Dog on the Moon

DOG ON THE MOON
by Helen Harding
Dedicated to the characters in this book who, although entirely fictional, took on a life of their own.
Copyright Helen Harding 2013 ISBN 978 1 304 33308 7
 
DOG ON THE MOON
A Novel


CHAPTER ONE


   The cat was stuck in the chimney again. Wendell could hear his yowling and scrabbling. Soot was rattling down and getting on the carpet.
  “I’m not getting you out of there, not until morning. Get yourself out. You got yourself in so get yourself out. I’m going to bed.” He bent himself and peered up the chimney. “Good night!”
When he went outside to roll the garbage bin to the road it was snowing. He looked up at the chimney. It was his fault. He had removed the mesh to clean out the leaves when the chimney wasn’t drawing as it should, and he hadn’t replaced it because it had rusted all to pieces. Now the cat was stuck in there for the second time in a week. Tomorrow he’d rescue the damn cat and find some more mesh. Tonight he was going to bed.
  In the morning he heard nothing from the chimney. Dead or gone? He borrowed Mike’s ladder. He didn’t have to ask. Mike had told him to take it when he needed it because his wife Arlene did not like to have her drinking disturbed. Arlene watched him from the window. She was wearing some kind of black evening dress. She let go the curtain. He heard her shout something.
He set the ladder up against the chimney because he did not want to be sliding about on the slippery composition roof tiles. That meant he had the ladder expanded all the way out, but it was OK. He reached down the chimney and felt around. When he thought he’d fall into the chimney himself if he stretched any further, he felt the cat’s cold fur at his finger tips. All his weight was on his groin, doubled over the chimney top. He was able to grasp a handful of wet, sooty fur. He pulled the limp cat out and dropped it onto the frozen ground. Most likely dead, he thought, even if it wasn’t stiff. He was extra careful coming down the ladder. He picked up the cat and walked toward the garbage bin. It was still full. He set the cat on dead leaves at the top of the bin. The cat was black and white, its fur matted and filthy. As he closed the bin he thought for a moment that it clawed at him.
Tiffanee, the neighbor girl, was banging on the door.
  “Where’s Skitsy? He didn’t come for his milk.”
  “In the garbage. Dead.”
The girl went out to the bin and picked up the bedraggled cat. It squirmed weakly in her arms. “He’s not dead. What made you think he was dead? I’m taking him home. You don’t deserve to have him.”
  “Fine, fine. Keep the damn thing. Don’t think I’ll pay for no vet.”
  “Fuck you,” said the girl, “that’s the garbage truck right now. He’d be on his way to the landfill if I hadn’t got him!” Wendell made a run at the girl.
   “Git!” He said. “Get your ugly little ass out of here and take the damn cat with you and quit bothering me!” He slammed the door on her indignant face and grabbed his coffee cup. The coffee was cold but he always drank it that way. Cold and black with no sugar.
   When Wendell returned the ladder Arlene was in the front yard with her old pit bull, waiting for it to do its business. Arlene had pulled her husband Mike’s barn coat over her black velvet. Since his hands were occupied with the ladder Wendell nodded in her direction, but she turned her head away and took a drag on her cigarette. “Be that way,” he muttered.

   It didn’t take long to close up the house. He washed the dishes and emptied the refrigerator. Turned off the heat and the hot water heater and unplugged the phone. He’d fixed the insulation on the water pipes the year before, but he left the water dripping in the kitchen sink.  The swamp cooler on the roof was already drained. It was good to get on the road. It was where he always wanted to be. On the way out of town he stopped at the post office to put a hold on his mail.

  When Tiffanee came home from school she saw Arlene on the ladder. She was painting her window frames a liverish red.
  “That looks nice,” Tiffanee said. Arlene continued to paint. She was doing a meticulous job. When she had completed one window she started to descend the ladder with the paint can and brushes in her hand. She wasn’t feeling too good. She had to stop for a minute and close her eyes, but she made it down all right. She was still wearing the black velvet dress and the Carhartt jacket. There was dark red paint on the frayed sleeves. In the kitchen she got a bottle of vodka out of the freezer and sat down to watch Judge Judy.
  “Has Wendell gone again?” Mike asked when he got home.
  “How would I know? You thinking I’m having an affair with the little bastard? If his trailer’s gone he’s gone.”
  “His trailer’s gone.”
   “Then he’s gone. Throw me a cigarette will you hon?”
   Arlene was dead to the world in a dreamless sleep when the fire trucks came. Mike went out to see if he could help but they didn’t need him.

C H AP T ER    T W O

   Wendell spent the first night parked at a Walmart. It felt so good to be away from home. All those folks standing back from their windows watching the street. Watching each other watching each other. And watching him.
   In the morning he went over to McDonalds and had a senior coffee. He knew where he was going. Back to Tonopah. Back to Tonopah to see if he could find the girl playing the nickel slots. He knew her name. Svetlana. But she called herself Lana. There was something about her. Something hopeless. He liked that in a woman. He’d have to ask around. See if anyone knew her.
   He turned onto a BLM dirt road before it was dark. The silence would be good. He liked silence. He liked the thought of the long road ahead. He parked in a bullet strewn clearing by the remnants of a campfire. In the night he went outside to take a piss. It was cold and clear. No moon. He thought for a moment that the stars were throwing diffuse shadows across the desert, but he knew that could not be.

   “Does he have a cell phone?” Arlene laughed in the fire chief’s face. The fire chief noted alcohol and tobacco.
  “What about family? Does he have any family, family or friends or anyone who might know where he went?” Arlene laughed again.
Mike said, “He was pretty much a loner.”
  “You could find out if he has insurance,” said Tiffanee. If he has insurance he’ll be back to claim it you can bet.”
The fire chief looked at Tiffanee. What was she getting at? She must know something.    Or she wanted him to think she did.
  “We still have more testing to do. Don’t cross that yellow ribbon. It’s there for a reason.” Tiffanee shrugged.
It was a brick house and was only partially destroyed. The living room chimney that had been set into the exterior wall of the house had collapsed, but the widow- maker hanging chimney was still in place in the wall between the kitchen and the mud room. Stove pipes from both rooms fed into the brick chimney five feet above the floor, where for more than a hundred years it had ended improbably, without support. The house would have to be destroyed. “We should have let it burn,” the fire chief said.

   Lana was gone from Tonopah. Wendell asked at the motels and casinos. At the restaurants and bars. He thought someone would remember her accent but no-one did. He went to the brothels also, just to be sure. The workers only stayed three months, he thought, and it had been almost that since he was there. She could have been a hooker, but she hadn’t acted like one.
He tried to remember what she had said. He wondered if he’d teased her too much about her accent because to be honest when he thought about it, she had got a little snippy when he kept repeating what she said. Not on the first day, but the second day.    She’d talked about Ukraine, where she was from, and her mother and brother who still lived there. Probably he had talked about himself too much. He did that when he’d had a few drinks.    And politics. He was a Libertarian, and she’d never heard of Libertarians so he had to explain. Mostly they just laughed. That was what he remembered. That was what he wanted back. But Lana was gone. That first night was good, he thought. They’d had dinner then gone to a bar. She’d come back to his trailer, but not too much happened. They were both drunk. She did take the twenty he offered. Then the next day they met at the slots again, but she didn’t seem so friendly. So why did she show up? He didn’t understand
   Next day he gave up looking for her. Maybe he was cured of Lana. Maybe he wanted a woman with a lot of lipstick and a loud laugh. Women like that could be fun. But he couldn’t get Lana out of his mind.

CHAPTER THREE

   She knew they were out there. She could hear them screaming. It was dark and as Lana awoke, she thought there might have been an earthquake and she was trapped and slowly suffocating and all around her in the smothering darkness were others, trapped and sucking for air as their broken bones went septic and the blood oozed mercilessly out. She was at a rest area on Interstate 17.
   It was the Hudson’s Bay blanket that did it. It was a double, uncut blanket, and the weight of it had trapped her in the night. It was cold so she had wrapped herself in the blanket which she kept on the back seat of the Camry. She had a bad dream that would mess her up all day. But she was warm.
  She reached for the cup holder and sipped at cold coffee. She pulled on her quilted nylon coat and went to the rest rooms and cleaned her teeth and combed her hair and put on fresh eye make-up. She went into the handicapped stall and changed her underwear and did a little wet-wipe cleaning. When she left the rest room it was still dark, but there was pale green sky behind the mountains to the east. Today she had to do laundry. And find a job. She had four dollars and five cents. She had to find a job. She got back in the car and put her face in her hands and wept.
   She thought of Other Person, who she called Dexter, and the kids back on the res. She did not think of returning to them, to the shoebox house, the last still occupied in a group of four. No water no heat no hope. Dexter drunk half the time. And the kids’ thousand mile stares.
   I wish there were people pounds, she thought. I’d have a room and a bed and food and water and friends to talk with. I’d go to the fence and make eye contact with people looking for a companion. I might even find a happy home. If I didn’t they’d put me out of my misery unless it was no kill.
   She stopped crying and got the peanut butter out of the glove compartment and ate a couple of spoonfuls, then she drank the last of the coffee.  She had dropped her accent. It was hard to remember all the time. She’d slipped up once or twice with that little creep in Tonopah, but he was too dumb to notice.  She pulled out of the rest stop and headed for Sedona. She needed to get a job. The problem was that she couldn’t stand being indoors. It drove her nuts to have walls shutting her in. She had to be able to get out, to see the outside from a door or a window. A big chunk of outside. Even then sometimes she couldn’t stand it. She’d just go. Get the hell out and go sit on a rock somewhere. When that happened she’d have to go back and try to get her pay check and they wouldn’t always give it to her. That was bad. Motel housekeeping would be good. She could do that if all the doors opened to the outside and not a freaky dark windowless corridor.

   She was sitting on a bench outside an ice cream shop. She was hungry. An old woman sat down on the bench as far away from her as she could, perching half her butt on the bench and clutching her purse. She was wearing slippers covered with golden sequins.
  “Can you lend me a twenty?” Asked Lana.
  “No.”
  “What about ten?”
  “I’ll call the cops if you ask again. There’s an ordinance...”
  “You ever been hungry? I’m hungry.”
  “Yes. I been hungry. Get a job.”
  “I’m trying. It’s not that easy.”
  “There’s a food bank isn’t there?”
  “There is? Where?”
   “How should I know? Probably over in Cottonwood. I don’t know.” Lana tried to make eye contact.
  “Listen to me you old bitch. Give me a twenty and I won’t hurt you.”
  “Take what you like you whore!” The old woman flung her purse at Lana.    She stuck out her legs and pointed her toes at the sky and cackled like the Wicked Witch of the West.
  “Fooled you there, didn’t I? Get away from me or I’ll call the cops.”
Lana picked up the ugly old purse and walked away.
There might be a secret pocket. But the old hag didn’t seem concerned. She was still sitting on the bench laughing her head off and kicking at the sky.
   It was a nineteen-eighties knock-off trophy purse, and it held nothing but the stale remnants of some Saltines and scraps from their packaging. Lana looked back at the old woman. She was still sitting on the bench and nodding her head as though she were talking to herself. Lana held up the purse.
“What is it dear?” The gray irises of the old woman’s eyes had dissolved into the blood flecked whites.
  “I’m giving you back your purse.” She put the purse on the bench beside the old hag.
  “That’s all right dear. There’s nothing in it.” She leaned down to pick up a tiny, wizened dog who shivered at her feet. “Come on, Scruffy, let’s go home.”
  “Wait!” Called Lana, “Please wait!”
The old woman shuffled away, her arms cradling the little dog, purse dangling from her elbow. Lana felt like crying again. She needed to eat.
  “Jesus would help me!” She called.
The woman turned to look at her. “Believe that if you want,” she said, and continued walking.
Lana sat down on the now empty bench. She thought about ice cream. Sweet. Creamy. Smooth. Rich.
   Iris stood on the porch steps and reached in her coat pocket for her key. Not there. Then she remembered that she’d brought her purse with her for some dumb reason and put her key in the card pocket. She put Scruffy down and looked in the purse.
  “Damn!” She said. The key was not there. The girl must have taken it. She turned to look down the street. Had that bitch followed her home? Iris didn’t think so. Still hugging Scruffy she retraced her steps to the bench outside the ice cream store. The girl was still there, her toes in the cheap sandals kicking at the sky. The girl was not smiling.
  “Where’s my key?”
  “How should I know?”
  “It was in my purse. Now it ain’t there. I saw you turn it upside down. It must of fell out.” Iris walked over to where she thought Lana had been standing and peered down at the ground. She saw the key first, but Lana snatched it up.
  “This it? What’ll you give me for it?”
  “I won’t give you nothing! Give me the damn key!” Lana was dancing in her broken sandals. She was waving the key at Iris who was snatching at air trying to grab it.
  “You got a bathroom?”
  “’Course I got a bathroom.”
  “Let me use your bathroom and I’ll give you your key.”
Iris thought she’d call the cops and claim a home invasion when the girl was in the bathroom, but when Lana saw the tiny windowless shower and toilet she panicked. The little duplex was so small, so dark. No. She could not go in. She sat on the tiny front porch and flung the key into the house. She was crying.
   Iris kicked off her golden slippers and fed Scruffy his mini kibbles. She brought a cup of tea to the weeping woman on the porch.
  “What’s wrong? It ain’t dirty! First you force me to let you in then you won’t go in there! I’m calling the cops.”
  “I can’t go in places like that.” Lana wiped her eyes and saw the ruined eye make-up smeared on her hands. She wiped at her eyes again to try and even out the mess.
  “If they throw you in jail you’ll be in a place a lot worse!”
  “I know. How do you think I got this way?” Lana turned her head and looked into the dark little house. “You got any bourbon? You get me drunk and I’ll go in there.”

   Iris sat in the early morning sunlight that filled the kitchen and she wondered about Lana. It took a while, but the woman had eventually got her courage up and used the bathroom, taken a handful of fig bars and walked into the sunset. There’s some strange story there, Iris thought. Probably many stories. She’d been in prison, that was for sure, but then who hadn’t? Not too many people that Iris knew. But that didn’t explain her weirdness. Iris knew it was not her business, but it was fun to imagine. She thought of her own hungry years. A winter night in a freight car where she robbed
a boy of twelve. Threatened him with a ripped up soup can and took his last few dollars off of him. She wondered where that kid was now, sixty years later. Retired. Living winters in a trailer park on Padre Island. Or maybe his boy bones were still lying in a blackberry tangle outside some Oregon town where the cold and hunger finally did him in. “Hope not,” she said to Scruffy who had brought  his food dish and dropped it at her feet.    Such is life. She poured herself more coffee, and poured some for Scruffy, because he liked coffee too, especially with a lot of milk.
   The woman was asleep on the porch. Huddled up on the floor under her ugly coat. Something was wrong there. She’d said she had a car so why hadn’t she gone back to it? Iris reached for the phone. Time to call the cops. Then she changed her mind. The girl was at the front door, shivering.
  “Bathroom?” She asked. Iris brought the girl a cup of tea and a granola bar. Lana
wished the tea was coffee but what could she say?
  “Thank you.”
Iris sat on a green plastic lawn chair.   “You got to get a job. While you’re looking you can stay here if you want. I won’t charge you nothing if you don’t use too much hot water and don’t mess up the bathroom or the kitchen if you want to use it.”
  “Thanks, Iris. I’ll pay you soon as I get a pay check.”

  Lana hit a few motels. She tried to look normal. Friendly even. Her face felt like a piece of styrafoam when she tried to smile. She couldn’t go back to that miserable little house and the deranged old woman. The car was out of gas though. She needed things like clothes and shampoo. Near the edge of town she saw an imposing gate and a rustic but elegant sign saying ‘Inn of the Ancients Private’.  She could see little cabins grouped round a main building with a deep verandah and glass walls. A swimming pool. A man reclining in a poolside chair reading in the warm sun. She walked up the shallow, carefully swept steps toward the reception sign.
   A woman in a shalwar kameez ran down the steps shouting “Deidre! Deidre!” A boy of about fourteen stood on the top step shouting “Mom, remember? Deidre’s dead! Deidre’s dead!”
Lana skipped neatly past both of them and entered the reception area.
The woman ran past Lana and took her place behind the counter. The boy sat down on the steps.
  “I’m looking for a job in housekeeping,” Lana said. The woman at the counter raised an eyebrow.
  “You know anything about this place?” Lana shook her head.
  “Well as you see we are a small resort. We specialize in shall we say difficult guests.” Both her eyebrows were now half way up her forehead.
  “Have you worked in a ‘difficult’ environment before?”
  “I’m difficult myself,” said Lana, turning away.
  “Let me introduce myself,” the woman called, her eyebrows now returned to normal, “my name is Elf.” Lana thought that the woman looked elfish, with her round pale eyes and spiked black hair.
  “I’m Lana.”
  “We have trouble keeping competent staff. Would you like to give it a try?”
What the hell, thought Lana.
  “Yes,” she said.


CHAPTER FOUR


   Wendell stood in the road and stared at the ruin of his house. He’d get the lot cleared and sell it. Good riddance. He needed to find the fire-proof box though. It was still in there somewhere. Or it should be. It had his birth certificate in it, and the ten thousand seven hundred dollars he’d saved. And the title to the house and the insurance papers and the franchise papers. Herbie still owed him on the franchise.
   Tiffanee was standing by the yellow tape. She’d done her hair in tight braids. She looked ridiculous.
  “You thinking about your box?” She asked, “I wouldn’t go near that chimney for nothing. Just so you know I didn’t take it.”
  “Well that’s nice to know,” said Wendell.
  “Believe what you like. You’re gonna have to wait ‘til they burn it and that chimney collapses. Then you’ll find out.”
  “She got your box you know,” Arlene called from her porch. She was wearing 501s and a metallic gold top with a low neck.
  “I don’t got your box. I gave it to Chief Schmidt.”
  “And what did you take out of it before you gave it to him?” Wendell was restraining an urge to strangle the child.
  “I couldn’t get it open.” Tiffanee was scowling and biting at the ratty tail of a braid.
  “You know Tiffanee, you’re going to die alone, and your body will never be found. I can see it in your eyes.” Tiffanee blinked and ransacked her mind for an appropriate reply. Arlene laughed loud and reached for her cigarettes.

