"You'll see. It'll be a surprise. It'll be wonderful." Our mother smiled through the bars and nodded. "I'm saving you two. Mildred's coming. I'm surprised she hasn't already."

A young man in a tan suit and carrying a briefcase entered through the two sets of barred doors, let in by another deputy. He came in our direction but stopped at our father's cell. One of my father's hands extended out, and the man grabbed it and shook it. My father laughed and said, "O-kay, o-kay." Seeing this man talking to my father made me realize my parents had less to do with each other now. This may have been why my mother felt light. Something had left her. A weight.

"Don't you think you children should go home?" our mother said through the bars. A beam of late-morning sunlight penetrated down into her cell. She let go of our hands and smiled. We hadn't been there two minutes. We hadn't said anything that made any difference. I don't know what we expected.

"Don't you love us?" Berner said, fighting her tears. I looked at Berner and took her hand. She seemed desperate about everything.

"Of course I do," our mother said. "That oughtn't worry you. You can rely on that." She reached one small hand up to touch Berner's face, but Berner didn't move closer. Our mother left her hand there in the air for a moment.

"Are you going to commit suicide?" I said. The red sign was right there. I couldn't ignore it. I'd never said that word before saying it to my mother.

"Of course not." She shook her head. She looked up at the windows behind us. This was a lie. She did do it in the North Dakota State Penitentiary and probably had already made mention of it in the jail that day. "I told you," she said. "I had some weak feelings before."

The man in the tan suit, who'd been speaking to our father, said, "Well, all right. You just sit tight here. I'll have a word with your better half now." His briefcase snapped shut. He'd been exhibiting some papers and having our father sign them.

"She's got a federal case against me." My father's voice echoed down the line of cells.

"I'll bet she does. A lot of people do." The young man laughed and began walking toward us, his boots. .h.i.tting sharp knocks on the concrete.

The deputy stepped close to Berner and me from behind and said, "This is your parents' lawyer now, kids. We better let him get a word with your mom in private. Come back and see them later. I'll let you in."

Berner looked at the man approaching and instantly stopped crying. Our mother smiled at the two of us. Tears were in her eyes. I saw that.

"I've decided I'm going to write something." She nodded at me as if this was news I'd like.

"What is it?" I asked. The deputy put his hand on my shoulder. He was pulling me away.

"I'm not sure what it'll be yet," she said. "It'll be a tragic-comedy, whatever it is. You'll have to tell me what you think. You're a smart boy."

"Did you rob a bank?" Berner said. Our mother didn't acknowledge this. The deputy moved Berner and me away from her cell so she could have her words with the lawyer. She wouldn't be there much longer. I never saw her again, though I didn't know I wouldn't at the time. I would've said more than I did say if I'd known that. I was sorry Berner asked her about the bank, since it had embarra.s.sed her.

On our way out, we again pa.s.sed the cell where our father was. He was lying on his busted cot in his sock feet, holding a sheaf of papers, reading. We must've crossed his light because he turned, half sat up and gaped at us. "Okay?" he said and flapped the papers toward us. "Did you get to see your mother?" The deputy kept us moving along.

I said, "Yes, sir," as we pa.s.sed his cell door.

"That's good then. I know it made her happy," he said. "Did you tell her you loved her?"

I hadn't said that, but I should've.

"We did," Berner said.

"There you go," he said.

That was all we had time to say. I've thought many times, since I never saw him again either, that it was better than saying what was true.

Chapter 38.

It's a good measure of how insignificant we were, and of the kind of place Great Falls was, that no one came to see about us, or to get us and transport us to someplace safe. No juvenile authorities. No police. No guardians to take responsibility for our welfare. No one ever searched the house while I was there. And when no one does that-notices you-then people and things quickly get forgotten and drift away. Which is what we did. My father was wrong about many things; but about Great Falls he wasn't. People there didn't want to know us. They were willing to let us disappear if we would.

