“He knows I’ve got it.”

“But he don’t know where you’re at?”

“No.”

The deputy watched him. “What did you do back there?”

“Back where?”

“Wisconsin.”

“Nothing,” said the boy.

“You did something.”

“No, sir.”

“Yes you did. You left.”

The boy kept looking at the deputy. No sound but the cruiser’s idling engine. After a minute the deputy leaned a little closer and lifted his face in a peculiar way. As if to take the boy’s scent.

“Where you coming from, bro?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s twice you asked me that. I mean where you been at, before you come through here?”

“I was in California for a while.”

“California.”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Sorry?”

“What were you in California for.”

“To see the ocean.”

The deputy stared at him. “These are some poor answers, bro.”

The boy waited.

“You steal this truck from your daddy?”

“Was it reported stolen?”

“I asked you a question.”

“No, sir. I borrowed it.”

“You borrowed it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The deputy squared himself and glanced up the highway to where the truck’s shadow on the road reached long and thin for the dark beyond. His torchbeam slashed mildly up and down as if he were testing the flashlight’s weight in his hand. He told the boy to step out of the borrowed truck and go stand behind it in the lights of the cruiser.

Dawn was coming, a creeping shade of violet in the east. The boy smoked his cigarette and dropped the butt and mashed it under his boot toe. The air smelled dryly of sage and juniper and rocks and dirt but it was a cold smell, and even without the cigarette his breath smoked white. September, he thought, early September. The seasons might be changing but they were not his seasons and he didn’t know the signs. He shuddered and tried to shake the pain out from under his kneecap. He’d slept a while at the rest stop, the sleeping bag as pillow, but then the cold and pain had got to work on him and he’d driven on.

The deputy’s black eyes appeared in the rear window of the cab, above the passenger’s seat, and were gone again. Between the highway and a far mesa ranged a field of pale grass with the dark heads of chaparral rising out of it like the humps of sea monsters. Standing there not thirty yards away was an antelope, or pronghorn. Sharp corkscrew antlers, one obsidian eye fixed on the boy. The boy stared back, his own eyes aching, and he thought of the Chinese man leaning down, widely unlidding one eye between finger and thumb and sinking his needle light into the helpless ball, smell of rubber fingers, Hello, Sean, I’m Dr. Lee. White lights beyond the Chinese man’s needle light flooding in and then the sudden bomb of leg pain that sent all lights streaking like comets across his vision—and within the streaking lights was the car or the jeep-thing that had come out of the trees and locked its tires in the dirt, the yellow lenses of the man behind the wheel and the look on his face which was no look at all just his yellow eyes as the jeep-thing slid. And then the boy must have slept again because he woke himself talking. Answering questions when he became aware that he was answering questions. No feeling at all in his leg, as if they’d cut it off. His mother and father off to one side and another man looking down on him, big man in a sheriff’s jacket. Holding a sheriff’s hat in his hand, big serious face trying to look friendly.

Good, Sean. You’re doing just fine. Now, I need you to do something for me. It’s real important. I need you not to tell anybody else who ain’t a lawman what you just told me. Do you understand? Anybody else asks, you just tell them you don’t remember a thing. Nothin about no sunglasses, nothin about no blanket, none of that. Do you understand?

Everybody staring. Mother father Chinese man sheriff.

Can you do that for me, son?

“Step on back here,” said the deputy.

The boy came up and glanced in the window. Socks and T-shirts strewn over the unrolled sleeping bag and down on the floorboards, the canvas bag on its side with the gear tumbled out. The glove box gaping, all its junk stuffed back in as if to gag it. Don’t say it, Dudley. Don’t say a word.

The deputy said, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Is that it, then?”

“You borrow those tools from your daddy too, in that grip?”

“Some. Some are mine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“My daddy come in the house one day to take a shit and when he comes back out to the garage his table saw is gone. Somebody borrowed it.”

“That wasn’t me.”

The deputy turned his face and spat.

“Tell you what, bro. You don’t look to me like nothin but dumb white trouble, and I don’t want none of that anywhere near my town or on this highway even. You copy?”

The boy gazed over the truck into the east where the dawn was coming. The stars and their kings and their creatures all swept away in the tide of light.

Little brother, the man with the yellow eyes called him.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “I do copy. But I need gas. I was planning on stopping for gas.”

The deputy raised his beam like a great sword. “There’s a Shell station fifteen miles up the road, exit 151,” he said. “They got all kinds of gas there.”

11

February. The days dull and leaden and cold. Sitting at the dining room table head bowed to his homework when she came down the stairs and hushed by in slippers and housecoat stirring the air with her sleep-smell on her way to the kitchen. Watching her pour water from the filtered pitcher and stand at the sink holding the glass to her chest, staring out.

An hour after school, an hour before dark.

Do you want to go somewhere? he said. Pen stilled and denting his finger in a dull bite.

She turned as if surprised. Her hair a lifeless drapery. Eyes backed into shadow.

We could go to the store, he said.

No, sweetie. Parts of a smile came to her face and she turned back to the window. Do you need money? she said, lifting the water, sipping.

He shook his head. She held the glass to her chest.

It’s still there, she said, more to herself than to him.

Th e twenty-seventh of February, this was. Two days after her nineteenth birthday. Th e two of them had been back in the house for three months. His father was in Colorado, in the same motel room where he and the boy had lived.

Th e boy got into his jacket and his crutches and went out the back door and over the icy pavers to the metal building and unlocked the door and stood a minute at the threshold staring at his father’s desk, his breath mushrooming into the trapped cold. Th e woman in her skirt. Her bare legs. Getting up to smile, shake his hand. A client, his father said.

When he emerged from the metal building he seemed to move along on strange implements: elaborate clattering fusions of crutch and shovel and yard rake. In this way he came around to the front of the house and to the curb and he swung down into the street under the black arms of the sycamore where he and Caitlin used to climb and he looked back. Th e window was empty.

It was a red squirrel, spread-eagled as if to embrace the road, the world, preserved by cold, skull crushed. Th e county said they’d come but they didn’t.

He stood in his crutches looking at it. Why didn’t you stay in your nest, stupid?

He set the rake tines over the body and the square-point shovel behind the plush, riffling tail—but some clinginess would not let him rake the body into the shovel and instead he had to work the blade spatula-wise under the tail and under the little hind feet and along under the belly and finally the head, prizing that up with a small ripping sound. He took the rake and crutches in one hand and bent on his good leg and lifted the weighted shovel and held it level while he got the black bag open, and then he spooned the shovel carefully in and tilted until the stiff body dove splashing down into darkness. He bread-spun the bag and put a knot in it and got on his crutches again and looked back and the window was empty.