NINA THOUGHT OF HIM most during punishment, when she would have to sit alone at the back of the schoolroom and none of the other girls would dare look at her. Like stiffskirted puppets all in a row. That was when she saw him in the brumal shroud of a dream: he sat alone on his porch watching distant planes blink across the sky and smoking the cigars they all said would be the death of him. A cool plume encircled his hairless skull, illuminated by shafts of dim lamplight. His radio crackled uselessly from a windowsill. He would sit there reading until the moon reached its apex, rheumy eyes squinting through bifocals thick as hockey pucks and lips forming dry whispers from page to page. Sometimes he fell asleep right there on the porch and did not wake until sunrise.
Back home she heard all about him. Grandpa Ewell, the crazy man who had single-handedly brought on a war within the family by refusing to come in where he could be cared for. All sides had tried and failed in their attempts to placate him, advise him, coerce him, bribe him. He sat obstinate and incommunicable, legally deaf and half blind, and waved at them with the same contemptuous gesture he would use for a swarm of summer flies. "Leave me alone," he would croak, his voice like a scratchy record plucked from an attic box. "I want to stay here with my wife." That was what he said. His false teeth clicked and settled with finality and his eyes strayed speculatively to where an old shotgun lay racked and rusting. They always backed off then and returned muttering curses and vague threats.
Nina saw him every now and then, mostly around holidays. The family would pack into their wood-paneled Pinto and drive the ninety miles out to his small Dakota farm where cattle stood shitting and flipping their tails, chickens squawked and fought in the yard, and hawks sailed overhead in dizzying arcs, their black serrated wings locked on invisible currents, eyes scouring for rodents. After arguing all the way about what they ought to do with the old man, her parents would sit with him and spin out the most awful bullshit she had ever heard, shouting at the top of their lungs into his half-cocked ear, and she would watch him as if he were some atrophic husk that might blow away with a wrong shift in the breeze. As the awkward silences grew longer and more uncomfortable her parents would begin wriggling their hands and drumming their feet on the floorboards while they shot secret, meaningful looks at each other, filling the air with their sighs. Her grandpa was never more than half there. He would talk a little in his raspy voice and then drift into a silence which would not break. She imagined that he kept another world imprinted on the backs of his gray eyelids and that all he had to do was shut them and he would be there. And this is how they would leave him, asleep, his chin perched delicately in the cave of his chest, his coffee table lined with open beer cans, his little house swimming in the evening's purple light.
Eight days shy of Christmas her mother arrived at school in a flurry of scarves and sun lotion.
"You're late," Nina said. She stood in an empty courtyard shadowed by gray brick walls. In the doorway an old nun waved mechanically. Her mother smiled and waved back.
"Thank you," she called, seemingly to the school itself. She took Nina's hand and they walked to the car. "Did you do well on your exams?"
Nina shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not."
"Oh well. You've had troubles, I hear."
"No I haven't."
"Yes. Well. Perhaps you'll try harder next term and make us all proud of you. It's simply a marvelous day, isn't it?"
That night a terrible storm blew in from the west. When her parents thought her asleep, Nina snuck out her window and ran among the empty neighborhood in a pair of thermal boots and heavy winter coat. She sat on the diner's crusted stoop and listened to the heater hum as an ocean of snow deluged into creaseless folds, burying parked cars in broad rolling mounds. The men inside the diner crouched flush-faced over steaming mugs. A striped cat yawned dreamily from the countertop.
She returned half frozen to find a police cruiser blinking in her driveway, a slow gray slush trickling from the tailpipe. Fear quivered in her gut. She slunk about the low black windows, waiting for something to happen, until the cold grew too intense and she was forced to climb the sticky drainage pipe and slide through her unlatched window. The moment her feet hit the carpeted floor she heard voices, far off and muffled, floating disembodied and unreal through the plaster walls. She felt her face go red in the sudden warmth.
She heard her name.
"She's sleeping," her mother said. "No reason to wake her."
Her father grunted something inaudible.
She moved closer to her door, cracked it and lay down with an ear in the open hallway.
