First challenge was to talk Shane out of the scissors. "I'll coif the lad's hair. I'm a licensed barber in the state of New Jersey, you know."

"You're too short, Shane. The hair cutter has to stand higher than the head."

"I hate to break the news, little lady, but your t.i.ts are too small."

Then came the "Sit up straight, I can't do this if you're slouched over a drawing pad."

"Have you ever cut hair before?" Owsley asked.

"Can't be that hard, hairdressers aren't famous for brains."

Shane wheeled over to kibitz, and Marcella brought Hugo Jr. up from the creek. "Hey, Andrew," she called. "Want to watch Maurey turn the hippy boy normal?"

"I'd rather barf up."

I really got into the combing part. My fingers had never experienced anything so soft and smooth. It was like making snow angels naked, like riding Frostbite slow motion, like Sam Callahan licking between my legs.

Marcella let Hugo Jr. crawl across the picnic table. "Lonicera Mangleson had hair that long, and when she cut it a wig maker in Amarillo paid forty dollars for the leftovers."

"You going to comb all day?" Shane asked.

The longer I combed, the more Owsley tensed up. "I've never had a haircut, not since the day I was born. It won't hurt, will it?"

"I won't hurt you."

"I wish they weren't looking at me."

As I finished the comb-out, Lloyd came back for Moby d.i.c.k. "I got a tank of gas and some groceries, but I'll need another six-pack. We're out of Yukon Jack territory, Maurey. Southern Comfort's almost the same stuff."

"What time is it?" I asked.

"One, maybe one-thirty."

"I missed Paul Harvey. My life is in shambles. I missed Paul Harvey and we're trapped in a h.e.l.l-hole where they don't sell Yukon Jack."

"I told you she'd fall apart in the South," Shane said.

"Janis Joplin drank Southern Comfort. She was hard core and she died. Make mine tequila."

Shane made a drooling snort sound. "If you drink tequila, you'll be hard core and die, too."

Lloyd hoisted himself into the driver's seat. "What're you doing to the boy?"

"Maurey's playing Samson and Delilah," Shane said.

Lloyd watched a few moments. "Don't cut his ears off. He'll bleed in the ambulance."

Sam Callahan says the two times men invariably make cornball comments is when they're watching someone get a haircut or watching someone change a tire. You ask me, there's more than two cases.

I started by forming a ponytail with my left fist and cutting straight across. Was the first ponytail I ever saw long as a pony's tail. Shane's scissors were little dudes he used to cut tape for his urine system, so mine wasn't an efficient beauty shop operation. My snips had the subtlety of a machete hack across Guatemala. But a weird thing happened as the scissors clipped their way through the ponytail. The world surrounding Owsley and me shut down, went blurry. Everything focused into one cone of light where my hands intersected his hair.

There's a trance state that two beings can reach where the silly banter of nearby yahoos no longer exists. Time no longer exists. Nothing before, after, or around the immediate unity of the two matters. It's neat.

Frostbite and I achieved the trance in an arena filled with several thousand people dressed in western wear. I pulled it off while nursing both my babies, and once an old sheepherder and I found it dancing "The Tennessee Waltz" at a Fourth of July street party in Tensleep.

The moment you're supposed to transcend the reality of time and s.p.a.ce is s.e.x, but that's one area where I've never come close. s.e.x is complex-Will my birth control kick in? Why won't he slow down? Will he treat me like dogs.h.i.t in the morning? The relationship works with horse and rider, mother and child, or two dancers who become one with the music and thus with each other. First time you start wondering who'll finish on top, the deal is blown.

"Why didn't you want Andrew to call you Owsley?"

"Freedom gave everyone stupid names, said a new ident.i.ty would force a break from our hung-up pasts. He's the one with the hung-up past."

The hair between my fingers was clean mountain water; sunlight on the Tetons in winter; awakening at dawn and lying in bed listening to the birds.

"So where'd he come up with Owsley?"

"Owsley's the guy in California who makes LSD. Freedom wanted me to become a chemist. He said n.o.body gets high on art."

The scissors were a silver canoe gliding through a golden lake. All these metaphors made my c.l.i.toris throb.

"Do you have a real name?"

"You'll laugh."

"Why would I laugh?"

"Brad."

"Brad?"

"I knew you would laugh."

"I'm not laughing. Do you hear laughing?" What he heard was me gasping for air. "Okay. Owsley is dead. Out of the fallen hair will arise Brad. The normal boy."

"Will cutting my hair and saying I'm normal make me normal, Mrs. Talbot?"

"Sure. While we're taking new ident.i.ties, call me Miss Pierce from now on. I'm done with Talbot."

"We'll be Brad and Miss Pierce."

By G.o.d if I didn't have an o.r.g.a.s.m. Not your everyday gee-that's-nice o.r.g.a.s.m, either. There's "I got off, dear. You can stop now," and then there's o.r.g.a.s.m. o.r.g.a.s.m is when your eyes and ears ring. o.r.g.a.s.m is when you can still feel it hours later in the back of your knees.

"Are you done, Miss Pierce?"

"Yeah, let's find a mirror."

29.

Marcella changed Hugo Jr. down by the creek where she could watch Andrew wade up and down promoting leaf races in the slow current. Owsley, now Brad, found a Safeway sack in the trash can for his shorn hair. I asked him what he planned to do with it.

"I might stuff it in a box and mail it to Freedom."

"You think he would understand the symbolism?"

Shane peeled off a toenail, put it in his mouth, then spit it on the ground. "In 1964, my hair was long as Brad's, before you chopped it off. That's when I was on the bus with Ken Kesey."

