Shadow Prey

them taking you out.”
    “You coming here?” Sam asked.
    “I better. I don’t know where they got their information, but if they’re tracking me . . . I’ll see you in a half-hour.”
    When Shadow Love arrived, Barbara stood on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek and took him straight into the kitchen for a sandwich.
    “Somebody betrayed us,” Shadow Love said. “That fuckin’ Hart was in the street outside the apartment. He’s passing out money now. The hunter cop too.”
    “We’re not doing as well as I hoped,” Sam confessed. “I’d hoped Billy would get at least one more and that John would make it out of Brookings . . . .”
    “Leo’s still out and I’m available,” Shadow Love said. “And you can’t complain about the media. Christ, they’re all over the goddamned Midwest. I saw a thing on television from Arizona, people out on the reservations there, talking . . . .”
    “So it’s working,” Aaron said, looking at his cousin.
    “For now, anyway,” Sam said.
    Later that night, Sam watched Barbara move around the bedroom and thought, She’s old.
    Sixty, anyway. Two years younger than he was. He remembered her from the early fifties, the Ojibway bohemian student of French existentialists, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, her fresh heart-shaped face without makeup, her books in a green cloth sack carried over her shoulder. Her beret. She wore a crimson beret, pulled down over one eye, smoked Gauloises and Gitanes and sometimes Players, and talked about Camus.
    Barbara Gow had grown up on the Iron Range, the product of an Ojibway father and a Serbian mother. Her father worked in the open-pit mines during the day and for the union at night. Her mother’s Bible sat in a small bookcase in the living room. Next to it was her father’s Das Kapital.
    As a teenager, she had done clerical work for the union. After her mother died, leaving a small insurance policy, she’d moved to Minneapolis and started at the university. She liked the university and the talk, the theory. She liked it better when she heard the news from existential France.
    Sam could still see all of that in her, behind the wrinkled face and slumping shoulders. She shivered nude in the cold air and pulled on a housecoat, then turned and smiled at him, the smile lighting his heart.
    “I’m surprised that thing still works, much as you abuse it,” she said. Sam’s penis curled comfortably on his pelvis. It felt happy, he thought.
    “It’ll always work for you,” Sam said. He lay on top of the blankets, on top of the handmade quilt, impervious to the cold.
    She laughed and left the room, and a moment later he heard the water start in the bathroom. Sam lay on the bed, wishing he could stay for a year or two years or five,wrapped in the quilt. Scared. That’s what it was, he thought. He put the thought out of his mind, rolled off the bed and walked to the bathroom. Barbara was sitting on the toilet. He stepped in front of the vanity and turned on the water to wash himself.
    “Shadow Love’s still watching that movie,” Barbara said. The sounds of TV gunfire drifted up the stairs.
    “ Zulu, ” said Sam. “Big fight in Africa, a hundred years ago. He says it was better than the Custer fight.”
    Barbara stood up and flushed the toilet as Sam dried himself with a towel. “Is this the end?” she asked quietly as they walked back into the bedroom.
    He knew what she meant, but pretended he did not. “The end?”
    “Don’t give me any bullshit. Are you going to die?”
    He shrugged. “Shadow Love says so.”
    “Then you will,” Barbara said. “Unless you go away. Now.”
    Sam shook his head. “Can’t do that.”
    “Why not?”
    “The thing is, these other people have died. If it comes my turn and I don’t fight, it’ll be like I turned my back on them.”
    “You’ve got a gun?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And this is all necessary?”
    “Yes. And it’s almost necessary that we . . . die. The people need this story. You know, when we were kids, I knew people who rode with Crazy Horse. Who’s alive now to talk to the kids? The only legends they have are dope dealers . . . .”
    “So you’re ready.”
    “No, of course not,” Sam admitted. “When I think about dying . . . I can’t think about dying. I’m not ready.”
    “Nobody ever is,” Barbara said. “I look at myself in the mirror, on the door . . .” She pushed the bedroom door shut, and the full-length mirror mounted on