Her mother had been knockout beautiful and no good, and Dakotah had heard this from the time she could recognize words. People said that Shaina Lister, with aquamarine eyes and curls the shining maroon of water-birch bark, had won all the kiddie beauty contests and then had become the high-school slut, knocked up when she was fifteen and cutting out the day after Dakotah was born, slinking and wincing, still in her hospital johnny, down the back stairs of Mercy Maternity to the street, where one of her greasy pals picked her up and headed west for Los Angeles. It was the same day the television evangelist Jim Bakker, an exposed and confessed adulterer, resigned from his Praise the Lord money mill, his fall mourned by Bonita Lister, Shaina’s mother. Bonita’s husband, Verl, blamed the television for Shaina’s wildness and for her hatred of the ranch.
“She seen it was O.K. on the teevee and so she done it,” he said. He wanted to get rid of the set, but Bonita said there was no sense in locking up the horse after the barn burned down.
Verl and Bonita Lister were in their late thirties and stuck with the baby. If it had been a boy, Verl said, letting the words squeeze out around his roll-yer-own, he could have helped with the chores when he got to size. And inherited the ranch was the implied finish to the sentence. Verl had named Dakotah after his homesteading great-grandmother, born in the territory, married and widowed and married again only after she had proved up on her land and the deed was in her name and in her hand. At a time when the mourning period for a husband was two or three years, and for a wife three months, she had worn black for her first husband an insulting six weeks before taking up a homestead claim. Verl treasured a photograph showing her with the deed, standing in front of her neat clapboard house, a frowsy white dog leaning against her checkered skirt. She held one hand behind her back, and Verl said this was because she smoked a pipe. Dakotah was almost sure she could see a wisp of smoke curling up, but Bonita said it was just dust raised by the wind. Since that pioneer time, the country had become trammelled and gnawed, stippled with cattle, coal mines, oil wells, and gas rigs, striated with pipelines. The road to the ranch had been named Sixteen Mile, though no one was sure what that distance signified.
Bottle-blond Bonita (her great-grandfather had been a squaw man, and black hair was in the genes) made an early grandmother. Ranch-raised and -trained, she counted the grandchild as a difficulty that had to be met. She was used to praising thankless work as the right and good way, but what she was going to do without Jim Bakker’s exhortation and encouragement she didn’t know. First, an impaired husband, the endless labor and (sometimes forced) good humor that were expected of women, then a bad-girl daughter, and now the bad girl’s baby to raise. Verl Lister was burden enough. By himself, he could not run the ranch, and they often had to ask their neighbors to throw together and give them a hand. Of course, it was because he had been a wild boy in his youth, had rodeoed hard, a bareback rider who suffered falls, hyperextensions, and breaks that had bloomed into arthritis and aches as he aged. A trampling had broken his pelvis and legs, so that now he walked with the crouch of a bagpipe player. She could not fault him for ancient injuries, and remembered him as the curly-headed young man with beautiful eyes sitting on his horse, back straight as a metal fence post. But a man, she thought, was supposed to endure pain, cowboy up, and not bitch about it all day long. She, too, had arthritis in her left knee, but she suffered in silence.
Throughout the nineteen-eighties, it was a puzzle where all the ablebodied labor had gone. During the energy boom, oil companies had sucked up Wyoming boys, offering high wages that no one else, not even Wyatt Match, the county’s richest rancher, could pay. When the bust came, there were still no ranch hands for hire. “You’d think,” Verl said, “with all them oil companies pullin out there’d be fifty guys on every corner lookin for work.” But the hands, after their taste of roustabout money, had followed the dollar away from Wyoming.
Verl was a trash rancher, Wyatt Match said, oyster eyes sliding around behind his gold-rimmed lenses that darkened in sunlight, and not so much because Verl’s land was overgrazed but because there were fences down and gates hanging by one hinge, binder twine everywhere and rusting machinery in the pastures. There was an old sedan with the hood up in one of the irrigation ditches. A defunct electric stove rested on the front porch. The Lister cows roamed the roads, constantly suffered accidents—drowning in the creek in spring flood, bogging in mud pots that came from nowhere.
Spring was the hardest time, the weather alternating between blizzards and Saharan heat. On a snow-whipped evening, Dakotah setting the table for supper, Verl said a cow who had tried to climb a steep, wet slope that apparently slid out from under her had landed on her back in the ditch.
“Had me some luck today. Goddam cow got herself tits-up in the ditch couple days ago. Dead, time I found her,” he said in a curiously satisfied tone, squinting through faded lashes, winking his eyes, the same aquamarine as those of the wayward Shaina.
“Not every man would say that is luck,” Bonita said wearily. She went to the sink, stepping over Bum, Verl’s ancient heeler crippled by cow kicks, and began scrubbing out the only pot large enough to boil potatoes in quantity, a pot she washed and used several times a day.
“It is, in a way of speakin.”
She couldn’t have puzzled that one out even if she had had the time. With Verl, it was one thing after another. He went into the national forest to cut wood every fall, and she knew that he someday would cut himself in half with his cranky old chain saw. She almost hoped he would.
For Verl Lister everything turned on luck, and he had experienced very little of the good kind. His secret boyhood dream had been to become a charismatic radio man, meeting singing personalities, giving the news, announcing songs, describing the weather. All this ambition grew from a small, cheap radio he had earned as a boy selling Rosebud salve, riding from ranch to ranch on an aged mare. In bed at night, he put it under the covers and turned it whisper low, listening to honey-voiced Paul Kallinger on a high-watt border station and the lonely-hearts-club ads, pitches for tonics and elixirs, yodelling cowboys, and, by the time he was in his teens, Wolfman Jack, with his scandalous sex talk and his panting and howls. Yet he had never wanted to be like Wolfman Jack. Kallinger was his ideal.
He had no idea how to get into the radio game, and the plan faded as he grew into work on the home ranch. For fun he rode broncs, the source of his present miseries. He still kept the radio in his truck on constantly, had a radio in every room of the house despite the region’s bad reception. But the stations were pale imitations of the old border blasters of his youth. When NPR came to Wyoming, in the nineteen-seventies, he judged it dull and hoity-toity.
Growing up, Wyatt Match had been given every advantage. He’d had good horses from the time he could walk, trips abroad, hand-tooled boots. He went to an Eastern prep school and then to the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, he came back to Wyoming with one or two ideas about agricultural progress and tried too soon to get into the legislature when the times favored conservative, frugal ranchers as political leaders, not spendthrift rich men, a label his father’s private golf course had burned into an envious population. Over the years, he had become a sharp-horned archconservative with a hard little mind. After his youthful start flirting with useless ideas sown by the Eastern professors, he had dedicated himself to maintaining the romantic heritage of the nineteenth-century ranch, Wyoming’s golden time. Descended from Irish stock, he had milky skin that flamed with sunburn, and his ginger hair had turned a saintly white. His pride was a blue neon sign—“Match Ranch”—near his post-and-lintel gate that was large enough to be the torii of a Shinto shrine. After years of trying, he had finally made it into the state legislature. Local people were used to seeing his dusty Silverado bulge out onto the road and pass them on the right, throwing up a storm of gravel.
