from leaving, and started walking back to the door. He reached out to open it for her.
A car passed, the people in it—three of them, two women and a man—all wearing eyeglasses. The three sets of glasses looked foolish, turning to stare at Vera Mae; and when Lonnie looked back at her, she was obliging the tourists by standing on one leg, holding on to the door handle, the other leg straight up in the air, the tight hem of her saddle pants ending in a silk-stockinged foot.
Lon got to laughing, and the pickup wobbled back and forth a little, making the effect even better. The car disappeared around a bend, its out-of-state license bright and shiny in the sun.
Vera Mae collapsed on the seat, giggling. “The wild, wild West,” she said. “I can stand on my hands on horseback, too. Both hands. Only I got to have a special saddle and a trained horse.”
“Well, now,” Lonnie said, “that ought to come in right handy around a ranch.”
The creek went off at right angles to the highway, which began to fall. “We’re on the east side now,” Lonnie said. “See how the firs are thinning out, and the ponderosas startin’ up.” When she didn’t answer, he said, “The ones with the red bark. Them and cedars and a few black oaks are all we have around our country.
“The underbrush,” he said, “is mostly salal and some jack pine and white fir. It’s not as thick as on this side. Boy, one time they took me to a fire over on the coast, and the brush was something! Grew right up under the trees and—”
“What are you nervous about, Lonnie?”
He didn’t answer while they passed a big lumber truck bringing three ponderosa logs uphill. “Can’t fool you, can I? Just going over in my mind all the things wrong with the ranch. A sagebrush quarter-section is kind of a mean thing; it don’t make you enough money to live good, and it makes just enough to keep you there. You ever lived in a place didn’t have plumbing?”
“You keep taking on about the plumbing,” she said. “How often do you think I go to the can? I have fine kidneys.”
Lonnie chuckled, but it made him uneasy to hear her talk that way. Joan had made him clean up his English, and he guessed Dot had done the same thing to Tommy, though maybe a man who went to college like Tommy had done didn’t talk dirty in the first place. He hadn’t, lately, known enough other girls to know how they talked when they knew you a little . . .
A lake appeared alongside the road, through the pines. He nodded at it. “Gettin’ towards the desert,” he said. “If we had a fast car, now, we’d be in our own hills in an hour.”
They went through a lumber town, company-owned, company-built, out of company boards. The railroad tracks came up from the south and ran alongside them, and then a grain elevator, a cattle-loading yard, a big Quonset hut selling war surplus, a second-hand yard, and they were in town. Lonnie pulled into a gas station and stopped, and the kids woke up and hopped out, all in motion, Mike almost breaking his neck when he stepped on one of the spurs Duke had given the kids for “wedding presents.”
Vera Mae got out, too, as Lonnie raised the hood of the car and put water in it. He told the man to fill it up with gas. Vera Mae gave each of the kids a nickel for the coke machine, and said to Lonnie, “I might as well use that thing. Might be my last experience.”
Busy checking his tires, he looked up at her. “Aw, lay off, Vera Mae.” But she winked at him with what looked like good humor, and took June around the filling station. He couldn’t help thinking that he probably had the wife with the best figure within a couple of hundred miles; which was no reason for a man with two kids to get married. But he was sure glad he had.
They rolled out of town, and now it was tough rolling; ninety-seven miles of straight desert, with only a couple of houses in between, a roadside store, a state highway maintenance station. When he passed the latter, he said to Vera Mae, “Joe Howard told me once I can always get a job on the maintenance crew with the state. If we get short of cash.”
She didn’t seem to hear him, or didn’t think he was worth answering. She said, “Is this the desert that’s close to our place?”
He told her it was. And he got such a kick out of hearing her call it “ours” that the car clicked up ten miles before he remembered to worry about the radiator which he should have flushed out before starting on this trip . . .
“It’s not so hot, today,” he said. “You ought to cross here about the end of July. We try and wait for dark.”
Vera Mae didn’t answer at once. He looked over at her, and she was staring out the window the way he sometimes caught himself staring at her. He felt uneasy; try as hard as he could, there wasn’t anything to hang onto, anything that would tell him what she was thinking about. Maybe she and her other husband lived on a desert once. Maybe she’d taken a trip on one of those fancy deserts down in Southern California, like Palm Springs or Twenty-nine Palms with her husband. Or with some other fellow. She was from Los Angeles . . .
That’s what he mustn’t ever do. Think about her with other men. She hadn’t tried to fool him about what he was getting, just like she was getting a man with a cheap homestead and two kids.
Vera Mae must have felt him looking at her—it didn’t take much looking to watch this straight road across the alkali flats—because she gave a little shiver, like she was cold, and turned around in the seat. “Is it all like this, Lonnie?”
He shook his head. “Road goes across the alkali flats,” he said. “Where there used to be a lake. Still is, flood years. Get off ten, twelve miles, and there’s buttes and peaks. Can’t see them from the road; the high mountains kind of overshadow them . . . Look!”
He pointed, and then banged on the back window so the kids would look. A herd of antelope had gotten too close to the road, and now were retreating, frightened by the car. They turned and wheeled, like they had been practicing up, and then settled down to their steady, bounding run, alkali dust rising like smoke off a grass fire. The wind carried the dust ahead of them, and they disappeared as it settled.
“Ain’t that something?” he asked. In the truck body Mike and June were jumping up and down and yelling.
But Vera Mae didn’t seem to care much about antelopes. She had put on that faraway look again and was staring out at the cloud of dust into which the pronghorns had disappeared, but they didn’t seem to pleasure her. Finally, still looking dreamy, she said, “Lonnie?”
His hands were wet on the wheel. “Yeah?”
“Lonnie—that’s where you found Mulemouth, isn’t it? He nodded, and she went on, “And tracked him down, after your jerky’d given out, and on alkali water?”
He didn’t know what all this meant. “Sure. Picked his tracks up just about this far south and stayed with him to the north rim.”
“What a guy,” Vera Mae said. Then she sat up, and her eyes focused on where she was. “Jesus Christ, what a guy you are!”
He felt fine. He stepped on the gas, and the old bus found another two, three miles of speed from some place. He felt wonderful. All the time she’d been daydreaming, she’d been thinking about him.
CHAPTER VI
SHE’D SEEN plenty of deserts in her life, this one wasn’t as bad as the Mohave or the Colorado, or the
