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  At school the next day Dakotah mumbled to Sherri that she was sorry her granddad had brought the kitten back. “He said cats give him asmar.”

  Sherri looked at her. “He didn’t bring it back. He didn’t come to our house. What’s asmar?”

  As she approached her teens the leg whippings stopped. Bonita seemed to soften through time or remorse. Yet as Dakotah filled out her grandparents became very watchful. She was not allowed to go to anyone’s house, or to walk to and from school. Social nights were out, and Bonita told her there would be no dating, as that was the way her mother had been ruined. All around them the gas fields opened up and Verl squinted down the road to see if EnCana or British Petroleum was coming to free him from poverty.

  Dakotah was curious about her mother. “Didn’t you save any of her stuff?” she asked Bonita after a secret rummage through the attic.

  “No, I didn’t. I burned those whorish clothes and the stupid pictures she pasted on the walls. She was kind of crazy is what I come to figure. Always makin some mess or doin some outlandish thing. She never did nothin in the kitchen except one time she cooked a whole pot a Minute rice, caught a trout in the stock pond and cut off a piece a that raw trout and laid it on the rice and ate it. Raw. I about gagged. That’s the kind a thing she did. Crazy stuff.”

  Dakotah, knowing herself to be unattractive, was too eager to please, hungry beyond measure for affection. She was ready to love anyone. Sash Hicks, a skinny boy dressed perpetually in camouflage clothing, with a face and body that seemed to have been broken and then realigned, noticed her, attracted to her shy silence. She responded with long, intense stares when she thought he wasn’t looking and daydreams that never went farther than swooning kisses. One day Mr. Lewksberry, the history teacher, in an effort to make his despised subject more interesting, pandered to the local definition of history by assigning his students an essay on western outlaws. In the school library, turning the pages of the Encyclopedia of Western Badmen, Dakotah came on a photograph of Billy the Kid. It seemed Sash Hicks was looking up from the page, the same smirky triumph in the face, the slouched posture and dirty pants. Sash immediately gained a lustrous aura of outlawry and gun expertise. Now in her daydreams they rode away together, Sash twisting back in the saddle to shoot at their pursuers, Verl and Bonita. In real life Dakotah and Sash began to think of themselves as a couple, meeting in hallways, sitting near each other in classes, exchanging notes. She felt he was her only chance to get away from Bonita and Verl, that the distance between them could be bridged by grappling. She loved him. At home she kept Sash a secret.

  In the beginning of their senior year Sash Hicks made up his mind. No judge of character, he gauged her a biddable handmaiden who would look to his comforts. He said, Let’s get married, and she agreed. She expected her grandparents would boil with rage when they heard the news. She said it quickly at the dinner table. They were pleased. She had not realized that they shared her feeling of unjust imprisonment from their own perspective.

  “You’ll get along good with Sash,” said Verl, jovial with relief that she would soon be off his hands.

  “Too bad Shaina didn’t think a that, might a saved her,” mumbled Bonita, who never gave up on the subject. Their approval was the closest to praise they had ever bestowed on her.

  Dakotah dropped out of school a few months before graduation. The school counselor, Mrs. Lenski, middle-aged and with murky blue eyes outlined in brown, tried to persuade her to finish. “Oh, I know how you feel, I completely understand that you want to get married, but believe me, you will never never regret finishing school. If you should have to get a job or if trouble comes—”

  No, thought Dakotah, you don’t know how I feel, you don’t know what it is like to be me, but she said nothing. She found a waitressing job at Big Bob’s travel stop. The pay was minimum wage and the tips rarely more than dimes or quarters but enough for them to rent a three-room apartment over the Elks lodge.

  Otto and Virginia Hicks and Verl and Bonita came with them to the town clerk’s office on Dakotah’s day off. After the brief ceremony, aware that some kind of celebration was proper, they went to Big Bob’s and sat in a booth, surrounded by truckers and gas field workers. Mr. Castle, the manager, gave them free drinks and his best wishes. Sash picked at a sore on his upper lip and ate three Big Bobbers with a quart-size milk shake. Dakotah ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream. Mrs. Hicks spilled cola on her lilac skirt and became impatient to get home and sponge it off.