Berner and I walked home that Monday by a different route. We felt different now-possibly we each felt freer in our own way. We walked up to Central past the post office and down toward the river, along by the bars and p.a.w.n shops, a bowling alley, the Rexall, and the hobby shop where I'd bought my chess men and my bee magazines. The street was bustling and noisy with traffic. But, again, I didn't feel anyone staring at us. School hadn't started. We weren't out of place. A boy and his sister walking back across the bridge in the sunny breeze, the river sweet and rank on a late morning in August-no one would think: These are those kids whose parents went to jail. They need to be looked after and protected.

We stopped at the railing in the middle of the bridge and watched pelicans glide and soar above the river's current. Swans floated at the near bank where a skim of yellow dust rocked on the surface. We watched two people paddle a canoe downstream toward the smelter stack and the Fifteenth Street Bridge. On the walk Berner had worn her sungla.s.ses and been silent-no talk about our mother and father. At the railing, with the Missouri sliding beneath us, her hair rose and fell in the puff of dry breeze, her hands gripping the iron barrier, as if the bridge might become a train and pull away. She seemed young, too young to run away and be on her own. We were fifteen. But our ages really didn't matter. These were the true facts we were facing, and age doesn't figure into that.

It's odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It's so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seemed impossible to find among the facts. If there was a hidden design, living almost never shed light on it. Much easier to think about chess-the true character of the men always staying the way they were intended, a higher power moving everything around. I wondered, for just that moment, if we-Berner and I-were like that: small, fixed figures being ordered around by forces greater than ourselves. I decided we weren't. Whether we liked it or even knew it, we were accountable only to ourselves now, not to some greater design. If our characters were truly fixed, they would have to be revealed later.

It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone a.s.sures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.

And by then I was well on my way to knowing how to subordinate one thing to another-a lesson the game of chess teaches you, and does so almost immediately. The events that made all the difference to our parents' lives were becoming secondary to the events carrying me onward from that August day. Learning this unsimple fact has been what this telling has been about up to now-that and seeing our parents more clearly. I believe that's why I felt freed when Berner and I stood on the bridge that day, why my heart was beating hard with exhilaration. That may have been the elusive truth and why I let my father's ring drop into the river and didn't afterward think much about it.

Best to leave us on the bridge that morning, better than to think of me at home, watching from the porch as Berner not long after, walked away down our shady street and out of my life, toward wherever hers would take her. To concentrate on Berner leaving would make all this seem to be about loss-which isn't how I think about it to this very day. I think of it as being about progress, and the future, which aren't always easy to see when you're so close to both of them.

Chapter 39.

What happened was, Mildred Remlingler drove up to our house in her battered old brown Ford, came straight up the walk, up the steps and knocked on the front door, behind which I was waiting alone. She came right inside and told me to pack my bag-which, of course, I didn't have. I had only the pillowcase still containing my few possessions. She asked where my sister Berner was. I told her she'd left the day before. Mildred looked around the living room and said this would have to be Berner's choice now, wherever she was, because we didn't have time to go and look for her. Juvenile officials representing the State of Montana would be coming there soon, looking for Berner and me to take us into custody. It was a miracle, she said, they hadn't come already.

Then with me in the car seat beside her, Mildred drove us out of Great Falls that late morning of August 30, 1960, and straight north up the 87 highway in the direction our father had taken Berner and me not so long before, when we saw the Indian houses and the trailer where the beef was killed, and where he may have gained a first inkling he and our mother were headed for trouble.

Mildred didn't much speak at first, as Great Falls settled into the landscape behind us. She must've felt I understood exactly what was happening to me, or else that there was no way to explain it, and we should be quiet and I should cause no one any trouble.

