When we got home, Helen said she’d make acorn casserole for dinner, but I said I wasn’t hungry. Rudy said I was welcome to take out some of my anger on target practice up in the nursery, but I told him maybe later. They watched me walk back to the camper. I knew what they were thinking. Don’t go back to sleep. Please don’t go back to sleep. I might have told them to save themselves the worry. I might have told them I would never sleep again.

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.