She drank off the remainder of the tea, still warm in her fingers, and watered the hardpan with the last drops. Somewhere out there, her mountain was resting. Was it a mountain? Was there a more accurate term? A bluff, a butte, a ridge? She felt the old desperation for the right names. Out here, one had to learn English all over again. Earlier in the day, Maya had tried to hold on to the words Ranger Holliver had called out. Washes, canyons, mesas, eskers, and fells: she gave up. It had used to make her feel unsafe, this encirclement by the unknown — but known to everyone else. It had occurred to her on the naturalist walk that this sense of endangerment was discretionary. If one does not know things, one also does not know one can be harmed by them.
Couldn’t she invent her own name for the mountain? Just as Laurel and Tim were “the cowboys.” Only that was a lie. How to be truthful about the mountain? Because a mountain was always truthful, she felt. The mountain did not make mistakes. (She remembered Uncle Misha: “A snowflake never falls in the wrong place.”) It would never work, her union with the bluff-butte-ridge-mountain. She resented its unapproachable splendor.
“I wanted to open a café once,” she said for no reason. “Café Gogol. Isn’t it something to open a café named after someone you haven’t read?” Somewhere far away, an animal howled at the night. She made a slight noise and recoiled.
“Just a coyote,” he said. “Mile away.”
“It feels like a short mile,” she said.
He smiled. “Don’t think about it. Keep telling me about the café.”
“I wanted it to have a library. I would be strict — you would have to read the book there. But you could pay with books. One day a week, for example, you would not be allowed to pay with money, only books. And I would be the cook. At the diner today, I looked at the man in the cooking window, with sweat and grease on his face, and I imagined myself in his position. In this small town, forgotten by everyone, everything.”
“I’m sure it looks like the desert to you,” Marion said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if a million people come here each year. Man who owns that diner’s a millionaire. I’d pay money to see you take him on to put in a library, though.”
“I never thought it could be cold in the desert,” Maya said.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “I clean my brain here.”
They sat on their stumps, looking ahead. The silence was split by an occasional call, something that sounded like loneliness to Maya and to the caller probably like a basic self-affirmation. Her first night on Misha’s farm, Maya was awoken by a donkey shrieking like a sheep caught in barbed wire. She rushed to wake up her uncle. “Oh, little daughter, he’s just checking himself,” Misha said, smiling sleepily. By the end of the summer, the call had merged with the other sounds of the night. Now, the howl having receded, there was full silence, not even cicadas, the usual custodians of the darknesses Maya had known.
“You’re trying to find the parents, aren’t you,” Marion broke the silence.
“I’ve spent eight years thinking about it,” she said. She told him the town. “Sometimes, I think it isn’t an actual place, Montana. It exists but not in the way other places exist.”
“Are you nervous?” he said.
“I envy Alex,” she said. “He thinks this is a mistake. Today, I think it’s a mistake, tomorrow I think it’s not a mistake.” She felt the ground with her fingers. “It’s my birthday in two days. But I want to fast-forward to the day after. Isn’t that sad?”
He shrugged. “I don’t care about my birthday. You can’t assign good things.” He slapped his knees as if this was a concluding statement and he was about to rise, but he stayed put and a little nerve seemed to go out of him. He shook his thermos. “My flawless feel says there are two capfuls of this whiskey-tea left. Let’s finish, and then I’ll show you something. A birthday present.” He pointed into the gloom.
“You want to go — there?” she said.
“It’s not bad.”
“Are you sure? I’ll need to hold your arm.”
“I won’t object.”
After finishing the tea, they walked past the edge of the campground, the hardpan murmuring under their feet, Maya’s head filling with rattlesnakes. Every step resolved amicably was a small deliverance — she got sixty a minute. But you couldn’t feel those attacks of relief — safe, safe, safe — without striding around darkness where rattlesnakes roamed.
“They don’t really come out at night,” Marion said, guessing her thoughts. They weren’t hard to guess: She was stepping through the gloom like a horse, her legs kicking out before cautiously meeting the ground. “They like sunshine. Just like you.”
The campground was far behind now, though Marion walked steadily without the aid of a flashlight. She asked if he still had it, and he shone it in front of her. “But it only makes it darker, in a way,” he said. She nodded and he flicked it off.
In the darkness, Maya felt uneasy down to her bowels. She made herself think of an evening at Uncle Misha’s. Her uncle had not brought her to the farm to stand in the crystalline sun, finally revealed after nine months of winter, and admire fresh soil. She was given a spade and pickaxe and sent to ruffle up plots for corn, squash, and beans in the garden Misha had decided to get going. By two P.M., the sun, looking to make up for time lost in winter, had reached the spot in the sky from which it could shine most directly on Maya’s pigtails, and she felt that her stomach would tear in half if she lifted the pickaxe once more. But she refused to reveal herself as unequal to the task, buried her face in a trough Misha had just refilled with icy well water for the pigs, and went back at it. At the dinner table, as Misha stuffed behind his cheeks bread smeared with sour cream and sunflower oil, he glowered at his niece pridefully. The niece fell asleep at the dinner table.
The night that Misha had asked Maya to go out to the garden and snip off some zucchini for his farmhouse stir-fry — eggplant, old bread crusts, blistered tomatoes — was well into the summer. (She observed with pride the copper of her skin, dried out by the sun; her forearms, which, she imagined, showed new lines and veins; only her breasts refused to grow.) The garden had lost its mind. The leaves of the squash, pitted by some infestation Misha had explained but Maya had forgotten, hung about like giant elephant ears; the squashes themselves trampled underfoot like Buddhas; the cucumbers and zucchinis swung at every step like — well, it was impolite to say what she gathered they resembled; and the tomato vines had wrapped themselves around every fencepost or slithered down the loam like reptiles. Snakes lived in the garden, and gophers, and rabbits. The entire animal world approved of the garden she’d made.
It was dusk when she walked into the garden for Misha’s dinner zucchini, violet bands of light on the horizon, the grass exhaling after being released by the sun. Pushing aside the cratered squash leaves, which regathered above her, she felt as if she was disappearing into an unfriendly wood; she imagined the pest that had riddled the leaves crawling around her ankles and snakes coiling around her feet. She got hopelessly tangled, but when she tried to free herself, she found an even denser clump, and then something pricked her skin. She screamed and tried to fight her way out of the patch, trampling the harvest. Stalks banged her shins, sandpapery leaves rubbed her thighs, thorns pecked her cheeks. She fought with the thicket until she ran out and collided with Misha, who had come running out of the house.
“What is it, dochen’ka?” he huffed out. His smoking made him short of breath. “What is it?”
She could not bring herself to say; she was too embarrassed. She only pointed at the garden.