Up on the benchland north and west of the Highwoods, it was nothing but hot yellow wheat and gra.s.shoppers and snakes crossing the highway and the high blue sky, and the Bear's Paw Mountains out ahead, blue and hazy but with bright snow on their peaks. Havre, Montana, was the town farther north. Our father had delivered someone a new Dodge there earlier in the summer, and ridden the Intermountain back to Great Falls. He'd described it as a "desolate place, down in a big hole. The back of beyond," where, he said, he'd encountered the flagship of the Polish navy-which was another of his corny jokes. I couldn't imagine why Mildred would be driving us there. On the map Havre was nearly as far north as you could go in Montana, and as far north in the whole country. Canada was just above it. But I was still acting on the trust that adults often do strange things that in the end are revealed as right, after which someone takes care of you. It's a crazy idea and should've seemed crazy to me then, given all that had happened in our family. But I felt I was doing what our mother had planned for me, and for Berner, too. Given my character, that was all I needed to think.

In Havre-which did lie at the bottom of a long hill, with the Great Northern yards, a narrow brown river, and a line of rimrock running along the northern side of the highway-Mildred looked at me across the car seat and told me I was too thin and peaked and was possibly anemic, and I should eat something because I might not run into food the rest of that day. Mildred was a large square-hipped, authoritative woman, with short black curly hair, snapping small dark eyes, red lipstick, a fleshy neck, and powder on her face that masked a bad complexion, though not very well. She and her car both smelled like cigarettes and chewing gum, and her ashtray was full of lipstick b.u.t.ts and matches and spearmint wrappers, though she hadn't smoked while we were driving. My mother had said Mildred had been afflicted with marriage problems and now lived alone. It was hard for me to see how a man would marry her (though I'd sometimes felt that way about our mother). She was large and wasn't pretty at all, and was bossy. Mildred wore a green silky dress with little red triangles printed on it and large red beads, and stiff hosiery with heavy black shoes, and seemed uncomfortable dressed that way. In the window behind her on a wire hanger were her white nurse's costume and cap, which seemed a much more natural thing for her to wear.

In Havre, we drove down the hill to First-which was the main street-and found a sandwich shop across from a bank and the GN depot. We sat at the counter inside, and I ate cold meat loaf and a soft roll with b.u.t.ter and a pickle and lemonade, and felt better. Mildred smoked while I ate and watched me and cleared her throat a lot and talked about having grown up on a beet farm in Michigan and her parents being Seventh Day-ers, and her brother going to Harvard (which I'd heard of), and about how she'd run away with an Air Force boy and "landed" in Montana. The boy eventually transferred, and she'd stayed on in Great Falls, studied nursing, and married another time before figuring out it wasn't for her-which was when she'd taken Remlinger back as her name. She said she was forty-three, though I'd thought she was sixty or more. At a certain point she turned on her stool and pinched my earlobe and asked if I thought I had a fever or was coming down with something. I didn't, although I felt anxious about where we were going. She said I should go to sleep in the back seat after lunch, and this was what let me know we weren't just going to Havre that day but were traveling farther on.

From Havre, we drove north, across a wooden railroad viaduct over the tracks and the muddy river and along a narrow highway that angled up the rimrock grade high enough to let me look back to the town, low and dismal and bleak in the baking sunlight. I was farther north than I'd ever been and felt barren and isolated, becoming unreachable. Wherever Berner was, I thought, was better than this. But I couldn't make myself ask anything because I realized the answer might've been something I wouldn't like, after which I wouldn't know what to say or do about my life, and would've had to face the fact that I'd made a mistake staying and not going with my sister (although she hadn't asked me).

The land north of Havre was the same as we'd been driving through: dry, unchanging cropland-a sea of golden wheat melting up into the hot unblemished blue sky crossed only by electrical wires. There were very few houses or buildings to signify people lived up there or needed electricity. Low green hills lay far out ahead in the shimmering distance. It was improbable we were going there, since I speculated those hills would be in Canada, which was all that lay ahead of us from my memory of the globe in my room.

Mildred again didn't talk much-just drove. She did smoke one cigarette, but didn't like it and tossed it out the vent. Buzzards hung in the sky, curving and motionless. I believed that if a person were to be lost where we were, buzzards would be the only way you'd be found, but you wouldn't survive.

