But all Waltzer’s constellations told such turned legends. There was the Bowsprit, about another rotten boy who slew his father while he slept and later became a fire-breathing pirate who devoured his victims’ limbs and decorated the rail of his ship with their heads. This fellow tramped up and down the high seas challenging men and gods until a brave captain met him in battle, the two of them going sword and sword across decks for days without rest. At last the captain by superior craft cleft the other in two, at an angle, so that the pirate’s head with one arm and shoulder thumped on the deck with a terminal snarl. Job done, the captain returned to his ship to wash for dinner and looked in his polished brass mirror. You see what’s coming: The poor captain saw not his own face but the pirate’s, and the nastiest grin all over it. Following this all his noble impulses fell away like a mail shirt, and he developed a wild controlling lust for jeweled plunder and an appetite for boiled legs and arms. “So you can win the battle, Reuben”—Waltzer shrugged—“but the war is lost long ago.”

“Crumb,” I reflected morosely, as Fry and Davy trotted up.

Waltzer put his altered hand on my head. “Don’t let it bother you,” he said.

But it did.

The next day Martin Andreeson called. The fellow who’d given Davy a lift, name of Robinson, had promised to show Andreeson the place he’d dropped him off. They’d been going to meet at the Amidon cafe, but Robinson never showed. There were three Robinsons in the phone book; Andreeson reached two; the third’s telephone had been disconnected. Inquiring directions to the disconnected Robinson’s house, Andreeson drove eight rugged miles along the edge of the Badlands. The house he found there was cold and boarded.

“The situation, Martin,” Dad said, “requires prayer.”

I’d have given quite a bit to hear the fed’s response. Whatever it was, Dad said, “Of course—we’ll expect to hear from you,” then hung up and called me over.

“Chest tight?” he asked—a rhetorical question, for he could hear what had become the usual wheeze.

“Yes sir.”

“What can I do?”

He’d begun approaching it this way ever since Dr. Nickles threw cold water on the vinegar treatment.

“Just pound a little.”

He turned me by the shoulders and I braced against the door-jamb while he worked my back. Except for the thumping it was a quiet morning, and when he stopped I could hear Roxanna humming in the next room.

“Better?”

“Yes sir.”

He listened. “Sounds about the same.”

“It’s better.”

“Reuben,” he said out of nowhere, “is there something you ought to be telling me?”

My insides jelled. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re looking peaked,” he said. “It wears, this whole thing, doesn’t it.”

So it was only my health he was worried about.

“I’m going to the trailer and pray for your brother,” he said, such sadness in his face it was as though he knew something I didn’t, instead of the reverse.

No word arrived from Andreeson that day. Or the next. What did arrive was a northwest wind that sang against the house. In the Dakotas it needn’t snow to blizzard. The wind came low and fast, peeling the drifts. From her window upstairs Swede and I watched a cavalry charge minus the horses; wide chunks of snow tore themselves off the ground and flung forward, tumbling to white sand that coiled and rushed like Huns. It was a ground wind, a ground blizzard. Picture a storm to match any in wildness but only eight feet high. From Swede’s window it was like looking down on a violent cloud. The barn protruded—its door invisible down inside the storm—and the handle of a snow shovel stuck in a drift, and Roxanna’s red birdhouse on a tilting pole. Above the storm it was actually sunny; we could see the gleaming tin dome of a neighbor’s silo miles away. But when we went downstairs drafts came from everywhere, and the light was gray and discouraging, and on the west wall an electrical outlet glowed with frost, a foot from a ticking radiator.

The wind lasted two days. Thinking of the cabin in the hills, with its shrunk chinking and corroded stove, I worried for Davy. Also for Sara.

“Swede,” I wondered, “how long till you’d freeze to death in a wind like this?”

“You mean with your clothes on?”

I bridled. “Well, what do you think? How many people are going to go out in this with nothing on?”

“Nobody goes out with nothing on. It’s something that happens when you begin to freeze; the thermometer in your brain gets turned around. You start thinking you’re hot, got too much on; you figure you’ll cool off.”

I was buying none of this. Couldn’t afford to. Picturing Davy all bundled up in this wind was bad enough.

“It’s true, Reuben. It’s like a mirage, the snow turns to desert. Once, two college boys snowshoeing out in Wyoming—they found ’em froze solid, standing up. Snow to their waists, nothing on but boxer shorts, police couldn’t fit ’em in the car so they tied ’em on top, like in deer season—”

Goodness knows how long Swede might’ve continued in this way, so I said, “What if you were in a rotten old cabin, cracks in the walls and the wind blowing through?”

Well, that set Swede on another track even more horrific. She related a story about some troop of outcasts running out of food at the onset of a recordbook blizzard; and how hungry they all got, eating their belts and boottops, though not their lone horse, which had sensibly escaped; and how the weaker among them skidded away from reality and started gnawing their own limbs, smacking their lips yet making, you’d have to say, no nutritional gain.

