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