   Wendell needed a plan. What to do. Where to go. He’d liked being a kid in Northern Michigan, but he didn’t fancy going back there.    He remembered his mother in the kitchen door, her arms loaded with laundry off the line. Stiff as corpses. Funny thing was, when they thawed out they were almost dry. The times when the heating oil froze so thick the stove wouldn’t light. No. He might visit his sister in the summer some time though.  Then he had an idea. He’d journey around looking for Lana. Even though he didn’t care anymore it would give him a reason. He hadn’t had much of a reason since he sold the store. And now the house was gone.

   Arlene was fixing her nails and planning a yam casserole. She was thinking that they could put a rental on Wendell’s lot. She’d been in construction. She could do a lot of the work. She had two yams in the fridge but they could be bad. She’d have to check. She wondered how much Wendell would want for the lot. Tiffanee was sitting on the porch steps. She was oddly quiet.
  “He didn’t mean it.” Arlene said. Tiffanee shrugged and started undoing a braid.
  “Everyone dies alone.”
   Arlene was thinking that a green apple off the old tree by the fire hydrant might be good with the yams. She wondered if Madge at Hair Today could do her hair yam colored. That would be nice. Especially with matching nails. Not yam colored lipstick though. Contrasting lip color, and she’d wear her sage green sweats. That would be nice. She went in the house and looked in the fridge. She
threw the yams in the garbage.
  “You want to go to the store with me?” She called to Tiffanee, “remind me I need toilet paper and yams and a yellow cake mix - oh and miso soup mix and some KoolWhip - remind me OK?” She rummaged around in her leopard print purse. “Now where in hell’s my car keys?”

   Wendell had a ton of paper work. The trailer was hot in the middle of the day, and he was damned if he’d start the generator to run the a.c.  The library was open Wednesday to Saturday noon to five, but on Saturdays and whenever school was out the place was full of kids looking for porn or even doing their homework for all he knew.  In the old days libraries were silent places, but now the kids yelled back and forth like they were in a playground. Wendell growled and glared and signed papers and made copies. He had to go to the post office to pick up his mail because a fire truck had taken down his mail box and he didn’t see the point of replacing it. Arlene and Mike could replace it if they bought the place. All he wanted was out. He’d parked the truck and trailer under the tree on the north side of the park, but a deputy banged on the window one night and told him he couldn’t live on the street, so he moved back onto his property with the burned out house looming over him. He’d have to see if the fire department would burn it down all the way once the inquiry was complete. Mormon brick wasn’t up to much but it didn’t burn like wood. He wanted it down. Flattened and cleared.
He ran into Arlene at the market.  She was with the little bitch who most people thought burned down his house.
  “So what happened to the cat?” He asked Tiffanee.
  “Skitsy? Found him squished into the road.”
   Arlene was pawing through the yams. She held up a yam for inspection then discarded it. Wendell said hi.
  “You still thinking of buying my place?” He asked.
  “Thinking. Tif, go get the KoolWhip before I forget.”
She turned to Wendell. “We’ll pay cash for the cleared lot. Fifteen thousand.”
  “Out of your mind. Sixty thousand.”
  “In your dreams.” She wheeled her shopping cart around and eyed the check-out lines. The overweight retired teacher had the shortest line, but that was because she was so damn slow no one wanted to go to her. But she didn’t screw up like Mister Speedy the high school kid.
  “Not ready to sell yet anyway,” said Wendell.
  “Later,” Arlene answered as she headed for Mister Speedy’s line.
Tiffanee sidled up to Wendell and whispered “You’ll die alone, Wendell, just like us all, but you’ll die soon!”
  “Thanks, Tiffanee, Hope you’ll join me. And the cat too. See you there!”
  “Go get in the car,” said Arlene.

   Tiffanee was sitting on the porch steps of her parents house. The cat crouched watchfully next to her on the railing. Not dead. Tiffanee was picking flakes of white paint from the edge of the steps and thinking about running away. She caught a nice flake of discolored paint under a fingernail. A strip a couple of inches long came off. The strip curled itself into a C shape. She rubbed it to powder between her fingers and tried to scrape up another strip, but she couldn’t get her fingernail under. Tiffanee thought that her life was OK. Her mom went to work every week-day and brought home groceries and did the laundry and stuff like that. She got mad sometimes, but not very mad, and she got happy sometimes, but not very happy. She did Pilates in the basement before she went to work most mornings. Tiffanee’s dad was gone most of the time. Sometimes she was surprised to find him on the couch with his phone. He’d turn his head halfway toward her and say “Hey Tif,” and go back to what he was doing. Tiffanee had no complaints. She’d rather have had Arlene and Mike for parents. But that was OK.
   She wasn’t sure about running away. She knew she could end up dead if she did. She pulled up another paint flake. The wood underneath was clean and bright. She could see the grain. But what the hell so what? She might as well do stuff while she was still a kid before they could blame her. Tiffanee stood up slowly. The yam casserole hadn’t gone down too well and she was considering throwing up. The cat sprang off the railing and disappeared into a lilac bush.

  “Like the yam casserole?” Arlene asked Mike as they fell together into bed. Mike hadn’t liked the sour apple slices unexpectedly encountered among the mushy yams, but it wasn’t as bad as some of the stuff she came up with.
  “Excellent,” he said.


CHAPTER FIVE

   Iris dragged her chair to a sunny patch by the kitchen window. She put her feet up on the sill and lit a cigarette. She watched the smoke coil up through the sunlight. She knew she had to stop smoking. She didn’t want to quit, but there was no-one left to enjoy a cigarette with. And then too she might gain weight. God forbid.
    The woman Lana was out looking for work. She’d have to get over her stupid fear if she wanted to find good paying work, but any work is better than no work isn’t it? Iris finished her cigarette and called Scruffy for his afternoon walk.
  “She better get something quick,” she said to Scruffy, “she can’t stay here forever.”
Lana pulled a parking tag off her windshield, screwed it up and tossed it in a trash can. She drove the car on fumes to Iris’ house. Iris was picking up dog shit with a scooping device and flinging the shit into the street.
  “You shouldn’t do that,” said Lana.
  “You think Scruffy did that? That turd is bigger than he is. That feller next door takes his Doberman out early early and late late. I know whose shit that is. He’s the one ought to be ashamed. Scruffy’s doesn’t hardly show. Just dries up and blows away I guess.”
   Lana was pawing through the contents of the trunk, looking for clean pants to wear to her new job. She had to do laundry. “Is there a laundromat I can walk to?” She asked Iris.
  “Eight ten blocks,” said Iris. “You find a job?”
  “I did find a job. I been in training today and they didn’t pay me nothing, but I start with pay tomorrow. It’s at a like resort place for crazy people that want to be left alone. I got a job if my background check clears.”
  “I’ll let you do a washer load here. That’ll last you a couple days.”
  They sat on the porch steps and drank tequila from recycled parfait containers. Lana took a banana and a packet of potato chips from her purse. “Left-overs from lunch,” she said. She stretched out
her legs and sighed. “Those people are all nuts. They got too much money to know how lucky they are.”
 “Rich or poor if your life’s fucked up it’s your own damn fault,” said Iris.

   Elliot hadn’t bothered to dress. He sat at his desk in his faded dressing gown.
  “The word as a blunt instrument.” What on earth was he thinking? Plunder had stopped accepting his submissions decades ago. They had even had the temerity to request that he submit no more than one piece a year!    But for some reason he had written those idiotic words on the back of an envelope and even started a file. He dragged the file to the trash. Who did he think would accept his tired old words today? The New Yorker? Striving to be up to date with appalling articles about dead rappers?
The lunch girl was knocking at his door.
  “Come,” he answered. The girl barked softly and placed his burger and salad on the table.
  “Coffee? Tea?”
  “No thanks.” Colorless bitch. Some aging whore Elf had dragged off the highway. For god’s sake this isn’t a Mother Theresa refuge, he thought, it’s a place for people who pay to be left alone.
  “I’d like a knife and fork for my hamburger if you don’t mind.” Lana returned with the knife and fork neatly wrapped in a paper napkin. She knocked again.
  “Come,” he said.
  “I can’t, I’m not ready,” said Lana. She thought he might have cracked a smile, but his bitter old face remained expressionless.
  “What’s that  'word as a blunt instrument’ on that envelope?”
  “None of your business. Please go.”
  “Sorry,” said Lana. Gotta be nice. Gotta keep the job. Elliot cut his burger into pie slice sections, removed a wedge, examined the red interior of the beef patty and shuddered.
   Lana asked Elf if people could put a chair outside where she could put their lunch if they did not want to be disturbed. Elf said there were flies and other predators, “Not a good idea,” she said.
  “OK but that Elliot Phelps does not like me.”
  “Then make him like you,” said Elf as she picked up her cell phone. Now there’s a challenge, Lana thought. Elf put down the phone.
  “Lana. We need to talk.” Lana’s guts took a dive. End of the line after just seven
work days? Elf walked out to the pool and crouched to check the water quality with some sort of indicator. She looked up at Lana and scowled against the sun.
  “Do you think you could do this for me each morning?  Just leave the print-out on my desk and I’ll take care of the rest.”
  “You better show me again.”
  “You just follow the instructions they’re right on it. Any fool .....”
  “I’m not any fool. If I do it I want to do it right.” Elf demonstrated again, with painful clarity.    Lana nodded seriously.
  “Why were you yelling that first day I saw you?”
  “I get that way sometimes. Follow me and I’ll show you where this stuff is kept.” As she locked up the pool maintenance shed she turned to Lana and said “I have some issues.”
  “No kidding,” said Lana.


C H A P T ER    S I X


   Tiffanee was sitting on the kids’ swing in the back yard of an abandoned house down by the high school. She was staring at her right thumb and forefinger. The harder she looked the more bizarre they appeared. Fingers are as ugly as penises, she thought, but you don’t have to look at penises that often. Her mother sometimes wore stick-on fingernails. She once had a set that were a black and white checkerboard design. Tiffanee thought they were cool, but they didn’t make her mother’s fingers look any better. She scratched at a scab on her knee. One day she would be a cat with silky gray fur and yellow eyes and beautiful paws. That would be much better. She stood up and stretched and headed for Arlene’s to see what was for dinner.
   Arlene was not fixing dinner. She was sitting at the kitchen table sketching with a red ballpoint on the back of the phone bill envelope. She was wearing Zumba pants and an old tee shirt. Her hair was tied up with a sequined scarf.
  “The living room is too square,” she said to Tiffanee. Her plan was to round off the corners and make the room oval.
  “What about the windows?”    Asked Tiffanee.
  “I’m not touching the windows. That’s out of my league. Let’s get the furniture out of there so we can start on it tomorrow.” She looked up at Tiffanee. ”You got school tomorrow?”
  “Not if I don’t want,” said Tiffanee. Arlene wasn’t listening. She was thinking about an oval skylight. There was an attic and a pitched roof over the living room, but she could deal with that.
  “You had dinner?” She asked Tiffanee.
In the morning they gutted the living room. Removed the fitted carpet, tore out the book shelves and uncovered the old fire-place.
   By the time Mike came home the house looked like a war zone with furniture jamming the front hall and the living room reduced to desolation. Mike stood still in the hallway for about fifteen seconds then reached into his pocket for his car keys and left.


CHAPTER SEVEN


   Wendell got a settlement with the insurance company. They had no record of having asked for the underwriter’s lab number off the wood stove all those years ago, so he was home free about having an illegal stove in the house. He decided to wait on selling the lot.
   It was a perfect late fall morning when he filled up the gas tanks, checked all the levels and drove out of town. He had the state of Nevada between him and home before he stopped to refill the gas tanks.    He followed a road to nowhere and stopped under a juniper tree by a cow fouled creek. A place to stay a while and think. When he opened the door to the trailer he thought he saw Tiffanee in the half light, sitting on his bed. He took off his sunglasses and saw that it was Tiffanee, her braids so tight that they slanted her eyes.
  “I’m taking you home,” he said.
  “I’ll tell them you kidnapped me.”
  “Who’d believe that?”
  “They would. I’d say you raped me.”
  “I’m taking you home.”
  “I don’t want to go home. Just let me out.”
  “You want to get out go ahead. It’s dark out there.”
   Tiffanee opened the door and looked out. Wendell was opening a can of beans. She stepped out into the last of the sunset and peed behind the trailer. The dirt road was no longer visible. A cow roared once into the silence. It was cold. She tried to open the trailer door. It was locked. The truck was unlocked. It would be fun to drive off. She imagined Wendell eating beans straight from the can and losing his balance when she took off, but Wendell must have the key. She laid herself down on the driver’s seat and slept.
   In the morning Wendell opened the truck door. He was holding a cup of coffee with a pop tart balanced on top. Not for her.
  “I been thinking,” he said. “It’d cost me two tanks of gas to get you home and get back here. You know how much that is? So I thought I’d just drop you off at the next sheriff’s office or police department we come to. Let them take it from there.
  “I’d tell them -”
  “I know what you’d tell them. Wouldn’t do you no good I can assure you of that. They’ll put you in juvie until your dad comes for you - whenever that would be. “’Course I could drop you down a mine shaft and you’d be gone forever. No problem. I could do that.”
  “Gimme a bottle of water,” said Tiffanee.    Wendell grabbed a bottle from the flat in the truck bed and threw it to her. Tiffanee caught it and started down the rutted dirt road, back the way they’d come.
  “Long way to the highway!” Wendell called.
She walked until the sun was high and hot. How far had Wendell driven on the bumpy dirt road that had thrown her all over the trailer? Five miles? Twenty miles? She was shaking with hunger. She took another swig from the water bottle and looked around. No house, no other road no nothing but short brownish sagebrush. Not even a cow. She kept on walking until the sun gave her a long, skinny shadow. A puff of dust appeared on the road behind her and she guessed that it was Wendell. She staggered into the brush to hide then changed her mind and returned limply to the side of the road. Wendell pulled up beside her and rolled down the window.
  “You know Tiffanee you’ve caused a heap of trouble for you and me both and don’t give me no   “whatta ya mean we paleface” because we’re in this together. Tiffanee didn’t get the ‘paleface’ bit.
  “Just give me some food and water and take me to the highway.”
  “Then I’d get it for abandoning you. You got a choice.  The sheriff or home. I’ll make your dad pay for all the gas I’d waste on you.”
  “If you take me home I’ll just run away again.”
  “That’s no concern of mine. You think I care?”
  “Just leave me alone then.” She started plodding down
the road. Wendell put his head out the truck window.
  “Hey, Tif, you know where we are?” Tiffanee shrugged her shoulders and went on walking.
  “Ever hear of the Honeycombs?” Wendell shouted, “well that’s it starting about here. Cops won’t go in there. BLM guys go in there and never come out. You know who know their way around the Honeycombs? Rustlers and felony warrants. It ain’t a place to be seen, because if you’re seen you’re dead. You really want to be dead, Tif? You know you missed the road back there? You took the wrong fork back a couple miles. Lucky I figured what you done. Get in the truck Tif. Now.”
Tiffanee slumped to a stop.
  “You don’t scare me none. Give me some water. Do you got any food?”
  “It’s getting on night Tif. Get in the truck!” Tiffanee kept walking. Wendell pulled up beside her, picked her up without a struggle and threw her in the truck bed.
  “You’re free to jump out, you little bitch, so don’t say I kidnapped you!” He turned the truck violently and drove back to the trailer. When he parked the truck Tiffanee did not move. She was lying on her back with her eyes closed, completely inert.
  “Don’t pull that on me. Get out of the truck!”
Tiffanee did not move. “God’s teeth!” Wendell muttered. He couldn’t revive her.
Limp as a rag. Wendell thought about dropping her down a mine shaft, but with his luck he’d be seen by some gold hungry idiot with a shovel. Even if he got away with it he’d have guilt hounding him the rest of his life. She’d have won in a way if he did that. He threw his sleeping bag over her and weighed it down with a bag of tire chains and a salt lick that he’d found. He hitched up the trailer and headed for town. Any town.

  “Grandfather?” The admitting clerk asked. Wendell let his head dip and the deed was done.    He was now a grandfather.
  “Insurance?”
  “None.”
  “How do you plan on paying?”
  “Cash. She’s just dehydrated. Ran off in the desert looking for arrow heads and got lost. Lucky I found her.”

   A few hours later Tiffanee was released
He paid twelve hundred in cash and took Tiffanee to breakfast at Denny’s.
  “I’m your grandpa,” he said.
  “Nah,” said Tiffanee, “I know both my grandpas and you ain’t them.”
  “You owe me twelve hundred dollars, Tif. You better not forget that.”

   Tiffanee stabbed at her hash browns. This wasn’t in her script. Why hadn’t the cops come after him like they were supposed to?    She’d felt too weird to say anything at the hospital.
  “What the hell, let’s go check out Vegas. What you say, Tif?”
Tiffanee had slipped under the table, just for the quiet.
  “I’ll take that as a positive response,” said Wendell.
  “Take it any way you want, you old maggot!”
   In the morning they were driving down the wide main street of a dusty, empty town. Two young women crossed in front of the truck. Wendell slowed down to ask them where the grocery store was. They were wearing cut-offs and tee shirts slit half way down the front. While one girl pointed out the market the other looked at Tiffanee and slowly, slowly shook her head. No.
  “You know what them two are?” Wendell asked as he turned into the grocery parking lot. Tiffanee shrugged.
  “They’re hookers. They get rented to people for sex.” Tiffanee peered into the side mirror but she could not see them.
  “Not much business here I wouldn’t think,” said Wendell.
  “They didn’t look too happy,” said Tiffanee.
  “They make fair money. You want to do that Tif? You could pay me off for the hospital. Maybe in just one time. We could sell you as a virgin. You are a virgin aren’t you Tif?”
  “No way will I do that you can’t make me. Not for nothing!” After a long, silent drive they pulled into a Vegas shopping mall.
  “We’ll have to get you a frilly dress, Tif, and -- here --” he pulled on a braid “undo these and spread out your hair a little.”
He did not buy the frilly dress. They walked a mile or so to the Strip. Tiffanee was entranced. She walked beside Wendell and talked and laughed at the wonders flashing at her. Wendell stopped to talk to a slow moving man. He beckoned to Tiffanee. She took off down the Strip, dodging the crowds and no longer seeing the wonders around her. Wendell watched her until she disappeared.    He laughed and turned away to find his truck and trailer. When he got back to the mall he found Tiffanee sitting on the tow bar re-braiding her hair.
  “Take me home,” she said.


