The Water Museum

One. Mountains Without Number

In a beat-down house at the foot of a western butte, a woman sips her coffee and stares at her high school yearbook. Most everybody’s gone. The pictures seem to be a day old to her. She still laughs at the drama club portrait, still remembers the shouting when the football team won the regional. And there she is on page thirty. She was one of the pretty ones, for sure. One of the slender ones who had a mouth that suggested to every boy that she knew a secret and was slightly amused by it. She had famous lips.

She looks at herself in her drill team uniform. Runs her finger down her skinny leg. Wonders where that girl went.

Now she keeps the shades at the back of the house pulled down so she doesn’t have to look at the cliffs. A few years back a woodpecker got into her roof beam, and it’s all chipped out. Wood bees are rooting around in there. She has been meaning to hammer some sheet metal over that corner, but she hasn’t seen woodpeckers in years — not since the drouth got ahold of the land. She keeps her geraniums and little apple tree out front alive with her dirty dishwater. Saves money, though her neighbor says that makes her a Democrat. Being eco-logical and all that happy crappy. They laugh about it over the fence some mornings.

“Them apples,” the neighbor says, “are gonna come up tastin’ like Lemon Joy.”

But the old lady isn’t out today, and the woman wonders as she often does if the neighbor is dead in there. Some days are spooky like that, and she doesn’t know why. She wants everything to live forever.

Her coffee dregs go down the drain, and she rinses the cup in her plastic water bin and upends it in the dish rack and slides her keys off the counter and goes out. Turns hard left out the door so her back is to the butte. She drives a Ford F-150 with 120,000 miles on it. One bumper sticker: HONK TWICE IF YOU’RE ELVIS, with a little yellow smiley face. Backs out and doesn’t look up. She can never find Bon Jovi on the radio. Just Jesus and Trace Adkins. But Trace is good enough. The sky feels like it’s on fire as she drives into town. Her morning clients are always there before she is. Waiting for her. Feels like the last six people left in the West.

* * *

Atop the butte, the spirits of the old ones are indistinguishable from the wind. From up there, the old main street is thinned by altitude and turns silver in the morning sunlight. Crows skitter across the streak of light like small embers. And her truck pulls into a diagonal slot outlined in faded yellow paint. The pickup could be any color, any color at all. It doesn’t matter. The sun is turning it gray. She looks as small as a pebble in a creek bed.

Up there, the wind is an oven, and nobody below knows there are ancient fire rings and small middens of deer bones and remnants of lodges where pack rats still gather twigs from the dead white trees. Scattered across the brow of the butte, hide scrapers and arrowheads and metates hollowed out in flat rocks where acorns and pine nuts were ground by ten thousand years of women smaller than the one below but with the same thick braid of hair. Gray, everywhere gray, threading its way among the colors, as it has stitched the fields to the south. Dead watercourses form scars across the belly of the world. The oaks and the pines are as pale and colorless now as photographic negatives, except for the wide black plains to the east: dead oceans of boiling rock.

The few tourists who speed through town on that main drag don’t use film anymore. Their children may never know what negatives are. If anyone takes a snapshot, it is on a smartphone. And it will be a picture of these red and black cliffs, not the town, not the woman.

The colored figures painted upon the face of the butte are the only relief for a hundred miles: white, blue, yellow.

* * *

They call her Frankie. Has been Frankie since high school. It was so cute then, so saucy. Better than Francine, by God.

Frankie pulls herself out of the Ford, wonders how her hip got so stiff. She couldn’t ride a horse today if you paid her. Wonders how she got to this time in life when she tries to get up from a booth inside her diner and her hip locks on her and keeps her trapped for an extra minute until her body releases with a click like a door unlocking. How she got to this season of night fevers and wet sheets and spooky moods. Her keys are clipped onto a great purple carabiner with a small foxtail with Indian beads dangling. She sounds like bells as she moves.

Her clients await her in the scant wedge of blue shade along the wall. She nods to her breakfast club and slams the truck door and hates the way her upper arm jiggles and wishes there was a health club in town. She grins — that grin of hers never aged. Her lips will always stay famous when the rest of her falls away. Health club in town? She wishes there was still a town at all.

