Billy held his foot still. He aimed the pointed toe at the porch ceiling.

“I took them off a man down in Denver thought he could play nine-ball. A fool and his boots are soon—hey,” he said, looking beyond Grant, “there you are, girl. Come on over here.”

The dog lay in the shadows watching him. She looked at Grant.

“Don’t look at him, come here.” Billy pinched the cigarette in his lips and spanked his thighs and the dog rose slowly and went to him, her head low. “You don’t remember how to come when you’re called?” He took her head in his hands and shook her.

“Let up on her,” Emmet said.

“Aw, she loves it. Don’t you, Lo, don’t you, huh? We used to wrastle like goddam alligators.”

“She’s too old for that now.”

Billy stood and removed the cigarette from his lips. “Damn it, Pops. Don’t you think I know my own damn dog?”

Emmet stared at him, then looked away.

Billy picked up his beer and tipped it back, the sharp knob of his throat working until the bottle was emptied.

“All right then,” he said. “Can you loan me a few bucks, Pops?”

“What for?”

“What for. So I don’t starve. All I got is eight bucks and a check I can’t cash till Monday.”

“Why didn’t you cash it before you come up here?”

“Because I didn’t, that’s why. Now can you loan a man a couple of bucks or can’t you?”

Emmet pulled his billfold from his hip pocket and adjusted his glasses to peer inside. “All I got is a twenty.”

“That’ll do.” Billy stashed the note in his shirt pocket and looked at the dog again where she’d resettled herself on the floor next to Grant. When he stared at her the dog pinned her ears.

He began tugging at the patch of hair under his lip.

“Well, Grant,” he said. “It’s good to see you again, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Why would I mind?”

“Why would you mind?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you—?” He looked from Grant to Emmet, and back. “Because seeing you here means that that brother of mine still hasn’t found that daughter of yours, that’s why.”

Grant looked at the young man. Held his blue eyes. The first he’d known of Billy Kinney was in the mountains, in those early days when they lived in the motel—the sheriff stopping by one day to say he’d be gone for the day, driving down to Albuquerque. Angela staring at the sheriff with eyes that held only one concern, one question, always: What did he know? It’s nothing, said the sheriff, I gotta go get my little brother out of jail, be back as quick as I can. It had stunned them—the first time since they’d known him that the sheriff had not seemed to be entirely theirs, devoted exclusively to their needs. They could not object, they could not blame the sheriff, but neither could they bear it, this abandonment, because within it was the message that, in time, the investigation, the manpower, the reporters, the world, would all move on.

“God damn it, Billy,” Emmet said, leaning forward in his rocker, clutching the armrest with one hand. “What in the hell is the matter with you?”

“What? Nothing’s the matter with me. What’s the matter with you? I’m just trying to be friendly here.”

“Why don’t you go be friendly somewheres else?”

“Jesus Christ, I didn’t mean nothin. He knows that. Don’t you, Grant.”

Grant sipped his coffee. “We’ll see you later, Billy.”

Billy looked from one to the other and shook his head. He flicked his cigarette into the dirt and went nimbly down the steps. A moment later the El Camino roared and a red stain of taillights spread over the dirt at the corner of the house. The tailgate came briefly into view and then lunged forward, throwing up red fans of dirt. They heard the car progressing down the drive, heard it idling at the county road, revving throatily, but there was no squealing of tires, and after a few seconds the sound of it faded away altogether.

Across the way, over the doors of the machine shed, the automated farm light had come on, lighting up a scrim of grit in the air they could taste.

“I gotta say I’m sorry for that, Grant.”

“No you don’t, Em. I got a boy too. He’s just young.”

“He ain’t that young. And I’m too old. I was already old when we had him. I wonder if that’s why.” Emmet stared into his coffee. Grant stared out at the night. A bat dove blackly into the light to snatch a moth and wheeled away again. Soundless as a thought.

“I’ll say one more thing,” said the old man. “Though I know a man ain’t supposed to say such things aloud. But if it come down to just one of these boys coming home, yours or mine? I’d of voted for yours.”

10

The truck, a long-bed blue Chevy, moved down the interstate under a low moon and the fading vault of stars. No crew cab, three years old, in good shape. No bumper stickers or decals. No gun rack. It held cruise control steady at 77 mph, two miles over, all its bulbs alight and nothing out of the ordinary but the out-of-state plate. The driver was heading north and if there was another passenger or any kind of luggage or possessions in the cab with him, these were stowed out of sight. Ten miles from the upcoming town on a steep grade, the Chevy swung into the left lane to pass a flatbed hauling a tremendous black stone, a monument of some kind, and then it swung back into the right lane again, and the silver SUV that had been following did the same and bloomed with flashing lights, red and blue, red and blue, strobing soundlessly in the dark predawn.

The officer sat back there running the plates. In the truck, the boy squinted at the headlights in the rearview and pushed the mirror out of true.

Out over the desert the moon had struck a black edge of sky, the flat of a mesa, and sat flat-sided itself in a field of stars. Tossed, unknown stars; a strange heaven. With his head half out the window he looked and looked, disbelieving, almost dizzy, until at last there was Pegasus, and from there the others: Cepheus, Cassiopeia, and Andromeda, the king’s daughter, chained to her rock. Naked, forsaken, watching the sea. He was not a great student but he had learned the stars. The idea that they’d been there, in their places, long before their names, long before the first eyes saw them.

The officer, walking up, put his light on the boy’s face, and then into the passenger’s seat, lighting up a red roll of sleeping bag and a green duffel, the duffel incompletely zipped on a gray nest of tubesocks. Below the duffel on the floorboards sat a canvas carpenter’s bag with leather grips and a brass buckle fastened across the mouth. It looked full and heavy.

The officer lowered his light and stood in the frame of the window, half lit like a moon in the beams of the cruiser. Under the hatbrim he was black-eyed and smooth-faced and he wore a black shiv of mustache. His jacket bore the insignia of the sheriff’s department but he was too young to be sheriff. He asked for the boy’s license and registration. He put his light on one document and then the other and then flicked it to the boy’s face again, throwing white pain into his eyes.

“This your license, sir?” In his voice was that lilt of another land, another people, older than anything.

“Yes.”

“This says you’re seventeen.”

The boy waited.

“That correct?”

“Yes.”

“How long you been sucking on those cancer sticks?”

The boy glanced at the cigarette between his knuckles. “Sorry?”

“You the oldest seventeen I ever saw.”

The boy waited. “How come you pulled me over?”

“Failure to signal when you passed that flatbed. Who is Grant Courtland?”

“My father.”

“This his truck?”

“Yes.”

“He know you got it, way out here?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what do I mean? Does your Wisconsin daddy know you are driving his truck in New Mexico.”