The policeman looked as if every grain of superfluity had been swept from him: His pale cheeks had been so closely shaved that they burned like mirrors in the cold sun. He covered the distance between his cruiser and the transgressors, Alex left in the margins, and greeted Maya, but her tongue had gone dry, so she only nodded.
“Your vehicle?” he said. “Welcome to South Dakota.”
“Will we be arrested?” Maya said.
“Arrested?” the cop said.
“It’s our first time,” Maya said in self-defense. “I’m sorry. We were driving all night—”
“They let you relieve yourself on the side of the road in New Jersey?”
He had a young man’s voice, and Maya realized she was probably older than him. She shook her head mournfully.
“We like our land urine-free, too,” he said. Alex, until now rooted in place, called out for permission to approach. The cop shrugged; it was a free country. Alex stepped carefully toward them.
“I’m sorry,” Maya croaked out. “It was a mistake. I’m very sorry.”
The cop watched her with curiosity. “I’m not going to arrest you,” he said, as if the trouble would be greater for him.
Maya was covered with gratitude, and felt on the verge of tears.
“But I will give you a ride to the diner,” he said. “It’s just up the road.”
“But there will be a ticket,” Maya said, wanting to offer up a lack of illusions.
“There will be a warning,” the cop said. “And a ride in my cruiser. Let’s go. Your husband can follow in your vehicle.”
Down the field, the white birds leaped and plunged. The birds dove for buried worms not only when the cows chewed the grass, but when they shat it out, the birds’ feathers turning oily and brown.
Alex watched with astonishment as Maya walked her son to the police cruiser. They climbed in behind a mesh-wire panel. The patrolman leaned out the front window and ordered Alex to follow. Alex nodded energetically and ran toward the Escape. The cop turned toward the backseat. “You all right?” he asked Maya. He looked at Max: “You ever been in a squad car?”
Max shook his head. He was taking in his surroundings like a cat — alert but unsure what to think of things.
“It’s going to be your first and last time. Unless you decide to sit where I’m sitting. We’ve got a deal?”
Max nodded. Adults were constantly striking deals with him.
A quarter mile up the road, the Badlands Diner sent gray plumes of wood-scented smoke out of a scuffed, dented chimney. The cruiser pulled up by the large windows, and Maya had the fresh experience of being watched by two dozen diners as she and her son idled in the backseat of a police cruiser.
The cop looked back at Max. “Keep your mother out of trouble,” he said. To Maya, he said: “Do you know where you’re going?”
Maya nodded feebly. “Thank you,” she managed.
“Enjoy your stay,” he said.
“I don’t like New Jersey,” Maya blurted out in conciliation.
“I don’t blame you,” the cop said. “Though, to be fair, haven’t been myself.”
Maya nodded, as if accepting a reprimand, and opened the back door. The diners at the window stared. She climbed out, dragging Max behind her. “Thank you,” she said once again into the cavern of the car. The cop raised a finger to his temple. The last thing Maya saw before heading in was her husband’s glare from the wheel of the Escape, which he had parked sufficiently far from the cruiser to avoid obvious association with the woman getting out of it. He looked as if he wished the South Dakota law had addressed this case differently.
Inside the diner, a fireplace was roaring and the short-order bell was clacking over and over — Maya had expected, in the wilderness, soul-chilling, funereal quiet, but her morning clamored with bedlam. Every scalloped red banquette was taken. A clothesline strung with fans of pleated red-and-blue bunting wavered lightly above the seating. There must have been rooms upstairs because the ceiling heaved with footsteps and scurrying. Children? Animals? Children fleeing from animals? Maya almost learned the answer — some cataclysm befell the feeble flooring, sending a skein of white dust onto the hostess stand. Maya quickly swept it off with her hand.
A mincing son at her side, she was ignored by two waitresses, gliding around each other with the resentful familiarity of people who have spent long hours in the same kitchen. Maya instantly feared both of them. “Well, they’re salting everything at the tables, Charlie,” one of them said to the sweaty face peering out of the short-order window. Her hair was pinned up in a businesslike pile, as if in the morning she gave you pancakes and in the afternoon she loaned you at the bank. “My job is to tell you,” she said to the sweating face. “What you do with it, that’s your job.”
A man at the counter was watching Maya; the manager? Maya tried to avoid his eyes, which bored into her with a glinting amusement — she did not feel up to another correction. The stains of paint on his jeans and his wrists, and his shoulder-torn sweater, would have made her think he was poor — Maya thought everyone in the American West would be poor — but the sweater was thickly woven, and his knife and fork were poised above his eggs with a strange delicateness, as if he was shy to cut in. A book was open next to his plate.
“Sit down, if you’re looking to order,” he said to Maya. “They don’t know what to do with you if you’re standing.”
Maya colored, feeling the interloper’s familiar cluelessness. It, not Alex, was her true life’s companion. Just when she began to get free of the feeling, she mispronounced a word or failed to apprehend some invisible rule, and lived the next days like a guest, a cherry pit of self-reproach in her stomach. How was one to know these things? The hostess podium said: “Please wait to be seated.”
“My son just needs to go to the bathroom,” she said timidly. Because she was trying hard to pronounce the words without an accent, she sounded to herself like someone who’d arrived yesterday. But the man only smiled in that American way, at once vacuous and reassuring, out of grayish-green eyes. With the tip of his butter knife, he indicated an alcove at the end of the counter.
“You can just go?” Maya said. “It isn’t only for customers?” Now, Maya was intent on scrupulously observing laws both written and unwritten. She would be the Badlands Diner’s most desirable customer. She would cause no further provocation this morning.
He plucked an inverted cup from a long tray with two handles shaped like buffalo skulls and set it to the right of him. “There,” he said. “You’re a customer.”
Maya knelt before Max. “It’s just that way, honey.”
“Come with me,” Max whispered.
“I can’t go with you. Girls can’t go into the bathroom with boys.”
“You have to wait just one minute,” the man said. “The Furies are in there right now.”
The bathroom lock cracked open and two teenage girls tumbled out. Giggling, they made their way down the counter. It was plain that they were sisters from their heavy legs and soft, swimming cheekbones, but their laughter rang out differently — one hid it in her chin and the other, a year or two older, sang it out. They were Laurel’s age when she delivered her son, if not older. But they were children, just children. But Laurel, in her home, had felt like a woman. The laws for each person are different. Maya saw the girls’ father in the strict cut of their mouths, the eyes glowing gray-green and mossy like his. They were like the same words in two slightly different languages. On the father’s face she saw a reticent satisfaction. Seated, the older one tried to steal an egg from his plate. She got the yolk, which dripped all over the counter, setting off a fresh round of laughter. He tried to get a corner of her shirt to wipe it, and she yelled. The waitress with the bank haircut laid down a pile of napkins on the counter without looking at anyone and went into the main room with a coffeepot.