"Well," the officer said thickly. "You won't have to identify him, anyhow. It wouldn't be practical. But you'll need to come down, sign a release. I know you'll be wanting to make arrangements soon as possible."
"Yes," her mother said. "Of course. Thank you very much."
She heard her mother escorting him to the door, the shrill and mournful sound of the wind as it opened, then the throb of it closing too hard against the frame. She lay flat and breathed slowly, precisely. The blood in her ears roiled like an open tap. She thought of nightmares she'd had in which her parents conspired to carve and cook her in the frying pan, unaware of her listening through the floor. In the dreams there were never any lights. The house was dark, inescapable, and the footsteps would come slowly up the stairs, in the deliberate rhythm of a march, hands stretching to feel for her, the scrape of their fingertips like rubber nipples against the walls.
She heard her father's sigh, long and heavy, ending in a kind of gurgle. "So it's finally happened. He had to go and finish it his way."
"It's not your fault," her mother said. "You tried. You were a good son. Now if he had been just a bit more cooperative..."
"Such an awful death."
"Yes," she said. "Horrible."
Nina drew back her head and shut the door quietly. She walked to the window and looked out into the swirling snow. All the city was lost in whiteness, silent and entombed, like static on the television with the volume down. Even the raking wind lay down and slept.
She read about it in the obituary. Roy Ewell, driving twenty head of scattered cattle through the storm, half blind and mostly deaf, following by heart the contours of his beloved land, had picked the wrong moment to spur his horse across the train tracks. An Amtrak conductor described seeing the man and horse emerge like twin phantoms at the rail's edge and calling out uselessly, unable to brake in time. Nina shut her eyes. She imagined the slow lifting of hoof onto the snowcovered tracks, her grandpa's gray Scandinavian eyes forward and slanted, unseeing, and the poor horse freezing at the sudden blare of the whistle while her grandpa may have felt something, a drawing back of some slight air current as he lifted his chin, wondering what on earth could possibly put the scare in his old horse. Then the unearthly slap of the train hitting him at full speed, dragging man and horse down together beneath the crunching iron, spreading them out over the half mile it took to come to rest, steaming and shuddering and whining as the door swung open and the conductor leapt out into a waist-high drift to stare back over the whitewashed distance.
On the way to the funeral she kept quiet. The Pinto shuddered along in the slow lane and her father cursed it softly, kicking his foot down hard against the gas pedal. The snow had been plowed up against the roadside and lay in towering brown-streaked mounds, bleeding off into empty farmland. Bright sunlight glared back from the surrounding flats and they all had on sunglasses to protect their eyes. Her mother had rubbed suntan lotion on her cheeks.
"Why don't we sing a song?" her mother asked, smiling blandly in the rearview mirror.
"I don't sing," Nina said.
"Don't they make you sing at school?"
"Nobody can make me do anything I don't want to do."
"Nina! Such a thing to say. You sound like your grandpa."
Her father turned his head and frowned.
"Such a willful girl..." her mother said, letting the words trail off into a defeated sigh.
Nina sat still and looked out the window at the streaming plains, the vast and empty basin of soil and snow. In such moments she felt alone and distant, hating her mother and cursing God, although later, in fear, she would repent.
When the slanting roof of the country church became visible over miles of flat seamless land, she sat up and looked west toward her grandpa's farm. The church stood at the edge of a small crossroads town in which a low-lying grocery store, post office and restaurant squatted around the central attraction: a misshapen gravel lot dealing in used farm implements. Weekly specials were advertised in illegible red-inked signs flashing beneath yards of blinking Christmas lights. As they passed through the center Nina read the storm-battered scrawl aloud, which streaking into the wet cardboard looked like so much spattered blood: LAST CHANCE SALE. DEAL NOW OR FOREVER HOLD YOUR PEACE.
Nina laughed.
"That's not funny," her mother said and looked at her sternly, which made Nina laugh again.
They parked in front of the church and got out of the car. Already a small group of relations were gathered inside the church and a single bundled man had shuffled out to wave a meaty hand in the air.
"Hi Uncle Bud," Nina called. She ran up and gave him a hug. He was the only relative she cared about--the rest could go to hell.