There was a tinge of superiority in all that he said, even in meaningless comments about the weather. Match seemed to indicate that blizzards, windstorms, icy roads, and punishing hail were for other people; he moved in a cloud of different, special weather. In the days when he was trying to push his way into the legislature with his radical ideas, a well-respected older rancher took him aside and told him, stressing his words, that Wyoming was fine just the way it was. Gradually, he learned the truth of that statement.
His political value increased after he married Debra Gale Sunchley, a Wyoming ranchwoman, a hard worker with a built-in capacity for endurance, who dressed in crease-ironed jeans, boots, and an old Carhartt jacket. The first Sunchley had come to Wyoming with the 11th Ohio Volunteers to fight Indians during the Civil War.
Debra Gale Sunchley Match was secretary-treasurer of the Cow Belles, and a member of the Christian Women’s Book Circle. Debra Gale had read no more than ten books in her life, but she knew she had as much right as anyone to give her opinion. After Wyatt divorced her to marry Carol Shovel, whom he had met on a California golf vacation, Debra Gale and her brother Tuffy stayed on as joint ranch managers. Match built his ex-wife her own house on the property, a simple one-story ranch with a big shed for her nine dogs. He paid her a wage. She was a good worker, and he wasn’t going to let her go.
As Dakotah grew up, the Lister ranch staggered along, Bonita making ends meet, worrying about money and Verl’s health. The only free time she had was when she knelt at the side of the bed saying her prayers, asking for the strength to go on and for her husband’s well-being.
“Don’t let yourself get old before your time,” she said impatiently to Verl, who seemed to look forward to old age. It took half an hour in the morning for him to limber up his joints. It irritated her that the child, Dakotah, had little interest in riding or rodeo, resisted 4-H meetings. Bonita could always think of some task or job for the girl, whether it was collecting eggs, picking over beans, or discovering the section of broken fence where the cows got out. Scraping the burned toast for Verl was the most hated task. Verl insisted on toast but would not part with the money for a toaster.
“My mother made good toast on the griddle,” he said. “It come already buttered.” But Bonita often burned the toast as she tried to cook eggs and hash, forgetting the smoking bread. Dakotah rasped the charcoal into the sink with a table knife.
Once, moved by some filament of need for affection, Dakotah tried to hug Bonita, who was scrubbing potatoes in the sink. Bonita briskly shoved her away. Sometimes Dakotah wandered around the ranch on foot, usually heading for a steep pine slope with a tiny spring, the ground littered with old gray bones from a time when a mountain lion had had her den beneath a fallen tree. Bonita herself never went for a walk, a wasteful dereliction of duty. She worked spring branding with the men and still managed dinner for all the hands, was back on a horse at November sale time overseeing the cows prodded into cattle trucks with Swiss-cheese sides, while Verl cut winter wood in the forest. Verl walked nowhere, was always in his truck when he wasn’t in the reclining chair he favored. He’d come into the house and sigh. “Well, I had me some luck today,” he’d say in his plaintive voice.
She waited. What followed might be one of his slowly unwinding stories that went nowhere, wasted her time.
“Filled up the gas can, got up there in the woods, and damned if the can hadn’t tipped over and spilled out all the gas.”
Yes, it was. He was speaking in his portentous, I’ve-got-grave-news voice. She nodded and scraped carrots, making the orange fibre fly. She was still in her red pajama bottoms, but had pushed the heifers out of the east pasture, mended a broken section of fence, got the mail, fed the bum lambs, and was now cooking dinner. There had been no time to pull on a pair of jeans. She wasn’t going to town anyway.
“And then I got to workin awhile and the chain broke.”
“Well, you surely had problems.” Once, oppressed by Verl’s self-pitying complaints, she had considered poisoning him. But they carried no insurance, and how she would manage alone she didn’t know. Then, too, she never forgot the joyous winter when they were courting, the long freezing drive in from the ranch in a truck with a broken heater to meet him at the Double Arrow Café. Her teeth chattering, she would walk from the snowy street into the wonderfully hot and noisy bar, Russ Eftink punching G5 again and again to make “Blue Bayou” play continuously, and Verl, the tough handsome cowboy, slouching across the room toward her and pulling her into the music. Into the pot went the carrots, and she started on the potatoes with an ancient peeler that had been in the kitchen since Verl’s great-grandmother’s day.
His voice lifted. “And my chest didn’t hurt today the way it done yesterday.”
“Uh-huh.” She rinsed the potatoes and cubed them so they would cook faster.
“I supposed to go see her, that doctor, tomorrow mornin at ten minutes before eight. I don’t know if I should now. Seein it didn’t hurt today.”
“Well, Verl, it might a been a matter a luck, don’t you think? That it didn’t hurt and you workin so hard.”
He squinted at her, trying to tell if she was being sarcastic. “It’s just I don’t want a leave you all alone, and me dead of a heart attack,” he said sanctimoniously.
She said nothing.
“So I guess I better go.” It was what he’d intended to do from the beginning.
Wyatt Match thought Verl Lister’s dilapidated place gave Wyoming ranchers a slob name. He personally thanked heaven that Lister was not on the main road. He often quoted Robert Frost’s line “Good fences make good neighbors” without understanding the poem or the differences of intent between those who made fences of stone and those who used barbed wire. He had picked the Listers to criticize, and whether it was Verl’s work habits, or the way he never looked straight at anyone except in the left eye, or Bonita’s aqua rayon pants suit, Wyatt Match made them out to be the county fools. In truth, Verl Lister’s cows were wild and rough because they were rarely worked; they suffered parasites, hoof rot, milk fever, prolapses, and hernias; they were shot by rifle and by bow and arrow; they fell on T-posts, ate wire, coughed and snuffled, stumbled into streams and drowned. Verl referred to Match as “him and his click—them bastards pretty much run things the way they want.” Yet if he met Match at a cattle sale or at the feed store he would smile and greet him cordially. And Match, in turn, would say, “How’re you, Verl?”
Verl resented Match, but it was Match’s second wife, Carol, whom he truly detested. She was a California woman with red eyebrows and foxy hair, clothed in revealing dresses and garnished with clanking bracelets. Carol Match had endless recipes for Wyoming’s betterment: bring back the train or start up a bus line for public transportation; invite black people and Asians to move in and improve ethnic diversity; shift the capital to Cody; make the state attractive to moviemakers and computer commuters. It got around that she had said Wyoming people were lazy. Lazy! Verl was outraged. Although he himself avoided as much work as he could, it was because he was half crippled and it was bad for his heart. The whole world, except this California bitch, knew that there were no more frugal, thrifty, and hardworking people on the face of the earth than those in Wyoming. Work was almost holy, good physical labor done cheerfully and for its own sake, the center of each day, the node of Wyoming life. That and toughing it out when adversity struck, accepting that it was not necessary to wear a seat belt, because when it was time for you to go you went. Not being constrained by a seat belt was the pioneer spirit of freedom.
