come with you, but I’m not getting involved in anything illegal.” He wanted some assurance.
“It’s all public land,” I told him.
“We’ll go, and then we’ll come right back,” he agreed.
“It won’t take more than three or four days.” I could hardly believe I’d succeeded in devising a workable plan. What a beautiful vision I had, then, of these shores, the gentle licking of the green waves, and myself far from here. There was hope.
Then I remembered. “How are we going to get there?”
“A car will be the least of our problems,” Prine said.
***
We got off the Samtrans bus down past the airport, where the driveaway places were.
“Which one of you is the driver?” the man at the counter asked.
“He is,” I said.
“I am.” Prine confirmed it.
“Do you have a reference?” the man asked. “Someone who can vouch for your character?”
“That would be me,” I said.
“How long have you known the driver?” the manager asked me.
“I don’t know. Eight, nine years.” I had to think.
“Relationship?”
“He’s my brother-in-law.” The ease of this testimony surprised me, as if I’d opened my mouth and fluent Dutch came out. Lynne wasn’t my wife anymore, but he was her brother.
We signed the paper for our car—a white Saab just a few years old, belonging to a marketing manager who was being transferred to Salt Lake. Out of the printer came a sheet of directions to the drop-off point in West Jordan.
That was all there was to it! I had to laugh. In my mind we were all over the country in this car.
“There’s something I want to know. Why doesn’t everyone do this?” I asked, as we were driving out of the city.
“Most people don’t have the imagination.”
I did. In the canyon, it was likely we’d find a burial, with jewelry—shell beads and bracelets.
We were driving the Emigrant Trail backwards, reverse pioneers. The discards were everywhere, on the side of the road. All we had to do was gather them up.
In Winnemucca, the fast-food restaurants and motels had been built right up to the edges of the cemetery, surrounding the graves. That’s probably how it was in the mining camps.
“Do you want me to drive?” I asked. We’d stopped for gas.
“That’s all right,” Prine said.
“Well, I can drive if you want me to. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes.” I was taking some medicine to help me pay attention, and also, I’d finally gotten around to keeping a list of things I needed to do, as a high school counselor had once suggested.
But he didn’t want me to. So, until it got dark, I worked puzzles out of a book I found under the seat—mazes and jumbles, where you rearrange the letters to answer the question in the little cartoon. There weren’t any surprises on the road. Just nightfall—the sky pressing down.
***
I remembered a time from my boyhood, camping with a group from church, under mountainsides so high it seemed like someone must have built them, like they were dams holding something back. At night, through the tent walls, I felt them towering.
It was the same way with this drive. The invisible world was made visible, as we came into Salt Lake, with the mountains on one side, the desert on the other, the lights of the hotels, and the wide, empty streets after midnight.
“We’ll need shovels,” I said as we passed a shopping center surrounded by acres of parking lot.
“I’ve already thought of that,” Prine said.
In the suburbs south of the city, he pulled up outside a little house with a swingset on one side, and a tricycle and some toy vehicles overturned on the lawn. The television was chattering inside. After we’d been stopped there a minute, the porch light went on.
“I’m just going in for a second,” Prine said. “You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“I’ll just run in to get Cody,” Prine said.
This was Lynne’s house, then. Cody was her stepson, one of her new husband’s kids.
“Oh, I’m coming in,” I said.
Cody was in the kitchen, spreading peanut butter on bread and putting sandwiches in plastic bags. A backpack leaned against the wall just inside the door.
Prine looked him over. “I forgot you don’t eat meat,” he observed.
Cody waggled one foot at him. He was wearing canvas sneakers. “No animal products,” he said.
When I pulled out my cigarettes he caught my eye and held it. He was one of those kids.
“I’ll just go outside, then,” I said. But I didn’t.
“You could’ve told me he was coming,” Cody said to Prine. He had small eyes and a chin beard that stuck out, and he didn’t stand up straight. But I couldn’t think of what to say to him yet.
House sounds in a dim room, water running in the sink. The TV surged with tearful late-night music, and outside in the dark, a bird was singing its song. These sounds comforted me. None of them was my fault. I lay back on the loveseat at one end of the kitchen, where the table ought to be, while Prine and Cody went about the house gathering up supplies.
“Hey.” Prine shook me awake.
Lynne was there.
“Bill’s going to be home soon,” she said. She was in her nightgown, a plain white thing with ribbon woven in and out around the edges. She was putting things away while she talked, the way women who have children are always doing. I looked at her knees, and then at her hair, a straight, shining wall keeping me out.
She looked at her brother. “You, I’d expect this from,” she told him.
Prine had two shovels in his hands, from the garage.
I swallowed. My throat felt raw. I had a cold that I couldn’t get rid of, but this wasn’t one of my symptoms. I wanted to be touched under my clothes. It had been a long time, and I’d have given anything for that. “You loved me, and then you didn’t.” Did I actually speak or only think it? She was looking at me the way a snake might look at the skin it sheds.
But I was seeing her in her nightgown, and then, in my mind, her wedding dress, stiff with lace,
