I looked down into the clear green water. I could see the large round rocks, the smooth colors of water stones, and then I saw her standing upright beneath the bridge. She was dancing in the river water, a traditional dance, slow and sustained, dancing to a song we could not hear. I pushed back from the railing, felt the clank of the drag hook at my back. I didn’t want to see what I was seeing. I was afraid these people would look to me for answers I didn’t have. Logically I knew she was just caught in a deep crosscurrent, a current that was pulling her, a trick. But in my heart I felt the Indian in me trying to understand what this all meant. I scanned the length of the river as if I could find answers. The river ran milk white over rocks a good long way then seemed to stop and still to this channel that held Louise’s sister. Here the water ran deep and surface calm, thick as oil. Rocks shined. Branches bowed deep to dark, green currents. I tried not to look at the spot in the river where Florence’s hair tangled in the twisting flow.

I thought of this story rising from here, Florence standing in water with her eyes open and her arms reaching. They will say that Florence was dancing in the water, and not just dancing, dancing dead. I knew this story would soon lead to mistrust and anxiety. I have my stories too.

I have seen a sudden wind swirl up so fast it has a voice, even in a room with all the doors and windows shut, and it talks and talks until morning. I have seen my grandmother rise up above the flames of a campfire as she danced to become well. I have seen the medicine man turn his back to a crowd of people and turn once again to show his eyes colorless as silver dimes, and for the rest of that year money had come to me.

When I became a police officer these stories took a backseat to small houses filled with hungry children. These stories disappeared when headlights met on a moonless road or I found a young man sleeping under a white man’s car on a night so rainy half his face was dark with mud.

I wanted to shake these people who held to these stories when their children were waking up with the smoke of cold hissing through their wood-split homes. I saw so many Indian families with such pitiful houses—Louise and her grandma and this poor girl for one. I saw the damn chinking crumbling. Their house stuffed with rags. I’d stopped by early in the morning and I had seen the snow on their floors. Poverty is a story that doesn’t seem to get told.