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I went there, went west and I came back. I think it was someone else's experiment and I was caught up in it. But at least they found me, brought me back. I had to wait for them, like a snake coiled in a crock.

Preserves wait in their solemn jars. I step outside the door into a rattle of hail, and I step back into the rattle of coins on salvers and the self-proclaimed Green Prophet from Utah calling his crowd to give, to find their calling, that they can fill the hole they all must sense.

"Dearly Beloved," the Green Prophet cries to the sedate plaster skies and prisoners and princesses. "Do you find, do you find that you can't be satisfied, do you find that no hours are enough, do you find that no one life is ever enough? As dusk closes do you feel this!? Walking and looking in windows? This is our human failing, certainly I know this, to not be satisfied, this seems our downfall, our distress. Yet I am persuaded that this puzzling dimension, this cruel drive, this still small voice, may also be our greatest source of potential success. What shall we do then? I tell you now that you can use your longing and failing! Destroy this distress you feel, vanquish your void, abolish tribulation, make it a living sacrifice. I beseech you now, make it your sword and ploughshare both! By the mercies of God ye shall be satisfied when you awake. Do not be afraid of dusk - do not be afraid of the window."

Sally the Outside Woman walks her sad chicken on a length of twine and I glance and follow her lovely fake confidence and her damn ass in her bustling dress. I don't know her name, but I know she must be nervous despite the fact she is never nervous. I first saw her outside and call her Outside Woman. I also call her Mustang Sally, though no one gets my little joke in 1870.

Outside Woman's face has been marked under one eye, a scar that doesn't go away. Inside Woman frets that her breasts aren't pretty, she worries so about veins or lines on her breasts, terrible, she says, frightful. Yet she is gorgeous and generous. We are all gorgeous and generous. And each day I want to meet someone new in the tall grass and hummingbird wildflowers and dead river alder. Just to touch an arm. But it can't work, it can't be like that.

That quiet woman that I love and she ignores me. It doesn't take me long.

In the town market there are pelts in blood, hands in blood, and fanged animals hang on hooks. Citizens and travelers sell meat and skins for money to buy land and tools and steel ploughs and guns and food in their mouths. If you have no money you can watch or maybe get a free bite of something. The man in the hat sprinkles sawdust under us all to soak up blood. Game birds lie tucked in baskets, deer hang in mid-leap. A man sings, Were you there, were you there when they crucified my Lord ?! What is Sally Goodin doing in town playing the fiddle? I only know her as a country person from the road by the river, like me, a bit outside of things, I didn't think of her being possible here with me among the meteors and Christmas sky rockets outside the Elephant Hotel. Ah, those gaunt grand ballrooms and rude sprung dance-floors, the horsehair under the floor, horsehair crammed in chairs and horsehair hiding in walls, horsehair holding the paste walls together, the way we are all held together. The Green Prophet calls: "The lascivious lollygagging lumps of licentiousness, they disgrace the common decencies of life by their lovesick fawning at our public dances."

The wet west wall in the massive stairwell bends from rain and pressure of the backside of the hotel coming away. I want to put pressure on her backside.

"They loiter and love, lounging and spooning, dalliance and secret indecencies."

Indoor Woman's sister says she is evil, that she must recognize her sins, and that's a good first step. But to me she is only good.

You are a good person, I tell her, but she doesn't believe me. No trust.

I believe. I believe in us. I believe I am innocent of all charges.

She says, There are times you seem angelic.

And may thy slumber be blessed

We walk through Christmas as if we know what's what; we walk the few streets we have. Gaily coloured sky-rockets lift from Hazen's Bookshop, and tinted lights burn in many merchants' windows. We drift in air and we admire the rockets in air, feel we are also up there in the sky with the new rockets, feel that we are moving among meteors and strolling the light of shop windows, strolling yards of lit roseate and yellow glass showing rockets and slow radiant people at windows and occasionally we steal a glance with gravity at our own fine bodies and sideways turned heads.

Perhaps a glass of something inside The Elephant Hotel, a glass of something bracing, for our Green Prophet takes a breather and our fiddler's bow goes back and forth, back and forth, and the heads nod duly in time. The woman is solo, alone, no other instrument plays with her.

