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  “Way we see it,” said Bonita to Dakotah, “is you ought a join the army yourself. They take women. You can support Little Verl that way. Finish your education. And find out how to get through the red tape that will track down Sash Hicks. Me and Big Verl will take care a him until you get through with the army. A job at Big Bob’s don’t pay enough.”

  Verl added his opinion. “When you come back you can get a real good job. And if you can get one a them digital cameras cheap at the PX, we’ll take pictures a him—” He nodded at the baby sleeping in his carry chair.

  She could not believe how solicitous they had become. It was as though their icy hearts had melted and the leg whippings had never happened, as though they were bound by consanguineous affection instead of grudging duty in obeisance to community mores. She marveled that this change of heart was rooted in involuntary love, a love that had not moved them when they brought her as an infant to the ranch.

  Her grandfather himself drove her to the recruitment office in Crack Springs, harping all the way on duty, responsibility, the necessity for signing the papers so child support could come to them. He also drove her to the Military Entrance Processing Station in Cody. He had even picked out a specialty for her: combat medic.

  “I checked around,” he said, winking his pinpoint aquamarine eyes, which, as he aged, had almost disappeared under colorless eyebrows and hanging folds of flesh. “EMTs make good money. You could get to be a medic and when you come back, why there’s your career, just waiting.” The word “career” sounded strange coming out of his mouth. For years he had ranted against wives who worked out of the home. On the ranches the wives held everything together—cooking for big crowds, nursing the sick and injured, cleaning, raising children and driving them to rodeo practice, keeping the books and paying the bills, making mail runs and picking up feed at the farm supply, taking the dogs in for their shots, and often riding with the men at branding and shipping times, and in mountainous country helping with the annual shove up and shove down shifting cattle to and from pasturage leased from the Forest Service, and were treated with little more regard than the beef they helped produce.

  It was almost spring, last night’s small snow spiking up the dead grass in ragged points, balling in the yellow joints of the streamside willow, snow that would melt as soon as the sun touched it. She was joining the army, leaving behind the seedy two-story town, the dun-colored prairie flattened by wind, leaving the gumbo roads, the radio voices flailing through nets of static, the gossip and narrow opinions. As they drove through the town, she saw the muddy truck that was always parked in front of the bar, the kid named Bub Carl who hung around the barbershop. The sun was up, warming the asphalt, and already heat waves ran across the road as the old landscape fell away behind her. Yet she felt nothing for the place or herself, not even relief at escaping Verl and Bonita, or sorrow or regret at putting the baby in their care. As for the child, she would be coming back to him. He would wait, as she had waited, but for him there would be a happy ending, for she would return. She picked him up and stared into his slate blue eyes.

  “See? I’m comin back to get you. I’m coming back for you. I love you and will come back. Promise.” She just had to get through the dense period of life away from the ranch, away from Wyoming, away from her baby who gave the place its only value.

  She went to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri for basic training. The first thing she learned was that it was still a man’s army and that women were decidedly inferior in all ways. The memory flashed of a time when she had gone shopping with Bonita in Cody. Bonita favored a pint-size mall that featured Cowboy Meats, Radio Shack and a video store. Dakotah chose to wait in the truck instead of trailing after Bonita, who was a ruthless and vociferous shopper for the cheapest of everything. Dakotah watched a man and his two children outside Grum’s Dollar Mart, where there was a tiny patch of grass. The man had a hard red face and brown mustache. He was dressed in jeans, dirty undershirt and ball cap, but wore ranch work boots. He was throwing a Frisbee gently to the boy, a slow toddler unable to catch it. Against the Dollar Mart wall stood the girl, a year or two older than the boy, but the father did not throw the Frisbee to her. Dakotah hated the way he ignored the girl’s yearning gaze. She smiled at the girl staring so fixedly at the father and son. At last Dakotah got out of the truck and walked over.

  “Hey there,” she said to the girl, smiling. “What’s your name?”

  The child did not answer but flattened herself against the grimy wall.

  “What d’you want?” said the father, letting his arm down, the Frisbee sagging against his leg. It was a nylon Frisbee, the kind dog owners favored.

