As her grandmother stood next to the other woman’s teepee she had felt the flush of her heart. She could hear him inside with this woman and he wasn’t doing so good. The woman was laughing at him and telling him his man thing was dead and ugly like a lizard. Louise’s grandmother stood in the fine silt dust of that day as the evening fanned the trees to coolness and she felt ashamed for her husband and for herself. She was so caught up in her husband’s shame she didn’t hear him as he sneaked from the teepee. When he saw Grandma he tried wrestling the sharp knife from her hands. He had a big smile on his face. They kicked around in the dust awhile, Grandma and the old man, until finally the old man looked up at Grandma and said, “If you want to kill me because you’re so jealous then here I am.”

Grandma had taken a long look at her husband, the black pigment in his knees, the sag of his pierced earlobes, his face swollen with sixty years of buffalo fat, and she never let him know she could have laughed at him. I hated him, her grandmother had told Louise. Louise let this story drift in her. She thought she understood and then she closed her eyes. She heard her grandmother and Charlie Kicking Woman. She could hear the stiff soles of Charlie’s boots and she pulled her sister’s sweater over her face.

There was a sudden light inside her that made her cup her hands over her face so she wouldn’t see the bruises on her arms, so she wouldn’t see just how dark she really was in a well-lit room with a blue-eyed white man. She noticed the man’s nails shined and he smelled like clean alcohol, the kind of alcohol that didn’t come from a breathless voice, the kind of alcohol that didn’t wheeze in his lungs but shined on his hands when he sewed up the cut on the back of her arm. He sat her down in front of his pressed trousers, so close she could see the first three notches of his zipper. She leaned back on the damp heels of her hands and looked at the floor.

The nurse entered, carrying a large, white porcelain bowl of alcohol and gauze. Louise looked up at the doctor but he only smiled at her. The nurse set the bowl down on a small table near her knee. The doctor leaned close to her. She could smell his licorice breath as he pulled her head eye-level with his waist. She tried to jerk back.

“Easy,” he said.