Keota

Wyoming 1965

It's daybreak when Keota puts coffee on for her parents and makes toast. There's no margarine so she scrapes peanut butter from a nearly empty jar and smears it on.

She takes coffee—there's no milk—to the kitchen window of the cramped four-room house off an access road to hayfields. She can see the edge of town and the nearby feedlot that keeps the slaughterhouse going where her pa works.

Her mother wanders in. What's for breakfast?

Dry toast.

I should've gone to the store last night.

I’ll go, Keota offers, preferring to miss her father’s morning mood.

Get me some cigarettes, he says from the doorway. He hands her a twenty. Keep the change.

Hail Mary, she thinks, a good mood.

He's pulling onto the road when she returns. She hands him the cigarettes through the open window of the nicest car they've ever had, a tan-brown and white ‘56 Ford Fairlane, one dent, no rust. Then she and her mother walk into town to catch a ride to the Double-J where they help with the cooking. Farley, an old ranch hand, picks them up in front of the feed store, one of his stops for supplies. Sometimes Keota helps him load stuff: salt licks, chicken feed, pesticide, beet pulp, vaccines.

Keota, Farley says as they get into his truck, Whatcha' cooking us up today?

Cheese soufflé, she says, a thing she's seen in a magazine.

He laughs. Lordy, not again! She and her mother laugh too, maybe because of Pa's good mood earlier.

But that mood is gone when he comes home that night with a grocery sack and an open can of beer. He puts the can on the counter and puts away the groceries, mostly quarts of Rainer. Keota, sensing danger, hurries to wash the dishes left in the sink that morning.

Fix me some supper, he orders.

She gets out the tin pie plate of leftovers they brought home from the noon dinner at the Double-J. Venison chops, mashed potatoes and peas. She takes off the wax paper and turns on the oven.

I hate wild meat. Give me something else, he says when he sees it.

Since when? she wonders. And what else is there? Nothing. I can get you a pork chop sandwich at the Grill.

Then get going!

He offers no money but, luckily, she has his change.

Hand me that beer before ya’ go! he yells after her.

She turns to get one of the quart bottles from the fridge, forgetting his open can until her elbow hits it. Jesus, no! she says, trying to stop it as it rolls across the counter. But it goes over the edge, hits the floor and splashes her jeans.

Anticipating his rage, she tries to run outside. He yanks her arm, throws open the fridge door and it slams against the wall. He grabs one of the quarts, breaks off the top on the edge of the sink, pushes her to her knees, and pours Rainer on her head.

It’s an amazing few moments. First she's sickened both by shame and the way he smells: of beer, cigarette smoke, slaughterhouse blood and dung. Then, almost immediately, it occurs to her that no matter what this asshole does to her he can never get into her head. The idea is startling and it shuts out everything he is yelling at her.

Despite kicking at her, making her clean up the beer, and sending her to town wet and stinking, she's okay. She feels energy and hope and something stirring in her, something she doesn’t quite get.

Once outside, she crosses the road, ducks under a fence and takes a short cut through a field of Herefords grazing on wheat stubble. Wanting to get the delivery over with and go shower, she runs. Shacks in the distance, in the sunset, look shiny. Unreal. A good omen, she decides. She's onto something.

By the time she gets to town, the wind is up, carrying the smell of feedlot even here. Waiting at the café for her order, Keota is sure that she's figured out something important. When the sandwich is ready, she pays and goes towards the door, feeling all eyes on her. Of course, she must look terrible. Pathetic.

Hell! Down the road I'll be at the ocean, she thinks—turning suddenly to give all gawking the finger. But they'll all still be here.

A wonderful place, she's heard. Ocean.

Chapter 1

Acapulco 1993

For days, heat and humidity trapped in the bay by mountains had the city on its knees. Not even trade winds blowing most of the day could dislodge it. Chris Boyd, used to cool, dry summer evenings on the west slope of the Rockies, felt faint. She turned onto the Costera towards Club KayO's where she was to meet an American named Tommy who might know the whereabouts of her mother, Keota. Chris's best friend Rainy had promised to join her.

