Chapter Twelve

Lyle passed the time by holding different pieces of his clothing up to the heater vents, drying them out. Although she hadn't spoken to him since he'd turned the dome light off, the girl in the back seat had handed him a bag of snack mix and a bottle of Yoo-hoo, which Lyle devoured as though they were the prime rib back at the Cattleman's Steakhouse in Oklahoma.  The whistling of the wind against the window told Lyle the weather had still not improved outside, but he wasn't worried; the fuel gauge showed more than half a tank so he knew they'd be safe there for the rest of the night and into the morning when help would arrive. With all his clothes dry, Lyle put his socks back on and started to fold his coat into a pillow.  It was very late and with all the walking he'd done after a full day's work, he could barely keep his eyes open any longer.

"Hey, I'm going to try to catch some shuteye for awhile," he said to the girl in the backseat.  "You got a blanket back there to cover up with or something?  You want my coveralls?"           

"No, I'm fine," she replied.

"You don't have some kind emergency snow kit in the trunk with a blanket in it?  You know, just in case something like this happens?"  Even with the heater on, she had to be chilly as little as she was wearing.

"Haven't looked in the trunk."

"Didn't figure this was your car."  Lyle laughed.  "Nobody drives a Crown Vic but cops and old people.  You boost this off whoever did that to your face?"

"Nah, some old guy.  Poor guy was dumb enough to leave his car running when he went into a motel to see if they had a room.  I was hiding in the bushes, freezing my ass off. When I jumped in the car there was a little dog sitting up there in the passenger seat, one of those wiener dogs.  It started yipping at me.  I didn't want to take the guy's dog so I opened the door back up and chunked the dog out and hit the gas.  He came running out screaming and yelling at me as I drove off.  Last thing I saw in the rear-view was the old guy picking up his dog and kissing it.  Thought I could beat the storm if I hauled ass headed east, but I slid off the road and hit a fence post. Tried to get back on but I was stuck.  Figured I'd just wait here until the cops show up in the morning."

"I'll do my best to vouch for you when the cops show up," Lyle said.  "You've been awful good to me."

"Don't matter to me none.  Jail's a hell of a lot better than where I've been."

Lyle wanted so badly to ask her exactly where that was, but he changed the subject instead.  "So after you wrecked it, you never looked in the trunk?"

"Just the glove box.  That's where I found the gun.  Old guy probably just had it for protection, I guess.  He didn't look like a cop or a gangster or anything like that."

Lyle started to reach for his boots.  "Well, before I go to sleep I'm going to get out and look in the trunk. See if there's a blanket for you.  There's got to be a suitcase back there too.  Might be some stuff we could use, something you could cover up with." The few number of threads covering the girl's body combined with the few number of years in her age was making Lyle very nervous.

"Nah, don't mess with the guy's stuff.  Less I do to the car the less trouble I'll be in tomorrow.  I don't have nothing against that guy.   I just needed his car."

"You must've needed to get out of town in a hurry," Lyle said.  Although he could no longer see her face in the dark, the bruises and blood were burned into his mind.

"You have no idea."

"Alright then, suit yourself.  I won't mess with it," Lyle said before lying back down on the front seat.  He started to roll over on his side, to curl up and let the sleep take him, but instead he sat back up.  "Hey, thanks... I mean for everything, for letting me in the car, for the snacks, you know, the whole deal.  Thank you."

"I didn't do it for you, Cowboy.  I did it for your girlfriend and her boy.  Mostly though I did it for your little girl.  She didn't do nothing to nobody to deserve what she got.  Your surviving just might be what gives her a chance."  She paused for a moment.  "But you're welcome for whatever it's worth."

Lyle lay back down and was about to close his eyes when the girl added in a calm voice, "I don't think you would, but I've been wrong before.  So I'm just going to say it.  Don't you even think of trying something on me after I fall asleep.  I'm going to have this gun right here just in case.  Just because I listened to your story and we've shared some food and cigarettes don't mean I won't unload this gun into you if you try to feel me up or something."

"You don't have to worry about me," Lyle assured her.  "I won't harm you.  I'm just going to get some sleep.  Good night..."

"Amanda.  My name's Amanda."

"Good night Amanda."

"Good night Lyle."

After a moment of silence, Lyle added, "Hey, Amanda?  Whatever music you got to face in the morning, I'll face it with you, alright.  I promise you that." With that, Lyle closed his eyes, and didn't so much drift into sleep like a kite in the breeze as he plunged into it like a skydiver without a parachute.

***

The screams from within the car yanked Lyle out of a mundane, yet strange, dream about shoveling out horse stalls and spreading straw alongside Mrs. Arbuckle, his ninth grade Algebra teacher, and a guy named Stan from AA. From the pitch and volume of the screams, Lyle expected to see a wild animal attacking the girl or maybe whoever had beaten her up earlier forcing himself on her or trying to finish the beating he'd started.  But there was no one else there.  Amanda flailed and kicked, alternating between shrieking unintelligibly and crying out with a mumbled, "No.  No. No."  It reminded him of his Uncle Willie, Lyle's father's younger brother, who had stayed with Lyle's family for a time after he returned from Vietnam.  Lyle tried to wake her by calling out her name softly, but he knew she was somewhere else, somewhere so terrifying she couldn't hear anything but her own screams and her own pounding heart.  He called out to her louder, but still no luck.  Lyle was, himself, a little foggy so it took him a minute to realize that not only was she flailing her hands in her sleep but in one of those hands she was holding the .38.

Lyle ducked down as low as he could in the front seat.  If her dream kept up like this there was a pretty good chance she was either going to shoot Lyle or shoot herself. Nothing was going to wake her up, but he had to get the gun from her somehow without it going off.  He reached up and quickly turned on the dome light so he could see better to grab her wrist with one hand and to pry the revolver out of her hand with the other before she could pull the trigger.  He peeked into the back seat and then quickly looked away.  In her thrashing, Lyle had inadvertently seen that the poor thing didn't even have anything on under her skirt. Whatever had happened to her was bad enough that, if she woke up while he was holding onto her arm, she was likely to shoot him anyway just out of fear.

He had to get the gun fast, but it was in her right hand, the farthest away from Lyle.  He was going to have to reach over her body to get to it.  He watched for a few moments to see if there was any kind of pattern to her movements.  She seemed to be trying to push someone off of her.  He decided that when she pushed her hands up he would lunge across her, doing his best to keep his pelvis and legs in the front seat, while grabbing onto her wrist with his right hand and ripping the gun from her hand with the left.  Whatever he did he couldn't jump too far and land on top of her.

The next few times she pushed up he couldn't make himself move.  "Next time," he kept saying to himself. But she was growing more and more agitated so he finally just did it.  He thrust his upper body into the back seat and grabbed her wrist just as he'd planned, and she struggled against him, still asleep.  He immediately reached out to grasp the gun, but with her struggle he lost balance and fell toward the back seat, his face landing on her bare stomach.  As soon as the skin of his cheek touched the skin of her abdomen, she jerked up and he saw her eyes open in terror before she released the sound of an animal caught in the jagged teeth of a rusted trap.

"What the f..." is all he heard before the gun started firing.

Chapter Eleven

Maricruz and Benny lay wrapped up together on the couch beneath his black and yellow fleece blanket, surrounded by the saintly halos of the choir of candles.  Benny had fallen asleep in the middle of a game of twenty questions.  He'd been nodding off and finally when Maricruz asked, "Is it something you would wear when its cold?" she didn't get an answer, just the sound of deep breaths that reminded her of the yoga class she'd taken once with her Aunt Yolanda.

Out of habit, Maricruz started to get up from the couch as she did every night from Benny's bed.  One night he would read a chapter to her from one of his books and the next night she would read a chapter from the same book.  After she turned off his light, she'd clean house or balance the checkbook or pack his lunch for the next day. But that night she realized there was nothing she could do.  The electricity was off, the phones had gone dead, and the room had already cooled a little so she couldn't bring herself to get out from under the covers.  So she just lay there for a change, her body at sabbath, but her mind unable to join.

