I had heard a lot of Indian women say, as if it was going to hurt me, that they were going to marry a white man and move off the reservation. I said if that’s what it took to make a better life, beat it. I carried the grudge that maybe it was true. Maybe marriage to a white man would have solved their problems. Maybe these women wouldn’t have ended up stuck in a tumbledown house with too many kids and a man who threw the few dollars he had at the Stockman Bar. But what good had come of all of this, of all this talk, of all this fighting? While we argued Harvey Stoner had slipped into our bedrooms with a grin on his face.

The idea of Louise and Stoner burned a hole in my gut. The only consolation I gave myself with this man was that Louise was smarter than he was and I knew it. I had more to think about than one love triangle. I had gotten the news the day before that I had to police a special-host powwow. I knew in the way a man follows sign that the powwow would bring problems, a powwow too late in the season for my comfort. I never minded winter gatherings, only the powwows just before the cold. After August, a powwow made us all old Indians again, hungry bears, stingy as squirrels in autumn, looking for that one person to hold us through the winter freeze. I knew Baptiste and Louise would try to make each other jealous. And jealousy sparked jealousy. I had seen all the powwow love triangles I wanted to see. The triangles circled in the fall, the dead romances recharged, the old girlfriends, the first flings, the bragging men, the strutting boys. Fighting words from men so old their teeth clicked. All of them, the men and the women, circled for the first jab until rage sprayed like a beer cap blown. A brawl I had to stop.

But there had been other times, rare times when I didn’t have a single drunk to chase away. Only dancing. Only laughter. I’d just been the chaperone who’d come to eat fry bread and watch. I hoped for the best but knew better.

I suspected Stoner would come for Louise. And he did. He didn’t just drive past the powwow grounds. He got out of his car to have himself a look. He stood over the stick game squatters with his new hard luck. Since he’d started seeing Louise he hadn’t been looking too good. His face was haggard and drawn.