I was hungry when I left. The closer I got to Fellis’s, the more I felt bad about the money, Mom’s ash baskets, Daryl’s pills. No, not Daryl’s pills—he wasn’t even taking them.

From the woods, the streetlamps glowed orange. My sneakers scraped the concrete as I walked and I thought about how good those fiddleheads with salted pork and a slab of moose meat would taste after popping a pin or two (not three, then I’d pass out). The road bent and I looked up to see Beth’s house. The driveway was crowded with police cruisers and a black van. An officer shone his flashlight in Fellis’s truck, and another talked to Beth in the driveway. Headlights poured over the trees—another tribal cop—and he pulled by Beth’s house.

I turned my ass around and split into the woods.

Star- and moonlight hit the water. Down by the river, I sat on a rock, wishing I’d eaten and grabbed those pills and had a cigarette. Wishing I’d never heard of Antiques Roadshow. Maybe even wishing I was a winooch and didn’t live on a reservation whose history was in a little museum and could be stolen for a buck. Didn’t make any sense that parts of us were worth so much and at the same time we were worth so little. “You’re nothing.”

I grabbed a twig off the ground and pretended to smoke it. “Fuck you, Tabitha,” I said, and as I said it, the first dog barked.

I had nowhere to go, but I ran like I did. The paths all met at some point, right in the heart of the reservation, right behind the tribal lumberyard. I couldn’t hide in someone’s garage, because that would mean I’d have to get on the roads, so I stayed in the pitch-black woods. I kept going, stopping only to listen for growls and to look behind me for light.

No dogs barked and no light shone. I slowed, thinking: deny, deny, deny. You weren’t with him. Those pills? You never seen them. The iPod? You don’t know. He says you kicked him. You say he’s a liar.

I denied all night until the sun came up. I had to hide all day until the sun went down. A stench rolled off the river, and not knowing where else to go, I followed it to Nelson’s.