  The toddler was yelling at the father. “Frow! Frow!” When the man did not throw the Frisbee, the boy began to whine and blub.

  “Nothin. Just sayin hello. To the little girl.”

  “Yeah. Well, here comes your granny. Git home and don’t be botherin my kids.” The little girl gave her a look of pure hatred and stuck out a long, yellow tongue.

  Bonita wedged the bags of groceries between two bags of garbage she intended to drop off at the landfill. “What’re you doin talkin a him?”

  “I wasn’t! I was sayin hello to the little girl. Who are they?”

  “He’s Rick Sminger, one a Shaina’s old…friends. Least said about him the better. I was you I wouldn’t ask no questions. Get in and let’s get goin.”

  The worst thing about the army, the thing she knew she could never get used to, was the constant presence of too many people, too close, in her face, radiating heat and smells, talking and shouting. Someone who has grown up in silence and vast space, who was born to solitude, who feels different and shrinks from notice, suffers in the company of others. So homesickness took the shape of longing for wind, an empty landscape, for silence and privacy. She longed for the baby and came to believe she was homesick for the old ranch.

  She made a low score on the aptitude test, edging into the borderline just enough to continue on. She thought about Verl’s suggestion she become a combat medic. She had no other ideas. At least she would be helping people. She named it as her choice of a Military Occupational Specialty. During basic training she heard that becoming a combat medic was very tough. Candidates went crazy, they said, because of the enormous amounts of information they had to memorize. But she had learned CPR in sophomore gym class and thought she could study enough to pass a few tests.

  After basic training she went to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for EMT training, and the immediate future loomed like a cliff. All of her fellow volunteers seemed to have been practicing medicine since kindergarten. Pat Moody, a wiry blonde from Oregon, was the daughter of a doctor and had heard medical talk for years. She was excited about training at Brooks Medical Center because of its famous burn unit and planned to become a doctor after she got out of the army. Marnie Jellson came from a potato farm in Idaho and had cared for her sick mother for two years. When the mother died she had enlisted. Tommet Means had been an EMT since high school. Chris Jinkla came from a family of veterinarians and had accompanied his father on calls a thousand times.

  “I grew up bandaging paws,” he said.

  She and Pat and Marnie became friends. Pat played the guitar and taught Dakotah enough chords to string together “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” Marnie had a collection of movies that they watched on weekends. Marnie had a potato tattooed on her left calf and knew dozens of potato jokes. Both of them talked about their families, and finally Dakotah explained that her grandparents had bought her up, told about Sash and the breakup and the baby.

  “You poor kiddo,” said Marnie. “You’ve been through a lot.”

  “How can it be,” Dakotah asked them, “that you feel homesick for a place you hate?” She thought of the neutral smell of dust like stones or old wood, of summer haze from distant forest fires, of rose-rock outcrops breaking from the rusty earth. She thought of the run-down town, every other building sporting a weathered For Sale sign.
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  “Maybe it’s the people you are homesick for, not the place,” said Pat.

  And of course it was. She saw that right away. Not just Baby Verl, but even closed-up Bonita and Verl hitching along on his bad legs.

  She bought a camera and sent it to Bonita and Verl, begging them to take photographs of Baby Verl. She taped the dozens of them on her wall. She wrote long letters to the baby, covered the margins with symbols of kisses and hugs. She and Pat and Marnie raided the PX for baby toys, miniature blue jeans, pajamas imprinted with tanks and planes.

  They went to dinner at restaurants and Dakotah learned it was bad manners to stack the empty dishes. “I was just helpin the waitress out,” she explained. It was what ranch people did after finishing their burgers at Big Bob’s.

  At a Japanese place one night Pat persuaded her to try sushi.

  “What is it?” she asked, looking at the hump of rice with an orange slice of something on top.

  “It is salmon and rice, and that is wasabi, a kind of grated horseradish. It’s hot.”

  She ate it, and the texture of the salmon startled her. “It’s not cooked!”

  “It’s not supposed to be cooked.”

