Barbara Gow had grown up on the Iron Range, the product of an Ojibway father and a Serbian mother. Her father worked in the open-pit mines during the day and for the union at night. Her mother’s Bible sat in a small bookcase in the living room. Next to it was her father’s Das Kapital.

As a teenager, she had done clerical work for the union. After her mother died, leaving a small insurance policy, she’d moved to Minneapolis and started at the university. She liked the university and the talk, the theory. She liked it better when she heard the news from existential France.

Sam could still see all of that in her, behind the wrinkled face and slumping shoulders. She shivered nude in the cold air and pulled on a housecoat, then turned and smiled at him, the smile lighting his heart.

“I’m surprised that thing still works, much as you abuse it,” she said. Sam’s penis curled comfortably on his pelvis. It felt happy, he thought.

“It’ll always work for you,” Sam said. He lay on top of the blankets, on top of the handmade quilt, impervious to the cold.

She laughed and left the room, and a moment later he heard the water start in the bathroom. Sam lay on the bed, wishing he could stay for a year or two years or five, wrapped in the quilt. Scared. That’s what it was, he thought. He put the thought out of his mind, rolled off the bed and walked to the bathroom. Barbara was sitting on the toilet. He stepped in front of the vanity and turned on the water to wash himself.

“Shadow Love’s still watching that movie,” Barbara said. The sounds of TV gunfire drifted up the stairs.

“Zulu,” said Sam. “Big fight in Africa, a hundred years ago. He says it was better than the Custer fight.”

Barbara stood up and flushed the toilet as Sam dried himself with a towel. “Is this the end?” she asked quietly as they walked back into the bedroom.

He knew what she meant, but pretended he did not. “The end?”

“Don’t give me any bullshit. Are you going to die?”

He shrugged. “Shadow Love says so.”

“Then you will,” Barbara said. “Unless you go away. Now.”

Sam shook his head. “Can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“The thing is, these other people have died. If it comes my turn and I don’t fight, it’ll be like I turned my back on them.”

“You’ve got a gun?”

“Yeah.”

“And this is all necessary?”

“Yes. And it’s almost necessary that we . . . die. The people need this story. You know, when we were kids, I knew people who rode with Crazy Horse. Who’s alive now to talk to the kids? The only legends they have are dope dealers . . . .”

“So you’re ready.”

“No, of course not,” Sam admitted. “When I think about dying . . . I can’t think about dying. I’m not ready.”

“Nobody ever is,” Barbara said. “I look at myself in the mirror, on the door . . .” She pushed the bedroom door shut, and the full-length mirror mounted on the back reflected the two of them, naked, looking into it. “ . . . and I see this old woman, shriveled up like last year’s potato. A clerk at the historical society, all gray and bent over. But I feel like I’m eighteen. I want to go out and run in the park with the wind in my hair, and I want to roll around on the grass with you and Aaron and hear Aaron putting the bullshit on me, trying to get into my pants . . . and I can’t do any of that because I’m old. And I’m going to die. I don’t want to be old and I don’t want to die, but I will . . . . I’m not ready, but I’m going.”

“I’m glad we had this talk,” Sam said wryly. “It really cheered me up.”

She sighed. “Yeah. Well, the way you talk, I think when the time comes, you’ll use the gun.”

Shadow Love paced.

Sam lay at Barbara’s right hand, asleep, his breathing deep and easy, but all during the night Barbara could hear Shadow Love pacing the length of the downstairs hallway. The television came on, was turned off, came on again. More pacing. He’d always been like that.

Almost forty years earlier, Barbara had lived a half block from Rosie Love, and had met the Crows at her house. They had been radical hard-cases even then, smoking cigarettes all night, drinking, talking about the BIA cops and the FBI and what they were doing on the reservations.

When Shadow was born, Barbara was the godmother. In her mind’s eye, she could still see Shadow Love walking the city sidewalks in his cheap shorts and undersize striped polo shirt, his pale eyes calculating the world around him. Even as a child, he had had the fire. He was never the biggest kid on the block, but none of the other kids fooled with him. Shadow Love was electric. Shadow Love was crazy. Barbara loved him as she would her own child, and she lay in her bed and listened to him pace. She looked at the clock at 3:35, and then she drifted off to sleep.

In the morning, she found him sitting, asleep, in the big chair in the living room, the chair she once called her mantrap. She tiptoed past the doorway toward the kitchen, and his voice called to her as she passed: “Don’t sneak.”

“I thought you were asleep,” she said. She stepped back to the doorway. He was on his feet. Light was coming in the window behind him and he loomed in it, a dark figure with a halo.

“I was, for a while.” He yawned and stretched. “Is this house wired for cable?”

“Yeah, I got it for a while. But when there was nothing on, I had them turn it off.”

“How about if I give you the money and you have them turn it back on? HBO or Cinemax or Showtime. Maybe all of them. When the heat gets heavy, we’ll really be cooped up.”

“I’ll call them this morning,” she said.

At midmorning, after breakfast, Barbara got a stool, a towel and a pair of scissors and cut Sam’s and Shadow Love’s hair. Aaron sat and watched in amusement as the hair fell in black wisps around their shoulders and onto the floor. He told Sam that when old men get their hair cut, they lose their potency.

“Nothin’ wrong with my dick,” Sam said. “Ask Barb.” He tried to slap her on the butt. She dodged his hand and Shadow Love flinched. “Watch it, God damn it, you’re going to stick the scissors in my ear.”

When she finished, Shadow Love put on a long-sleeved cowboy shirt, sunglasses and a baseball cap.

“I still look pretty fuckin’ Indian, don’t I?”

“Get rid of the sunglasses,” Barbara said. “Your eyes could pass for blue. You could be a tanned white man.”

“I could use some ID,” Shadow Love said, tossing the sunglasses on the kitchen table.

“Just a minute,” Barbara said. She went upstairs and came back a few minutes later with a man’s billfold, all flat and tired and shaped to another butt. “It was my brother’s,” she said. “He died two years ago.”

The driver’s license was impossible. Her brother had been four years older than she, and bald and heavy. Even with the bad picture, there was no way Shadow Love could claim to be the man in the photo.

“All this other stuff is good,” he said, thumbing through it. Harold Gow had credit cards from Amoco, Visa and a local department store. He had a membership card from an HMO, a Honeywell employee’s ID without a photo, a Social Security card, a Minnesota watercraft license, a credit-union card, a Prudential claim card, two old fishing licenses, and other odd bits and pieces of paper. “If they shake me down, I’ll tell them I lost my license on a DWI. When an Indian tells them that, they believe you.”

“What about you guys?” Barbara asked the Crows.

Sam shrugged. “We got driver’s licenses and Social Security cards under our born names. I don’t know if the cops have those figured out yet, but they will.”

“Then you shouldn’t go out on the street. At least not during the day,” Barbara said.

“I’ve got to talk to people, find out what’s going on,” Shadow Love said.

“You be careful,” Barbara said.

Shadow Love was in a bar on Lake Street when an Indian man came in and ordered a beer. The man glanced sideways at Shadow Love and then ignored him.