Where might Lyle be at that moment?  What is he doing?  Is he still alive?  Is there really nothing, absolutely nothing, she could do?  She was used to stepping into any situation and doing what needed to be done to remedy it.  Like her father, Fernando, she was a fixer.  It was she and her father who came to the rescue of Los Tres Hermanos when Abuelo's stomach pains ended up being pancreatic cancer.  Abuelo had started the restaurant all the way back in 1958 with his two older brothers, who died a few years before him, and he'd run it like an extension of his own home, which it literally was for a time when he and Abuelita lived in the same apartment where Maricruz and Benny now lived.  But as Abuelo wasted away in the hospital, yellow-eyed and skeletal, Maricruz's father pored over the restaurant's financials.  When Maricruz came back to Rocky Ford for the funeral mass, driving down from Boulder two weeks before finals near the end of her first semester at the university, she heard the whispered conversations.  $120,000 was the number she kept hearing for how deep the hole was.  "We're going to lose the restaurant," she heard Aunt Yolanda tell one of the cousins.  Knowing her parents would let go of the restaurant so she could stay in school, against her parents' tearful protests, after finals she moved home to help her father save Los Tres Hermanos. Together they cut costs and put in countless hours without pay.  She waited tables and kept the books back then just as she continued to; the only difference was that now she got paid for it.  With the help of Abuelo's small life insurance policy, they managed to pay it off in a matter of only six years.

There had never been anything Maricruz couldn't fix or at least handle with a relentless grace, but that night the snow was just too deep, the wind too strong, and the air too cold for her to fix this for Lyle.  If there was anything, any thing, she could do, she would.  She stared into the flame of the St. Jude candle on the coffee table and whispered out her own petition since she did not know the prayer to St. Jude by heart, praying the way she imagined Protestants must.  "Please God, bring him home.  He's come too far.  He's worked too hard to make things right.  I don't want to lose him.  I don't want my little boy to lose him."  Her lips fell silent for a moment, and then she tried to cut a bargain.  "I promise that, if you give him the strength he needs, I'll tell him the truth.  I'll tell Benny.  I'll make Rick tell his wife."  She'd often considered doing that, but this is the first time she'd ever heard herself say these words out loud.  "Please help them all to understand the past is in the past and that we never meant to hurt them by not telling them, just to protect them.  Just give me that chance, Lord.  Just give me that chance."  She crossed herself as best she could while still cuddling with Benny.  "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen."

Maybe she shouldn't have made that promise to God, although getting Lyle back was worth having to keep it.  But what if she got him back just to lose him again over this? How was she supposed to tell him?  "I'm so glad you survived, Lyle, and by the way your AA sponsor is Benny's father.  I must have forgotten to tell you... and Benny." How long should she wait to tell him?  Should she tell him over dinner?  In a public place?  Should she tell Lyle and Benny at the same time?  Should Rick be there? How would Rick feel about her telling them? What would happen when Rick told his wife?  Does that matter?  Would that kind of shock send Lyle back to drinking in order to cope?  And Rick?  Maybe she should just sit Lyle down, after making chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes for him and putting on the low cut red dress she'd worn when they drove all the way up to Colorado Springs for dinner that one time, and tell him the story, the true story, the whole story, like this:

"Lyle, you remember how I've told you about how after we paid off the restaurant debt my dad offered to pay for me to get an Associate's Degree in Accounting at the community college over in Pueblo, about how after six years out of school I went back?  And you know that's how I got to know Rick.  He taught the "Introduction to Literature" class I took for my humanities credit.  I loved that class. You know how I love to read.  One day in class he read from Dylan Thomas.  I know you're not big on poetry but I love the first lines of the poem he read, "Do not go gentle into that good night,/old age should burn and rave at close of day;/rage, rage against the dying of the light."  He told us about how Dylan Thomas was a raging drunk, then he told us us that he had been one too, and that he'd been sober for less than a year.  He said he read Thomas's poetry to remind him of what he might have become, a lush who stumbled out of a Greenwich Village pub then collapsed into a coma only to die not long after. 'That's the power of poetry,' he said.  'It can save your life.'  I loved that class so much I thought about changing my major over to English but I knew my dad wouldn't go for that. Do you want some more gravy?  Maybe a little more steak?  

"Well, later that semester I stopped by his office to see if he would read the first draft of the essay I was writing on Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find."  I wasn't sure if the Misfit in the story represented something in particular.  Pure evil?  Modern society?  Geez, I'm getting off subject.  Anyway, we ended up just talking about life, about my short time in Boulder, about the restaurant.  He told me about how his drinking problem started when he was in college in Kansas.  After college everybody else quit drinking, but he just kept going.  He told me about how just a few months before I got to know him, his wife, Jacqueline, had taken their two boys and left, moving in with her parents all the way off in Dayton, Ohio where she'd grown up.  That had been his wake up call that finally sent him into AA.  He'd tried it before but never followed the program, didn't bother reading the Big Book, tried to skip steps.  But after his wife left he went all the way with it.  'It wasn't easy,' he said, 'but it worked.  One day at a time.'  You like this dress, don't you, Lyle?  I don't know.  Do you think it shows a little too much skin?  I'm not sure about it. 

"After that we started getting together for coffee.  I mostly asked him questions about literature.  He mostly talked about his wife and kids.  He was obviously still in love with her.  He was alone, wounded, you know.  I was twenty-four-years-old, going to school and working full-time at the restaurant, and living with my parents and younger brothers in Rocky Ford.  You better believe I was lonely too. I'm sure you can see where this is headed, Lyle, and you don't need to hear the details. You just need to know the truth.  We slept together, Rick and I.  How many times?  Do you really want to know that?  Probably seven or eight.  It wasn't like he was seducing me or anything or like I was some innocent teenager. We were both adults, lonely adults.  I couldn't believe we were doing it.  I sure wasn't raised that way, and if anybody had found out he would have lost his teaching position, not to mention what my family would have said.  

"We broke it off because we both knew what it was or what it wasn't, and because our messing around helped him to realize how much he really did want his family back. Yeah, it hurt a little, but not because I was in love with him or anything like that.  It just hurt because life was going to go back to normal... or so I thought.  We both promised never to talk about it again, but then a few weeks after we broke it off I missed my period.  Oh my God, I thought.  What in the world am I going to do?  After the pregnancy test came out positive I went to him and told him.  He cried and broke a coffee mug on the floor of his office, but he knew better than to suggest I do anything about the pregnancy. His wife had just promised to come home to give it another shot.  He hadn't told her about us, which I don't blame him for.  I hadn't told anyone either and didn't plan to.  His family was finally getting back together.  I didn't want for our foolishness to keep that from happening, but I also didn't know what was going to happen to me.

"Over the next couple of weeks we came up with a plan.  I'd tell my parents I had a one night stand with someone at the school but that I didn't want to be stuck with that guy in my life for the next eighteen years so I wasn't going to involve him, which was at least partially true.  He would empty out his savings to pay for my doctor visits and diapers and food and stuff.  Then he'd send me some money every month.  We'd meet with a lawyer and he'd sign over all parental rights.  We'd leave each other alone after that, like we were erasing each other from a chalkboard.    

"My parents freaked, but they were really very good about it after the shock wore off.  I think Abuelita told them that they just had to deal with it or they'd end up losing me and the baby too.  I think Father Carl actually talked to them too.  They came around.  You know how great my parents are. My mom and Aunt Yolanda went with me to all the appointments and got me through the birth.  My dad was the first to hold Benny.  I've been telling Benny ever since he asked about his dad for the first time that his dad was a good, smart man but that it just didn't work between us.  Sometimes I'd get down and jealous of what Rick had with Jacqueline and his boys, but I've never blamed him.  Why should a month of stupidity cost him his whole life.  It must have been so hard for Rick.  It must be hard for him, knowing he has another son just forty-five minutes away.  Over the years we saw each other a few times by accident at the mall or movie theater in Pueblo but we'd just pretend we didn't know each other.  He'd keep looking over his shoulder to watch Benny.  I can't help but feel bad for the guy.  I hate it that Jacqueline doesn't know.  I wish we could go back in time and not be together or that we could at least go back and be honest with everybody from the beginning.

