"I told them you were going to hide out in the mountains and I was getting money for supplies. You should be able to get a long way before the cops figure out that you're not on the res. There's about a hundred bucks here."

Billy started the car and drove off the dam toward Fort Smith.

"Where are we going?" Samson asked.

"First we have to stop and fill up these jugs with water. I'll take you to Sheridan and you can catch a bus there. I don't trust this car to go any further. If we break down in the middle of nowhere you're fucked."

Samson was amazed at his friend's ability to think and act so quickly. Left to himself he knew he would still be staring over the dam wondering what had happened. Instead he was on his way to Wyoming.

"I should go home and tell Grandma that I'm going."

"You can't. I'll tell them tomorrow. And once you're gone you can't call or write either. That's how the cops will find you."

"How do you know that?"

"That's how they caught my brother," Billy said. "He wrote a letter from New Mexico. The FBI had him in two days after that."

"But…"

"Look, Samson, you killed a cop. I know you didn't mean to, but that won't matter. If they catch you they'll shoot you before you get a chance to tell what happened."

"But everyone saw."

"Everyone there was Crow, Samson. They won't believe a bunch of fucking Indians."

"But Enos was Crow — part Crow, anyway."

"He was an apple, only red on the outside."

Samson started to protest again but Billy shushed him. "Start thinking about where you're going to go."

"Where do you think I should go?"

"I don't know. You just need to disappear. Don't tell me where you're going when you figure it out, either. I don't want to know. You could try and pass for white. With those light eyes you might pull it off. Change your name, dye your hair."

"I don't know how to be white."

"How hard can it be?" Billy said.

Samson wanted to talk to someone besides Billy Two Irons, someone who didn't make as much sense: Pokey. He realized that for all his craziness, all his ravings, all his drinking and ritual mumbo jumbo, Pokey was the person he most trusted in the world. But Billy was right: going home would be a mistake. Instead he tried to imagine what Pokey would say about escaping into the white world. Well, first, Samson thought, he would never admit that there was a white world. According to Pokey there was only the world of the Crow — of family and clans and medicine and balance and Old Man Coyote. The white man was simply a disease that had put the Crow world out of balance.

Samson tried to look into the future to see where he would go, what he would do, but any plans he had ever made — and there hadn't been many — were no longer valid, and the future was a thick, white fog that would allow him to see only as far as the bus station in Sheridan, Wyoming. He felt a panic rising in his chest like a scream, then it came to him: this was just a different type of Coyote Blue. He was trying to look into the future too far and it was ruining his balance. He needed to focus on right now, and eventually he would learn what he needed to know when the future got to him. What did Pokey always say? "If you are going to learn, you need to forget what you know."

"Don't use all your money for the bus ticket," Billy said. "Once you get out of the area you can hitchhike."

"Did you learn all this when your brother got in trouble?"

"Yeah, he writes me letters from prison about what he did wrong."

"He put a bomb in a BIA office. How many letters can that take?"

"Not that. What he did wrong to get caught."

"Oh," Samson said.

Two hours later Samson was climbing on a bus headed for Elko, Nevada, carrying with him everything he owned: twenty-three dollars, a pocketknife, and a small buckskin bundle. He took a window seat in the back of the bus and stared out over the dark countryside, really seeing nothing, as he tried to imagine where he would end up. His fear of getting away was almost greater than his fear of being caught. At least if he were caught his fate would be in someone else's hands.

After an hour or so on the road Samson sensed that the bus was slowing down. He looked around for a reaction from the other passengers, but except for an old lady in the front who was engrossed in a romance novel, they were all asleep. The driver downshifted and Samson felt the big diesel at his back roar as the bus pulled into the passing lane. Out his window he saw the back of a long, powder-blue car. As the bus moved up Samson watched the big car glide below him, seeming to go on forever. He saw the back of the driver's head, then his face. It was the fat salesman from his vision. Samson twisted in his seat, trying to get a better look as they passed. The salesman seemed to see him through the blackout windows of the bus and raised a bottle of Coke as if toasting Samson.

"Did you see that?" Samson cried to the old lady. "Did you see that car?"

The old lady turned to him and shook her head, and a cowboy in the next seat groaned. "Did you see who was in that car?" Samson asked the bus driver, who snickered and shook his head.

The cowboy in the next seat was awake now and he pushed his hat from over his eyes. "Well, son, now that you got me wetting myself in suspense, who was in the car?"

"It was the salesman," Samson said.

The cowboy stared at him for a second in angry disbelief, then pushed his hat back over his eyes and slid back down in his seat. "I hate fucking Mexicans," he said.

CHAPTER 14

Lies Have Lives of Their Own

It took just six weeks for Samson Hunts Alone, the Crow Indian, to become Samuel Hunter, the shape-shifter. The transformation began with the cowboy on the bus mistaking Samson for a Mexican. When Samson left the bus in Elko, Nevada, and caught a ride with a racist trucker, he became white for the first time. He expected, from listening to Pokey all those years, that upon turning white he would immediately have the urge to go out and find some Indians and take their land, but the urge didn't come, so he sat by nodding as the trucker talked. By the time he got out at Sacramento, California, Samson had memorized the trucker's litany of white supremacy and was just getting into the rhythm of racism when he caught a ride with a black trucker who took amphetamines and waxed poetic about oppression, injustice, and the violent overthrow of the U.S. government by either the Black Panthers, the Teamsters, or the Temptations. Samson wasn't sure which.

Samson was booted out of the truck in Santa Barbara when he suggested that perhaps killing all the whites should be put off at least until they told where they had hidden all the money. Actually, Samson was somewhat relieved to be put out; he'd only been white for a few hours and wasn't sure that he liked it well enough to die for it. His immediate concern was to get something to drink. He bought a Coke at a nearby convenience store and walked across the street to a park, where, under the boughs of a massive fig tree, amid a dozen sleeping bums, he sat down to consider his next move. Samson was just summoning up an obese case of hopelessness when a nearby bundle of rags spoke to him.

"Any booze in that cup?"

Samson had to stare at the oblong rag pile for a few seconds before he noticed there was a hairy face at one end. A single bloodshot eye, sparkling with hope, the only break in the gray dinge, gave the face away. "No, just Coke," Samson said. Hope dimmed and the eye became as empty as the socket next to it.

"You got any money?" the bum asked.

Samson shook his head. He had only twelve dollars left; he didn't want to share it with the rag pile.

"You're new here?"

Samson nodded.

"You a wet?"