At a certain point, Mildred took in a deep breath and let it out as if she'd decided something she'd been keeping silent about. She licked her lips and pinched at her nose and cleared her dry throat again.

"I should tell you some things now, Dell," she said, steering with two hands, her stocking feet on the pedals, her black shoes off and pushed aside. She was staring firmly ahead. We'd only pa.s.sed two cars since Havre. There didn't seem to be a place visible where we were going. "I'm taking you up to Saskatchewan to live for a little while with my brother, Arthur." She said this abruptly, as if it wasn't an enjoyable thing to say. "It won't have to be this way completely forever. But right now it does. I'm sorry." She licked her lips again. "It's what your mother wants. You oughtn't fault yourself for it. I'm disappointed your sister broke away. You two could've made a good team."

She looked over at me and faintly smiled, her short hair flittering in the hot window breeze. Her teeth weren't particularly straight and she didn't smile a lot. I felt as if Berner was actually there beside me and Mildred was addressing us both.

"I don't want to do that." I said this with absolute certainty. Mildred's brother. Canada. I felt sure I didn't have to do any of that. I had a say-so.

Mildred drove on for a time without speaking, letting the highway plunder on beneath us. Possibly she was thinking, but probably she was just waiting. Finally she said, "Well, if I have to take you back, they'll arrest me for kidnapping you and put me in jail. Then the one human being who can help you-and who's not a confirmed criminal, and who's willing to do your poor mother a last favor'll be out of reach. They're looking for you to put you in an orphanage. You better think on that. I'm trying to save you here. I'd have saved your sister if she'd been smarter."

My throat had already begun tightening, and this tightness screwed right down into my chest and made a pain, and I suddenly couldn't bring in enough air, even though we were going sixty, and hot wheat fragrance was blasting in the windows. I felt an urge just to shoulder open my door and fling myself out onto the rushing pavement. Which was nothing like me. I wasn't violent and didn't do things suddenly. But the black road seemed to be my life shooting away from me at a terrible speed, with no one to stop it. I thought if I could pick myself up and start walking I could get home, even find Berner, wherever she'd gone. My fingers found the door handle, squeezed it, ready to give a pull. Berner had said she hated our parents for lying. But I'd refused to hate them and remained the loyal one who stayed and did what our mother wanted. Which made me the one bad things were happening to now. I couldn't have said what I was expecting, or what my mother's plan for me was. She'd explained everything to Mildred and not to me. But I wasn't expecting this. I felt like I'd been tricked and abandoned, and that my loyalty wasn't respected, and I was here now with this odd woman, where only the buzzards would find me if I took control over my life. Being young was the worst thing. I knew why Berner had strived to be older and had run away. It was to save herself.

The airlessness in my chest ached the way it does when you drink too-cold water and feel paralyzed. But crying would be the signal of even greater defeat. Mildred would think I was pitiful. I squeezed my eyes tight shut, clutched the warm door handle, then released it and let hot air from outside overcome my tears. I don't now think it was so much what Mildred had said-that I was being driven to Canada to be put in the care of strangers-as much as it was the acc.u.mulation of all that had pa.s.sed in my life in the last week's time, and that I'd tried to take control of but failed. Mildred was only trying to help me, and help my mother. How I felt on hearing what I'd heard was more than anything a kind of grief.

"I don't blame you," Mildred said finally. She must've known I was crying. "It doesn't give any comfort to know nothing's your fault. You might like it better if it was." She adjusted her big legs in her seat, raised her chin and sat forward as if she saw something up the road. I'd stopped crying. "We're crossing the international border to Canada up here," she said, settling back in her seat. "I'll tell 'em you're my nephew. I'm taking you to Medicine Hat to buy you school clothes. If you want to tell 'em I'm kidnapping you, that'll be the time." She pruned her lips. "We'd like to stay out of jail if we can, though."

Ahead, where the highway was only a pencil line into the distance, two dark low b.u.mps became visible on the horizon, backed by blue sky in which there was not a cloud floating. I wouldn't have seen the b.u.mps if I hadn't looked where Mildred was looking. It was Canada there. Indistinguishable. Same sky. Same daylight. Same air. But different. How was it possible I was going to it?

