Lamb

They drove an hour out. A thousand, two, three thousand feet down to a high plateau dark with trees, edges of the highway shaggy red with Indian paintbrush. Cattle wrenching yarrow from the weeds with huge square teeth. A crow perched on the shoulder of a dead pronghorn, its carcass deflated in the gravel. They drove through three cattle gates, black cows and bulls among the trees and on the hillsides and in the rocks and knee-deep in empty irrigation ditches on both sides of the highway. The two-lane widened into a four-lane. They passed a ramshackle taxidermist’s, a drive-through taco stand. Tack and Feed. Snake Creek Mercantile. Pizza Hut, Sears, Kum & Go, Napa Auto Parts, and Safeway. Cardboard-colored condominiums set up in a row like empty shoe boxes, a stage set for children, a temporary game. They passed an adult boutique in a windowless concrete building. A broken metal swing set at the base of an outcropping of red-and-green striped rock. A skinny teenage girl in red-and-white dots pushing a stroller. Empty lawn chairs outside the Roundup Motel. A life-size plastic pinto rearing up from a little island of volcanic rock and weeds.

“Where is everybody?” she asked.

“Somewhere else.”

Downtown was eight blocks long: little yellow, blue, and green houses with cement-slab porches, crammed among leafless cottonwoods, dirt lawns, and cracked sidewalks. There were two gas stations, one boarded up. One tall grain elevator rusted at its metal seams, a small glassless window at the top, the gaping black mouth eating rain and snow and sleet, eating all the cries and accusations the wind carries with it, of failed enterprise and family farms. A one-story brick liquor store advertising fishing and hunting licenses; a lopsided pickup in forest-service green and rotted wood-handled ranch tools scattered around it. A mom-and-pop hardware. A country kitchen. A white-painted church.

Lamb parked across the street from the kitchen, a ratty shingled awning shading red and yellow letters painted on the windows. CHICKEN-FRIED CHICKEN $3.99 and beneath that: COLD BEER $1.00. A tier of lumpy pies turned beneath an orange light in the window, and inside a huge old man in suspenders bent over his newspaper at the counter, holding his tiny white ceramic coffee mug with a massive, giant-knuckled hand. A sign posted inside the diner said ROOMS FOR RENT, and Lamb stopped in the middle of the empty street, wide for running cattle, and looked up. “You could come back here to live when you’re sixteen,” he said. “You could be the waitress.”

“And live up there?”

“We’d get you your horse, and a flowered apron for your waitressing dress—one with long sleeves, it keeps you covered, and buttons all the way up the front. And everybody in town would know you.”

“Where would I keep the horse?”

“And everyone would love you. All the patrons would want you to marry their sons and nephews and grandsons. Smart people. And you’d know all about them. Names of their children, names of their shepherds and blue heelers. Health of their old folks. And you’d go to the town meetings in long skirts, and you’d pin your hair up, like women should. And smile at them with your perfect milk white teeth. And I’d stay out at the little house, all old and gray, and you’d feel sorry for me so you’d come on your horse with slices of peach pie and cold meat loaf, wouldn’t you?”

“It wouldn’t be because I felt sorry for you.”

“You wouldn’t, would you?”

“No.”

“Come, dear.” He took her arm. “I’m going to feed you really good.”

They crossed the street, walking toward the image of a man and a girl in the windows before them as if finally, after all this travel, they were approaching themselves. There they were—hovering somewhere inside the restaurant, walking on air, looking out at their street bodies, beckoning like ghosts.

Lamb held open the swinging glass door. Flatware rang against ceramic plates from the fat man at the counter, a skinny man and his wife in a booth. Bobby Vinton played on the AM radio. The waitress was a teenage girl with a big belly and short dark hair and thick eye makeup. She led them to a small Formica table flecked with gold and topped with a chrome napkin holder, a bottle of ketchup, a bottle of hot sauce, and forks and steak knives rolled up tight in white paper napkins. Magpies lined up on the telephone wire across the street. The waitress put laminated menus on the table, just wiped and still wet.

“Okay,” Lamb said. “I want you to pick out what you want, and order two of them. Then dessert.”

“I’m not that big a pig.”

“Yes, you are.”

“What are you having?”

“Chicken-fried chicken.”

“Me too.”

“No mind of her own?”

“I’ve never tried it before.”

“Oh, I see. Wants to try new things, does she?”

“So?”

“I’m just teasing you, dear. I think it’s a fine choice. Know why?”

“Why.”

“It was my choice.”

By the time they left the diner it was early evening, chilly. They passed a bar with the outline of a neon cowboy on horseback swinging a rope, the red green yellow and electric blue light brightening against the failed day.

At the Safeway they bought a can of red chili beans, a can of ranch beans, a can of pinto beans. A dozen cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew; little paper-wrapped cans of potted meat; a dozen flat paper-wrapped cans of sardines; raisins and jack cheese. Sliced bread; a jar of peanut butter; two pounds of bacon and three dozen eggs; a two-liter glass bottle of brown whiskey; apple juice and tomato juice. Matches. Soap. Powdered milk. Powdered cocoa. Instant coffee. Potato Buds. Shampoo and toothpaste.

“You use an adult toothbrush?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He put two in the cart. “You floss?”

“Not so much.” He threw in two wheels of waxed, mint-flavored floss. “You’re going to use both of those before you leave.”

“That’s a lot.”

“We’re going to start you on some good habits.”

“Are we staying for two years? Because we’re buying enough.”

