Peter looked up and saw that Deschutes was waiting for a response. “When would you need me?” Peter asked, calculating the cost of a trip to Bozeman.

Deschutes cleared his throat. “Are you busy tonight?”

Deschutes lived twenty miles outside of Lawrence, in a little town called Vinland that was founded by abolitionists in the 1850s. More than a hundred years later, the town attracted a group of liberal army vets and became known as a sort of artists’ colony where everybody secretly smoked pot and celebrated the solstice. A few residents taught art or philosophy at the university in Lawrence, but most were working artists. Some worked with neon, others with wood. The unifying factor was a sensibility not for art but for strangeness. The mayor made custom beaded handbags for celebrities but was better known for his collection of feral cats (his Special Kitty Crew) and for having once seen the Virgin Mary in an egg sandwich. One year, he tried to elect a blind sheep as sheriff—GIVE HIM THE BAAALOT!!! signs around town read. Despite its quirks, Vinland was not entirely removed from the traditions of small-town Kansas. There was a grain elevator and a small church, left over from the abolition days, as well as a diner where everything on the menu was either made of sugar or had once been alive. On the outskirts sat a modest airport where rich people from Lawrence and Topeka kept their prop planes. In the summertime, the planes wheezed overhead or did lazy loop the loops, their thick contrails staining the air, reminding the hippies below of the pleasures big money could buy.

Peter wished he had grown up in Vinland instead of in Lawrence, where nature was sectioned off into designated green spaces and being interesting entailed wearing small glasses and having a PhD in the humanities. What had his father been thinking? He’d been an artist, and yet he’d sold out, settling into a career designing greeting cards for Hallmark. Now, thinking of Rena out in the wilderness wearing Carhartts and sleeping in a tent (would she have her own tent or share one with people from her crew—possibly male people?), Peter regretted not having a more outdoorsy childhood, one where he’d learned how to start fires and identify edible plants instead of master Nintendo games and stick forks into electrical outlets.

Deschutes’s house sat on top of a brown hill that overlooked both the church and the airport. The house was a squat structure with low ceilings and windows so choked with ivy that the light inside was dim and dappled. In any other hands, the house would have been morose and ugly, but Deschutes was an artist and had impeccable taste. He’d populated the house with antique clocks and Italian leather chairs and potted succulents boasting waxy red flowers. It was the type of home where men should have smoked pipes and discussed literature, but instead there was just Deschutes, doing whatever it was he did in his free time.