As a tale of grue it was badly timed; Waltzer, too, had spoken of cannibalism, and in fact it seemed a thing he might practice without remorse. I descended to morbid reflections. Suppose the storm lasted a week? How much firewood did they have in that cabin—and how much food? With both Davy and Sara on hand, I was certain Waltzer would eat Davy first; he had other plans for Sara. I spent a vicious wish on Andreeson: if only he were out there with Waltzer. Then bring on a blizzard! But this bit of drama didn’t satisfy as I’d supposed it might; the fed, to my puzzlement, seemed less putrid than he once had. Sitting by Swede as she read silently on the couch, I counted six of my breaths to each of hers. What I wanted was a great big inhale or, failing that, a little peace. I ventured out to the Airstream.

Dad was playing the antique guitar. Stepping into the dimness of the barn I heard its soft strings humming one lovely chord and then another. He was playing slowly yet precisely, for I heard no orphan notes. I stood listening while he played any number of quiet hymns, stopping sometimes to tune a string up or down. I don’t mean he was already Segovia or anything; it was only days since he’d repaired the instrument with a tube of airplane glue and a Spanish windlass tied up from long johns. Still, he had worked out many of the songs we loved in those days, “Amazing Grace,” and “Cast Your Eyes upon Jesus,” “It Is Well with My Soul”; also “Happy Trails,” and “The Cowboy’s Lament.” Sometimes Dad sang, sometimes hummed; sometimes there was a long search for this or that desired chord. I could’ve listened all day. When he stopped and I heard him moving about inside the trailer, I eased from the barn and shut the door.

Inside, Roxanna was stirring up bread, her latest hothouse blooms in a tin vase on the table, soup asteam in a pan just as though we were a family not perched at the edge of great loss. Even Swede seemed to have reached some sort of harbor. She sat in her room above the blizzard, fomenting joy for Sunny and his wife now that they’d obliterated the entrance to their secret valley, as well as about half that rotten posse.

The wind blew through a second night, stratifying snowbanks and encumbering roads. Then it wore out. The house fell quiet. After breakfast the others went out to shovel—I was no good for it, but Dad said someone had to stay by the phone. I did so all morning but Andreeson did not call. The afternoon idled along. I read Last of the Mohicans twice through—Classics Illustrated—then got out Roxanna’s scrapbook and revisited Jonas Work’s obit. None of this warded off agitation. None of it kept bad pictures away: pictures of Davy drawn and freezing, of snow sifting through the unchinked shack. Concentrate as I might on Hawkeye and Uncas, Jape Waltzer’s tale of the cannibal pirate kept telling itself to my brain. Starring Jape, of course—it was a part written exactly for him, with his fetching confidence and lunatic glint. Like the pirate, you could imagine Jape Waltzer winning even when he lost.

This time the county plows reached us by late afternoon. Hearing nothing from Andreeson Dad called his motel in Rathton. The owner, also desk clerk, took a message. His annoyance was audible in Roxanna’s kitchen. He told Dad the federal man paid his bill readily enough but was a great deal of trouble. Sometimes he left for days, returning to his room in the small hours. It disturbed the neighbors. And always the phone calls—federal men received many phone calls and there was no telling when. The owner told Dad he was a businessman, not a secretary. From the office he had to pull on his coat and boots and go down five doors to Mr. Andreeson’s room; the messages were piling up; it was too cold for this.

“When did he leave?” Dad asked.

Suspending complaint the owner thought this over. Early the previous day he’d taken a call from one Mr. Robinson. He was in Amidon, at the cafe. Andreeson was glad for the message—had, in fact, the owner grouchily acknowledged, tipped him a two-dollar bill for its delivery. Not long afterward, the motel lot already turning humpy with drifts, the owner had watched Andreeson’s tan Mercury creeping away through the wind.

Dad hung up the phone. He stood to the window and looked west. The snow lay hard and clean-shaven and the broken hills rose up out of it—I don’t guess you could find more inhospitable geography. But the wind had stopped and the cold sun put such an edge on hills and barn they might’ve been razored from a magazine.

“Rube,” he said, “that Andreeson’s a smart fellow, but he doesn’t know one thing about winter in North Dakota.”

A thought dropped from nowhere, like a big snake.

Dad plucked his coat off the hook, heading to the trailer. I plucked mine to follow, then nearly sat down. My legs trembled, hips and kneecaps loose as dominoes.

“Something the matter?” Dad inquired.

“Yes sir.” I didn’t want to say it—the thought. Yet it coiled around me, irresistible. It squeezed, and I yielded. “Mr. Andreeson’s in bad trouble.”

He looked at me, and I at his shoes.

“What is it, Reuben?”

But the snake had me so hard I could barely speak. I sagged to the floor to shiver. What I saw was Waltzer, telling of his first sight of Davy in the Amidon cafe. I saw Andreeson, encouraged—only days ago—having shown Davy’s picture to the right man at last. Then Waltzer again, from my final visit: comfortable, talking easily, refusing all concern at my insistence that Andreeson was drawing near.

“Reuben,” Dad said.

It was too much to manage all at once, so I only replied, “His name isn’t Robinson, it’s Jape Waltzer—and he’s with Davy—and he’s going to kill Mr. Andreeson.”