C H A P T ER    E I G H T


   Lana had been there ten days when she came to work one Sunday morning to find a body floating face down in the swimming pool. A woman wearing Faded Glory jeans and an Armani jacket
Nobody seemed to have noticed. There was no one in reception. Lana had been given the honor of manning the desk from six in the morning to eight on Sundays so that Elf could help out in the kitchen. Lana called Elf from the desk.
  “Is it one of ours?” Elf asked.
  “Don’t think so.”
  “Call 911. We need to get it out of here.”

   Yellow tape. Photographs. Questions. Residents, galvanized out of their lethargy, gawking intensively. Elf’s son got a close-up of the woman on Facebook and YouTube in no time at all.
The floater was removed, the water sampled. The police left. The yellow tape remained. Later in the day someone noticed a child alone in a car parked near the entrance. The drowned woman’s daughter.
Lana kept shaking even after the little girl had been found and taken away somewhere. She kept thinking about the woman and her Armani jacket and the girl in the car. A few days later when Elliot called her a stupid bitch for bringing him a breakfast burrito instead of a ham croissant she started to cry.
  “I can’t stay here if that son of a bitch keeps cursing at me,” she wept to Elf, “I can’t take it anymore.”
  “You don’t have to,” said Elf. She dragged Lana to Elliot’s apartment. He looked startled.
  “Paying to live here does not give you the right to insult the staff!” Elf’s eyebrows had escaped to her hairline.
  “You son of a bitch!” Lana shrieked from the refuge of Elf’s back. Elf turned on her. “Cool it!” She snapped. Lana slunk out. In a couple of minutes Elf came outside.
  “He says he’s sorry,” she said. “And there’s a cop wants to talk to you.”


CHAPTER NINE


   “He’s fuckin’ gone,” said. Arlene.
   “No shit!” Said Tiffanee. “Why’d he do that?”
   “Don’t know. He didn’t say nothing. Just took off. All he took that I know of was his Jeep and his wallet. First time he ever done anything like that.” Arlene’s eye make-up was all over her face. Caked deep in the wrinkles under her eyes. Her hair coiled lifelessly over her shoulders. “These are his sweats I’m wearing. Gray. Seemed like the right things to wear.”
   “He’ll be back,” said Tiffanee.
   “Think so?”
   “Maybe.”
  Arlene lit up a cigarette. “Fuck him anyway,” she said. She walked over to the living room door and peered at the desolation within.
   “Lot of work,” said Tiffanee.
   “That’s for sure,” said Arlene. “I’m gonna need three quarter inch ply. Hope that bastard didn’t take the jig saw.”

   Wendell was thinking about Lana. He didn’t want to. He kept remembering that empty look she had, and the silky texture of the skin on her inner arms. He missed his house too. He missed sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and watching TV on the little set he kept on the kitchen counter. After he sold the store he had become lazy, sleeping late and looking forward to the mail coming around eleven, even though all the mail he got was ads for pizza and hearing aids. He did his bills by EFT so he didn’t have to think about them.  He wondered if Arlene had known that he could see her in the bathroom when she stood between the shower and the sink. She didn’t have much of a body, but he’d liked watching her shaving her pits and cleaning her teeth. Now all that was over. He was full time RV, and he was glad that his few belongings had burned up. It was all a load of crap, but it was hard getting up in the morning with nothing to do and no place to go. There was supposed to be adventure around every corner on the road, but he wasn’t finding any. He knew he didn’t look like much. No-one ever looked at him twice. Not that he was ugly or fat. Just hardly there. He was turning into a ghost. A ghost would have more fun though. You could cause trouble as a ghost. He’d get his revenge on that little bitch Tiffanee if he were a ghost.
   Rain was spattering the trailer windows. A cold front moving in. He was at a campground in southern Colorado. Time to move on. He didn’t wait for morning. By morning he could be snowed in. He drove south to New Mexico and then south and west into Arizona with the snow close behind.
He was searching for Lana again.

   Mike sat on the slightly suspect bedspread in a cheap motel just off the freeway. He’d done it this time.    He loved Arlene. Or did he? Someone at work had said he shouldn’t make fun of her the way he did. It was his way of getting people to like him, to make them laugh with his outrageous tales about Arlene. And some of them were true. It was his fault because he had never tried to stop her drugs and drinking. He’d always told himself that was her decision, not his. Stoned or sober she was free entertainment, that was for sure, and it filled up a big space inside him that shouldn’t be empty. Not in a normal person. He was out of clean underwear. He had to go get his stuff.
   Arlene was in the remains of the living room. She looked up at him, stapler in hand.
  “You forget something?”
  “Everything. I left kind of sudden if you remember.”
  “You want back?”
  “I don’t think so. We need to talk about the money thing.”
  “Forget it. I’ll get a job no problem. I want the house.  I’ll pay you the equity. It’ll take a while. You pay off the Explorer. I never drove it.”
  He went upstairs and started packing clothes and his Tom Waits CDs. He felt so stupid. What a failure he was! Third marriage down the tubes. No promotions. No kid who wanted to know him. He wept. Arlene was leaning against the door jamb watching him.
  “It’s for the best,” she said, and turned away. He heard what sounded like a chain saw starting up in the living room. What in hell was she doing?



C H A P T ER    T EN


   It was a different cop. A detective.
  “I told all I know,” Lana said, “why do you want to hear it again?” He was a skinny man with a cynical face and a bored expression. He made no answer but launched a litany of questions. No, she had not noticed the car. She did not see the child. She had been in a hurry to get time stamped in by six o’clock. There were always cars parked on the street. Ask a patrol cop. They’d know that. She did not notice the car. She did not know the woman. She did not touch the body.
  “You have a record. Don’t leave town,” he said.
  “Fuck you!” She whispered, half hoping he heard, then she said  “I paid my dues. My record’s supposed to be expunged.”
  “Not for a felony,” he said.
  At the end of her shift she got in her car and started driving. Driving anywhere. She stopped by the side of the freeway and threw up. At the next rest area she crouched in a stall for fifteen minutes as the walls of the tiny stall crept closer and closer. She had diarrhea and she was still vomiting. Her body started to shake and she was dizzy from dehydration. She bought a diet Coke from a doubly caged machine. It helped. At the next overpass she turned back. Nowhere to go. No one who could help. But she had a job, she had a place to stay even if it was just a porch. She had committed no crime. She was having the meteorite vision again. Seeing herself struggling out of the smoking rock somewhere in the desert. Watching her own body form out of fumes. Seeing her fingers form as her eyes cleared and focused. Seeing that golden face in the dark.
  “There’s nowhere to go,” she said to Iris. It was cold on the porch,
  “Come on in,” said Iris. “It’s warm in the kitchen. You can sit by the window. Let’s have some tea. And I got tequila. Come on in.”
  “My stomach’s upset.”
  “Come on in. Try some tea.” Lana stepped meekly into the house. The kitchen had a door to the back yard and there were two windows. She could see the front door too, from where she was sitting, but the damn walls were too close. She shut her eyes.
  “It’s warm in here, she said. Iris pushed a yogurt parfait container half full of tequila across the table.
  “I gotta go!” Lana made a run for the bathroom then changed her mind and lunged out the front door to let go her gut in Iris’ overgrown oleander. Iris stood by the oleander holding a bag of cat litter and
a handful of toilet paper.
  “Better?” She asked Lana.
  “Thanks.” Lana took the cat litter and sprinkled it around.
  “Come on in. Wash your hands. I’ll nuke your tea.”
  “I’ll be all right,” said Lana. She was shaking again.
Iris sipped her tequila and took a long look at Lana. “Girl you’re going crazy, you know that?”
  “I been crazy a long time.”
  “Do you have anyone?”
  “What do you mean ‘ anyone’?”
  “Anyone that cares about you?” Lana laughed with her teeth clenched.
  “Do you?”
  “I don’t need no one,” Iris said. “No kids?”
  “Do you?”
  “Never had any.”
  Lana picked up her mug of tea. “I had kids once.” Rose wanted a story OK let her have a story.
  “Thought so.”
  “Yeah well not for long. I suppose you want the story?”
  “Be nice to know.”
  “Same old same old. High school freshman year. He was a football player -- sound like a movie? I saw him crying. End of the game and we were losing as always. He was crying. I could see the tears through his helmet.
  "He tried so hard.” Lana looked out the kitchen door at a garbage can and a few feet of fence.  “He tried so hard. So after that when I saw him I would always smile and soon we got to talking and you know how it goes.
  “We ended up in a motel room sitting cross legged on the bed face to face and pulling each other’s hair. The hair on our heads I mean. I’d reach out and tweak a little -- he kept it real short, then he’d reach out and tweak mine. We sat there like that until three in the morning then we fell asleep. We fucked a couple of times, but mostly we just sat looking at each other and pulling each others’ hair. I got pregnant and he left for the army. I wrote to him but I guess he never got the letter. I don’t know. I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl. I just wanted it out of me.”
  “Funny if he or she showed up one day,” said Iris.
  “Who, that baby? Damn funny,” said Lana, “I’d tell him to get lost. I don’t owe him a fucking thing. I kind of hope he’s dead.”
  “How old would he be?”
  “Damned if I know. Twenty-two twenty-three I suppose.”
  “You been in prison right? How did that happen?”
  “None of your damn business.” Lana grabbed the last cigarette from Iris’ pack then dropped it on the floor.
  “You said you had kids. There were others? One day you might try telling someone the truth. It might help.”
 “Fuck that. What are you some kind of shrink? Fuck that.”
 Iris picked up the empty pack. “You want to know how I got by all these years? After poor Dwayne was gone?”
  “You want to tell me go ahead.”
  “Breaking and entering.” Iris picked up the ash tray and emptied it unto the garbage bag beneath the sink. Her last pack of cigarettes gone. No more. She was done. Maybe.
  “You ever got caught?”
  “Never did. See I never got citizenship. I do a felony and I’m out on my ass.”
  “Is that true? Why didn’t you just get citizenship? You have a green card right?”
  “I never bothered. Who the hell cares? Anyway I was about as careful as anyone could be. Broke into my friends’ houses, my neighbors, people with security signs on their lawns. Never got caught. Not close. Made a fair living. Paid cash for this house.” She was reaching for a cigarette pack that wasn’t there.    Damn!



CHAPTER ELEVEN


   For the first time in years Elliot allowed himself to remember the dreadful day when Sara got so drunk and screamed the ugliest proliferation of invective he had ever heard. At him. At a party with all or most of his friends present. He loved her didn’t he? Or he had then. Hadn’t he?
But it was all over after that. He never found out if she knew about Suzanne at that time, though she certainly did later, when the divorce was slowly grinding away at his ego and his bank account. Suzanne had taken off for London and who could blame her?
  That horrible woman who brought his food -- what was her name? -- She had jarred the memory out of him. Hiding behind Elf and screaming insults, her face twisted into pure ugliness. Wasn’t he in this retreat to avoid such disturbances?
  He got up slowly and stepped outside for the first time in a week. The sun was gently warm. He went out to the pool and stretched out on a chair. He dozed off a little and awoke to the thought of the drowned woman. What a fool! To drown herself while her child waited patiently in the car. Pure selfishness. Still he felt tears trying to fill his eyes. Not for the idiot woman or her child but for himself. Why was life so hard -- even when it was easy?
  He was surprised to see Earl who lived in one of the chalets, walking purposefully toward the pool. No one had swum since the drowning. Earl pulled off his earphones and set his player on a table.
  “Someone’s gotta do it,” he said, and jumped into the turquoise water. Elliot noticed that Earl still had his watch on. Perhaps it was waterproof.


Wendell was taking a piss by the side of the road.    A fifty- five gallon drum full of garbage buzzed with flies.    A mesquite tree gave a little shade. He was zipping his fly when he saw the woman. She was brown and skinny, wearing a fluttering bright rag of a skirt and laughing at him and pushing at the hair behind her ears so it spun out in the wind.
  “Are you OK?” She asked.
  “Are you for real?” She reached out her hand. They were twelve feet apart, she was above him on the road cut.
  “Here, touch me!”
  “Don’t need to touch you. I’m down wind of you and I can smell you loud and clear.”
  “What do you mean? I swim in the tank every day!” Wendell wasn’t the sharpest pencil in the cup, but he did have good peripheral vision, and he had seen the fleeting shadow behind the trailer. The quick glance from the woman. Something wasn’t right. Wendell turned away.
  “Gotta be going,” he said. Someone had been behind the trailer he was sure.
  “Can I borrow your cell phone?” The woman called.
  “Don’t have one,” he answered. He got in the truck and drove onto the road. The trailer
remained behind after tearing loose from the wiring. He drove half a mile. The tires seemed OK. He did a U turn on the empty road and charged the trailer with his truck. He was hoping he’d destroyed the kitchen and the water and propane tanks. He was hoping the two of them were back there and were dead. What the hell. Time to leave the scene.

  Back on the road without many of his few possessions, he wondered why he had destroyed his own trailer. What was going on back there? Did they want to rob him? Take the truck? The trailer? He imagined himself dead in an arroyo with a few rocks piled on his body. No-one would find him. Never. No-one would miss him. Ever. That was why he carried a gun. Concealed in a broad elastic waist holster that made him look a bit girlie, but hid his Glock pretty well. The woman may have noticed it. That look she had flashed over his shoulder. Did that change their plans, whatever they were? Could be they were harmless.
  No. He wondered if he should go back and get the trailer. Or he could get a tow truck to bring it to some town.    He kept on driving.
  At Trona he slept in his truck, parked behind a big mineral plant. Before dawn he returned the way he had come. The trailer was gone. He doubled back just to make sure. Gone. That left just him and the truck. If something happened to the truck then it would be just him. Alone. With nothing. Well not exactly nothing. He still had his bank account. And not a card or a check book that anyone could take from him. He knew his account number and that was all that mattered. He had a few thousand in hundreds in his jeans pocket at all times. Always, because you never know, do you? And his Glock. He had his Glock.
  The problem was that he didn’t know where he was going. He felt as though he had driven off the end of the earth and was lost in emptiness. Not even moving because you don’t move through emptiness do you? If emptiness is nothing how can you move from one point to another? He thought he might be going crazy. He was driving north on California 33, past oil wells and dusty towns. Taft. Back in the ‘60s he’d bought his mother a cafe in Taft. That was when he had a chain of five gas stations. The cafe was a success. Not fancy or anything. His mother did breakfast and lunch. The coffee was good, he remembered. Hills Brothers, or was it Maxwell House? She nearly
always kept it fresh except the last hour before she closed at 2.30, because she didn’t want to throw out good coffee. He wondered if he could run a cafe. It would be something to do. What he really needed was to start over fresh. He couldn’t do a cafe, that wasn’t his style. He wouldn’t do auto parts again. He’d have to work for someone and he was through with
 hat. Hell with that. He could put a ‘Mr Fixit’ sign on the truck and do business cash only. Something to think about.



CHAPTER TWELVE


Arlene and Tiffanee stood back to back in a moment of silence, surveying their handiwork.
  “Well I’m damned,” said Arlene.    The living room was transformed to an airy and graceful oval. The walls and ceiling were painted eggshell white and the old pine floor had been exposed and polyurethaned. Evening sunlight poured in through the west window.
Arlene wished Mike could see it, but Mike was gone. Taken some kind of oil job in Brazil or Poland or somewhere.
  “A nice oval table right in the middle. Same shape as the room. That would be nice. You could entertain.
  “Give dinner parties,” said    Tiffanee.
  Arlene looked a little tired. “It’s perfect how it is. It stays empty. Who would I invite anyway? The president?”
  Tiffanee was wondering if Arlene would pay her anything. She had hardly been to school all month, and she must have worked ten hour days a couple of times a week, and a few hours on the other days too.
  “I owe you,” said Arlene. I’ll pay you when I get my check. OK?”
  “Here’s hoping,” said Tiffanee. Arlene stood looking into the hall where the old living
room furniture was piled.
  “I need help, Tif. Lets get all this crap out on the lawn and stick a FREE sign on it.
  “It’s gonna rain,” said Tiffanee.
  “Let it,” said Arlene.

  When Tiffanee got home her dad was sitting on the front step with a beer.
  “See Tif, they make money off of you. Every day you don’t show up they lose money. You got to show up, Tif, and get your head counted at least.”
  “Why should I do that? What do I get out of it? You think I ever learned anything at that dump? I learned who to buy dope from and that’s about all.” Her dad raised an eyebrow and looked at something on the beer label, even though it was too dark to see.
   “Funny you should say that, Tif. I hear you read more books than anyone at the summer literacy festival.”
  “I didn’t read them. I already read some of them. I lied about the others.”
  “So anyway, Tif, show up or you get kicked out. Simple as that.” He tossed the beer can into the street.
  “I bet Arlene would home school me. I learned how to make a rectangle room into an oval from her.”
  “Fine. Put an ad in the paper you’ll make a fortune. I’m not spending money I don’t have to send you to some rich kid school where you get away with murder. You’re going to stay at the same schools as the other kids around here and you’re going to stay ‘til you graduate, you hear?”
  Tiffanee was slightly frightened. Maybe she could skip a couple of grades and graduate early, but hell, she wasn’t even in high school yet. God. Years and years. Out of the question.
  “What about the internet?” Asked Arlene. You can do college on the net so you ought to be able to do high school. Let’s check it out.”
  “Yeah but I’m still in seventh grade.” Arlene sighed and lit up a Camel.
  “Honey, sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet, you know what I mean? When you have a baby in you you know there’s shit ahead. Ether birth or abortion for you and nothing can change it so you say what the hell because there’s nothing else you can do. Know what I mean?”
Tiffanee turned her mouth into a thin flat line. She felt tears trying to get into her eyes but she would not let them.
  “And don’t go taking off for Vegas again. You do that again and you’ll end up in a group home and believe me honey you’re better off away from those places.”
Arlene was actually thinking of the havoc Tiffanee could wreak in such a place. The damage she could do to innocent children.    Tiffanee was considering suicide.