  “I hope it don’t stain,” she mourned.

  The Hickses were famous for their card parties at which canasta was the game of choice and the first prize was one of Virginia Hicks’s pecan pies, for she came from Texas and prided herself on them. Otto Hicks had met her when, as a young man just out of college, he went to Amarillo for a job interview with a drill-bit manufacturer. He wore his cowboy hat and boots and barn jacket and did not get the job. Yet he persuaded Virginia, their head receptionist, to walk out without notice and come with him to Wyoming, and that was some satisfaction. As an added revenge, when he walked past the personnel manager’s parking space he had scratched the door of the man’s car with a hoof pick that he had in his pocket. Back in Wyoming, Otto got into the snow fence business, subcontracting for the state highway department.

  Bonita and Verl, leaving their balled-up greasy napkins on the table instead of putting them in the disposal bin, also hurried away as Verl felt his old pain encroaching, moving stealthily toward his heart. None of them knew what it was like having a serious medical condition, Verl thought, or what it was like waking in the morning and never knowing if he would see the yard light come on at twilight. He had given up on the clinic doctors and now followed the local practice of consulting a chiropractor, the most favored Jacky Barstow, a fat man with steel rod fingers. The chiropractor told him his problem was in his spine, and most ailments, including cancer, were caused by bad, jammed-up spines. Verl’s spine, he said, was one of the worst he had ever seen. Verl slid out of the booth and Bonita followed. Dakotah, unable to shake off her job training, picked up after them, threw the cups and paper wrappers in the trash bin, something Sash Hicks (and Mr. Castle) noticed with approval. No one had paid for the food, and Mr. Castle told Dakotah he would deduct the cost from her next paycheck.

  Sash Hicks was not the first naked man Dakotah had seen. When she was fourteen Bonita fell down the porch steps because of her arthritic knee’s stiffness and pain and broke her left arm. The new doctor at the clinic, a slab-sided fiftyish woman, after talking on the phone with Bonita’s regular doctor, who was treating her for the arthritis, ignored her furious glare and said it was the ideal time to get that recommended knee replacement as she would be laid up for weeks anyway.

  “You’re not getting any younger, Bonita,” she said, showing her the X-rays. “The right knee looks pretty good, but the bones are very worn and diseased in the left. It can’t get better by itself, especially if you persist in ignoring the situation. The replacement will let you get around pretty well. You’ll have years of painless movement.” Bonita protested, but Verl said she should go ahead with it, and after her arm was set they moved her to a hospital room for knee surgery.

  Verl came home from the hospital around noon carrying bags of groceries and several bottles of whiskey. He said that Bonita would be back home in ten days encased in two casts.

  “So you’ll have to pretty much take care a the kitchen.”

  He seemed a little excited, putting steaks in a Pyrex dish and shaking Tabasco and Texas barbecue sauce onto them, sprinkling coarse salt and pepper. He made a long, rectangular fire on the ground, cowboy style, saying it would burn down to a good bed of coals. He told Dakotah to get some potatoes ready for baking. Dakotah caught some of his excitement; it was a vacation from Bonita and her rules, a kind of picnic for her and Verl. But around four o’clock the real reason for the steaks showed up—Harlan, Verl’s brother who worked for the Bureau of Land Management in Crack Springs.
Harlan was short and muscular and very quiet. His hair was longer than Verl’s. He wore brown plastic-framed glasses. Whenever he visited conversation died away and they all stared at the curtains or picked at their cuticles until someone, usually Bonita, said, “Well, I got to get somethin done,” rose and left the room. But now, without Bonita, a kind of conversation sprang up between the two brothers, a discussion of an old schoolmate who had been indicted for embezzling the town’s Arbor Day tree fund. While the fire sank into shimmering coals they sat on the ground and drank the whiskey, then Verl laid the two steaks directly on the coals. Clouds of fragrant smoke spread out and after a minute he stabbed the meat with a long-handled fork and turned it over. Black coals and ash stuck to the charred steaks. Harlan held out a tin pie pan and Verl got the meat onto it. They went into the kitchen. Neither of them said anything to Dakotah until she put the baked potatoes on the table with the butter dish. She had figured out that the steaks were only for the men.