The morning crowd nods and touches her arm and says “howdy” and “hey-now” as she pushes through them to the door. Saint Frankie of the Perpetual Coffeepot. She unlocks the door with those jangling keys, rattling and melodious. She feels like a fifth-grade schoolteacher and they feel like kids waiting for school to start. The men look her over. She still fills a pair of jeans, they think, though only she knows what size she wears now. The swinging door allows the old scents of grease and bread and donuts and eggs to join the sage and dust in the street. The breakfast club follows Frankie into the shadows, seeking refuge.

Frankie flips on the a.c. and the blowers bang to life.

They think they’ve always been there, these good people, but they haven’t. One of her breakfast club, Ike, used to tell Shoshone tales to anyone who would listen. He was a major pain, of course, with his Indian legends. But then he died and suddenly became one of their angels. Good ol’ Ike! And Remember when Ike used to say…? And what he said was that the cliffs did not love them because they spoke English, not Shoshone. That the spirits who tended to the butte spoke the old tongue, and nobody who ever climbed up there managed to learn a damn word of Shoshone — he always pronounced it Sho-shown, like that. “If you learned a few old songs and went up there to sing, the mountains would hear you, and miracles would happen.” He smoked two packs a day like all the old-timers, and he died in 1987.

But the cliffs are older than the Sho-shown. The cliffs don’t count years — years are seconds to them. Flecks of gypsum pushed off the edge by the hot wind. They are the original inhabitants of this valley. And they weren’t always cliffs. They were entire mountains once, until the inevitable carving wind and scouring dust and convulsive earthquakes and cracking ice trimmed them, thinned them, made their famous face appear to oversee the scurrying of those below.

Mountains, too, are doomed to die. But it is their curse to die more slowly than anything else on earth. To weaken and fall, mile by mile, carrying their arrowheads into the gullies, and with them the gemstone skeletons of the old ones, and the great stony spines of the elder giants. Even these are mere infants to the falling mountains. All falling as grit on the flats. Tiny hills for ants to climb.

* * *

If you hit Highway 20 to Idaho Falls, you’ve already missed it: New Junction — home of the Benson Hill High School Mountain Men and the State Champion Benson Hill Colorettes. The sign on the playing field is partly down now. It says:

SON HI

OLO ETT S

Frankie’s Diner is the only restaurant left in town, though there is a Taco John’s on the east side, right before you hit the Sinclair station with its green dinosaur on the sign. The mountains knew those animals well. Truckers and tourists, when they come through, stop at Taco John’s for their sodas and their burritos and their toilet breaks. Frankie doesn’t seem to mind, though she keeps her feelings close. She doesn’t serve hazelnut French roast anyway, she tells herself. Everything at Frankie’s is like it ought to be, like it used to be.

She bakes big blueberry muffins every Tuesday and they’re gone by dinnertime, mostly gobbled by The Professor and Miss Sally. Frankie’s has its best crowds on Tuesday mornings. Everybody comes in except those crusty old waddies who still try to run a few beeves in the draws. Once in a while, one of them rides his horse right down the street, looking like something out of a crazy cowboy movie. They don’t even wave, just grimly straddle their saddles and clop out of sight. Those boys don’t care to talk much, and if there’s one constant at Frankie’s, it’s palaver. It was busier when she was a kid, when her mom and dad ran the place, but the oil field roustabouts are gone over to Rock Springs in Wyoming. And the uranium miners are long gone, too. Lots of them tearing up the Indian reservations now, but some of them still burning out their lungs and kidneys digging around the back side of the butte. But that’s nearer to Arco.

People don’t mention Arco much. Hell, Arco came up with the figures on the cliff faces idea before they did. Arco beat the Mountain Men every year just about. Arco was the first city (“city,” ha!) lit by nuclear energy in the world. The buttes and mountains look down upon Arco also, and after the seas of molten fire they observed, the reactor meltdown in 1961 was just a little pool.

* * *

Inside Frankie’s, the coffeepot is on and Ralph, the Sinclair owner, sits on his stool at the counter and opens his paper: drunk drivers and abandoned horses and no call for rain. Well, hell — there was never all that much rain to begin with. They are inhabitants of the rain shadow, where those Cascades to the west scrape all the juice out of the clouds as they head this way.

The phone rings, and Frankie beams and sits in the kitchen and says, “Hi, doll! How you feeling?”

“That’s Sammy,” The Professor says, as if everybody doesn’t know it.

“When’s she due?” Miss Sally asks.

“Any day now!” The Professor is feeling like a news anchor, delivering the headlines. “A girl!”

“No shit,” mutters Ralph.