  The principal scheduled her for a daily meeting with Mr Hughes, the attendance counselor.
  “If you don’t show up we’ll have the cops looking for you,” the principal said. “Personally I’d put a shock collar on you. I have one at home for my dog. He weighs about the same as you. That and a GPS implant. You’re not stupid, Tiffanee. You could go on to college if you put your mind to it.” Tiffanee turned her head and pretended to spit. College!
  “That ain’t my plan,” she said.
She was sulking outside the counselors’ door when Polly Gomez came out.
  “You seeing Hughes?”    Tiffanee nodded.
  “Don’t let him get close. He’ll be all nice and friendly then he’ll get a hand on you. If you stay back from him he’ll leave you alone.”
  Mr Hughes looked up from his computer. “Sit down, Tiffanee,” he said, and continued working. Tiffanee focused on Mr Hughes’ pale, thinning hair for a while, then she shifted her gaze to his preternaturally clean finger nails. Eventually he hit the enter key and shifted his attention to Tiffanee.
  “Did Polly say anything to you?”
  “Yeah.”
  “Can I ask you what she said?”
  “You can ask if you want.”
  “All right. Now tell me what she said.”
  “She said I should stay away from you. Not let you get close. That’s what I plan on doing.” Mr Hughes displayed his perfect teeth.
  “She had no reason to say that. She is a troubled person.”
  “Aren’t we all?” Said Tiffanee.
  “So, Tiffanee, is there anything about school that you like?”
  “I like the canned fruit cocktail they have Thursdays.”
  “For lunch?”
  “What else? They stopped doing free breakfast a couple years ago. You should know that.”
  “Yes well I mean do you like any of the classes? And don’t say recess.”
  “It ain’t a class.”
  “Very perceptive of you.”
  “No I don’t like any of the classes.”
Mr Hughes yawned. “Time’s up. Same time tomorrow.”
  “Him and his sloths,” said the janitor. He was waiting to clean the room so he could go home and watch the game.
  “Sloths?”
  “What I said. Him and his wife they breed sloths. He used to take them round the schools, but some kid broke in and stole one and they found it run over outside Walgreens. Sad. They’re cute little buggers. Look like they’re always smiling.”
  “Wow that’s truly weird. I have to see him each day so I’ll ask him about them.”
  “He don’t talk about them. When that one got killed he sat on the road by its body and cried a long time with the cars all going around him.”
  “So how do you know him?”
  “I planted a lot of mulberry trees for him back when I did landscaping. I guess the sloths eat the leaves and stuff.”
  All the library computers were occupied by girls sending their smiling faces around the earth. Tiffanee went to the huge, tangible dictionary still reposing majestic and alone on its plinth. She looked up  'sloth'.  There was just a small entry. What had been the encyclopedia shelves were now full of audio books. She wandered through the stacks until it was five minutes before closing. A computer was open. She pounced. She searched sloth images. There it was. A three toed sloth. It was smiling rather sadly, its wide spaced, gentle eyes locked on hers.
  “I want a sloth,” she said out loud as she signed off the computer and walked out into the chilly night.



CHAPTER THIRTEEN


   Wendell was somewhere near Ritzville Washington when he received inspiration from god, the devil or the state of his stomach.
“Damn!” He said. “I’m going back there,” he announced to the steering
wheel, “I’m going back there to find them fuckers.” He found himself shaking with rage. His life had been hard. He’d backed down to people one time too many. Not any more.
  He drove more than a thousand miles before he slept, though he drifted off a couple of times at the wheel. Some trigger in his mind had jerked him awake before disaster. The truck lights were almost on him that one time when he just made it back into his lane. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe the truck veered onto the shoulder, horn blaring. Maybe it capsized out there in the nowheres.
He didn’t remember.
  He awoke to eye burning mineral glare from the lake at Trona. He had parked near a chemical plant, dusty and silent. He bought a two liter Coke at a grocery and sucked down the whole thing. He needed to find a place to sleep out of the sun. It was early morning, but already hot. The woman at the store said he should go out to the pinnacles. He’d been there once before when his mom was still alive. A family road trip when he was about ten. He seemed to remember shade, but that was an illusion. He walked among the towers and cones, on a slight caffeine high, then he went on to Ridgecrest and found a motel. He was going the wrong way but it was the closest town and he needed to sleep.
They let him have a room even though check-in wasn’t until two. He awoke at six in the evening and took a long shower and changed his clothes. He needed a laundry. He had no more clean socks.    He sent out for pizza and spent the night watching movies. He couldn’t find any porn. Strange for a military town.    Before sunrise he started for the place where he was hijacked. He parked where he’d parked before and he waited. He didn’t usually smoke that much but he got through a pack in a few hours. He had drinks in his cooler, and a couple of bags of Fritos on the passenger seat. By afternoon the heat was unbearable and he got out of the truck and started walking around it. He didn’t dare leave the truck. He couldn’t lose that too. He started the motor so he could run the air conditioner. He couldn’t get much radio. He dozed off and awoke to find that it was nearly dark. The woman’s face was pressed against the window, inches from him. Behind her he could make out the dark figure of her mystery companion.
  “What the hell did you do with my trailer?” Wendell shouted.
  “Sold it to the gipsies, what else was it good for?” The woman answered. Wendell could see now that she was much older than he had thought, and bone thin.
  “What in hell are you doing out here anyway?” He asked.
  “Living. Trying to get by. Like anyone else.” It seemed the hairs on the back of his neck were standing before he consciously remembered the infamous murders. He’d heard the rumors that some of them were still out there in the desert. The ones that didn’t go on the spree. Didn’t get shot down or busted.
The other person’s face was briefly visible. A boy. Fifteen, sixteen.
  “You sold my trailer to the gipsies did you? Then give me the money!” Wendell was pretty sure they had no gun or if they did they had no ammunition. He thought about getting out of the car so he wouldn’t have to shout, or at least rolling down the window more, but he decided not to.
The boy made a hoarse, hiccup sound. A laugh, perhaps.
  “We didn’t get nothing for your stinking little piece of shit trailer.”
  “Seventy dollars we got. One of them’s living in it up by Lancaster. Why don’t you go ask for it back?” The woman said.
  The boy jumped into the bed of Wendell’s truck. He turned to the woman.
  “I’m out of here!”
The woman looked up at the boy, her face empty and frightened. Wendell started the truck and took off fast, hoping to knock the kid out. The woman stood out in the road. Ghost like. Lost.
The kid had fallen and tripped on the salt block that Wendell had not removed from the truck bed. He hit the brakes and got the Glock out of the glove compartment. He got out of the truck and pointed the gun at the kid. “Get out of the truck or you’re dead.”
The woman was weeping silently. Far down the road headlights were approaching.
 “The both of you get over on the side of the road and try to look normal for Chrissake!”
The car slowed as it passed them then sped on its way. Wendell, the woman and the boy looked wistfully at the receding red lights.
   “I’m out of here,” said the boy. He started walking in the same direction as the car, now out of sight.
   “Bobby don’t leave me!” The woman was sobbing. Wendell thought that if that wasn’t a country song he’d have to write it. Her hands were crossed on her chest and her head bowed like a penitent.
  “Don’t leave me alone with Zeb!”
  “Zeb’s dead, mom, or he will be in a couple days.”
Wendell was thinking that the words ‘Zeb’s dead’ sounded like something from a movie he might once have seen. Or was that Judd? He turned to the boy.
  “You ain’t going nowhere until I figure out who the hell you are and what you’re up to out here.”
  “Zeb made the money,” said the boy, “I helped out but he was the one who dealt with the gipsies.”
  “That’s how we live,” said the woman, “we part out cars for the gipsies. Zebulon was good but a Prius fell on him a couple weeks ago. He thought he’d get better quick but he’s passed out most of the time now. They came and took the trailer, but they haven’t brought in any more work for us.”
  Wendell shook his head    “That don’t explain why you’re hiding out up here.”
  The boy wiped his nose on his bare arm and said “You know Harry Garrotte don’t you? That ain’t his name but that’s what they called him. Well he’s my grandpa, right mom?”
  “Whatever,” said the woman.    “There was twelve of us left up here. We didn’t do nothing. Not that time”
  “So where are the rest of you?”
  “Dead or gone. We’re all that’s left.” Wendell wanted to believe them. He wanted to sit by a
camp fire and listen to their tales.
  “I got a boot and a steering lock I’m gonna put on the truck. I want you to take me to wherever you live. I want to see Zeb. You go ahead of me. I got my flash light and my gun so don’t be messing with me.”
  “Don’t be using the flashlight,” the woman said, “there’s drones and stuff up there and infrared trackers. We stay in the arroyo. We act like jack rabbits or deer or whatever.”
  Zeb was plainly dead when they got back to him. A dark faced good looking man. He must have died in great pain, all doubled up like a fetus. Dried tears on his cheeks.
  “What’ll you do with his body?” Wendell asked.
  “Throw him in the mine shaft like the others,” said the woman.
  “Others?”
  “Yeah. The others that died here. It’s like our burying ground. There’s a lot of them down there. Dace, he tried to work the mine. One day he never came back. That’s when we found the shaft. Old Dace must of stepped through the rotted boards.”
There was no camp fire. “We live like we’re not here,” said the woman. She stood up and pulled off her tank top and ragged skirt.
  “I’m going to get in the tank. You want to come?"
The water was cool but not cold, the tank bottom slimy.
  “You want to fuck?” The woman asked.
   “If you tell me your name.”
  “Debbie.”
  “No!”
  “Alright I was named Falling Moon. You want to call me Falling? Fell would be better. I think I’m done falling. You want to do it in the water?”
She ducked into the murky water and took his chilly penis in her mouth. Wendell suffered a panic attack and flung himself backward.
  “For Chrissakes give me a minute!” The woman laughed. “You old farts are all alike!” She reached for the side of the tank and started to pull herself out. Wendell pulled her back into the water.

  There was nothing to eat. Fell and Bobby had already looted Zeb’s pack. They’d eaten all the saltines and drunk most of the vodka. Wendell went back to the truck and found some Fritos.
He slept with Fell on a piece of carpet surrounded by tall sagebrush. He awoke with his teeth chattering from the cold. A meteor dragged a short tail across the sky. Fell slept on smoothly.
In the morning they dragged Zeb to the mine.    Wendell was careful where he stepped. He did not venture close enough to the broken hole to give Zeb the push he needed to clear the edge and drop seamlessly away. Fell dragged at a broken four by four partly buried in the dirt.
  “This happened before. This is what Zeb did..”
  “I’ll do it,” said Wendell gallantly.    He dragged the four by four out of the baked earth and nudged Zeb’s body forward, but it still hung up on the edge.
  “His tee shirt’s caught on something,” said Fell.
Wendell stepped away from the edge and grabbed Fell by the wrist.
  “You gotta show me your place. Where you work. No use having secrets now. If you’re telling me the truth about everyone being gone that is.”
  “We got to get him down. There’s helicopters come over from Edwards or somewhere. There’s Border Patrol. We got to get him out of sight.”
  “Right. You got a winch?”

   It took an hour to get his truck and the winch in place. Fell took her life in her hands to get the cable hooked to a loop on Zeb’s jeans. He dropped hard enough to snap the belt loop before the cable hook released.    Gone. Disappeared.    Wendell had a flat tire. He was secretly impressed by the chop shop hidden in a grove of palo verde. For a moment he thought about taking it over. But he’d dealt with the gipsies before, back when he had a service station. They were too damn smart. He was tired of playing games. Too old for such heavy work. And people must know about the place. Especially with the price of gold still high. Prospectors, archaeologists, even hikers.
  “You better come with me,” he said to Fell.
  “What about Bobby? He’ll be back. He’s always come back before.”
  “Let him. Time he took care of himself.”
  “You never had a kid, did you?”
  “He left you fast enough didn’t he?”
  “That’s different. He’s a kid.”
  “I can’t force you. You can take care of yourself, I’m sure.” He turned for the truck and realized that he wasn’t quite sure how to get back on the road.
  “You better guide me back to the road then I’ll let you out.”
She did not get out.
  “I’ll call you Moon,” Wendell said. “That’s a pretty name. Prettier than Fell.” The woman shrugged.
 “Whatever,” she said.



CHAPTER FOURTEEN


  “The cops are here,” said Elf, “they say they think that woman didn’t drown. The autopsy shows she didn’t drown.”

  “I didn’t see anything I didn’t tell you about,” said Lana. “I didn’t notice anything. I already told you!” Same cop, same questions. He had a photo this time.
  “You ever see her before?”
  “That’s her?”
  “That’s her. Sally Dalgleish. Ever saw her before?”
  “If she was dead in the pool I saw her then, but I don’t recognize her. I never saw her face.”
The cop looked at the photo and shrugged.
  “What about the little girl in the car?” Lana asked.
  “What about the girl in the car? Is there something you know?”
  “I already told you I never saw her. I just wondered if she knew anything.”
  “None of your damn business.”
  “It is if you suspect me of something I didn’t do.”
  “You found the body, that’s all.”
  “Well I told you all I know.”
  “We’re waiting for more tests to come back. We’ll know more then.”
He had something like a smart phone in his hand. He pushed a bar on it.
  “You recorded me? That’s not legal!” The cop pulled a small smile across his tired face.
  “This is a police investigation. Thanks for your co- operation.”

   Lana grabbed a lunch to take to the woman with the tea cup poodle in cabin three. Elliot was coming up from the pool, iPad in hand.
  “Lunch?” He asked with an attempted smile.
  “Not for you. I’ll bring yours next.”
   Elliot was trying to be a pleasant person. He was finding it monstrously difficult. How could one smile at this dolt of a woman?
When Lana returned with his burger which she had carefully sliced in wedges, Elliot made a serious attempt at a friendly expression.
  “I appreciate your punctuality,” he said, cringing slightly. Lana said nothing.
  “You must have a difficult life,” he hazarded. Lana said nothing, but picked up his laundry bag.
  “If I take this now you’ll have it back tomorrow instead of Wednesday.”
  “What do I care?” Elliot thought, but he nodded. “I saw the cop talking to you.”
  “They think I killed that woman. If I killed someone I wouldn’t dump them in the pool where I work. I got more sense than that.”
  “You need a lawyer.” Lana laughed and left with the laundry bag.
Elliot whispered an obscenity at the closing door. “Paranoid slut,” he said. It was almost liberating to think of the creature incarcerated for the rest of her miserable life for something she may not have done.
  “So what are you afraid of?” Iris asked Lana. “People find bodies all the time and they don’t get charged with murder.”
  “Yeah well. I was at a murder once. I didn’t do nothing. I was a minor but I got thrown in jail anyways. I thought my record was expunged but I guess not.” She was trying to mend her gray cashmere sweater, but she was using white sewing thread and it didn’t look good. Like the place on the side of her face where a broken bottle wound had been sewn up with monofilament.
  “What happened? How did you get mixed up in a murder?”
  “I was in a group home with this girl JD. from somewhere near Gallup. She said her grandmother had money and we should go and get it. We ran off and hitched a ride. The grandmother said she had no money and if she did she’d never tell JD.  JD started beating up on her. I don’t know what happened I didn’t look. I was guarding the door.”
  “Don’t you feel bad? Her killing a poor old woman?”
  “She wasn’t that old. She was very fat though. Couldn’t hardly walk she was so fat.” Lana wanted a cigarette but she didn’t have any. Iris had stopped smoking, at least for now. “I’d never have done anything like that. I never care that much.”
  “About money?”
  “About anything. Long as I got a place to sleep and something to eat. And maybe a cigarette and some eye make-up.” She laughed
  “And an Armani jacket?” Iris said.
  “Fuck you if you think I’d kill for an Armani jacket” Lana laughed again. “It would sure be nice to have one though.”



CHAPTER FIFTEEN


   “Were you ever in love?” Wendell asked Moon. They were driving on California 178 looking for the kid. Moon said nothing. Wendell was hoping they didn’t find the brat. He wanted Moon to himself. At least for a couple of days. She might be a lot more fun than Lana, he thought. The only problem was the niggling idea at the back of his mind that she might be a killer. What did she say? “Not that time --” Wasn’t that what she had said, or something like it? Not the famous killing spree but another one that didn’t collect so much publicity? It made him a little nervous. He’d never been much for risk in his life, except the time he’d borrowed twenty thousand to get into the car wash business. It turned out OK. But sleeping in the same bed as a killer would be something else. No. He wouldn’t do that -- but then again hadn’t he already slept by her side out under the stars?    Maybe he was just paranoid.    When they reached Lake Isabella Wendell drove onto a beach and stopped.
   “We’re not going to find him. What do you want to do?”
   “Find a Walmart.”
   “You think I’ll buy you stuff? Not in this world.”
   “What? You think I don’t got money? Are you crazy or what? You think Zeb had no money on him? You think I don’t have any?    Give me a break!” She got out of the car and crouched to pee. Wendell thought about driving off without her, but life was empty and he thought she might fill it up a little for him.
   “Well your money ain’t in your drawers since you aren’t wearing any. Not in your bra. Same reason. You don’t got a bag with you so that leaves a money belt. You got a money belt? You don’t have a few thousand stuffed up your ass do you? Or did you sneak off in the night and deposit it all in a bank? I don’t think so.”
   “None of your damn business. I need a drink.”
  They drank tequila and watched a distant camp-fire blaze and diminish. In the morning they continued on to Bakersfield. To find a place to live. To search once more for Bobby.