"We had to stay away from each other, but then when you fell down those stairs and you needed help getting sober I didn't know who else to call so I called Rick and told him, 'You owe me this. Help Lyle get sober.  Give me and Benny this chance.  I gave you your life back, now give me mine."  I thought about telling you then, but you and Rick got to know each other so well and you were actually staying dry.  It's been so weird that you've brought him around some.  Oh, you had no idea.  No, there's no feelings there at all for him.  Seeing him and Benny together has been surreal.  I've had to step out of the room a few times.  Oh, Lyle, don't get mad at him.  It's just a shitty situation all around.  If you're mad at him you have to be mad at me too.  Do you really want to be mad at me?  Especially after all you've put me through?  You have to know that I don't want for Rick to be Benny's dad.  I want you to be Benny's dad.  Please forgive me.  Surely if anyone on this planet knows what its like to need forgiveness it's you.  Sit down, Lyle.  Please don't leave me.  Please don't leave Benny.  We can both put away our pasts. We can both be forgiven together. This can be new, Lyle. You and me and Benny and maybe even someday Savannah.  This can be new, brand new."

What would he say to that? 

Maricruz jumped as she was startled out of her imaginary confession and apology. Benny's eyes opened wide, and they both sat up and looked toward the door. Did they really just hear a knock?  There it was again.  Could it be?  Maricruz ran to the door and, filled with hope, she turned the knob.

Chapter Ten

Illuminated only by the dim glow of dashboard gauges, Lyle ripped his gloves and coat off, then peeled the bandanna from his beard and the stocking cap from his sweat-matted hair.  When he pulled his feet out of his wet boots they made a sucking sound like he was pulling them out of a mud bog.  After he stripped his waterlogged socks from his feet, he lay down on the front bench seat to shimmy his way out of his coveralls, leaving him wearing only his faded old Wrangler jeans, worn on the rear and inseam from the saddle, along with the flannel shirt Maricruz had bought for him at the farm supply store last Christmas.  He put his face just an inch or two from a vent, and moaned almost with ecstasy as the hot air thawed his face like the late morning sun melting frost from grass.  Lyle heard the strike of a cigarette lighter and looked back into the void of the back seat to see only the cherry of a cigarette pulsing with heat as the woman inhaled her first drag.  The car filled with smoke as she exhaled, instantly taking on the smell of a bowling alley or bar. 

"Don't suppose I could have one of my cigarettes, could I?"  For a moment he thought she was ignoring him, but then a cigarette and the lighter landed softly on the seat beside him. He lit it and cracked the window an inch or so to let out some of the smoke.  Ever since he was sixteen, he'd always held his cigarettes with his pointer finger and thumb, more like someone taking a toke off a joint, instead of between his middle and pointer fingers like his grandmothers and his mom always had.  All he could hear in the car for a few minutes was the sound of one deep breath after another until the breathing in the front seat seemed to line up with the breathing in the back like some sort of guided nicotine meditation.  Breathe out emptiness.  Breathe in fullness. 

The woman rolled down the back window slightly and dropped the butt out, and then Lyle heard the cap turn as she opened the bottle before taking a swig.  She coughed from the burn, and he thought she might throw it back up.  What an amateur.  He felt the presence of her hand holding out the open bottle to him, not far from his face. The distilled oaky sweetness filled his nostrils.  No one would ever know if he had just a taste, being out in the middle of nowhere with someone he'll probably never see again.  He deserved it after all he'd been through that night.  Plus it would help him relax, maybe even get a little sleep to pass the time until help could arrive in the morning.  How many times had he sat on the tailgate of his truck over the years out at the riverbed or in the middle of a field at the oil pumps, drinking and dancing with a few friends, nothing but laughter, the fresh night air, and maybe a little action before the night was over?  Breathe out emptiness.  Lyle pulled another drag from his cigarette.  Breathe in fullness.  He exhaled, and then hoped she couldn't tell that his hand was trembling as he gently pushed the bottle away.  "Nah, don't drink anymore." 

The woman in the back seat laughed.  "What the hell are you doing carrying around a bottle of whiskey in the middle of a blizzard then?"

"Hey, it helped me get in your car didn't it?"  Lyle dried some melting snow from his beard with his shirt sleeve.

"That didn't have a damn thing to do with me letting you in here.  I took it just because I could."

Lyle turned to face the back seat.  "Then why did you let me in?"

"Was all that crap true?  What you said about your girlfriend and her son and your little girl?"

Lyle tried his hardest to make out what the woman looked like, but all he could see was her shadowy form reclining across the car's back seat.  "Every damn word of it."  

"But why was it so important for you to get to them tonight?"

"That's kind of a long story."  He dropped his cigarette butt out the window and rolled it up.  "I wouldn't even know where to start."

"Well, neither one of us is going anywhere for a while."

He took a deep breath.  "First of all, the name's Lyle.  What's yours?"  He slowly reached his hand toward the back seat.  When she never shook it or responded, he pulled it back and began, "Well, I guess I could start by saying I've worked cattle or farmed wheat ever since I was just a kid."

"So you really are a cowboy?  Like a real cowboy?  I didn't even know that still existed anymore."

"Yeah, and I've been a drunk cowboy since I was about seventeen.  I spent up every paycheck at bars and liquor stores and spent most nights trying to get some cowgirl out of her Rocky Jeans.  Then I moved up here coming up on two years ago and got on as a hand out at the Crazy Snake Ranch."  He held one of his socks up to the heater vent.  "A little over a year ago, I met Maricruz when she was waiting tables at her folks' Mexican joint. She does the books there too.  She's sharp as hell."  He turned his sock to dry the other side.  "We started seeing each other and I got to spending a lot of time with her little boy, Benny.  You know, taking him fishing and teaching him to ride a horse.  He's a good kid, a real good kid.  And Maricruz is a helluva woman, a helluva woman.  I figured I was coming up on thirty-five so it was time for me to finally get my shit together so I wouldn't lose her... and Benny.  Then out of the freaking blue I got a letter from Osage County back in Oklahoma. That's how I found out about Savannah.  A letter from the county!  So I had even more reason to cut down on my drinking, and I did, to you know, maybe just a few Jack-and-Cokes in the evenings."

"That's cutting down?" the woman in the back seat asked.  "You really are a drunk, aren't you?"

Lyle switched and held the other sock up to the vent.  "Well, I was managing it okay for the most part.  But then one night all the hands were going out to raise hell for somebody's birthday.  I can't even remember whose it was.  We got kicked out of the bar in town after some dumbass kicked a bar stool out from under a townie and was about to kick his ass for no reason.  So we ended up stumbling over to Maricruz's folks' restaurant.  I was already wasted, but I still knew enough to try to talk them into going someplace else.  They wouldn't listen, though, and the pricks I was with got all loud and ended up chasing off all the customers. They kept putting shots in front of me and I did what I always did; I kept drinking them. Finally Maricruz's brothers and uncle cut us off and the other guys I was with just started tearing shit up, kicking over chairs and breaking plates.  I tried to stop them but I couldn't. Maricruz was crying and told me to get the hell out, and when we heard the cops coming we finally took off."

"You didn't stick around anyway?  What an asshole."

"I was in no shape for that.  I should have gone home but a couple hours later I climbed up the stairs to Maricruz's apartment door and started banging on it, wanting to say I was sorry.  She wouldn't open the door, though, so I kept pounding on it.  She finally opened it just a crack and told me to get lost or she'd call the cops again.  Benny came out of his room while we were yelling at each other and she tried to calm him down, but she was crying too, and I kept telling her to let me in so I could talk to him.  It got to a point where all she kept asking me over and over again was, 'Is this really who you are Lyle?  Is it?'"

"Did you hit her?"

"Hell no.  I never laid a hand on her or any woman in my life.  I've never been a mean drunk like my daddy was, just a stupid one.  But I did try to push my way in the door. I just wanted to be with her and to talk to Benny.  But she slammed it in right in my face.  Busted my nose.  I stumbled back and my boot heel must have caught the top step because I ended up falling down all twenty-three of 'em."

The woman in the backseat snickered.  "Karma's a bitch ain't it, Cowboy?"

