ne-o-na-wa-ta?'
Jane said, 'Maybe,' then got up and kissed Mattie Wilson. Felker said, 'Thank you, Mrs. Wilson. If I had known how wonderful it is here, I wouldn’t have waited for Jane to bring me. I’d have come alone.'
As they left, Mattie said to Jane in Seneca, 'Keep one hand on that one. He’s beautiful, but he didn’t learn that much about women from his mother.'
They walked among the dried husks in the cornfield, then between the trees of the orchard. 'What did she say?' he asked.
Jane smiled. 'She said you had a blueberry caught in your teeth.'
He swept his tongue around in his mouth. 'I do not.'
She shrugged. 'My Seneca must be getting rusty.'
They made their way to a second farmhouse, this one a little better kept up but smaller. Jane walked up onto the front porch, opened the door with the key, and entered. Inside, the house looked like the home of a bachelor, but one who hadn’t been here in some time.
'Is this Jimmy’s farm?'
'Well, title is complicated here,' she said. 'It’s Jimmy’s house, but it really belongs to his mother because she’s the senior woman of his clan. They don’t divide land like, ’Here’s the boundary; let’s put a fence on it.’ They use what they need until they don’t need it. Jimmy doesn’t have a wife. When he does, he might live here, or he might go live in a house that belongs to her.'
'That doesn’t sound too complicated.'
'It isn’t,' she said. 'But sometime in the twenties the Canadian government decided that all Canadian Indians had to be patrilineal. So legal ownership could be in the name of some man who isn’t even related to Jimmy. It doesn’t matter. Right now it’s ours. I’m going to take a bath and go to sleep in it.'
'I was hoping you’d say that,' said Felker. 'Is there a couch or something ...'
’’There are two bedrooms. Pick one.'
He hesitated. 'Jane ... before I go to sleep I should say this. You saved my life maybe three times last night. I want to thank—'
'Save it,' she interrupted. 'We can talk later.'
Jane soaked in Jimmy’s bathtub for a long time, letting the warm water soothe the muscles in her back and arms and legs. On the wall above her, presumably for Jimmy’s contemplation, was a large poster of a blond woman who for some reason had taken off all of her clothes and sat straddling a big black motorcycle. Jane viewed her critically. She wasn’t really that attractive. It was only a matter of attitude.
13
She woke up slowly, fighting off consciousness for a long time as she lay in the bed with the sun beginning to shine into the room. She had held herself in the dream, had explored it and found that it wasn’t the kind of dream with boundaries but the kind that opened out before her in every direction she looked. She finally had relinquished it, like a swimmer giving in to the need to rise to the surface for air. When she opened her eyes she felt an instant when she couldn’t remember where she was, and it was like coming up and gulping for air too soon and breathing water. She felt a sensation like drowning must be, a desperate reflex to get up and out of it.
She sat up and looked around her at Jimmy’s room to make the dream go away. Then she listened for Felker. He was moving around in the living room. That was probably all it had been: She had heard him, and her mind had acted to absorb the noise into her dream so that it could get the sleep it needed. She stood up and went to the dresser to get her leather bag, and took it into the bathroom with her.
When she was dressed in clean blue jeans and a sweatshirt, she came out and bypassed the living room to get to the kitchen. When he came in to join her, she was making coffee. She didn’t look at him as she said, 'Sorry I slept so late.'
'That’s okay,' he said. 'I just got up myself.' She turned around and saw him run his hand over the thick whiskers that had grown in on his jaw. 'Do you think I should grow a mustache?'
'A mustache is not a great disguise for you.'
'What’s a great disguise?'
'Great? Great is like you take female hormones for a year, get a sex-change operation that’s so good that your reclusive billionaire husband never suspects that you weren’t always a woman, and neither do any of his army of security people.'
'I’d better settle for good. What’s good?'
'I haven’t decided yet.' She frowned. 'You’re a big, muscular, hairy ex-cop. You add a mustache, it just makes you look more like what you were anyway. You’ll need something that makes you look like a different kind of person who just happens to look like you.'
'This is starting to sound like Zen.'
'It’s not, but it is an attitude. What we’ve got to do is think about you.' She stared at him for a moment. 'You know who looks most like cops?'
'Who?'
'Criminals. They walk the same and they have the same facial expressions. Criminals just have worse tattoos and better haircuts.'
'Passing for a criminal doesn’t sound like a step up.'
’’That was just an example,' she said. 'You could pass for an old soldier. Were you ever in the military?'
'Yeah. Army. I hated it.'
'But you know the names of things and where the bases are and all that. If you just don’t try to pass for a soldier in an army camp, you’re okay.'
'I also don’t get paid. Say I’m a retired master sergeant. How does that help?'
'It gives people a box to put you in, so they don’t have to spend any energy thinking about you. We do all the thinking ourselves now.'
'But what’s the smartest thing to be?'
'Just start thinking about who you really are. I mean, what would you have done if circumstances and accidents hadn’t pushed you into all this? We can make up other circumstances to account for anything. It just has to be something you can keep being for a long, long time.'
'How long? Forever?'
'Say, twenty years. I imagine you’ve noticed, but it’s amazing how few people who carry guns for a living last that long.'
'I noticed,' he said. Then he added, 'But there’s an endless supply.'
'But the replacements won’t care about you, because John Felker is dead too and you’re somebody else.' She watched him for a moment. 'So what do you want to be when you grow up?'
'I don’t know.'
'Then keep thinking about it.'
They spent the day in the kitchen, sometimes sitting across the table from each other, sometimes up and walking around the room, now and then stopping to eat something, wash dishes, or make more coffee, but always talking.
'A lot of it is premeditation,' Jane said. 'You think ahead so that what you do doesn’t cause somebody to ask questions you can’t answer yourself.'
'Like what?'
'Apply for a job where you need a security clearance or where they give employees lie-detector tests.'
’’That one I know. The first question they ask is your name, so they’ll know what it looks like when you’re not lying. What else?'
'You don’t buy a house until you can survive a credit check. You rent. You think before you do anything.'
'So I live like a rat in a hole forever.'
'No, just the opposite. You look for ways to be average. You don’t get a job as a dishwasher, for instance.