“I’d sure tell her where to set her empties, but you can’t tell nobody like that nothin,” he said to Bonita. “She is too ignorant. It would just be water off a duck’s ass.”
One day in the auto-parts store, where Carol Match was checking to see if her order for a side-window sunscreen for the restored 1948 Chevy half-ton had come in, he listened to her talking to Chet Breen behind the counter. She was wearing a tiny blue skirt, with the hem just below her fatty buttocks, and a silky top that showed off her robust tanned breasts.
“They have got to put a traffic light at that intersection. Somebody is going to get killed one day.” Her bracelets rattled.
“Always been O.K. the way it is. Just got to be a little bit careful. People here never had no trouble with it.” Breen looked at her chest for a few seconds, then looked away, then again let his gaze slide down into the cleft.
“The place needs some new people,” she said.
Verl understood that she didn’t just mean importing strangers. She meant an exchange. For every California fool she brought in, a native would be removed. He was sure she had a list, and that he was on it. Breen said nothing, and that, thought Verl, had probably got him on the list, too.
“Wyomin is fine just the way it is,” Verl said to Bonita. “They come in here and . . . ”
For Dakotah, kindergarten was packed with revelations. On the first day the teacher, a fat woman with a pink, hairy sweater, asked the children for their birthdays.
“We’ll have a party each time it is somebody’s birthday,” she said with false excitement. Each child named a date, but Dakotah was confused. The boy next to her said, “December nine.”
The teacher looked expectantly at Dakotah.
“December nine,” she whispered.
“Oh, class! Did you hear that? Dakotah has the same birthday as Billy! That’s so wonderful! We’ll have a double birthday party! Two children have the same birthday! We’ll have two cakes!”
Riding home in the truck with Bonita, she asked if she had a birthday and if it was December nine.
“Well, of course. Everbody has a birthday! Yours is April 1st, April Fools’ Day. That’s when you play mean tricks on somebody. Like the April Fool trick your mother pulled on us. Why do you want to know?”
Dakotah explained that the teacher wanted to make parties at school, with cakes and games. And she didn’t know her birthday. And there was a song.
“Well, we never went in for that birthday stuff. We don’t do such foolishness. No wonder the school is always runnin out a money if they spend it on cakes.”
In school, she learned again what she already knew: that she was different from others, unworthy of friends.
The Listers did their duty, raising Dakotah, Bonita making peanut-butter sandwiches for her school lunch while listening to “Morning Glory.” The radio voices roared in the bathroom, where Verl crouched on the toilet with chronic constipation. His chest pain, which often migrated to some remote interior organ, where it pulsed and gnawed, had long baffled the young woman doctor from India, who tried to fit into the rural life by uncomprehendingly attending the local amusements of fishing derbies, calcuttas, poker runs, and darts tournaments.
“You see Jimmy Mint catch that three-hundred-dollar fish?” she asked, to put Verl at ease. He preferred to describe his torments in exquisite detail, drawing the devious path of a pain with his finger, tracking across his chest, down to his groin, around to the side and back again, rising to the throat.
At last the doctor sent Verl to Salt Lake City for advanced tests. Bonita went with him after arranging for Dakotah to stay with Pastor Alf Crashbee and his wife, Marva.
Dakotah, then seven years old, stood shyly in the hallway while Bonita and Marva Crashbee talked. Mrs. Crashbee spoke in emphatic phrases to set up her salient points. She puffed her cheeks and her nostrils flared. As Dakotah waited to be told what to do, she fell in love with a candy dish. The single piece of furniture in the hallway was a long, narrow table. On its gleaming surface rested Mrs. Crashbee’s car keys. At the farthest end was a small blue plate, close to a saucer in size, and shaped like a fish. On it were seven or eight watermelon-flavored Jolly Rancher candies. It was the amusing shape and color of the dish that entranced, its variegated blues ranging from cobalt to flushes of teal. Mrs. Crashbee noticed her gaping and told her to help herself, thinking that the poor thing probably never had much candy. After Bonita left, she said it again, in a spasm of urging.
“Go ahead! Help yourself.”
Dakotah took a Jolly Rancher and unwrapped it, not sure where to put the wrapper. The pastor’s wife led the way into the kitchen and pointed at a chrome can. When Dakotah tried to lift the lid, the pastor’s wife motioned her away, trod on a foot pedal, and the lid flew open. This, too, was novel. Dakotah blushed with shame, because she had not known about the foot pedal. At her grandparents’ house, trash went into a paper grocery bag that sat on a newspaper.
Bonita returned to pick her up. She told Mrs. Crashbee that Verl’s tests showed serious arthritis in his joints and lumps of bone where old breaks had healed badly, but that not much could be done. He needed a whole new skeleton, and his heart was weak. A bull had stepped on his chest when he was twenty and bruised his heart. They told him just to take it easy.
“He’s at home resting this very minute,” Bonita said.
On the way out, Dakotah’s coat sleeve somehow brushed the blue dish off the hall table. Jolly Ranchers skittered along the floor like pale-red nuts.
“For pity’s sake,” Bonita said, bending down to pick up the broken pieces. “Clumsy as a calf.” Mrs. Crashbee, shaking her head and thrusting out her chin, said, “It is nothing, just an old cheap dish.” But her tone implied that it had been part of a set of Royal Worcester. Bonita gave Dakotah a good leg whipping when they got home.
Mrs. Crashbee had a microwave oven that had magically heated the soup for lunch. When Dakotah described this marvel to Bonita a few days later, Verl, who was listening from his chair in the living room, snorted and shouted that he guessed he would stick with the good old kitchen stove. It was a way of saying that there would be no microwave oven for Bonita, who had shown some interest in Dakotah’s description.
Thin and with colorless brown-gray hair and grayish eyes, yet with a boy-size nose and chin, and no trace of her mother’s vivid beauty, Dakotah hunched over and kept to herself at school, was considered somewhat slow by her teachers.
When she was in the fourth grade, Sherri Match brought four kittens to school. “They’re for free,” Sherri said. “You can choose.”
Dakotah instantly wanted the tiny black one with white paws and a diminutive tail that stood straight up. She smoothed him, and he purred.
“You can have him,” Sherri said grandly, dispenser of munificence.
She brought the kitten home under her sweater, where he scratched and wriggled, terribly strong for such a small creature. In the kitchen, she gave him a saucer of milk. He sneezed, then drank greedily. Bonita said nothing, but her expression was chill.
“Where’d that cat come from?” Verl demanded at supper.
“Sherri Match was givin kitties away.”
“I bet she was,” Verl said grimly. “Well, it can’t stay here. Cats give me asthma. I’ll take it back to them goddam Matches.” And he picked up the kitten and strode out to the truck.
At school the next day, Dakotah mumbled to Sherri that she was sorry her granddad had brought the kitten back. “He said cats give him asmar.”
Sherri looked at her. “He didn’t bring it back. He didn’t come to our house. What’s asmar?”
