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The woman who was breast-feeding the child wiped his chin with her shirt, then put his mouth on the nipple again and looked impassively out the window. Her face was without makeup, her hair dull brown, long, and stuck together on the tips.
“You keep looking in the back of the bus. Something bothering you?” the driver said.
“Not at all.”
“You think we’re spikers or something?”
“What?”
“Spikers. You think we go around driving railroad spikes in trees?”
“No, I don’t think that.”
“’Cause we don’t, man. A tree is a living thing, and we don’t wound living things. Does that make sense to you?”
“Sure.”
“We live up on the reservation. We’re a family. We lead a natural way of life. We don’t get in nobody’s face. All we ask is nobody fuck with us. That ain’t a lot to ask, is it?”
I looked out the streaked windowpanes of the folding door. The countryside was green and wet and covered with a gray mist.
“Is it?” he said.
“No, it’s not.”
“’Cause a lot of people won’t let you alone. They’re at war with the earth, man. That’s their fucking problem. You don’t do it their way, they try to kick a two-by-four up your ass.”
The ride was becoming increasingly more uncomfortable. I figured it was three more miles to my truck.
“Do you know a girl named Darlene American Horse on the reservation?” I said.
“I don’t know her.”
“She’s from there.”
“That might be, man, but I don’t know her. Check with my old lady.” He nodded backward toward the woman with the child at her breast.
I asked her about Darlene. She wore large wire-rimmed glasses, and she looked at me quietly with no expression in her face.
“I don’t know her,” she said.
“You’ve lived there long?”
“A year.”
“I see.”
“It’s a Blackfeet reservation,” she said. Her speech had that flat quality of quasi-omniscience that you hear in women who have reached a certain gray plateau in their lives from which they know they’ll never escape.
“Yes?” I said.
“They’re all Blackfeet. The Sioux live over in South Dakota.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“American Horse is a Sioux name,” she said. “He fought with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse against the whites.”