“I don’t know.”
“Well, I do. And out on the Old El Rancho Road there will be no TV. None.”
“I like TV.”
“No you don’t. You just think you do.”
“That’s not true.”
“Did you ever live in a house without one?”
“No.”
“Then what makes you think it wouldn’t be better?”
She was silent.
“Listen, Tommie. It’s a beautiful story, okay? It isn’t messed up at all. If you’re expecting it to be, I’ll just stop now. Maybe you don’t want to hear it.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good. Are you comfortable?”
“Yes.”
“And you want to know what happens next?”
“Just tell it.”
“Our girl went up to the windows and looked into the dark kitchen. The horse helped her in over the sill. When she came out she was carrying a bag of soft white bread, and she and the horse crossed the field again, lumbering, crossed the highway, and settled beneath a maple tree all black and blue in the twilight. The girl leaned her body against the horse. He was warm. She opened the bag and one soft white pillow at a time fed herself, and then the horse, both of them chewing, happy because they’d escaped, but heavy and slow because they were so, so tired. The horse could hardly keep his beautiful red face up, and the girl could scarcely keep lifting the bread to his mouth. A breeze pulled the ends of her hair and all the trees turned into night trees. And there they slept, so soundly that the whole night passed in a single perfect moment.”
Tommie started out of sleep. “I still have both pillows.”
“I know.” He smiled. “You looked so good sleeping on them. You looked just like a sleepy freckled pig. I was watching you. I was watching your round belly rising under the blankets, and watching you hog all the pillows. You were snoring!”
“I wasn’t even asleep.”
“You were.”
“I’m sorry. Here.” She pushed one of the pillows at him, and the other. “Have both.”
“Uh-oh. She wanted to turn him into a pig too. But he wasn’t having any of that. Besides”—he pointed at the green curtains drawn across the little frame window—“it’ll be daylight soon. We got to get out and catch the morning. I’ll step outside while you get dressed.” He was up on his feet.
“Did we sleep?”
“What a question.”
“You slept with your boots on.”
“I guess I did.”
“What time is it?”
“Don’t you worry about the time. Don’t you worry about a thing, little miss piggy. I’ll watch the calendar for us both, okay? The Mondays and the Tuedays and the Wednesdays.” He looked at her bare arms and shoulders above the polyester edging on the wool blanket, then opened the door and stepped out into the dark.
Let’s say there were none of those truss towers of galvanized steel lining the highway this next day. No telephone poles. No wires. Say that Lamb’s truck and the highway were the only relics of the actual world. The road was overcome with native grasses and aromatic flowers, with wild onion and pussytoes. Soft gaping mouths of beardtongue, and mountain lover, and buckbush and drowsy purple heads of virgin’s bower. Say it was like this that they crossed the Midwestern line beyond which the sky spreads itself open—suddenly boundless, suddenly an awful blue.
Tommie sat cross-legged in the passenger seat and Lamb glanced sideways thinking that if she were in fact to break away from the truck, somehow, he would let her go.
“What’re you thinking about over there?”
“Nothing.” Outside her window was the roofless shell of a pine board homestead. She had her shoulders hiked up, her little mouth open, a crease between her brows.
“Sort of beautiful the way it’s all destroyed.”
“I know.”
“You sound smarter every time you agree with me.” He winked, stopping the car on the shoulder. “We’re in Wyoming now. Were you wondering? You can always just ask and I’ll tell you exactly where we are.”
“Okay.”
“That out there.” He pointed to the little ruin of sloping, black-mouthed house. “That could have been the first homestead in the Wyoming Territory. Maybe eighteen fifty. That little broken home could be Cheyenne. First mark on a fresh and hairy green plain.”
“It’s yellow.”
“You can imagine it green.”
She looked out the window.
“You want to go see?”
She shrugged.
“I know,” he said. “It’s farther than it looks and you’re tired.” He raised his voice a bit. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime journey back in time. But our girl was sleepy.”
“Okay. Let’s get out.”
He raised his fingertips to his ear.
“Yes!” she said. “Open the door!”
“That’s exactly how I want to hear it. I’m just your guide, right? This is your trip. This is your week. I’ll have this cabin for the rest of my life. I’ll have this highway. But this is the only time you’ll get to see it. So come on. Let me hear it: It’s my week, Gary.”
“It’s my week, Gary.”
“Good. I want you to be greedy about it.” He unlocked the doors.
They went over the gravel shoulder and down the irrigation ditch and up again onto hard dry ground. To the north, scores of slanted wooden snow fences set in the grass like empty easels. The wind was loud and the sagebrush shook like knotted gray fists. As far east and as far west as the eye could see, wood posts and a three-wire fence. A blue plastic bag turned over itself in the grass.
“Oh,” she said. “We can’t.”
“Oh, you sweet little thing.” He lifted one of the wires between its barbs and held it open. “That’s just a fence.”
She stepped through and he followed.
“Ready?” he said, brushing his hands on the thighs of his blue jeans. “Set. Go!” He took off running, his black-and-silver head flashing in the dazzle. “Try to keep up, you lazy pillow pig!” She ran after him and he grinned back at her puffing and bobbing over the uneven ground, stopping her with an arm across her belly when she approached the house. The tops of her cheeks were pink behind her freckles, and her hair stuck in sweat to her temples.
“Careful,” he said. Rusted orange nails pointed up from the overturned boards.
Glassless windows, all the house wood gray. A rocking chair the color of dirt sat oddly intact and perfectly still on the wood-slab porch.
“Someone must have brought it out,” he said, looking at it. “You see any beer cans, you’ll know for sure.”
“Kids come here?”
“I bet some guy dragged a mattress out here in his old man’s truck and hauled out a bunch of flashlights and cheap wine and paper cups and cigarettes, and brings out a different girl every Saturday night.”
“Gary!”
He put his hands up in the wind. “Hey, I’m just a guy telling you how it is. It’s better if you know. Consider yourself warned.”
“Sick.”
“Do you want to go inside and see?”
“No. It gives me a spooky feeling.”
“I know,” he said.
“Do you think they died here?”
“Who? The girlfriends?”
“No, dummy.” She punched him lightly in the arm and pulled down on her T-shirt, lifted by the wind like a thin yellow flag off her belly. “The people who lived here.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Indians. Snow. Fever. Smallpox. Any number of things. But there’s no graveyard, is there? Which makes me think they probably just moved on.”
“That’s not as fun to think about.”
“Don’t get melodramatic on me, Tom. We’ll never survive the week.”