When she approached her teens, the leg whippings stopped. Bonita seemed to soften through time or remorse. Yet as Dakotah filled out her grandparents became very watchful. She was not allowed to go to anyone’s house, or to walk to and from school. Social nights were out, and Bonita told her there would be no dating, as that was the way her mother had been ruined. All around them the gas fields opened up, and Verl squinted down the road to see if EnCana or British Petroleum was coming to free him from poverty.
She was curious about her mother. “Didn’t you save any of her stuff?” she asked Bonita after a secret rummage through the attic.
“No, I didn’t. I burned those whorish clothes and the stupid pictures she pasted on the walls. She was kind of crazy is what I come to figure. Always makin some mess or doin some outlandish thing. She never did nothin in the kitchen except one time she cooked a whole pot a Minute rice, caught a trout in the stock pond, and cut off a piece a that raw trout and laid it on the rice and ate it. Raw. I about gagged. That’s the kind a thing she did. Crazy stuff.”
Dakotah, knowing herself to be unattractive, was too eager to please, hungry beyond measure for affection. She was ready to love anyone. Sash Hicks, a skinny boy dressed perpetually in camouflage clothing, with a face and body that seemed to have been broken and then realigned, noticed her, attracted to her shy silence. She responded with long, intense stares when she thought he wasn’t looking, and daydreams that never went farther than swooning kisses. One day Mr. Lewksberry, the history teacher, in an effort to make his despised subject more interesting, pandered to the local definition of “history” by assigning his students an essay on Western outlaws. In the school library, turning the pages of the “Encyclopedia of Western Badmen,” Dakotah came upon a photograph of Billy the Kid. It seemed as if Sash Hicks were looking up from the page, the same smirky triumph in the face, the slouched posture and dirty pants. Now, in her daydreams, they rode away together, Sash twisting back in the saddle to shoot at their pursuers, Verl and Bonita. In real life, they began to think of themselves as a couple, meeting in hallways, sitting near each other in classes, exchanging notes. At home, she kept Sash a secret.
At the beginning of their senior year, Sash Hicks made up his mind. No judge of character, he gauged her a biddable handmaiden who would look to his comforts. He said, “Let’s get married,” and she agreed. She expected her grandparents would boil with rage when they heard the news. She said it quickly at the dinner table. But they were pleased.
“You’ll get along good with Sash,” Verl said, jovial with relief that she would soon be off his hands.
“Too bad Shaina didn’t think a that, might a saved her,” Bonita mumbled. Their approval was the closest thing to praise they had ever bestowed on Dakotah.
She dropped out of school a few months before graduation. The school counsellor, Mrs. Lenski, middle-aged and with murky blue eyes outlined in brown, tried to persuade her to finish. “Oh, I know how you feel. I completely understand that you want to get married, but, believe me, you will never, never regret finishing school. If you should have to get a job or if trouble comes—”
No, Dakotah thought, you don’t know how I feel, you don’t know what it is like to be me, but she said nothing. She found a waitressing job at Big Bob’s travel stop. The pay was minimum wage, and the tips rarely more than dimes or quarters, but it was enough to rent a three-room apartment over the Elks lodge with Sash.
Otto and Virginia Hicks and Verl and Bonita came with them to the town clerk’s office on her day off. After the brief ceremony, aware that some kind of celebration was proper, they went to Big Bob’s and sat in a booth, surrounded by truckers and gas-field workers. Mr. Castle, the manager, gave them free drinks and his best wishes. Sash ate three Big Bobbers with a quart-size milkshake. Dakotah ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream. Mrs. Hicks spilled cola on her lilac skirt and became impatient to get home and sponge it off. “I hope it don’t stain,” she mourned.
The Hickses were famous for their card parties, at which canasta was the game of choice, and the first prize was one of Virginia Hicks’s pecan pies, for she came from Texas and prided herself on them.
Bonita and Verl also hurried away, as Verl felt his old pain encroaching, moving stealthily toward his heart. None of them knew what it was like having a serious medical condition, Verl thought, nor what it was like waking in the morning and never knowing if he would see the yard light come on at twilight. He had given up on the clinic doctors and now followed the local practice of consulting a chiropractor. The chiropractor, a fat man with steel-rod fingers, told him that his problem was in his spine, and that most ailments, including cancer, were caused by bad, jammed-up spines. Verl’s spine, he said, was one of the worst he had ever seen. Verl slid out of the booth, and Bonita followed, leaving their balled-up greasy napkins on the table instead of putting them in the disposal bin. Dakotah, unable to shake off her job training, picked up after them, threw the cups and paper wrappers in the trash bin, something Sash Hicks (and Mr. Castle) noticed with approval. No one had paid for the food, and Mr. Castle told Dakotah he would deduct the cost from her next paycheck.
Sash Hicks discovered that her quiet demeanor masked a gritty stubbornness. After a few weeks, when they weren’t rolling on the new Super-Puff mattress, they were fighting over issues petty and large.
“Chrissake,” said Hicks, who was still in school, working toward his goal of becoming a computer programmer. “All I asked was for you to get me a beer and some a them chips and the salsa. That goin a break your arm?”
“Get it yourself. I been bossed around since I was a kid. I didn’t agree to be your maid. I worked a full shift and I’m tired. You should be gettin me a beer. You act like a customer. Go on, talk to the manager and get me fired!” She surprised herself. Where had this hard attitude come from? It must be from her rebellious, unknown mother. And maybe also from Bonita, who had her own raspy side when Verl wasn’t around.
Hicks, aggrieved, saw that he had made a dreadful mistake. Plus, she was flat-chested. After months of her obstinate refusals to bring him tools or beers or to pull off his stinking sneakers, they had it out. He said he was through, and she said good, but she was keeping the apartment, since she paid the rent. In a flare of accusations and blames, they agreed to divorce. He moved back to his parents’ house and indulged in a debauch of drinking and partying to celebrate his new freedom. When he failed his final exams, he joined the Army, telling his father that the Army would train him in computer programming and he’d get paid for it, too. It was even better than his original plan—it really would let him be all he could be. He used the investment bonus for a down payment on a new truck, which his family would keep for him until he came back.
But before he left for basic training Dakotah discovered she was pregnant.
“Oh, my God,” Bonita said. “You get hold a Sash Hicks right now.”
“What for? We are gettin a divorce. I’m Dakotah Lister now. He’s goin in the Army. Me and Sash are through.”
“Not if you are havin his baby. You’re not through by a long shot. You better call him up right now and stop this divorce mess.”
Dakotah would not call him. Why, she wanted to ask Bonita, didn’t you and Verl stop me from marrying him in the first place? But she knew that if they had protested she would have run off with Sash to spite them.
The months went by. Dakotah kept working at Big Bob’s, enjoying the apartment, having all that room to herself. Sometimes she talked to the absent Sash Hicks: “Get me a glass a champagne, Sash. And a turkey sandwich. With mayo and pickles. Run down the store and pick up some chocolate puddin. What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” She planned to keep the apartment after the baby came. She had not considered who would take care of the baby while she worked.
One day Mrs. Lenski, the school counsellor, came into Big Bob’s and sat in a booth by herself. She pulled a tissue from her purse and blew her nose, sopped at her watery eyes.