"Damn straight.  When I woke up in the hospital, sore as hell and shaking, I looked around for Maricruz but she wasn't there. I didn't blame her, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt.  Instead there was some guy sitting in the chair by my bed reading a book.  It turns out after the ambulance came and picked my broken ass up, she'd called some professor from over at the community college in Pueblo who'd been a drunk too. Rick.  Hell of a guy.  Probably my only friend in the world right now. That day in the the hospital room he told me, 'Maricruz and Benny deserve better than this, and I won't let you screw up their lives.'  I guess since he'd been in my place before, though, he'd talked her into giving me another chance if I stayed sober and went to ninety AA meetings in ninety days.  He said he'd help me, but I couldn't see Maricruz or Benny or even call them for those three months.  All I could do was write.

"I don't know why Rick's done all he's done for me. My own family don't give two shits about me, but tonight was my ninetieth meeting, my ninetieth day dry. That's why I was in Pueblo tonight.  Rick was willing to go out in the weather to meet me at the church.  I wanted that coin so bad, that coin that says "90 Days" on it, so I could show it to Maricruz and show it to Benny and eventually show it to my little girl. That's why I was so hellbent on getting home tonight.  That's why I needed in this car so bad."

"Can I see it?" the woman asked.  "The coin?"

Lyle dug it out of his jeans pocket and handed it to her.  Without thinking, he reached up and turned on the dome light so she could see the coin.  For the first time, the woman lying on the backseat came into focus. All she had on was a tube top with frayed seams and what looked like blood stains on it, along with a fake leather miniskirt.  Her feet were bare and there was a pair of worn out old high heels on the floorboard. She had stringy peroxide hair with enough makeup on her face for three circus clowns, but still not enough to cover her black-eye and busted, swollen lip.  She kind of reminded Lyle of some of the pretty girls from the trailer park on the edge of town that he'd known in high school, the ones who always seemed to get knocked up before junior prom.  In one hand she held the coin but with the other she grabbed the .38 off the back dash and pointed it at Lyle. "Turn it off now!"

He followed her instructions, and they sat silently.  "What the hell happened to you?" Lyle finally asked.  An anger he hadn't felt in a long time began to well up inside him when he thought about what her answer might be.

"Just keep telling your story, Lyle," she said.  "You don't want to hear mine, and even if you do, I don't want to tell it."  As she handed him his coin back she added, "I've been through way too much for only being sixteen."

Chapter Nine

Maricruz dug through the hallway closet to find the old tequila box tucked behind some rain boots, a coat that had slipped off a hanger, and the boxes of Christmas decorations that she'd stuffed in there until Lyle could haul them over to her parents' house.  She’d always used liquor boxes from the restaurant to store everything from old love letters to household cleaning supplies, and for the first time she wondered if she’d need to finally invest in some plastic containers.  Would seeing an empty rum or gin box be enough to set Lyle off?  She made a mental note to ask Lyle what he thought about it in a few days when all this worrying and wondering would be over.  

As she labored to heave the box onto the small Formica kitchen table that was supposed to look like unstained wood grain but wasn’t fooling anybody, the cylinders of glass inside clinked against one another like the trash bags filled with empty bottles she hauled out from the restaurant to the dumpster in the alley every night.  When she opened the top of the box, a riot of colors within the glass cylinders bombarded her vision: vibrant reds, tropical yellows, spotless whites, vacant blacks, humid oranges, and bottomless blues.  Amid the colors, forlorn and sacred faces gazed back at Maricruz from the glass cylinders, offering her mercy, or maybe asking for it; she couldn’t quite tell.  Maricruz instinctively made the sign of the cross when she saw them.  She and Benny would be keeping company with the communion of saints that night. 

She had never actually taken anything out of this box, only added to it each time she returned home from visiting with her Abuelita, who lived in the back bedroom at her parents’ house.  Abuelita was famous within the family and the parish for her stories of running the alleys and hillsides in Guanajuato as a young girl and for knowing the patron saint for every possible part of life.  Abuelita was especially proud of her candle of Saint Lidwina, the patron saint of ice skaters, which she’d sent for a few years earlier in preparation for the Calgary Winter Olympics.  She’d lit that candle every time Brian Boitano was to skate and it worked.  She was only half-kidding when she claimed to have prayed him to the gold.  

Their parish priest, Father Carl, a man of about fifty years of age who had been exceedingly kind to Maricruz when she’d been pregnant with no man in sight, had given Abuelita a mail-order catalog all the way from Italy, which all the family assumed was to humor her so he could actually get some work done instead of answering her phone calls.  This catalog made it possible for her to supplement the candles she bought at the grocery store by giving her access to all the obscure saints she would never find in the supermarkets in Rocky Ford or La Junta, or even in Pueblo or Colorado Springs.  Whatever Maricruz’s problem might be—from a plantar wart to constipation to an alcoholic boyfriend—Abuelita sent her home with a candle to light for it.  But Maricruz had never lit them, not one.  It just seemed strange to her, like she was buying her prayers at the supermarket along with the Kool-Aid and frozen pizza.  However, tonight she and Benny were going to need their light, and if their intercessions were thrown in too, then they—or really Lyle—could surely use it.

Maricruz carefully took a white candle out of the box and carried it over to the secondhand end-table by the couch.  Benny peeked from behind his book and watched her intently as she placed it there.  He put the book down and moved closer, studying the image on the glass of a young woman, wearing a modest robe, cape, and head covering, and holding a large crucifix.  He asked who she was, and Maricruz told him it was Saint Margaret of Cortona.

“Why’s there a dog sitting at her feet?” he asked.

Maricruz was no theologian and she’d made it to mass more in the previous ninety days than in the year or two before combined, but she knew this story well, as many times as Abuelita had told it to her.  “Because the man she loved went off and didn’t come back, but his dog did,” she answered him.  She paused for a moment when she heard herself say, “the man she loved went off and didn’t come back."  She glanced toward the window, and then continued, “The dog led her to where the man she loved had been killed.  When she saw him she was so sad that she gave herself to God.  It changed her life.  She had a son, too, just like I have you, and she loved him very much.  She’s the patron of single mothers, like me."  She gestured toward the box.  "Do you want to help me put these out?”

As Benny pulled each candle from the box he asked her about the image.  She told him the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe as he placed the canary yellow candle on the kitchen counter.  “She’s the patron of Mexico, where Abuelita and Abuelo (you never knew him) grew up.”  When he asked about the red candle with the picture of a woman in what looked like a nun’s habit sitting on a log while holding a shepherd’s crook in one hand and an open Bible on her lap, she enjoyed telling him of Saint Monica, of how much she loved her wayward son, Augustine, and of how she is the patron of alcoholics. 

“Like Lyle, right?” Benny asked, handing her the candle.

She held it up and skimmed the words on the back, “Dear Saint Monica, troubled wife and mother, many sorrows pierced your heart during your lifetime...”  Maricruz could relate.  She looked at Benny.  “Yes.  Abuelita gave me this one to light for Lyle.”

“So he won’t be an alcoholic anymore?”  Benny was already pulling the next candle out of the box.

“Well, that’s not really how it works, kiddo.”  She ran her free hand through Benny’s chocolate tinted hair, a shade lighter than anyone else’s in the family, as was his skin.  “He’ll always be an alcoholic, but our prayer is that he’ll be able to keep from drinking from now on.”  She went on to explain to him more of what that meant.  “When it comes down to it, though, it’s up to Lyle, but we can help him, and so can Lyle’s friend Rick.”

“I really like Rick,” Benny said as he looked at the next candle.

“He really likes you too, Benny.”  Her heart ached for a moment for her son, like St. Margaret and St. Monica for theirs.  “But Lyle loves you.”

“I know, Mom.  I love Lyle too,” Benny said before asking about the next candle.

This went on for another twenty minutes or more.  Among others there was the blue candle of Saint Martha, the patron of waitresses, and the orange candle for Saint Luigi Scrosoppi, the patron of football players that her Abuelita had given to her to light for John Elway to help him lead the Broncos to the playoffs the previous season.  Then they came to a black candle with an image of an armored man on horseback cutting his red cape in half and handing one of the halves to a nearly naked beggar.  “San Martin Caballero,” she told him.  “The patron saint of cowboys.”

