When he finally goes to bed he still doesn’t rest, but has a dream about his dead wife. She is standing in the kitchen of their little crooked house in the woods, cutting up a hen for soup.

“How come you won’t turn around and face me?” he asks.

“You turned loose of family,” she says. “1 have to turn my back on you.”

“Why even talk to me, then?” he asks.

“I’m cooking for you, aren’t I?”

“Yes. But I’m afraid you hate me.”

“Why would I cook for you, then?”

“I don’t know;” he says.

“Pay attention to who takes care of you.”

She stirs the huge pot on the stove. Turning in the bubbling surface, Cash can see a dry tuft of Mr. Crittenden’s white hair. His wife is very large. There is no roof on the kitchen, only a forest clearing and legs like trees. Her head looks like carved stone against the sky, a head he can’t precisely recognize. It could as easily be his mother, or his daughter.

“There’s a hundred ways to love someone,” her voice tells Cash. “All that matters is that you stay here in the same room.”

He wakes with his chest so full it might burst. He wonders whether he has had a heart attack, or is simply dying of loneliness. “I have to go back,” he tells Rose, not caring that she is asleep, and will not hear.

The summer rains in the Rockies come all the way up from Mexico. Or so Cash has often told himself, in an effort to make himself believe he’s leading an exciting life. But Mexico or no, the rain is terrible for tourism, the Health Corral has been empty all day. Tracey sits at the checkout counter reading the gossip magazines, asking Cash whether he believes a woman could actually give birth to triplets with three different fathers. Cash thinks of his own wild daughters, and doesn’t doubt it.

Rose wasn’t afraid to go back to work. At lunchtime she reported it was the same over there, no business. She claims the news has gotten around and nobody wants to come into a store where a man took his life. Cash knows better: people around here would come in hunting bargains, hoping for a suicide sale. It’s the weather causing the slow-down. Vacationers expect perfect happiness, perfect weather, and if they don’t meet it here they’ll drive on toward Missoula or wherever else they imagine they will find it. Young people, like Rose, one eye always on the road out of town.

When Cash hears the first shots, he feels strangely exhilar-ated. He’d thought maybe they would call off the bird shoot because of the rain, but the boom of gunfire comes again, rattling the plate-glass store front. He leaves his post at the checkout and presses himself near the window, waiting.

“They’re shooting those pigeons today,” he tells Tracey.

“I read about that in the paper. That’s gross, isn’t it? They can’t just let some poor little birds alone?”

“They’re weed birds,” Cash says. “They want to live here but they can’t. That’s why they keep going around and around up there.”

He feels another boom, and the subtle aftershock. His whole body vibrates with the plate glass. Suddenly the birds are there in the sky, not circling in their perfect wheel but scattered in every direction by twos and threes, turning in flighty panic. On their own. He thinks of the place a world away from here where he climbed trees with no greater longing in his chest than to find a nest full of eggs. Cash can see his own face in the plate glass, empty with relief, as the shot birds fold their wings and vanish one by one, finding the ground at last.

12

THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF HUMANITY

ALL THREE GENERATIONS OF ALICE’S family have been lifted into the air for the first time this summer: first Turtle and Taylor flew to Chicago and back, and now the first leg of Alice’s own flight is coming in for a landing. Alice feels this shows an unusual degree of togetherness. Her plane scoots under the clouds, revealing the Mississippi River and St.

Louis far below A huge metal arch on the riverbank stands higher than any building, put there for no purpose Alice can envision. As useful as spitting off a bridge, but people do such things, to prove they were here on earth for a time. The descending plane sweeps over the largest graveyard Alice has seen so far. Her neighbor in the window seat has spent the flight hunched in silence, and now remarks: “Well, that’s some welcome.”

“I can see the point of it,” Alice says, determined to dis-agree cordially with this cheerless woman. “If you have to make so much noise, you’d just as well pester the dead as the living.”