“Why, Dakotah. I wondered where you were these days. I see you and Sash are expecting. Excuse me, I think I’m getting the flu.”
“I’m expecting. He don’t even know. We broke up. You were right. It would of been better if I graduated. Get a better job than this.” She gestured at the booths, at the cubbyhole where the orders from the kitchen came out—Adam and Eve on a raft, axle grease, Mike and Ike, and Big Bob’s superburger, called a “bomb” in the kitchen.
“It could be worse,” Mrs. Lenski said. “You could have been a school counsellor. Heartbreaker job.” She gave Dakotah her card and said they should stay in touch. She came in once a week after that and always asked what Dakotah was doing, planning, thinking of for the future—those questions that adults believed occupied the thoughts of the young.
Mr. Castle asked her to come into his office, a windowless hole that barely contained his desk. A huge tinted photograph of his wife and triplet daughters took up most of the desk top. Boxes of paper cups were piled in the corner. Mr. Castle had a red, jolly face and a store of mossy jokes.
“Well, Dakotah,” he began. “I don’t have no problem with you havin a baby, but the company got a policy that no lady more than six months gone can work here.”
“That’s not fair,” said Dakotah. “I need this job. Sash and me split up. I’m on my own. I work hard for you, Mr. Castle.”
“Oh, I know that, Dakotah, but it’s not for me to say.” He cast a husband’s practiced eye over her. “That baby is expected pretty damn soon, right? Like in a few weeks? You can’t fool me, Dakotah, so don’t try.” All the jolliness had dried up. She understood that she was being fired.
The boy was born six days later, and Mr. Castle winced as he realized how close they had come to having a delivery during noon rush hour. He sent a potted chrysanthemum with a card saying, “From the Gang at Big Bob’s!”
Dakotah had somehow expected the baby to be a quiet creature that she would care for as one cared for a pet. She was unprepared for the child’s roaring greediness, his assertion of self, and for the violence of love that swamped her, that made her shake with what she knew must come next.
“I guess I got a put the baby up for adoption,” she said to Bonita, then broke down and bawled. “I had money saved up for the doctor, but now I don’t have my job and can’t pay the rent.” Bonita was aghast. The boy was legitimate, though deserted by his father. She could almost hear the Matches sneering that Bonita and Verl would not care for their own flesh and blood.
“You can’t bring more shame on this family. It’s almost as bad as what your mother done. You come up with some support money from that no-good bum you married, and your granddad and me will take care a the child. We’ll have to do it. Your mother’s sin unto the second generation. I want you to call up Mrs. Hicks and tell her that her precious son skipped out on his child. Tell her that you are goin to the child-support people and a lawyer. I’ll bet you anything he give the enlistment bonus to his folks.”
“I spose you want a squeeze money out a him,” Mrs. Hicks said to Dakotah. “He is in the Army, and we don’t know where. Someplace in California. He didn’t tell us where they was sendin him. Probably Eye-rack by now. He said he was bein deployed to Eye-rack. But we don’t know for sure. He didn’t tell me.” There was bitterness in her voice, perhaps the bitterness of the neglected mother, or of someone wishing to be in the land of fresh pecans.
Bonita sighed. “She’s lyin. She knows where he is. But them Hickses stick together tighter than cuckleburrs. We’ll have to take care a him. You name that baby Verl, after your granddad. That’ll make him more interested to help the boy.”
Among the privileges of Western malehood from which the baby benefitted were opened dams of affection in Bonita and Verl. Dakotah was amazed at the way Verl hung over the infant’s crib mouthing nonsense words, but she understood what had happened. It was the same knife slice of love that had cut her. He wanted Dakotah to change the child’s last name to Lister, but she said that although Sash Hicks was a rat he was still the legal and legitimate father and the baby would stay a Hicks.
Nor could Sash Hicks be located. He had been at Fort Irwin National Training Center and had sent home a cryptic letter: “I learned some Arab words. Na’am. Marhaba. Marhaba means hello. Na’am means yes. So you know.”
Neither Bonita nor Verl would hear of Dakotah’s going on welfare or accepting social services, for the Matches would rightly condemn them as weak-kneed sucks on the taxpayer’s tit. They talked it through at night, the yard light casting its corrosive light on the south wall. She could go back to Mr. Castle and beg for her old job. Bonita and Verl would care for the baby. Or—
“Way we see it,” Bonita said to Dakotah, “is you ought a join the Army yourself. They take women. You can support Little Verl that way. Finish your education. And find out how to get through the red tape that will track down Sash Hicks. Me and Big Verl will take care a him until you get through with the Army. A job at Big Bob’s don’t pay enough.”
Verl added his opinion. “When you come back, you can get a real good job. And if you can get one a them digital cameras cheap at the PX we’ll take pictures a him—” He nodded at the baby sleeping in his carry chair.
She could not believe how solicitous they had become. It was as though their icy hearts had melted and the leg whippings had never happened, as though they were bound by affection instead of grudging duty. She marvelled that this change of heart was rooted in involuntary love, a love that had not moved them when they brought her as an infant to the ranch.
Her grandfather drove her to the recruitment office in Crack Springs, harping all the way on duty, responsibility, the necessity of signing the papers so child support could come to them. He also drove her to the Military Entrance Processing Station in Cody. He had even picked out a specialty for her: combat medic.
“I checked around,” he said, winking his pinpoint aquamarine eyes, which, as he aged, had almost disappeared under colorless eyebrows and hanging folds of flesh. “E.M.T.s make good money. You could get to be a medic, and when you come back, why, there’s your career, just waiting.” The word “career” sounded strange coming out of his mouth. For years, he had ranted against women who worked out of the home. On the ranches, wives held everything together—cooking for big crowds, nursing the sick and injured, cleaning, raising children and driving them to rodeo practice, paying the bills, making mail runs and picking up feed at the farm supply, taking the dogs in for their shots, riding with the men at branding and shipping time, and, in mountain country, helping with the annual shove up and shove down to and from Forest Service leases—but were treated with little more regard than the beef they helped produce.
It was almost spring, last night’s small snow spiking up the dead grass in ragged points, balling in the yellow joints of the streamside willow, snow that would melt as soon as the sun touched it. She was joining the Army, leaving behind the seedy two-story town, the dun-colored prairie flattened by wind, leaving the gumbo roads, the radio voices flailing through nets of static, the gossip and the narrow opinions. As they drove through the town, she saw the muddy truck that was always parked in front of the bar, the kid named Bub Carl, who hung around the barbershop. The sun was up, warming the asphalt, and already heat waves ran across the road as the old landscape fell away behind her. Yet she felt nothing for the place or for herself, not even relief at escaping Verl and Bonita, nor sorrow nor regret at putting the baby in their care. As for the child, she would be coming back to him. He would wait, as she had waited, but for him there would be a happy ending, for she would return. She picked him up and stared into his slate-blue eyes.
“See? I’m comin back to get you. I’m comin back for you. I love you and will come back. Promise.”