Chris pulled up to the curb in front of the club, left her car with the valet and got in line behind dozens of tourists eager to party. The last time she'd seen a line this long was in college, outside a lecture hall where Ram Dass had just spoken. She'd gone there to set up an interview for a journalism class, armed with research she’d done on him and the LSD he'd once championed. When it was her turn, before she could say a word, the former Harvard professor touched her arm. That which you long for, longs for you, he'd said as a limo pulled up to the curb.

What? she’d asked. You mean Keota? But the crowd had closed around him and he was gone. It wasn’t until hours later that she'd come to, remembered the interview she was supposed to have scheduled, and knew that Ram Dass had not meant her mother.

This time, Chris wanted to hear with an impartial reporter's ear, not a frantic daughter's. She'd brought everything she had of Keota’s for the meeting, the photos, the well worn postcards mailed from dozens of locations, and the eleven pitiful notes scrawled across the kind of brochures you find in motel lobbies.

Once through the line, she found a table beneath a fan. The place smelled of garlic, sweat and coconut oil. She caught a waiter’s eye and ordered mineral water with ice. Why would someone giving or selling information want to meet here? she wondered. Besides the lack of air conditioning, it was impossible to hear over the heavy metal band and too dark to examine photos. The glossy walls looked wet in the flash of strobes, and the dancers did too.

Young, sunburned tourists soon filled the place, all looking as if uniforms had been assigned: skimpy dresses for the girls, blousy shirts for the guys. Tequila poppers and blended drinks made the rounds, administered like first aid by waiters as serious as medics.

Her stomach had begun to cramp, just as it often had after Keota left. Usually, at the AA meetings her dad would drag her to. The stories of drunken stupors and crazy times the AA-goers recalled fondly, and seemed to miss, always got to her. She was eleven or twelve before her dad quit making her go—immediately after the night a regular recounted an outing with his buddy and the hookers they had taken to their adjoining hotel rooms. Unable to get it up with his girl, the storyteller had gone out into the hall and knocked on his buddy's door. Hey, he admitted asking his friend, Can we trade?

All the reforming drinkers broke up laughing, including her dad. Then the next up, a newcomer who stroked his beard as he talked, reported getting sick enough of his chest hair that he'd tried to remove it. Evidently, that is, because he could only recall waking from a blackout, razor in hand, bleeding and missing a nipple. The room was dead still for a moment after that one. That was the worst, the silence that followed a not-so-funny story. That and her gnawing dread of the tales her father might tell of her mother but, thank God, never did.

Yet, here she was, a decade or so later, in a place that might better be called Club Chaos, still afraid of what she might hear about Keota. She estimated that eighty percent of the people here were now drunk enough to try to trade partners or shave their chests.

After another thirty minutes, Chris grabbed her only evidence of ever having had a mother and went to the pay phone by the restrooms to call Rainy. The desk clerk at their hotel hadn’t seen her. Chris hung up and returned to the bar. A group of couples had taken over her table. Certain that neither the man called Tommy nor Rainy would show, she decided to leave.

On her way out, she thought she saw Alejandro across the room, the guy she and Rainy had argued about earlier that day. She hurried through the crowd after him but lost him. Once outside, she gave her parking ticket to the valet and paced at the curb, searching for Rainy in the line of people waiting to get in. When the valet brought her car, she threw her packet of Keota stuff onto the passenger seat and headed down the Costera. She was in a dark residential area with no streetlights when Rainy popped up from the back.

Hello.

Chris jerked around. Rainy! What the hell?

I have to tell you, I think the upholstery back here is moldy.

Where have you been?

Hiding. You were right, there’s something weird about Alejandro.

Why, what happened?

First of all, he—hey, watch that car!

The headlights made an abrupt veer into their lane and Chris swerved right. Her car jumped the curb and sailed above the narrow boulevard toward the squatty trunk of a palm. She tried to brake, but they were airborne.

About to crash beneath palm fronds flaming in the headlamps, she thought about—of all things—her mother’s fortune telling. The thing she most associated with her departure the summer of the year Nixon was impeached and she, Chris, started school.