   On the reservation the man named Other Person woke his kids early. They took their crayon drawings and the laboriously written letters and put them in an envelope. He wrote his own short note
  “I miss you baby please come home soon.”    They got out in the road and hitch-hiked to town. In the back of an empty pick-up Bruce and Bridget kept standing up and waving their arms and laughing. Other Person thought it was kind of fun himself. When they got to town they mailed the letters and felt pretty good about it. He knew that the letters went nowhere, and he did not put a return address on the envelopes.
   He went to the grocery and bought a six pack of malt liquor and drank a couple while the kids played on the school yard swings.
  They sat by the side of the road and rested for a while. It was seventeen miles home. He drank another malt liquor and the kids played a game with the ants and their long freeways in the sand.
He loved the warm sun, his peaceful children, but when he thought of Lana the knife in the gut pain returned and he was not sure if thinking of her caused the pain or if the pain caused him to think of her. Was the pain anger or jealousy or love or sorrow? Or was it pancreatitis as the doctor said?
  They got a ride most of the way home. The kids flopped on the cool cement floor and watched cartoons while he heated a can of beans.
  In the afternoon they packed water bottles in their book bags and set off to visit the rock. He had taken Lana there so long ago, and they had smoked crack and taken peyote and shared a vision and knew they shared a soul. The rock had come from the Moon. Sent by a dog that the Russians put up there many years ago. The dog had sent the rock as a cry for help.
  “The dog must be dead by now,” said Bridget.  He smiled at his young daughter who had not yet
learned to avoid reality.
  “Pretend he isn’t,” he said.



CHAPTER SIXTEEN


   Arlene stood in the doorway to the oval room. A giant black toad had dropped onto her head, enveloping her shoulders. There had been no warning as there usually was, no time to fight the bastard off. Nothing would dislodge it now. It would stay until it got bored and moved on. She would bore it with silence. Inertia.
  The oval room was so beautiful and so useless. Such a waste of time. She thought about Tiffanee working her ass off. Painting, sanding, measuring so carefully and all for nothing. An empty room with no use. Arlene went to her bedroom and lay flat on her smooth emerald bed. She remained there for three days and no one came to the door.   If messages appeared on her phone or her e-mail she did not look at them. On the fourth day Tiffanee banged on Arlene’s bedroom window. This was surprising because the bedroom was on the second floor, but Tiffanee was a resourceful girl.
She saw the three empty gin bottles on Arlene’s bedside table. One for each day. About normal.
   “Hey Arlene! I need your help. I need to build a sloth house.”
Arlene turned her head away. ‘Sloth’ was a word she didn’t recognize. She resumed staring at the ceiling. In a few minutes Tiffanee appeared at the bedroom door. Arlene wondered which window she had neglected to lock.
   “I need your help,” Tiffanee said.
   “I need to pee,” said Arlene. Her urine was deep orange. She did not remember getting up to go to the bathroom in the last few days, but she might have. She must have flushed the toilet if she did.
   “Honey could you get me some coffee? The cream will be bad, but there’s that powdered stuff in the cabinet over the sink.”
   Arlene wasn’t certain but she thought that the toad had moved on. Fucking brain sucker! She thought.
   “A sloth house,” said Tiffanee, “it has to be tall enough to have a climbing pole or a live tree in it.”
   “What’s a sloth?” Arlene asked. Tiffanee had printed out a picture of a sloth. Arlene raised her eyebrows.
   “It’s cute. How big is it? Could it live in the oval room?”
   “They like to stay up trees,” said Tiffanee. “They move very slowly. They like to sit at the top of a tree and rest. They have very big stomachs because they eat leaves and it takes a long time to digest leaves and stuff like that so the food they eat stays in their stomachs for a long time so they can get enough energy to live. They shit about once a week. They come down to the ground to shit. Well that’s what Mr. Hughes told me. He’s the counselor I have to see each afternoon after school. He used to have sloths but he got rid of them except one a while ago I guess.”
   “That seems strange,” said Arlene, “You’d think they’d just let it drop down. That would save them energy.” Tiffanee shrugged.
   “I read up on them. They kind of lean against the tree trunk with their back feet on the ground when they shit. I think that maybe to get all the shit to sink down or something like that. You only go once a week you probably want to get rid of as much as possible.”
   “Do they need shelter from the cold?”
   “They live where it stays warm. I think they’d need shelter here.”
Arlene was sitting on the edge of the bed.
   “Could you get me more coffee, hon, and a couple cookies.” She was thinking about a sloth condominium. She wondered if sloths could climb chain link fence. Probably, if they could climb trees. She thought it looked like a purple satin day. Her purple satin pants and the rose pink gauze top. She’d have to spoil the effect with a sweat shirt though, because the house felt chilly. And her hair. God. Her hair must be a mess. She would put in the cookie sheet on the roof-top swamp cooler and start up the furnace. Winter. Where was Mike? She wondered if he was cold. If he was lonely. Probably not. Sloth stuff would cost. Lumber. Fencing. She needed to talk business with Tiffanee.



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


   Lana was buying a nail file and a hard back titled ‘Death in Brazil’ at the dollar store. She had become friendly with the guy who seemed to manage the place. They’d gone for a walk a couple of nights before. She liked his eyes. He’d asked her to call him Tommy, which she happened to know was not his name, but what the hell.
   “That’s a good read,” said Tommy as he swiped the book.
   “Good,” said Lana, and smiled into his warm brown eyes.  Nice.
   “Want to come to my place for dinner? I’m grilling some chicken and I have tabouli salad left over from last night. It’s still good.”
   “Sure, I’d like that,” she said.
  He lived at a motel ten miles out of town. When she pulled up the place looked empty except for Tommy’s car.
   “There was a construction crew that worked on the overpass staying here,” Tommy said, “they finished up and left yesterday. I’m taking care of the place for the owner for a couple days. The closed sign is up but I watch the place for them sometimes. They got a big wedding or something. Pakistani folks. I get free rent. I do some cleaning and maintenance too.”
  There was a barbecue grill outside his door, but it didn’t look as though anyone had used it in years.
“Come on in,” he said.    Smell of stale cigarette smoke. Picture of a bright blue lake and a bright green mountain. Ancient TV teetering on a high shelf. King size bed with a brownish spread.
   “Where’s the chicken?” She said, gazing trustfully into his gentle eyes. She didn’t want chicken. She wanted sex. The hunger was radiating to every cell she possessed. Her body softened compliantly.
   “You’re my chicken,” he whispered as he took her in his arms. It happened so quickly that she couldn’t remember how he did it, but she found herself handcuffed with her wrists in front of her.. He pushed her    gently face down on the bed and tried to pull off her jeans. He had to turn her over to undo the fly opening. He looked into her eyes and whispered “I like to spank. Is that alright with you?”
   “No,” she whispered, “I don’t like being hit. Don’t.” He had duct tape across her mouth in no time.
   “Just a precaution,” he smiled, as he turned her on her face again. He showed her his whip. “You’re going to love this,” he said, “special made.”    Finely braided with a silver bead and nine fine narrow strands. The leather was. lustrous with use and blood and oil. She turned her face away and waited.
   The first few lashes almost felt good. He paused to rub some lotion that felt warm on her skin and smelled like cedar. Then he started enjoying himself. She heard his moans as the warm rain of his come fell across her buttocks. She felt a rush of pleasure as she always did when a man came even if she didn’t.  When he took off his belt with the big cowboy buckle she felt the panic break loose. She shit herself with fear. He came with a warm wet towel and cleaned her up. “Don’t do that again,” he said. He tugged up her tee shirt as far as he could and hit her hard again and again. She felt his second ejaculation as she passed out.
   She awoke fully dressed and slumped in the driver’s seat of her car, the keys were in her lap. There was half dried vomit clogging her hair. The motel was dark and silent. Tommy’s car was gone. The blood on her back had congealed into her tee shirt. When she moved, the fabric tore away and she had to cry out. Duct tape and handcuffs gone.    She reached forward to put the key in the ignition and wailed long and loud at the pain and she kept wailing all the way back to Iris’ house through the silent, empty streets.
   Iris was up as soon as Lana staggered in. “My God!” She said. “Did he give you a shot?” Iris asked as she surveyed the damage.
   “Might have,” Lana murmered.
   “I got some stuff I can give you, but if he already gave you some drug it might kill you.”
   “Just give me four Vicodin. That’s what I had last time.”
   Iris cleaned the cuts as gently as she could. “I think I can butterfly them,” she said. “It won’t be pretty. You want to go to the E.R.?”
   “Can’t you stitch ‘em?” Lana asked.    Iris sighed.
   “I suppose I could. If they get infected you’ll really have to go to the E.R.
  There were two dozen cuts that were oozing blood, and six or eight places where the slashes were deep enough to gape wide open. When Iris had mended five of them Lana said “You have to stop now. I can’t stand any more. Can you butterfly the others?”
   “I’ll call you in sick,” said Iris. It was growing light outside. Lana didn’t answer. She was nearly asleep, lying on her stomach with the sheet tented over her back by two chairs.
   “I’m in your bed,” she said.
   “Yes you are, and if you like it you can move in off the porch and sleep in the spare room like a civilized human,” Iris said.

   She was back at work in a few days, moving slowly and doing as little as possible. Elf helped out with the bed making and bathroom scrubbing. Lana did what she could for Elf in reception.
Elliot had been silent since he heard about Lana. He felt guilty. Hadn’t he gloated at the idea of Lana’s being falsely convicted of murder? The woman didn’t look good. Elliot experienced stirrings of pity.    When Lana came in with his burger and coffee once again he attempted a concerned look.
   “How are you feeling?” he asked.
   “Alright,” she said. She did not look at him.
   “I’m sorry about what happened to you.”
   “Yeah,” she said.
   Lana moved into Iris’ spare room. Iris charged her a hundred a month. She still spent most of her time outside. Late in the night she would drag her sleeping bag out to the porch, curl up on the canvas chair and sleep out the dark. Sometimes in the hour before first light the temperature would drop below freezing. Lana would put her head inside the sleeping bag and huddle until she was driven indoors by the cold.
   She stopped at the dollar store one evening to buy milk and tampons.    Tommy with the name Carl embroidered on his shirt was at the register.
   “How you doing?” he asked pleasantly.
   “There’s a contract out on you,” Lana said with a smile as she handed him the money. “Have a nice day,” she said.
   “You too,” said Tommy, still polite.
   “Let’s kill him,” said Iris.
   “Be great.” Said Lana. “Beat the living shit out of him.”
   “Keep him alive for a few days though.”
   “Yeah. Good.”
   “Fuck that,”said Lana. “Not worth the trouble.”
   “He must of got away with it a whole lot of times.   Someone needs to stop him.”
   “Not me,” said Lana.
   “He’ll kill someone,” said Iris.

   Carl locked up the store and set the alarms. He was exhausted. It was Halloween and the store had been full of single moms buying last minute sale merchandise to outfit their kids. Tomorrow the crap would be marked down further and then trashed. Thanksgiving and Christmas were coming up. He’d be busy for weeks and he was short on help. He wasn’t feeling good either. He knew he should see a doctor but his insurance wasn’t worth shit. The headaches were knocking him sideways and he didn’t know what to do.
   When he got home he microwaved a TV dinner and let out the cat. He turned on the TV and crashed on the sofa. When he woke it was nine o’clock. He restarted the microwave and listened to the sound of kids giggling at the front door. He had a bowl of bubble gum on the counter. He picked up the bowl and opened the front door. A pair of twelve year olds in monster outfits were standing there, their cheap masks held firmly in place with heavy stocking caps The Mace was completely
unexpected. He howled in surprise and reeled backwards. One of the kids had the door wedged open. The kid flung a couple more canisters into the hallway behind him and then slammed the door shut. He heard them laughing as they ran down the street. He grabbed his phone and started to dial 911. Then he thought maybe he didn’t want a bunch of cops ripping up his house. There was stuff they might find. He ran into the street gasping for fresh air. Squinting through burning, streaming eyes he could see no trick or treaters.
   When they got home Iris and Lana sat out on the cold porch, wrapped up in quilts and drinking tequila. After the second shot Iris started to laugh. She laughed until tears ran down her face. This caused Lana to start off with a quiet giggle that slowly progressed into shrieks and howls. She had to stop when her stomach hurt too much to continue. She staggered into the house dragging her quilt behind her and fell on the sofa without a thought for windows or doors. In the morning she found Iris passed out on the porch steps with Scruffy in her arms. Iris was warm enough with the quilt around her.

   It was Lana’s day off. She wanted out. Away from Iris and work and everything, especially Tommy/Carl lurking in the Dollar Store watching for fresh meat. Perhaps he had learned a lesson. Perhaps not. She drove into the mountains past aspen trees just losing the golden glory of their foliage. She saw a Forest Service sign for Bone Lake and followed the dirt road for a few miles. The lake was not much more than a pond. A couple of picnic tables and a muddy, reed spiked
shoreline. A place for fishermen, she thought, but there were none around. She walked the trail around the lake. It took about an hour, and for the last fifteen minutes she was cold and eager to get back to the car. She nearly missed the picnic area, but she glimpsed a table half hidden by some brush. As she walked toward the parking lot she saw a man sitting on the ground with his back against a Doug fir trunk. Not a man. More like a boy of sixteen or so.
   “Hi,” she said. He turned his head slowly to look at her.
   “You know you was stalked by a mountain lion?”
   “What?”
   “Like I said. You was being stalked. Right there across the lake. There’s a family of them there. I been watching them. You’re lucky you ain’t dead. I heard the kill cry last night. They must of got a deer. You lucky they weren’t hungry.”
   “Holy shit. Are you kidding me?”
   “I ain’t kidding why would I lie to you?”
   “Are you here all by yourself? Where’s your car?”
   “Yes I’m by myself and my car is in my dreams.”
   “Are you living out here? It’s going to snow any day now.”
   So she drove him back to town. He had nothing with him. She reached into the glove compartment and gave him the peanut butter jar and spoon.
   “It’s what I live on sometimes. Help yourself.”
He wasn’t thirsty. Must have been drinking the creek water and finding berries and stuff though it was late in the year.
   “You got family in town? Where are you from?”
   “South. No family. Not no more.”
   Lana had an idea. She took the boy to the Inn of the Ancients and knocked on Elliot’s door.
   “You got money don’t you? There’s someone here needs money.” Elliot looked up from his iPad.
   “I am not in the habit of lending money to unknown persons -- or known persons either for that matter. Who is this needy creature? A friend of yours?”
   “No. I found him out by himself. He’s not very old and he has no place to go.”
Elliot had an unreasonable suspicion that this encounter was being videotaped He caught the kid’s red tinged eye.
  “What’s your name boy?” He roared, “Oliver Twist?”
  “Bobby sir.”
  “Make that Bob. ‘Bobby’ connotes vulnerability.”
  “My name is Bobby.” Elliot handed Lana three twenties. Lana looked shocked.
  “Are you kidding me? What can he do with this? He has to get a place to live and he has to eat and get clothes and stuff while he looks for a job and that’s going to be hard because he don’t have i.d. Give me two hundred for him.  That would be better than nothing.
   “Out!” Elliot shouted and pushed open the door.
   “Take me back there where you found me. There’s something I want to show you.” the boy said as they walked back to her car.
   “I’m not going all the way back there for no reason. You know how much gas is? It went up a dime overnight.”
   “There’s something up there I want to show you.”
   “Might it have something to do with money?”
   “It might.” They arrived back at the lake just before dark. Bobby led
her away from the parking lot to a brushy area. “Look there,” he said. Lana looked and saw a jumble of weeds and thistles.
   “So? What am I supposed to see?”
   “Look again.”
  The marijuana plants were struggling to survive in the weedy mess.
   “No one’s been here this year. maybe not last year. It’s forgotten weed.   Someone abandoned it.”    
   “But it’s not worth much is it? No buds, not manicured,
half dead.”
   “Yeah but it’s pot. We could dry it and pretty it up. I could sell it. Middle school kids will buy anything. I could get enough money to find a life.”
   “So what’s stopping you?”
   “I need scissors and baggies and I need transportation. And I need food.”
   “I have a job. I can’t drive you around all day. Seems to me you can take care of yourself up here. I’ll come up here one more time with a sleeping bag and a tarp, yes and some food and baggies. That’s all. And give me some of that weed so my friend and I can check it out.”
  Bobby was run from one school by an angry girl with a lacrosse stick. Some kind of rich kid school, he thought. Not a friendly place. Bobby was lacking in social skills. The best time for making a sale was in the morning when a lot of kids walked to school. He almost blended in.    He made four hundred dollars in seven school days which was enough for him. He was afraid. He did not want to be put in some kind of care situation. He’d rather face the bums and rollers under the freeway overpass. He wished he’d learned to read better. That would be a help. He was fast with money though.

  He didn’t say good-bye to Lana, he just put out his thumb and headed for Los Angeles. Or maybe Vegas. Some place where stuff might happen.
   “How’s that boy?” Elliot asked Lana.
   “Who knows?” She answered. He did not sleep well that night. He kept thinking of Suzanne, far away in London, and the lost boy at his door. People he could have helped and chose not to.

   Lana and Iris smoked Bobby’s weed.
   “Hardly got a buzz,” said Iris.


CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


  Arlene and Tiffanee went to visit Mr. Hughes’ remaining sloth. The sloth was more or less invisible high in his tree. He appeared to have achieved permanence, hanging quietly from his branch.
   “What I used to like about them was their imperviousness,” said Mr. Hughes. Mr Hughes’ name was Jason, but mostly he thought of himself as Mr Hughes. He had an unfortunate face which transmitted every emotion that shimmered among the cells and neurons of his brain. Poker, business, acting were all professions closed to him. Even teaching was difficult, because his students could read him and know just how far they could push him. Mr Hughes had retreated to counseling where he was one on one with his adversary.
   “Imperviousness can lead to an untimely death,” said Mr Hughes.
   “But they don’t hurt anyone do they?” Tiffanee asked.
   “Well you wouldn’t want one to mistake you for a tree and stick his claws into you.”
Tiffanee nodded and peered upward. It was growing dark.
   “Well, Tiffanee, if you want him he’s yours. I think I’m through with sloths.”
   “Would you help me with him at first?”
   “Sure.”
   “Well wait a minute,” said Arlene, “it’s my yard where he’ll live, and I’ll be building the sloth den with Tiffanee’s help.”
   “Great,” said Mr Hughes while his face registered panic. He feared Arlene.
   “I helped Arlene build an oval room,” said Tiffanee, “well we changed a room from rectangle to an oval.”
   “It was a lot of work,” said Arlene, “but Tif did good. She missed a lot of school though.”
   “No more of that!” Mr Hughes said. His face actually matched his voice for a moment.


