The first time Shane saw her was in the bar. She came in with a group of young people, mostly Native. One man wore a T-shirt that said WE SHOULD HAVE BUILT A WALL. They ordered pitchers and endured the angry and horny glances from the regulars. The woman was tall and wore a firetruck-red tank top and a dirty pair of jeans with a big hole in the hip through which the whole bar could see a patch of creamy skin. She caught Shane staring at her early in the night. Shane couldn’t help herself. She’d been listening to a new pop song by a young singer, and this woman’s eyes were such a peculiar murk. They reminded her of the waters of the Gulf: dark, muddy, sometimes green but always shifting. The image and lyrics clotted together in her head.
“Assume you all are coming from the brouhaha down by Cannon Ball?” Shane asked, swiping their empty pitcher.
“Just a night off before we go back to the tents and bugs,” said Ocean Eyes. Her voice was big and low-pitched.
“Hey, even the people throwing their bodies in front of the imperial-industrial machine need a drink.” Shane could tell she liked that.
“Where you from?” the young woman asked.
“From nowhere. Going nowhere,” she said and walked away.
The crew hung around till close. One of the men behaved with that proprietary air all straight men had. He kept touching Ocean Eyes’s shoulder, and just the body language between them suggested they’d slept together. Still, Shane couldn’t stop staring at the woman with the thick, crazy hair and the big, loud laugh that seemed to rattle the picture frames on the walls. Old West history went timid at the sound of her voice. At the end of the night, with only a handful of regulars finishing up, the woman walked past her to the bathroom.
“Be careful driving,” Shane warned. “They’d love to catch you with a DUI and thin your ranks.”
Instead of answering, she just stared at Shane. Then with the smallest tilt of her head, she nodded to the bathroom. Nanette was busying herself with gossip at a table of Lakota regulars. In the small ladies’ room, the woman pushed her long, thick tongue into Shane’s mouth and slipped her hands up her shirt to twist her nipples. She had huge masculine hands that made Shane feel petite.
“Can I go down on you?” Ocean Eyes asked, and for a moment Shane forgot why she was there working in this lonely dive bar on the hard, forsaken plains.
“Of course,” she whispered.
Sometimes, if Shane had a particularly hard orgasm, she would cry. It was involuntary. The intensity just left her spent, and her emotions would swell. When she came, biting down on her thumb to keep from crying out, her tears were pouring, and she was embarrassed. The woman rose back up and kissed her on the mouth, pushing her own taste between her lips. She took her thick thumbs and wiped away Shane’s tears. “Now you owe me.” And she kissed Shane on the tip of her nose and left.
They saw each other again and again that summer, whenever she broke away from Sacred Stone to slip past the checkpoints and spend a few hours in the bed in Shane’s van. They would make love and talk about deep ecology, and the woman’s eyes would go stormy for both. Her name was incongruous with her whole being. “Kate” was the name of a sorority girl from a Dallas suburb. Shane said her name was Lucy and that she was from Chicago. She tried not to spin too many tales, to at least fabricate her subterfuge with kernels of truth. In turn, Kate told her about Phoenix and Portland, about her precarious and rootless upbringing. A doting and anxious mother never quite at home in this foreign country, a passionate and cruel father, who was nevertheless likely the reason she was here. She grew up with his activism around uranium mining in Arizona and coal plants poisoning the air on her grandmother’s reservation. It made Shane ache how much they had in common, twinned lives met on a new battlefield. Kate asked if Shane wanted to share her tent at the blockade.
“That really isn’t my scene,” Shane said and caught the disappointed look on her face. “What?”
“I hope one day you understand how silly that sounds.” It killed Shane not to tell her then, but she had to swallow the truth until she was sure.
When Shane heard TigerSwan and law enforcement had shut down Highway 1806, she panicked. The assault on the camp had begun. She saw the armored personnel carriers barreling down the road, hundreds of police in military gear, weighed down with mace, rubber bullets, water cannons, concussion grenades, and attack dogs. Since she had no cell phone, she drove down to where they’d blockaded the road and, despite the risk involved, approached the line. The site was Backwater Bridge, and the police wouldn’t let anyone pass.
“Turn around or you’re a part of it!” snarled a pink-faced cop. She could hear explosions and screaming. Over the rise, it sounded like a war zone. “Get moving!” And he took one step toward her. The pummeling blare of a sound cannon started up in the distance.
Later, she’d find out the police had used pepper spray and freezing jets of water in twenty-eight-degree weather. They nearly blew off a woman’s arm with a concussion grenade. The water protectors were kettled and cleared with CS gas, attack dogs, truncheons, and finally cuffed, tied, and thrown into kennels with a number written on each of their arms in Sharpie. Kate showed up at her van a day later, dirty, shivering, face streaked with tears and pain. She’d been arrested, cut loose, and the cops had never so much as offered her a towel. Shane turned the heat all the way up, stripped her naked, and held her body beneath the covers. Donald Trump had been elected president just thirteen days earlier. She’d watched in the bar on election night, the patronage evenly divided between elation and disbelief depending on one’s ancestry.
“We should’ve seen it coming,” said Kate, still trembling. “I plan on never being surprised by what this country’s capable of ever again.”
It was the first time she’d ever heard her hopeless, and it sounded so strange. Off-brand for a woman who’d truly believed the tribes would set up some tents and the oil companies would fall to their knees. Though some would hang on until the following February, for all intents and purposes that night marked the end of the Standing Rock protest. Done in by TigerSwan and the brutal Dakota winds.
Kate ended up with pneumonia, sweating and aching it out in Shane’s van for the better part of two weeks. “Why don’t we move on?” Shane suggested. “Come with me. You can regroup and get well.”
“I don’t want to move on,” she said. At this point, the color had returned to her face, but her voice would thereafter come with a slight rasp, as if all the coughing had scarred the interior of her throat.
“You need time. It’ll be summer before you know it, and you can plan your next revolt then.”
She was surprised when Ocean Eyes agreed. She knew she was taking a serious risk by associating with this woman. She didn’t care. Their vehicles dueled for the lead all the way to Jackson Hole, a place Shane’s father had always wanted to visit but never did. It was there Shane came to understand she’d fallen in love.
She found work on the ski trails. Kate got a bartending job and insisted on renting her own place. “Not quite ready to move into your van yet.” That was fine. It gave Shane the opportunity to sleep in a real bed from time to time. After just a month, Kate found another gig: advocating for the West’s bison herds, “And I don’t even have to get sprayed by a water cannon to do it.”
Winter receded, and with spring came the lush green of the forests and fields, the glittering beauty of the Snake River, the glory of the Tetons. They spent as much time as they could in the mountains, hiked deep into backcountry, got eaten alive by mosquitoes, crept slowly away from a black bear that wandered into their campground, woke at dawn to watch the sun rise over the eastern plains. They drank at the Cowboy Bar till close most weekends and found a reliable coke dealer to help them burn all these candles at all these ends, but when you’re young it feels like you’ll never run out of wax or wick. Shane knew this woman was a singularity, that she small-talked better than most people dreamed.