The driver didn’t answer. He and his friend got into their rigs and pulled onto the highway.

Why had the man stared at him like that? An attendant at the gas pumps was using the pay phone, looking briefly in Johnny’s direction. When Johnny stood up from the bench, threadworms swam in front of his eyes. He walked into the side lot of the truck stop and approached a driver standing by a rig boomed down with ponderosa logs, the engine hammering under the hood.

“Going toward Missoula?” Johnny said.

“I might be,” the driver replied. He was a short, hard-boned man with olive skin and a colorless cloth cap pulled down tightly on his scalp. He wore laced boots, black jeans, and a long-sleeved khaki shirt that was sweat-ringed at the armpits and flecked with black ash from a grass fire. He had a cold and was blowing his nose into a bandanna.

“I’d appreciate a ride,” Johnny said.

The driver’s eyes ran over Johnny’s person, lingering in places they shouldn’t have. “Climb in,” he said.

When Johnny pulled himself into the cab, he felt as though the tissue in his body were being separated from his bones. The trees along the road, the blue lake, and the fisherman in the red canoe seemed to spin around the truck’s cab. As the truck drove south and crossed a stream strewn with white rocks, he thought he saw the Indian woman looking back at him from a stand of aspen trees. He raised his hand to wave at her, then realized the driver was staring at him.

The driver’s ears were filmed with soot, and the initials “K.K.K.” were inked across the top of his right wrist.

“You in the Klan?” Johnny said.

“I put that tattoo on me when I was a kid. Wish I could take it off, but looks like I’m stuck with it.”

“You ought to take it off.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Johnny said.

Then his head sagged on his chest and he felt himself dropping away inside the steady motion of the rig, the whir of the tires on the asphalt, and the predictable vibration of the logs under the boomer chains. He didn’t know how long he slept, but he dreamed he was drunk, stumbling on a street, trying to hold on to a parking meter while passersby looked at him with a mixture of pity and revulsion. A terrible odor rose into his nostrils, but not one of vomit or jailhouse stink. It was infinitely worse-a fetid, salty stench like whorehouse copulation, a rat trapped in a wall, an owl incinerated in a chimney. In the dream he was still on the street, incapable of caring for himself, but all the passersby had fled and he was left alone against a backdrop of skeletal trees, deserted houses, and a white sun that was crumpling the sky into a carbonized sheet of blackened paper.

When he woke, he was by himself in the cab, parked by a motel with pink doors and green neon scrolled around the office. The summer light still hung in the sky, but the hills were dark, and he could see the glow of Missoula behind him. They had already driven through town and were not far from the reservation. What had happened? He took two swallows of brandy from his canteen, then drank again and felt the world begin to come back into focus. The truck driver was inside the motel office, counting the change the clerk had just given him. The driver crossed the lot and opened the cab door.

“Why are we stopped at the motel? Why didn’t you put me down in Missoula?” Johnny said.

The driver’s mouth looked small, his jaws fragile and too thin for the rest of his face. He glanced back at the office. “I tried to. You told me you wanted to go to the cemetery,” he said.

“I don’t remember that.”

“Sorry, fellow, but I can’t have that smell in my cab no more. I paid for your room. If I was you, I’d get ahold of a doctor.”

“You damn queer,” Johnny said.

“What did you call me?”

“You’re a queer or with the G,” Johnny said.

“Get out of my rig.”

Johnny stepped out of the cab, almost falling, and ran across a field and up an arroyo, his survival knife, canned food, medical supplies, and trade ax swinging inside the cloth sack in his hand. He ran until he collapsed behind a barn on a deserted ranch, high up in a vernal cup between two mountains. He lay on his back in the grass and mushrooms, panting, the stars hot and bright in the sky, his bandaged arm throbbing. When he removed the wrappings from his wound, he could hardly believe what he saw.

Johnny fished in his tote sack for his bottles of peroxide and iodine, but all he felt at the bottom of the sack was wetness and broken glass. He upended the canteen and drank until his throat constricted, with no sense of caution or restraint; he felt his heart slow and the brandy’s warmth settle in his stomach and spread through his limbs like an old friend. Then he filled his jaw with aspirin, found a shovel in the barn, and began walking.

He tripped over tangles of fence wire and in a creekbed was struck in the face by flying bats. He was up in the Jocko Valley now, back on the reservation-drunk, sick, his left forearm the color and texture of a pomegranate swollen with rot, its skin about to split. What had happened to the Indian woman? Why had she deserted him? Why had his power been taken from him?

But maybe the power he believed had been passed down to him from Crazy Horse was just another sham, a cheap illusion that provided an excuse for his personal failure and gave importance to a worthless alcoholic existence. Maybe he was exactly what most white people had always thought-another drunk Indian, a feathered joke dancing at powwows for the entertainment of tourists, a pitiful rumdum who got out of jail on Monday mornings and headed for any bar where he still had a tab.

An alcohol and drug abuse counselor at the V.A. had told Johnny there was a good chance he would end up a wetbrain. A day would come, the counselor said, when Johnny would experience a chemically induced seizure from which he would not recover. He would stumble along the streets, talking to himself, sometimes raging at strangers, his body crawling with stink, and never be aware that a change had taken place in his life.

Maybe that had already happened. Why had he insulted the truck driver who had tried to help him? More important, if indeed he had power, why had the Indian woman deserted him when he needed her most?

He sat down on a promontory that jutted out of a hill overlooking the Jocko Valley. He had thought the forest fires were out, or at least contained, but his perception had been an illusion, as perhaps all his other perceptions had been. Ash was drifting down on the trees like snowflakes, and in the west, beyond the crests of the mountains, he could see the reflections of fires in the clouds, even though he could not see the flames themselves. He remembered the truck driver who had given him a lift and remembered the soot on his skin and the smell of smoke in his clothes. The driver had been a strange man, his truck unmarked by a logo, with no identifiable license plate that Johnny could remember.

He pushed himself up on the shovel he had stolen out of the barn. When he looked up at the sky, the treetops and stars were spinning. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to see the driver’s face again. Did Death drive a truck and have a perverse gleam in his eye?

He stumbled down the hill toward his destination, no longer sure of either his sanity or the breath he drew. But of one conclusion he was certain-he would not arrive at his destination without help.

One of the bondsmen who had betrayed him lived on a small ranch, back against the hills, where he grew feed on thirty acres he had acquired by marrying a white woman. Parked in the dirt driveway was a patrol car used by the tribal police. The two-story clapboard house was dark, the keys in the ignition of the car.

Johnny threw his tote sack and shovel inside, started the engine, and drove without headlights through the back of the property and up the hill toward the headwaters of the Jocko River.