Benny smiled.  “He must be Lyle’s favorite!”

After they’d set out nearly twenty candles, there were just two left, a white and a red.  Benny set up the white candle on the coffee table and joked, “Jesus must have had some of grandma’s tamales.  His heart’s on fire!”  Maricruz tried not to laugh but she couldn’t help it.

“That’s the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Benny,” she finally said.  “That’s love.  The fire represents his love for the world.”

“That’d be weird if our hearts really glowed when we loved people.”  Benny had as philosophic a look on his face as an almost nine-year-old can.  “I guess we could wear coats if we wanted to hide it.”

Maricruz touched her hand to his cheek.  “There’s not a thick enough coat in the world that could keep people from seeing how on fire my heart is for you, Abenicio Rodriguez.”  She kissed him on his forehead, and just held her lips there for a moment. 

“What about for Lyle?” he whispered.

“It’s a different kind of fire I have for Lyle.  Something about Lyle is thawing out a part of my heart that’s been frozen for a long time, Son.  He's very special to me.”

“Is he going to make it home?” Benny looked down at his feet.  “I mean... ever?”

She pulled him close to her and held him so he could warm himself on her heart.  “Nothing will stop him. Nothing…  Now come on, Sweetie, we better put the last one out and then get them lit.  The lights are starting to flicker again.”  They both looked up at the ceiling fan globe. 

Benny reached into the bottom of the box and picked up the last candle, a red one with the image of a gray-haired man in a black cassock pointing up into the air with one hand as two young boys beside him read from open books.  “Here’s the last one,” Benny said.  Reading the name on the glass, he asked, “Who is Saint John Baptist de la Salle?”  

“Oh, I’d forgotten about that one.  He started schools in France several hundred years ago.  He’s the patron saint of teachers.” 

“Isn't Rick a teacher?  At that college where you used to go?”

“Yeah, he teaches at the community college in Pueblo.”  

She’d thought about throwing that candle away when Abuelita had given it to her after Maricruz had finally confided in her a couple of years ago.  Abuelita was still the only one who knew---besides Rick, of course.  Not Lyle.  Not even Benny himself.  But Maricruz could not show Abuelita how offended she was by the candle.  She just swallowed the hurt and embarrassment and thanked Abuelita, who had told her, “It doesn’t hurt to pray for him, you know.  If the story you’ve told me is true, then he’s not a bad man.  We’ve all made mistakes, Nieta.  But you’ve been given something most of us aren’t.”  Then Abuelita had picked up her framed photo of Benny on one knee in his green and white soccer uniform.  She then tapped the photo with her long fingernail and said, “Most of our sins bring only misery, but yours and this professor’s mistake turned into something beautiful.  Whether you like it or not, Maricruz, this man is a part of that, and he needs your prayers, just as I hope he is praying for you.”

As Benny set the final candle on the table by the phone, Maricruz was surprised to hear herself say, “We’ll light that one for Rick tonight, Benny.  He’s worried about Lyle too."  

Maricruz moved from one candle to the next, lighting a wick or two, waving out the match before it burned her fingers, and then striking another on the box.  As she finished, the lights finally went out for the night, and she and Benny stood together in the living room, admiring how the warm glow of nearly two dozen of Abuelita’s prayer candles had transformed their little apartment into an old-world shrine.  Maricruz half-expected a group of monks on pilgrimage to knock on the door, but if they had she would have been disappointed.  There was only one knock she prayed to hear on her door that night, and for that all she could do was wait.

Chapter Eight

Lyle hushed himself and crept up behind the car like he didn’t want to startle it.  As high as the snow drift was up against the driver’s side, it might as well have been the bunny slopes up at Steamboat Springs.  The best he could tell at first in the darkness, he thought the car must have been a Cadillac or a Mercury, but then he made out a Ford emblem on the trunk.  Crown Victoria.  He quietly brushed the snow off the license plate.  Wyoming.  He couldn’t help but smile when he saw the bronc riding cowboy stamped into the aluminum.  He’d never been a bronc rider himself; team roping had always been his event.  He often missed the sound of the chute opening, and then taking off at full gallop after the steer.  His old buddy Colton would lasso the horns, then Lyle would rope the animal’s hind feet.  They’d gotten to the point where it was like they were roping with two ropes but one mind, almost like an old married couple on horseback.  There probably wasn’t a small town rodeo arena they hadn’t competed in throughout Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle during those summers.  Of course Lyle still rode, and still roped, but now it was just doing his job, riding somebody else’s horse, roping somebody else’s cattle, all on somebody else’s land.  Maybe someday it would be his horse, his cattle, his land.

With the tailpipe billowing exhaust, Lyle knew somebody had to be on the other side of those black windows, and he wasn’t sure if that somebody knew Lyle was out there, or if they’d be happy about it if they did.  He really didn’t have a choice, though, so he knocked on the front passenger side window as though he was knocking on a neighbor’s door.  Nothing.  He knocked again, this time calling out, “Hello?  Anybody in there?”  Nothing again.  He slapped the window over and over with the palm of his hand.  “Hey, if you’re in there, open up!  I’m freezing my ass off out here!”  Still nothing.  Lyle looked around to make sure no one was coming back from taking a leak or otherwise sneaking up on him.  Finally, he tried the front door handle and then the rear door.  Locked.  Maybe there wasn’t anybody in there after all?  Or maybe they’d died in the wreck or been knocked out?  Regardless, Lyle was getting in that car. 

Finally after Lyle had tried everything he could think of, he yelled out, “If there’s somebody in there, you need to know I’m about to bust out your back passenger window!  I don’t mean you no harm, but I’m going to die if I don’t get out of this weather!”  He thought about using his elbow, but he wasn’t sure that would work, and he didn’t look forward to adding a shattered elbow to his current scroll’s worth of challenges.  So he pulled the bottle of whiskey out of the lining in his coveralls.  The thick glass at the bottom of the bottle just might be strong enough to break through the window.  In just the briefest of seconds holding that bottle, though, the laughter, the dancing, the green light look of one big-haired drunken cowgirl after another, tried to work their way from Lyle’s brain to his hands, urging his fingertips to move to the cap, to turn, to remove, to tip, to taste, to swallow.  Lyle fought it off, instead grasping the bottle like you might hold a fire extinguisher before bashing out a window to escape from a fire too big for the extinguisher to handle.  But just as Lyle was about to smash the bottle into the dark glass, the back window rolled down just a few inches and a woman’s voice—or maybe it was a girl’s?—warned from within, “If you do that, it’ll be the last thing you do.”  As she said this, she eased a gun’s barrel out through the small gap between the window and its frame, a kind of barrel Lyle had looked down before.  So even in the dark, he was pretty sure he was once again staring at the business end of a .38 revolver.

Lyle jumped back, dropping the bottle into the snow, and instinctively throwing his hands up into the arctic air.  “Take it easy!  I’m not going to hurt you.”

The voice in the car laughed.  “Damn right you’re not going to hurt me.  Keep walking.”

Lyle wanted to wipe the snow from his eyes but he was afraid to move.  “Ma’am I’ve already been walking for hours.  Please, I’m in a real bad way out here.”

“If you think I’m letting you get in this car, you’re freaking crazy.”

Lyle looked down at the bottle on the ground.  “Hey, I’ve got a bottle of whiskey and some cigarettes you can have, if you let me in.”

“If you haven’t noticed, I’ve got a gun, which means if I want your whiskey and cigarettes I can have them anyway.  And now that I think about it, I could do for a smoke and a drink.  So just slide them through the window real easy like.”

Lyle cursed his stupidity as he picked up the bottle and handed it through the window to her and then did the same with the half empty pack of cigarettes in his pocket.  He could feel the warm air from inside the car on his hand as he gave them to her.

“Now get moving,” she said again.

“Please,” Lyle pleaded.  “I’m not a threat to you.  I’m just a dumb cowboy who got myself in some trouble out here.”

“Well, Cowboy, that sounds like your problem, not mine.”

“Maybe I could be of some help to you.  If nothing else I could help you pass the time.”

“I bet I know how you’d try to pass the time with me.  Not going to happen, Cowboy.”