She went to Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, for basic training. The first thing she learned was that it was still a man’s army and that women were decidedly inferior in all ways. The memory flashed of a time when she had gone shopping with Bonita in Cody. Bonita favored a pint-size mall that featured Cowboy Meats, Radio Shack, and a video store. Dakotah chose to wait in the truck instead of trailing after Bonita, who was a ruthless and vociferous shopper for the cheapest of everything. Dakotah watched a man and his two children outside Grum’s Dollar Mart, where there was a tiny patch of grass. The man had a hard red face and a brown mustache. He was throwing a Frisbee gently to the boy, a slow toddler unable to catch it. Against the wall of the Dollar Mart stood the girl, a year or two older than the boy, but the father did not throw the Frisbee to her. Dakotah smiled at the girl staring so fixedly at the father and son. Finally, Dakotah got out of the truck and walked over.
“Hey there,” she said to the girl. “What’s your name?”
The child did not answer but flattened herself against the grimy wall.
“What d’you want?” the father said, letting his arm down, the Frisbee sagging against his leg.
“Nothin. Just sayin hello. To the little girl.”
“Yeah. Well, here comes your granny. Git home and don’t be botherin my kids.” The little girl gave her a look of pure hatred and stuck out a long yellow tongue.
“What’re you doin talkin a him?” Bonita said.
“I wasn’t! I was sayin hello to the little girl. Who are they?”
“He’s Rick Sminger, one a Shaina’s old . . . friends. Least said about him the better. I was you, I wouldn’t ask no questions. Get in and let’s get goin.”
The worst thing about the Army, the thing she knew she could never get used to, was the constant presence of too many people, too close, in her face, radiating heat and smells, talking and shouting. Someone who has grown up in silence amid vast space, who was born to solitude, suffers in the company of others. So homesickness took the shape of pining for wind, an empty landscape, for silence and privacy. She longed for the baby and came to believe she was homesick for the old ranch.
She made a low score on the aptitude test, edging into the borderline just enough to continue on. She thought about Verl’s suggestion that she become a combat medic. She had no other ideas. At least she would be helping people. She named it as her choice of a military occupational specialty. During basic training, she heard that becoming a combat medic was very tough. But she had learned C.P.R. in sophomore gym class and thought she could study enough to pass a few tests.
After basic training, she went to Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, for E.M.T. training. All of her fellowvolunteers seemed to have been practicing medicine since kindergarten. Pat Moody, a wiry blonde from Oregon, was the daughter of a doctor and had heard medical talk for years. Marnie Jellson came from a potato farm in Idaho and had cared for her sick mother for two years. When the mother died, she had enlisted. Tommet Means had been an E.M.T. since high school. Chris Jinkla came from a family of veterinarians and had accompanied his father on calls a thousand times. “I grew up bandaging paws,” he said.
She and Pat and Marnie became friends. Pat played the guitar and taught Dakotah enough chords to string together “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” Marnie had a collection of movies that they watched on weekends. She had a potato tattooed on her left calf and knew dozens of potato jokes. Both of them talked about their families, and finally Dakotah explained that her grandparents had bought her up, told about Sash and the breakup and the baby.
“You poor kiddo,” Marnie said. “You’ve been through a lot.”
“How can it be,” she asked them, “that you feel homesick for a place you hate?” She thought of the neutral smell of dust, like stones or old wood, of summer haze from distant forest fires, of rose-rock outcrops breaking from the rusty earth. She thought of the run-down town, every other building sporting a weathered “For Sale” sign.
“Maybe it’s the people you are homesick for, not the place,” Pat said.
And, of course, it was. She saw that right away. Not just Baby Verl but even closed-up Bonita and Verl hitching along on his bad legs.
She bought a camera and sent it to Bonita and Verl, begging them to take photographs of the baby. She taped dozens of them on her wall. She wrote long letters to Baby Verl, covered the margins with symbols of kisses and hugs. She and Pat and Marnie raided the PX for baby toys, miniature bluejeans, pajamas imprinted with tanks and planes.
They went to dinner at restaurants, and Dakotah learned that it was bad manners to stack the empty dishes. “I was just helpin the waitress out,” she explained.
At a Japanese place, one night, Pat persuaded her to try sushi.
“What is it?” she asked, looking at the hump of rice with an orange slice of something on top.
“It is salmon and rice, and that is wasabi, a kind of grated horseradish. It’s hot.”
She ate it, and the texture of the salmon startled her. “It’s not cooked!”
“It’s not supposed to be cooked.”
“It’s raw—raw fish! I ate it!” Her stomach heaved, but she kept it down and even ate another. A day later, she remembered Bonita describing Shaina putting raw trout on some Minute rice. Was it possible that her mother had heard somewhere about sushi and decided to try it—Wyoming style? Was it possible that her mother had been exhibiting not craziness but curiosity about the outside world? She told Pat and Marnie about it, and they decided that was it: curiosity and a longing for the exotic.
As the tsunami of reading material, lectures, slides, videos, X-rays, computer tutorials on anatomy, diseases, trauma, physiology, obstetrics, pediatrics, shock, and a bewildering vocabulary of medical terms swept over the group, Dakotah did not think she would pass the E.M.T. Basic Registry Exam. And, even if she did, then came primary-care training and the horror courses in chemical, explosive, and radiation injuries.
“I will never get to Whiskey level,” she said calmly to Pat, thinking of needle chest decompression and clearing airways, both of which she dreaded.
“Come on, you’ll make it,” Pat, who aced every test, said. Dakotah passed the E.M.T. test, but at the bottom of the class. Marnie flat out failed.
“Suggest you think about changin to military police,” the squinty-eyed, spotted-banana-skin instructor said to Dakotah. “Medicine is not your thing. I know I’d sure hate to be lyin there with my guts hangin out and here comes old rough-hand Dakotah tryin to remember what to do.”
Pat went to Fort Drum, in New York, for training at the medical-simulation center, where darkness, explosions, and smoke mimicked realistic battlefield situations. She sent Marnie and Dakotah a letter describing Private Hunk, a computerized patient-simulation mannequin who could bleed, breathe, and even talk a little. He was complete in every detail, constructed for countless intubations, tracheotomies, catheterizations. He suffered sucking chest wounds, hideous traumas. He bled and moaned for help, and on occasion shrieked an inhuman bird call, like a falcon. He was hot or cold, at the instructor’s wish, could run a fever or suffer severe hypothermia.
“He’s got a cute little dick,” Pat wrote. “I’m in love with him.” Dakotah answered the letter, but they never heard from Pat again.
There were many letters from Bonita, the words looping downhill across the page and ending with a two-line prayer. She always began with news of Baby Verl’s progress—cutting teeth, crawling, standing up, how Verl’s old dog Bum had taken to him, following him everywhere and letting Baby Verl pull his ears, how Verl had got another dog, Buddy, because Bum was getting old, and how Buddy loved the baby even more than Bum did; and only when she had detailed every wonderful thing Baby Verl had done did she report on other things. Big Verl, she said, had quit his chiropractor and was now going to a fat woman who gave massages and charged terrific prices: “At least she advertises they are massages. If Verl wasn’t Verl, I would think it was something else.” Dakotah felt a rare and even painful rush of affection mixed with pity for Bonita, although she suspected she was only writing out of a sense of duty.