Keota had told fortunes just that one time, at a picnic Chris's father had hosted to celebrate his three years as publisher of The Charlo Weekly News. This only party he would ever throw was huge and went on most of a Saturday.

All day guests had gone to and from the beach and the porch—location of several kegs of beer and coolers of pop. Platters and roaster pans of fried chicken, baked beans and salads sat out in the heat on a large picnic table someone had hauled in. Hot dogs and hamburgers smoldered on adjacent barbecues. Her father kept the bonfire going all day and no one went near it until a breeze came up late afternoon and the sun dipped into a bank of clouds.

Most of the guests packed up and drove off right after sunset. The fire, by then, was a pool of simmering coals. Keota brought out marshmallows to the few kids still waiting for parents up on the porch, drinking beer and in no hurry. But instead of rejoining the adults, Keota took a newspaper from a stack beside the pit, rolled it and ignited one end in the embers. She eyed this torch from all angles, turned directly to a neighbor boy and told him his fortune, as though seeing it in the flames.

The other kids clamored to hear their fortunes too, and Keota seized an armful of papers and doled them out. One by one, she went around the circle, setting fire to each child’s issue of The Charlo Weekly, extracting all of the fate therein, quickly, before losing it to smoke and ash.

In the light of those popping cinders, Keota looked more beautiful than she’d ever looked in Chris's memory. Keota was not unhappy that night and her dark curls and large, black eyes were shiny. All the kids watched spellbound as this exotic mother moved gracefully about the fire with each bright torch, her voice soft and haunting. Bursts of flame, as tossed twigs or candy wrappers ignited unexpectedly, added to the eerie mood of the night.

When it was the neighbor Lorraine Comstock’s turn, Keota said, You, my dear, will sing like a bird. And to Chris: Christian, you will travel far from home looking for someone or something until you’ve lost home altogether. But, she added, twisting the already extinguished roll a last time before tossing it into the fire, at the right moment you'll find home again.

When it came to Lorraine’s best friend Judy Throckmorton, Keota frowned, puzzled. My goodness, she said, catching her breath.

What? Judy Throckmorton asked.

Keota smiled at her and threw the blazing paper into the pit. But Chris knew by her hesitation and the way she fingered her hair that she was struggling for something to say.

You will be known throughout the valley.

For what? Judy wanted to know.

That’s all, kids, let’s go up to the house.

Keota started up the hill and Chris ran after her. Mom, what did you see?

Her mother turned but didn’t stop. Nothing.

But what about Judy Throckmorton?

Keota let her catch up and even put an arm around her. Which one was she? she asked, flipping long strands of hair from her eyes with the back of a hand full of barbecue utensils.

The last one.

Keota bit her lip. "I don’t really see anything. I was just fooling around," she said, and hurried on up the hill.

You saw something bad! Chris insisted.

Her mother kept on going and Chris flopped down on the side of the bank. Waves lapped at the beach, her father Judd Boyd burst into laughter on the porch, and Cat Stevens sang from the stereo: I know I have to go away. I know I have to go.

After her father’s beach party, almost everyone on the point held a smaller version of it, beginning with the neighbor several houses down the shore. Kids were not invited to this party and Chris was left with a sitter named Patty.

From the back porch, Chris watched people arrive at the east end of South Shore Drive with things they lugged to the backyard. Then it grew dark and the moonless night so black that the bonfire lit but a small area of beach. A dim porch light illumined no more than indistinct movement on the deck, but the music was loud enough to keep Chris awake long after Patty made her go to bed.

When she heard voices and laughter near the house, Chris got up and went outside. Patty and a guy? But all she could make out was a two-headed shadow, as a near-full moon scaled the mountains and dropped a line of light across the lake.

She put on her flip-flops and headed down the hill. Almost immediately, she stubbed her toe on something and lost her balance. She started sliding and then tumbling, hitting one or two large rocks on the way down. Her right leg hurt and she yelled at Patty, but there was no answer.

