LANADA AZURE'S father was in one of my college classes. This was at the University of Montana, in Missoula. My own father could also be found on campus. He still lived on the rez and, like Bernie Azure, would drive into the little city for classes and then slip back between the mountains into the world up there.

Each time I spotted my father wandering around campus, I turned away. As a young man in Illinois, he had kept his end of a bargain he'd struck with his father, a professor of mathematics, who had promised him a new truck if he would attend a single semester of university classes. The vehicle must have wavered in my father's imagination throughout those sixteen weeks. Then my grandfather produced the actual truck. My father did not stop driving until he had crossed into Canada and reached the Yukon, a place he had been reading about since he was a little boy. He took up residence in a small town on a Preserve. There, before he'd turned nineteen, he was shot. I would like to know that story to tell it, but I don't.

Not long after that, he and my mother reduced the abstract possibilities with which each had been loaded into the specific thing of me. When we would cross paths on campus, he was maybe forty and freshly divorced. He carried his schoolbooks around in the ragged backpack I'd mis-sewn from patterns in a sixth-grade home economics class.

Bernie Azure lived in the center of a maze of dirt roads in the forest. As a senior in high school, I'd once found my way to his place. Lanada and I