"My pretty girl," Uncle Bud smiled, his fleshy face red with cold and razor rash and uneasiness. "How've you been getting along?"
"Rotten," she said.
"Oh well," he shrugged, and said hello to her father. The usual stiffness passed between them. Uncle Bud was the older brother and he drove a meat truck. He talked about the countless states he'd been to as if it were all the same to him and he'd just as soon sit tight on the farm as in the cab of a steaming, hurtling rig. But she knew he only did that to make her feel better about being stuck in school all year long.
They went inside and all the adults passed around handshakes and secret looks. A few other kids were there but she thought they acted stupid and wouldn't talk to them. She also thought her mother talked too loud. She sat in a corner and waited for Uncle Bud to come and talk with her. Finally he did, ambling on stiff legs, toting a soup-pot belly beneath a striped dress shirt, smelling of hastily bought cologne and ancient whiskey.
He sat down beside her and sighed as if exhausted from a strenuous physical effort. "Well, how about it. All the family in one room. Guess that's one thing not to be sorry for."
Nina looked at him. "What's in the coffin?" she said.
He looked over at the blue-laced, dark wood box that lay gleaming on the tabletop, the window shut tight. His eyebrows wrinkled up and looked funny.
"Well that's your grandpa, honey."
"Can't be," she said.
"Why not?"
"There would have been too many pieces. I mean, they couldn't have stitched him back together. I'll bet they buried him where he was, out by the side of the tracks."
Uncle Bud's eyes were wide and horrified.
"I wonder whose job it is," she went on. "I mean who has to walk along and find the pieces and bury them--"
"Jesus," Uncle Bud said. "What are they feeding you back home?"
Nina didn't understand what food had to do with any of it. She eyed the coffin suspiciously, thinking that when the people all left she might open it and have a look, just to be sure.
In a few minutes the funeral started. She did not remember much of it. The usual priest was not there; instead a thin young man with cleanshaven cheeks and hair the color of spring pollen gave an earnest but boring talk full of ideas he must have learned recently in college. He kept using long words which no one seemed to understand. Nina thought it was strange that the only man in the room who didn't know her grandpa was the one yacking on about him. After a while she looked over and saw Uncle Bud with his eyes closed.
When it was over they went outside and watched the box get put into the earth. The gravesite was a long walk from the church and everybody was cold, standing with arms folded on the frozen plain and feet stamping off the deep snow. Nina was sure it was an empty box they were lowering into the dirt so she didn't pay any attention. The whole thing seemed silly to her and distant, maudlin actors on the television screen faking their tears by script.
The priest read some more words from the Bible but his voice was just a mutter beneath the wind. The sun glinted off his oval spectacles. Finally they all made the sign of the cross and turned back toward the church. Uncle Bud was coughing and blowing his nose into a silver handkerchief. They marched in a short twisting line, stiff and slow, a dark somber wire flickering over the white yard, and when Nina broke into a dead run not even her mother's angry shout could stop her.
When she got back home she was in trouble and had to stay in her room, but at night she snuck out and walked into open stores and bars just to see how people would look at her. Uncle Bud had kissed her and said he would be by soon. She waited, bored. Finally he called.
"Hey kiddo," he said, sounding as if his tongue were bloated.
"When are you coming by?" she asked.
"Soon, soon. Do me a favor, will you? Put your old man on the line."
She sat nearby and drank hot chocolate and listened to an argument unfold. She didn't know what it was about, but when her father began yelling, really yelling up a storm so that his face was bright red and his words a shrill and chaotic slur, she felt her chest go tight and left the room. It had something to do with Uncle Bud being executor of the will because he was older, and he had already used some of the money to fix his truck and had been in jail one night after drinking himself senseless. She found it all hard to believe.
That evening a second storm buried them in their house and it took three days to dig out. It was a blizzard, the kind that would kill you if you weren't careful, the kind that carried with it stories of people freezing to death less than ten feet from home, lost in the blinding swirl, good as a hundred miles away. Nina sat trapped in her room feeling the hours stagnate. She read a picture book about Africa which seemed strange and impossible, filled with colorful animals and sun-withered trees and tribal women smiling and dancing in a circle, shaking hands at the cerulean sky. When her father came in and asked if she would go with him to see how the old farm was holding up, she was bored enough that she said yes.