  Tiffanee was watching Arlene.    Arlene was up the sloth tree. She was building a sloth house. Tiffanee had her doubts. Do sloths need tree houses? Perhaps in the winter time. She had been hoping that Arlene would build a sloth door to the oval room so that he could enjoy a really warm place in the winter cold. Arlene was talking about installing electricity in the tree house so that the sloth could have a heater with a thermostat and a light and perhaps a radio or a TV. Tiffanee wondered whether sloths had good vision. She would ask Mr Hughes. She knew that porcupines chewed electric wiring. The sloth might electrocute himself.  That would be bad, especially for Mr Hughes. Why did she care about Mr Hughes? She did not know.
   “Tif, bring up those two by fours leaning up against the shed. You better do them one at a time.”    Tiffanee tried to subdue a scowl. She hated being ordered about like some flunky. Arlene hadn’t been like that when they were doing the oval room. It was more like they were equals. Of course Arlene was a master builder in her own way, but Tiffanee wanted to be an apprentice, not a slave. She climbed the ladder holding the two by four vertically and hoping it would knock Arlene off balance.



CHAPTER NINETEEN

 
  Wendell was thinking about dumping Moon. She made him spend a lot of money on crap like those heavy milky drinks they sell at fast food places. She’d suck one down in no time without so much as offering him any. And she liked to eat at Applebys and stay in a motel every night. On his own he’d sleep in the truck and have a bag of Fritos for dinner. The sex wasn’t that hot either. Sometimes he felt like he was fucking a hibernating boa constrictor.
  They had a fight one night at a Motel 6 and he woke to find no Moon. He moved the curtain to look for the car. Moon was trying to get it open. She had no key, he’d always made sure of that. He pulled on his pants.
   “So, can I help you with that?” He asked.
   “Get the fuck away from me,” she said. Her face was hidden by her heavy dark hair. He grabbed a handful.
   “Exactly what I want to do.” He twisted her hair in his hand. “Come on back in so we can talk without making a scene.”
  Back in the room Moon jerked her head away from him. “I could have killed you easy. I could have killed you and took all your money.”
  “Too late for that now. I’ve never trusted you. I’ve never slept easy with you around. I’ll give you a hundred. Go look for your kid or whatever I don’t care just get the hell out of my life.”
  “Get real. Give me a thousand.”
  “Fuck that. Here’s two hundred. Get your stuff and leave.”
  She took her stuff and left. He watched her walk alone down the still dark street. He
wanted to call her back and take her in his arms because he thought he might love her, but he didn’t. He thought about going back home. At least he knew a few people. The folks he ate lunch with at the Senior Citizens’ Center, his old neighbors, Arlene and Mike and Tif and that couple who walked by his old house sharp at five every day whatever the weather. Trouble was that he didn’t like any of them and they didn’t like him either.
   “Get a life,” he said to himself, “Get a life.”
  He was thinking about Lana again although he knew it was pointless. It wasn’t like he could look for her on Facebook. For a start he didn’t know her last name and Moon said her first name probably wasn’t her real name either. The good part was that it gave him an excuse to keep traveling around the casino and resort towns of the west, and this was more fun than finding a job in some
auto parts store. He wasn’t hurting for money, at least for a while. He could do this for at least a year before he might have to settle down. He could always live off his Social Security because he’d worked since his fourteenth birthday and always on the straight. There was 1600 a month going into his bank account back home and he wasn’t touching it.
  Wendell married Jessica straight out of high school and they stayed married twenty three years. When he returned from Vietnam Jessica was pregnant and the child who they named Mitch clearly had a black father. Wendell didn’t care. They told the kid he was adopted, but in high school Mitch started trying to find his father.
  Jessica had to tell him that she didn’t know who his father was, that it was just a thing that happened out of loneliness. Mitch went off to the Marines and got himself killed in some training accident. Jessica took off soon after and didn’t stay in touch. Wendell married again, but that was a big mistake.    Sometimes Wendell wished he had family. Mostly he was glad there was no one he gave a dam about. Except perhaps Lana.

  Moon walked down the silent dark street until she was out of sight of the last motel at the edge of town. A car slowed down as it passed. Moon started to howl. “Why me?” She yelled into the darkness. “Why me why me why me for god’s sake why?” No answer.  She turned back into town and stopped at the Denny’s.  She ordered coffee and made it last a couple of hours of bright warmth. What next?
“Are they hiring?” She asked the waitress.
“They’re always hiring,” the waitress answered Moon stepped out on the freeway access and flagged down a truck.

  Bobby stared out at the wide Pacific darkness. It was 2a.m.    He wasn’t cold, but he would be soon if he didn’t move. He was allowing himself the luxury of self pity. He wondered if anything good was in his future. What was ‘good’ anyway? A wife and family and a stinking job that made him a slave to some ass hole boss? Mowing the lawn and a stupid barbecue thing in back so he could poison his two little kids with burned fat? A sulky overweight wife who wouldn’t do what he wanted in bed?
He had been lucky though, because his light colored hair and eyes made it much easier to get a birth certificate and a Social Security number. A real one. Now he could get a real job too. If he wanted. He stood up slowly and looked around for his shoes. There was a roaring in his ears that made no sense. He looked out at the dark ocean and something didn’t seem right. He was running before the word ‘sunami’ entered his mind. The soft sand was pulling at his bare feet, but he was glad that he hadn’t found his shoes because they would have slowed him down more. When he reached the boardwalk he could hear sirens and see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles. Which way was uphill?    There was a marina to the south and he sure as shit wasn’t going that way. He ran straight east as the roads began to clog with cars. He’d stepped on something sharp and his left foot hurt to beat hell but he had to keep going.


  Less than a mile away Moon had seen the wave from a beach front hotel room that would be splinters in seconds. She leapt out a balcony window and caught some forgotten Christmas lights strung round a palm tree trunk. She scrabbled desperately at the trunk and was able to climb into the canopy. Her body bled from a hundred slashes. She wound her hands into the Christmas wiring and shriveled her self into a ball as the wall of water slammed the tree into the balcony that she had just left.
  Bobby stepped on something warm and squishy. Whatever it was it pulled at his painful foot. He kicked at the thing before he realized it was an old woman with a broken leg. She had his ankle in a hug and she wasn’t letting go.
   “Help” She croaked.
   “Fuck!” He said, but he couldn’t leave her. Or could he? He picked her up and ran on. One of her legs was hanging loose. She had fainted in his arms.
  When the water caught up with them it had lost its momentum and was about to recede. Bobby shifted his mode from survival to loot. There had to be valuable stuff floating about. He saw an ambulance parked on dry ground and he dumped the old woman on the hood and left the scene. He had stuff to do.



CHAPTER TWENTY


  Wendell was in the lobby of a motel in Susanville when he saw the sunami story on the morning news. Sneaker sunami, the announcer said, her over made-up eyes round and serious. Someone from the Geological Survey was trying to explain how such a thing could be. The sunami had managed to destroy hundreds of miles of California coastline, though not Crescent City which was at least slightly prepared.
  Wendell felt his flagging will to live revive. Something to do! He was on his way to Santa Barbara or anywhere he was needed. He had skills. He had a truck. He had time. He filled the back of the truck with bottled water and granola bars. The basics.
  By the time he got near the coast they were turning volunteers away. He was told to sign up with the Red Cross. Instead he drove across a winery and a field full of mammoth burros to get to an unguarded back road. He found a small town where wealthy people came to hide from the plebs. An obscenely expensive restaurant specializing in kelp foam and lamb lungs on toast had been flattened along with everything else.

  The National Guard people were grateful for the granola bars and drinking water, but didn’t want his help until he started ordering people about in a quiet and authoritative voice which he had never used before. He saved a woman from instant death by explaining why no, they should not move that beam no not until they reinforced that point over there did they see what he was talking about? Yes? Good.
And Wendell rejoiced. He worked tirelessly for three weeks and was personally thanked by the Governor when she alighted from her helicopter to survey the scene. Someone took a photograph and said they would e-mail it to him, but they never did.
  Further down the coast they found Moon or quite a lot of her amid the wreckage of the motel. Her face was found intact though slashed and disfigured. Her expression was seraphic, calm, with the hint of a smile because the words fluttering weakly in one last outpost of her dying mind had been that her real name was Debbie, and that was a very good name.



CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


  Elliot was standing on the steps outside Liverpool Street Station. He was chilled to the bone. He had forgotten the cold. There was a McDonalds a few yards away and he longed to go in and get a cup of coffee, but he was afraid of missing Suzanne. As soon as he got on the plane he realized that his e-mail had been a mistake. Attempting to reignite a love affair was always a bad move. Now here he was, freezing his ass off in a city he loathed.
  Someone was calling his name. Suzanne was standing one step below him, looking up and smiling strangely. She kissed him perfunctorily on each cheek in the London style. What did that mean? He checked in at the Strand Palace and they ate at one of the noisy restaurants. She talked about her job and did not look him in the eye. When he asked her if he should take a blue pill she said not tonight and he knew he was on a fool’s errand. She looked haggard, he thought, and old. Of course she was decades younger than he was, but he remembered her freshness when they first met. She almost smelled like a rainy spring morning and he loved her for that.
   “You look tired,” he said.
   “I am tired.” She reached across the table for his hand and made a visible effort to look him in the eye. “Elliot, I need to ask you something.” Oh god, he thought, here we go. Must be money or a
favor. An intro at Friend Publishing? They had ridden the tide with e-books and were doing quite well.
   “Fire away,” he said.
   “Well you know I only came here just to get away from the mess. To try to save you more embarrassment.”
   “Your decision, my dear, not mine.”
   “Not quite the way it was, Elliot, but never mind. Since you’re here I may as well tell you I could use some money. Hugh is a musician and he doesn’t make much. We’re having a hard time.”
  Elliot imagined Hugh playing guitar in a self-righteously cutting edge band. Probably younger than Suzanne. Lizard thin and unwashed.
   “He plays violin. Mostly classical. He plays on the Underground. He’s not well. He gets pretty tired. He’d like to retire, but his pension won’t amount to much.”
Elliot took down his clay pigeons. A lovely California girl had morphed into a furtive, rat like creature shrinking into a colorless raincoat. And it was his fault. Perhaps not entirely. After all, Suzanne could have made other choices.
   “I’ll buy you a ticket home. You need to get out of this place.”
Suzanne smiled gently. “Let’s go see Hugh. He’s playing just down the road.”
   “Not necessary,” said Elliot.
   “Do it for me,” she said. The first thing Elliot thought when he saw Hugh was of a newly hatched chick. A self effacing person, a shy person, a kind person who would always step back to allow others to pass. A man guaranteed to be smashed and butchered by his fellow humans. A man who, no matter how great his talent, would never be acknowledged. And Suzanne had let Elliot come all the way to England because she loved this loser.
   “Let’s go get a drink,” Elliot said. Hugh brightened considerably. There were a few pound notes in his violin case. He rummaged about in the case hoping to find another coin or two. Slim pickings.
  Hugh ordered a Double Diamond, Suzanne a Corona.  Elliot went with scotch and soda.
   “If I’d known you were going for that I’d have ordered one too,” Hugh said when the drinks came. Elliot went to the bar and brought back a scotch for Hugh. He caught a peculiar look in Hugh’s pale, mild eyes.
   “So you want to take the one sweet thing in my life away from me, do you?” Hugh said.
   “I want her to be happy. That’s all.”
   “So you want a second chance? You think you deserve a second chance?”
   “I just want her to be happy. She doesn’t look happy.”
   “For Christ’s sake what is this a slave market? Anyone interested in my opinion?” Suzanne shouted. A few heads turned. Hugh cringed into his hand-knitted scarf. Had Suzanne made it for him? Could Suzanne knit? Elliot didn’t know.
   “I don’t know about you, Elliot,” Suzanne said, “you don’t seem to realize what a total bastard you are. It’s not my fault your damn grandkids came in and thought you were trying to kill me and called 911. It’s not my fault that that blew open your lousy life and mine too. Trying to blame me for everything like I was a scheming gold digger which I wasn’t. That’s why I came here, to get away from you. Gave up a good job. I can’t even work here legally though I do of course, but I hardly make enough to live. Hugh and I make enough to get by if we don’t mind being hungry once in a while. At least we know Hugh can get medical care when he needs it. Elliot get out of my life!” At least seven people were listening avidly.
   “Hold it,” said Hugh, “there’s a simple solution. Give us money, Elliot. Give us money and get the hell out of Suzanne’s life.”
   “Yeah, Elliot, give them money and then you can all shut up,” said a long nosed man at the next table.
   “Oh I don’t know, Alan, it’s better than the telly isn’t it?” His crimson haired companion cackled. “I know you, dear, you play violin by the Underground.”
A shabby person spoke kindly. “You play lovely. I nearly always drop you a few coin. There’s so many like you so I can’t give more, but you play nice.”
  Elliot looked out the window. It was raining heavily. He would go back to the airport and wait for a flight. He would not give Suzanne money. Out of the question. Let her fight her own battles. He went to the counter and ordered drinks for Hugh and Suzanne, paid for them and went out into the cold rain.



CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


   Tiffanee’s mother felt the panic rise. Her daughter had disappeared again. It was nearly midnight and Tiffanee was not at Arlene’s or anywhere else. Tiffanee’s mother stood in the middle of the kitchen and noticed that she was flopping her hands around. Was she wringing her hands? Wasn’t that just in books? Then the phone rang. Arlene had found Tiffanee.
She was crouching in a corner of the sloth pen. The sloth was securely inert half-way up his tree.
   “Honey, honey,” her mother said in a soft, dripping voice which caught in her throat.
Tiffanee looked up at her mother in the dim light from Arlene's oval room window.
   “I don’t know what to do,” she said.
   “You don’t have to know. Stuff just happens.”
   “Not to the sloth it doesn’t. The sloth just waits and nothing happens. I’ve been waiting and waiting but nothing happens.”
   “When stuff happens it can be bad. Remember Mr. Hughes’ sloth that got run down by a car? Remember when you hid in Wendell’s trailer and ended up in Las Vegas? You know what that was like for me?”
   “For you? Shit. You know what it was like for me?”
   “I’m just saying that when you try to make stuff happen it can turn out bad for a whole lot of people as well as yourself.”
  “I can’t get up,” said Tiffany, “my legs have gone to sleep. Anyway that’s stupid. Even if you don’t try to do stuff and just stay home and be quiet still bad things happen”
   “OK but at least you can’t blame yourself for it. One thing you do need to do is bring Sloth indoors. It’s getting too cold for him outside.”
   “We built him a shelter with a heater, but he won’t go in it,” said Arlene.
   “We need to cover his pen with plastic,” said Tiffanee.
   “It’ll look like a damn homeless camp round here,” said Arlene.
   “Can I bring him home for the winter?” Tiffanee asked.
   “We’ll work something out in the morning,” her mother said.



CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


   “It’s always good when you get a period because you know you’re not pregnant,’ said Arlene.
   “I’m not worrying about that,” said Tiffanee.
   “You will.”
   “Huh!” The thought of a man putting his penis inside her was interesting but not attractive to Tiffanee.
   “Well,” said Arlene, taking a swig from her gin bottle, "when you do get interested for Chrissakes use a condom.” She took a Trojan out of her purse.  “Here, keep it with you. Don’t laugh. You know how to use it? It’ll stop babies and a whole lot of diseases.” Tiffanee was giggling at the idea of a baffled half-baby clawing in vain at a rubbery barrier, trying to unite with its other half. Sad.


  Arlene had installed a sloth door to her mud room. She had erected a short but sturdy Chinese elm with added platforms and branches. The sloth seemed happy in the mud room and rarely used his door to the cold outside.  Arlene and Tiffanee were knitting scarves for homeless people.
   “They’ll sell them for meth,” said Tiffanee.
   “Let ‘em,” said Arlene, “they’d hardly get a buzz on for what they’d get for ‘em.”
  Tiffanee went to the mud room and unhooked Sloth from his tree. His permanent smile remained in place. Tiffanee thought that Mr Hughes’ sloth was probably smiling to the last. Perhaps that was why Mr Hughes got so upset. No. It was the kids who abandoned the sloth that he could not get over.
   "You better go home,” said Arlene. “Your dad’s home isn’t he? You want anything for Christmas?”
   “Trinkets,” said Tiffanee.
  Later that night when she was really drunk,Arlene went upstairs and pawed through her coffers of cheap jewelry in search of trinkets for Tiffanee. She put on her emerald green and loaded herself with glitter. One look in the mirror caused her to collapse on the soft bedroom carpet in a storm of tears. Before dawn she crawled to the bathroom, leaving a trail of broken glitter, vomited, and made it back to her bed.



CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


  Bobby had a real job. Not only that but he had a car. His boss paid cash for it. A ten year old Corolla but it got him around and it was registered to him and he had a real address in Santa Monica! Just a studio apartment in a complex full of welfare moms who he was told to stay away from. No problem there! all he had to do was deliver stuff. Not pizza. USPS flat rate boxes that never went through the mail. No address on them. He had to memorize the addresses and his boss had kind of said he’d get killed if he went to the wrong place. Bobby wrote the addresses on his palm just to be sure. Once he could have sworn the guy didn’t say apartment A or apartment B so Bobby held onto the package until the guy came at him in a meth rage. Bobby stood his ground.
   “You never said apartment B. I don’t got your number so I can’t call you. Shit! What could I do?”
   “Get the fuck over there or we all dead. Now!” Bobby delivered the package to an angry woman with bushels of inky black hair. She snatched the box and slammed the door. Bobby got cash money with each delivery. He had no credit card, no bank account. The name on the apartment was not his, and he paid rent directly in cash to a woman he took to be the manager. The car was in his real name. He had the registration but not the title. He had a legal driver’s license though. That was the good thing. He realized that his lack of much identity made him both valuable and precarious. One night when he’d stolen a single serve tequila and drunk it on an empty stomach he invented a song called ‘My Name is Nobody’. It sounded good to him. He was lonely but that was nothing new. He knew that he had to be careful. The fear that ate at him was that he would screw up big time and die in a bad, bad way. He had a stash of money growing in his back pack. Soon he would leave town. Leave the car somewhere and maybe go back to Bakersfield to look for his mom.



CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


     Lana greeted Elliot with a burger cut into four neat quarters.
   “Welcome home,” she said. Elliot grunted. The burger
was good and Lana looked pretty.
   “You ever been loved by someone?” He asked.
   “Love?” Said Lana, “Love is the shit people hand you when they want something.”
Elliot actually groaned and banged his fist against his forehead.
   “For god’s sake girl!”
   “What god? For chrissakes there’s no fucking god!”
   “What do you want Lana? There must be something.”
   “Not you. That’s for sure.”
   “Well that’s good because I certainly don’t want you, but
I would like to help you if that’s possible.”
   “To make you feel good?”
   “Yes, to make me feel good if you like.”
   “Fuck that,” said Lana, and left.
Elliot called a son in Omaha. He was taking a deposition. He called a daughter in Long Beach. Land line disconnected. He called his ex-wife number two. They exchanged banalities. Awkward silences stretched themselves embarrassingly. Mutual relief as they said good-bye.
He took out the last of the Glenfiddich and drank it down without bothering to savor it.

  Iris and Lana sat in the kitchen drinking green tea. Iris had to keep the electric heater going full blast because Lana insisted on having the back door half open. Iris was getting a little tired of Lana.
   “You have to get your own place. No offense but you cramp my plans. I got a couple of prospective clients. I need to stylize the place.”
   “Clients? For what?”
   “Fortunes and stuff.”
   “I thought you couldn’t do that in town. All those gipsy places are out of town.”
   “I’d be very discreet. Call myself an adviser. I’m too old for that other stuff. Blackmail. Breaking and entering. That’s in my past.”
   “You could teach me.”
   “You don’t have the talent I can tell.”
   “So what is my talent?”
   “You don’t need one.”
   “Weird,” Lana muttered.
Iris was smoking again. Lana wanted a cigarette but she wouldn’t give Iris the satisfaction.
   “I’m looking for a place,” she said. She wasn’t.
   “No hurry,” said Iris.
   “Thanks for what you did,” said Lana.
   “What did I do?”
   “Maced that fucker. That was nice. Thanks.”
   “No hurry,” said Iris. She got up from the table to take Scruffy for his late walk. Lana poured the last of the tea from Iris’ English teapot.

  Iris liked walking Scruffy in the dark. She had a route that lasted about half an hour and she enjoyed looking into people’s houses and seeing what was happening. A smell she recognized wafted up her nose. Usually she smelled marijuana smoke when she passed the small, greenish house at night.    Next morning the police were there, and an ambulance and a clean-up crew. Suicide, they said. Iris did not remember seeing whoever lived there. Sad, she thought. Then it occurred to her that she too would one day die alone. Did she care? No. Not if Scruffy went first. She might have to see to that.

  Elliot was restless. He needed a life. He wasn’t dead yet was he? He could go another thirty years. The thought made him panic. Perhaps he could set himself up as a consultant. He’d have to pass the bar in Arizona if he wanted to practice law again. He didn’t want to go back to New York. He could do immigration advice but he didn’t speak enough Spanish. He could volunteer. He had all the money he’d ever need. But then he’d have to be nice to dreadful people and that wasn’t his style. He could learn though, couldn’t he? Easier than Spanish perhaps.
  There was Lana again with the damn cut up burger. “You don’t need to carve it up,” he said. “I thought that was how you wanted it,” she answered.
   “Fucking can’t do anything right!” She flounced out. Elliot actually ran to catch her before she reached the service door.
   “Im sorry! Truly I’m sorry!”
   “Fuck off!” She said.
   “Lana I’m sorry, believe me I’m sorry!” He sounded sincere. “I’m kind of messed up right now. I’m sorry.”
   “Yeah,” said Lana, and pushed through the service door. Elliot banged his fists on his forehead. Under his breath he uttered certain curses and imprecations. He got up and tried to figure out the coffee maker.    He had no coffee.
   “Still looking,” said Lana.
   “I don’t know about you,” said Iris, who was on her third tequila. “Who the hell are you anyway? You never talk about yourself, like where you come from or anything.”
   “I told you about the killing didn’t I? You forget? When my friend beat her grandmother to death? Got stuck in prison as an adult two long years? You forget? Or was that not nice enough? So what else do you want to know about anyway? I had a nice mom and a nice dad and lived in a nice house on a nice street in a nice town went to a nice school married a nice man had two nice kids and lived happily ever after? That what you want to hear? How about a dog on the Moon tossed a meteorite that landed on the res and a shaman split it open and found me all fossilized inside and he pissed on me and I came to life and was given magic powers and started the cult of the Mad Moon Dogs of St Francis and made millions of dollars until my magic ran out and whatever.
That better?”
   “Thanks,” said Iris, “that’s the most you ever said about yourself. I’ll remember all that.” She poured more tequila. “Ever think about that Russian dog? Probably was a stray that ran free and drank from puddles and ate road kill then got caught and stuck through with tubes and sensors and stuck in a steel ball and died of suffocation and thirst and starvation up there on the moon.”
   “Probably didn’t know what the hell happened. Probably didn’t care,” said Lana.
She was eating Cheetos one at a time and slipping a few to Scruffy under the table. She moved her foot and accidentally stepped on the little dog.
   “Oh sorry Scruffy. Sorry sorry sorry.” She picked up the dog and hugged him and knew that she had to get out of Iris’ way. Find a place. Or maybe stay at the Inn like they’d offered.
   “I’m going I’m going,” she whispered, her face pushed into Scruffy’s dank fur.
Iris picked up the paper and handed it to Lana.
   “You see this?”
   “No. What?”
   “That woman that drowned. Overdose. Died in bed then her boy friend dumped her in the pool. The kid saw it all. He drove her car. They found DNA.”
   “Poor kid,” said Lana, “another darkwalker on the earth.”
   “Whatever,” said Iris.



CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX


  Wendell had the truck parked so the morning sun shone in on him. Lana was back in his mind again. Sometimes he felt relieved that he had not found her. He could turn her into anything he wanted in his head, even though he knew she was nothing but a burned out hooker from some god-forsaken corner of Europe.. There was something strange about her though. That was the trap he’d fallen into. He needed another disaster to get his mind off her.. During the sunami rescue work he forgot her, but now that things were quiet again her dull, passive face appeared anywhere he looked. He’d see a cloud and there she was, outlined in silver. If he had a camera he could take a picture, but he knew it wouldn’t come out looking anything like her.
  He was camped in the mountains above Crescent City where redwoods caught the early morning sea mist before the dry heat of the valley displaced the cool ocean air. He was sleeping in the cab after he woke one morning to meet a young black bear in the truck bed. It was a long way to drive for food so he lived on what was available. Trout. Crawdads. Wild greens. He shot a squirrel but it was too tough to chew.    A couple of months before there’d been huckleberries and thimbleberries and blackberries and gooseberries. Lana was being pushed from his mind by visions of Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast. Eventually he went in search of one.
  At Walmart the checker kept looking at him. She was a gray, heavy women. As she handed him his receipt she said, “Is that you in the Mirror?” He looked around.
   “What mirror?” The woman pulled up one of the papers at the check-out.
   “This here. That’s you ain’t it?” It was. Clear as a bell. Standing knee deep in wreckage, pointing at something. Even had his name.
   “Well I’ll be,” he said. “You’re famous,” said the checker and gave him a wink. It seemed to him that he should have got paid something. He drove north on 101. Rain spattered thinly. He
imagined Lana in a check-out line slipping her eyes over the Mirror. Probably she wouldn’t notice him, but who knows, maybe she would. Whatever. He turned on the radio to find some weather information. Snowing in the Siskiyous. He stopped at Port Orford for gas. When he was getting coffee someone said it was snowing at Yachats. He turned south. Nowhere to go on a cold gray Oregon afternoon. Where in hell was Lana? Or even Moon? Or anyone.


  It was raining on the reservation too. Other Person wrapped his two children in plastic bags, put water bottles in his pack and headed out to look for the dog that his grandmother had seen in a dream that night. It was his grandmother who had found the rock flung from the moon by a Russian dog. A plea for help so very long ago. His children hoped that the dog had come back to earth.
It was getting dark when they reached the meteorite. A coyote slunk into the dusk.
   “He’s home,” said the little boy.
   “That was Coyote,” said his father.
   “Coyote the trickster has taken the dog’s spirit from the moon,” said the boy.
    “The moon does not send dogs,” said an elder. "The moon sent us horses. The moon once sent a girl child, but the moon sends no dogs".
  “The dog was a stranger, sent there by Russians. He longed to go home. Coyote brought the dog’s spirit home,” said the boy.
  “You confuse me. Be silent,” said the elder.



CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN


  Tiffanee gave a presentation about Sloth. She brought him to English class and gave a reasonably articulate lecture on sloth life. When asked why his fur was green she had explained that sloth fur hosted an ecosystem containing many kinds of living things both animal and vegetable.
   “Gross!” The class yelled as one.
   “You all got bugs living in your eyelashes!” Tiffanee shouted back.
  Tiffanee’s mom had a boyfriend who sometimes stayed overnight when her dad was away.. Tiffanee was not supposed to know. She damaged him one morning almost by accident. She had known that he was lurking outside her door so she kicked it open with all her strength. The door slammed him in the face and knocked him down the first four stairs and flung him
against the wall. He actually cried. “What were you doing up there anyway?” Tiffanee’s
mom asked without looking at him.
   "Bedroom doors should open inward,” was all he said as he held paper towels to his bleeding nose.
   “I know what I want to be,” Tiffanee said to Mr. Hughes.
   “You do, do you?” “Yeah. I do. I want to study things.” “What things?” “I don’t know. I just want to study things.” “Well congratulations. You think that makes you special
or something?” “Most people I know don’t want to study things. They
just want to look good to other people. Like their hair and clothes and stuff.”
   “If you want to study things you have to go to college. A good college, a university. It’s very hard to get into a university. You’d have to start right now and you might work your ass off and get nowhere. That’s what happened to me. You think I want to be a middle school counselor in this hick town? You think this is what I wanted to be?”
   “Your problem,” said Tiffanee and left.
Sloth smiled down at her from his tree. Tiffanee was crying.
   “You can find out stuff without going to college,” said Arlene, “I never went to college. I just learned by doing. Worked for me.”
Tiffanee looked at Arlene. “If you’re so happy why do you drink and do meth?”
   “Who said happy?” Arlene lit up a cigarette.



CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT


 
   “There’s a Carls opening just down the road and that Burger King on the next block’s already been taking us down. I got no choice. It’s not that you’re a bad worker or nothing like that. I just gotta cut back. That’s all there is to it.” The manager waved at the order computer. “See that? Just after noon and look at that. Three cars in the drive through and two inside customers. Jenny there’s wiping off tables and emptying trash which she don’t have to do right now just so she looks busy.”
   “Got time to lean you got time to clean,” Bobby quoted.
   “Yeah well anyway, you can pick up your check next Friday and good luck. Right?”
   “Right.”
   “Get your GEDs. You could get into the manager training program somewheres. I heard The Tire Guy might be hiring.”
   “GEDs?”
   “Yeah. GEDs. Never heard of GEDs? It’s like high school graduation without high school. You should look into it.”
   Bobby looked into it. There was a GED study program at the library. His reading wasn’t good. He was quick to learn when he kept his mind focussed, but it was so damned boring. He’d learned a little math from working on cars, so that was no problem, and he’d learned Howard Zinn’s take on history from a nut case named Habitat who had been with them for a couple years when he was eight or nine. Grammar was hard for him. He could write the way he spoke, but that didn’t work for the volunteer instructors who tended to give up in despair almost weekly. Bobby was about to give up in despair too when an ex military volunteer told him he could get in the Air Force if he got his GEDs. He could work on planes maybe. Steady pay. He’d get a little respect. Wear a uniform.
   It was a Marine recruiter who found Bobby first, and he didn’t let go. Bobby had a birth certificate that he’d had to have to apply for his driver’s license. The birth date on it hazarded a guess at his age that made him seventeen.
   “We need to change that,” said Sergeant Beltran, “you got no one to sign for you so you have to be eighteen. We can fix that. You gotta get that GED then we can go to work for you.”
Sergeant Beltran was a little desperate. He was below quota. He needed a couple of sign-ups by the end of the quarter. He was working on it. The Marines weren’t keen on GED applicants, but the Sergeant sensed a good Marine in Bobby.
   “You don’t got any dependents do you?” He asked Bobby.
   “I got a mom but I don’t know where she’s at.”
   “She ain’t a dependent. You’ll get to take a vocational aptitude test. They may not want you with a GED, so then you could try the Army. They’ll take anyone whose warm.”
   He must have done well on the test because he was assigned to Intelligence. Basic Training was a shock. He came close to going AWOL and getting back to reality, but the challenge was there. Combat training was a whole lot of fun. He excelled. He was a convert. And they were paying him!
Bobby was a Marine. It felt like he’d come home. It was a safe place to be even if you did get killed. He wasn’t happy about Intelligence. He’d pick up a new language in a hurry no doubt, but he wanted to drive a tank.
   “Anyone can drive a tank,” the Sergeant said.



CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE



   Sloth wasn’t feeling well. Tiffanee could tell. He was slower than usual and his eyes were dull and his smile was slipping. He was eating, but Mr Hughes said that there must be something missing in his diet. The Zoo vet didn’t know much about sloths, but he said he knew someone he might call.
Tiffanee sat with Sloth all night. She wanted to throw up.
   “Don’t die, Sloth, please don’t die,” she kept whispering, “I want to have you for my friend until I’m old.”
   The sloth hung quietly in his tree. He continued his slow decline for the next few weeks. Tiffanee declined too. She became sadder and quieter until the Zoo vet called and said there was a wasting disease that sloths sometimes had. There was no cheap test for the disease, but a common antibiotic had been found to be effective against it. Did Tiffanee want to try it? Fifteen dollars should do it. She might also try adding blueberries to Sloth’s diet.
   It seemed to Tiffanee that Sloth improved immediately. It seemed to her that his smile came back.
   “I’ll never leave you,” she said, “I’ll keep you warm and well I will.” She loved Sloth. He didn’t move fast. He didn’t get aggressive. He just was. Perhaps she could learn from him. Not likely, she thought. She began thinking about finding a mate for Sloth. That would make him happy. Or would it?
   Tiffanee did not remember the day that Sloth died. Perhaps he had fallen from his tree. Perhaps he had not really recovered from his slow decline.    Arlene found Tiffanee all soaked in tears out in the grass under Sloth’s tree, the one that was in his outdoor pen. It took the help of a passing neighbor to unlatch Tiffanee’s arms from the cold body.    Tiffanee’s mom loaded her into her truck and took her to the E.R. for the second time in her life, and when she awoke and started screaming they gave her a tranquilizer. Arlene worked all day to remove the slightest trace of Sloth. She even hid his grave though she put rocks over it so she could find it if she had to. “’Bye, Sloth,” she said as she shoveled dirt over his small greenish body. She wondered if Sloth had anything catching? Did they get rabies? She’d have to ask Mr Hughes.
   Some time in the night the tranquilizer wore off and Tiffanee got out of bed, dressed and left the house. She walked out of town and away from the road and through back yards and fields and patches of desert and she walked until half light when she came to a feed lot. She stood at the chain link fence and caught the eye of a buff colored cow who was standing under a feeble light. The cow was looking straight at her. Its fur was ruffling slightly in the predawn wind. “Don’t let them kill you,” she said to the cow, and the cow answered “Why not?”
  Tiffanee walked toward the foothills and did not stop until she stepped into a coyote den and turned her ankle.
   The pain revived her. After a short stop to moan and clutch her ankle she walked on, separating her mind from the pain. She was wondering why she was alive. She was wondering why she and Arlene and the buff cow and her mother’s boyfriend were alive. It seemed to her that animals just were. They tried to stay alive and they tried to breed, but they weren’t like humans.
   “ Power!” Tiffanee yelled to the passing wind, That’s all people want. That’s all there is. Power.” Not even sex or money. That was just shit. Power! All there is.
   At the base of the foothills a chain of ranches caught the mountain water and spread vestiges of green along the desert floor. Tiffanee was twenty miles from home. The Sheriff’s car slowed down beside her and she got into it with a sigh. The young cop handed her a Pepsi from a cooler beside him on the front seat. He didn’t say anything. Just watched her in his rear view and talked softly to someone on his radio.



C H A P T E R    T H I R TY



   Wendell hadn’t checked his e-mail in weeks. Maybe months. He stopped at the library in Redding and occupied a computer. He had just two pages. Hotmail siphoned off most of the junk. He didn’t buy on line or even look up stuff very often. There was nothing personal. No names that he
recognized except the car dealership back home. There was one message titled ‘Unidentified body’ sent from a coroner’s office.    The message said that his name and e-mail address had been found on the body of an unidentified victim of the sunami. The body had been cremated and disposed of. Cash on the body had been taken to defray expenses. The dead woman had some small items on her and since her body was not claimed he was the only person who might be interested in having these objects, valued at less than thirty dollars.
   Wendell was intrigued. He was wondering if the woman was Lana. That would be cool. He had given Lana his e-mail address on a paper napkin, but he thought he’d seen her toss it in an ashtray at the casino. More likely it was Moon. Arlene might have his e-mail address but she wouldn’t be dead in California would she? Another trip to California! Could be a Sign, he thought.  After having his i.d. checked he was handed a yellow envelope.
   “Not much,” said the receptionist, “Just a cheap watch and a pendant.”
   Wendell recognized Moon’s watch. He said that he had known her by the name ‘Moon’, but it wasn’t her real name. She’d mentioned another more ordinary name once, he said, but he didn’t remember it.
   Back in his truck, Wendell looked at Moon’s watch. A man’s watch with a big, clear face. She’d told him that she bought it because it had a heavy canvas strap so that the the buckle pin could be stuck in anywhere. Her wrists were so thin. He remembered that, and for a moment he felt a pang of pity for poor Moon. The pendant was made from an antique looking button. A chinese character had been painted on the back, but he didn’t know what it meant, if anything.