Mildred was sc.r.a.pping around in her big red patent leather purse on the floor and continuing to drive. The dark b.u.mps quickly materialized into two low, square shapes that were buildings-side by side on a rise of prairie. A car sat beside each one. It had to be where the border started. I didn't know what happened there. Possibly someone could take me into custody, put me in handcuffs, and send me to an orphanage or back home where there was nothing but an empty house.

"What are you thinking about," Mildred asked.

I peered ahead at the sky above Canada. No one had ever asked me what I was thinking straight out. It hadn't mattered in our family what Berner and I were thinking-though we always were. What have I got to lose? were the words I said silently, which was what I was thinking, though only because they were words I'd heard other people say-in the chess club. I wouldn't have said them to Mildred. But I was shocked that what I was thinking felt true. What I said was, "How do you know what's really happening to you?" It was just what I made up to say.

"Oh, you never do." Mildred had her paper driver's license in the hand she held the steering wheel with. We were already approaching what were two wooden cabins established side by side. The highway split where it pa.s.sed them. "There are two different kinds of people in the world," Mildred said, "well, really, there're lots of kinds. But at least two are the people who understand you don't ever know; then there're the ones who think you always do. I'm in the former group. It's safer."

A bulky man in a blue uniform stepped outside the wooden hut on the right, which we were approaching. He was fitting a policeman's hat down onto his head and waving us forward. A red flag I didn't recognize-but that had a little English flag up in its left corner-fluttered on a pole beside the hut. A sign under the flagpole said YOU ARE ENTERING CANADA. PORT OF WILLOW CREEK, SASKATCHEWAN.

The other cabin beside it was the American one. The Stars and Stripes flew over it-though I suspected not the fifty-star one that included Hawaii. A border was two things at once. Going in and going out. I was going out, which felt significant. A smaller hatless man, in a different blue uniform and wearing a badge and a side pistol, stepped out of the American cabin into the breeze. He watched Mildred pull ahead. Possibly he knew about me and was preparing to come arrest us both. I looked straight forward, sat still. For some reason I couldn't have explained, I wanted us to get across, and felt exhilarated and afraid we might be prevented. Of the two types of people Mildred had mentioned, I must've been in the first group also. Otherwise why would I ever be where I was, with everything I'd ever understood disappearing behind me? It wasn't what I expected to feel. I had waked up in my bed alone, had watched my sister walk away out of my life, possibly forever. My parents were in jail. I had no one to look after me or out for me. What have I got to lose? was probably the correct question to be asking. The answer seemed to be very little.

Chapter 40.

The highway up into Canada lay across more endless cropland, indistinguishable to my eye from below the border, but with more houses and barns and windmills and evidence of people. The green hills that I'd first seen from north of Havre were, Mildred said, the Cypress Hills. They were like the Alps, she said, set out on the prairie by themselves-an anomaly from when there were glaciers on the plains. They had their own isolated forest and animal life. The people who lived there didn't like strangers. The towns we pa.s.sed through, however-Govenlock, Consul, Ravencrag, Robsart-looked like any ordinary towns in Montana. Though I thought if you grew up in a place with such a strange name-including Saskatchewan (a name I'd rarely heard before)-then you'd always feel strange about yourself. Nothing later in life could be as completely normal as it had been for me living in Great Falls.

Driving north in the low, late-day sun, Mildred recited to me what she knew about Canada that she felt might prove useful. Canada was owned by England and contained provinces, not states of a union-though there was practically no difference, except Canada only had ten. People mostly spoke English, but in a different way she couldn't describe, but I'd be aware of it and could learn it. She said they had their own Thanksgiving, but theirs wasn't on Thursday and wasn't in November. Canada had fought beside America in the same world war my father had fought in and had gotten involved in it even before we did, due to Canada's obedience to the Queen of England, and in fact had an air force as good as ours. She said Canada wasn't an old country like ours and still had a pioneer feel, and n.o.body there really thought of it as a country, and in fact in some parts people spoke French, and the capital was back east, and n.o.body respected it the way we did Washington, D.C. She said Canada had dollars for money, but theirs were different colored and were sometimes mysteriously worth more than ours. She said Canada also had its own Indians and treated them better than we treated ours, and Canada was bigger than America, though it was mostly empty and inhospitable and covered with ice much of the time.

