his car was illegally parked.
JOHNNY AMERICAN HORSE was hurt. He had been hurt several times while federal agents and county lawmen chased him across the state-abrasions, sprains, and cuts from falls-but this time it was serious and he had lost the medical supplies Amber had sent him. Up in the Bob Marshall Wilderness a sharpshooter’s round had ricocheted off a boulder and driven a stone splinter deep into his left forearm. He had removed the splinter, bled the wound, and washed it clean in a stream, but two days later the edges of the hole were red and tender, a tiny pearl of infection in the center. He gashed the wound open with the point of his survival knife, an electrical current climbing instantly into his armpit, then heated the knife blade in his campfire and stuck the point inside his flesh.
He passed out and fell backwards into a patch of moss under a fir tree. When he woke in the morning, western bluebirds filled the branches, their breasts as orange as new rust in the sunrise. He made a poultice of birch bark, wrapped it on his arm with a leather boot-lace, and walked higher up on the mountain, out of the smoke of forest fires, into strips of snow among fir trees.
Fever took him the next day, although he wasn’t sure if it came from infection in his arm or bad water in a slough. He wandered deeper into the Bob Marshall, climbing to the top of the Grand Divide, from which he could see Marias Pass and the ancient home of the Blackfoot Indians. Farther east, beyond the roll of the plains, was the home of the Crow, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Oglala Sioux. The Blackfeet called the place he stood on the Backbone of the World. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the vastness of the landscape below him, was a place called the Sand Hills, where the dead went to live with the buffalo and the grandfathers who watched over the four corners of the universe. Far to the east, it was raining on the hills, and clouds veined with lightning moved across the sky like bison flecked with St. Elmo’s fire.
In that moment Johnny American Horse knew he would never be alone.
Canned food, a GI mess kit, and a canteen filled with apricot brandy, even a GI can opener tied on a thong to an obsidian arrow-point, had been left for him under rocks or hung in trees by other Indians, all of whom knew Amber and told her where Johnny was and where he was going. But the living were not the only friends Johnny had. Perhaps because of his fever, or perhaps not, he believed his odyssey across the Backbone of the World had intersected the Ghost Trail.
On it he saw the spirits of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and the holy man Black Elk. But there were others on the Ghost Trail who had no names. Heavy Runner’s band, who had been massacred on the Marias River by the U.S. Army in 1871, still lived inside the morning fog and looked at him with hollow eyes from inside the trees. The hundreds of Blackfoot men, women, and children who had died of smallpox and were supposedly buried in a pit on Ghost Ridge outside Browning sat on rocks high overhead, beckoning, their agency-issue clothes hanging in rags.
When he passed them by and waved farewell, they did not appear to him again. Instead, a lone Indian woman materialized on a ledge, inside a mist, above a stream that boiled over rocks. She wore beaded moccasins and a white buckskin dress fringed with purple glass beads, eagle feathers tied to her braids. He did not have to ask who she was. For years she had been seen not only by Indians but by the military personnel who guarded the intercontinental missile silos positioned along the eastern slope of the northern Rockies. Soldiers standing sentry swore they had seen her inside secured areas that no unauthorized person could have entered, her dress glowing in the darkness, her large eyes filled with an indescribable sadness.
Once, when Johnny had lost his coat crossing a stream, she pointed to a cave behind a cluster of box elder. Inside it, he found a blanket pack rats had made a nest in and six cans of condensed milk. When he slipped on the edge of a crevasse and almost fell three hundred feet onto rocks, she appeared on the cliff and moved a ponderosa branch aside so he could see handholds cut into the stone by Blackfeet hundreds of years ago.
He circled back through the Bob Marshall, crossed the middle fork of the Flathead River, and kept going south toward the Swan Peaks, his arm throbbing, his fever like a warm friend inside his clothes. He no longer thought in terms of calendar days. In fact, he began to think of time as a self-contained entity that could not be compartmentalized. The present disappeared inside morning fog or the misty haze of smoke and rain that lay on the mountains at sunset, smudged out as though by a giant thumb, leaving only the woods, the creeks, the peaks against the sky, then suddenly a trapper’s log cabin hidden in a hollow, flint tools washed loose from a hill by snowmelt, a rusted ax head buried deep in a tree trunk, a rocker box standing starkly in a dry streambed, tepee rings on a shady knoll, a turkey track carved on a flat rock, pointing to the North Star.
