“You haven’t seen Cyrus, have you?” Izzy asked.

“Have you been to that Nephy’s house?”

“Yes. I was just there.”

“Just asking.” Alma’s eyes looked shrewd as a crow’s eyes. “I know they are friends.”

“We’re all friends,” Izzy said.

“All friends…” Alma said. “I saw him over there a few months ago.”

“Saw Cyrus?”

“Yes.”

She meant that time when Nephy had called crying because Seth was drunk, threatened her. Cyrus went over to check. “He was helping them out,” Izzy said.

“Helping them out.”

Shut up, old bird.

The cross-hatching of wrinkles reminded Izzy of the doll heads Leanne used to make out of dried apples with teeth from grains of rice. As the apples dried, they began to smell more and more of vinegar. Now, Alma’s apple doll mouth opened, and Izzy almost expected to see rice teeth, but the teeth she saw weren’t nearly that white. “You don’t want to mess with that,” Alma said.

“Mess with what?”

“Anything, these days. Strange things going on around here.”

“What does that mean?”

“Rumors.”

“What kind?”

“Some kind of Satist cult thing.”

“Some kind of what?”

“A Satist cult.”

Izzy almost laughed. “Like, sadist?”

“No, Satist. Satan.”

“Satanic?” Izzy asked queasily, imagining headless chickens and pentagrams painted on boulders with blood. She’d forgotten how crazy Alma was.

“Yeah. Beware of cults! Practice safe sects.”

Ha. Yeah. “What have you heard, Alma?”

“I don’t know. Just things. Something afoot.”

No wonder Cyrus didn’t want to raise a kid out here. “What does that even mean, Alma? Seriously.”

“Something’s afoot. If you want to find someone, you have to put yourself in their shoes,” Alma said, as if she had picked these words of wisdom from the empty blue sky. She chuckled at her joke and began to whistle. It was no use. Izzy wondered if the air out here made everyone crazy, or was it the water? But she, herself, had been raised on both.

◆◆◆

Izzy’s mother kept rinsing dishes and puffing a cigarette when Izzy entered the trailer where she’d grown up. The cigarette smoke couldn’t mask the smell of the jackrabbits Larry killed and skinned, or the resin of creosote—greasewood, he sometimes called it—that he picked to make teas and ointments.

Larry used to quiz her: How old can a creosote plant live to be? That’s right, ten thousand. I’d like to get me some of that. Maybe it will wear off in the picking. Describe the flowers. Yes, solitary, axillary. Fruits? Globose with five indehiscent one-seeded carpels covered by trichomes. Define axillary, globose, indehiscent, and trichomes.

Izzy knew way too much about the plant. Larry had homeschooled her, along with Seth and Nephy, even though they were all a grade apart, and Izzy had learned to list facts, usually scientific ones, as a way to calm herself when she was anxious or afraid. Once Cyrus had asked her how she got so smart. She’d tried to laugh it off, but he persisted.

“It’s just a coping mechanism,” she said. “And Larry, I guess.”