“Listen, I was driving east when my truck hit some ice and I ended up out in a pasture.  The wreck knocked me out cold.  When I came to, I got to walking, which I did in the wrong direction for over an hour.”  Lyle’s voice sped up, trying to tell the whole story before she could tell him to leave again.  “When I hit the river, I knew I had to turn around.  Just before I found this road, I fell down in a ditch full of snow and at that point I just plain gave up.  And then I fell asleep or passed out or, hell, I might have died for a minute there for all I know.  Whatever the hell happened, I had the scariest damn dream I’ve ever had in my life, but when I woke up somehow I had the gumption to pull my ass up out of that hole and up onto the road and to start walking.  I was petering out again, though, but then… then, I saw your car, and I thought maybe I was seeing things like folks do out in the desert, but here you are, right here in front of me, and everything on my body is frozen, and I can feel that warm air creeping out of there, and I’ve got people waiting for me over in Rocky Ford.  I’m going to die out here and you are the only one who can save me.  So, please.”

“That’s a real touching story, Cowboy, but do you think I’m dumb enough to fall for that?”

“Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re doing out here, but I promise you I’m just trying to get home to my girlfriend and her little boy.”  Lyle started to raise his voice.  “Lady, I haven’t seen them in three months, and that’s all my own doing.  But, damn it, I’m trying to make things right, and I really screwed up tonight trying to beat this storm home.  If I die out here, it’ll be my own stupidity that killed me.”

The voice inside the car was silent.  Maybe she was thinking, reconsidering.

“Please!” Lyle called out.   He paused to gather in his emotions, and then decided to reach down to the bottom of the well of his own guilt and shame to pull out one last attempt to convince the woman with the gun.  “There’s somebody else who needs me to make it out of here alive… a little girl… my little girl.”  He finally wiped the snow from his eyes.  “Savannah.  That’s her name.  She’s four years old, and she lives with her mom back in Oklahoma.  I’ve only met her once in her whole life, about six months ago, and I can’t die without being some kind of dad to that little girl.  She deserves as much.  Don’t let my stupidity cost her.  So I’m begging you, ma’am, please let me in that car.”

At first there was still no reaction from the woman inside.  Then she slowly pulled the barrel of the gun back into the car, and the window rolled up, leaving Lyle once again alone with only the wind and snow for company.  He wondered what else he could have said, and how much farther down that county road he could make it.  After a moment, he turned to walk away, but just before he took his first step, he heard the click of the automatic locks disengaging, and turned back around to see the front passenger door pushed open ever so slightly.  As Lyle slipped himself into the car he kept saying, “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you."

It was so dark he still couldn’t see what the woman in the back seat looked like, but he definitely heard her say, “You better be telling the truth, Cowboy.  If you’re some kind of pervert… if you so much as think about touching me… I promise you before God and my dead momma that I’ll put all five of these bullets in between your eyes, and I won’t think twice about doing it.”  There was something in her voice that told Lyle she wasn’t bluffing.

Chapter Seven

With swirling winds and the thick clouds separating earth from sky like a curtain dividing the profane from the sacred, Lyle had trouble figuring out which way was east.  He lumbered through the deepening snow for what seemed like ages, feeling like he must be at least a quarter of the way to Rocky Ford, only to slide down an embankment and almost into the icy current of the Arkansas River.  

At first he cursed every drop of water that ever carried away an ounce of dirt over the millions of years to form that damn river, and he hated every step he’d walked in the wrong direction.  He sat for a good while resting against the frozen embankment, which gave him a break from the full force of the relentless winds.  He ate half of the beef stick, wanting so badly to devour the other half, and wanting even worse to wash it down with a nip or two of the Wild Turkey.  Once again he could almost hear the laughter, the clinking of glasses, the rhythmic tap of his boot soles two-stepping on a wooden dance floor, and the music. The taste of Jack and Coke on his lips and the voice of Lyle Lovett in his ears.  What's so wrong about that?

Although his body had stopped falling some time ago, Lyle realized his thoughts and thirst were plunging toward a much more dangerous river than the one that sprayed him every so often with frigid water caught up in a gust of wind.  He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and after lighting five or six matches from the book, he finally kept it lit long enough to breathe in a little calm.  The smoke sometimes fooled his body into thinking the hole inside had been filled.  After he ground out the half smoked cigarette, he reached back into his flannel shirt pocket and held the photo of Maricruz in his trembling hand, which along with the nicotine coursing through his veins, helped him to forget his predicament for just a moment.

As he held the photo close enough to his eyes so that he could see her crooked smile in the solitary darkness, he tried to figure out what to do next.  It dawned on him that instead of cursing the river, he should have been blessing it.  The Arkansas River snakes southeast out of the jagged Colorado Rockies all the way through Kansas, Oklahoma, and finally into Arkansas.  On the way there, it flows just a few miles north of Rocky Ford.  The river also—and this is what was most important to Lyle that night—flows parallel to the county road he’d been on when he hit the patch of ice.  Although he wasn't where he wanted to be, he now actually knew where he was.  The terrain along the river would be too rough to traverse for as many miles as he needed to cover, but he finally had his bearings.  So he placed the photo back in his pocket and, still feeling he might need it for something at some point, tucked the bottle back within the torn lining of his coveralls, and turned back the way he came to begin retracing all two miles worth of laborious and frozen steps.  If he did this, he knew that eventually he had to run into the county road, and that county road was his only chance.

Although he would have never imagined it possible, the weather seemed to worsen as he headed back toward the south.  The wind pounded the right side of Lyle’s face with a barrage of snow that felt more like frozen bullets from a Gatlin gun than the heavy flakes that descended slowly toward the hills outside of Bethlehem on Christmas cards.  He could never see more than just a few feet in front of him.  He had to rub his eyes continuously to keep his eyelashes from freezing together and the bandana over his nose and mouth was soaked through with breath and had frozen to his beard.  The canvas of his coveralls had reached its saturation point from his ankles up to his knees.  The leather of his boots seemed to be only another thin, wet layer of his own skin.  The nerves in the tips of his toes and fingers argued about whether they would go numb or light themselves on fire.  He’d barely slept the night before from excitement, and with only a half of a gas station beef stick in his stomach, he was growing weak, hungry, thirsty, and wondering if—he tried to convince himself it was when—he’d finally run into the road.  If it wasn’t soon, Rick just might have to write that eulogy after all.

His knees were stiffening, causing him to stumble and fall like a drunk, which is something he’d spent a lot of time practicing over the years.  He must have taken a million steps, but on step number one million and one the ground suddenly gave way beneath him and he fell onto his back, his entire body going under the snow like it was water.  The snow must have been four feet deep in that spot and it formed a kind of frozen sarcophagus around Lyle.  With his head dazed and aching, Lyle lay in the snow, overcome by a warm blanket of the thought of how good it felt to be lying down. The longer he lay there, the less he tried to coach himself to stand and the more he started to reflect on how sometimes a man just has to humble himself, bowing down, or in this case falling down, and admitting that the battle is lost.  He’d probably walked close to four miles already—more than two of those in the wrong direction—and he still hadn’t found that damn road.  He started to comfort himself that there are worse things in life than dying. 

   

Lyle decided that he wanted his body to be found with the picture of Maricruz in his hand so he pulled it out again and held it to his chest.  As he did this an impulse came over him, an impulse that he’d felt for the first time in his life just over the past ninety days, especially in those moments when he found himself staring at his own reflection in the water of a toilet boil, heaving out the residue of years of poison.  He started to use his cracked and scabbed lips to form a prayer—maybe to God, maybe to the night, maybe to Maricruz, or maybe even to himself; he really didn’t know.  “Help me get up,” he mumbled aloud.  “Please, help me get up.  There’s no more left in me.”  It was more like he was breathing the words than speaking them.  “I don’t care who it is, just send someone, anyone, to help me get up.”  Lyle kept whispering these words over and over until the weight of his eyelids was heavier than he could lift any longer.  The bawling of the wind above him and the soaking chill of the snow all around him drifted away, forgotten like they were in the distant past. 

