cut through muscle because her lip curled up slightly.
Because of her stern expression and the haughty look her curled lip gave her, Wesley felt that he and this Indian girl were somehow similar, both slightly disapproving of the company they were in, both present and yet not present in every room they entered. Then Wesley caught himself. This was just an Indian girl; he had no good reason to think she was anything like what he imagined.
The gray-haired woman spoke over her shoulder to the girls. “Your ride doesn’t come, that’s it. You’re out of luck. That’s a private phone.”
The short girl kept smiling. “We know. Thank you.”
The woman saw the four boys standing by the door. “You here to eat? Or just come in out of the snow?”
Frank spoke for them. “We’d like to get something to eat. If it’s no bother.”
“Oh, it’s a bother all right. That’s why I make people pay me.”
Tommy was the only one who laughed.
“But you got to sit down, boys. That’s the way it works. You sit down and I bring the food to you on a plate.”
Lester began to walk toward the back of the cafe, but Frank caught him by the hem of the coat. “Over here.”
They hesitated like a flock of birds that take an instant to understand the direction they’re heading, then turned and followed Frank to a table by the window. The girls were already seated at an adjoining table.
As soon as they sat down, Tommy began to talk to the girls. “You gals need a ride somewheres? Is that what I heard?”
The tall girl stared out at the blowing snow, but the plump girl looked over at the four boys.
“How about it?” Tommy asked again. “We got a car. We can take you.”
“Someone’s coming for us,” the shorter girl answered.
Tommy ignored her reply. “Out to the reservation? Is that where you’re going?”
The tall girl cast a withering look their way. “We go to Sacred Heart.”
The other girl nodded. “We live here in town.”
“Sacred Heart,” Frank said in a voice so soft Wesley barely recognized it as his brother’s. “The high school, right?”
The plump girl kept smiling that smile that never seemed to increase or decrease in its intensity. “We’re seniors,” she said.
“We are too,” Frank replied. “Well, three of us. My brother’s a sophomore.”
Wesley winced. At least Frank hadn’t said which one was his brother.
Tommy leaned over the table. “Where do you want a ride to?”
Frank waved his hand over the oilcloth, a small, quick gesture that looked as if he might have been brushing crumbs away, but Wesley knew what his brother was doing: Frank was trying to tell Tommy to shut up, to tell all of them that they should allow him to do the talking.
“We’re sort of stuck here,” Frank said to the girls. “We were heading down toward the Badlands to do some hunting. When it started snowing and blowing we decided we better get into town and hunker down. We’re staying at the Overland Hotel.”
“Where did you come from?” the shorter girl asked.
“We come a ways,” said Frank. “We’re from Montana. From Bentrock. You know where that is?”
Wesley thought he heard the tall girl sniff derisively at Frank’s question.
The other girl giggled. “Montana. My uncle says Montana’s nothing but cows and cowboys.”
Frank smiled at her. “He’s not too far off. It’s the Wild West, that’s for sure.”
Tommy almost came out of his chair. “Yeah? You know what we call North Dakotans?”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Lester put in. “There ain’t a restaurant in the whole damn state of Montana where you have to wait this long to get waited on.”
Frank changed the subject. “How’s the food here? She’s not going to try to poison us, is she? Just because we’re from Montana.”
Without looking in their direction the tall girl said something that sounded to Wesley like “Ah-nish-ah-pahn-ta,” and her friend laughed.
“What the hell was that about?” Lester asked.
“She said—” she had to wait until her laughter subsided—“she said it’s good enough for cowboys.”
“What was that?” Frank asked. “Sioux?”
The tall girl turned their way once more. “Lakota,” she said sharply.
Lester asked, “Is she ever going to take our order?”
Frank slid his chair over to the girls’ table. “Say something else,” he said. “In Lakota, I mean. I like the way it sounds.”
Wesley was amazed. He couldn’t believe how gentle, how soft-spoken his brother was. He had seen Frank around girls before, at school, at football games, at the drugstore counter, and Frank was always louder and funnier and bigger and bolder than anyone else. Girls couldn’t stay away from him—because he was handsome, yes, but also because there was something dangerous about him. They had to keep an eye on him. And they were right. Wesley had heard the way his brother talked about girls, as if he could tear chunks from them, get “a piece of ass,” “a little tail,” “some tit,” or how he could punish them with sex, make them “moan” or “squeal” or “beg for more,” or how he’d reduce them to animality and have them “crawling on their hands and knees.” Now Wesley saw this courtly young gentleman who seemed more interested in the Indian language than ... than what Wesley knew his brother wanted from these girls.
The girl did say something else in Lakota, another phrase that sounded to Wesley like a little run of soft sighs punctuated with sudden stops of consonants. She did not speak to Frank, however. She addressed her friend.
“What is it? What did she say?” asked Frank.
The plump girl scowled. “Not for you, she said. We don’t speak our tongue for you to listen.”
Lester pointed to his companions. “Do you know what you want to eat? Should I just go back there and tell her what we want? Me, I’m going to have a fried ham sandwich. Maybe some soup.” He leaned toward the plump girl. “Hey. How about that tomato soup. Is it the kind made with milk?”
She looked at Lester as if he were the one speaking a foreign tongue.
Tommy nudged Frank’s chair with the toe of his boot. “You going to ask ’em?”
Frank ignored him. “I wasn’t making fun of your language. Really. I just like to hear you talk it.”
Tommy kicked Frank’s chair again. “Tell them about the whiskey.”
“What’s he talking about?” the plump girl asked.
Frank gave Tommy a dark look and mouthed the words “shut up.”
“What?” she asked again.
“My partner here was hoping—I mean, we were all hoping—since our hunting trip is all fouled up we were hoping you could cheer us up.”
The plump girl turned to her friend with an expression that seemed to Wesley to be beseeching. She wanted to, Wesley knew, but her friend wouldn’t have anything to do with them.
“I was going to ask you to show us around town,” Frank said. “But I better not. You’re just too damn unfriendly.”
Tommy squirmed in his chair and began to protest over what Frank said. Didn’t Tommy know? thought Wesley; didn’t he