Chris tried crawling back up the hill but the pain in her knee was unbearable. She pulled her nightgown out of the way and, with her arms and good leg, pushed herself up the hill on her butt. Once on the bank she rested before tackling the porch. Then, holding onto the railing, she hopped up the steps to the door and, inside, felt along the wall for the kitchen light. Her knees were bloody, her nightgown grass-stained and ripped. Her bum leg, besides being swollen and numb, was full of cuts from dragging it. She hopped to the living room, found the phone number her mother had left for Patty and called it.

You what? her mother asked over the party music that was even louder over the phone.

I hurt my leg! Chris yelled. Really bad! Please, come home.

Take some aspirin, her mother said and hung up. Chris hopped to the television, turned it to a movie, and hopped back to the couch. She was chilled and pulled up the afghan slung over the back of it. She didn’t get the movie and tried calling her parents several more times. Okay, okay! We’re coming, her mother yelled over the noise. Did you take the aspirin?

No, it’s upstairs! I told you, I hurt my leg.

Well, for god’s sake, tell Patty to get it for you! The line went dead.

In the morning Chris woke to sun beating through the window on her swollen limb. She could hear her parents arguing in the kitchen. Mom! she cried. But it was her father who wandered in to see what she wanted. His eyes were bloodshot and his bathrobe had a cigarette burn in the sleeve. He looked unhappy and in need of a shave. Why did you sleep out here? Move over, he added, approaching her injury.

No, Daddy!

He picked up the afghan. What the sam hill?

Where’s Mom? she cried. With just this bit of concern, Chris began to break.

Don’t cry, baby, we’ll run you to the hospital. Let me get some clothes on. He ran out and her mother appeared, in the same general shape as her father.

Oh, honey, she said, Why didn’t you tell me it was so bad?

Soon her father returned and carried her out to the car. By now Chris felt faint. The next thing she was aware of was an unfamiliar male voice. It was hot and her leg hurt worse than it had all night.

It’s broken, the voice said. In two places.

Wondering who was talking, she opened her eyes. But all she could see were her parents, hung over and alarmed.

The next few weeks, Chris slept in the den. It had its advantages—close to the kitchen, the best TV in the house, and she could see what was going on down at the lake.

One night late, Chris heard her parents come in the back door. In the foyer, her father paid and dismissed the babysitter—not Patty—then tiptoed into the den. Her mother followed and soon the two were at the desk near her. One of them had something the other one wanted and Chris watched as these two specters struggled silently over whatever it was. They might have been nothing more than drapes moving in the open window breeze except that they twice banged into the desk and then the chair next to it. When the struggle turned in Chris's direction, her mother fell over the back of the couch and landed on top of her. Chris screamed and she and Keota rolled to the floor, the heavy cast first. Cigarettes from out of nowhere spilled across the carpet with them.

I hate you, Chris shouted. That caught them off guard, causing them to stare in her direction in the longest of brief moments. The air was laden with the scent of alcohol and her mother began to cry.

Don’t ever talk to your mother like that again, Judd said, helping Chris back onto the couch. Her mother got up and fled, squashing cigarettes as she went. Judd ran after her, first bumping into a chair, then the half-open door.

I was talking to both of you, Chris called after him. Ashamed of herself, Chris lay awake the rest of the night. When dawn broke, she watched a gray light spread across flattened and broken Marlboro Lights. Soon after—in her mind it was always the next day, though her dad said not—Keota went out to get some things. That’s what she’d said, she had to go get, or maybe do, some things. When her dad got home from the paper a few hours later, he wanted to know where Keota was.

And where’s dinner? he demanded, looking around the kitchen. She knows I have a meeting tonight.

Chris shrugged. But all of a sudden she knew by the way her stomach had gone queasy that her mother had left them. She hopped up the stairs on her good leg, holding onto the banister, going as fast as she could. Her father, obviously sensing the same, ran up and around her. By the time she got to her parents’ bedroom, he had all the bureau drawers open and was throwing her mother’s remaining things from the closet onto the floor. Chris was stunned and stood there helplessly. Her mother’s cosmetics and toiletries were missing from the dressing table. He noticed that too and attacked all that was left. He grabbed Keota’s framed picture and threw it across the room, then flung a vase of drooping flowers from Keota’s garden.

