It’s a good thing Karen was gone, it’s a good thing I was alone, because if anyone had looked inside the camper that night it would have been a demon they saw, a demon in the dark with glowing eyes drying out. Aldi Birch could go ahead and file a motion, but I wasn’t going to wait around for any motion. My own motion had finally begun. All night, I fed the fire. I stared at the woodstove until dawn. I ground my mind against the flame.

In the morning, light snow fell. Barefoot, I stepped outside to pee. Fox tracks circled the camper. Ducks cackled down at the shed. I let the cold stab up through my feet and into my legs. I’ll know you, my boy, I’ll know you by your toes. You can roam, but I’ll find you and bring you back again. By that time, I had made my plan.

12

KAREN

I took the Greyhound to points north. As a young whittler, I would have hitchhiked, but the problem with hitchhiking is that people pick you up because they want company. You have to talk to people, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to be alone. I knew that where I was going it was likely to be all men, and not men I wanted anything to do with. And I had a setting for that. Most women have it, definitely most queers. A setting where I sealed myself off. So it would probably be about the same as being alone. Which is what I deserved anyway.

When I boarded the bus it was night. Our part of the state was all hills and water, was like a jungle the way wild grapevines grew and big leafed trees closed in. Sandstone, red clay, no flat land, people farmed anywhere they could, shoving a few seeds down into the sediment on top of a boulder, the cattle grazing down in the valleys. But I traveled north away from all that, and in the morning the red winter showed land flat and hard and even, cornfields and long gray highways, road signs you could see coming a mile away. Soon the fields of silage gave way to towers, drill rigs, well pads, containment ponds, lights and lights and lights. The sky above was mud.

The bus pulled into the Greyhound station on the edge of town, people smoking outside, large men, brown skinned or dark, white men with red faces, all in work clothes. The only woman I saw worked the ticket window. Then I saw Shane. He was leaning on a silver SUV, brand-new by the look of it. He’d lost some of his hair, but what was left of it he still wore long and wavy, tucked into the collar of his shirt. He brought a cigarette to his mouth, which wasn’t a habit I remembered. Other than that, he looked about the same, his quick face, unfailingly friendly, eager to share all the information he had. He saw me through the bus window, stubbed out his cigarette, brought out his old grin, showed a couple of new gold teeth, raised his arm so high in the air he lifted himself off the ground. If he’d lost a few teeth over the years, hell, so had I.