"You think we're spikers or something?"

"What?"

"Spikers. You think we go around driving railroad spikes in trees?"

"No, I don't think that."

"Cause we don't, man. A tree is a living thing, and we don't wound living things. Does that make sense to you?"

"Sure."

"We live up on the reservation. We're a family. We lead a natural way of life. We don't get in nobody's face. All we ask is nobody fuck with us. That ain't a lot to ask, is it?"

I looked out the streaked windowpanes of the folding door. The countryside was green and wet and covered with a gray mist.

"Is it?" he said.

"No, it's not."

"Cause a lot of people won't let you alone. They're at war with the earth, man. That's their fucking problem. You don't do it their way, they try to kick a two-by-four up your ass."

The ride was becoming increasingly more uncomfortable. I figured it was three more miles to my truck.

"Do you know a girl named Darlene American Horse on the reservation?" I said.

"I don't know her."

"She's from there."

"That might be, man, but I don't know her. Check with my old lady." He nodded backward toward the woman with the child at her breast.

I asked her about Darlene. She wore large wire-rimmed glasses, and she looked at me quietly with no expression in her face.

"I don't know her," she said.

"You've lived there long?"

"A year."

"I see."

"It's a Blackfeet reservation," she said. Her speech had that flat quality of quasi-omniscience that you hear in women who have reached a certain gray plateau in their lives from which they know they'll never escape.

"Yes?" I said.

"They're all Blackfeet. The Sioux live over in South Dakota."

"I don't understand what you mean."

"American Horse is a Sioux name," she said.

"He fought with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse against the whites."

It's her married name, I thought.

"You know how they bought it, too?" the driver said.

"Dealing with the Man under a flag of truce. They went into the fort and got their asses shot. That's what happens when you trust those fuckers."

My God, why didn't I see it, I thought.

"Hey, you're looking a little gray," the driver said.

"What?"

"You want some food? We got extra," he said.

"No. Thank you. Did y'all know a guy by the name of Clayton Desmarteau?"

"You better believe it. Same outfit as me. First Cav."

"Did he have a sister?"

"What d'you mean 'did'?"

"You haven't seen him around in a while, have you?"

He thought for a moment.

"I guess not," he said.

"Do you know if he had a sister?"

"I don't know nothing about his family. He don't live on the reservation. He used to come on it to organize for AIM against them oil and gas companies. They're gonna mess up the East Front, try to build pipelines and refineries and all kinds of shit." ' "What color were his eyes?"

"His eyes?" He turned and grinned at me through his red beard. His teeth were missing in back.

"I look like I go around looking at guys' eyes?"

"Come on, were they turquoise?"

"What the fuck I know about a guy's eyes? What kind of stuff are you into, man?"

"He's a policeman," the woman with the child said.

"Is that for real?" the driver said.

"No."

"Then why you asking all these questions? You trying to give some shit to Clay ton's people?" The hair on his forearms grew like red metal wires on the edges of his leather wristbands.

"No."

"Cause the Indians don't need no more hassle. These are native people, man, I mean it was their place, and whites been taking a dump on them for two hundred years."

"I'll get off here," I said.

"You bothered by something I said?"

"Not in the least, partner. The rain's stopping now, and I need to walk. My truck's just over the rise."

"Cause we got no beef with nobody. We thought we were helping you out. You gotta watch out for a lot of people in this state. I ain't blowing gas, Jack. It's the times," he said.

I stood on the side of the road in the damp, sunlit air, a green pasture behind me, and watched the bus disappear over the rise. My truck was still a mile down the road.

The old woman was hoeing in a rocky vegetable patch behind her house. She wore laced boots, a man's oversized wool trousers, and a khaki shirt, and a shawl was wrapped around her head. In the distance the wet land sloped toward the Divide, where the mountains thrust up violently against the sky, their sheer cliffs now purple with shadow. Up high it had snowed, and the ponderosa was white on the crests and through the saddles. The old woman glanced sideways at me when I opened her wood gate and walked into the yard, then continued chopping weeds in the rows as though I were not there.

"Darlene American Horse is your daughter, isn't she?" I asked.

She didn't answer. Her white hair bunched out under her shawl, and the corners of her eyes were creased with concentration on her work.

"Mrs. Desmarteau, believe me, I'm a friend," I said.

"I want to find out what happened to your son. I want to help Darlene, if I can."

She thudded and raked the hoe in the dirt and stones and notched out weeds between the cabbages without ever touching a leaf.

"I think Darlene lives among some bad people. I want to get her away from them," I said.

She pulled back the door of an abandoned, dilapidated privy, put away the hoe and took out a shovel. In the back of the privy a calico cat was nursing her Utter on top of a pile of gunnysacks. Mrs. Desmarteau laid the shovel across a wheelbarrow loaded with manure and began pushing it toward the edge of the vegetable patch. I took the handles out of her hands and wheeled it across the dirt yard, then began spreading the manure at the end of each row. The clouds were purple on top of the mountains, and snow was blowing off the edges of the canyons. Behind me I heard the plastic sheets of insulation rattling on her windows.

"She's your daughter, isn't she?" I said again.

"Are you one of the FBI?" she said.

"No, I'm not. But I used to be a policeman. I'm not any longer. I'm just a man who's in some trouble."

For the first time her eyes looked directly at mine.

"If you know Darlene, why are you asking me if she's my daughter?" she said.

"Why are you here and asking that question? You don't make sense."

Then I realized that perhaps I had underestimated this elderly lady. And like most people who consider themselves educated, I had perhaps presumed that an elderly person like someone who is foreign-speaking or unschooled could not understand the complexities of my life and intellect.

"I didn't relate the name to yours," I said.

"But I should have. She wears her brother's First Cav army jacket, doesn't she? She also has turquoise eyes. Your family name is French-Canadian, not Indian. Darlene and Clayton's father was part white, wasn't he?"

"Why do you say she lives among bad people?"

"The man she stays with isn't bad, but the people he works for are. I believe she should come back home and not stay with these people on the lake."

"You've been there?"

"Yes."

"Are they criminals?"

"Some of them are."

Her hand slipped down over mine and took the shovel. Her palm was rough and edged with callus. She was motionless, the shovel propped against her wool trousers, her eyes fixed on the jagged outline of the mountains against the sky. The clouds on the high peaks looked full of snow.

"Are they the ones that killed my boy?" she said.

"Maybe they were involved in some way. I don't know."

"Why is she with them?"

"She thinks she can find out what happened to Clayton and his cousin. She worked in a bar. Where is it?"

"Five miles down the road. You passed it when you came here."