Daddy, no! she screamed.

He looked over at her with a look that scared her. She hobbled down the stairs, grabbed her crutches, and went out the door and down the block to Lorraine Comstock’s, the neighbor girl who'd been at the picnic with the fortune telling. It was still light when she rang the bell. One of the Comstock boys answered and told her to come in. Rainy! he shouted up the staircase. Chris waited uneasily, feeling privy to somewhere she ought not be, in the biggest house on the block where Lorraine Comstock was called Rainy by one of her notorious brothers whose horseplay, loud music, swearing, reckless bike riding—you name it—gave pause to most of South Shore. That and the reason she was there had her stomach churning.

When the brother did not get an answer, he sent Chris up to a bedroom—more hopping. The door was open and Rainy was on the bed watching television. Chris did not explain her sudden entrance and the girl did not act surprised to have someone she hardly knew, in a cast, visit unexpectedly. She simply made room on the bed for her, then went downstairs to get the dinner her own mother had left on the counter in the kitchen before leaving for her bridge club. She returned with that and two forks. Chris and Rainy ate in silence, their attention supposedly on a documentary about elephants.

After it was over, Rainy shut off the television and turned over to sleep. But Chris lay in the dark listening to music coming from somewhere in the house: If you want to leave, take good care . . . a lot of nice things turn bad out there. Oh, baby baby, it’s a wild world. I’ll always remember you like a child, girl.

Chris buried her head in the pillow, determined not to cry, lest she be put out into the dark on her crutches to face alone what was left of her ruined life.

It was warm and humid when Chris woke up. Music played in the distance and the night air was fragrant with fresh cilantro, tortillas warming, and wood smoke. It was pretty too, for a bright C of moon had drifted into view through a lattice or screen to her right.

Realizing that she was half-naked, Chris felt around for a cover. She pulled up a sheet, identified dirt beside the thin mat she lay on, stiff fabric things constricting her neck and chest, and swelling around her eyes and aching cheekbones. The more awake she became, the more she hurt, increasingly so—like when Novocain wears off to the point that you’re suddenly tearing apart cupboards looking for something to kill the pain. Too, she felt spacey, like she had just spent the night smoking pot.

The tight thing around her neck was making her itch and she tried to get it off. But it was too painful to figure out how it was attached and too dark to see what she was doing. Faint lantern light made shadows along a wall of vines or palm leaves. She heard something and struggled to turn over. In the corner a woman was bent over a fire and its light flickered across an odd sort of ceiling. Music began to play again in the distance, no longer Cat Stevens but mariachi.

How had she ended up at a campsite in the strangest place imaginable? And where the hell was Rainy? Chris watched the woman, trying to get her attention. Where is Rainy and do you have any painkillers? she tried to ask. No words came.

At some point she realized the woman had gone and left the fire unattended. It was merely a glitter of gold-orange now, reminding Chris of the summer bonfires of her childhood, how from the middle of the lake, the sum of them mapped the course of shoreline like a trail of flares.

Keota had liked taking the rowboat out across the water once the fires got going. She'd stay out there alone for hours and never wanted company, no matter how much Chris begged to go along. What was she thinking about out there? Chris used to wonder.

It should have been obvious; she was thinking about all the other places she would go alone.

Chapter 2

Charlo’s Lake 1974

Losers

Though Keota had planned to someday leave Judd, she’d become used to her life and, possibly, even changed her mind. But one morning, a sudden impulse to go struck dramatically, urgently. If she could tie this itch to anything, it was to a dream she’d had before daybreak. Evidently, she had cried out during it, because she awoke to Judd shaking her.

You okay?

She nodded.

You said: 'I'm not like you.' You who? Me?

My father.

To her surprise, Judd had laughed and lain back down. Don’t kid yourself, he said. We all end up being like our parents.

Not all of us, she said, getting up. She put on her slippers and robe and went outside. The air was cool and she headed down South Shore Road. By the time she turned back, it was almost dawn and a hair of sun was tracing an outline across the mountains. When she got to the house, instead of going in, she went down the hill to the dock. Slipping over the eastern range, light shot through the water, flashing neon-like across the speckled backs of trout feeding several yards out. For no reason she could fathom, that swift movement of life under water depressed her.