I like this woman's neck. Inside Woman bends her head to listen to Sally play.

Dearly Beloved. We are gathered today at her fine neck. The men fight over her, no matter the century. Wooden cabin or glass tower.

The airport. Where I flew.

March 4, 1870: this is where I am, at the stone fort. Stop me if you've heard this before. By noon there is a sizeable crowd at the fort. They are doubters; it will not happen.

Thomas Scott comes out the side door praying and they shoot him down. All of us are doubters.

At first he was standing, not looking so cocky as days before, then he kneels, looked confused in his blindfold. He came from some sodden corner of Ulster Ireland. Is he praying or mumbling to himself?

"Is he crying?" Inside Woman asks me.

I'd be blubbering and begging for their mercy.

"How old is he?"

"Maybe thirty?"

"He worked on the road crew," Sally says.

"Maybe I can get his spot," I say.

"It's a good job."

"Do they hire Catholics?" asks Inside Woman.

"Maybe not."

This sad attempt at ceremony and guns, Riel's attempt.

Six men fire at the Orangeman, fire on a signal, and Scott pitches sideways, knocked over by the few shots that manage to find him. Inside Woman watches silently.

"Scott is still alive," Sally whispers to me.

Scott moving on the ground like a slow reptile. The smoke from their rifles seems to come later, an afterthought, a note from a wooden fiddle.

And Scott has breath, remains crawling the cold March ground like a live man. The fucking halfbreeds may have shot him, but he maintains that he is alive, stubborn still, will cause them trouble from the grave.

"What are they going to do now?" Sally asks, knowing what is next.

The Canadian is next. The Canadian approaches Scott. The Canadian with the droopy mustache and his pants tucked into his boots - I don't know his last name, but he knows Schultz - the mustachioed Canadian walks up not looking left or right and with his revolver he shoots Thomas Scott the Orangeman in the ear and Scott's hair jumps as if he just now had an amazing idea and at the exact same time the shot bursts out from Scott's lips like some strange exclamation or oath.

"Did he not just shoot him in the eye?" asks Sally.

"No,"I insist. "It wasn't. He did not." Inside Woman quietly shrugs.

Perhaps the leaden shot took some left turn in this poor fellow's trepanned brain, following some internal canal or routeway, or the metal orb simply cut its own King's Road straight from ear to mouth, his salty language altered, his vernacular made tame, brought to heel. Is Riel happy now? I see a vision of Scott's ear canal and I see a boat at the shore, keel up, a river, another canal. This mad metal river glitters right beside me, close to me and Sally and her, but its own purely strange world. What is a river? Is a river an element? A world? Static and always shifting, quicksilver I can't hold in my arms, yet look, the river has a definable form, a landmark , our shacks and houses and bodies and lives arranged around it like at a tablecloth to eat, there , yet not there when moving - the river is visible, but always gone, a crazy conveyor belt, wood planks and your sheets and back bacon and dead bloated animals from freshets, all passing with speed not before evident in our river (you've changed !.

Thomas Scott said, For God's sake take me out of here or kill me. I guess he got what he asked for. I write Inside Woman every day; I want her to write me back. Is that too much to ask? Thomas Scott must be quite dead now, blood leaked into his hair, but the microscopic rivers stopped, the eels stopped, his head still and shocked. Now Scott is looking much less loutish.

Sally says, "God knows, he was trouble for them alive and kicking and swearing, but by the fecking Christ he may be more trouble now that he is executed and the shooters' names published in the Ontario papers."

The Ontario papers will adopt this boyo. He came west for adventure and a new country, and now we all have that, now we are all starting an adventure, an undiscovered country.

"He's still alive," says Sally. "Can you see?"

"Can't be."

"I think he is. He's alive in the coffin."

"Can't be."

West of the fort we watch wild horses move like sudden amphetamines, mares and mustangs with a playful, shabby look, their rough coats grown out over a long winter. In stormy weather I see the wild horses hiding from the wind, seeking a shed wall, a copse of trees, a bluff, animals hiding and relaxed as assassins.

