I understood I had to be straight with myself too. I couldn’t lie to myself about Louise anymore. I desired to possess her, and in many ways I wasn’t much different from Plowman, not much different from Stoner. I wanted Louise in all the small ways a man can want a woman, probably in some ways as bad as Sam Plowman had wanted Hemaucus. I didn’t have the high ground here. I knew I had a lot to be ashamed of. This morning I had let a white man press a mud-boot to Hemaucus and talk about bullet trajectories and possible motives when I should have leaned over her with respect and closed her eyes.

I still chased Louise, looked for her, told myself she needed to be looked after. I should have backed off a long time ago, when my wife still loved me. There’s a point in love where we all can choose to be in love or not to be in love. Maybe something deep in our lives beyond instinct and hope makes us weary and too damn wanting, the slow time when we look out our morning window and we don’t see the new sun or the grass shining. We only see that something is missing in our lives, something we’re not quite sure of, like the feeling of losing a good, deep breath to restlessness. I jumped on the hope of solution and it turned out to be love again, which in my opinion was just more wanting, the worst kind of wanting after you had already stood at the altar with a shit grin on your face that didn’t look like a happy glow after five years.

I’d been thinking maybe I’d try to move off the Flathead for a while. I’d been wondering what it might be like in California, free from all my troubles. But deep down I knew I’d just be staying here. I was stuck with wanting something I knew I’d never have. And Louise was the woman I felt myself pulling in my breath for, my soft gut. A woman who saw only that my boots were polished and holeless, the leather on my holster had a nice sound, that I always had a good meat sandwich in my jockey box. I guess maybe that’s all the Indians saw in me. It’s what I saw in myself, a whole lot of nothing everybody else didn’t have.