When she finally went inside, Judd was making coffee. He gave her the look—a despairing expression that said he just didn’t get what troubled her. Even Chris, at the table eating cereal, eyed her quizzically.

Out walking? he asked.

Yes.

He sighed. That sigh always followed the look. But within minutes he’d forgotten her and was correcting Chris as she read the cereal box to him.

Eggs? Keota asked him.

I already ate.

Chris?

No, thanks, she answered, reaching for her crutches.

What do you say? Judd asked her.

May I please be excused?

You may.

Christian swung across the kitchen and into the hall easily, despite the awkward cast. She was a graceful child, Keota thought, waiting for her toast to pop up. She didn’t bother with butter and took it to the table where Judd, reading his own copy in his own newspaper, was chuckling as if reading the thoughts of some brilliant stranger for the first time. Keota felt suddenly out of breath and winced; it had just occurred to her that her whole life so far had been about needing air.

When Judd got up to go, Keota cleaned up the kitchen and took out steaks to thaw. Judd was right, she decided. She was turning into her mother, having the marriage her folks had had. She went from room to room, examining everything with a new perspective. The furniture was her mother’s taste, and Keota was always buying duplicates of things her mother had been forced to leave behind on their sudden moves in the middle of the night.

Whenever her father had had to flee someone, a woman’s husband, an irate landlord, the new owner of any item he sold—a junk car, property he didn’t own, aluminum siding that would never be installed—they moved, leaving behind anything that would not fit in the back next to Keota and the dog. It amounted to everything.

Soon Keota wasn’t just looking at things but gathering them up. She took the frozen steaks she’d put out for dinner to the yard and flung them over the fence to the neighbor’s dog. Her loafers on the porch, too worn for having never been anywhere, made her cry. She tossed them into the trash. She took off her wedding ring, flushed it down the toilet and went upstairs. In her bedroom, she threw most of the contents of her closet onto the floor and, after kicking the things into a pile, made several trips down to the cans at the side of the house.

Finally, the gloves at the back door ended her tirade—garden gloves kept by her mother for the garden she would never have, aging and curling from no use like well-worn ones did from water and potting soil. The sight of them had knocked the wind out of her.

From the kitchen Keota could hear the impeachment hearings that had dominated daytime television the last few days. Sweating, she stuck her head into the den where someone was talking about a subpoena for White House tapes and documents regarding a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Chris, disinterested witness on the couch, was sitting with her casted leg propped on the hassock reading a comic book.

Mom, what are you doing? Chris asked, maybe alert to something unusual going on.

I’m cleaning out some junk.

Back upstairs, Keota put the few clothes that remained and some cosmetics into the only piece of luggage in the house that wasn’t older than she was, a green, hard case Samsonite. She searched through a desk drawer of photographs for one of Chris. She found several: Keota as startled new mother holding a bundle of baby next to Judd, smug father; Chris on Judd’s shoulders, living proof that he and his frigid wife had had, on at least one occasion, sex; Chris as puzzled toddler, maybe already suspecting what she’d gotten herself into. When she found one taken in an emotion-free studio by a professional paid to leave turmoil behind the eyes out of the picture, she threw the discards back into the desk.

She told Chris she was going to the bank and drove into town and cleaned out the savings account. When she got back, she fixed Chris lunch and went upstairs to shower and change.

I have to go get some things, she hollered to Chris from the kitchen before leaving. There was no answer but she could hear the television. Keota went out back to the driveway and around the house. Wearing red heels, a red dress and fake gold jewelry, she carried the suitcase carefully down the hill to the beach. She took off her shoes and walked barefoot up the shoreline to the dock of a rental house occupied that month by people from Des Moines. She asked the young, slender teen with his feet in the water to give her a ride across the lake to town. She would have taken her car but it was as junky and unreliable as any her father had ever pawned off on some sucker.