He followed a trail used by grizzlies along the crest of the Flathead Range. To the west he could see Swan Lake, like a giant blue teardrop, and the Swan Peaks rising gray and steel-colored and cold into the clouds. At night, the Indian woman in the buckskin dress lit his way, the incandescence of her dress moving ahead of him in the trees.
It rained on the canopy, but he could not feel the water on his skin. Sometimes he had to stop and rest, his head reeling from the thin air, the wound in his arm tightening against the poultice wrapped around it. Up ahead, the Indian woman waited for him in the evening shadows. Somehow he had lost his backpack and his food and cans of condensed milk, although he could not remember slipping the straps from his shoulders. He took a swallow of the apricot brandy from his canteen, but the liquor was like diesel fuel on his empty stomach, and he vomited on the ground.
He saw the Indian woman walk toward him, her cupped hand extended. He opened his palm without being told and she filled it with huckleberries.
“Thank you. You’re a kind woman. But you haven’t told me your name,” he said.
There was no smoke in the wind that gusted up the trail, and he could smell the odor of wet leaves on her skin and rain in her hair. She spoke to him in the Blackfoot language, but he could not understand what she was saying. She pointed to the south, at the Swan Peaks, and touched his shoulder, indicating that he must follow her now, that he must not sleep until he was in a safer place.
“We’re safe on the trail. There’s no one up here,” he told her.
But she ignored his words and beckoned for him to follow, an urgency growing in her face.
Around the next bend she left the trail, mounting the hillside, and set her hand on a dome-shaped, lichen-encrusted boulder protruding from the soil. Behind it was a deep depression filled with trees that had rotted into dark brown humus and a burrow that a bear had dug for a winter den. Johnny crawled inside the den, took off his canteen, trade ax, and knife, and laid his head down on a thick pile of animal-smelling moss just as a helicopter roared by overhead, its searchlights vectoring down into the forest.
The next morning he thought someone might have shot at him, but he couldn’t be sure. Dry thunder had been echoing in the canyons, and a violent gust of wind could snap a tree limb as loudly as a rifle shot. But the second time he heard a popping sound, he also saw pulp fly from the trunk of a dead larch. He left the trail, zigzagging through the forest, not stopping until he had crested a hill. He slid at least two hundred feet down an arroyo into a streambed, next to a row of nineteenth-century sluice boxes strung out on the rocks like a miniature wrecked train.
That night he came out of the mountains into a wet glade spiked with cattails, where he watched a cinnamon bear and two cubs cornering and swatting fish out of a slough. He crossed the glade, following the Indian woman, whose moccasined feet left soft green depressions in the reeds she walked through. He entered mountains again, where he found a cairn with a deer antler protruding from the top of the pile. Under the rocks were cans of sardines and boned chicken, a package of nuts and dried fruit, a box of Hershey bars, toothpaste and a brush, aspirin, bandages, iodine, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He pulled the poultice from his arm and a smell like rotten eggs rose into his face. He poured the disinfectant onto the wound and watched it boil in the moonlight, then washed it clean with brandy from his canteen. In the distance he could see a ranch house surrounded by a rick fence, inside of which were red horses racing through a meadow, under the moon.
He lay back in the grass to sleep, but the Indian woman squatted next to him and looked entreatingly into his face.
“What is it?” he said.
She placed her hand on the disturbed pile of stones. As she did, a white light shone through the pile as though it emanated from the earth rather than her palm. Crumpled between two pieces of slag was a letter inside a Ziploc bag. It was written in longhand, and it read:
Dear Johnny,
The FBI have doubled their surveillance on me and I can’t get to the materials to move them. People being what they are, I’m afraid it’s a matter of time before someone gives us up. But even if we fail, I will always love you and be proud of what we have done together. Lester Antelope gave his life and died bravely for our cause. I only hope I can be as brave as he.