Lyle stood in the midst of an infinite field of waist-high wheat as the sun rose warmly, filling the sky with a spectrum of reds and yellows, flowing together into a canopy of orange.  The golden heads of grain, heavy with kernels ready to be harvested, bowed and bobbed in the dry early summer breeze like square-dancers to their partners.  The sun warmed the skin of his clean shaven face as he walked slowly through the field, holding his arm out, letting the palm of his hand roll over the bristly hairs of the heads of grain as though he was petting them.  Lyle felt like he had been in the field since before he was born and could remain within its boundaries long after he died. 

He’d thought he was alone until out of the corner of his eye he saw that someone else was in the field with him.  As Lyle approached the figure, he made out that it was a man about Lyle’s age, lean and sinewy, with a parted and slicked palm aid haircut.  The man wore denim overalls, a white undershirt, and boots, and he sipped a clear liquid from a mason jar.  The look on the man’s face made Lyle feel uneasy like this field belonged to the man and Lyle was not welcome there, that he would not be tolerated.  The man’s eyes, with blazing serpentine veins spreading from bourbon shaded irises out into the yellows that should have been whites, resented Lyle, maybe even hated him.  An ancient fear boiled Lyle’s insides, and he needed to get away from the man as quickly as he could.  As Lyle turned away to run, the man’s coarse hand grabbed Lyle’s forearm so tightly the man’s thumb and fingers pressed against Lyle’s bone like a vice.  Lyle tried to pull away, wanting to scream for the man to let him go, but when Lyle opened his mouth the voice was not that of a man, but rather of a boy, of himself when he was a boy.  The man’s grip was inescapable, strong and painful, simmering and familiar.  In his struggle, Lyle saw a tattoo on the man’s forearm, a faded image of an American flag and an anchor, and Lyle recognized who the man was.  Lyle jerked back violently, breaking free and falling to the ground.  His father stood over him menacingly as he had done often and when his father opened his mouth, Lyle heard a voice he had not heard in twenty-seven years, except for in his nightmares. 

“Get your sorry ass up off of the ground,” the man spat onto Lyle, throwing down his jar and spilling what smelled like grain alcohol all around Lyle. "Are you still worthless, still a waste of air?”  Lyle tried to crawl away.  “If you don’t get up I’ll beat the life out of you.  Is that what you want?  I said get up!”  The man continued to berate Lyle, growing louder and more venomous with every word.  The figure of his father seemed to grow larger and larger as did the sun behind him as it rose into the sky like a film in fast forward and grew in size and intensity so that it enveloped the sky and turned Lyle’s father into an obscene and malignant shadow.

Lyle yelled out in the boy’s voice words that were the refrain of his childhood, “Leave me alone!  Get away from me!"  The wind grew so strong the grain was forced over so it nearly touched the ground and the heat of the blast on Lyle’s face was like the opening of an oven door.  The scorching wind seemed to thaw Lyle’s frozen synapses and allowed a thought to blow throughout his mind, maybe in the wheat field, maybe in the snow.  He shrieked at his father above him, “I hate you, you sick bastard!  I have to get up—not because you told me to, but because it’s worth freezing my ass off all night and having my toes cut off from frostbite and walking ten miles—I’d walk a million miles— just so I don’t have to see you again!  If this is hell, then I’ll do whatever I have to not to come back here, but if this is heaven, I’d rather burn!”  Suddenly his father was gone.

Lyle’s eyes blinked until they opened.  The scorching heat had departed, replaced by frigid cold.  Snow surrounded him on all sides as though he lay down in a tub.  Above him he could see the snow blowing, but for the first time all night he was completely protected from the wind.  He propped himself up on his elbows, and his head began to clear.  After he’d considered the situation, he said aloud, “Son of a—I bet I fell in a ditch!”  He thought for a moment and a smile formed beneath the bandanna on his face, and he cried out so loud they must have heard him in Rocky Ford, “And, I’ll be damned!  If I’m in a ditch, that means I’m just a few feet from a road!”

Lyle found new strength to climb out of what had almost become his own shallow grave.  As he pushed and crawled, he made out a rusty old section of barbed wire fence in front of him.  After catching his coverall leg on one of the barbs, ripping another small hole in the canvas, he stumbled and fell onto the road.  Frantically he dug through the snow and placed his hand on the surface like he was pressing his palm against the stones of a holy temple.  Asphalt!  Surely he'd happen upon a house at some point and some family of good prairie folk would take him in even though it must have been close to one in the morning.  He dreamed about it as he walked--the hot shower, the bowl of steaming soup, the sound of Maricruz's voice on the phone, and a few hours sleep on the couch beneath a home-knit blanket.

Once again, though, he walked and walked, yet it seemed like he was on a vast frozen treadmill, going nowhere, finding nothing.  He considered eating the other half of the beef stick, but decided to wait just a little longer.  Trying to keep his spirits up he started singing old Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings songs to pass the time.  He was about halfway through croaking out "Good Hearted Woman" when he saw it.  He rubbed his eyes at first and checked the bottle to make sure it was still full.  Yet there it was just twenty feet or so in front of him like a steel and glass oasis on wheels, just off the road and held in place by a fence post. He took off running toward the car and as he approached the rear end, he told Rick to put that eulogy away, because this car had exhaust coming from the tailpipe.

Chapter Six

Maricruz took Rick’s advice and sat down on the basket-woven seat of a ladder-back chair that rested near the phone, just under the two framed art prints that added to her apartment’s air of simple sophistication. The two posters, which were hung side by side on maize colored walls, seemed to argue with one another.  On the left were the lively sunflowers of Diego Rivera’s “Muchacha con Girasoles.” On the right was the very strange and dark “Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace, Hummingbird, Cat and Monkey” by Frida Kahlo.  Everyone loved the Rivera, but she used to have to take down the Frida every night before Abenicio could fall asleep.

“Hello?” Rick asked through the phone.  “Maricruz?  You still there?”

She drew in a deep breath like she was about go under water.  “Yeah,” she said as she exhaled. 

“Well, first I started to call the hotels here in town just in case Lyle might have been too proud to come back to my place.  He’d been so sure he could make it back to Rocky Ford tonight.  But then I realized that Lyle’s too broke to afford a room.  He’d refused the five bucks I tried to give him for gas when he left, but I’m pretty sure his wallet’s empty.  He keeps sending all his money back to Oklahoma.”

“So are you telling me he’s stuck on the highway somewhere?” she asked.

“Well, next I called my neighbor, Shirley.  That’s who I was on the phone with for so long.  She’s the second shift dispatcher for the Pueblo County Sheriff and she’s working tonight.  I told her about Lyle and she told me that only two vehicles tried to get on the highway headed east this evening but both were turned around by the deputies.  One of them was some irate asshole in an eighteen wheeler but the other one was a man fitting Lyle’s description in a truck like his.  It sounds like he was a real gentleman compared to the trucker, but he did try to talk them into letting him through.  They wouldn’t budge though, and they just told him he was going to have to spend the night in Pueblo, that in less than a half hour or so the highway was going to be impassable and nobody would be able to--- Anyway, they turned him around.”

Maricruz sat up, hopeful.  “So he has to be in Pueblo somewhere.”

“That was my hope too, but then Shirley brought up that if he was really desperate to get back to Rocky Ford he may have tried to take the county road a couple miles north of the highway.”

“So that’s why you wanted me to sit down.”  She used her free hand to cover her mouth.

“Yeah, Shirley said there are a few families that live out on that road but they’re all just outside Pueblo.  If he made it more than ten miles or so east of town then there’s not a soul that lives out there, just a few old farmhouses abandoned since the Dust Bowl.  But she told me something—”

Maricruz interrupted, “Do you really think he’d be crazy enough to take that road with a blizzard blowing in?”

“Well, before he pulled out of the church parking lot, he told me nothing was going to keep him from seeing you tonight, and I think he meant it.”

Maricruz stood up and paced.  “Well, they’re going out to look for him, right?  I mean, they’re sending a car or a truck or something.  They’re not just going to leave him out there are they?”

“I’m really sorry Maricruz but Shirley said by now the snow’s so deep not even a 4x4 can get out there, that the sheriff said there’s no way they can send someone east on that county road until the plows can clear it and that won’t be until tomorrow sometime.  Those deputies have their own families to think about too, you know.  But let me tell you what else Shirley—”

“We have to get to him, Rick.  We have to go out there.”  The lights flickered off then on again.