They drove out of the city over the crusted blacktop. Out in the country the road turned a strange sunblasted color which was like the clay of ancient adobes. She sat in the front seat and played with the radio until her father grew annoyed and slapped at her hand. Then she sat still and watched the level snow-buried land whip by. She wondered how the Indians had survived out there with no sticky tar roofs or hot water or gas heaters. How they could fend off such a storm with only a patchwork of buffalo skin and prayers to the powers of the West.
"Your mother spoke to me last night," her father said suddenly.
There was a silence.
"That's nice," Nina said, and laughed morosely.
Her father took his eyes from the road and glared at her. "She's concerned about your attitude. Your grades came in. She's concerned, that's all."
"So how'd I do?"
"They are not adequate. They are substandard."
"Oh."
"Sister Federica says she doesn't understand. She says you sit in your seat making faces and won't say anything."
"She doesn't like me is all. She hates me. I made her look bad because I showed that Virginia doesn't border Georgia in front of the whole class. That's why."
Her father reached into the glove compartment and searched for his sunglasses. He pulled them out and covered his eyes in a mirrored glaze. As he set them crooked on the bridge of his nose a look of sudden confusion washed over his pinched face. Nina sighted the path of his eyes and saw what it was. A dark form stood far off in the center of the road like a brown tufted wall, a gate of hair shut against trespassers, and Nina squinted her eyes in the bright sun and raised her curled hand to shade them.
"A buffalo," she said.
Her father whispered a curse. It seemed impossible. Alone on that wide expanse of nowhere it stood with head bowed and blunt horns slanting, swishing its tail with calm deliberation against a motionless flank. As they drew close a single olive-like eye flared wide, swelling bigger and bigger until it was like a dark well in which they could fall forever and never reach bottom.
They stopped a good distance short of the buffalo and her father honked the horn. The buffalo turned its great head slowly and steam snaked upward from the long prow-like nose. It stamped its delicate hooves and let out a snarl.
"Stupid thing," her father said. "Where the hell did it come from?" He squeezed his palm against the horn and revved the engine. "Goddamn you! Get out of the road!"
The buffalo snapped its head in terror and for a dreadful moment Nina thought it would rush the car. She braced her feet against the floor and slid toward the space beneath the dashboard. Instead it stamped its hooves and turned one way and the next as if perplexed about where on that vast and uniform plain it ought to run; its eye seemed to swell to the size of a baseball and then all at once it bolted in a fury of snow and snarls and steam, heading toward distant cloud banks, a dark receding shadow on the land.
"Praise Jesus," her father said. He brought the Pinto slowly up to high gear and shook his head in disgust. The buffalo had made him forget all about her grades and Nina was relieved, pressing her face against the cool window to watch it ramble across the snowy plain, already distant and dwindling smaller and smaller but never vanishing, never lost. Even when the churchtop rose up against the iceblue skyline she could see it far off drifting like a tuft of prairie smoke, like a cloud bearing thunder and hail.
The cab of Uncle Bud's rig was sitting in front of the house at a crooked angle and all about the yard nothing scampered or crawled or slithered. There were no hawks in the sky. She saw her father's face go dark and his lips draw tight. He let up on the gas and they drove slowly into the yard, crunching snow beneath the worn radials. He pulled up next to the trailerless cab and cut the engine.
The storm door opened and Uncle Bud came out and stood on the porch. Her father got out of the car and she followed eagerly, sensing a taut wire of tension balanced in the air between them.
"What are you doing here?" her father said. He leaned against the steaming hood and made no move toward the house.
"I can see to the place if I have a mind."
"I guess there's no law against it."
"No there's not," Uncle Bud said. His hair was hanging loose about his shoulders and his cheeks looked red and swollen. "It's somebody needs to look after the place."
"I guess so," her father said.
There was a long silence and the two men eyed each other up and down. They didn't look like brothers. Not even distant cousins. It seemed as though they were strangers meeting for the very first time and not liking it one bit.
Her father took a few steps forward.
"Don't you think that maybe I ought to handle dad's affairs from now on?"
