He kicked the can out into the scrubland, and when they were past that spot, he looked back and there it lay, right where it had been since some cowboy-maybe on his way to 26-had chucked it from the window of his pickup truck. He remembered that on Hee Haw-that old show starring Buck Owens and Roy Clark-they used to call pickup trucks cowboy Cadillacs.
“What are you smiling about?” Willa asked him.
“Tell you later. Looks like we’re going to have plenty of time.”
They stood outside the Crowheart Springs railway station, holding hands in the moonlight like Hansel and Gretel outside the candy house. To David the long building’s green paint looked ashy gray in the moonlight, and although he knew WYOMING and “THE EQUALITY STATE” were printed in red, white, and blue, they could have been any colors at all. He noticed a sheet of paper, protected from the elements by plastic, stapled to one of the posts flanking the wide steps leading up to the double doors. Phil Palmer still leaned there.
“Hey, mutt!” Palmer called down. “Got a butt?”
“Sorry, Mr. Palmer,” David said.
“Thought you were going to bring me back a pack.”
“I didn’t pass a store,” David said.
“They didn’t sell cigarettes where you were, doll?” Palmer asked. He was the kind of man who called all women of a certain age doll; you knew that just looking at him, as you knew that if you happened to pass the time of day with him on a steamy August afternoon, he’d tip his hat back on his head to wipe his brow and tell you it wasn’t the heat, it was the humidity.
“I’m sure they did,” Willa said, “but I would have had trouble buying them.”
“Want to tell me why, sugarpie?”
“Why do you think?”
But Palmer crossed his arms over his narrow chest and said nothing. From somewhere inside, his wife cried, “We got fish for supper! First one t’ing an’ den anudder! I hate the smell of this place! Crackers!”
“We’re dead, Phil,” David said. “That’s why. Ghosts can’t buy cigarettes.”
Palmer looked at him for several seconds, and before he laughed, David saw that Palmer more than believed him: Palmer had known all along. “I’ve heard plenty of reasons for not bringing someone what he asked for,” he said, “but I have to think that takes the prize.”
“Phil-”
From inside: “Fish for supper! Oh, gah-dammit!”
“Excuse me, kiddies,” Palmer said. “Duty calls.” And he was gone. David turned to Willa, thinking she’d ask him what else he had expected, but Willa was looking at the notice posted beside the stairs.
“Look at that,” she said. “Tell me what you see.”
At first he saw nothing, because the moon was shining on the protective plastic. He took a step closer, then one to the left, moving Willa aside to do it.
“At the top it says NO SOLICITING BY ORDER OF SUBLETTE COUNTY SHERIFF, then some fine print-blah-blah-blah-and at the bottom-”
She gave him an elbow. Not gently, either. “Stop shitting around and look at it, David. I don’t want to be here all night.”
You don’t see what’s right in front of your eyes.
He turned away from the station and stared at the railroad tracks shining in the moonlight. Beyond them was a thick white neck of stone with a flat top-that thar’s a mesa, pardner, jest like in them old John Ford movies.
He looked back at the posted notice, and wondered how he ever could have mistaken TRESPASSING for SOLICITING, a big bad investment banker like Wolf Frightener Sanderson.
“It says NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF SUBLETTE COUNTY SHERIFF,” he said.
“Very good. And under the blah-blah-blah, what about there?”
At first he couldn’t read the two lines at the bottom at all; at first those two lines were just incomprehensible symbols, possibly because his mind, which wanted to believe none of this, could find no innocuous translation. So he looked away to the railroad tracks once more and wasn’t exactly surprised to see that they no longer gleamed in the moonlight; now the steel was rusty, and weeds were growing between the ties. When he looked back again, the railway station was a slumped derelict with its windows boarded up and most of the shingles on its roof gone. NO PARKING TAXI ZONE had disappeared from the asphalt, which was crumbling and full of potholes. He could still read WYOMING and “THE EQUALITY STATE” on the side of the building, but now the words were ghosts. Like us, he thought.
“Go on,” Willa said-Willa, who had her own ideas about things, Willa who saw what was in front of her eyes and wanted you to see too, even when seeing was cruel. “That’s your final exam. Read those two lines at the bottom and then we can get this show on the road.”
He sighed. “It says THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED. And then DEMOLITION SCHEDULED IN JUNE 2007.”
“You get an A. Now let’s go see if anyone else wants to go to town and hear The Derailers. I’ll tell Palmer to look on the bright side-we can’t buy cigarettes, but for people like us there’s never a cover charge.”
Only nobody wanted to go to town.
“What does she mean, we’re dead? Why does she want to say an awful thing like that?” Ruth Lander asked David, and what killed him (so to speak) wasn’t the reproach in her voice but the look in her eyes before she pressed her face against the shoulder of Henry’s corduroy jacket. Because she knew too.
“Ruth,” he said, “I’m not telling you this to upset you-”
“Then stop!” she cried, her voice muffled.
David saw that all of them but Helen Palmer were looking at him with anger and hostility. Helen was nodding and muttering between her husband and the Rhinehart woman, whose first name was probably Sally. They were standing under the fluorescents in little groups…only when he blinked, the fluorescents were gone. Then the stranded passengers were just dim figures standing in the shattered moonlight that managed to find its way in through the boarded-up windows. The Landers weren’t sitting on a bench; they were sitting on a dusty floor near a little cluster of empty crack vials-yes, it seemed that crack had managed to find its way even out here to John Ford country-and there was a faded circle on one wall not far from the corner where Helen Palmer squatted and muttered. Then David blinked again and the fluorescents were back. So was the big clock, hiding that faded circle.
Henry Lander said, “Think you better go along now, David.”
“Listen a minute, Henry,” Willa said.
Henry switched his gaze to her, and David had no trouble reading the distaste that was there. Any liking Henry might once have had for Willa Stuart was gone now.
“I don’t want to listen,” Henry said. “You’re upsetting my wife.”
“Yeah,” a fat young man in a Seattle Mariners cap said. David thought his name was O’Casey. Something Irish with an apostrophe in it, anyway. “Zip it, baby girl!”
Willa bent toward Henry, and Henry recoiled from her slightly, as if her breath were bad. “The only reason I let David drag me back here is because they are going to demolish this place! Can you say wrecking ball, Henry? Surely you’re bright enough to get your head around that concept.”
“Make her stop!” Ruth cried, her voice muffled.
Willa leaned even closer, eyes bright in her narrow, pretty face. “And when the wrecking ball leaves and the dump trucks haul away the crap that used to be this railway station-this old railway station-where will you be?”
“Leave us alone, please,” Henry said.
“Henry-as the chorus girl said to the archbishop, denial is not a river in Egypt.”
Ursula Davis, who had disliked Willa from the first, stepped forward, leading with her chin. “Fuck off, you troublesome bitch.”
Willa swung around. “Don’t any of you get it? You’re dead, we’re all dead, and the longer you stay in one place, the harder it’s going to be to ever go anywhere else!”