  “Still hard in the middle, dammit,” said Verl. “Don’t you know how to bake a potato?” But they ate them and then, ignoring her, went into the living room to watch television crime shows and drink more whiskey. She made herself the old reliable peanut butter sandwich.

  During the night some unfamiliar sound like an Indian whoop woke her, but she heard nothing more. She got up to go to the bathroom, tiptoeing in the dark past the guest room where Harlan would be sleeping. But the door was open and the moonlight shone on an undisturbed bed. Maybe, she thought, after all that whiskey he was sleeping on the couch. She turned the corner toward the bathroom, switched on the hall light as the door to Bonita and Verl’s bedroom opened. Harlan came out. He was naked, his eyes dazed. His sexual parts looked large and dark. He seemed not to see Dakotah and she fled back to her room and down the back stairs, going into the yard rather than risk the path to the bathroom again.

  Sash Hicks discovered her quiet demeanor masked gritty stubbornness. After a few weeks, when they weren’t rolling on the new Super-Puff mattress, they were fighting over issues petty and large.

  “Chrissake,” said Hicks, who was still in school working toward his goal of becoming a computer programmer, “all I asked was for you to get me a beer and some a them chips and the salsa. That goin a break your arm?”

  “Get it yourself. I been bossed around since I was a kid. I didn’t agree to be your maid. I worked a full shift and I’m tired. You should be gettin me a beer. You act like a customer. Go on, talk to the manager and get me fired!” She surprised herself. Where had this hard attitude come from? It was something in her, and it must be from her rebellious, unknown mother. And maybe also from Bonita, who had her own raspy side when Verl wasn’t around.

  Hicks, aggrieved at her stubbornness, saw he had made a dreadful mistake. Plus she was flat-chested. After months of her obstinate refusals to bring him tools or beers or to pull off his stinking sneakers, they had it out. He said he was through and she said good, but she was keeping the apartment since she paid the rent. In a flare of accusations and blames they agreed to divorce. He moved back to his parents’ house and indulged in a debauch of drinking and partying to celebrate his new freedom. When he failed his final exams, he joined the army, telling his father that the army would train him in computer programming and he’d get paid for it, too. It was even better than his original plan—it really would let him be all he could be. He used the enlistment bonus for a down payment on a new truck which his family would keep for him until he came back.

  But before he left for basic training, Dakotah discovered she was pregnant.

  “Oh my god,” said Bonita. “You get hold a Sash Hicks right now.”

  “What for? We are gettin a divorce. He’s goin in the army. Me and Sash are through.”

  “Not if you are havin his baby. You’re not through by a long shot. You better call him up right now and stop this divorce mess.”

  But Dakotah would not call him. Why, she wanted to ask Bonita, didn’t you and Verl stop me from marrying him? But she knew that if they had protested she would have run off with Sash to spite them.

  The months went by. Dakotah kept working at Big Bob’s, enjoying the apartment, having all that room to herself. Sometimes she talked to the absent Sash Hicks. “Get me a glass a champagne, Sash. And a turkey sandwich. With mayo and pickles. Run down the store and pick up some chocolate puddin. What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” She planned to keep the apartment after the baby came. She had not considered who would take care of the baby while she worked.

  One day Mrs. Lenski, the school counselor, came into Big Bob’s and sat in a booth by herself. She pulled a tissue from her purse and blew her nose, sopped at her watery eyes.

  “Why Dakotah. I wondered where you were these days. I see you and Sash are expecting. Excuse me, I think I’m getting the flu.”

  “I’m expecting. He don’t even know. We broke up. You were right. It would of been better if I graduated. Get a better job than this.” She gestured at the booths, at the cubbyhole where the orders from the kitchen came out, Adam and Eve on a raft, axle grease, Mike and Ike, and Big Bob’s super burger, called a “bomb” in the kitchen.

