He nodded, and went to his bedroom for a clean shirt. Drank too much. That’s what he’d figured, at first. Kids partied on the lake bed year-round. Harris often heard the echoes of screeching and thumping they called music. Out here they could see the headlights of Bowman’s BLM Jeep coming from fifty miles away, if it came at all. The whole area was off-limits, but most kids knew as well as Harris did that paying one man to patrol the entire basin, from the north edge of the lake bed all the way to the Quinn River Sink, almost a thousand square miles, was the same as paying nobody.
He returned to the kitchen. This girl seemed different from those kids, somehow. She was beautiful, or could have been. Her features were too weary for someone her age.
Magda motioned to the dog, lying in front of the swamp cooler. “Who’s this?”
“Milo,” he said. “She found you. You likely got heatstroke. You should eat.” He brought her a mug of the soup and refilled her water.
She took a bit of soup up to her lips, nodding politely to the dog. “Thanks, Milo.” She looked around, not eating, spooning at her soup as though she expected to find a secret at the bottom of the mug. “You’re a real rock hound, no?”
“I do some lapidary work,” he said.
“You at the mine?”
“Used to be. I retired.”
Magda set her soup on the coffee table. She picked up a dusty piece of smoky quartz the size of a spark plug from the shelf beside her and let it rest in her palm. “So, what do you do out here?” she asked.
“I make by,” he said. “I got a few claims.”
“Gold?”
He nodded and she laughed, showing her metal fillings, a solid silver molar. “This place is sapped,” she said, and laughed again. She had a great laugh, widemouthed and toothy. “The gold’s gone, old-timer.”
“Gold ain’t all gone,” Harris said. “Just got to know where to look.” He pushed the mug toward her. “You should eat.”
Magda regarded the soup. “I don’t feel good. Hungover.”
Milo lifted herself and settled at Harris’s feet. Harris scratched the soft place behind her ear. “I drove you in from the lake bed,” he said, gesturing out front. “I got a standard cab. Small. You didn’t smell like you drank too much. Didn’t smell like you drank at all.”
Magda set the quartz roughly on the coffee table and leaned back into the couch. “That’s sweet,” she said dryly.
Harris walked to the pantry and returned. He set an unopened sleeve of saltine crackers in Magda’s lap. “My ex-wife ate boxes of these things.”
“Good for her,” said Magda.
“Especially when she was pregnant,” he said. “I suppose they were the only thing that settled her stomach. Used to keep them everywhere, on her nightstand, in the medicine cabinet, the glove box of my truck.”
Magda touched her belly, then quickly moved her hand away. She considered the saltines for a moment, then opened the package. She took out a cracker and pressed the salted side against her tongue. “You can tell?” she asked, her mouth full.
Harris nodded. “What, twelve weeks or so?”
The question bored Magda, it seemed. She shrugged as though he’d asked whether she wanted to bust open a geode with a hammer and see what was inside.
Carrie Ann had taken a hundred pictures of herself at twelve weeks. Polaroids. The film had cost a fortune. She wanted to send them out to family, but, as with so many of her projects, she never got around to it. So for months the photos slid around the house like sheets of gypsum. After she lost the baby, when he couldn’t stand the sight of them anymore, he collected every last one, took them to work and, when no one was around, threw them into the incinerator.
He took the quartz into his own hand now and pointed it at Magda’s abdomen. “You want to tell me who did this to you?” He spit on the crystal and with his thumb buffed the spot where the saliva landed.
“It was my boyfriend,” she said. She snapped another cracker in half with her tongue. “But he only did it because I asked him to.”
Harris felt instantly sick. “Why’d he leave you then?”
“Because he’s a fucking momma’s boy. He’d just finished when we saw BLM coming. That ranger goes to Ronnie’s church. We’re not supposed to be together.” She smiled. “He said he’d come back for me.”
“Hell of a plan.”
“You think I don’t know that? He just took off.” She folded another cracker into her mouth.
“He could have killed you, hitting you like that.”
“What were we supposed to do? His mom was threatening to send him to Salt Lake to live with his grandma just for going out with me.”
“What about your folks?”
“Forget it.”
“Jesus,” Harris said softly.
“I tried him.” Magda laughed. “La Virgen, too. Nothing.”
Harris decided to let the girl be a while. He turned on the AM jazz station and had his evening smoke on the porch. Through the screen door came Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Fats Waller, Artie Shaw. When he returned, Magda was biting into the last saltine in the sleeve. “Can we turn this off?” she said, and without waiting for an answer hit the power button on the radio.
Harris went to the pantry and brought out the whole box of saltines. He set it on the coffee table. “You want, you can take these with you.” She eyeballed the box. “I’ll give you a ride,” he said. “We got to get you home.”
“I know. It’s just… I’m still feeling a little sick.” She combed her fingers through her hair. “I wonder would the ride upset my stomach even worse, you think? Probably I should stay here, just for the night. If that’s okay with you, Bud.”
This was a lie, he knew, though her face gave up nothing. He didn’t like the prospect of explaining to the authorities why he was hiding a runaway. And there were her parents to consider. If he had a girl, he’d beat the living shit out of anyone who kept her overnight while he was looking for her. The county was full of men—fathers—who’d do the same or worse.
And yet he said nothing, only sat for a moment with his hands on his knees and then walked to the linen closet to get the girl a quilt and a clean pillowcase. He’d take her home. First thing in the morning. The girl smiled up at him as he handed her the linens. What was one night?
His sleep was fitful and often interrupted. He had to piss constantly these days and crossed the hall as quietly as he could, hoping the girl would not notice. When he did sleep he dreamed vile scenes of stomachs and fists, babies and blood. Once he woke sure he’d heard the throaty chafe of Magda’s voice at his bedroom door. Levántate. Around four a.m. he started to a faint knock, imagined. An erection strained against his shorts. It’d been some time since he was blessed with such and so he quietly took advantage. After, he slept soundly through the remaining nighttime hours.
Harris rose in the early violet of the morning, antsy with a feeling like digging on a fresh plot of land. He dressed in clean blue jeans, white cotton socks, boots and a fresh white T-shirt. He tucked an unopened pack of filterless Camels into his breast pocket, poured himself a mug of coffee and walked quietly through the living room to the porch, so as not to wake the girl.
Carrie Ann had been gone since the spring of 1991, having cleared her Kewpie dolls and floral china out of the curio cabinets, wrapped them in newspaper, married a state trooper she’d met in Fallon while she was—yes—staying at her sister’s. She’d long since moved with the man to Sacramento. Their miracle baby was almost sixteen. And still Harris accommodated her by smoking outside.
He’d stirred the shit a little when, a new bride, she forbade him from smoking in the house. He went on about a man’s home being his own and hadn’t he earned the right, but in truth he didn’t mind being shooed outdoors. He was even patient later, when she implied that his smoking—combined with his single glass of bourbon in the evening—was the reason they were having such a hell of a time conceiving again, that he ought to take better care of himself, and finally that he didn’t give a shit whether they made a baby or not. But it could not be said that Harris made things easy for his young wife. He never held Carrie Ann’s temper against her—in his head he forgave her before she even apologized—but just the same he never let on how it soothed him when she let off steam, that seeing her angry was effortless next to seeing her hurting. And where was the harm, he figured, in letting his hotheaded wife guilt herself into a steak dinner, a foot rub, a blow job?