He’s thinking of a vacation. Maybe Florida. He’d like to fish.

They hear her laugh. “Bye-bye!” she says. “Love you too!” Dishes clatter back there.

“Another beautiful day,” The Professor announces.

“Wait. Don’t tell me,” Ralph replies. “It’s sunny.”

The diner’s windows look west, away from the cliffs. Frankie likes it this way. The old motor court sits across the street. And a couple of white houses and two trailers. Some of them have foil over their windows. Satellite dishes. Frankie thinks about how each of those little places is a story. The drivers hurrying through town think about the huge stories looming over the road. They don’t even see the town. Those numbers on the face of the butte.

They’re huge. Much bigger than the old red handprints painted on the rocks when gargantuan creatures walked the plain, hairy and regal and slow as clouds. Taller than the lines of antelope scratched into the rocks.

The numbers start at 23. They march forward through time and stop at 00. Nobody in town likes to look at 77. Especially Frankie.

* * *

“Here we are,” Frankie says, as she says every morning, once the call is over.

She pours the first cups.

“How’s Sammy?” Sally asks.

“Just about fit to burst,” says Frankie.

“I remember those days,” Sally says with a wink.

“How did we do it?” says Frankie, going to Ralph, and to the far booth and then to The Professor.

“What the hell,” says The Professor at his customary window seat, where he spends every morning staring out — as if there would be anything new to see.

Everybody glances outside, and by damn, something new does come along. A lone steer, all slat sides and idiot drool, ambling down the street, looking in the windows. He stops and chews his cud and drops a pound of fertilizer outside the diner.

Frankie opens the door and waves the coffeepot and scolds, “Shoo, now! G’on!”

He shakes his big horns once and gets dogged on down the street by a squadron of agitated biting flies.

“You seen that?” asks Miss Sally, but nobody answers.

Frankie says to Ralph, “Pay you a dollar to shovel that patty out of there.”

Ralph stares at his paper.

“Feed me first. I’ll do it when I’m done. No charge. I’ll be keeping your tip, though.”

“There goes my Cadillac,” Frankie says, winking at Sally, who covers her mouth with a napkin.

“A gentleman,” The Professor announces. “Chivalry is not dead.”

“Sure ain’t,” says Ralph, pondering the ball scores. Goddamned Seahawks.

* * *

Doesn’t every town in America have an old-timer called The Professor? That duffer who knows everything and everybody, as long as they are dead. He can tell you who Monica Benson dated between 1955 and her tragic demise in the flood of ’67. Yep, it rained sometimes. And the big cliffs made sure the arroyos north of town exploded with deep red floods that swept cars out to the lava beds and left them upside down and full of sand.

Frankie is mixing her batter. The ovens are on. Miss Sally grabs the pot and goes ahead and refills her friends’ cups for them.

“Gotcha, Frankie!” she announces brightly, like another breaking news report.

“Thanks, hon!” Frankie calls from the back.

Everybody has a personal cup, and they hang on wooden dowels on the wall. Old Bev and Howie still hang there, though they died a couple of years ago. Right beside Indian Ike’s cup with feathers and a circle with four colors in it.

“Hope you have a hair net!” Frankie adds. Everybody chuckles.

“Oh, you!” cries Sally, which makes her blush as she sits back down.

The Professor’s cup has some kind of chemical diagram on it. He really was a professor, of sorts. Taught Science and Bio 101 at Benson Hill. He coached drama club after school, which is where he met Frankie in 1976. It was hard to get boys in there, since actors were pretty much known as “faggots” by the Mountain Men. Still, Frankie was queen of the color guard that year, and some of the footballers followed her naughty smile into the club. That’s how he met Son Harding and poor old Stick. Stick made it as an actor for a month and dropped out of the club when he tried to read Shakespeare. That was some fairy shit right there and Stick wasn’t going to put up with it. But Frankie and the Colorettes had won a state ribbon that year, and she was hell-bent on winning a drama award, too. She wasn’t about to let all the boys off the hook. So Son was her partner — he didn’t mind — and they did solos from West Side Story. He couldn’t sing to save his life, but Frankie belted it out like Skeeter Davis, by God. And she danced fine, too. Spun those skirts of hers like a carnival ride and made everybody feel like it was the Fourth of July when she took the stage. Frankie made Sonny great. They were all juniors that year.

