“The whole time?”
“Look, Tom. I’ll be frank with you, right? I’m always going to be frank with you.” He took her by the shoulders and stooped, so they were facing each other. “Here’s the thing. I feel a little funny about the possibility of that old man peeking in the windows and seeing us, and well, getting ideas.”
“Like he’ll know you’re not my uncle.”
“Exactly.”
“But you act like an uncle. Even like a dad.”
“Well, my dear, that’s tremendously kind of you to say, but excuse me for saying I’m not exactly sure either one of us knows what a dad ought to act like.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And when all the lights in a house are on and a man is outside in the dark, he can see in. Have you ever tried that?”
“Yeah.”
“So.”
“We’ll use candles. Like the olden days.”
“Whatever you want, piggy. But we’re going to have to take care of some business before nightfall.”
“Like lunch.”
“And dinner. And ice. And a cooler. Because this guy is thirsty for a cold beer. And of course your candles. And whatever else we need. Like warmer clothes for you.” He held open the cabin door and they stepped outside. “Think you can stand another hour twenty in the car? See some of the local color?” He shut the door and tried it. Locked.
“I have to get dressed.”
“Yes, you do. Hey,” he called into the shop after her, “don’t put your shoes and socks on yet.”
When she came back out barefoot and dressed in her dirty T-shirt, Lamb swooped her up and she shrieked and twisted. “Careful,” he said. “You don’t want to black my other eye.” She let herself go like a rag doll. “Damn, kid. You’re a heavy sack. What’ve you been eating?”
“Goose livers.”
“Ah, well. Goose livers.” He carried her around to the back of the Ford and opened the hatch and set her down. “Don’t move.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
She crossed her chest and kissed her forefinger.
“You’re sweet.”
She heard him go back in the shop and clanking metal and rushing water, and when he came back it was with a towel over his shoulder and a carton of powdered soap and a full plastic bucket.
The girl pulled her legs up. “No way,” she said. She scooted back into the Ford. “Too cold.”
“Oh, stop it.” He got on his knees. “Give me your feet.”
She shook her head.
He opened and closed his hand, beckoning. “Come on,” he said. “Nothing comes next till you let me.” She watched him. “Come on. I got a towel. Your feet are filthy. You got to wash them before you put them in your socks. What if we can’t find any kid socks in town? These’ll be the only ones you have all week.”
She inched forward.
“Good girl.” He opened the tub of soap. “We’ll say that in this story you’re the princess, right? And I’m just the grizzly old guy who lives in the barn and cleans your feet.”
She looked out over his head while he scrubbed her feet and ankles and calves, pushing his fingers between her toes and admiring her arches. He put his fingers to her heel and lifted her foot. “It’s the perfect foot,” he said. “You have the perfect foot. If I were a sculptor,” he said very gravely, “I could not have a conceived of a more perfect foot, Tommie.”
They drove an hour out. A thousand, two, three thousand feet down to a high plateau dark with trees, edges of the highway shaggy red with Indian paintbrush. Cattle wrenching yarrow from the weeds with huge square teeth. A crow perched on the shoulder of a dead pronghorn, its carcass deflated in the gravel. They drove through three cattle gates, black cows and bulls among the trees and on the hillsides and in the rocks and knee-deep in empty irrigation ditches on both sides of the highway. The two-lane widened into a four-lane. They passed a ramshackle taxidermist’s, a drive-through taco stand. Tack and Feed. Snake Creek Mercantile. Pizza Hut, Sears, Kum & Go, Napa Auto Parts, and Safeway. Cardboard-colored condominiums set up in a row like empty shoe boxes, a stage set for children, a temporary game. They passed an adult boutique in a windowless concrete building. A broken metal swing set at the base of an outcropping of red-and-green striped rock. A skinny teenage girl in red-and-white dots pushing a stroller. Empty lawn chairs outside the Roundup Motel. A life-size plastic pinto rearing up from a little island of volcanic rock and weeds.
“Where is everybody?” she asked.
“Somewhere else.”
Downtown was eight blocks long: little yellow, blue, and green houses with cement-slab porches, crammed among leafless cottonwoods, dirt lawns, and cracked sidewalks. There were two gas stations, one boarded up. One tall grain elevator rusted at its metal seams, a small glassless window at the top, the gaping black mouth eating rain and snow and sleet, eating all the cries and accusations the wind carries with it, of failed enterprise and family farms. A one-story brick liquor store advertising fishing and hunting licenses; a lopsided pickup in forest-service green and rotted wood-handled ranch tools scattered around it. A mom-and-pop hardware. A country kitchen. A white-painted church.
Lamb parked across the street from the kitchen, a ratty shingled awning shading red and yellow letters painted on the windows. CHICKEN-FRIED CHICKEN $3.99 and beneath that: COLD BEER $1.00. A tier of lumpy pies turned beneath an orange light in the window, and inside a huge old man in suspenders bent over his newspaper at the counter, holding his tiny white ceramic coffee mug with a massive, giant-knuckled hand. A sign posted inside the diner said ROOMS FOR RENT, and Lamb stopped in the middle of the empty street, wide for running cattle, and looked up. “You could come back here to live when you’re sixteen,” he said. “You could be the waitress.”
“And live up there?”
“We’d get you your horse, and a flowered apron for your waitressing dress—one with long sleeves, it keeps you covered, and buttons all the way up the front. And everybody in town would know you.”
“Where would I keep the horse?”
“And everyone would love you. All the patrons would want you to marry their sons and nephews and grandsons. Smart people. And you’d know all about them. Names of their children, names of their shepherds and blue heelers. Health of their old folks. And you’d go to the town meetings in long skirts, and you’d pin your hair up, like women should. And smile at them with your perfect milk white teeth. And I’d stay out at the little house, all old and gray, and you’d feel sorry for me so you’d come on your horse with slices of peach pie and cold meat loaf, wouldn’t you?”
“It wouldn’t be because I felt sorry for you.”
“You wouldn’t, would you?”
“No.”
“Come, dear.” He took her arm. “I’m going to feed you really good.”
They crossed the street, walking toward the image of a man and a girl in the windows before them as if finally, after all this travel, they were approaching themselves. There they were—hovering somewhere inside the restaurant, walking on air, looking out at their street bodies, beckoning like ghosts.
Lamb held open the swinging glass door. Flatware rang against ceramic plates from the fat man at the counter, a skinny man and his wife in a booth. Bobby Vinton played on the AM radio. The waitress was a teenage girl with a big belly and short dark hair and thick eye makeup. She led them to a small Formica table flecked with gold and topped with a chrome napkin holder, a bottle of ketchup, a bottle of hot sauce, and forks and steak knives rolled up tight in white paper napkins. Magpies lined up on the telephone wire across the street. The waitress put laminated menus on the table, just wiped and still wet.