  “It’s raw! Raw fish! I ate it.” Her stomach heaved but she kept it down and even ate another. A day later she remembered Bonita describing Shaina putting raw trout on some Minute rice. Was it possible that her mother had heard somewhere about sushi and decided to try it—Wyoming style? Was it possible her mother had been exhibiting not craziness but curiosity about the outside world? She told Pat and Marnie about it and they decided that was it—curiosity and longing for the exotic.

  As the tsunami of reading material, lectures, slides, videos, X-rays, computer tutorials on anatomy, diseases, trauma, physiology, obstetrics, pediatrics, shock and a bewildering vocabulary of medical terms swept over the group, Dakotah did not think she would pass the EMT Basic Registry Exam. And even if she did, then came primary care training and the horror courses in chemical, explosive and radiation injuries.

  “I will never get to Whiskey level,” she said calmly to Pat, thinking of needle chest compression and clearing airways, both of which she dreaded.

  “Come on. You’ll make it,” said Pat, who aced every test. “Those are situational exercises, which makes it real interesting.” Dakotah passed the EMT test, but at the bottom of the class. Marnie flat-out failed.

  “Suggest you think about changin to military police,” said the squinty-eyed, spotted-banana-skin instructor to Dakotah. “Medicine is not your thing. I know I’d sure hate to be lyin there with my guts hangin out and here comes old rough-hand Dakotah tryin to remember what to do.”

  Pat went to Fort Drum in New York for training at the medical simulation center, where darkness, explosions and smoke mimicked realistic battlefield situations. She sent Marnie and Dakotah a letter describing Private Hunk, a computerized patient-simulation mannequin who could bleed, breathe, even talk a little. He was complete in the last detail, constructed for countless intubations, tracheotomies, catheterizations. He suffered sucking chest wounds, hideous traumas. He bled and moaned for help and on occasion shrieked an inhuman birdcall like a falcon. He was hot or cold, at the instructor’s wish, could run a fever or suffer severe hypothermia.

  “He’s got a cute little dick. I’m in love with him,” wrote Pat. Dakotah answered the letter, but they never heard from Pat again.

  There were many letters from Bonita, the words looping downhill across the page and ending with a two-line prayer. She always began the letter with news of Baby Verl’s progress with cutting teeth, crawling, standing up, how Verl’s old dog Bum had taken to him, following him everywhere and letting Baby pull his ears, how Verl had got another dog, Buddy, because Bum was getting old, and how Buddy loved the baby even more than Bum, and only when she had detailed every wonderful thing Baby Verl had done did she report on local events. Her sister Juanita had come from Casper for a visit and to show off her new husband, who worked in the gas fields for Triangle Energy. The first husband, Don, had worked for the same company. He had believed fall-protection gear was for pantywaists and died when he reached for a hoist-lifted pipe and missed. Big Verl, Bonita wrote, had quit his chiropractor and was now going to a fat woman who gave massages and charged terrific prices. “At least she advertises they are massages. If Verl wasn’t Verl I would think it was something else.” Dakotah felt a rare and even painful rush of affection mixed with pity for Bonita, although she suspected she was only writing out of a sense of duty.

  A few letters came from Mrs. Lenski, alternately sardonic and cheerful. It seemed to Dakotah that as soon as she had left, the town started dying off. One of the Vasey twins had been killed and the other severely injured in a car crash at the intersection where everybody knew to slow down. Some truck with Colorado plates had blasted through and T-boned them. And, wrote Mrs. Lenski, two lesbian women with a herd of goats had bought the Tin Can house and planned to make cheese and sell it locally. Dakotah was shocked to see the word “lesbian” on the page of a letter like any ordinary word. Tug Diceheart and two other hands riding for the Tic-Tac had been caught making meth in the bunkhouse and arrested. Juiciest of all, Mrs. Match had left Wyatt and returned to California to become a real estate agent. Dakotah wondered if Verl was gloating.

  Both Dakotah and Marnie changed their MOS to Military Police. They had become closest friends, closer than she had ever been to Sash. Dakotah, for the first time in her life, had someone to talk to, someone who understood everything, from rural ways to failing at tests. Marnie said maybe they were in love. They talked about setting up house together with Baby Verl after they got out. One day they were in a Humvee, Dakotah clutching a machine gun, on their way to a checkpoint to search Iraqi women.

