But she was still up there, a dot against the evening clouds, when he hiked down the other side of the rise to where he’d hidden his Jeep in a tangle of junipers.
6
It was unnaturally dark on the wide, rutted roads of the Wind River Indian Reservation because, Nate guessed, someone had once again decided to drive around and shoot out all the overhead lights. He confirmed his suspicion when he heard the crunching of broken glass from the shattered bulbs beneath the tires of the Jeep as he slowly cruised down Norkok Street toward Fort Washakie. Despite the chill of the evening, he kept his windows down so all his senses could be engaged. Dried leaves rattled in the canopy of old trees and skittered across the road. The last sigh of the evening sun painted a bold red slash on the square top of Crowheart Butte in his rearview mirror.
In the 1860s, Chief Washakie of the Eastern Shoshone tribe ended a war with the encroaching Crow by fighting one-on-one with Chief Big Robber, the Crow leader. Washakie killed Big Robber and cut his heart out and stuck it on the end of his war lance in tribute to the fallen enemy. Hence the name of the butte. The reservation itself was huge, 2.2 million acres-the same size as Yellowstone Park. It was home to 2,500 Eastern Shoshone and 5,000 Northern Arapaho. In the old cemetery Nate drove past the last shard of sun glinting off rusted metal headboards and footboards that reached up out of the ground. Because the Indians interred their dead on scaffolds and the Jesuits insisted on burial, a compromise was reached: the bodies had been buried in their deathbeds.
Nate felt a sudden dark pang as he looked over the cemetery when he thought of Alisha, his lover. He had left her body on scaffolding of his own construction just two months before. He hadn’t been back to the canyon where she’d been killed. He’d never go back.
All that remained of her except for his memories was the braided strand of her hair tied to the barrel of his. 500 Wyoming Express revolver.
As Nate slid down the roads in the dark, he glanced at still-life scenes of the residents through their windows. For some reason, the Indians seldom closed their curtains. He saw families gathered for dinner, people watching television, and in the lit-up opening of a single-car garage, a pair of young men in bloodied camo skinning a mule deer.
Alice Thunder’s faded white bungalow was located just off Black Coal Road, and Nate cruised by it without slowing. Muted lights were on inside, and her GMC Envoy was parked under a carport on the side of her house. She lived alone there, and it appeared she didn’t have company.
He did a three-point turn in the road and came back and turned onto a weedy two-track behind her house and parked where his Jeep couldn’t be seen from the road.
Nate padded up the broken concrete walk to her back entrance and tapped on the metal screen door. Dogs inside yipped and howled, but through the sound he could feel her heavy footfalls approach. She didn’t turn on the porch light but stood behind the storm door and squinted at him. Small mixed-breed dogs boiled around and through her stout legs.
“Is that you, Nate Romanowski?” she asked.
He nodded and leaned his head against the peeling doorframe. His legs felt suddenly weak from his injury.
“If I invite you in this house, am I committing a federal crime?”
“Maybe,” Nate said.
She yelled at her dogs to get away from the door, then cracked it open. He smelled a waft of warm air mixed with the smell of baking bread and wet dog hair.
“Get in here before someone sees you,” she said. “You’re hurt, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, letting her lead him into the kitchen. Four or five dogs sniffed at his pants and boots. Alice Thunder was not a hugger or a smiler or an open enthusiast.
“Do you want to sit?” she asked, gesturing toward the table. She’d not yet set it for her evening meal.
“I brought you some ducks,” he said, handing over the burlap sack.
“I love duck,” she said.
“I remember you saying that. Careful, they’re live.”
“I’ll twist their heads off in a minute,” she said, ushering him to the table. “We can eat two of them. Do you want to eat duck?”
He sat heavily. His shoulder pounded at him, each pulse of blood brought a stab of pain. “Duck would be good,” he said.
Alice Thunder was short and heavy, and her face was the shape and size of a hubcap. She had thick short fingers and a flat large nose and warm brown eyes. As the receptionist for the Indian high school for twenty-two years, she knew everyone and everyone knew her. She’d befriended Nate’s lost lover Alisha when she’d moved back to the reservation to teach, and after Alisha’s grandmother died, Alice Thunder had stepped in. Alisha’s high school basketball photo was balanced on the top of her bookcase. Nate knew the two of them were related in some way, but he wasn’t sure of the details. It was often the case on the reservation.
Her house was small, simple, and very lived-in. There were few pictures on the walls and a noticeable lack of gewgaws. Unlike some of the other Indian homes Nate had been invited into, there were no romantic portrayals of noble Plains Indians or rugs depicting maidens or warriors. Only the doll made of bent, packed straw and faded leather clothing on a shelf hinted at sentimentality. She’d once told Nate that her grandfather, an important tribal elder, had made it for her when she was a child.
“First I’ll kill the ducks,” Alice said, “then I’ll see what’s wrong with you. And I’m telling you now I want to eat most of the duck fat. I hope you don’t want any.”
“I already know what’s wrong with me,” Nate said. “I just need some help with the dressing. And you can have all the duck fat.”
“So why are you bleeding?”
“I got shot with an arrow.”
“Where’s the arrow?”
“I pulled it out.”
Alice Thunder paused at the back door with the sack of ducks and looked Nate over slowly. He couldn’t tell whether she was amused at him or puzzled, or both. She had a way of making her face still while her eyes probed.
“Did you think an Indian woman would be able to help you more than the docs at the clinic because you were shot with an arrow?”
He said, “I can’t go to the clinic.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “You’re an outlaw, I almost forgot.” Then she bumped the back door open with her big hip and went outside to kill and clean the birds.
The little dogs gathered at the back door to whine and watch.
He sat without saying anything when she came back into the kitchen with three bloody duck breasts. She dipped them into a bowl of buttermilk, dredged them in flour and cornmeal, and dropped them into a cast-iron skillet bubbling with melted lard. She covered bits of bright-yellow fat in the flour as well and dropped them into the lard to create rich cracklings.
“Take off your shirt and let me take a look at your wound,” she said over her shoulder. “Was it an Indian who shot you?”
“No,” Nate said. “A redneck.”
“There are Indian rednecks.”
“This wasn’t one of them,” he said, rising painfully and reaching up with his right hand to unzip his vest.
Alice never said “natives” or “Native Americans.” She always said “Indians.”
While the duck breasts sizzled, she turned around and put her hands on her hips and closed one eye as she