Frankie puts The Professor’s bowl of oatmeal in front of him. Sally eats English muffins with jam. She can’t afford more, but everyone makes believe she’s a light eater. She actually pays with change that she fishes out of one of those plastic ovals that squeeze to open, as if she’s still in grade school. Frankie makes a big show every Tuesday of eating a blueberry muffin with her, calling them extras, even though she can’t stand them anymore.

Ralph studies the Big Beaner Platter — eggs, chorizo, beans, and tortillas — as if it were an engine needing a tune-up. He isn’t sure if Mex food is right for the valley. But he’s up for something new.

Professor: “Ralph, what you eating?”

Ralph: “Illegal alien grub.”

The Professor turns to three sheepherders skulking in the corner booth, hunched and dark.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Basque,” says one of them — and a look that tells him to mind his own business. “Legal.” The men go back to their eggs.

Professor: “And what you reading?”

Ralph: “Paper.”

Professor: “What’s it say?”

Ralph: “Same as yesterday. Obama’s still a communist.”

Miss Sally: “Oh now.” She still has an old Hillary sign in her front yard. The only blue campaign sign in the whole region.

* * *

Frankie’s in and out of the swinging door all day long. She tries to count her steps — Dr. Oz says to get in ten thousand a day. She could probably get there on a fairly busy shift. It reminds her of the old marching days. She can’t afford busboys right now, so she buses the tables, cooks, washes dishes, and takes the orders. A strand of hair has escaped her braid, and it is stuck to the sweat at her temple. She brushes it away with the inside of her wrist. Her eyes are still blue. No rings on her fingers.

Professor: “You’re sweet as a spring daisy.”

Frankie: “Sweet-talk me some more and I might run off with you.”

She tops off his cup.

“How’s the hunt going?” she asks.

“Copacetic.”

He loves big words like that. They only piss Ralph off. The three Basque sheep men in the corner eat loud and mumble in their space-alien lingo. They smell like lambs to Frankie.

The Professor has a contract with a scientific catalogue to supply ants for ant farms. He finds a colony and inserts a straw down the hole and blows until the ants swarm out. When they come up with eggs, he knows he’s getting somewhere. Sooner or later they evacuate their queen, and he sucks her up in a pipette and puts her in a little plastic container. He makes a few bucks off each container, and he makes a few more for bottles with workers and eggs in them. He has to label the various colonies well so the ants won’t find each other when the jars are uncorked and tear each other apart. They go into a cardboard box with perforated holders and go out of Arco via UPS.

He used to man a roadside stand this side of Taco John’s where he sold rock crystals and petrified wood he found in a secret canyon up the side of the butte. He had a little sign on his petrified dino dung box: COPROLITES ARE GOOD SHIT. People were probably offended. He sells his rocks on eBay now.

Ralph: “Hunt, hell. Crawling around with your ass in the air. At your age.”

“You’re a bold talker for a newcomer,” The Professor says.

“Been here since nineteen seventy,” Ralph says.

The Professor winks at Frankie.

“Dear boy,” he says. “I painted the nineteen sixty-three number up on the butte. Used house paint and brand-new rollers that I stole from the janitor’s office at Benson Hill. You can’t top that.”

Ralph rattles the page. He is sick of history. “Congratu-goddamn-lations,” he says.

The tradition started in 1923, after the last Indian died up on the butte. They called him Joe, and some cowboy brought him down on a mule. His little valley was where the Class of 1923 made their ascent to paint their graduation date on the lowest available cliff. It was a scandal — the leader of this wild bunch, Billy Pepper, faced a night in the hoosegow until his pap and Mr. Benson himself came and bailed him out. He was mostly in Dutch for drinking, but the town leaders secretly saw a nice tradition being born. The butte knew, if they didn’t, that the top of the 23 was at the height where great sharks and whales once swam, and where the smoke of old Joe’s last chimney fire hovered as he burned all his letters from his dead wife and his Bible before he lay himself down on the floor of the cabin to sleep forever. Now there is no trace of his house except for the bulbs that break from the ground every April and start to bloom.

The Professor always loved to lecture about the numbers when he subbed the history classes. They weren’t in any particular order—24 was right beside 23, but 25 was far off to the west. It depended on the moxie of the painters, didn’t it. How high were they brave enough to climb? How long were their ropes? His line was: “Junction’s numbers are what hopes and dreams look like.” For these were the best moments of their lives. These were the doorways into imagined futures. Doors they thought were swinging wide, though perhaps only their grandfathers knew the doors were actually slamming behind them.