Uncle Bud growled. "I think you've done enough handling of things."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean you've been handling the old man so long it looks like he could scarcely stand on his own. Handled college out of him, the only one to do that. Handled a down payment on your mortgage when I was living in motels. Bet you would have liked to handle him some more though. Maybe have sweet talked him into splitting things sixty-forty."
"That's a damn common thing to say," her father said, his voice high like a schoolteacher's.
Uncle Bud smiled and his crooked teeth stood out like bits of frozen snow. He looked relaxed and drunk. He was not wearing a jacket and his belly hung impressively over his worn leather belt and faded jeans. His eyes spun with untellable feelings.
"I guess I'm common enough," he said slowly. "Common as salt. But I'm still executor of the will, and you're not taking that from me unless you want to shoot for it."
He was suddenly cradling a large Colt revolver loosely in his fat hand. Her father went all stiff. His face flushing red. The little muscles on the side of his face beginning to tick.
"I'm getting the sheriff," he said officially. He spun around and opened the driver door. "Get in the car, Nina."
Uncle Bud stepped forward and waved listlessly with the gun. "Let her stay and wait. I wanna have a couple words with her before you go and lock me up."
"Yes," Nina said. "Let me stay. I want to stay."
Her father's face turned from red to ash. He looked from Nina to Uncle Bud and back again. "Get in the car," he said.
"No," Nina shrilled. "I want to see the house again. I'm staying, anyway."
She walked briskly up the porch stairs and into the house. The sudden warmth of the front hall lit a fever all through her face and hands. Outside she heard Uncle Bud milling on the porch and the Pinto starting up with a violent wheeze. She heard the wheels spinning and the reverse gear rise to a shrill whine. Then she saw the door handle turn; it opened and Uncle Bud stepped inside.
In the living room a fire was burning. She walked in and sat on the flowered couch and let rhythmic tides of heat lap at her skinny legs. Uncle Bud came in and stood leaning against the mantle. The snow on his boots melted slowly into a dark puddle on the floor. He still had the Colt revolver in his hand but he held it curiously as if it were something he'd found in the brush and couldn't quite place.
"Well," he said. "Guess I'm a dumbfuck, acting to your father like that."
"I don't care," Nina said.
Uncle Bud looked out the window. "Cold out there."
"You think he minds?"
"He's used to it."
"I mean grandpa."
"Oh. I expect he don't much care anymore, cold or no cold, fire or no fire. Though he'd be glad to see you warming here. He loved you best of all, you know."
Nina stopped kicking her legs out at the fire. She realized all of a sudden that she didn't even know the man and hadn't cried for him and never would. He seemed altogether remote and unknowable, a fuzzy spot in her mind, a blank and faceless form silent in his hardwood chair, stooping every now and then to sip at a stale smelling beer.
"Honest," Uncle Bud said. "He talked about you when I'd stop off between hauls. He said you had spirit in you and wouldn't be nothing but trouble for your folks. Said you were a regular smartass."
Uncle Bud walked to the coffee table and picked up a half empty bottle, leaning painfully as though his lower back were sore. He took a swig and held it out to her. She wrapped her hand around the sticky neck and stared into the shit-colored liquid as through the eye of a microscope. Then she raised the bottle and let a trickle of the rank stuff slide onto her tongue.
"Uugh," she squealed. "It burns."
Uncle Bud laughed and took the bottle back. "One day you'll like it," he said. "I bought my first bottle when I left home for good. That was a long time ago."
She looked up at him. "What are you going to do?"
He ran the tip of his boot against the floorboards as if he were rooting for something. "Hell, I don't know. Maybe I should run for it. What do you think?"
"Yeah!" Nina said. "I'll throw them in the wrong direction. You can be an outlaw."
Uncle Bud was looking at the floor. He seemed remote and very sad, very tired. "Anyway, I don't feel like it. Guess I deserve what I get. I just wanna sit here with you. Hell, it gets so lonely at times I think--well never mind what I think."
He came over and sat on the couch. The dark bottle balanced on a broad thigh and reflected the swirling pattern of the flames. The weight of his body sunk in the couch and she slid down the crater toward his lap.
