“No, Benny,” Tommy said. “The Tribal Council is not going to get involved. That isn’t our jurisdiction.” He could just see himself crossing swords with Roger Fox and Frank Oglanda. They’d run him off the reservation. A three-month chairmanship of the Tribal Council had not turned Tommy Dog into a complete idiot. “You go back and tell that Miss Redcorn,” he said, “her best hope is the court, and if she wants to talk to Roger and Frank, she should pick up the telephone and make an appointment. And now I got an appointment to take Millicent to the mall.” Rising, he said, “My advice to you, Benny, is to ask your uncle Roger to put somebody else to following your friend Little Feather around, and you keep away from her.”

Going out, Tommy paused in the doorway to look back, and Benny was still sitting there, in profile to Tommy, slumped, dejected, head down, gazing hopelessly at the floor. In that position, he looked exactly like that famous statue of the mournful, defeated Indian, except he wasn’t on a horse and he wasn’t tall and thin. And he didn’t hold a lance with its tip down in the dirt. And he didn’t have the headdress. But other than that, it was exactly the same: the defeated Indian.

By Monday morning, May had decided it was like living with a retiree. John had only been back from the North Country since Friday, but he had never been so present before. Everywhere in the apartment she looked, there he was, slumped and leaden, looking surly and bored out of his mind.

She hadn’t known it was possible for someone who didn’t have a regular job, who’d never had a regular job in his life, to sit around exactly as though he’d just been laid off. But here he was, a sodden lump and no fun at all.

Over breakfast Monday morning, before leaving for her cashier’s job at Safeway, May decided to bring it out where they could look at it, discuss the problem, so she said, “John, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. He was slumped over his cereal bowl, looking down into it, at the sugar and the milk and the cornflakes all massing together in there, all in a soggy clump, turning gray somehow. His breakfast had never turned gray before. He held the spoon angled into the gob, as though he might use the stuff to patch a hole somewhere, but not as though he had any intention of eating it.

She said, “John, something’s wrong, you’re not eating your breakfast.”

“Sure I am,” he said, but he still didn’t lift either his spoon or his eyes. Then he frowned into the bowl more deeply and said, “I just remembered. In the orphanage, you know, the bowls they gave us had cartoon people in the bottom, like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and all, and everybody always ate real fast to see what was in the bottom, even when we had pea soup. I usually got Elmer Fudd.”

This was more than John had said in the last three days combined, but he seemed to be talking more to the bowl than to May. Also, he rarely spoke about his upbringing in the orphanage run by the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery, which was fine by her. She said, “John? Would you like some bowls like that?”

“No,” he said, and slowly shook his head. Then he let go of the spoon—it didn’t drop; it remained angled into the gunk—and at last he looked up at May across the kitchen table and said, “What I want, I think, is, you know what I mean, some purpose in life.”

“You don’t have a purpose in life?”

“I usually got a purpose,” he said. “Usually, I kind of know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, but look at me now.”

“I know,” she agreed. “I’ve been looking at you, John. It’s this Anastasia thing, isn’t it?”

“I mean, what am I doing here?” he demanded. Slowly, the spoon eased downward. Silently, it touched the edge of the bowl. “There’s nothing for me to do,” he complained, “except sit around and wait for other people to scheme things out, and then all of a sudden Little Feather’s supposed to give me a hundred thousand large, and guess how much I believe that one.”

“You think she’ll stiff you?”

“I think she’d stiff her mother, if her mother happened by,” John said. “But I also think Tiny doesn’t like to be insulted, so I figure we’ll get something out of it. Sooner or later. But in the meantime, I’m here, and what’s going on is going on up in Plattsburgh, where it’s cold as hell, and there’s no point in me going up there, because there’s nothing for me to do there any more than there’s nothing for me to do here, which is nothing.”

“Maybe,” May said, “you should look for something else to do, like you normally would. Some armored car or jewelry store or whatever.”

“I don’t feel like I can, May,” he said. “I feel like I’m stuck in this thing, and I can’t think about anything else, and maybe all of a sudden I will be needed after all, and I shouldn’t be off doing something else.” He shook his head, frowning once more at the bowl. The gray mass in there looked dry now. “I never thought you’d hear me say this, May,” he said, “but the problem is, and I know this is it, the problem is, everything’s going too easy.”

Benny Whitefish and his cousin Geerome Sycamore and his other cousin Herbie Antelope loaded the coffin into the rented van and shut the doors. Then Geerome went behind the tombstone and threw up.

Benny was pleased that Geerome had thrown up, because it meant there was at least one person around here who was a bigger goofus than himself, but of course, since Uncle Roger had put him in charge of this mission, he had to say, in a manly kind of fashion, “That’s okay, Geerome, it could of happened to anybody. Don’t think a thing about it.”

“Where’s the water?” Geerome asked. He was making the most awful face.

“It’s in the van,” Herbie said, “but pour it into something else, okay?”

Geerome turned his awful face on Herbie. “Whadaya mean, put it into something else?”

“A cup or something,” Herbie said.

Geerome said, “I don’t have a cup. Benny? You got a cup?”

Herbie said, “Then pour it in the bottle top, drink from that.”

“The hell,” Geerome said. “You get like a quarter ounce at a time like that. What am I supposed to do all that for?”

Herbie made his own awful face and said, “I don’t want your mouth on that bottle, all right? Not if the rest of us are gonna drink from it.”

“Well, tough noogies on you,” Geerome told him, and stomped off to the front of the van.

Benny said, “Come on, Herbie, don’t worry about it. We’ll buy another bottle at the Trading Post,” which was the name of the shopping mall he preferred.

“You’ll buy,” Herbie said.

Benny sighed; the lonely responsibility of command. “All right, all right,” he said. “So let’s get going.”

The fact is, this was a pretty awful task they had in front of them, and that’s why it was making them all kind of nervous and testy. Geerome’s mouth wasn’t any worse than it usually was, but their nerves were kind of off.

Here they were, in the old Three Tribes cemetery, way toward the back, late on Monday afternoon, almost dark, the shadows of the tombstones reaching out black and spooky, like ghostly fingers, and Benny and his crew had just finished digging up a grave. The person they’d dug down to and now transferred to the van was named Ichabod Derek, and he was one of the few people in the Three Tribes cemetery who wasn’t from one of the three tribes, he having been a Lakota from out west who had married a Kiota woman and moved east to her reservation with her so she could support him. He’d died a long long time ago, around 1940 or something, but the main point about him was, there wasn’t one chance in a million that he had any Pottaknobbee blood in him. Or DNA.