He didn’t answer. Inside the office, I asked him again.

“A couple of guys are here to fry my Spam,” he said.

“Which guys?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Saw them in a dream. But they’re here,” he said.

“That’ll make a fine defense. Maybe we can get a couple of counselors from detox to testify for us.”

He told me he’d work off my fees at my small spread outside Lolo, then went to search for his pickup truck so he could drive back to his house on the reservation in the Jocko Valley.

IT’S PROBABLY FAIR to say that welfare dependency, alcoholism, glue sniffing, infant mortality, the highest suicide rate among any of our ethnic groups, recidivism, xenophobia, and a general aversion to capitalistic monetary concepts are but a few of the problems American Indians have. The list goes on. Unfortunately, their troubles are of a kind most white people don’t want to dwell on, primarily, I suspect, because Indians were a happy people before their encounter with the white race.

The irony is, except for a few political opportunists, Indians seldom if ever make a claim on victimhood. Individually they’re reticent about their hardships, do their time in county bags and mainline joints without complaint, and systematically go about dismantling their lives and inflicting pain on themselves in ways a medieval flagellant couldn’t dream up.

Johnny American Horse didn’t belong in the twenty-first century, I told myself. He lived on the threadworn edges of an aboriginal culture, inside a pantheistic vision of the world that was as dead as his ancestor Crazy Horse. I told myself I would help him with his legal troubles, be a good friend to him, and stay out of the rest of it. That was all decency required, wasn’t it?

Temple joined me for lunch by a big window in a workingmen’s café near the old train station on North Higgins. Across the street were secondhand stores and bars that sold more fortified wine than whiskey. Brown hills that were just beginning to turn green rose steeply above the railyards, and high up on the crests I could see white-tailed deer grazing against the blueness of the sky. The café was crowded, the cooks sweating back in the kitchen, frying big wire baskets of chicken in hot grease.