“We’re having the full experience,” she said.
Behind them, the door creaked open again.
“Whoops,” a girl said.
As if excited to be discovered with him, Frances squeezed him harder, and again he thought of kissing her. To let himself be seen as the man she’d chosen, to cement his status with a public kiss, was worth the cost of what Becky would learn from her friends, what Ambrose would say. But to do it on a night when his group was in crisis could send a bad message. He contented himself with breathing his thanks into her hair.
The next morning, very early, after sleeping essentially not at all, he stole out of the school and walked down the road. The sun hadn’t cleared the ridge, but a flock of mountain bluebirds was awake, foraging among bitten tussocks, perching on fence posts glaucous with frost. Daisy Benally was chopping onions in the chapter-house kitchen, her sister still asleep. When Russ told Daisy what had happened, she just shook her head. He asked where he could find Clyde.
“Don’t go there,” she said.
“But where is he?”
“You know the place. Up the canyon where Keith lived.”
“Are you saying Clyde is a Fallen Rocks?”
“No, he’s a Jackson. You shouldn’t go there.”
Russ explained why he had little choice but to go. Daisy, who’d reached an age where she greeted anything the world did with resignation, allowed that he could borrow Ruth’s truck. He would have liked to leave immediately, before he had time to be afraid, but he waited until the group came down for breakfast. Everyone’s hair was flat and dirty, every eye red from a night on a hard floor. By way of mending fences, Russ asked Ted Jernigan, who’d sat down with Frances, to take charge of the group for the morning.
Frances, too, looked dirty and poorly slept. “You’re not going alone,” she said.
“It’s fine. I can take care of myself.”
“She has a point,” Ted said. “Why don’t you and I go together?”
“Because I need you to stay here with the kids.”
“I’m going with you,” Frances said.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I don’t care what you think.”
Her eyes were on the table, her expression sullen. Russ wondered what he’d done to make her angry.
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Yes I want to do that,” she said crossly.
He guessed she was embarrassed. Embarrassed by her fear for his safety, embarrassed by her need to stay close to him.
Ruth Benally’s truck was barely big enough for him to fit behind the wheel. If the fuel gauge could be trusted, there was half a tank of gas. As he followed the old road along the wash, he told Frances about the first time he’d driven it, the Enemy Way ceremony he’d blundered into. The road had since been widened, but the surface was no better. Negotiating the ruts and stones, he was slow to notice that Frances wasn’t listening. Her eyes were fixed on the windshield, her mouth tight. He asked what she was thinking.
“I’m thinking,” she said, “I’d rather just buy two guitars with my own money.”
“Do you want to go back?”
Not getting an answer, he stopped the truck. “I mean it,” he said. “I can easily take you back.”
She shut her eyes. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Russ, but I’m a fearful person.”
“Someone else could have come with me. It didn’t have to be you.”
“Just drive.”
He reached for her, but she jerked away from him. “Just drive.”
He didn’t understand her. He couldn’t sort out the mixture of confidence and fear, self-love and self-reproach. In her own way, she was as odd as Marion. He wondered if all women were odd or only the ones he was attracted to.
The farther he drove up the valley, the less he recognized it. The land had always been dry, but he didn’t remember it being so utterly denuded. Gone were the sheep and cattle, gone every conceivably edible leaf and shoot, gone even the fence wire. All that remained were rough-hewn fence posts and erosion-scored slopes. Except that the rocks were white, not red, the landscape could have been Martian. Even the sky had a strange yellowish-gray pall. The haze was too pale and diffuse to be from a fire, and it wasn’t a dust storm—there wasn’t any wind. It was more like the pall over Gary, Indiana, on a clear Chicago day.
The alienation deepened when he passed the last of the fallen rocks and saw, in the distance, Keith’s old farmstead. He’d assumed he would find people here, maybe Clyde himself, but there was nothing. No grass, no garden, no animals, only gnarled junipers and dead cottonwoods, their broken limbs barkless and silvery. In his mind, the farmstead had remained unchanged, alive with Keith and his extended family, their chickens and goats. To see what time had done to it was to become aware of how old he was.