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and he fell full-length.
    He slid a good fifteen feet. He was all wet on his right side. He could smell the crushed grass. His jeans would be stained. The elbow of his shirt.
    Du Pré got up and he walked on, his side stitched a little, he had pulled some muscles in his chest.
    Du Pré went around behind the spruces.
    No one there. Of course.
    Du Pré heard feet running toward him.
    A couple of the young security men came around the spruces, one on each side.
    “Hey, man,” said one. “Everything all right? We saw you running.”
    “Oh, yes,” said Du Pré. “It is all right.”
    The three of them looked at each other for a moment.
    Du Pré shrugged and he walked back toward the gym.

CHAPTER 7
    “T HEM POWWOWS ALL THE same,” said Madelaine. “Same people doin’ same things. I go to ’em, but I don’t miss leavin’ them.” Madelaine grinned at Du Pré. She had her left hand on the dashboard of the car. The turquoise bracelet burned sea blue in the sunlight.
    Du Pré glanced over at the fence line crossing a little feeder seep. A prairie falcon gripped a post, wings half-extended.
    They were doing about eighty on a narrow two-lane blacktop road. Every once in a while, they passed a little white cross mounted on a steel fencepost. The crosses marked spots where people had died in car wrecks. On Memorial Day, family would often put plastic flowers on the crosses.
    “I had some good times with them Turtle Mountain people,” said Du Pré. “Them good people.”
    “That guitar player, him Daby, is a dirty old man,” said Madelaine. “He grab my ass”, you know.”
    “Um,” said Du Pré. Well, he thought, you can eat old Daby for your lunch, the old bastard won’t try that again, I am sure. Maybe he drive, Turtle Mountain, ice bag in his lap, keep the hurt from his nuts getting ripped off down a little.
    “He play pretty good guitar, though,” Madelaine said.
    She don’t rip his nuts off. She tell him, you play pretty good, I don’t rip your plums off this one time, you know. Second time, I take ‘em, fry them, eat them. Turtle Mountain oysters.
    “I tell him, mind your manners, I fry up some Turtle Mountain oysters.” said Madelaine. “Him don’t like that.”
    They crested a long sloping hill and looked down suddenly into a swaled bottom, thick with cattails and loud with Canada geese. The car windows were shut but the geese honked loudly enough so they could be heard easily. Du Pré glanced over and saw young geese, in their yellow down, following their parents.
    The car bottomed out as it crossed a little bridge and men shot up the rising road. A pheasant flew suddenly.
    Above the water’s reach to the roots hanging down into the earth, the sagebrush reappeared.
    They got to Toussaint in two hours. It was a bright and sunny day and the Wolf Mountains to the north gleamed with fresh snow up high.
    “You want some pink wine?” said Du Pré.
    “No,” said Madelaine. “I need to go home. I am a little worried about Lourdes.”
    Lourdes was Madelaine’s eldest daughter. A good student, quiet and shy, when she grew up she would be a stately woman. She had her father’s big bones and blade nose.
    Du Pré nodded. Lourdes had just turned fifteen and she was the most rebellious of Madelaine’s children, in a quiet, firm way. No scenes. No calls from the police. If she drank or smoked dope she did so very quietly. Du Pré didn’t think that she did.
    Lourdes liked to control everything around her.
    Lourdes was a frightened, intelligent girl.
    Du Pré drove up to Madelaine s house. The front door was open. The radio was turned up very loud. Bad rock and roll music.
    It was all pretty bad, Du Pré thought.
    Du Pré parked and he got out and opened the trunk and he got their nylon suitcases. He took one in each hand and he walked up toward the house.
    “Du Pré!” Madelaine yelled. Her voice was a little hysterical.
    Du Pré came in. He set the bags down.
    Madelaine was standing by the telephone,