A few letters came from Mrs. Lenski, alternately sardonic and cheerful. It seemed to Dakotah that, as soon as she had left, the town started dying off. One of the Vasey twins had been killed and the other severely injured in a car crash at the intersection, where everybody knew to slow down. Some truck with Colorado plates had blasted through and T-boned them. And, Mrs. Lenski wrote, two lesbian women with a herd of goats had bought the Tin Can house and planned to make cheese and sell it locally. Dakotah was shocked to see the word “lesbian” on the page of a letter like any ordinary word. Tug Diceheart and two other hands riding for the Tic-Tac had been caught making meth in the bunkhouse and had been arrested. Juiciest of all, Carol Match had left Wyatt and returned to California to become a real-estate agent. Dakotah wondered if Verl was gloating.
In Iraq, both Dakotah and Marnie changed their M.O.S. to military police. They had become close, closer than she had ever been to Sash. Dakotah, for the first time in her life, had someone to talk to, someone who understood everything, from rural ways to failing at tests. Marnie said they were in love. They talked about setting up house together with Baby Verl after they got out. One day they were in a Humvee, Dakotah clutching a machine gun, on their way to a checkpoint to search Iraqi women.
“Yup, here we are with the fuckups. M.P. is where the dumb ones end up. Supposed a be the stupidest part of the entire Army.”
“Don’t you think some of the officers could get that prize?”
“Yeah. So probably M.P.s come second. Second-dumbest, something to brag about.”
They had learned that the checkpoints were intensely dangerous, and after a few weeks Dakotah developed a little magic ritual to keep herself alive. She rapidly twitched the muscles of her toes, heel, calf, knee, hip, waist, shoulder, eyebrows, elbow, wrist, thumb, fingers on the right side, and then repeated the series for the left side. Bonita had sent her a silver-plated cross that she recognized. It had always been in the second drawer of the kitchen dresser with a tortoiseshell comb, a pot holder too nice to use, a pair of small kid gloves that had belonged to Verl’s famous great-grandmother, a red box with a sliding lid filled with old buttons. She wore the cross once, but it got tangled with her dog tags and she put it away.
She hated searching the Iraqi women, knew that they hated her doing it. Some of them smelled, and their voluminous, often ragged and dusty burkas could conceal anything from a black-market radio to baby clothes or a bomb. One young woman had six glossy eggplants hidden under her garment. Dakotah pitied her, unable even to buy and carry home a few eggplants without an American soldier groping at her.
On the day the I.E.D. exploded under the Humvee, she had not completed the left side of the protecting muscle twitches, choosing a third cup of coffee instead. It happened too suddenly for anything to register. One moment they were travelling fast, the next she was looking up into the face of Chris Jinkla.
“Moooo,” she said, trying to make a cow joke for the veterinarian’s son, but he didn’t recognize her and thought she was moaning. She felt nothing at that moment and tried her magic muscle-twitch sequence, but something was wrong on the right side.
“I’m fine, Chris. Except my arm.”
The medic was startled. He peered into her bloody face. “My God, it’s Pat, right?”
“Dakotah,” she whispered. “I’m Dakotah. I’m fine, but I need my arm. Please look for it. I can’t go home without it.” She turned her head and saw a heap of bloody rags and a patch of skin.
“Marnie?”
Her right arm was still there, though cruelly shattered, and the best they could hope for, said the doctor at the field hospital, was to amputate and save enough stump to allow for a prosthetic. “You’re young and strong,” he said. “You’ll make it.”
“I’m fine,” she agreed. “How about Marnie?” She knew as she asked.
She was shipped out to Germany with other wounded soldiers, gradually aware that there was some awful knowledge hovering, something worse than her mangled arm, which had been amputated, something as bad as losing Marnie. Maybe they had discovered that she had cancer and wouldn’t tell her. But it was not until she was sent to Walter Reed that she heard the bad news from Bonita, who stood at her bedside with a curious expression of sorrow and, looking at the stump of her arm, ghoulish curiosity.
“Oh, oh,” Bonita whispered, and then burst into streaming tears. Never had Dakotah seen anyone cry that way, tears pouring down Bonita’s cheeks to the corners of her mouth, splashing from her jawline onto her rayon blouse as though her head were filled with water. She could not speak for long minutes.
“Baby Verl,” she finally said.
“What?” Dakotah knew instinctively that it was the worst thing.
“Ridin in the back a Big Verl’s truck—” And the tears began again.
The story came slowly. The eighteen-month-old child had loved riding with his great-grandfather, but this day Verl had put him with the dogs in the open truck bed. Big Verl was so proud to have a boy and wanted him to be tough. The dogs loved him. Bonita said that several times. The rest of it came in a rush.
“See, Verl thought he’d just sit with the dogs. They done it before. But you know how dogs hang over the edge. Baby Verl did that, too, near as we can tell, so that when the truck went down in one a them dips it threw him out. It was a accident. He fell under the wheels, Dakotah. Big Verl is half crazy. They got him sedated. The doctors are fixin it up for you to come home.”
Dakotah threw back her head and howled. She began to curse Bonita and Verl. How could he be so stupid as to put a baby in the bed of a pickup? The shouting and crying brought an irritated nurse, who asked them to keep it down. Bonita, who had been backing away, ran into the corridor and did not return.
“It takes a year, Dakotah,” said Mrs. Parka, the grief counsellor, a fullbosomed woman with enormous liquid eyes. “A full turn of the seasons before you begin to heal. Time does heal all wounds, and right now the passage of time is the best medicine. And you yourself must heal physically as well as spiritually. You need to be very strong. What is your religion?”
Dakotah shook her head. She had asked the woman to write to Mrs. Lenski and tell her what had happened, but the woman said it was part of the healing process for Dakotah to face the fact of Baby Verl’s passing and tell Mrs. Lenski herself. She wanted to choke the woman until she went blue-black and died.
“There are other ways for you to communicate. The telephone. E-mail?”
“Get away from me,” Dakotah said.
At the end of the summer, she was still there, in a grimy old motel somehow connected to the hospital, getting used to the prosthesis. She sat in the dim room doing nothing. She struggled to understand the morass of papers about disability allowances, death allowances, Baby Verl’s support. One of the official letters said that support payments for Baby Verl Hicks should never have been paid to, by, or through Dakotah but through the child’s father, S/Sergeant Saskatoon M. Hicks, currently at Walter Reed hospital recuperating.
That Sash was somewhere at the hospital amazed her. That she had learned about it amazed her more, for the confusion and chaos of lost patients was like the nest of rattlesnakes Verl had once shown her, a coiling mass under a shelving boulder. He had fired his old 12-gauge at them, and still the torn flesh twisted.
One afternoon a volunteer came to her. Dakotah saw that she must be rich; she was trim and tanned and wore an elegant raspberry-colored wool suit with a white silk shirt.
