They pass semis in a blind wash of white. Station wagons and pickup trucks. The Nova swishes but stays road bound. Sometimes Baker lets out a little whoop, and sometimes he yawns and then shakes his head violently, as if to drive away his fatigue, but mostly he stays clenched, focused, two hands on the wheel, leading with his chin. The flask stays in his pocket.
An hour south of Salt Lake, the snow stops and the freeway clears. Baker slowly relaxes, sits back, and holds the wheel with one hand, but he still seems agitated. It is past ten.
“So, tell me,” Baker says. “Were you fucking her? Was this other kid fucking her? The Indian? God, let’s hope not. Let’s hope not for her sake. I mean, she’s in a big enough shit storm already without fucking some mongrel dog.”
“Don’t say that,” Jason says — and Baker pounds him on the shoulder, fist like stone driving him into the door.
“Don’t start giving me advice about what to say.”
Jason rubs and rubs his arm, and the moment he releases it, Baker pounds him again. The new pain vacuums up Jason’s breath, leaves him cringing and wincing, close to tears.
“Okay, goddammit?” Baker says.
“Okay.” Jason says. “Okay.”
“So. Who was fucking her? Somebody was fucking her.”
“No.”
“Kid, you must be the stupidest guy on the face of this earth. Your buddy was fucking her. Is fucking her. I mean, that’s the way this works: you ate all your horses, it won’t stop snowing, and somebody else is fucking your girl.”
He pounds the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. Fear seeps through Jason. He tries to sort out the message in the story: Who ate the horses? What was the snow?
“Get it?” Baker says. “You’re fucked, is what it is.”
They pass a sign that glares in the Nova’s headlights: CEDAR CITY 112. Jason knows that is where they will leave the freeway and head down, into the desert, to Short Creek.
Baker yawns — the yawn swamps him, against his will, large and powerful — and then shakes his head violently, as if to drive it away. He sniffs. Nods.
“Yeah, I’m afraid Lori was fucking your little redskin. Worse than I even thought. I mean, you live your life, you make your plans, you try to do the right thing, and what happens? What happens, kid? I’m asking you.”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know! You do know because I just told you! What happens,” Baker says, “is you ate all the horses and it won’t stop snowing and the girl you love is fucking some dirty Indian nigger and you have to figure out what to do about it.”
He whistles and clicks his tongue.
“Gotta figure out who to eat.”
• • •
She feels almost sick going back into that house. A little dulled and confused. An unplugged lamp sits on the floor, cord like a tail, and trapezoids of moonlight, cast through the windows, hang on the bare walls. Ghosts of missing furniture haunt the carpet.
“This place is huge,” Boyd says, flipping on a light. Loretta flips it back off. “Let’s not go announcing ourselves,” she says. She sets down her duffel bag. The gold inside — the coins in the canvas sack, rolled tightly inside one of her denim skirts — clangs dully on the linoleum entry. She kicks off her shoes. Force of habit. Ruth’s rules. Boyd wanders the carpet in his dirty gray tennis shoes, gazing up at the high ceiling like he’s in a cathedral. It’s past ten, late for around here, but who knows who might see a light and get interested. She’s not sure whether the United Order might stop by. The God Squad. She’s not sure it isn’t officially Uncle Elden’s house or the Order’s house. They own everything. But Dean’s key worked on the front door, and she’s soon to see about the others. She’s gripping them so tightly they might be cutting into her palm.
It’s time to tell Boyd, probably. She looks at him to begin and sees he is coming her way, his best attempt at a romantic look on his face, eyebrows raised. It never ends, these men coming at her. She can tell he is nervous, half embarrassed. She misses Bradshaw and his crazy confidence.
“Stop it,” she says, though she smiles to soften it. “I’ve got something to show you. To tell you.”
They sit on the floor in the darkened, moonlit room. She explains about the coins she has. She explains about the gold that is still, now, she thinks, locked in Dean’s office. “Gold!” Boyd says. “Fuckin’-A!” She unwraps and shows him the coins, thick and heavy, gleaming richly, almost amber in the dim light, and she lets him hold them, and he seems awestruck. He keeps saying it, a prayer or a curse: “Gold!” She tells him about the Sutter Creek gold, how important it is to Dean, and how important that is to her.
“I want to take it from him, and I want him to know I took it from him, and I want him to know that I knew how important it was to him when I took it,” she says.
Boyd is looking at her strangely.
“Lori,” he whispers. “Why did he leave that gold down here? In an empty house?”
“What?”
“Why did he leave it here? Why would he?”
It does not dawn on her slowly. She does not have to think it over. It reminds her of a crash she once had on a bicycle; one moment she was moving along one way, and then she abruptly was not, and the blow that struck her felt not like it came from a specific direction but from everywhere at once. Why had she ever thought the gold was here? She couldn’t remember.
“Lori?”
She takes the coins and wraps them back up, then goes to the door to Dean’s office, the white cube at the back of the room off the kitchen. The key slides and turns. She puts on the light in the windowless room. It’s half emptied, too — some of Dean’s books remain, some files, a pair of his Red Wings on the floor beside the chair, one tipped on its side. She goes to the cabinet, to the bottom drawer, and takes the smaller key between her thumb and forefinger. The key slides and turns, and the drawer pulls out, and the drawer is empty.
“Well, shit,” Boyd says.
She sits in the chair heavily.
“Who cares?” Boyd says.
She cares. This is not his to judge, to care about or not care about. She kicks idly at the metal drawer, and then again, harder. She thinks back: The Sutter Creek gold wasn’t with the coins, she knew that. Didn’t she know that? And she had looked everywhere through that house up in Idaho, everywhere she could think of, every chance she had. And then — what? Why had she decided it was here? He told her. Hadn’t he? The idea seems so ludicrous now. So clearly, obviously ludicrous. She feels stupid. As stupid as Jason. As stupid as Boyd.
“We should get out of here,” she says.
“We’ve still got the coins, though,” Boyd says.
She doesn’t answer. We. His big hurt brown eyes. How could she have done what she did with him? She feels a pang of judgment about herself: whore. Boyd flops onto the couch, arms outstretched, exhausted. She goes to the carpeted, banistered staircase and starts up. She will get her things, her shoebox, and they will go, and that will be okay, it will be all right, it will still be great that she has done this, that she has fled Dean and that life.