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    According to Harriet Dierker, Kim had come down to Minneapolis from some backwater up near the Canadian border, one of the desolate places that made you feel that you were treading the line between life and death, balanced in the darkness between the blue-black forests of pine and evergreen and fir and the flat, strip-mined wastes where the Mesabi had been slit open and its innards pulled out for the good of the steel companies. That part of the country remained an impenetrable, sorrowful mystery to me. Anyone who’d come from there, it seemed to me, must have had to try a little harder. But people I knew who’d come south to the lights of the Twin Cities said I was wrong: Anything, they said, was easy after growing up on the Iron Range. Anyway, the Norway Creek Club must have seemed like heaven to Kim Roderick in the late fifties when she’d gone to work as kitchen help.
    Mrs. Dierker, wasn’t sure if Kim had known Billy Whitefoot from up north or if she met him at the club, where Billy ran the tractor with the eight lawn-mower assemblies splayed out behind it, back and forth, every day all summer long across the golf course. Billy had been a very handsome black-haired, black-eyed Indian boy, who had done well at the club, lived over the pro shop, and gone to Dunwoody Institute in the fall and winter to learn the baking trade. Anyway, she thought so; after all, it had been more than fifteen years ago and she couldn’t expect to remember the details.
    She did know that the members’ golf committee had allowed Billy to live in the room over the pro shop because they were convinced that here was a boy who just wasn’t like all the other Indians who didn’t give a damn about anything but getting drunk. By saying that, Harriet Dierker believed she was showing her own open-mindedness, her willingness to judge people individually. And Billy had been just fine for a while. Then there had been Kim Roderick. “Billy, my God—he looked like an Indian god, Paul, like a real-life Hiawatha!”—Billy hadn’t had a chance. By the end of the summer Kim was pregnant and she and Billy got married. After all, even though he was an Indian, he was a bright boy, well-liked, doing well at Dunwoody, a serious boy … And apparently he really fell for Kim Roderick. Harriet allowed as how you couldn’t blame him: a temptress, she’d been, always bending over and stretching and showing her legs and her bosom. “I’d never say anything but several of the club members used to make sure they were around when she’d help clean the pool late at night and take a dip,” she said. “I saw her and I saw the men watching her.”
    The baby was due in the late winter, to the best of her recollection, and Billy Whitefoot didn’t live that winter in the pro shop. The couple dropped out of sight, maybe went back up north for the winter, but when spring came there was a letter from Billy wondering if their jobs were still open. They were and the first week in April they drove up in an old station wagon, Billy and Kim, no baby; everyone assumed it must have been left with a grandmother or an aunt up north and no one really wanted to know. There were rumors that summer about Billy. People said he’d been drinking; just like an Indian, some of them said. Several mornings he didn’t show up for work and the gigantic mower stood along with the other equipment in the shed. Kim never missed a day, though, refused even to discuss Billy, almost as if he weren’t there anymore. She was working as a waitress in the evening and as a pool girl during the day, but every free moment found her on the tennis courts with Darwin McGill, the pro, learning the game.
    That was where Ole Kronstrom first really paid any attention to her.
    The sun was warm and the wind scurried blissfully in the rich green crowns of the trees in the park. Mrs. Dierker showed no signs of letting up so I went inside and warmed four brioche, which were actually flown in several times