Your gal with “The Eight-Thirty Blues,”
Amber
How long had it been since they had danced to “The Eight-Thirty Blues” under the stars at the Thursday evening concert on the river? It seemed a lifetime ago. He put the letter inside his shirt and fell asleep in the grass. Through the ground he could hear the drone of automobiles on a highway.
He woke just before dawn, the mountains like a black bowl around him, the sky and stars swept clean of smoke and dust, the air dense with the smell of ozone and distant rain. He ate a can of boned chicken, washed his face in a stream, and brushed his teeth. He started to examine the wound in his arm for infection, but the bandage was still clean and taped solidly in place, and he felt no pain when he touched its surfaces. He decided to let well enough alone.
Just as the light went out of the sky and the stars faded into the morning, he thought he saw the Indian woman among a grove of cottonwoods farther down the stream, waiting for him. But when he approached her, the wind gusted through the trees, and a large doe clattered out of the grove and churned up the hillside. Then it stopped and stared back at him.
“It’s only me,” he said.
He thought the wind would gust again and change the animal’s shape back into that of the Indian woman. Instead, the doe flipped its tail in the air, exposing the white fur underneath, and galloped away, two spotted fawns running behind its hooves.
It was evening and the sun had gone all the way across the sky when Johnny came out of the mountains onto the highway and the world of truck stops, tourist cabins, and cracker-box real estate offices knocked together from fresh-planked pine. In a general store he bought a denim shirt, new jeans, socks, underwear, a razor, and soap. He shaved and changed into his fresh clothes in a filling station restroom, then looked into the mirror and went back to the general store and bought a straw hat that he pushed down low on his head.
A highway patrol car passed him as he walked toward a truck stop where a half-dozen tractor-trailers were parked. He used the outside mirror on a parked pickup truck to watch the patrol car disappear up the road, then bought a fried pie and ate it on a wood bench in the shade of the café. Through the trees on the opposite side of the road he could see a blue lake and a man in a red canoe fishing in the shadow of a cliff. The wind was cool and surprisingly free of smoke, the sky streaked with lavender horsetails in the south. Again he thought he smelled rain.
Above him, a piece of paper flapped from the thumbtack that held it to a message board.
The sheet of paper had been rained on and sun-dried and was curled around the edges, but he could clearly see the bold lettering printed across the top: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
The picture under the caption was an enlargement of a mug shot taken in the early morning hours at the Missoula County Jail. Johnny looked at the face in the photo-the eyes half-lidded, the jaws slack with booze-and hardly recognized himself.
A couple of log truck drivers came out of the café. One of them sniffed the air and looked at Johnny, his face disjointed. Johnny lifted his eyes into the driver’s and held them there.
“You doin’ all right, buddy?” the driver asked.
“Yeah, I’m all right. How ’bout you?” Johnny said.
The driver didn’t answer. He and his friend got into their rigs and pulled onto the highway.
Why had the man stared at him like that? An attendant at the gas pumps was using the pay phone, looking briefly in Johnny’s direction. When Johnny stood up from the bench, threadworms swam in front of his eyes. He walked into the side lot of the truck stop and approached a driver standing by a rig boomed down with ponderosa logs, the engine hammering under the hood.
“Going toward Missoula?” Johnny said.
“I might be,” the driver replied. He was a short, hard-boned man with olive skin and a colorless cloth cap pulled down tightly on his scalp. He wore laced boots, black jeans, and a long-sleeved khaki shirt that was sweat-ringed at the armpits and flecked with black ash from a grass fire. He had a cold and was blowing his nose into a bandanna.
“I’d appreciate a ride,” Johnny said.
The driver’s eyes ran over Johnny’s person, lingering in places they shouldn’t have. “Climb in,” he said.
When Johnny pulled himself into the cab, he felt as though the tissue in his body were being separated from his bones. The trees along the road, the blue lake, and the fisherman in the red canoe seemed to spin around the truck’s cab. As the truck drove south and crossed a stream strewn with white rocks, he thought he saw the Indian woman looking back at him from a stand of aspen trees. He raised his hand to wave at her, then realized the driver was staring at him.