So 58 abuts 90; 92 bleeds downhill into a feminine-looking 88; 68 is the funny one, but what do you expect? The 8 is two stacked flowers with white petals and yellow hearts — hippies even out here. Some of the numbers seem to have small beards, but these are cascades of dung from peregrine and buzzard nests.

It was 1949 that was the first time people believed the tradition was going to die out. By then, they had made postcards of the numbers, and Frankie’s folks sold them in a wire rack beside the cash register. None of the GIs seemed to want to return home. Those Mountain Men who’d made it back from Guadalcanal and Arles were out there bombing around the USA in jalopies and on motorcycles. Nobody wanted to come punch cows or dig uranium at Arco or try to grow alfalfa or run sheep up on the highlands. That was when the ranches began to die out. Things slowed down, and the first old-timers pronounced The Death of America and The End of the Way Things Were Supposed to Be. But they were off by a few decades. It was really the 1960s that killed them all. Freeways appeared far from New Junction’s city limits, and tourists jumped out of the valley and drove the big roads instead, taking their money with them.

Benson Hill closed in 2000. At least Frankie’s daughter graduated before that. “Oh my Lord,” Frankie thinks. Every once in a while she remembers that she is going to be a grandmother.

She doesn’t like it when The Professor talks about all the stories. It just reminds her that ’Junction is blowing away, bit by bit, and Benson Hill is closed and the Colorettes are gone, and the Sinclair with its grand view of the butte is where Stick used to work and she can still see him smoking and staring up at the numbers and then she sees Son in his silly white bell-bottoms. It’s not right, is what she thinks. Is a town dead when the old men die, or when the children leave?

Ralph and Miss Sally are playing with The Professor. The numbers game. Frankie wishes she had one of those iPod things to shut their voices out. Son Harding used to like crazy new music back then — Yes and Alice Cooper. She’d listen to that right now if she could.

She drops big blues in front of each client, steaming hot. Dabs of butter running in yellow rivulets down their sides. “One Butte with Lava,” she says as she delivers each muffin.

Ralph says, “Nineteen forty-one.”

“Oh well. What a year! We were, of course, at war. Benson Hill boys were patriotic, I tell you. They went in high numbers to the Pacific theater.”

Frankie is thinking, Sonny always told her he’d take her all the way to the ocean — any ocean — if she’d leave Stick and run away with him. Crazy boy. Wrote her the only poems she ever got from anybody.

The Professor: “That number was painted by a young cowboy with jug ears. Name of Wally Wachtel, known as Big Double for the two W’s in his name, don’t you know. And his poor old ears. The only big things about Wally were his ears and his hat.” He laughs. “Wally undertook that project after the prom. Climbed up there alone. If you were to climb on up there, you’d see across the white number four is the name of his sweetheart, Pru Speich. Poor dumb bastard misspelled ‘Pru’ and wrote ‘P-R-O-O.’ Still there. He was shot in the head by a Japanese sniper in the Philippines. His body never came home.”

Ralph: “Well, ain’t you a bundle of joy.”

The Professor: “Natural selection, my friend.”

Ralph tosses some money on the counter.

“Christ,” he says. “Now it’s evolution.”

“What a newfangled idea,” The Professor mutters.

The butte knows that Big Double Wally saw eagles fly in a mating dance as he struggled up. That he almost fell. That the entire valley floor, once drained of ocean, became another kind of sea — red and orange and screaming hot as the lava rolled across the flats. Ferns, palms, ancient shaggy pines bursting into flame and vanishing under the languid waves of melted stone. Air so hot the flying creatures trying to migrate burst into flame and plunged into the inferno. And Big Double hanging from his little rope, swinging like a pendulum for a minute of sheer terror, shouting, “Oh gravy!”

Miss Sally: “Frankie, dear — your own dad painted the fifty-nine, don’t you know.”

“Yep. Know it.”

Frankie thinks about some of the maneuvers she led the Colorettes through at the games: drop spins, crazy-eight carves, flutters, toaster turns.

Ralph leaves and doesn’t shovel the pile outside her door.

