“Sal said something else, too. About you.”
“What?”
“‘Don’t bring him around here again, don’t let him be talking to Dixie Lee, either. He does, I’m gonna cut off his dick.’”
I looked
out the door again at the woman hoeing in her garden across the alley. Her face was pink, her hair white, and her arms were as thick as a man’s.
“That’s what our man had to say?”
“Clete and Dixie Lee pretend he’s all right because they have to. But he’s cruel. He frightens me.”
“You should get away from him.”
She put her spoon in her soup and lowered her eyes.
“You’re an intelligent woman,” I said. “You’re a good person, too. You don’t belong among those people.”
“I’m with Clete.”
“Clete’s going to take a big fall with that guy. Or he’ll take a fall for him, one or the other. Down inside, he knows it, too. Until he started screwing up his life, he was the best partner I ever had. He carried me down a fire escape once while a kid put two .22 rounds in his back. He used to put the fear of God in the wiseguys. They’d cross the street when they saw him on the sidewalk.”
“He’s been good to me. Inside he’s a good man. One day, he’ll see that.”
Her attitude toward him struck me as strange. It seemed more protective than affectionate. But maybe she was that kind of woman. Or maybe it was what I wanted to believe.
“I wonder if you can help me with something,” I said.
“What?”
“Did Clete tell you about some trouble I’ve had in Louisiana?”
“Yes.”
“Harry Mapes is my way out of it. I think he killed two people up here. Maybe they were Indians, members of AIM.”
She looked down at her food again, but I saw her eyes narrow, the light in them sharpen.
“Why do you think that? About the Indians?” she said.
“Mapes killed these people because they were in the way of his oil deals. Dixie Lee said these AIM guys can tie the oil companies up in court over a nineteenth-century treaty.”
“It’s a big fight over on the Rocky Mountain Front.”
“The what?”
“It’s the eastern face of the Continental Divide. The Blackfeet called it the backbone of the world. The oil companies want into the roadless areas by Glacier Park. That was Blackfeet land. The government took it or got it for nothing.”
“Did you ever hear about any AIM people disappearing?”
“Why don’t you ask up at the reservation?”
“I plan to. Why are you angry?”
“It has nothing to do with you.”
“It seems to.”