I rode along thinking about these things and how they could become true just by pa.s.sing two huts marooned in the middle of nowhere. I felt better than I had earlier in the day when I didn't know where I was going. It was as if a crisis had pa.s.sed or been escaped. What I experienced was relief. I only wished my sister, Berner, had stayed to see it with me.

More wheat fields ran past, and the afternoon air was sweet and cool. I made out individual dust torrents where farmers were operating combines in the distance. Grain trucks sat out on the cut-over ground, waiting to haul the wheat away. Tiny distant figures moved around the trucks as the harvesters emptied loads and the trucks moved off. Once we were out of the hills, there were no landmarks. No mountains or rivers-like the Highwoods or the Bear's Paw, or the Missouri-that told you where you were. There were even fewer trees. A single low white house with a windbreak and a barn and a tractor could be seen at a distance, then later another one. The course of the sun would be what told you where you were-that and whatever you personally knew about: a road, a fence line, the regular direction the wind came from. There was no feeling, once the hills disappeared behind us, of a findable middle point from which other points could draw a reference. A person could easily get lost or go crazy here, since the middle was everywhere and everything at once.

Mildred told me some things about her brother, Arthur Remlinger. He was American, was thirty-eight years old, and had lived in Canada for several years by his own choosing. He was the only one in her family to go to college, and had hoped to become a lawyer, but for various reasons hadn't finished his studies and had become disenchanted with America. He lived north of where we were, in the small town of Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, where he ran a hotel. It was just a coincidence, she said, that she and he lived across the border from each other. She saw him infrequently, which she didn't consider important. She loved him. The reason her brother was agreeing to take charge of me, she said, was because I was American and had no place to go, and it was a favor to her. He would find things for me to do. He had no children of his own and would be interested in me-and in Berner, too, if she hadn't run away. He was an unusual man, as I would see. He was cultivated and intelligent. I'd learn many things being around him and would like him.

Mildred decided on another cigarette and expelled smoke from her large nostrils so it rushed out the window. She'd been driving for hours-just to get me away from where I was imperiled. She could only have been exhausted. I tried to picture where we were going-Fort Royal, Saskatchewan. It sounded foreign, and threatening because it was foreign. I could only feature the same prairie all around us, where there was no place for me.

"How long am I going to stay with your brother?" I only said this to make myself say something.

Mildred sat up straighter and gripped the wheel in both fists. "I don't know," she said. "We'll have to see. Don't spend time thinking old gloomy, though." Her cigarette was in the side of her mouth, and she was talking with the other side. "Your life's going be a lot of exciting ways before you're dead. So just pay attention to the present. Don't rule parts out, and be sure you've always got something you don't mind losing. That's important." This advice was not very different from what our father had said to Berner and me the day we didn't go to the State Fair. I understood it was what adults thought, though it was the opposite of the way our mother saw things. She'd always ruled out a great deal and understood the world only in her own terms. Mildred fattened her cheeks and fanned herself with her hand, which meant she was hot inside her green silky dress. "Does that make sense to you?" She reached across the seat and knocked her soft fist against my knee the way you'd knock on a door. "Does it? Knock, knock?"

"I guess it does," I said. Though it didn't really seem to matter what I agreed with. That was the final time Mildred and I talked about my future.

Chapter 41.

