She had heard old stories of women pulling men inside of them and crushing them. She paced slowly toward him. She knew it was Baptiste that could pull her inside of himself. She was small next to him. Naked, she felt like a young girl beside him, a girl he wouldn’t want. She wished she had her nightgown to cover her. She stepped even closer to him and felt her nipples stiffen. He did not touch her. He licked his teeth in the darkness. He was not like Mr. Bradlock, a fifty-year-old man who had not known a woman. She saw him shift his heavy penis in his trousers. He was not playing her game. She rubbed up against his natty shirt breathing his scent. His hands twitched at his thighs but he did not move to hold her. His breath was even and warm. “I’ll marry you,” she told him, feeling the cold weight of her heart. When he stepped back from her he laughed. Louise looked at the stiff rooster tail of his hair as he turned from her. She watched him walk up over the hill. He walked quickly across the long field. He did not trip or stumble in the darkness. His walking was sure and steady and she thought for a moment she might follow him. She saw him leap the fence near the highway. Wind lifted a tight haze of smoke up and over him until she could no longer see him. She was thinking that he would come back to her but Baptiste was gone. She did not feel his winking presence in the cattails, or his shadowed watching from the rocky hillside. She closed her arms around her nakedness, knowing he had wanted her when she could not be had.

She thought of Jules Bart in the Dixon Bar, how he turned away from her. Baptiste was turning from her, too, and she felt snagged by him as if he had hooked her desire to survive and had cut the line. He didn’t want what she had. She heard the high rushing wind over the tops of the cottonwoods. She looked down at herself. Her skin was smudged with ashes. She thought of warriors heading into battle with snake paint on their ankles. She felt an ache of laughter in her shoulders, the low curve of her stomach. She was naked and standing out under the stars without a man or the prospect of a man. She had bared her ass to a man she sometimes hated and found he had less use for her than she had for him. She walked to the porch and sat down, weak with wanting to laugh. She was a bigger fool than Baptiste Yellow Knife.