* * *

The sun has moved on to that Pacific shoreline she never saw, and it is all probably turning copper and cool at the end of a long day. Here it is still hot, and quiet, and the glow fires up the top half of the butte. She is sitting in her truck, staring at 77, wishing she still smoked. The renegade steer from the morning is lurking beside one of the trailers across the way, and it eyes her, then bellows. She starts her engine and it trots across the street toward her. “What do you think?” she says out loud. “Do I look like a rancher to you?” The steer lows and eyeballs her. She puts the truck in gear. “Do I look like I’m hauling hay to you in some field?” She lowers her window and says, “Shoo.” She waves her hand. He shakes his horns and bellows again.

As Frankie drives away, she watches the steer in her rearview, trotting after her.

“Don’t you beat all,” she says.

She is tired and her feet hurt. That hip is trying to lock up on her again. She thinks she’ll be darned if she lets her hip or this crazy little bull keep her from going inside and watching her shows. She smells like food — it’s the worst part of her day. If she washes the grease smell out of her hair, she’ll be blow-drying it for hours. Coming home smelling like fried flesh, she can hardly bear to eat. She usually gives herself a bowl of Special K and some iced tea. Watches shows on the satellite where people buy houses on beaches on islands and basically sunburn for a living. She doesn’t drink much, but she does have a weakness for a bowl of ice cream. And she likes a hot soak and a good book. But tonight she feels the hollow spot, and she drops a splash of Southern Comfort into her Diet Coke and then another.

Outside, the chain-link rattles. Stupid cow.

“You better not eat my flowers,” she says.

She laughs for a minute — what is the neighbor going to think when she sees Frankie has a new bull?

It’s time for her bath. She has a good mystery she’s been working on — a Sara Paretsky. In those books, Chicago seems like some kind of Star Wars city to her, like Oz, if Oz had lots of murders. She can’t imagine what it would be like to walk the streets of that giant canyon of crystal and stone. And that lake! Why, they were never going to run out of water. And her daughter. In the city. Just about to pop. Frankie saves calling her for later. “Oh, Sammy,” she says. Sammy is the only thing that makes her cry. Sammy and the little peanut she’s bringing into the world.

Tub’s running. She should save this water for the tree and the steer. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she feels like the drouth has taken all her own water from her, just like the little ranches all about. It takes eight thousand gallons a day to grow enough forage for cattle, and to keep the cows and horses alive.

Her braid looks like straw. Her chin has dropped. Her shoulders are slumping. She cringes when she remembers when Sonny and Stick thought she was the prettiest, most interesting girl in this entire state. How poor Son tried to get her away from Stick. “Your skin is like new snow,” he’d tell her. What kind of thing was that to say? It must have come out of his books he was always carrying around. Nobody talked like that. Not to Frankie. It shook her, bad.

The picture of Son is in the hallway, outside the bathroom. She touches his face when she goes to bed. He had the softest hair she ever felt, on a girl or a boy. She always wishes she could touch that hair one more time. Poor old Stick hangs in the kitchen, beside the fridge.

She calls Sammy most nights, but the Southern Comfort has made her sleepy. Besides, sometimes Frankie senses that she bores her daughter. And Frankie can’t bear to be boring anymore. Frankie says a prayer every night and settles in to listen to the all-night UFO shows on the AM radio.

On her left hip, where nobody sees it, her only tattoo: 1977.

* * *

Stickshift, so they called him — on account of his ability to drive anything with a motor — never forgave Sonny for leaving the Mountain Men. He probably suspected Frankie and Sonny had some secret thing going on in the little theater, but then Son was just a drama fag. Right? Shit, they probably shared lipstick and pantyhose! Haw. The boys laughed at that.

Frankie was loyal to Stick, of course. They were going to marry after school ended. Stick was going to run the gas station and expand the garage beside it to service all the cars and tractors and trucks between here and Boise. He wasn’t much of a reader, unlike Frankie, but he brought her paperbacks when he went on runs with his dad, delivering machine parts into Oregon. Sonny, though. Sonny came at her with poems and paintings and drawings and records. Son smelled her hair and teased her till she laughed so hard she cried. And they acted together like they were dancing.

But even Frankie’s dad said Son was no-account. A hippie. “You can’t eat poems,” he told her.

It was after the senior prom when Son came up to her at the bonfire at the foot of the cliffs. Everybody was drinking. Stick was blitzed and sleeping in his truck. The Colorettes were roasting marshmallows for the boys. And Sonny sidled up to her and smelled her neck. The bolts of lightning that shot down her body made her jump. Somebody was playing Seger on the tape deck. They locked eyes.

“Frankie,” he said. “Run away with me.”

She shoved him a little.

“Crazy boy.”

