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“You're rather bold.”

“You asked me.”

She looked at him as if half wishing someone would come and take him away, but then, half not. “I did, didn't I. I'm thirty-two.”

“That must be a nice age. I think I would like to be thirty-two.”

“And why is that?”

“If you want to go somewhere, you just get in the car and go. That in itself is a tremendous advantage. You have your own place. I'm assuming that you do. I don't know that.”

“You're at it.”

“Well, okay. That's what I'm talking about. And you can put pictures on the wall, and when your friends come over, they'll say, ‘Hey, I like what you're doing with this place.'”

Later he was talking to Charlotte again. They were on top of the air-conditioning shed, and Doc and Dalton were gone.

Charlotte said she and her mother were out of money and putting Pallas's expenses on a credit card. They would have to sell her. Charlotte's mother was a flight attendant who flew from Burbank to Hawaii and back three times a week.

“I can give her up,” said Charlotte. “We have to. I know that. But that will be a hard day. We went to Del Mar. We went to City of Industry. We went to Indio, Micah.”

“How did you learn to ride so well?”

“I made my legs strong,” she said. “I don't know what she'll think when I don't come around anymore.”

Micah put his arm around her and she leaned her head on his shoulder. “I'm never having a credit card,” he said.

“It's too much,” she said. “The vet, the board, the feed, the farrier.”

She slid away and lay down with her head on Micah's thigh. “Pallas Athena was almost Horse of the Year,” she said quietly. “This is comfortable.”

After a little while Micah said her name but she was asleep. He laced his fingers behind his head and lay back on the roof of the shed. “I'm up on a tightrope,” someone sang below. Micah wondered what Tiny would say about a girl who was sad because she might have to give up her jumping horse. He might not make fun of her if he knew she was Micah's friend. He wondered where Indio was. The way Charlotte said the name, it sounded like an enchanted city with streets paved in jade.

The woman in the long red shirt woke them up. The party was over, the night cold. Charlotte sat up and rested her head in her hands with closed eyes. The leg she'd used for a pillow was dead to feeling and Micah hobbled around until he was ready to go.

Five or six times a year Joan visited a fortune-teller named Dijkstra in the desert. He lived on a long gravel road off Old Woman Springs Road north of Twentynine Palms Highway in the isolated beauty of that country.

Much as she loved the Joshua trees and the high desert, Joan could not have lived alone here as Dijkstra did. The darkness would close around her—she would be out of her mind in a matter of days.

Dijkstra's house was three stories tall and the paint had been peeled away by the wind. Dusty velvet curtains moved in the windows, ceramics lined the sills. The place looked like something from an old photograph but for a satellite dish off to the side.

Dijkstra made pottery that he sold in the towns along the highway, and he used the potter's wheel for divination as well.

He met her at the front door. In his seventies, he wore a pith helmet, khaki shirt and shorts, light green socks up to his knees, and battered desert boots.

Years ago he'd been a marine researcher in Monterey, but one day he got the bends while diving and in the recompression chamber received a vision of living in the desert.

They went into the kitchen and sat on opposite sides of the potter's wheel. Beside the wheel a cactus grew in a terra-cotta pot, and the Palm Springs Yellow Pages lay on the wooden floor.

“How are things?” said Dijkstra.

“I got a role in a movie, and my son came to live with us,” said Joan. “He's fourteen and doing pretty well, I think—he's made friends, got on the volleyball team at school. The other night he didn't come home till three in the morning.”

“You must have been worried.”

“I was asleep. He came in and woke me up. I can't stay mad at him. I can't even
get
mad at him. I was out of his life for a long time.”

“This happens with families.”

Dijkstra picked up the Yellow Pages and handed them to Joan. She let the book fall open in her lap. She tore out a page and placed it on the wheel for the turning of clay.

Dijkstra secured the page with Scotch tape. “Think back to the night your son woke you up. The transition from sleep is a time when insight is strongest.”

“Okay. Doing that.”

He placed his hands on his knees and worked a foot treadle. The potter's wheel began to turn, and the right angles of the page gave way to a circle spinning on the wheel.

“This is the part we don't like so much, said Dijkstra.”

“It hurts,” said Joan.

“What is pain?”

She remembered the night. The bedroom door creaked, Micah said he was home. Joan got out of bed and they went into the hallway and she held his arms and looked into his eyes. The part of the mother will be played this evening by Joan Gower. Micah's eyes were the innocent cinnamon color they always were.

