The clock makes the V of 1:50. Louis should have been here hours ago. But first there was the matter with Dean — Dean arguing, and then insisting, that he not bring in the police, and then Becky recoiling when he told her he had agreed to that and shaming him into coming here at last. And now that he’s here, he’s being told he is too early. He is recalling now what it had been like to be a brawling youngster — he and Dean swinging it out on the front lawn as kids, he and any number of other boys, his friends, even, back in those days of high school and youth, the days of drag racing the dirt roads around Gooding, the days before he settled down, as he always knew he would — recalling what it had been like in the moments before a fight, the pressure about to burst.
“I know this is hard, Louis,” Moody says, watching one of his hands idly scratching the back of the other.
“How would you know that, Sidney? By what possible means would you know this is hard?”
Louis senses that he has recomposed himself.
“Maybe you ought to speak to the sheriff.”
“Maybe I should, Sidney. Maybe I damn well should.”
Apparently, his voice has risen. The sheriff comes out from the warren of fluorescent-lit linoleum hallways, holding up both hands and smiling amicably, a peacemaker.
• • •
Louis has been immersed in other people’s problems for so long that he’s almost forgotten what the hot pain of crisis feels like firsthand. He had served as the ward’s bishop for almost five years, and most recently has been the head of the young men’s program. People approach him constantly for advice and solace. My husband is spending all of our money gambling. I am struggling with sexually impure thoughts. My boss is asking me to work on Sundays. My wife won’t tell me where she’s been going on Saturday afternoons. My son is stealing money from his grandmother.
What do these people want? He would simply tell them what he thought they should do—leave your husband, forgive your husband, report your son to the police—but that was never what they wanted. People almost always know what they should do. What they come for is comfort. To have the difficult thing done for them. They want to be confirmed as the kind of person they think themselves to be, while doing something that person would not do. Or to extract themselves from the situation that proves they are not the kind of person they think themselves to be. To retract, to undo, to redo. Years and years of listening to people has hardened this sense in Louis — this notion that people come to him for love and repair only, never for advice about what to do — and has also hardened his sense that he can do neither, that he cannot fix them and he cannot love them, not really love them, not enough to fix them.
And so he has become distant from them, one by one, with their heartbreaks and hypocrisies, wanting to be relieved of the things that are rightfully theirs. He has become just as distant as Sid Moody, the deputy, and because he understands Moody’s detachment, he understands how Moody is calculating his own — Louis’s — pain and need and impossibility, and he understands that Moody had put him at a distance before they even began.
• • •
He and Becky drive the roads around Gooding. He tells her it’s because the kids might be out there somewhere, crashed and hurt, or worse, but he doesn’t think the kids are out there. He just wants to move. To avoid sitting. Becky has entered a stunned silence at last, but she bombarded him with questions, with expectations, when he returned from the sheriff’s office. The sheriff had agreed to put out a dispatch to other law enforcement agencies, and to put in a few calls to sheriffs in neighboring counties.
“And what else?” Becky asked.
“What else what?”
“Is that it?”
“I don’t think there’s anything else to do.”
He can hear the rage in the watery notes of her voice. It is a sticking point between them — his passivity — and she is feasting on this, filling herself with all that he is not, though they will speak of it, as ever, in the measured tones of people in control.
“There has to be more, Louis. There has to be.”
So they are driving. They drive east on Old Shoshone Road, and south on Pole Line, and back west on Highway 26, and then south on 46, and then he begins simply cruising every country block, through the fields and farms. She asks him again where he thinks Jason has gone, and he tells her again that he doesn’t know. No ideas? No, he says. Does she have any? She does not.
They return when it’s time for milking. There, inside the noise of the barn, the wet suck of the machines and the milky, cow-shitty odor, Louis feels a measure of relief, and stops thinking for the moment, tries his very best to vanish inside the things that make this day like any other day.
Loretta
All things begin to seem possible. Loretta says, “Who wants to gamble?” and Jason, who seems to be stumbling and slurring even while sitting silently, burps and grins, and Boyd says, “How are we supposed to get away with that?” and Loretta rolls her eyes. “Jeez. I thought I was the sheltered one,” she says, thinking maybe they could just live here, like this, the three of them. Or just two of them — she and Boyd. Every worldly thing is here. Every sinful thing.
They go to the casino, and she is right, no one bothers them. She gets tokens for the slots at the window — shows them her room key, and they ask no questions. The casino is mostly deserted; the ringing of slots and the thick haze of cigarette smoke fill the room. Now and then the reek of liquor wafts by, and Loretta breathes it in. She sits at a slot machine, and Jason and Boyd flank her. At one point, Boyd reaches across and says, “Let me try,” and pulls the lever, and she smells him, soap and beer and something sweetly foreign, and she looks at his skin and finds that she wants to look at it closely, wants to examine his dark skin — she has never been so close to it, never touched it, and now she finds it exotic and interesting, the way it pales at the elbow and finger joints and worn places, the way it lightens on his palms, and she thinks about what this skin is, in the world that she has left behind, she thinks about the fact that the skin is the punishment of God, in the world she has left behind, and it makes her want to touch that skin and smell that skin. It makes her want to know what that skin means — that difference. She wonders about demons and men; she wonders why she believes in demons, beings beyond the world of people. She cannot understand why she believes in this, when so much of everything else from that world she has left behind she has simply left behind. What if Boyd were a demon? What if that was what his dark skin meant? And what if she wanted it anyway?
The waitress roaming the casino asks them if they want drinks, and Loretta answers for all of them: “Three beers and three shots,” and the waitress jots and leaves. Loretta pulls the handle — cherry, banana, cherry — and the waitress returns. Loretta shows the boys how to throw back the shots, though she has never done it. How does she know how to do it? Her future is teaching her how.
Jason seems the drunkest, but they’re all drunk. It’s almost six. From the speakers comes rowdy music. “I… wanna rock and roll all night and party e-ve-ry day.” Loretta keeps pulling the slot handle, and keeps losing. Behind her, Boyd and Jason bicker.
Jason says, “I’d be happy to buy you a bus ticket home,” and Boyd says, “I bet you would.”