Flint has been in juvenile detention homes since he was 7. Learning all the tricks of a survivor, he manages to escape and heads home to his mother and sister Cecile. But his mother, a hopeless drunk, immediately makes it clear that she no longer wants him. So Flint and Cecile steal money and a gun and leave. Living by their wits in the intense March Montana cold, they assault and rob a kind local pediatrician who stops to give Cecile a ride.
Flint grabs the drugs from the doctor's bag.
They keep on toward the motel where their aunt, Marie, lives with her father near the Crow Reservation and its mythic past. Intertwined with the children's story is Marie's memory of her mother's drowning, her Native American heritage and the lore of six generations of the family's women. Her grandmother was forced to dress like a Wild West show Indian and sell trinkets to tourists. Her mother, once the darling of the nuns with dreams of attending college, instead married a white man and cleaned toilets in his motel. Aside from occasional passages muddied by strained literary effect, the novel is a well-written if thoroughly depressing tale of generations of lost dreams and hopelessness.