Now she pricked her finger on a cactus thorn, and holding her hand over the wheel she squeezed out a drop of blood that fell to the spinning page, a dark blot dissolving in motion.

“You did that very well,” said Dijkstra.

He left off pedaling and watched the wheel as it slowed and stopped. Joan pressed her fingertip to her teeth. The blood had made a nebula pattern among the names and numbers that the fortune-teller examined with a magnifying glass.

“You will sleep with a man in a small house,” he said. “There is forest all around. You don't know how you feel about him.”

“Oh wait, I know what that is. The plot of the movie I'm going to be in. Very good.”

“As for your son, he will be a good volleyball player, and many people will come to see him play. But when you see him play, that game he will lose.”

“That's not fair. Maybe I should stay away.”

Dijkstra set the magnifying glass on the wheel. He put a drop of Neosporin on Joan's fingertip and wrapped it with a Band-Aid.

“Perhaps you could go to a game that is not critical in the standings.”

“I hate to be the cause of him losing.”

“You're not. It's the way it happens. You won't avoid seeing it, he won't avoid losing.”

“What else?”

“You should be careful about this movie role. It might be tempting to leave television, but maybe that's not the best way to go.”

“Is that in the blood?”

“Not really,” he said. “I'm just thinking of television actors who have tried to make that transition and ended up neither here nor there. And there is a young woman. Help me. Around your son.”

“That's probably Charlotte.”

“She is important to him.”

“Mmm. Already.”

“He will fight for her.”

“Will she break his heart?”

“She's his first love. What else would she do? But you just have to let that go. He has more wisdom than you might think.”

“I knew it.”

Joan rubbed her bandaged finger and asked how Dijkstra's investments were doing. Besides making pottery and telling fortunes he traded stocks on a computer in the living room.

“I try not to hold anything more than three days,” he said. “The whole thing could go over at any time.”

Joan drove back to the city through fields of windmills. She knew better than to explain Dijkstra's method to people because the blood part would seem weird, but it made sense to her, requiring more input from the sitter than Tarot or palmistry, which people had no problem with.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

A
MAN HIRED
Tiny Darling to pull the seats out of the old Trinity Church in Grafton. The church had shut down years back and the little congregation had moved on to Sunday services in Chesley or Stone City. Some had stopped going at all.

The man had come up from Morrisville with the thought of remodeling the church and renting it out as housing. He wanted to make his reputation as the one who saves old churches by turning them into apartments.

“That'll never happen,” said Tiny, “but whatever you say.”

“You're not looking ahead.”

“There's houses going empty in this town. And that's houses.”

“Aha. This is not a house, it's a church. Prices are rising in Morrisville and Stone City. Where will people go?”

“They say Texas is popular.”

“I will call it the Trinity Apartments.”

“Here's what I'll do on the chairs,” said Tiny. “Ten dollars apiece.”

“Five.”

“Seven,” said Tiny

“Done.”

It was cold and dark inside the church. Water stains streaked the walls, the rugs had turned to threads, birds had built nests between the ceiling beams.

The chairs were made of bentwood and black iron and joined in rows of eight on either side of the aisle. They'd come from a movie theater in Chicago about a hundred years ago.

The legs were fixed to the floor with bolts petrified by time and rust. But Tiny had wrenches and ratchets and pipes, and every bolt gives up some way. As he worked he thought about the Trinity. The Holy Ghost always seemed like the wild card. What was his job? Tiny was not sure.

He rigged a plywood ramp down the stairs and dragged the chairs out and loaded them on a flatbed truck. They'd go to the landfill except for four he set aside to put on his back porch.

Church chairs at Tiny's house would be something to talk about, should anyone show up in the mood for conversation.

At noon he pulled his gloves off, got his lunch from the cab of the truck, and sat in the churchyard eating and drinking a beer.

Louise's mother came along the sidewalk with her walking stick. Mary Montrose had gotten small these days. She wouldn't like him drinking beer in the shade of the church but she only asked what he was doing.

Tiny pushed one of the wooden seats down for Mary. It was a hot day and his neck and shoulders felt strong and useful from the pulling and dragging.

“I'd live in a tent before I took an apartment in that building,” Mary said. “They say thousands of bats come flying out of the steeple at night.”

Tiny reconsidered the nests he'd seen. He didn't know how bats lived. Thousands seemed a high estimate. He gave the beer can a shake, tipped it up, put it in the paper sack.

“It's rough inside, I can tell you that.”

“If it can't be a church, I'd just as soon let it go,” said Mary. “I remember Louise and June standing on the stage saying their pieces at Christmas Eve.”