  “Yup, here we are with the fuckups. MP is where the dumb ones end up. Supposed a be the stupidest part of the entire army.”

  “Don’t you think some of the officers could get that prize?”

  “Yeah. So probably MPs come second. Second dumbest, something to brag about.”

  They had learned that the checkpoints were intensely dangerous, and after a few weeks Dakotah developed a little magic ritual to keep herself alive. She rapidly twitched the muscles of her toes, heel, calf, knee, hip, waist, shoulder, eyebrow, elbow, wrist, thumb, fingers on the right side and then repeated the series for the left side. Bonita had sent her a silver-plated cross that she recognized. It had always been in the second drawer of the kitchen dresser with a tortoiseshell comb, a pot holder too nice to use, a pair of small kid gloves that had belonged to Verl’s famous great-grandmother, a red box with a sliding lid filled with old buttons. She wore the cross once, but it tangled with her dog tags and she put it away.

  She hated searching the Iraqi women, knew that they hated her doing it. Some of them smelled, and their voluminous, often ragged and dusty burkas could conceal everything from a black market radio to baby clothes to a bomb. One young woman had six glossy eggplants hidden under her garment. Dakotah pitied her, unable even to buy and carry home a few eggplants without an American soldier groping at her. Never had the world seemed so vile and her own problems so mean and petty.

  On the day the IED exploded under the Humvee she had not completed the left side of the protecting muscle twitches, choosing a third cup of coffee instead. It happened too suddenly for anything to register. One moment they were traveling fast, the next she was looking up into the face of Chris Jinkla.

  “Moooo,” she said, trying to make a cow joke for the veterinary’s son, but he didn’t recognize her and thought she was moaning. She felt nothing at that moment and tried her magic muscle twitch sequence, but something was wrong on the right side.

  “I’m fine, Chris. Except my arm.”

  The medic was startled. He peered into her bloody face. “My god, it’s Pat, right?”

  “Dakotah,” she whispered. “I’m Dakotah. I’m fine but I need my arm. Please look for it. I can’t go home without it.” She turned
her head and saw a heap of bloody rags and a patch of skin.

  “Marnie?”

  Her right arm was still there though cruelly shattered, and the best they could hope for, said the doctor at the field hospital, was to amputate and save enough stump to carry a prosthetic. “You’re young and strong,” he said. “You’ll make it.”

  “I’m fine,” she agreed. “How about Marnie?” She knew as she asked.

  The doctor gave her a look.

  She was shipped out to Germany with other wounded, gradually aware that there was some awful knowledge hovering, something worse than her mangled arm, which had been amputated, something as bad as losing Marnie. Maybe they had discovered she had cancer and wouldn’t tell her. But it was not until she was sent to Walter Reed that she heard the bad news from Bonita herself, who stood at her bedside with a curious expression of mingled sorrow and, looking at the stump of her arm, a ghoulish curiosity.

  “Oh, oh,” she whispered, and then burst into streaming tears. Never had Dakotah seen anyone cry that way, tears pouring down Bonita’s cheeks to the corners of her mouth, splashing from her jawline onto her rayon blouse as though her head was filled with water. She could not speak for long minutes.

  “Baby Verl,” she finally said.

  “What?” Dakotah knew instinctively it was the worst thing.

  “Ridin in the back a Big Verl’s truck—” And the tears began again. “He fell out.”

  The story came slowly and wetly. The eighteen-month-old child had loved riding with his great-grandfather, but this day Verl put him with the dogs in the open truck bed. Big Verl was so proud to have a boy and wanted him to be tough. The dogs loved him. She said that several times. The rest of it came in a rush.

  “See, Verl thought he’d just sit with the dogs. They done it before. But you know how dogs hang over the edge. Baby Verl did that too, near as we can tell, so that when the truck went down in one a them dips it threw him out. It was a accident. He fell under the wheels, Dakotah. Big Verl is half-crazy. They got him sedated. The doctors are fixin it up for you to come home.”