“No, seriously. Let’s run away. Portland. I want to take you to that beach.”

She laughed.

“You’re drunk.”

He kissed her lips.

She stared into his eyes.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“I don’t know.”

He sipped his beer.

“Can I do it again?”

“No!”

They kissed, hard. She bit his lips.

Son’s breath was shaking out of him, and they leaned against each other — the huge perpetual shadow of the cliff looming over the entire town, the bottoms of the numbers writhing in the fire’s light as if they were dancing.

“I want to touch your hair,” she said.

Stick staggered out of the dark and he and Son stood side by side, peeing on the cliff face.

The Colorettes shrieked, “Ooh! Gross!” and scurried about in a frenzy of faux panic.

Stick hugged Son.

“You ain’t so bad,” he said. Went back to sleep some more.

Later, Frankie’s hands clutched Son’s hair and she cried against his bare shoulder. And ever since, she has thought she should have run. She should have gone. But you can’t just quit. You can’t just leave home behind to wither and die. You can’t. You can’t.

She drinks.

* * *

The empty house sits in the silent morning. The yearbook is still on the table, but the coffee cup is in the drainer. Outside, the little bull rakes his horns across the chain-link fence and, after a while, gives up and walks away. Nobody sees him go.

Above Frankie’s house, a slab of numbers wants to fall. Ice has gradually pried it loose from the butte, and it is just a matter of time until it shatters in a storm of rock. Could be today, could be in a hundred years.

Inside the diner, Frankie’s telephone is ringing.

The breakfast club has begun to gather. It’s just The Professor and Ralph and Sally. No sheepherders.

The Professor: “Know what a dinosaur is?”

Ralph: “No, what?”

Professor: “It’s a sore you get from sitting around in a diner all day! Get it?”

Sally: “Did you just make that up?”

Ralph: “Know what a seven-course cowboy breakfast is?”

Professor: “No, what?”

Ralph: “A six-pack and a fistfight.”

Sally: “I wonder where that girl’s at.”

They check their watches.

* * *

Frankie had wanted to go to Bible school for a couple of years and come back to marry Stick and teach Sunday school at Christ the Redeemer. Stick wasn’t into no college — he had his business all lined up, and his folks fronted him the money for a nice little house right outside town, where antelopes moved by like small sailboats in the golden grasses, and a family of foxes had a den in a little cut bank not a quarter mile from the back porch. But Son was going on to State, and he was going to read poems for gosh sakes. Poems. What was he going to do with poems? He drove her crazy sometimes.

“I’m going to live,” he proclaimed. As if she wasn’t alive. As if he’d be so much more alive than anybody else. It made her mad.

That night, he and Stick stole the paints from the Benson Hill janitor’s room. Two cans of house paint.

They climbed together in the dark. It rained. Everybody remembers that rain, how different it was that rain came in so late in the spring. And they must have made it because the big yellow 77 was there, far above the other numbers. Those boys crawling up the rock in the storm, probably egging each other on. Probably competing. The numbers are so high, no one has ever climbed up there to look, but everyone’s certain one of the sevens says Frankie. And people speculate still on which hand painted it.

Frankie is grateful she wasn’t the one who found them, lying broken at the foot of the butte. It was Stick’s poor father. He covered them with his coat and a tarp from the truck before he staggered out of there, forgetting to drive, hollering for somebody to get the sheriff.

* * *

Little pebbles drop from the Shoshone butte and sound like rain hitting Frankie’s tin roof. At the diner, they press their faces to the glass and peer into the dark, as if she might have somehow snuck past and entered without their noticing. They hear the phone ringing and ringing until it stops.

“I’m starving,” The Professor says.

Miss Sally says, “What if…”

Dirt rolls down the street. It makes small patterns in the wind that almost look like little waves.

Once, when the valley was full of water, dragonflies as big as ravens rattled through ferns and tall spikes of grasses and cattails. Cool fog blanketed the face of the butte — the softest thing the valley had ever known. Sometimes, the last people of New Junction dream of it: fog. It comes to them like a memory they never had. It is the dream of the mountains. The word for fog that none of them know sounds like the pinging of pebbles on Frankie’s roof. If only someone could say it, miracles might happen. The numbers hover in the haze. Peregrines dive. And the Shoshone word for the lost cool fog is pogonip.

The Professor looks up. “She’ll be here,” he says. “Right? Right?”

Ralph is already walking away.