Once there she thanked the boy and got out of the cabin cruiser with its shiny fiberglass siding and put her shoes on. She walked from the marina one block to the North Shore Grill, took a seat at the bar next to the only lone male and ordered a Scotch and water. The man, a salesman on his way to Ebers, bought her several more. Later, the two of them got into his late model Buick and departed town.

The salesman left her at a downtown hotel in Ebers after an hour or so of tedious sex. Before going home to his wife, he cupped her chin in his hands like Judd might cup Chris's and told her how wonderful the love had been.

Because her heels had gotten splashed in the boat and a little dusty from the street, Keota stopped at a drug store the next morning for shoe renewal before catching a Greyhound. On board, her bag secure on her lap, she took in her fellow travelers. Mostly down-and-outers, judging by demeanor, and one enthusiastic grandma type. She tried to sleep but the sun was on her face. All at once it disappeared into a lone thunderhead and scattered clouds around it lit up in stripes and puffs, in shades of pink, one layer after another as the sky darkened. Then in minutes, that all split into different widths of bright red ripples that soon turned black. A storm.

Keota took a deep breath. She was going through Hellgate Canyon on I-90, headed east. It felt right. She was twenty-three and starting over.

At the next bus station Keota used the bathroom and bought a bag of chips and a magazine, knowing she would be up most of the night. She was an insomniac like her husband and child. Judd topped off his evenings with whisky and milk so he could sleep; Chris was up and down from bedtime until dawn, grinding her teeth in fitful naps.

Keota looked through a stand of postcards and paused at several of Yellowstone Park. She bought a pack of them and looked at each one carefully. She had been there once when she was about eight or nine—a rare treat, incidental to her father working on a road crew near Livingston. From Wyoming, they’d taken a shortcut through the park despite the fee, rather than going the long way around by Bozeman. Keota had begged her father to stop to see Old Faithful erupt. Please, Daddy, she’d whined. We’ll probably never ever get back here again and the ranger said—

Christ almighty, if you shut your yap, we’ll stop, he said finally. She sat quietly until she saw the sign and arrow. Turn here, turn here, Daddy. The sign says here!

Jesus! Didn’t you see all those cars parked on that road? The hell if we’re goin’ in just to get stuck in goddamn traffic.

He kept driving and finally pulled onto the shoulder down the road from the event. The three of them sat in the car in silence as though the geyser might blow high enough to be seen for trees. Keota was fuming, her mother was taking the don’t-irritate-further approach, and her father, predictably, was the satisfied king of disappoint.

Face it, these people are losers, Keota told herself, looking at the backs of their heads.

Soon her father got out of the car to relieve himself in the bushes. As soon as he’d disappeared, Keota opened the back door.

Honey, where are you going? her mother asked.

I have to pee. Keota ran down the road to the turnoff as fast as she could and wiggled her way through the crowd in plenty of time to see the huge geyser shoot out of the ground into the air in the greatest spectacle she had ever seen. It had been well worth the beating she took too.

Before getting back on her bus, Keota scribbled a note to Chris. She rifled through her purse but couldn’t find a stamp. Through the depot window she noticed the older woman who’d been knitting in the station earlier, boarding a bus that said Phoenix. She ran out.

Excuse me, she said, holding out the card and a five-dollar bill. Would you please mail this for me when you get home? My daughter loves getting cards from different parts of the country.

The woman looked at her as if she had just been handed a bag of drugs. That’s a lot of money for a stamp.

It’s for your trouble. You can put the change in the collection at church, if you prefer. By now they were holding up the line of people wanting on.

Okay. The woman took the money and card and boarded. But Nogales is hardly glamorous, she added, waving.

Better than Charlo’s Lake, Keota thought. She would do that from now on; send Christian cards to say your mother’s going places—unlike her own parents who as far back as Keota could remember missed out on anything of mention happening elsewhere.

It seemed important that her daughter know that.

Chapter 3

Acapulco 1993

Judy Throckmorton’s Fortune

Muchacha, Chris heard. She opened her eyes to dim lantern light. The woman again, wearing something with a lot of fabric to it. A muumuu? Chris tried to sit up and the woman helped her. The woman’s long hair fell