“Oh, we are not. This is called preparation. This is called planning ahead. This is making sure you have everything you need and then some.”

“Okay.”

“It’s for your sake.”

“Okay.”

“If nothing else we’ll send you home with a bunch of loot, right? What else do we need? Did we get cashews? Are you over the cashews?”

“I’m over the cashews.”

“Good.”

They loaded up outside in the dark, and a mile down the road Lamb stopped again in front of another painted window. “One more stop.”

He led Tommie, teeth-chattering and hugging herself in her yellow sweater, into the Sportsman’s Paradise. It was faced with rough unfinished planks of dark wood, and just outside the door a plastic man with a plastic beard in a real red-and-black checked shirt held a plastic shotgun in one hand, a plastic fishing pole with reel line in the other.

“Are we going to buy a gun?”

He raised an eyebrow. “We’re here for shoes, stupid.”

“Hey.”

“Well, come on.” He nodded at her feet. “What are those? Did you think those were shoes? Who bought you those? Did your mother buy you those nine years ago?” He held open the door. “Put them both together and you don’t even have a third of a shoe.”

Small bells hitched to the glass door rang as they stepped in, and the store was warm and quiet. It smelled like rubber and pipe tobacco, was crowded with cardboard boxes of shoes and carousels of shirts and sweaters and jackets. Basketball hoops hung from the rafters, a line of fishing poles from the front doors halfway to the back. The brown-carpeted floor sloped beneath their feet. In the front, a man in glasses stood behind a glass counter filled with knives. He regarded them without expression, offering no greeting. Tommie followed Lamb, who took giant steps and walked brusquely to the back, promptly lifted a beige boot with yellow laces and blue rubber bottoms and waved it at the skinny pimple-faced kid in a brown vest with a white name tag that read: CLARE.

“That’s a name,” Lamb said. “You know that? You don’t hear that kind of name anymore.”

The boy reddened. “It’s my grandfather’s name.”

“That’s sweet. Listen, Clare. My daughter is going to need a pair of these good-looking boots in”—he looked again at her feet—“a seven.”

“That’s a boy’s shoe.”

“Well, do the conversion.”

Clare held up the boot and looked at the girl, who nodded and shrugged. He set the boot on the counter and disappeared behind hunter-orange curtains.

“So am I your daughter or your niece?”

Lamb turned over the display boot and knocked its blue rubber bottom. “That’s a good solid boot.”

“Sure.”

“You don’t like them?”

“They’re good. I like them. I never had a boy’s boot before.”

“They make boys’ shoes better.”

“Oh.”

Clare came back with the boots and Lamb took the box.

“You don’t want to try those on?”

“They’ll be fine. What she needs now, Clare, is something to cover herself up. Don’t you agree?”

Clare looked at the girl and she crossed her arms over her chest. “Women and girls,” he said and pointed toward the front of the store.

“Boys?”

Clare blinked and pointed to the right.

Lamb led the way. “Okay, Miss Piggy. Pick out a jacket.”

“Why boys?”

“They make all the boys’ clothes sturdier, especially this kind of gear. Does that bother you?”

She shrugged. While she looked, Lamb selected matching zero-degree mummy bags, wool socks, boys’ long underwear, and a guidebook on North American trees. He bought her fleece-lined mittens and a mess kit and a thermos and a backpack. Things a kid in Lombard wouldn’t have. Things she deserved to have.

“You’re going to have a lot of new stuff to bring back with you.”

“I know.”

“Lucky girl.”

“I know.”

He bought cartridges for a .16 and pretied flies in a box. At the glass counter in the front, the skinny clerk with gray hair and pockmarks was reading a magazine, the cover pressed open on the glass case. He looked at the flies, then ran his gaze up and down Lamb, resting it upon his bruised cheekbone, then to the girl, his face unchanging. Without taking his eyes off her he asked Lamb if he didn’t want any knives. His teeth were gray.

“Knives,” Lamb said. “Do we need any knives, Em?”

“What would we want a knife for?”

The man behind the counter looked at her. “Don’t your daddy take you fishing?”

She shook her head and grinned. “Not yet.”

“Hunting?”

“Nope.”

He looked out the window at Lamb’s truck. “When you get out of that vehicle, and get out on the river, or up in the mountains, you’ll need a knife.” The clerk looked at him. “Won’t she?” He took a shining silver knife with a five-inch blade out of the case and handed it to the girl, handle first.

Lamb looked at her. “I don’t know. I think your mother would kill me.”

Tommie shrugged. “She won’t care.”

Lamb looked from the girl to the man behind the counter and into the glass. “You don’t have a good knife do you, Em.”

The clerk retrieved the first knife and picked up another. “Maybe you want a skinning knife.”

“Something practical,” Lamb said. “Something she can fold up and keep in the coin pocket of her jeans.”

“Like for an emergency?” The clerk asked, splaying his open palms upon the glass.

“Yes,” he said, “like that.”

The clerk nodded at the case. “Go ahead and look.”

Lamb looked the man in the eye. “Why don’t you give us the most expensive one you have in there.” The man slid open the glass doors and selected a tiny bone-handled pocketknife. Reaching over the counter, he nodded at the girl, who opened her palm. He set it in her hand.

“That’s one twenty.”

She weighed it in her hand—surprisingly heavy for its size. They both had the same thought: like the pencil sharpener. She nodded at Lamb, and the clerk pointed his eyes at the girl’s pockets.

“You can fit that one in your Levi’s,” he said.