  “It could be worse,” said Mrs. Lenski. “You could have been a school counselor. Heartbreaker job.” She gave Dakotah her card and said they would stay in touch. She came in once a week after that and always asked what Dakotah was doing, planning, thinking of for the future, those questions that adults believed occupied the thoughts of the young. Dakotah had no plans for the future; the present seemed solid.

  Mr. Castle asked her to come into his office, a windowless hole that barely contained his desk. A huge tinted photograph of his wife and triplet daughters took up most of the desktop. Boxes of paper cups were piled up in the corner. Mr. Castle had a red, jolly face and a store of mossy jokes. He got along with everyone, calmed difficult customers as a snake charmer soothes irritable cobras.

  “Well, Dakotah,” he began. “I don’t have no problem with you havin a baby, but the company got a policy that no lady more than six months gone can work here.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Dakotah. “I need this job. Sash and me split up. I’m on my own. I work hard for you, Mr. Castle.”

  “Oh, I know that, Dakotah, but it’s not for me to say.” He cast a husband’s practiced eye over her. “That baby is expected pretty damn soon, right? Like in a few weeks? You can’t fool me, Dakotah, so don’t try.” All the jolliness had dried up. She understood she was being fired.

  The boy was born six days later, and Mr. Castle winced as he realized how close they had come to having a delivery during noon rush hour. He sent a potted chrysanthemum with a card saying, “From the Gang at Big Bob’s!”

  Dakotah had somehow expected the baby to be a quiet creature she would care for as one cared for a pet. She was unprepared for the child’s roaring greediness, his assertion of self, or for the violence of love that swamped her, that made her shake with what she knew must come next.

  “I guess I got a put the baby up for adoption,” she said to Bonita, then broke down and bawled. “I had money saved up for the doctor, but now I don’t have my job and can’t pay the rent.” Bonita was aghast. The boy was legitimate, though deserted by his father. She could almost hear the Matches sneering that Bonita and Verl would not care for their own flesh and blood. And he was a boy!

  “You can’t bring more shame on this family. It’s almost as bad as what your mother done. You come up with some support money from that no-good bum you married and your granddad and me will take care a the child. We’ll have to do it. Your mother’s sin unto the second generation. I want you to call up Mrs. Hicks and tell her that her precious son skipped out on his child. Tell her that you are goin to the child support people and a lawyer. I’ll bet you anything he give the enlistment bonus to his folks.”

  Dakotah did telephone Mrs. Hicks and asked for Sash’s address.

  “I spose you want a squeeze money out a him,” said Mrs. Hicks. “He
is in the army and we don’t know where. Someplace in California. He didn’t tell us where they was sendin him. Probably Eye-rack by now. He said he was bein deployed to Eye-rack. But we don’t know for sure. He didn’t tell me.” There was bitterness in her voice, perhaps the bitterness of the neglected mother or of someone wishing to be in the land of fresh pecans.

  Bonita sighed. “She’s lyin. She knows where he is. But them Hickses stick together tighter than cuckleburrs. We’ll have to take care a him. You name that baby Verl after your granddad. That’ll make him more interested to help the boy.” She sighed. “Does it ever end?” she asked and in her mind phrased a prayerful request for strength.

  Among the privileges of western malehood from which the baby benefited were opened dams of affection in Bonita and Verl. Dakotah was amazed at the way Verl hung over the infant’s crib mouthing nonsense words, but she understood what had happened. It was the same knife slice of lightning love that had cut her. He wanted Dakotah to change the child’s last name to Lister, but she said that although Sash Hicks was a rat, he was still the legal and legitimate father and the baby would stay a Hicks.

  Nor could Sash Hicks be located. He had been at Fort Irwin National Training Center and had sent home a cryptic letter. “I learned some Arab words. Na’am. Marhaba. Marhaba means hello. Na’am means yes. So you know.”

  Neither Bonita nor Verl would hear of Dakotah going on welfare or accepting social services, for the Matches would rightly condemn them as weak-kneed sucks on the taxpayer’s tit. They talked it through at night, the yard light casting its corrosive glare on the south wall. She could go back to Mr. Castle and beg for her old job. Bonita and Vern would care for the baby. Or—