The driver’s ears were filmed with soot, and the initials “K.K.K.” were inked across the top of his right wrist.
“You in the Klan?” Johnny said.
“I put that tattoo on me when I was a kid. Wish I could take it off, but looks like I’m stuck with it.”
“You ought to take it off.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Johnny said.
Then his head sagged on his chest and he felt himself dropping away inside the steady motion of the rig, the whir of the tires on the asphalt, and the predictable vibration of the logs under the boomer chains. He didn’t know how long he slept, but he dreamed he was drunk, stumbling on a street, trying to hold on to a parking meter while passersby looked at him with a mixture of pity and revulsion. A terrible odor rose into his nostrils, but not one of vomit or jailhouse stink. It was infinitely worse-a fetid, salty stench like whorehouse copulation, a rat trapped in a wall, an owl incinerated in a chimney. In the dream he was still on the street, incapable of caring for himself, but all the passersby had fled and he was left alone against a backdrop of skeletal trees, deserted houses, and a white sun that was crumpling the sky into a carbonized sheet of blackened paper.
When he woke, he was by himself in the cab, parked by a motel with pink doors and green neon scrolled around the office. The summer light still hung in the sky, but the hills were dark, and he could see the glow of Missoula behind him. They had already driven through town and were not far from the reservation. What had happened? He took two swallows of brandy from his canteen, then drank again and felt the world begin to come back into focus. The truck driver was inside the motel office, counting the change the clerk had just given him. The driver crossed the lot and opened the cab door.
“Why are we stopped at the motel? Why didn’t you put me down in Missoula?” Johnny said.
The driver’s mouth looked small, his jaws fragile and too thin for the rest of his face. He glanced back at the office. “I tried to. You told me you wanted to go to the cemetery,” he said.
“I don’t remember that.”
“Sorry, fellow, but I can’t have that smell in my cab no more. I paid for your room. If I was you, I’d get ahold of a doctor.”
“You damn queer,” Johnny said.
“What did you call me?”
“You’re a queer or with the G,” Johnny said.
“Get out of my rig.”
Johnny stepped out of the cab, almost falling, and ran across a field and up an arroyo, his survival knife, canned food, medical supplies, and trade ax swinging inside the cloth sack in his hand. He ran until he collapsed behind a barn on a deserted ranch, high up in a vernal cup between two mountains. He lay on his back in the grass and mushrooms, panting, the stars hot and bright in the sky, his bandaged arm throbbing. When he removed the wrappings from his wound, he could hardly believe what he saw.
Johnny fished in his tote sack for his bottles of peroxide and iodine, but all he felt at the bottom of the sack was wetness and broken glass. He upended the canteen and drank until his throat constricted, with no sense of caution or restraint; he felt his heart slow and the brandy’s warmth settle in his stomach and spread through his limbs like an old friend. Then he filled his jaw with aspirin, found a shovel in the barn, and began walking.
He tripped over tangles of fence wire and in a creekbed was struck in the face by flying bats. He was up in the Jocko Valley now, back on the reservation-drunk, sick, his left forearm the color and texture of a pomegranate swollen with rot, its skin about to split. What had happened to the Indian woman? Why had she deserted him? Why had his power been taken from him?
But maybe the power he believed had been passed down to him from Crazy Horse was just another sham, a cheap illusion that provided an excuse for his personal failure and gave importance to a worthless alcoholic existence. Maybe he was exactly what most white people had always thought-another drunk Indian, a feathered joke dancing at powwows for the entertainment of tourists, a pitiful rumdum who got out of jail on Monday mornings and headed for any bar where he still had a tab.
An alcohol and drug abuse counselor at the V.A. had told Johnny there was a good chance he would end up a wetbrain. A day would come, the counselor said, when Johnny would experience a chemically induced seizure from which he would not recover. He would stumble along the streets, talking to himself, sometimes raging at strangers, his body crawling with stink, and never be aware that a change had taken place in his life.