June was Mary's other daughter, a year or two older than Louise. She lived out West, in Colorado if she hadn't moved, and didn't come home much anymore.

“Far as that goes, Louise and Dan Norman got married in there, didn't they?”

Mary nodded.

“Once she'd divorced me.”

Mary had an old person's look in her eyes, as if the view from the churchyard was unlike anything she'd ever seen. “You and Louise were not married.”

This was not necessarily senility on Mary's part. She had hardly acknowledged the marriage when it was on.

“The way those girls would laugh in church,” she said. “They had their own words to the songs.”

“Like what?”

“Let me think,” said Mary. “Do you know the song ‘Make Me a Blessing'?”

“No.”

“Well, there is such a song. But they would say ‘make me a sandwich.
'
”

“Oh. That is kind of funny.”

“They thought so. And they would try not to laugh out loud but that only made it worse. Their shoulders would get to shaking, and pretty soon you could feel it all down the row. The minister hated us. They were just high-spirited girls.”

“I saw Louise the other day,” said Tiny. “She was washing her truck with a chamois. I was too married to her.”

“You believe what you want to believe.”

Tiny helped Mary get up, gave her the walking stick, and watched her make her uncertain way across the grass. How much longer would she go on? Tiny wondered. Or his own mother? It was hard to picture the world without them. After a bad storm the sky sometimes appeared a paler blue, too frail to hold up the sun. Maybe it would be something like that.

End of the day, the job half done: a grid of pale ovals on the floor marked his progress, showing where the legs of the chairs had been bolted down.

Tiny drove the flatbed to the landfill off the Mixerton Road north of the Rust River. He loved the landfill. It felt like another country —the bulldozers and the burial mounds they made, the sound and the dust, the swarms of birds.

He parked and stepped into the doorway of a corrugated building. The supervisor looked up from a fishing magazine.

“And what do we have today, Tiny?”

He came out to see the chairs in case they were something the landfill workers could use, but on consideration they had chairs enough.

Tiny drove along the ridge road. A bulldozer climbed a mountain of dirt and refuse. Fertilizer sacks darted in the wind like ghosts at Halloween.

Tiny stopped the truck and ran the lift. The church seats clung to the bed till it was pitched too steep and then they began to scrape and slide to the ground.

One night Louise drove through a thunderstorm to see a woman named Marian about a clock. She lived in Dogwood Crescent, a fancy neighborhood on the west side of Stone City. Louise parked the Scout beside a tall brick house with electric candles shining in bands of windows.

Louise never owned an umbrella, as she associated them with old people, so she ran across the street holding a newspaper over her head. Lightning turned the street white, and then came the thunder.

The woman Marian answered the door. She had blue eye shadow and long silver hair and she wore a red kimono with white lilies. Louise stood bedraggled and dripping in the entrance.

“I'm Louise, from the shop,” she said.

“Britt,” called Marian.

A younger man came to the front of the house in a white turtleneck sweater and burgundy jacket. His slippers were black with gold medallions.

“Take the lady's newspaper and coat. She's come about the clock.”

“Oh, very good.”

Britt took the newspaper from Louise and read the headlines. “Teens kidnapped at gunpoint, forced to drive man across town,” he said.

“Is this the time to be reading the news? Where are your manners? Are you hungry, Louise? My son is a chef.”

“You sent me a photograph of a clock,” said Louise.

“So I did,” said the mother. “Make Louise something to eat, Britt. In the meantime I will take her to see the clock.”

It was on a desk in an alcove with a heating grate by the living room. The base housed a garden scene in which two girls rode swings, tiny porcelain hands holding the wires, one girl swinging forward as the other swung back. The case was mahogany with gold inlay. A trellis laced with tiny roses formed an arch over the swings.

“When was it made?” said Louise.

“Oh I wouldn't know. The thirties or forties I should think. It belonged to my aunt.”

“Why are you selling it?”

“I've grown tired of hearing it tick. I suppose that's an odd reason, but these things happen. And Britt doesn't care for it either.”

Britt stepped into the alcove. “No, the clock, I hate it,” he said. “Please come eat while it's hot.”

The kitchen had a fireplace with a fire going. Britt had set the table for one—a bowl of soup, a basket of homemade bread, red wine in a proper glass. Louise didn't understand why they were making such a production out of selling a clock.

She spread a pressed white napkin in her lap. Steam rose from the bowl. Britt and Marian sat on either side of Louise, watching her intently. She picked up the spoon and tried the soup.

“Good God, this is excellent,” said Louise.