She leaned her head against his arm and looked up at him.
"Do you think he's buried out there?" she said.
"Aw, I don't know."
She jumped up with her back to the fire and her eyes lit red and dancing. "I'm gonna go and see," she said.
Uncle Bud looked as if he would protest, but then he only shrugged and tossed his bottle into the crackling fire.
She ran to the barn and swung open the door. Inside it was cold and dank, smelling of sweat and dung, hay and rotten leather, and the three roans yet to be sold or shot stood huddled together in a pen, snorting steam into the light-pierced air. She opened the gate and coaxed the oldest, a spotted mare tame as a house cat, into the bridle, the huge awkward saddle, leading her slowly into the sharp wind and bright low-hanging sun. Once outside she had to climb an old stool to get on top of the mare. In mid-swing she realized he must have needed it as well, kept it apologetically alongside the splintered woodpile as though to be broken and burned, and she felt a confused sadness throb all through her bones. She landed crooked, clung tight with her legs and took the heavy neck in her gloved hands. She spurred the mare into a reluctant trot.
The snow crunched and the mare complained and slowed to a staggering pace. In her impatience Nina kicked against the warm flank but the old mare would not be bullied. Nina sat back and let her legs go limp, remembering how she used to think she'd make a fine rodeo queen one day. That was before the boarding school, before unlearning what was unladylike, when riding carried no implications or incriminations. She looked back and saw the house falling away, the black cab sinking into the yard, and pulled her jacket tight around her neck. Against her legs the flesh pulsed and shuddered and ropes of coiled muscle swelled outwards. She rode south toward the train tracks, blinking in the sun's ice-white glare.
The hour seemed to freeze dead. The wind was kicking up waves of dusty snow that worked under her collar and inside her sleeves. Fragments lodged under her eyelid and burned. In some places the snow was too deep and she had to back the old mare out and cut a fresh angle, looking to the distant house for bearings, trying instinctively to follow the cow path's buried course. When she came finally upon the tracks--all black and slick with ice coating, concealed behind a long winding drift--she was startled to find them so close. All the way to the western horizon they slashed a field of unbroken whiteness like lines drawn in ink upon a fresh sheet of paper. There was no interruption in the pattern, nothing to separate one quarter-mile section from another. When she faced east it was the same: an endless monotony of black on white, unerringly straight, stabbing into the sprawling plains which were like a cloud-washed sky she rode over, a sky which extended forever and contained no sign of life or hope.
She shut her eyes and tried to imagine what it was like for him in those final moments. Her bones were old and bent, her skin pale and thin like worn newspaper, her eyes clouded and squinting in the dizzying onslaught of the storm. The mare whinnied and lurched nervously beneath her. She held the reins tight and drove the cattle with frequent hollers, battling their instinct to stop and huddle. She felt the rim of her ears so brittle that a misplaced finger might crack them into slivers. Her breathing was shallow and asthmatic. All at once the old mare stopped, bowing her long head, and Nina kicked her hard about the flank. She was confused and suddenly afraid, feeling the spinning cloud of snow grow thick about her and the wind coming up hard and knowing there was still a good thirty minutes to familiar fences, and this fear made her gut rumble and her heart hammer and her eyes water, and the damn mare standing there like a dumb post shivering and steaming until she jerked the reins with all her might and aimed the edge of her bootsole savagely into an arched rib bone. The mare raised her head and lifted a scrawny leg in the air. A thunderous vibration was rising from somewhere, seemingly far off and dim, and the very earth trembled with its resonance. Was it thunder? Thunder in a blizzard? Had she ever heard of that before? And could she trust these half deaf ears which more often than not held remembered sound between their grizzled walls, fragments of echoed years? The mare's hoof crunched into deep snow and then Nina lifted her head, blinking into the whiteness, thinking she was hallucinating, because the light that suddenly enveloped her was too bright to be real, too holy, and she had no sooner begun to discredit it than she was lost in it, swimming in one breathless moment that would never end.
