Harvey waited for her on the bleak roadside like a cat waits for a wounded bird. She scooped beneath a willow bush, down beneath the layers of snow where summer grass had swirled a small tight nest. She pressed her feet into the cold pocket and crouched among the branches. Her grandmother had taught her how to stay warm, how to survive. She thought of her grandmother and rubbed her hands. She would have to keep moving and soon. Harvey Stoner leaned back on his car door and reached through the open window. He began to spotlight the fields along the highway. He directed his brooding light over the soft landscape. Each hill curve became Louise. He could not see her.

The cold had entered Louise. Her skin was becoming gray. Harvey stayed so long he began begging her. He had dropped to his knees with a proposal of marriage. And even in the sleepy cold Louise almost revealed herself. She could have laughed at the idea, Harvey Stoner believing she wanted marriage from him. He got up from his knees, not bothering to brush the curds of snow from his slacks. “You’re nothing,” he finally said. “They don’t call you Perma Red for nothing.” She knew people called her Perma Red, but until that moment no one had dared to call her Perma Red to her face. She knew Harvey had only spoken the name to call her out, a dare for her to show herself. Perma Red, Harvey said in a smudge of breath lifting to the hills and the river, his wet breath making the name sparkle then fade. This was the darkest name they called her, the ranchers and the schoolboys, Mr. Malick and Eddie Taylor, the whispering Indian boys at the end of the schoolyard, the wet-lipped women sipping coffee at their kitchen tables. It meant all the bad names polite company could hiss. Red-light district. Slut. Louise understood the meaning of the name, a label that said she was Indian and nothing more. She came from Perma and she could never change her life standing. She wouldn’t let that name claim her.

Louise stood to watch Harvey leaving. She could see him for a long way down the slow curving road heading back into Dixon. He was almost gone when she saw the red flash of brake lights, the swooping turn back toward her direction. She saw the driver’s floodlight strobe the hillside and the fields, traveling up one side of the road and then the other. A shattering picture, a jarring light stuttering over the land in search of her.

She imagined Harvey Stoner looking through the dense trees, staring at the flat fields, blinking at the stunned mullein sparkling on the roadside. She realized then that he had wanted her to stay hidden in the cold. He wanted to ice her then thaw her, nothing better than a doll mute to his desires.