“How about a snack,” I say, and she says “Tsseeeee” and we go to the fridge and I pull out a string cheese and unwrap it for her and then she’s off running with the cheese waving like a floppy baton in her mitt. We need to go for a walk, I think. For once I am dressed and ready at the moment I have the impulse to go and I decide that Honey can wear her pajamas and first walk, then ride on me and we will walk a good long way. But then the prospect of covering the somehow interminable stretch required to get out of Deakins Park is so unappealing that I think no, we will drive the car to another location and start the walk from there. But then we’ll have to get in the car and get out of the car and Honey will scream when I put her into the car seat and I can’t bear to hear her scream right now and I scrap this idea and so we find ourselves on the pavement of Deakins Park again, taking big long strides to try and get out and over the railroad tracks and onto the road to somewhere.
Honey seems to have entered a stage where her only direction is forward, fast, and yet she lacks the coordination to really run. So she does a sort of swift headlong forward walk as though she is running against a great wind, her arms mostly staying at her side, her head and shoulders leading as she moves forward forward forward, falling frequently onto her hands and knees and moaning and holding up her hands for me to dust them off. She hates to have mess on her hands and she’s not sure how to dispatch the mess, but I’m here and I wipe off the gravel bits and dust and kiss her palm and she’s off moving forward again until we finally cross the railroad tracks and I scoop her up and put her in the Ergo which has been hanging off my back like a tattered cape.
I decide we have to do a loop. I think like I think every time we leave the damn house that the thing that makes me really crazy about being up here is that it is so draining to walk a great distance and then you have to just turn around and do it over again, reliving the same monotonously grand landscape in the same high heat and hot buffeting winds, with the same curious effort of moving your body at high altitude, the same slap of your flat feet on hard asphalt under the pale empty blue, the same nowhere to go.
“We need a horse,” I say to Honey, strapped to my front and sitting heavily. “Horse.” “Hone,” she says. “That’s right!” I say. She is lulled by the heat and silence and motion of my body and I wonder like I wonder every time whether it is harming her that I keep putting her in these long-walk situations where she has no verbal stimulation, just her mother, a big silent broody anchor that she is attached to like a barnacle. But it is hot hot hot and my head and my eyebrow throb and I turn us back around and finally we are home and it is 3:45 and I give her milk and put her into the crib to see if she will take another nap and she seems to be thinking about it and I go on the deck and smoke a cigarette and collapse.
Cindy emerges onto her deck with a terrible look on her face and then she sees me and we say Hi.
“What happened to you?” she says, “My god, your face is all busted up.”
“Took a little tumble down the stairs,” I say breezily. “Nothing serious!” She shakes her head. “What’s new with you,” I ask. “Did you all howl at the moon?”
“We went over to Manny’s.”
“You don’t look too happy.”
“They arrested Chad Burns over that eighty-six grand.” There are so many things about this I don’t understand that I just say, “Wow.” “He’s sitting in jail right now, they’re trying to humiliate him.” “That’s too bad,” I say.
“It’s fucking criminal, is what it is,” Cindy says. She puts out her cigarette and moves inside the house purposefully, the conversation disappearing with our smoke in the hot still air.
“Can I ask how your husband died?”
We are in the car with Alice, having navigated with reasonable success and minimal badness the end of the nap the dressing the loading into the car of Honey and the drive to the motel to collect her. She looks over at me with a peculiar expression and says, “He wrote a long letter, packed up his briefcase, took the bus over to the city courthouse, sat down in front, opened his briefcase, poured kerosene all over his flannel, and set himself on fire.”
I am stunned and I swerve the Buick as I look over at her and then back at the road.
“Jesus,” I say. “Was he… protesting Vietnam?”
“No,” she says. “Then… why,” I ask, and she says, “No, I mean, no, what I said isn’t true.” I glance over at her again and then back at the road.
“Okay.”
“He just died,” she shrugs. “His heart gave out when he was a young man.”
“That’s so sad,” I say, and immediately start misting up because there’s so much sorrow sloshing around the world. “But why the new version?”
“He was so good, it seems sad to me that he didn’t go out in a blaze of glory. He just worked and fretted himself to death.” I can see her look over at me out of the corner of my eye. “He was a very special person.” I make a sort of bullshit sad smile where your mouth extends flat across your face.
“Anyway, there’s no one left now who knew him or the girls. I can test out all kinds of wild stories.” I look over again and she has an owlish expression.
“I could see that,” I say. “I know it’s not equivalent but that’s sort of how I feel in Paiute. Everyone’s dead or moved on and I don’t trust the people who stayed behind with the historical record.”
“But I can’t do it,” she says, as though I hadn’t spoken. “The things that happened, happened.” I feel brave enough to ask what I have been wondering.
“And your kids?”
“Oh, they really died.” Okay. Honey blats in the back.
To get to Antelope Meadows you drive out past the bird refuge out past the dump to the side of town where the rim rocks grow. Big brown rock formations shot through with pale and glimmering veins, they pop dramatically out of the flat earth here and there, sometimes a mantle of soil and grass draped along the top of them. I point at them to change the subject.
“Rim rocks,” I say. “Pretty,” she says.