“You know we can’t do that.  You or I wouldn’t last twenty minutes out there.  Besides, Lyle is tough as an old boot.  If anyone can make it it’s him.  Like I said, I think he meant it when he said nothing would keep him from seeing you tonight.” 

“That dumb son of a---”  She looked over at Benny who had been listening to her side of the conversation.  His eyes were wide and wet.  “I’m sure you’re right, Rick.  He’ll be fine.  He’ll probably show up here anytime now.”

“Benny can hear you, can’t he?”

“Yes.”  She made herself smile as she told Benny, “Rick says hello, Sweetie.”

“Maricruz, I keep trying to tell you something else.”  Rick paused, expecting her to interrupt again.  When she didn’t he continued, “Shirley also said that about twenty minutes before Lyle showed up at the roadblock, not long before the scumbag in the semi truck did the same, somebody stole a car from the covered drive of a motel on the east side of town while the owner was in the office asking about a room.  They have no idea who took it, but the police and sheriff got calls from all over the eastside about a car speeding through neighborhoods right when the storm was starting.  She said the calls were kind of conflicting but that a couple of those calls came from just east of town on the county road.”

“The same county road Lyle might be stuck on?”

“Yes.  I don’t know if it’s good news or bad news, but Shirley thinks that if Lyle’s out there somewhere west of Rocky Ford, he might find out he’s not alone.”

“So there might be someone out there who could help him?”  Maricruz was willing to grasp at any hope.

"Theoretically, yes," Rick responded.  "But whoever it is, it's someone who had no problem stealing a car, someone who needed to get the hell out of Pueblo in a hurry, and probably someone who was counting on the fact that, with the storm rolling in, the police wouldn't chase them.  Somebody else may be out there with Lyle, but I’m not sure it’s the kind of person Lyle’s going to want to run into.”

Chapter Five

The electricity had been flickering off and on all evening, causing Maricruz to fear the phone lines might go down at some point as well.  She used two of her fingers to tuck a strand of her shoulder-length black hair behind her ear and then held the telephone up to it, nervously wrapping the spiraling phone cord around her arm.  Still busy.  She had tried to call Rick four times already and each time the result had been the same.  Lyle was not answering his phone out at the trailer house, and when she had spoken with his boss, Mr. Stockett, he told her that the other hands had said Lyle finished his chores early and that he had offered to do one of the men’s work for a full weekend if he would take Lyle’s shift of checking on the cattle and busting ice that night.  Even so, Maricruz thought, surely he hadn’t been foolish enough to drive to Pueblo.  She prayed this was the case but she knew Lyle well enough to worry that it might not be.

Although she had not actually talked to Lyle in those ninety days, he had sent her several letters, long letters filled with short sentences written in an apologetic cursive.  In one of the most recent letters he’d confessed, “I have failed everyone in my life.  Every single person.  But that man—that failure—died that night out in the hallway outside your door.  I will not fail you and Benny.  I would rather die all over again.”  Maricruz was desperate to reach Rick in hopes that if Lyle had been reckless enough to make the drive to Pueblo that he had made up for it by being smart enough to stay at Rick’s place until the roads were cleared the next day.  If she could just get through to Rick he could put Lyle on the phone and she could tell Lyle he did not need to worry; he hadn’t failed her.  He’d done everything he’d said he would.  She still wanted him and, as long as he stayed dry, she always would.  She dialed the phone again.  Still busy.

Wondering who Rick could be talking to for so long, she hung up the phone and walked across her apartment’s living room and pulled the curtains away from the window.  The wind groaned and the snow pounded against the panes.  She could see her reflection in the glass, a version of herself that was almost like an icon, with the golden light from the lamp on the end table behind her giving the reflection of her light copper skin an ethereal glow.  She did not always like the way she looked, but she stopped in that moment, just briefly, to note how much she resembled the other women in her family.  She often remembered the time when, tired of not knowing how Lyle truly felt about her, one night while they were sitting on her couch watching a movie they’d rented at the video store, Maricruz asked him, “Do you think I’m pretty?”  As soon as she asked that question she felt silly.  What was she, fourteen?  She was an intelligent, independent, strong woman and the best she’d come up with was, “Do you think I’m pretty?”  Lyle answered, “Of course I do,” without even looking away from the television as Kiefer Sutherland tried to woo a Chinese woman carrying a black parasol in a dusty old west town.  But even though Maricruz’s own question embarrassed her, she decided to go with it, pressing Lyle for more of an answer.  She used the remote control to pause the movie.  “Do you think I’m pretty?” she asked again.  In response, he began that stumbling dance of words a man does when he’s trying to figure out what a woman wants him to say. 

Finally after several starts that all began with, “Um, uh,” he actually tripped over the truth about Maricruz’s appearance.  He said, “Let me put it, uh, this way… These days everybody thinks a woman has to look like, um, a Barbie doll… like she’s allergic to food or something.  You don’t look like a Barbie doll.”  Maricruz looked away from him, feeling hurt even though she had neither interest in, nor the genetics for, looking like a Barbie.  He reached out and placed his calloused hand on her cheek and turned her face gently back toward his, then he whispered to her in words that had a hint of Crown Royal on them, “You look like a woman... like a woman from a long time ago that you might see in a fancy old black-and-white photo.  Pretty isn’t a strong enough word for the way you look, Maricruz.  You look like a real woman.”  She smiled.  Looking like a real woman beats looking like a Barbie doll any day, she thought. 

“Can you see him out there, Mom?”  Abenicio’s question startled her back into the present.   She turned to answer him.  He’d been reclining on the couch, under a black and yellow blanket with a buffalo on it, reading a book from the school library about a young boy who runs his own detective agency.  He had a flashlight beside him on the couch just in case the lights did go out.  The book rested open, pages down, on his lap.  “Where’s Lyle?  Is he still coming tonight?" 

Maricruz did not want to worry him so she responded, “No, Benny, I think he’s at a friend’s house in Pueblo.  I know you've been looking forward to this for a long time, but he can’t make it tonight because of the storm.  We’ll see him in a day or two.  Okay, Sweetie?”  Benny groaned and then picked his book up, found the sentence he’d left off on, and kept reading.  She held her gaze on him, finding it hard to believe he was already nearly nine-years-old.  She also wondered whether she should have accepted her parents’ invitation to wait out the storm at their house with the rest of the family.  With his grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins all packed into her parents’ four bedroom home Benny would be too distracted by playing peak-a-boo with his baby cousin, Manny, or by a game of Parcheesi with his older cousins, to worry about Lyle.  But since she was the one who had given Lyle that ultimatum ninety nights earlier, she couldn't stand the thought of Lyle somehow showing up and her not being there. 

When the phone rang she ran across the room as Benny popped up like a prairie dog from the couch.  She pulled the phone receiver from its perch on the wall.  “Lyle?”

“No, Maricruz, it’s Rick.”  Good, he seemed calm.

“Is he with you?” she asked, impatiently.

“I guess that means he’s not with you either, huh?”  He didn’t seem quite as calm anymore.

Benny called out to his mother, interrupting her as she was about to ask Rick a question.  “Is it Lyle?  Where is he?”  Maricruz shook her head. 

“Did you see him tonight?” she begged Rick.  “Please tell me he didn’t go to Pueblo.”

“I begged him not to when he called, but he came anyway, said he was going to make his 90-in-90 no matter what.  He said he was done breaking promises.”

“Why didn’t he just stay at your house?”

“I pleaded with him but he wouldn't hear of it.”

“How long ago did he leave?”

Rick was silent.

“How long ago, Rick?”

“It was about an hour and a half ago, Maricruz.”  His voice revealed his concern.

“My God, Rick, why didn’t you call me then?”

“I didn't want to upset you until I absolutely had to.  What would you have done, anyway?  I kept thinking he’d come to his senses and show up back at my place.”

“Rick, I’ve been trying to call you for the past thirty minutes.  Who have you been talking to all evening on the phone?”

Rick hesitated for a moment before saying, "That's what I'm calling you about, Maricruz.  I think you might want to sit down."