"What if the poor man is still alive?" asks Inside Woman.

Black and bays

The herd swings left, horseflesh moving in sudden shifts and ripples, bobbing heads over a choppy stride. I am with Sally and a woman I barely know, my mermaid I met walking the river and she was swimming, and we just saw a man shot, a botched job.

The execution, these strange horses. And her, Inside Woman. I want to pass on everything that happens to me when I walk the streets and river, every bird and animal that I see. I tell her everything. Why her? Why do I need to tell someone and why does she seem to like that, why does she even listen to me? Yet she does listen, unlike some others I know.

Dear Diary, I imagine her writing, Will he never shut up? How did I arrive here, like Scott, my head and legs caught in a country full of bullets and foibles? Thomas Scott crossed an ocean in 1863, all that trouble to get here. Riel walked from Quebec and Scott walked the water from Ireland and they met in the middle of the river: Hello stranger! Bonjour to you!

Down in the USA, down in the Territory I know my dead brethren are buried in the yellow dust; my soldiers, I can't quit them.

I will come back, yes, I promise that, we'll catch up.

Damn them all, my fear of the dead, and my violent irritating loves. I want to tell others of my mermaid, but we cannot be public, cannot be relaxed. I can't quit you. I get impatient, want to live normally again sometime soon. I can't be satisfied.

I don't miss much and there is not much that I miss. The crowd at the fort walls looks sick, caved in by a low blow. We can't quite believe what we saw. We want to flee the vicinity of the fort in case God strikes it down, smites us in the bargain, but we also want to linger, to see who is about by the walls, to chew the fat, mull over what we witnessed. I want to be by her, stay with her a bit longer so that this might be our experience, so that she might like me more because of this botched murder I want to want to exploit, I want to share. In a circle a crew of several men pick up the man laid low, Thomas Scott still bleeding (I didn't do it), and the men lift him into his crude coffin and they stumble away like ragged crows with a boxed burden.

Yoo hoo, are you alive in there?

I can't quit you, baby, which bothers me.

Where will they put you?

Enquiring minds wants to know.

Under the ice?

The French on one side of the river. They hate the other side. Alive at a river, a canal, a boat. So sail away, sail into yourself or sail into her if you can, sail on and try to eat your fear, your troubles, before something eats you.

Rain falls, peppering the rivers and streams, drumming the roofs of the town. Some days it looks as if I could leap the river easily; some days the other side is distant, invisible, as if it has moved leagues away, a far horizon I'll never get to know. I want to be faithful and I want to meet someone.

The hotel has a Dutch door and hot and cold running chambermaids. There at the fair our eyes caught, a kaleidoscope, a slide, a hall of mirrors. Where have they put a certain Orangeman Mr. Scott, the difficult Mr. Scott?

Life creeps, life rushes, the groom speaks; the wrong woman blushes, I escape by the skin of my teeth, will someday make a coat of the skin of my teeth.

Go west. Go walk out and look at the wild horses. It'll do you a world of good. Horses run sideways like assassins and hot geysers hooshing up in western mountains while Eastern cities twitch and sleep around their dams, their sunsets fixed by dead painters in brushstrokes and wrinkles embedded in wax. Far past a window ( do not be afraid of the window! ), a block of sky moves down the valley floor. I feel I am witness to something lumbering, animal, this live rectangle of dirty weather brushing a long skirt, dragging tendrils on the skin of the earth. If you were mine, we could be so good. If you were mine.

I am pulled like a crosscut saw. How I want to be good, to be normal, yet I want to touch her, crave contact. Her fine blouse, her long skirt swaying by me. If only you were mine, then I'd he happy. I believe this, my new faith, my confidence. I must see her, have her. That's how I got to Memphis.

In the west we share the vivid new river, share the giant red continent, shale and schist and sin and sweet sun, ate it all, sorry I ate the soft plum, the berry pies, the ducks and goose and dried meat, the blue night lightning, the stars and piebald horses, ate the whole stricken world.

Go west. A world of good. I am here, now. That's how I got to Assiniboia. You won't believe me. It was so delicious.