“Are you Dakotah Hicks?”
She had forgotten they were still married. Sash’s divorce action had gone dormant when he left for basic training.
“Yes, but we were gettin a divorce. And then I don’t know what happened.”
“Well, your husband is here in the complex, and his doctors think you ought to see him. I should warn you, he has suffered very severe injuries. He may not recognize you. He probably won’t. They are hoping that seeing you again will . . . sort of wake him up.”
Dakotah said nothing at first. She did not want to see Sash. She wanted to see Marnie. She wanted Baby Verl. She half believed he was waiting at home, ready to play patty-cake. She could feel his small warm hands.
“I don’t really want to see him. We got nothin to talk about.”
But the woman sat beside her chair and cajoled. Dakotah breathed in a delicious fragrance, as rich as apricots in cream and with the slight bitterness of the cyanide kernel at its core. The woman’s hands were shapely, with long pale nails. Because it seemed that the only way to get rid of the woman was to agree, in the end she went.
Sash Hicks had disintegrated, both legs blown off at mid-thigh, the left side of his face a mass of shiny scar tissue, the left ear and eye gone. It was almost like seeing Marnie, whom she knew was dead, although she kept hearing her voice in corridors. Sash’s nurse told her that he had suffered brain damage. But Dakotah recognized him, old Billy the Kid shot up by Pat Garrett. More than ever, he looked like the antique outlaw. He stared at the ceiling with his right eye. The destroyed face showed no comprehension of anything except that something was terribly wrong.
“Sash. It’s me, Dakotah.”
He said nothing. Although his face was ruined and he was ravaged from the waist down, his right shoulder and arm were muscular and stout.
She didn’t know what she felt for him—pity, or nothing at all.
Words came out of the distorted mouth.
“Ah, ah, eh.” He subsided as though someone had unscrewed the valve that kept his body inflated and upright. His moment of grappling with the world had passed, and his chin sank onto his chest.
“Are you asleep?” Dakotah asked. There was no answer, and she left.
The trip to the ranch was hard, but there was nowhere else to go. She dreaded seeing Verl. Would she scream and punch him? Grab the .30-30 on top of the dish cupboard and shoot him? Sonny Ezell’s old taxi moved very slowly. Her prosthesis was in her suitcase. She knew they would have to see the arm stump to believe what had happened, just as she would have to see Baby Verl’s grave.
They passed the Match ranch, unchanged, and turned onto Sixteen Mile. The days were shortening, but there was still plenty of light, the top of Table Butte, layered bands of buff, gamboge, and violet, gilded by the setting sun. The shallow river, as yellow as lemon rind, lay flaccid between denuded banks. The dying sun hit the willows, transforming them into fiery wands. Light reflected off the road as from glass. They seemed to be travelling through a hammered red landscape in which ranch buildings appeared dark and sorrowful. She knew what blood-soaked ground was, knew that severed arteries squirted like the back-yard hose. A dog came out of the ditch and ran into a stubble field. They passed the Persa ranch, where the youngest son had drowned in last spring’s flood. She realized that every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost boys early and late, boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers, and unsecured truck doors. Her boy, too. This was the waiting darkness that surrounded ranch boys, the dangerous growing up that cancelled out their favored status. The trip along this road was a roll call of grief. Wind began to lift the fine dust, and the sun set in haze.
When she got out at the house, the wind swallowed her whole, snatching at her scarf, huffing up under the hem of her coat, eeling up her sleeve. She could feel the grit. Every step she took, dried weeds snapped under her shoes. Sonny Ezell carried her suitcase to the porch and wouldn’t take any money. Someone inside switched on the porch light.
She did not attack Verl. Both of her grandparents hugged her and cried. Verl fell to his knees and sobbed that he was sorry unto death. He pressed his wet face against her hand. He had never before touched her in any way. She felt nothing and took it to mean recovery. There was a large color photograph of Baby Verl on the wall. He was sitting on a bench with one chubby leg folded under him, the other dangling and showing a snowy white stocking and miniature sneaker. They must have taken him to the Wal-Mart portrait studio. He held a plush bear by its ear.
Bonita brought out a big dinner— fried chicken, mashed potatoes, string beans with cream sauce, fresh rolls, and for dessert a pecan pie that she said Mrs. Hicks had sent over. She said something about Mrs. Hicks that Dakotah did not catch. It was a terrible dinner. None of them could eat. They pushed the food around and in hoarse, teary voices said how good everything looked. Verl, perhaps trying to set an example, took a forkful of mashed potato and retched. At last they got up. Bonita wrapped the food with plastic film and put it in the refrigerator.
“We’ll eat it tomorrow,” she said.
They sat in awful silence in the living room, the television set dark.
“Your old room is made up,” Bonita said. In the quiet, the kitchen refrigerator hummed like wind in the wires. “You know, them Hickses couldn’t afford to go to Warshinton and see Sash. They need to know about him. They can’t find out a thing. They telephoned a hunderd times. Every time they call that hospital, they get cut off or transferred to somebody don’t know. They need for you to tell them. It’s bad, them not knowing.”
She could not tell them how much worse it was to know.
The next morning, they could all drink coffee. Mourning, grief, and loss were somehow eased by hot, black coffee. But still no one could eat. At noon, Dakotah left Verl and Bonita and went for a walk up the pine slope. A new power line ran through the slashed trees.
At supper, the welcome-home meal reappeared, heated in Bonita’s microwave, which she had bought with some of Dakotah’s money. They finally ate, very slowly. In a low voice, Dakotah said that the chicken was good, though it had no taste. Bonita made more coffee—none of them would sleep, anyway—and cut Mrs. Hicks’s pecan pie. Verl gazed at the golden triangle on his plate, seemed unable to lift his fork.
There was the creak of the kitchen door, and Otto and Virginia Hicks came in, tentatively. Bonita urged them to sit down, got coffee for them. Mrs. Hicks’s red eyes went to Dakotah. Her hand shook and the cup stuttered against the saucer.
“What about Sash?” she blurted. “You seen him. We got that official letter that says he is coming home. They don’t say how bad he was hurt. We can’t find out nothing. He don’t call us. Maybe he can’t call us. What about Sash?”
Bonita looked at Dakotah, opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again.
The silence spread out like a rain-swollen river, lapping against the walls of the room, mounting over their heads. Dakotah thought of Sonny Ezell’s taxi rolling slowly past the bereft ranches. She felt the Hickses’ fear begin to solidify into knowledge. Already, grief was settling around the tense couple like a rope loop, the same rope that encircled all of them. She had to draw the Hickses’ rope tight around them until they went numb to the pain, had to show that it didn’t pay to love.
“Sash,” she said at last, so softly they could barely hear. “Sash is tits-up in a ditch.”
They sat frozen, like survivors in the aftermath of an explosion, each silently calculating his chances. The air vibrated. At last Mrs. Hicks turned her red eyes on Dakotah.
“You’re his wife,” she said.
And Dakotah felt her hooves slip as she began her descent into the dark, watery mud. ♦