17

In the bleary daybreak the boy passed a gas station just beyond the off ramp and drove into the little town the deputy had told him to stay out of. He took Main Street at the posted speed, parked among the spaces, and fed two of his dimes, and a third, into the meter.

The cafe door opened with a disturbance of small bells and he stood a moment in the warm, ancient reek: ages of coffee, ages of bacon. The quiet tink tink of knives on chinaware. A girl said, “Anywhere’s fine,” and he went to the row of stools at the counter. She came around and poured him a coffee and handed him a menu. She had the black hair and round face of a native people, although native to what he didn’t know. He ordered an English muffin.

“That’s all you want?”

“With butter and jam, please.”

She looked at him more closely. He seemed all bone and muscle under his denim jacket, and with that limp she’d first thought rodeo, but the boots were wrong and he wore no hat. He looked as though he’d slept on a rock. She imagined touching his yellow hair, dirty as it looked.

She played the thickness of her ponytail through her fist and held his eyes. “Douglas back there pours a humongous flapjack, and it only costs a dollar more than an English muffin.”

The boy glanced at some men behind him, their jaws working at their meals.

“No, thanks,” he said, and with a sigh, with an air of having done all she could do, the waitress left him. A minute later a toaster popped and she placed the muffin before him and stepped away to the cash register.

“How was breakfast, Gabe?”

“I reckon I’ll live.” The man winked a leathery lid at the boy and slipped a twenty from his wallet. The drawer rang open with a rich slosh of coins.

MORE DINERS CAME IN and the waitress carried loaded plates along her forearms. On one trip a plate appeared before the boy, the great flapjack steaming. When she returned to the counter it hadn’t moved. She inched a small china bowl toward him.

“Real maple syrup,” she said.

The boy popped the last of the muffin into his mouth. “Thank you. But I won’t eat it.”

She made a birdlike motion with her head. “Why not?” Behind her in the pass-through a man appeared. Large man stooping to look. Toothpick in his lips. One dark eye looking at the boy and the other wandering off into the world.

“I ate that muffin and that’ll do me,” the boy said.

She looked at the man in the pass-through until, muttering to himself, he went away, and then she turned back to the boy and collected the plate and turned again to upend the flapjack into a bin, and with each turn of her head her ponytail swung like a girl on the move, like a girl in a race, that thick and fitful, that alive.

He left the diner and walked along the sidewalk until he came to a Laundromat. He cupped his hands to the glass and then stepped inside. He thought he was alone but he wasn’t—a dwarfish round woman turned and blinked small black eyes at him and then turned back to monitor the portal of a dryer, her head cocked as if listening for some false note in the thumping heartbeat of it. The air was humid and sharp with the ammonia stink of piss. He went to the back by the soap-dispensing machine and stacked his quarters on top of the pay phone and pulled the slip of paper from his wallet and stood looking at it. He’d stopped calling her cell phone months ago because of the way she answered, and because of the way she sounded when it was not the call she wanted.

He got a cigarette to his lips and dropped two quarters in the slot and dialed the number and a voice told him to deposit more money and he did so and then lit his cigarette and waited.

“You can’t smoke in here.”

It was the woman, the dwarf monitress, torn from her vigil.

He nodded and showed her the receiver at his ear.

“This here’s a nonsmoking facility,” she said. “Says so right there.”

The ringing in his ear ended and he turned from the little woman as a voice said thinly, electronically, over the miles, “Hello? Hello . . . ? ”

“Hello, Aunt Grace?” he said. “It’s Sean.”

“Sean?” she said. “I can barely hear you. Where are you? Are you still in California?”

“I’m in New Mexico now.”

“New Mexico! What’s—Jordan, please stop poking him with that, now he asked you to stop, so stop.” There was a pause, a clatter of silverware, a young girl’s despairing voice. Covering the mouthpiece with her hand or her breast, his aunt said, “Right, young lady, just keep that up till I get angry, okay?”

The boy drew on his cigarette and sudden pain lanced into his knee, deep between the bones. White hot and twisting. He shifted his weight to that leg to force the blade back out.

His aunt said into the phone, “Ugh. I’m sorry. Are you there, hello—?”

“I’m here.”

“New Mexico!” she said again. “What’s in New Mexico?”

“I’ve got some work,” he said.

“You should come home, Sean. You can do that kind of work here,

can’t you?”

He knew that if there were news from Colorado his aunt would have

said so.

“Is Mom around?” he said, and for a long moment it seemed the connection had failed. At last his aunt said: “Sean, haven’t you talked to your dad?”

He said nothing. Then he said, “Why?” and his aunt said, “Seanie, your mom’s back in the hospital.”

He saw a dim phantom of himself in the face of the soap-dispensing machine.

“When?”

“Two weeks ago. She took too many pills.”

“She tried to kill herself.”

“No, she didn’t, Seanie, it was an accident. She was just taking too many of those damn pills.”

“Do the doctors think it was an accident?”

“The doctors are . . . cautious. They want to watch her for a while, that’s all.”

Behind him a harsh alarm sounded and the little woman opened the dryer and began hauling laundry hand over hand into a wire basket on wheels. Next to the soap-dispensing machine was a corkboard thick with fliers and ads: trucks and farm equipment for sale, offers of trash hauling and babysitting. Reflexively he looked for his sister’s face among them.

“Sean—?” said his aunt, and he drew soundlessly on his cigarette. Tapped ash to the dirty floor.

“Is she okay?”

“Yes. I mean, what’s okay?”

They were silent.

“She’s safe,” said his aunt finally. “She’s resting.”

They hung up and he spread the remaining quarters in his palm, tallied them, and dropped two more into the phone. He punched in a number from the corkboard and watched the little round woman backing herself through the glass door, her body rocking with the weight of two swollen garbage bags at the ends of her arms. “You ain’t got the right to smoke in here,” she said, pinning him with her black eyes. “You ain’t got the right to give other people your cancer.”

18

Grant left the sheriff and drove back over the divide and down again to meet the climbing dusk. He exited the freeway while still high above the city and took the county road back into the foothills, to the old mining town that lived on though the copper was long gone.

Inside the Whistlestop on his way to the back a man reached out to grab him. “Where’s the fire, mister?” It was Dale Struthers, the old veterinarian who owned the ranch down the road from Emmet’s. He and the wife, Evelyn, smiling up warmly. They told Grant to join them and he glanced at his watch and said he couldn’t, he only had time for one cold one and then he had to go see what kind of trouble Emmet had got up to.

“We were going to stop by on the way here, see if we could feed that old bird,” Struthers said. “But then we saw Billy’s car there and, well . . .”

“We didn’t want to intrude,” Evelyn said.