I went off to the park ladies' room to pee and wipe my upper leg-not all that stuff you feel afterward is boy goo. I didn't think Shane had noticed my Big O during the haircut. He wasn't the type to witness an o.r.g.a.s.m and not comment on it.

The women's outhouse shared a wall with the men's outhouse, and some nitwit had drilled quarter-size peepholes the women stuffed with wads of toilet paper. I imagined an ongoing battle of unplugging and plugging. This game must be an Arkansas thing; Wyoming men have the cla.s.s and style of a McDonald's burger, but at least they don't cop their thrills watching women p.i.s.s.

The graffiti read Marilyn Monroe had a Mastectomy. You tell me what that's supposed to mean.

When I returned, Shane was waving his wicked little toenail knife like a conductor on a baton. "Due to an outbreak of lice in the trenches, burr haircuts were ordered for all soldiers in World War One. One French division mutinied and marched en ma.s.se to the bordellos of Ma.r.s.eilles."

Brad interrupted the lecture. "Is your name really Shane?"

"Of course my name is Shane. Shane is an ancient, venerated praenomen of my forebears, on the matrilineal side. There were Shanes among the earliest Rinesfoos in thirteenth-century Belgium."

I thought about pointing out his matrilineal side would hardly have been named Rinesfoos but skipped it. He'd have claimed twenty-six generations of virgin birth. "Five or six Shanes live around Jackson Hole, but none of them are older than the movie. I think you stole the name from Alan Ladd."

"As a matter of fact, princess, the man who wrote Shane took the name from me. We had adjoining lockers on the UCLA football team."

"Let's ask Marcella. I'll bet cash your name is Percival or Mordecai, something wimpy and embarra.s.sing."

Shane's head bobbed up and down, with his chins floating slightly after the action. He raised up on his hands and took on the radish tinge.

"Go ahead," he said. "Ask her."

That's when Andrew screamed, which was nothing new, only his scream was followed by one from Marcella. "Snake!"

Lord knows what I thought I was doing, but I grabbed the scissors and ran down to the creek. Marcella, with Hugo Jr. clutched to her chest, pointed at the snake between us and Andrew. Long sucker with black bands and yellow spots. Slit tongue zipping in and out. Slithery movements. Andrew stood in shin-deep water, p.o.o.ping his pants.

With a yell, I jumped on the snake and got his neck in a death grip, just like the guy on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. The snake twisted and jerked, fighting to sink his fangs in my skin. Screaming the Blackfoot war cry, I straddled him and held his head at crotch level while his body writhed between my legs. Then I squeezed him with my left hand, plunged the scissors into his neck, and started cutting.

Yellow gunk flowed, then muscles popped out the slit-actually went faster than Brad's hair. After I cut through the spine I tore his head off and with one last shriek threw it as far as I could.

The only sound was Andrew whimpering in front of me. I turned back to find Marcella, Brad, and Shane staring like I was the mad serial killer of Tasmania.

"It was just a harmless king snake," Shane said.

Marcella ran over and pulled Andrew from the creek. She swatted him once on the rear, then hugged him until he recovered enough to burst into violent tears.

Brad was in awe. "You ripped his head right off."

I stared down at the snake's body, still writhing on the ground beneath my feet. Then I looked up and made eye contact with Shane. I said, "He looked like a big d.i.c.k. I always wanted to tear the head off a big d.i.c.k."

30.

"I deserve this drink."

Lloyd wrestled the shifter rod into second and pulled out on U.S. 270. "You've said that same thing each day since we met."

"I've deserved a drink each day since we met."

"What happens on days you don't deserve a drink?"

On the edge of town we pa.s.sed a stockyard jammed to the gills with pigs-Band-Aid-colored snouts and screwy tails as far as the eye could see.

"We raised a hog once," I said. "Dad named her Dolores Del Rio and she was gross, ate her own s.h.i.t along with six puppies, a bag of charcoal briquettes, and my school copy of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. I was never so happy to slaughter anything in my life."

Lloyd went into third and repeated himself. "What happens on days you don't deserve a drink?"

"Look. I just killed a snake and lost all my money. My hands are still shaking. If I ever deserved a drink in my life, I deserve this one."

"I'm not disagreeing. I only wondered what happens on days you don't deserve to drink."

"I don't drink." I said that before I thought whether it was true or not, but after a few moments' consideration I decided to believe myself. The last two weeks had been daily trauma-surely I earned my escapism after losing a child and blowing a suicide-and before that life had been so boring and tedious, alcohol made the unbearable barely bearable. Since Dad died the only days I didn't deserve a drink were the five spent in a coma.

"Deserving drinks is an interesting notion," Lloyd said.

"If you're going to lecture, I'll climb in back where I'm appreciated."

My tough-broad reputation had risen considerably in the back two-thirds of the ambulance. In an instant, Andrew changed from irritating brat to irritating hero worshiper-following me around the park like a lost lamb, crawling into my lap every time I sat down. He was only partially disenchanted when I refused to wear the dead snake around my neck.

Brad was too cool to actively fawn or anything, but when I twisted around in the pa.s.senger's seat to argue with Shane on the Eve-snake relationship in the Garden of Eden, Brad was bent over his art pad sketching my face.

As usual, Shane pontificated. "Woman has for all time been terrified of the serpent because of the distinct possibility that one could ooze into her womb and nest. It's an ovarian reaction."

I said, "Bull. Women are no more afraid of snakes than men. I didn't see you wheeling down there to save the kid."

"I knew the snake to be harmless."