Winter In The Blood

The bus is two hours late. There is a young woman in a purple coat asleep on the bus; the narrator sits across from her and tries to imagine what she looks like beneath the coat. Once in Malta, he goes to Minough’s bar to look for Agnes. He finds Dougie, one of Agnes’ brothers, and a “large white man” with “curly red hair” asleep on the bar (33). The narrator tells Dougie that he is looking for Agnes and that she stole from him. Dougie laughs and says that sounds like Agnes. He mentions to the narrator that the white man drives a big Buick and probably has a lot of money on him and offers the narrator a trade: If he helps Dougie take the man to the bathroom and rob him, Dougie will divulge Agnes’s whereabouts.

The narrator agrees, but when they get to the bathroom Dougie claims that there is no money in the man’s wallet. The narrator knows this is a lie, but Dougie refuses to share the money, even when the narrator insists it would be compensation for what Agnes stole. Dougie leaves without telling the narrator where Agnes is. The narrator futilely searches the bars and cafes, then the hotel and the movie theater. He returns to Minough’s again, but the Buick is gone now. It is still raining, and the narrator feels despondent.

After Minoughs, the narrator goes to the Pomp Room, a bar connected to a hotel, and meets a man from New York who wears an African safari outfit. He tells the narrator that he’d been at the airport about to travel to the Middle East when he decided to tear up his ticket, leave his wife, pick up his fishing gear, and drive to Montana. After this, the narrator calls him “the airplane man.” The narrator tells the airplane man that he will not have luck catching fish in the area, but the man insists that he caught many fish yesterday. Still, the narrator insists that there are no fish, and definitely not the type of fish the man claims to have caught. The man offers to go fishing together tomorrow, promising to buy the narrator a big steak and give him all of his fishing equipment if they can’t catch any fish.

Two men in suits enter the bar and, simultaneously, the narrator notices a barmaid nearby. The airplane man asks the narrator if they should question the men in suits about fish. One of the suited men says that he caught fish in the reservoir south of town, and the four men have a contradictory conversation in which the narrator insists that the river is muddy and barren, while the other three men claim it is clear and full of fish.

The airplane man asks the barmaid if he knows her from somewhere. She is noncommittal, but the man continues to question her about places they could have met. She says that her family’s cat smothered her baby sister, and that the sister would have looked like her except that the baby had a birthmark on the side of its neck. She whispers to the narrator that the man thinks he remembers her because he remembers her sister’s birthmark; her sister used to dance all the time and the man would pay her a dollar to dance for him.

As the barmaid leaves, the men discuss her body, admiring her hips and breasts. When the barmaid returns, one of the suited men tells her that the narrator says there are no fish in the river. She claims she caught seven fish that morning. The airplane man, drunk, roars and charges at the barmaid, swerving at the last minute and running out the door. The narrator tells the barmaid she should have danced for the airplane man, but she tells him it would not have been the same.

The next morning, the narrator awakens, hungover and shaken from gruesome nightmares. The dreams were surreal. In one, “a girl loomed before my face, slit and gutted like a fat rainbow, and begged me to turn her loose, and I found my own guts spilling from my monstrous mouth” (42). In another, the men wearing suits the night before were touching Teresa, remarking on her body, until they spread her legs and she gave birth to Amos the duck. Another dream includes, “a boy on horseback racing down a long hill, yelling and banging his hat against his thigh. Strung out before him, a herd of cattle, some tumbling, some flying, all laughing” (42).

The narrator manages to get out of bed. He remembers that he left his possessions at Minough’s bar last night and that he helped Dougie rob the white man. He worries that the white man is out looking for him for revenge. He doesn’t have clean clothes or a toothbrush, so he cleans up as well as he can and leaves the hotel.

It is Saturday and the narrator walks from the hotel to a bar beside the railroad station. The only person in the bar is the bartender, who stands next to the cash register, picking lint from his black shirt. The bartender recognizes the narrator as Teresa First Raise’s son. He asks after Teresa and the narrator tells him that she’s just married Lame Bull. The bartender asks if Lame Bull is a bushy-haired man and explains that there was a heavyset, bushy-haired man antagonizing his customers recently. The narrator says that Lame Bull is not bushy-haired, but he knows that man.

The bartender goes to the bathroom and asks the narrator to keep an eye on the bar. While the bartender is gone, the narrator thinks about the airplane man and the barmaid from the night before. He feels guilt and shame, though he cannot figure out why. He has mental images of the barmaid coming back to his room with him to make love, but he is not sure if they are a memory or a dream. A customer comes in and the bartender returns. The narrator remembers the letter the priest wrote to his mother; he retrieves it from his pocket and looks at it closely. He had wanted to read it and see what the priest had to say to his mother, thinking that a priest having a woman friend was a rarity, but he decides that he does not “want to see [his] mother’s name in an envelope, in a letter written by a white man who refused to bury Indians in their own plots, who refused to set foot on the reservation” (47). He tears up the letter.