The two in back laughed, but I looked out the window, at Pearl. She wouldn’t take her eyes off me.
I know there’s lots of world over and above Highway 5, but when you’re driving on it—four boys in one car and it’s so peaceful, so empty for mile after mile, when the radio stations cut out and there’s just static and the sound of your voices, and wind when you put your arm out to rest it on the hood—it seems you are balanced. Skimming along the rim of the universe. We had half a tank when we left home and we filled it up again twice before we got across the line to Plentywood. We dropped down there and edged along the bottom of Fort Peck to Wolf Point. Cappy turned the wheel over to me, and we sat there idling outside a liquor store while he bought a fifth and a case and another fifth. Zack had brought his guitar. He sang cry in your beer C&W, one after the next, making us laugh every time. And we kept going, the talk passing this way and that, turning funny and then ridiculous as Cappy made his plan to spring Zelia from her house at the return address in Helena—still far off.
Zack and Angus got nervous at a gas station and called home. That’s when Zack got his ear scorched off. He slunk back to the car, looked over at me, said, Oops! We ate the sandwiches. We ate beef jerky, spicy sausages, bags of chips, and cans of nuts from the gas stations. We guzzled water at a rest stop and the car died. We had to push it to a downhill slope, take it out of gear, and jump in while it rolled. The engine turned over and we war-whooped, high and fine. Zack and Angus passed out in back, leaning on each other and snoring. Cappy and I started talking and kept on driving west through the long dusk. The sun burned forever and stayed balanced on the horizon for an age, then flared red from below that dark line for another eternity. So it seemed that time stopped. We rolled effortlessly in a dream.
I told Cappy about the file I found in my father’s desk drawer. I told him everything on the enrollment form. I told him about the governor of South Dakota.
So that’s where the money came from, he said.
For sure. She was one of those smart high-school girls who get picked to bring coffee and file papers. Get their pictures in the news, especially a pretty Indian with the governor’s arm around her shoulder. LaRose told me. Linda knew it too. That’s where Yeltow got to her. And Lark, he kept the secret, but he was jealous. Thought he owned her.
The governor gave her money to keep her mouth shut. Start a new life?
She put the cash in her little girl’s doll to keep it safe.
Safe from Lark.
I told Cappy that I’d seen that doll’s outfit in the car as it came out of the lake, that the doll must have floated out of that opened window and washed onto the opposite shore.
After this, I think, said Cappy, it will all come out. There’s still that file with his name on it. So why not? She was jailbait, Mayla.
He’ll go down for sure, I said then.
But Yeltow never did.
The silence of wind around us, the car cutting through the night along the Milk River, where Mooshum had once hunted, driven out farther and farther into the west, where Nanapush had seen buffalo straight back to the horizon, and then the next year not a single one. And after that Mooshum’s family had turned back and taken land on the reservation. He’d met Nanapush there and together they had built the round house, the sleeping woman, the unkillable mother, the old lady buffalo. They’d built that place to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth.
Hinsdale went by. Sleeping Buffalo, too. Malta. We’d turn south far ahead at Havre. We’d traced our route on the gas station map.
Let’s keep going, said Cappy. I feel good. Let’s drive all night.
Make it so.
We laughed and Cappy slowed the car down and idled it while I ran around the front end, jumped in, started driving. The air was cool and green with sage. The