Charley Quarters climbed down off his truck fender, holding a small metal can I later learned had beer and ice cubes in it. He'd been waiting for us in the town of Maple Creek, Saskatchewan-to drive me and Berner the rest of the way to where Mildred's brother lived. He was her brother's all-around man, Mildred said, and she didn't like him. He was Metis, and was unsavory. Once the hand-off of me was over, she was going to drive back to Great Falls through Lethbridge, Alberta, so as to not attract attention at the border where we'd crossed before. The American border policeman had watched us when we drove through. He would wonder why she came back alone.

Charley Quarters set his can on the truck hood and came back to Mildred's window and leaned in on his elbows. He looked across at me with an unfriendly grin on his wide lips. I just stared up at the mare's tails in the west-the sky behind them purple and gold and bright green, turning blue in the high reaches. I tried not to seem afraid, which I was.

Mildred pushed him back with her palm. He had a strange, sour-sweet odor on him I could feel in my nose-from his clothes and possibly his hair. He was small and chesty and dense looking and muscular, with an over-sized head. He wore dirty brown canvas trousers, black rubber boots the trousers were tucked into, and a tattered purple flannel shirt with its elbows out and a pocket torn off. His black greasy hair was clamped in the back with a woman's rhinestone barrette, and he had slitted blue eyes and big ears. His teeth, when he smiled his unlikable smile, were large and yellow and all in evidence. He looked like a dwarf. I'd seen a picture in my World Book (left behind in Great Falls). But he was taller than a dwarf, though his legs bowed out. He seemed c.o.c.ky and rough, which I'd heard some dwarfs were.

He reached into Mildred's car and plucked one of her Tareyton cigarettes out of her pack on the dashboard and put it behind his ear.

"I thought we had two packages in the cargo." He leered at me again, as if he knew I wouldn't like being talked about as a cargo. He spoke in spurts.

Mildred said sharply, "You just take care of this one. Or I'll come up there and find you."

Charley kept grinning, and she had to push him back again. I wondered if this clipped way of talking was the way Canadians talked. "Does it have to eat?" Charley said.

"No," Mildred said. "Just get him up there and get him put to bed."

Two large men in bib overalls and straw farm hats stepped out the door of the hotel across the street. The town was empty and the street shadowy at sundown. The sign over the front door of the hotel said THE COMMERCIAL. Low lights were on inside when the door opened. The two men stood on the sidewalk and talked while they watched us. One of them laughed at something, then they walked to separate pickups, backed away from the curb, and drove slowly in opposite directions. They were Canadians, too.

"Is there something wrong with him?" Charley said, smiling as if I amused him.

"He's just fine." Mildred reached and clutched my arm and looked at me. "He's like the rest of us, aren't you?"

"Is he an orphan?" Charley Quarters said, looking in the back seat at Mildred's white uniform hung in the window. He reached a hand in and touched it.

I stared straight out the windshield at four tall grain elevators, half in shadows, silhouetted against the lighted sky. Swallows swerved in the twilight. A single lit bulb dangled where the funnel pipe hung in the nearest elevator, a pile of grain illuminated on the ground beneath it. I hadn't connected this word with orphanage up until then.

Mildred stared right into Charley's leering face. "He's got a mother and a father, unlike you. They love him. That's enough for you to hear about."

"Love him to death," Charley said, and stood up straight, backed away into the street, and looked at the sky-blue in the west, dark in the east. The mare's tails were already faded and there were faint stars. This was the man I was leaving with. In all likelihood I'd be left alone and forgotten.

"Now what I'll do," Mildred said this to me then, "is write you in care of my brother. I'll find out what I can about your folks and send that to you. Remember what I said about not ruling parts out. You'll be fine. I promise." She unexpectedly leaned toward me and pulled my face to her mouth, gripped my neck, and kissed me right on my jawbone. She squeezed me hard when I didn't kiss her back. Cigarettes and the fruity odor inside Mildred's purse, and cake makeup, and the spearmint she chewed was what she smelled like. Her spongy shoulders were shoved against my ear. "You've had a time," she whispered. "Just 'cause their life got ruined doesn't mean yours does. This'll be a start for you. Your sister's already made hers."