“What did I say, Britt?” said Marian. “Britt lacks confidence.”

“Jesus,” said Britt. “You don't have to tell her that.”

Louise tore a piece of the bread, dipped it in the soup. She took a drink of the wine. “Now, about the clock,” she said. “I'm not sure I can give you what it's worth.”

“We will not talk money at the table,” said Marian.

Louise figured she would keep the clock, having acquired it with so much ceremony. Dan met her at the door of the farmhouse.

“I was beginning to think I lost you,” he said.

“Is the house leaking?”

“Just that corner where it always does. I put a bucket down.”

“Look what I have.”

They took the clock up to the bedroom and Louise set it on the dresser and plugged it in. With her finger she gave one of the children a push to get them swinging.

Dan leaned his arms on the dresser and studied the clock. He found a thin red button on the side and pushed it. A bulb hidden behind the trellis lit the painted girls on the swings.

“Will the ticking bother you?” Louise asked.

“No. Will the light bother you?”

“Yes.”

“We can turn the light off.”

And she understood this as a kindness, because Dan loved the small and incidental lighting of appliances, clocks, radios in the dark. Louise thought this might have something to do with memories of the sheriff's cruisers and their busy dashboards.

Her hair was wet from the rain and she dried it with a towel
and then sat in a white nightgown brushing her hair at the
bureau.

They could hear the wind and rain and the clock. When she came to bed she was all over him like a shadow.

Jack Snow drove home from the Little Fox, an old-style strip club that suited his taste in sexual exhibitionism. Pole dancing he didn't care for. It looked more like work than dancing.

At Wendy's place he found that his key no longer opened the door. He knocked and knocked. Rain hammered the roof and overflowed the gutter, making curtains of water around the porch.

Wendy came to the living room window. She held a phone and dialed. Jack's phone rang. They talked with the window glass between them. Her lips moved and a little time passed while the signal traveled from the living room to wherever it went and back to the porch.

“You can't live here anymore, Jack. Your things are in the garage. We're done. I'm sorry it's such a rotten night, but the locksmith came today, and I don't make the weather.”

“What is this about?”

Her phone flashed red. “Hold, please. I'm getting another call.”

She sat on the arm of the couch and covered her mouth with her hand.

“That's my dad. He wants to know should he come over and make you go. He doesn't mind.”

“Look at me. I'm standing in the rain.”

“What should I tell him? He's on hold.”

“I'll go. What else would I do?”

“When?”

“However long it takes to load the car.”

“All right. One second please.”

There was standing water on the porch, and Jack walked around on his heels to keep the leather of his shoes from getting soaked.

“Okay,” said Wendy. “He's on his way over.”

“What'd I just say?”

“He doesn't trust you. I don't think anyone ever did trust you but me, Jackie. And even I didn't, very much.”

“What happened? Why are you doing this?”

“They're watching you. They know what you're doing. My parents hired the sheriff. Well, he used to be the sheriff. He investigated you.”

“What I'm doing? What we're doing.”

“That's the other thing. I quit. Why didn't you tell me you were in prison?”

“Hey. A lot of people are in prison. At least open the door and say goodbye.”

“That's what my dad said you would say.”

“You're making a mistake. The business is about to take off.”

“You should take off.”

Jack backed the Mustang into the garage, where he found three boxes on the concrete floor. Opening them to make sure she hadn't kept his music system, he saw that she had baked him a pie, wrapped it in wax paper, and laid it on top of his shoes and moccasins. He took the pie out and placed it on the floor, determined not to take her charity. But it looked good, so he put it back in the box.

He loaded the trunk and closed the lid and tried the key to the door in the garage.

“Not this one either,” said Wendy from the other side.

“Thanks for the pie,” said Jack.

“Oh. You're welcome. It's apple.”

“Hey, Wendy.”

“What?”

“Remember when I said you were smart?”

“No.”

“Well, I'm not so sure about that anymore. I think you might have a learning disorder.”

“You don't scare me.”

Jack power-braked in front of the duplex. Smoke rolled from the burning tires in the rain. If she was watching at all she would only find this comical or sad. He took his foot off the brake and the Mustang bolted.

“Ain't my night,” he said.

Perhaps his car would spin out and crash into her father's car coming the other way. A fiery collision. How ironic that would be. But Jack didn't want to die. That was the problem in that scenario.

He went up to the trainyard and carried the boxes into the warehouse. He sat in the office eating apple pie and drinking whiskey. Later he made a bed of packing quilts and fell asleep next to the catalytic heater.