“’Cause he’s hinky. ’Cause he’s working for the Wellstones now.”

“Hinky?” she said. “He’s a cop.”

“Maybe he used to be, but not now.”

“A cop’s a cop. I can always tell one. That guy’s a cop, Troyce,” she said.

“If he is, he’s for sale. I know a dishonest man when I see one.”

ONE HOUR’S CROOKED drive to the north, up by the Canadian line, Jimmy Dale Greenwood entered a phone booth by a filling station at a crossroads, where a single traffic light hung suspended from cables over the intersection. He began feeding pocket change into the coin slot. Through the scratched plastic panels in the booth, he could see the wind blowing clouds of dust out of a wheat field, hills that had started to go brown in the summer heat, a windmill ginning on the horizon, a dead Angus bull swollen under a willow tree whose canopy looked like an enormous stack of green hay. A gas-guzzler loaded with Indian teenagers went through the red light and disappeared down the asphalt, a beer can bouncing end over end in its wake.

No answer. Jimmy Dale hung up the receiver and checked the heel of his hand where he had written Jamie Sue’s cell phone number. He dialed the number a second time.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hey, hon,” he replied.

“Where are you?”

“Up on the Blackfeet res. I can see Canada from here. Where are you?”

“In the garden. Leslie is looking down at me from the window. I’ll call you back in five minutes.” She clicked off.

He left his duffel and rolled sleeping bag by the phone booth and went inside the filling station and bought a soft drink. He drank it outside by the booth, the wind blowing hot across the fields. To the west, past the undulating golden plains that had once been carpeted by buffalo, he could see the translucent smoky-blue outline of the northern Rockies and the eastern boundary of Glacier National Park. The phone rang inside the booth. His heart was beating when he picked up the receiver. “Hello,” he said.

“I’m on the other side of the stable. Leslie can’t see me. But I can’t talk long,” she said.

He told her where he was and described how she could get there, how to skirt the southeast corner of Glacier and to cross the Continental Divide at Marias Pass and to keep going through Blackfeet country all the way to the Milk River. He felt as though his words were actually creating her and Dale’s journey, drawing them closer as he spoke.

But she wasn’t hearing him. “Listen to me, Jimmy Dale!” she said. “I can’t drive up there. I don’t have a car. Leslie watches me all the time. There’s another way.”

“No, just get out of there.”

“You know how you ended up in jail? You don’t listen to anybody. With you, it’s always full throttle and fuck it, no matter who gets hurt.”

He felt his hand squeeze tight on the receiver. He had left the door to the phone booth open, and he could hear the wind blowing through the ocean of dry grass that surrounded him. He cleared his throat.

“Are you still there?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m here,” he replied. “I’m definitely way-to-hell-and-gone up here.”

She ignored the implication. “A man is going to help us. I’m buying a used Toyota. He’ll drop it in Arlee with the keys under the fender. There’ll be money and a cell phone in the dash compartment. The car should be ready tomorrow.”

“I don’t want Leslie Wellstone’s car, and I don’t want his money, either.”

“It’s not Leslie’s. I’m buying it with my money. You get rid of that stubborn attitude, Jimmy Dale.”

He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead and realized he was rubbing her cell number off his skin.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Everything. I thought you and me and little Dale was gonna be together today. I thought we’d be highballing up into Alberta. I know people who can take us across on a dirt road with no customs check. I thought we’d go plumb to Calgary.”

“We will. We just got to do it right. You don’t know what Leslie and Ridley are like. They own people. They suck the life out of them.”

He took the ballpoint from his shirt pocket and, pressing the phone receiver against his ear with his shoulder, tore a piece of paper loose from the phone directory and wrote out her cell number on it. Then he thumbed the piece of paper into his watch pocket. “I keep thinking we’re gonna get blown away in the wind, like leaves that go bouncing across a field. It’s the feeling I had in prison. That no matter what I tried to do, I was gonna be buried alive and wouldn’t ever see y’all again. You never come to visit me, Jamie Sue.”

“I couldn’t. But I’m going to make up for that,” she said.

He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe her real bad. In the silence, a cluster of newspaper scudded across the concrete and broke apart in the air. He watched the pages lift above an irrigation ditch and float like broken wings inside a dust devil. “How’s little Dale?” he asked.

“He’s wonderful. You’re going to love him.”

“I already do.”

“I know that, Jimmy Dale.”

“Who’s this guy helping out with the car?”

“He just started driving for me. But I knew him from before. He’d do anything for me.”

“What’s his name?”

“Harold Waxman, the daytime bartender at the nightclub on the lake,” she replied.

AFTER CLETE AND I left the Wellstone compound, we drove down to the edge of Swan Lake and parked in a grove of cottonwoods. We ate some sandwiches and drank soda that Clete had put in his ice chest. I had started the trip up to the Wellstone manor with a sense of optimism, but my spirits had begun to sink, and I wondered if we would ever find the people who had killed the two college students, Cindy Kershaw and Seymour Bell, or the sadist who had tried to burn Clete alive.

The soda had been in the cooler for days and was ice-cold and for some reason made me think of fishing trips with my father during the 1940s. Clete got out of the Caddy and walked farther down the shore and began skipping stones across the water. It was breezy and warm inside the trees, and I reclined the leather seat and thought I would rest my eyes for a few moments. In seconds I was fast asleep, and I had one of those daytime dreams that tell you more about your life than you wish to learn.

I thought the images were from a tropical forest in a Southeast Asian country. Mist hung in the trees, and the ground was white or gray with compacted layers of winter-killed leaves. Air vines hung in the columns of tea-colored light that penetrated the canopy. But the backdrop for the dream was not Vietnam; it was the Louisiana of my youth. The trees were all old growth, the trunks as hard as iron, the roots as big as a man’s torso, gnarled and brown and bursting through the earth. In the midst of the forest was a clearing, and inside the clearing was a freshly dug grave. An M16 rifle with an unsheathed bayonet affixed to the muzzle had been upended and driven solidly into the mound above the grave. A steel pot had been balanced atop the rifle butt, with a chain and a set of dog tags draped around the circumference. The cloth cover was rotted, blowing in cottony wisps, the inked turkey-track peace symbol barely visible. I could hear the dog tags tinkling in the breeze and see the soldier’s name and serial number stamped into the metal. I felt my mouth go dry and my heart expand to the size of a small pumpkin.

I woke up suddenly, unsure where I was. Clete was standing on the lakeshore, a smile on his face, a flat red stone poised in his hand. “Come throw a few with me,” he said.

“Throw what?” I said, my eyes blinking at the glare on the water out beyond the shade of the cottonwoods.

“Stones. I’m heck on pike.”

“Sure,” I said, getting out of the Caddy, my mind still inside the dream.

“You nod off for a while?”