“Did you feel anything?” he asked at last.

“No. Did you?”

“Yeah,” said Dale. That syllable was an understatement. He had come very close to raping this visitor, this near-stranger, this fifty-one-year-old woman. Dale shook his head again, feeling the last tidal surges of lust disappearing. He had not felt such an erotic moment since his late adolescence, and possibly not even then. This, he thought, must be the kind of wild loss of sexual control that the brain-dead fundamentalists are afraid of when they try to ban pornography—to ban anything erotic. Sex with no humanity at all. Pure sexual energy, absolute desire. A fucking frenzy. He looked back at the darkened doorway. The Scientific Method demanded that he step back through there and see what happened.

Not today, Charlie, thought Dale.

“What was it?” said Michelle, no humor in her voice now. She grabbed Dale by the upper arms and shook him slightly. “Did you see something? Smell something?”

Dale raised the flashlight between them, causing her to release his arms, and tried to smile. “Just an. . . emotion,” he said huskily. “Hard to describe.”

“Sadness?” said Michelle.

“Not quite.”

“What, then?”

He looked at her pale face in the reddish light. “You didn’t feel anything in there? Nothing at all?”

She squinted slightly. “Right now I’m feeling pissed off. If this is your idea of a joke, it’s not really funny.”

Dale nodded in agreement and tried to smile again. “Sorry. I think it’s just the effect of the wine and beer. I don’t drink that often and. . . well, I’m taking some medicines that may interact with it.” True, he thought, but both the Prozac and the sleeping pills make me impotent, not horny. “Maybe we’d better go back downstairs,” he said aloud. Part of his hindbrain was still commanding him to drag Michelle Staffney into that darkness and fuck her brains out.

“Yes,” said Michelle, looking intently at him, “maybe we’d better go back downstairs. It’s getting late. I’d better be going.”

DRIVING into the Blackfeet Reservation that lovely autumn day four years earlier, Dale tried to make conversation with Clare Hart—aka Clare Two Hearts. This area was known to Montana residents as “the Rocky Mountain Front”—or more simply, “the Front”—and the aptness of the phrase was everywhere visible, with the snowcapped peaks rising up high to their right as they headed south on Highway 89 and the rolling, empty plains sprawling off to infinity on their left. Dale glanced at his passenger several times, awaiting some comment, but Clare had nothing more to say about the view than she had in Glacier Park.

“Do you want to stop at the Museum of the Plains Indian?” asked Dale as they entered the reservation town of Browning.

“No,” said Clare. She watched the shabby town fall behind with its tourist traps and shops—many closed now after the end of the tourist season—selling their “authentic Indian artifacts.”

“Does all this make you angry?” asked Dale.

She turned to look at him with those piercingly clear eyes of hers. “No. Why should it, Professor Stewart?”

Dale lifted a palm. The homes on either side were rusted-out trailers with junked pickup trucks lying about in the gravel and scrub brush. “The injustice of the history to. . . to your people. Your mother’s people. The poverty.”

Clare smiled slightly. “Professor Stewart. Do you get all worked up about historical injustices to your Scottish ancestors?”

“That’s different,” said Dale.

“Oh? Why?”

Again he gestured with his open hand. “I’ve never even been to Scotland.”

“This is the first time I’ve been to Blackfeet country.”

“You know what I mean,” said Dale. “This economic injustice against the Blackfeet—the alcoholism, the illiteracy, the unemployment on the reservation—it’s all still going on.”

“And Scotland still isn’t independent,” Clare said softly. She sighed. “I know what you’re talking about, Professor Stewart, but it just isn’t in me to have much interest in all of the historical grudges in the world. My mother and I lived in Florence, but my stepfather’s ancestral house is in Mantua. In that part of the world, every city has tales of oppression by every other city. Every old family remembers a thousand years of injustice and oppression at the hands of almost every other family. Sometimes I think that remembering too much history is like alcohol or heroin—an addiction that seems to give meaning to your life but just wears you down and destroys you in the end.”

Why the hell are we here on this godforsaken reservation, then?Dale wanted to ask. He kept silent.

They followed Highway 89 down into the river bottom around Two Medicine River, then up, then down again across Badger Creek.

“Turn here, please,” said Clare, looking up from a road map and pointing to a paved road that ran west. A small sign read heart butte road. They drove west along Badger Creek toward the mountains and then south again, paralleling the foothills. Heart Butte, when they reached it, was a sad scattering of falling-down houses, trailers, a few double-wide mobile homes, and a concrete-block “recreation building” that looked as if it had been abandoned shortly after its completion. It was hard to tell the discarded pickups from those still in use. Everything had a psychic stench of poverty and despair hanging over it.

“Your mother was born here?” said Dale. That was what Clare had told him, but he wanted some conversation to leaven the sad scenery they were passing.

Clare nodded.

“Are you hunting for the house she lived in?” asked Dale. A few Blackfeet children watched them drive past. The children’s expressions were dead and incurious.

Clare shook her head. “It burned down a long time ago. I. . . there, please stop.” She pointed to a small trailer no different than most they had passed.

Dale pulled into the dusty drive behind an old pickup and waited. “Do you know these people?”

Clare shook her head again. They sat in the Land Cruiser and waited. After a while, a middle-aged woman came to the screen door of the trailer and looked at them with no more curiosity than the children had shown. She disappeared from the door for several minutes and then returned and stepped out onto the cinderblock stoop.

“Please stay here,” whispered Clare and got out of the truck. She walked over toward the woman, stopped about five feet away, and began speaking softly. The woman responded brusquely and squinted in Dale’s direction. Clare spoke again. Dale heard only snippets of the conversation but was surprised to hear that they were speaking in Pikuni, the language of the Blackfeet.

Finally the Blackfeet woman nodded, spoke a few syllables, and went back into her trailer. She reappeared a moment later and climbed into the ancient pickup truck.

Clare walked back to the Land Cruiser on the driver’s side. “Do you mind if I drive for a few miles?”

Mystified, Dale only shook his head, clambered out, and went around to the passenger side. The Blackfeet woman backed past them in a cloud of dust.

Clare adjusted the driver’s seat and backed out, hurrying a bit to keep the woman’s pickup in sight without driving into the dust cloud the vehicle kicked up on the gravel road.

They followed the other truck away from Heart Butte, down several crude BIA roads, along Jeep tracks, then west along another BIA road that headed off toward the foothills. They stopped several times for the older woman to get out of her truck and open stock gates. Each time, after they drove through, Clare would clamber out and close the gate behind them.

Once a man on a roan horse stopped the pickup, spoke briefly with the driver, and then rode back to stare at Clare and Dale for a moment. The man was dressed in basic cowboy work clothes, sweat-stained hat and all, and the only hint that he was Blackfeet was the dark, wide face with deep-black eyes.