   It wasn’t much of a drive to get back to the place where he’d met her. He thought he might like to go back there and take another look around. See what he could see.
   He remembered how to get close to the tank and the shop hidden in the gully, and he made a point of remembering how to get out, as long as it wasn’t dark.
   As he pulled into the shade of mesquite, he saw a white rental car parked by a pile of old tires. A man got out of the car and approached him. Wendell could see no gun but he knew there was one. No-one came to a place like this without a gun.
   Wendell recognized the young man as Bobby, Moon’s son. “What in hell are you doing here?’ Wendell said. “I could ask you the same.” “I got something for you,” said Wendell. “ It’s in my
pocket. Right here. Now I don’t want you thinking I done some bad thing to your mother because that’s not what happened. You hear me?”
“You came all the way here to find me? What made you think you’d find me here?”
“I didn’t think I’d find you here. I came back here to take a look around. Treasure hunt maybe. Maybe you guys had a secret mine out here. Something like that.”
“If there was a secret mine you think I wouldn’t be working it right now?    There ain’t a secret mine. There ain’t nothing here except a few dead bodies down that shaft which you know about already.”
“Well whatever. I got some stuff of your mom’s. She’s dead. Died in that sunami that hit the coast. They didn’t identify her. She’s ashes now. They gave me a couple things of hers. I’m glad to give them to you.
They’re in my pocket. I don’t have a gun in that pocket. I’m getting them out, right?” Bobby nodded. He looked at the watch and the pendant.
“That it?”
“That’s it. So what are you up here for? Looking for something?”
“Kind of. Looking for anything. I lived here all my life. I got in the Marines. I’m going to Afghanistan. I was going in Intelligence then they said no because I had a suspicious past. Howd’you like that? Now I’m company diarist. I’ll have a gun though. You gotta have a gun.”
   “Sorry about your mom.”
   “You must of been the last one to fuck her, right?”
   Wendell pinched up his mouth. “I don’t know. We’d split up a couple days before. Don’t know. It don’t matter anyway.”
   “I like this watch,” said Bobby.    He took off the watch he was wearing and put on the one that had belonged to Moon. He stretched out his wrist and looked at it. “Cool. I like to wear a watch. People use their phones, but a watch is quicker.”
   Any thing of any possible value was gone. Even the boards and rusted out 55 gallon drums. The old tires and a heap of rotten clothing were about all that remained.
   “There’s more up there,” said Bobby, “You want to go up there?” Wendell sensed a trick. But the boy was in the Marines. Going to Afghanistan. Or was he lying about that? Could he really have some thing in mind?”
   Wendell trudged up the hill behind Bobby, and then into an arroyo where a tiny cabin built from railroad ties still stood untouched. Two beds, a table. Old cans of chili and beans and pineapple.
   “It was my grandpa’s place. Ain’t anyone will touch it. I just thought I might find something I could keep, but I already looked. Nothing. I was just leaving when I saw you. I been here a couple days. I gotta get back. I just have four days.”
   As they were leaving Wendell looked across the hood of his truck at Bobby and said “Good luck in Afghanistan.”
   “I’ll kick ass,” said Bobby.
Bobby followed Wendell to 395 where he headed south for Camp Pendleton and Wendell turned north. Bobby was lying. Something was going on back there. Wendell the hero would find out what it was. As he approached the landmark mesquite he changed his mind. Seven Border Patrol trucks. A helicopter overhead. They flagged him down.
   He told them that he was headed for Stove Pipe Wells, going in the back way. An unfriendly person said that his truck had been spotted “back in there.” Wendell said they were mistaken.
   “My house in Utah burned down. I’m traveling. Looking around.”
He was beginning to feel sick    A plain clothes man in a white s.u.v. got out of his vehicle.
   “You speak Estonian?”
    “No.”
“Then get the hell out of here.”



CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE



   Arlene was thinking about building a sleeping porch. It would be nice to have a breeze catching place to sleep in the summer. Watch the stars. Listen to the distant night trains. The house was Mormon brick, like most of the town. Ferro concrete columns on a really sound foundation. She could do that. Could she use just a wood floor? No insulation? Screen windows with no glass? No, she’d have sliding glass windows to keep out the rain. Tyvek. Arlene sipped on her vodka and orange. Tiffanee was walking up the steps. She was quiet these days, always had her head down. They’d taken her some place after she ran away that last time. Arlene had given up on Tiffanee. She had her own problems.
   “Hey Tif! Long time no see.”
   “They gave me meds. Couldn’t hardly move. My mom’s supposed to make sure I take the fuckers but she’s easy to fool. I stopped taking them yesterday. I can think a bit more now. Don’t feel good though.”
   “You want to help me build a sleeping porch?” Arlene asked.
   “What’s a sleeping porch?”
   “A kind of upstairs screened porch for sleeping in summer. There’s a house on Fourth Street, Fourth and D I think, has one.
   “Where would you put it?”
   “Well the north side would be cooler, but that faces the street, so I was thinking south. There’s more room there too. We’d have to take down the old prune tree and probably the pie cherry. I was thinking we’d need to put in a good foundation but you know it wouldn’t have to be built heavy. Might be quite easy.”
   “I think my mom would like a sleeping porch,” said Tiffany.”
   “You think she’d pay for one?”
   “No. She don’t have much money. My Dad don’t do child support like he should.”
   “So why did you mention it?”
   “Because her life is shit. No one ever did her a favor in her life.”
   “Yeah well we make our own lives.”
   “No we don’t,” said Tiffanee as she walked away. Arlene shrugged and got out her measure and took notes with a heavy pencil on a brown paper lunch bag. She stopped after a minute, bit on the side of the pencil and went after Tiffanee. The girl looked weird. Her face expressionless.
   “We can do some looking around. Used timber. Things like that. We could do it cheap and pretty. Go ask your mom.”
   Tiffanee’s mom feared Arlene. She did not want Arlene floundering around her house trying to build a sleeping porch out of half rotten scrap lumber. She looked at her daughter’s thin, pale face and an emotion of some sort took control.
   “Well if you really want to build a sleeping porch it would be nice for Tiffanee, and she could help like she did with your oval room.” She considered volunteering herself but thought better of it.
   “Just so you know I don’t have home insurance.”
   “Not a problem,” said Arlene.
   “So you told me you want to find out stuff, right?”    It was Tiffanee’s last session with Mr. Hughes.
   “So?” Tiffanee answered. She was looking past him to a poster about bullying.
“And you like animals?” “Better than people.” “Did you think about being a vet?” “It’s real hard to get into vet school and there are too
many women vets who only do kitties and doggies and are scared of cows and horses. That would be me.”
“Not necessarily,” said Mr Hughes, “You could work around horses and find out if you’re really afraid of them. There’s a place down the highway about ten miles. They always need volunteers. They have a hard time staying open. Called The Last Chance. They take horses and burros that have been abandoned.”
“Well I wouldn’t like to find out stuff about animals by killing them and experimenting on them. But that’s how you find out right?” Tiffanee looked at Mr Hughes almost hopefully.
“Get your mom to take you. Once you’re in high school you could get work credit for volunteering out there.”
“God. You know how long ‘til I’m in high school?”
“Just get your act together and make a plan, Tiffanee. That’s all I can tell you.” Mr Hughes stood up and
extended his hand. Tiffanee was shocked, but she stuck out her hand and shook.
“I don’t want to see you again,” he said.


C H A P T E R    T H I R TY - T W O


   Lana moved into a small room at the Inn. It overlooked a noisy heat pump, three garbage bins and a view of distant mountains.    If she kept the window open she could stand it. She knocked out the screen though. The room was beneath the small gym that was behind the main reception area. She quickly realized that she was now on call just about any time of the day or night. No mention of extra pay for that service, and she was already paying more to rent the room than she had paid Iris. Still she had the place to herself and that was good. Occasional loud thumps from the gym were a minor irritation.
   And Elliot. Elliot quickly became a major irritation. He seemed determined to ingratiate himself. She had to go through the lobby when she left her room, even to go to the bathroom because she had to use the gym facilities, and Elliot was suddenly spending a lot of time in the lobby. It was rare to see any guest in the lobby,
so Elliot was always alone and waiting to pounce.
   “Fuck off, Elliot,” Lana said once, and Elf’s son must have reported it because Elf told her that if she ever heard that Lana had used bad language on the premises she would be fired on the spot.
   “Whatever,” Lana said.
   Elliot did not like Lana. In fact he found her quite repellent. He had no wish to touch her, but he was obsessed. Dammit he would make her like him! In the past women had nearly always acquiesced to his advances, and this woman was no more than a foul mouthed slut. Still, it was an interesting project, he thought. Perhaps he would write it up and submit it to Granta or even the New Yorker.
   “Good morning Lana,” he called.
   Lana was supposed to be neatly dressed when she went through the back of the lobby to get to the bathroom. She was wearing a found T shirt and a pair of cut off sweat pants. Her hair was uncombed. She had hoped to slink through the lobby unseen. She said nothing to Elliot but of course he would be waiting for her when she came back.
   “Fuck off you bastard,” she whispered to herself. When she returned from the bathroom her hair was freshly washed and pulled up into a knob on the top of her head. She was wearing a blue tank top and tan shorts. Elliot noticed for the first time that her waist was surprisingly small, and her legs, especially from knee to ankle were long and slender. He experienced a faint stir of interest. It quickly dispersed.
   “Lana, will you please accompany me for a short walk in the cactus garden?” Elf was watching from the desk.
   “You can leave your towel and stuff with me,” she called.
Lana gave a soft growl and stowed her stuff in a cubby hole behind Elf’s desk.
   “Be nice!” Elf whispered.
   “This ain’t a brothel!” Lana whispered back as she smiled politely at both Elliot and Elf.  Elf turned back to the lobby. Under her breath she was calling “Deirdre, Deirdre”.
In the cactus garden Elliot uttered a slightly histrionic sigh.
   “Oh Lana,” he said.
   “Oh Lana what?” she asked.
   “Lana, I would like to befriend you.”
   “Why would you want to do that? I don’t want to befriend you.”
   “Exactly,” he answered.
   “Excuse my language but fuck that,” she said.
   “I’m offering you the opportunity to be my paid companion. You would not have to worry about money. You would be free to live your own life a lot of the time....”
   “Oh I get it. You want someone around to wipe the drool off your chin when you’re stuck in a wheel chair. Probably need me to wipe your ass for you too. Right?”
   “My dear girl, I hope I have twenty years before it comes to that!”
   “Sorry but no. I’m not into that. I’d rather take your money to be your whore plain and simple.” What was she saying? Oh God no.
   Elliot cringed. The last thing he wanted.
   “It maybe a surprise to you but I have no interest in you sexually,” (Lying again. Lying his way to trouble).
   “I have to punch in,” said Lana, and left for the kitchen. His hamburger arrived uncut. A fan shaped design worked in tomato slices on the side of the plate. What did that mean? Elliot tore open a sugar package and sprinkled sugar on the tomatoes. Something he had not done since he was a child.

 
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE


   Iris wasn’t sure whether she missed Lana.. It was nice to be free to expand herself into every corner of the house and yard, but it had also been nice to sit with Lana and drink and talk. Iris was a little tired. She put Scruffy on his leash and took him for his last walk of the day. Nothing moved on the street. She turned left toward the highway and walked slowly, waiting for the little dog to do his business. As they passed under a street light Iris had a flash memory of a photograph she had seen once. Taken in some British city soon after the war. An old woman walking under a light on some foggy street.    The woman carrying a shopping basket which she held in her right hand, her arm hanging down straight and weary. And Iris saw herself and this was a shock to her. Surely not! But what did the driver of a passing car see if he noticed her at all? Some old woman trudging through the tail end of her life. Long journey over. A person who had no presence left to register on earth    Iris stopped for Scruffy to lift his leg. She waited for some hopeful thought to cross her mind, but none did.
   When Scruffy was settled in his corner Iris took a shower and slid naked into her neat single bed. She enjoyed the silky texture of cheap acrylic sheets. There were few pleasures that she knew of that came close to the sensation of stretching her legs as far as they would go in the cool, smooth bed and then writhing her body like an eel. She laughed out loud then laughed more because it
was so ridiculous. Her hand slipped between her legs and soon the long familiar warmth crept through her body.  Iris set sail on her nightly voyage beneath the dim glimmer of the smoke alarm.


CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR


   Arlene was tying a chiffon scarf around her waist and noticing in the mirror that her body wasn’t quite as nice as she remembered its being. She didn’t look at herself very often. She saw her body as a board on which she could attach interesting combinations of clothes, jewelry and cosmetics. Someone was calling up the stairs. Could it be Wendell?
   Yes. It could be Wendell. He was coming up the stairs calling her name. How dare he? She stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at him.
   “Stay down there Wendell, I will be with you in a moment.” She swigged on her vodka and tightened the chiffon scarf which was tie dyed in shades of blue.
   “So you’re back.”
   “I was just looking at my lot. Needs cleaning up I guess. I was wondering if you have a fair offer to make me?”
   “I’m running on empty right now Wendell. Mike left and I never had the sense to stash some bucks for myself all these years. Never thought he’d go.”
   “That vodka you’re drinking?”
Arlene went to the freezer and got out a fresh bottle.
   “You see my oval room?” She opened the door and Wendell peeped in.
   “You did that? It’s beautiful.”
   “Tiffanee helped a lot.” Wendell had an idea. It leapt fully formed into his mouth.
   “So Arlene, what if you build a nice rental, say a duplex, on that lot? You think you could do that? I’d pay for materials and permits and inspections and that stuff. You do the labor and design. We sell it and you get a third. That sound fair?"
   “Something you should know Wendell. Just so we can be straight on this one. When you watched me from your bedroom window, when you watched me in the bathroom, did it ever cross your mind that it cut both ways? I saw you Wendell and I saw what you done.    Not a word said. Never will be.”
   Wendell paused to reflect. There was no way that Arlene could have seen into the house from that window or any other for that matter. She was bluffing him.
   “Well Arlene, if that was true and it ain’t do you think anyone would believe a drunk like you?”
   “Yes, Wendell, people would believe a drunk like me. Don’t test your luck. I have a better idea. Let’s get married. In name only if you like. That way we’d both own everything and you couldn’t swindle me.”
    “I’ll think on it,” said Wendell, “There’s one thing certain. You’d have to let me teach you how to cook.”
   “And Tiffanee would be my paid help,” said Arlene, “After we finish her mom’s sleeping porch. Still got to do the screens.”
   “And the dog has to go.”
   “No way. Odin stays. You mess with me he’ll kill ya. That’s a promise.”

   Tiffanee got in a lot of trouble when she started volunteering at The Last Chance. Tiffanee don’t do stuff without checking with Betty or Tom. That paint you used on the gate posts was for the door to the office. We really appreciate your work and you’ve got that old bay eating again don’t think we don’t appreciate you but you have a lot to learn....
   Tiffanee watched and learned and tried to keep her mouth shut.    It was the first time she had wanted to do things right. Arlene never gave her a chance to screw up. She was always watching. At Last Chance Tiffanee was mostly on her own.
   When she got a halter on a head shy mustang she won a little respect from Tom who was a real cowboy but very old. A half wild burro broke her arm but she got over it. She knew the place would probably close. No money for feed. No money.

She knew there would be something else she could do though. Somewhere.


CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE


   Lana called Other Person Dexter because that was the name he went by. Who wants to be called Other Person?
   When he saw her get out of her car he turned away from the wind to light a cigarette.
   “Thought you stopped,” Lana said.
   “I keep trying.” He answered.
   “Second hand smoke. Think of the kids,” said Lana.
   “Think of the kids? When did you last think of the kids?”
   “Don’t hand me that shit. You knew I couldn’t stay.”
   “You staying now?”
   “You know I’m not.”
   “You come to take ‘em?”
   “No.”
   “Then why are you here?”
   “I got a job. Like a real one. I get paid regular. I can set up a bank account, send money. Make a plan.”
   “Why can’t you take ‘em?”
   “I’m like a personal assistant. I have to be there all the time. They’re better off with you. If you stop drinking. Also they might not let me take them. You know?”
   “There’s no hope for them here.”
   “Don’t lay that on me, Dexter. There is if you work at it.”
   “Fuck that,” he said, and turned his head to whistle to the kids who were hiding by the brush pile.
    “Your Mom’s here!” He yelled.  He turned back to Lana “Nice coat,” he said, “Your boy friend give it to you?”
   “I saved all my pay to buy it. It’s a Vivienne Westwood. Hard to find.”

   Lana did not see herself in her children’s faces. Their snapping black eyes so reactive, so curious. Their small, hard bodies that seemed to glitter. She wanted to wash their hair. She would wash their hair.
   “Hot water!” She ordered. Just like a birth in some old movie, she thought.
   When she was toweling Bruce’s hair she found herself hugging his hard, round head against her.
   “Be good to your dad. You hear?” She felt his nod. She turned to Bridget; “You hear what I said?” Bridget nodded.    She left them, Bridget holding the damp towel and the bucket of rinse water. Dexter nowhere in sight. She felt a stab of pity. Dexter had taken her in when she got out of jail and had nowhere else to go. He had been gentle. Kind.
   “I’ll see you,” she called to her children. “Tell your dad I said good-bye.”

   In the rear view mirror she saw the little clutter of houses. A light went on. Tiny windows to keep out cold and light. She shivered and turned her eyes back to the rutted road.



END