He lifted his glass for the watery dregs.

The boy looked away, his eyes drawn to the electric tiki torches at the bar. An erratic simulated guttering that, when watched, was not erratic at all but cyclical and predictable.

“So then what,” he said, turning back.

“Then what what.”

“What happened?”

Lester regarded him dully. “I’m sitting here with you, aren’t I?” He tipped his empty glass and crushed some ice in his backteeth. “I got hauled up before the dean, and do you know what he says? Says I can get the hell offa his campus by five p.m. or go directly to jail, my choice. I told him I didn’t take the first swing and he says that’s not what the great writer says, and I said that that bar was full of witnesses and he says that’s not what a single one of them says. I said there’s one who didn’t say that and the dean says which one is that and I say Mia, the girl who was sitting there through the whole thing. And he shook his head at me, the dean, and said, son, there was no girl sitting there.”

The boy got up to have a smoke. He walked past the bathrooms and he saw the pay phone he hadn’t seen coming in, and he thought about the time of night and he thought about the last time he’d called—a few days after she’d gotten out of the hospital, and although she was upbeat, although she said she was happy to hear his voice, all he could hear in hers was that place: the hall walkers, the mutterers, the TV gazers, the weeping, the forgotten, the broken.

He stepped through the metal door and into the cold and sleeting night.

A man stood smoking under the yellow light, his back to the wall, one leg cocked and the heel of his cowboy boot set to the bricks. The sleet blew over the scant eve and fell at an angle to a place just a few inches in front of the toe of his other boot. He touched the bill of his cap and said, “It ain’t much but it’s dry.”

The boy put up his collar and got a cigarette in his lips and the man produced a lighter and lit him.

“Pretty night,” said the man. His face was deeply lined, the stubble on his jaw half gone to silver, his eyes in shadow under the cap bill. “You all got far to go?”

“Not too far.”

“That’s good. I believe this will turn to snow, and snow on top of ice, that’s about as fun as it gets.”

The boy nodded. He smoked. “You going far?”

“Not as far as I come. But it’s those last miles, ain’t it? Especially when you got something worth getting to.” He turned and caught the boy’s eye and the boy half smiled and looked away.

The man gestured at the trucks in the lot. “I’m guessing that one there. That Chevy.”

“Sorry?” said the boy.

“I’m saying that’s your Chevy there, the blue one.”

The boy stared blankly at the truck. He could see the man watching him in the corner of his eye. “What makes you say that?”

“Well. From the look on your face when you stepped out here I took you for a man who has not had the pleasure of this particular smoker’s lounge before. And I see them Wisconsin plates. And I see what looks like a fair amount of gear in the cab there, like a man on the road.”

The boy drew on his cigarette. “Which one’s yours?” He was scanning the lot for an off-duty cruiser, or a detective’s car.

“Black Ford over there with the topper,” said the man.

The boy looked. In the rear window of the topper was an American flag decal and on the bumper below was a sticker with the words SMITH &

WESSON and nothing more.

“I guess you could sleep in there if you wanted to,” said the boy.

“You could, it weren’t packed so tight a mouse can’t lick his nuts.”

They smoked and looked out on the foreshortened night. The patter of the sleet on the roofs and hoods of the trucks. The boy’s head felt clearer for the cold air.

“Coming here I found a dog by the side of the road,” he said. “A German shepherd. Had a collar and tags.” He shifted his weight and didn’t look at the man.

“Dead?”

“No.”

“Somebody hit him?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you do?”

“There wasn’t anything to do.”

“So what’d you do?”

“I finished him. Then I set him under a tarp by the fence. There’s a phone number on the tags.”

The man looked at the boy and looked out at the storm. “My daddy shot a dog once. Old Jim-Jim.” He smoked and shook his head. “I can still hear that rifleshot like it was yesterday.”

Out on the frontage road a police cruiser crept slowly by, the dash-lit face of the officer turning to take them in, filing their images away.

“Whoever hit that shepherd didn’t even slow down,” said the boy.

“Does that surprise you?”

The boy studied his cigarette. “Maybe they didn’t know they hit it.”

The man looked at him. “You always think so well of people?”

“No, not always.”

The man took a last pull and held the butt before him as if it were some strange new thing. “Used to be a man could chase a good meal with a good smoke and never get up from his table. You remember that?” He tossed the butt into a pothole brimming with slush and pushed off from the brick and touched the bill of his cap. “You take it easy now.”

“You too.”

“Stay out of trouble.”

28

There’s the jeep-thing, of course—somewhere. Stowed in a cave of scrub woods with more scrub piled on top to cover it. She knows when he’s used it by the smell of gas on him and the smell of the places he’s been, a hamburger joint, a barbershop, a bar. The smells inside these walls are finite and the ones he brings back from the outer world must be sniffed and identified, like guests confronted by the family dog. She sniffs for the smell of the motel where she stayed with her family. The restaurant where they ate, the Black Something. She sniffs for the smell of her mother’s perfume.

Once a month he fetches groceries and she knows it’s once a month by the dates on the magazines he brings, National Geographic, Field & Stream, and this is how she knows roughly how long she’s been here too. No newspapers. Nothing to tell of herself or of the search, nothing to tell of her brother—how long he lay there and who found him and how they got him down the mountain and how his leg

is and You never should’ve left him, never should’ve done that, lying there so scared and his leg all wrong, and the man said he saw on the news when he went down that the boy was fine so stop asking him—and sometimes he brings a bright new shirt from the boys’ department because he won’t shop in ladies’, nor buy tampons or liners, such things were already here, stacked and stacked on a shelf above the toilet. Th e sight of them telling her everything that first day, everything.

People see him when he goes in the jeep-thing, when he goes down to wherever he goes. Th ey must. He moves among them like anyone would. Completes transactions. Trades pleasantries. He wore a ring that first day but not since and there is no woman down there, she knows this as any woman would. Does anyone give him a thought? Th ink him strange?

Th e yellow coin of light has slipped over the ninth gap in the floorboards and she pushes herself up from the cot and shuffles into the bathroom following the blue beam of the hiker’s headlamp that precedes her like eyesight itself.

Bathroom. Please. It is like some prairie outhouse with a dry, house-style porcelain bowl. She pulls the thin door and fits the little hook into the eyelet, takes down a box from the shelf and drops one tampon unwrapped into the water bucket where it swells and floats like a small drowned thing. Four more in this box. Twenty more in each of the four remaining boxes. Was this her schedule, her tenure here? Behind the toilet, low in one corner in the dark old wood, is a patch of a lighter shade. Once, she got down on hands and knees and looked closely. Felt with fingertips. Faint small scarrings in the wood. Hatch marks. Months and months of calendaring, incompletely sanded away. It sickened her and taught her: Don’t count. Don’t mark. Don’t believe in a foreseeable end with its nothing to do but wait, and wait.