She opened her eyes. She felt the warm and brittle horse hair in her hands, the thick pulsing neck. To the east and west the oily tracks lay desolate and still like prehistoric bones, and it struck her in a moment of simplest horror that her grandpa was not to be found; that he had vanished altogether from the earth. She felt a chill run all through her. Looking out over the endless distance it occurred to her that this might be death. Her clenched lips drew into a bloodless slit. She bent and held the mare's neck tightly in her hands, listening for the heartbeat and the rushing blood, sucking in the heat and the musty horse-odor.
In a rush she thought of Uncle Bud. She wanted to confront him now, to ask where her grandpa was, where he had gone. She spun the old mare and kicked hard against her heavy flank, starting her to a dangerous trot, and looked off to where her grandpa's house lay pasted flat against the skyline. That was when she heard the police car rushing in from town and bleating like a lost calf.
The mare moved with a surreal slowness, stepping carefully in the snow until she became confident of her footing, while Nina stood in the saddle trying to see what was happening. As she drew nearer and could just make out the black top of Uncle Bud's cab, she heard a strange voice waft briefly in the thin air. Her breathing quickened and the heat rose in her face. The mare pressed forward into the wind.
Soon figures became visible around the front porch. Her father was standing alongside two officers dressed in brown slacks with wide oval hats on their heads. She could not see Uncle Bud.
"Hey!" she called out. She leapt off the horse's back and tumbled through the snow.
Her father turned and watched her approach, then looked away at the porch stairs where the two officers had knelt. When she broke into the open yard she saw the officers helping Uncle Bud to his feet, and he was laughing loudly while he clutched his right arm with a big meaty hand.
"Jesus," he was saying to one of the officers, his voice broken by convulsive guffaws. "You figure a guy would take care. You figure he ought to know better."
She caught sight of his gun, just a few feet away on the ice-slick steps.
"Just my friggin luck. Is my arm broke?" He looked over at her and stopped rigid all at once. His bibulous eyes throbbed. "Hey sweetheart, you missed the show."
The officers were leading him to the squad car, his arm splayed wide at the elbow. She wanted to rush over and tell him that she was afraid grandpa might be someplace awful, blind and alone, but suddenly he was in the back seat of the cruiser and the officers were busy babytalking him and giving first aid, so she shut up and didn't say anything at all.
Her father came over and put an arm over her shoulder. She let it lie there coldly.
"Honey," he said, "your uncle's had an accident. He isn't well. They're going to take him to the doctor's."
She broke from him and ran to the car. One of the officers, a young man with sharp white cheekbones, had slid around to the driver's side and was cranking the engine while he talked loudly on his radio. The other was settling in beside Uncle Bud looking miserable and worried. As she came abreast of the window, Uncle Bud bent over and vomited in his lap. Then he looked up, a pinkish beard stubbling his chin, and rolled the window slowly down. His good hand was a contorted, tremulous claw.
"Don't look so grim," he said.
"Why not?"
He shrugged. "Guess you can look how you like, anyway."
She turned her nose at the reek. "Are they taking you to jail?"
"Could be," he said, and his sallow eyes rolled in her father's direction. "Ask the lawyer. I guess some guys are born lucky and the others have to shut up and do their best. Your grandpa trusted me with his will, but maybe that wasn't so smart. He never trusted me with much else."
His face was flushed in a strange mix of elation and wonder and consuming sadness. It seemed suddenly that there was so much she didn't know about her own family, about the people she'd been seeing all her life, and she felt very small and bewildered as her grandpa must have felt in that final moment before spurring his horse on into oblivion.
The squad car began to back away slowly, crackling snow as it maneuvered the driveway.
"Honey," her father said from behind.
But she launched after the car in a mad sprint and called out to her uncle in a furious voice, "Uncle Bud, it's nowhere! It's nothing out there at all!" and Uncle Bud leaned his head out the window and grinned, blunt-toothed, in a look she would never forget all the days of her life. "So what did you expect?" he said. "That's buffalo country."
She watched the window go up and the cruiser make a U-turn in the road. The
lights came on as it sped off toward town, growing smaller on the horizon, a
single fleeting object drawing upon itself like the last coiling ember in her
grandpa's fireplace. 
Copyright (c) 1994 by Aaron Even. Reprinted by permission of the author.
