After the snake bit her sister, Baptiste was scarce. “I should think he’d be ashamed of himself,” Grandma told Louise. “Their bad medicine is spinning back on the two of them. They’ll be laying low for a while.” Louise had grown weary of Baptiste and talk of Baptiste. “Be careful anyway,” her grandmother warned her. “The two of them are up to something.” Louise had her fill of Baptiste. The summer spread out before her and she felt restless. She spent time alone sighing in tall grass, watching shadows of clouds pass over the blond hills of Perma. Her grandmother would press her wrist to Louise’s cool forehead, make her drink juniper-berry tonic. Louise felt like she was in love, in love with herself. Even Perma looked interesting. Louise would stand above her grandma’s house, high on the hill, and hold her arms out to catch the cool breezes of the short summer nights. Sometimes she would sit on the porch of the Dixon Bar and listen to the jukebox. She liked the songs about brokenhearted lovers. She enjoyed listening to Eddie Arnold singing his cattle song because it reminded her of the man who lived at Milepost 108, the champion rodeo roper who’d recently returned home to the old Bart place.

He was a cowboy and she was an Indian, and Louise would sometimes imagine they would end up together because she knew it would never happen. The cowboy wasn’t interested in her and that made him interesting. Jules Bart the Cowboy and Baptiste the Indian were at opposite ends of her world. She wanted something more than a dusty Indian man from Perma who drank his days away. She allowed herself to think of breaking from Baptiste with someone she imagined was tough enough to whip him, but she didn’t really want either man. She wanted that summer to herself. She wanted to like whomever she pleased and for now she liked Jules Bart. As much as Baptiste Yellow Knife’s interest in her repelled her, Jules Bart’s disinterest attracted her.

Jules Bart’s ranch was hidden behind the hills of Perma, but his fields were alongside the highway where she would often see him. Some nights, the warm nights, the breeze felt like water, and Louise would watch him working in moonlight. He was long legged and narrow hipped. She had seen him drop his shirt from his shoulders and knot the sleeves around his waist to hang like a breechclout over blue jeans. Jules Bart was not like Baptiste Yellow Knife. Jules Bart had an easy patience about him. The moon would shine on his smooth skin and make her forget about Baptiste. In the dark grass she was only a whisper, close enough to hear the sound of his breathing.