Maybe that had already happened. Why had he insulted the truck driver who had tried to help him? More important, if indeed he had power, why had the Indian woman deserted him when he needed her most?
He sat down on a promontory that jutted out of a hill overlooking the Jocko Valley. He had thought the forest fires were out, or at least contained, but his perception had been an illusion, as perhaps all his other perceptions had been. Ash was drifting down on the trees like snowflakes, and in the west, beyond the crests of the mountains, he could see the reflections of fires in the clouds, even though he could not see the flames themselves. He remembered the truck driver who had given him a lift and remembered the soot on his skin and the smell of smoke in his clothes. The driver had been a strange man, his truck unmarked by a logo, with no identifiable license plate that Johnny could remember.
He pushed himself up on the shovel he had stolen out of the barn. When he looked up at the sky, the treetops and stars were spinning. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to see the driver’s face again. Did Death drive a truck and have a perverse gleam in his eye?
He stumbled down the hill toward his destination, no longer sure of either his sanity or the breath he drew. But of one conclusion he was certain-he would not arrive at his destination without help.
One of the bondsmen who had betrayed him lived on a small ranch, back against the hills, where he grew feed on thirty acres he had acquired by marrying a white woman. Parked in the dirt driveway was a patrol car used by the tribal police. The two-story clapboard house was dark, the keys in the ignition of the car.
Johnny threw his tote sack and shovel inside, started the engine, and drove without headlights through the back of the property and up the hill toward the headwaters of the Jocko River.
The cemetery that Lester Antelope had used to hide the goods from the Global Research break-in was located two hundred yards off the road, in a swampy notch fed by springs that leaked from green and yellow rocks. The cemetery was an environmental disaster created by the founder of a right-wing cult that had been run out of Sanders County, an area that normally gave refuge to groups as extreme as the Aryan Nation and Christian Identity. For Christmas, the cult’s founder had given his wife a coffin; after his divorce, he published her phone number and address in Screw magazine.
His eccentricities also included his demand that all deceased cult members and their loved ones be buried in his cemetery and that none of them be embalmed.
Johnny kicked aside a plastic cross on a grave and pushed his shovel into a lichen carpet dotted with poisonous mushrooms. He peeled back layer upon layer of humus and soil that was thick with worms and white slugs. The smell was not bad at first, but two feet down it struck his face-an odor that was like sewer gas, feces, and decomposing fish roe, the same odor he had smelled in the truck driver’s cab. He tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth and worked faster, flinging dirt and pieces of cloth and bone from the hole, until the shovel clanked against a metal box. He grabbed it by the handle, ripped it loose from the soil, and heaved it up into the leaves and pine needles, his eyes watering, the cloth of his bandanna sucked into his mouth.
Johnny heard a helicopter somewhere above the mountains, then the thropping of the blades drew closer, echoing off canyon walls behind him, searchlights piercing the treetops. He froze in the cemetery, his face tilted at the ground so it wouldn’t reflect light, his body contorted into a stick.
The downdraft of the helicopter roared over him, swirling pine needles off the ground, then was gone as quickly as it had come. Johnny dragged the box to the patrol car, shoved it into the backseat, and headed back down the road in the dark, his lights off.
He drove back through Missoula and caught the highway into the Bitterroots, passing a city police car parked on the shoulder. At Lolo, he turned west just as emergency lights appeared in his rearview mirror and a helicopter zoomed by overhead. He passed the dirt road we lived on and turned up a drainage between low hills, then cut across a field and bounced up a log road that climbed steadily through fir and pine trees and burned snags left by an old fire. He drove over the crest of the mountain into heavy timber, his headlights off now, the log road strewn with broken rock. Down below he could see our house and the pasture in the moonlight.
He stopped the stolen patrol car, pulled the lockbox from the backseat, and flung it down the side of the mountain into the trees.
Then he continued up the log road, back toward Missoula, or wherever the road went, the sides of the vehicle sparking off boulders, the frame bouncing on the springs, rocks exploding against the oil pan, tree limbs smacking across the windshield.
