If she dropped out of sight in the High Plains, who besides David Sanderson would
spare a thought? There was even some active dislike for her. That bitch Ursula Davis
had told him once that if Willa’s mother had left the a off the end of her name, “it would have been just about perfect.”
“I’m going to town and look for her,” he said.
Henry sighed. “Son, that’s very foolish.”
“We can’t be married in San Francisco if she gets left behind in Crowheart Springs,”
he said, trying to make a joke of it.
Dudley was walking by. David didn’t know if Dudley was the man’s first or last name,
only that he was an executive with Staples office supply and had been on his way to
Missoula for some sort of regional meeting. He was ordinarily very quiet, so the
donkey heehaw of laughter he expelled into the growing shadows was beyond
surprising; it was shocking. “If the train comes and you miss it,” he said, “you can
hunt up a justice of the peace and get married right here. When you get back east, tell all your friends you had a real Western shotgun wedding. Yeehaw, partner.”
“Don’t do this,” Henry said. “We won’t be here much longer.”
“So I should leave her? That’s nuts.”
He walked on before Lander or his wife could reply. Georgia Andreeson was sitting
on a nearby bench and watching her daughter caper up and down the dirty tile floor in
her red traveling dress. Pammy Andreeson never seemed to get tired. David tried to
remember if he had seen her asleep since the train derailed at the Wind River junction
point and they had wound up here like someone’s forgotten package in the dead letter
office. Once, maybe, with her head in her mother’s lap. But that might be a false
memory, created out of his belief that five-year-olds were supposed to sleep a lot.
Pammy hopped from tile to tile, a prank in motion, seeming to use the squares as a
giant hopscotch board. Her red dress jumped around her plump knees. “I knew a man,
his name was Danny,” she chanted in a monotonous one-note holler. It made David’s
fillings ache. “He tripped and fell, on his fanny. I knew a man, his name was David.
He tripped and fell, on his bavid.” She giggled and pointed at David.
“Pammy, stop,” Georgia Andreeson said. She smiled at David and brushed her hair
from the side of her face. He thought the gesture unutterably weary, and thought she
had a long road ahead with the high-spirited Pammy, especially with no Mr.
Andreeson in evidence.
“Did you see Willa?” he asked.
“Gone,” she said, and pointed to the door with the sign over it reading TO SHUTTLE,
TO TAXIS, CALL AHEAD FROM COURTESY PHONE FOR HOTEL
VACANCIES.
Here was Biggers, limping toward him. “I’d avoid the great outdoors, unless armed
with a high-powered rifle. There are wolves. I’ve seen them.”
“I knew a girl, her name was Willa,” Pammy chanted. “She had a headache, and took a pilla.” She collapsed to the floor, shouting with laughter.
Biggers, the salesman, hadn’t waited for a reply. He was limping back down the
length of the station. His shadow grew long, shortened in the glow of the hanging
fluorescents, then grew long again.
Phil Palmer was leaning in the doorway beneath the sign about the shuttle and the
taxis. He was a retired insurance man. He and his wife were on their way to Portland.
The plan was to stay with their oldest son and his wife for a while, but Palmer had
confided to David and Willa that Helen would probably never be coming back east.
She had cancer as well as Alzheimer’s. Willa called it a twofer. When David told her
that was a little cruel, Willa had looked at him, started to say something, and then had only shaken her head.
Now Palmer asked, as he always did: “Hey, mutt—got a butt?”
To which David answered, as he always did: “I don’t smoke, Mr. Palmer.”
And Palmer finished: “Just testing you, kiddo.”
As David stepped out onto the concrete platform where detraining passengers waited