The oil and heat indicators were lit on the dashboard, and he could hear piston rods knocking in the engine. From both north and south he saw helicopters headed toward him, their searchlights blazing.
He twisted the wheel on his vehicle and drove off the shoulder of the log road, crashing down the mountain through the undergrowth, pine seedlings whipping under the frame. The helicopters followed him down, flooding the woods with a white brilliance that left no place to hide. His vehicle went over a log, shattering the drive shaft, spun in a circle, and dead-ended against a boulder.
He opened the door and fell onto the ground, dragging his tote sack with him. He could see the heavy, armor-vested, helmeted shapes of his pursuers moving up the hill toward him.
He crawled away in the trees, his tote sack wrapped around his right wrist. His left arm was on fire, his heart hammering in his ears. Once again, he smelled the odor of a grave on his clothes and skin.
So this is how it plays out, he thought. You get popped at point-blank range in the woods or wrapped in chains and returned to jail, one of a series you’ll never leave. Either way, you’re about to be brought out of the mountains like a gutted animal hung from a stick, a lesson for all those who would imitate you.
Maybe it was time to let the other side pay some dues, he thought. He estimated he could get two, perhaps three, and with luck maybe even four of his pursuers before he went down himself. Why not? They had seen only his back while they had chased him all over the state. Johnny would never get the people who had killed Lester Antelope, but he could take several of this bunch as surrogates. They wouldn’t be expecting a street drunk to come at them with only a knife and trade ax. Time to paint the trees, fellows.
Besides, what did he have to lose? His power was gone. The Indian woman had left him at the highway, where the woods ended and the white man’s world began. The Indian way of life was dead, and Johnny American Horse and those like him were self-deluded fools to believe otherwise.
He blackened his face and hands with dirt, then reached inside his tote sack for a weapon. But his hand found only canned goods and broken glass. He dumped the sack’s contents on the ground. His knife and trade ax were gone.
A circle of flashlights shone in his face, then someone racked a shell into the chamber of a cut-down ten gauge. Johnny sat back against a tree, his bad arm in his lap. Red circles of light burned into his eyes and receded into his brain.
“Squeeze it off and be done with it,” he said.
“Are you kidding? Those shells are expensive. Hold up your wrist, Running Man Who Thinks with Forked Brain,” an FBI agent said.
The other agents laughed and lit cigarettes and talked about the National League pennant race. How about those Atlanta Braves?
IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS, Amber thought she was having a dream about a violent wind, then she realized the sounds surrounding her were real. The house shook, the doors rattled against the locks, and a glass pitcher on a kitchen windowsill shattered in the sink. She looked out her bedroom window and saw lightning in the clouds, like streaks of gold inside pewter. The air was filled with pine needles blowing from the trees on the hillsides, then the front screen door sprung back on its hinges and snapped back into place as loudly as a pistol report.
She got up from her bed and began closing windows, sure that the rain everyone had prayed for was about to drench the countryside. When she entered the living room she saw a yellow glow flickering on the porch, like the flame given off by a guttering candle. Then the entire yard filled with a warm yellow radiance, burning away the shadows, reaching all the way back to the barn, carving the horses out of the darkness.
Amber pulled opened the door, thinking she was about to see her first instance of ball lightning. Instead, the yellow light constricted upon itself, forming an envelope around an Indian woman wearing a white buckskin dress fringed with purple glass beads that were shaped like teardrops. The wind ripped through the house, blowing pictures off the walls, spinning the Rolodex on the telephone stand.
“Who are you?” Amber asked.
The Indian woman didn’t answer. She pointed toward the south, in the direction of the Bitterroot Mountains.
“Please tell me who you are,” Amber repeated, stepping out on the porch. Her bare foot came down on a cold, sharp-edged object. She stepped backwards and looked down at Johnny’s trade ax and, next to it, his survival knife.
“Where did you get these? Why did you bring them here?” Amber asked.
The Indian woman’s shape broke into hundreds of fireflies and disappeared. When Amber went back in the house, one of the Rolodex cards had been torn from the spindle and lay on the floor. The names on it were those of William Robert and Temple Holland.