herself that the dog had almost died because of her, flinging himself at the man who had killed Mary Alice and then had tried to kill Lola, too. So what if Bub’s presence meant a few extra stops so that he could do his business? She scratched at his ears. He thumped his tail against the seat. The pickup’s interior was toasty, and she’d long ago shed her parka and hat and mittens and glove liners. Still, the dog—the warm, living mass of him—provided a different kind of comfort, warding off the psychic chill imposed by her frozen surroundings. She kept one hand on Bub’s ribcage, with its reassuring rise and fall, and scanned the landscape, picking out features—a dense shelterbelt heralding a faraway ranch, the inevitable grain elevators marking a town—as a way of breaking it into manageable proportions.
Handfuls of houses, the remnants of railroad towns, sprang from the prairie at regular intervals and receded behind her before she could take comfort in the knowledge that other human beings shared the boundless space around her. Angus cattle stood motionless in fields of wind-whipped snow, like black barges in icy bays. At least, she thought, the road itself was largely clear of snow, scrubbed as it was by the merciless wind. Fellow travelers were such a rarity that she took to counting passing vehicles as a way to combat boredom. When that proved insufficiently distracting, she ignored Bub’s reproachful stare and warbled off-key tunes, starting with radio sing-alongs and then, when the dial went to static, a cappella versions of every song she could remember, including patriotic anthems and Christmas carols. She’d have recited poems, but all she could remember were dirty limericks and “Under the spreading chestnut tree,” its line about the smith’s large and sinewy hands leading her back to the limericks. By the time she reached the North Dakota border, she’d refilled the Thermos twice and stopped four times at gas stations whose bathrooms made her long for a fine healthy tree, if only such a thing had existed on the bald land and the mercury hadn’t stopped its daytime ascent at zero. She wondered what Judith had thought on her own long journey east, the mountains and trees vanishing behind her, exchanging the sometimes-stifling warmth and caring of her own people for the disinterest of strangers. Even if Judith had gone willingly, it must have been daunting.
Everything changed at the North Dakota line, starting with the road. The pickup had jounced over tarred seams that stitched the pavement together for more than four hundred miles when the ride smoothed, the tires rolling over new macadam, the unbroken coal-black surface startling against the snow. The road widened to four lanes. The distractions she’d so wished for hours earlier made a belated appearance. She’d passed the occasional oil rig in Montana, but here they grew in profusion, stabbing at the sky, a veritable forest cloaked year-round in green—not the verdure of leaves, but the rustling come-hither of ready cash. First came the ubiquitous pump jacks common even around Magpie, grasshopper heads ducking rhythmically as metronomes toward the earth as their mechanisms turned slow-motion revolutions. Closer to the patch, flames heralded Lola’s approach, waving like flags atop flare stacks beside rigs, burning off the natural gas that was a byproduct of oil drilling. Traffic picked up. Lola goosed the truck up an incline and steered it into a turnout. A supersize truck hauling a proportionate flatbed was parked there. Lola looked up and up. The equipment it carried—something round and metallic; part of a tank, maybe, or a pipe seemingly large enough to funnel the ocean—towered three stories above. She pulled her gaze back to the road with its surge of tankers and pickups and big rigs like the one parked behind her. There were panel trucks and fifteen-passenger vans, standard tractor trailers dwarfed by the double-and even
Handfuls of houses, the remnants of railroad towns, sprang from the prairie at regular intervals and receded behind her before she could take comfort in the knowledge that other human beings shared the boundless space around her. Angus cattle stood motionless in fields of wind-whipped snow, like black barges in icy bays. At least, she thought, the road itself was largely clear of snow, scrubbed as it was by the merciless wind. Fellow travelers were such a rarity that she took to counting passing vehicles as a way to combat boredom. When that proved insufficiently distracting, she ignored Bub’s reproachful stare and warbled off-key tunes, starting with radio sing-alongs and then, when the dial went to static, a cappella versions of every song she could remember, including patriotic anthems and Christmas carols. She’d have recited poems, but all she could remember were dirty limericks and “Under the spreading chestnut tree,” its line about the smith’s large and sinewy hands leading her back to the limericks. By the time she reached the North Dakota border, she’d refilled the Thermos twice and stopped four times at gas stations whose bathrooms made her long for a fine healthy tree, if only such a thing had existed on the bald land and the mercury hadn’t stopped its daytime ascent at zero. She wondered what Judith had thought on her own long journey east, the mountains and trees vanishing behind her, exchanging the sometimes-stifling warmth and caring of her own people for the disinterest of strangers. Even if Judith had gone willingly, it must have been daunting.
Everything changed at the North Dakota line, starting with the road. The pickup had jounced over tarred seams that stitched the pavement together for more than four hundred miles when the ride smoothed, the tires rolling over new macadam, the unbroken coal-black surface startling against the snow. The road widened to four lanes. The distractions she’d so wished for hours earlier made a belated appearance. She’d passed the occasional oil rig in Montana, but here they grew in profusion, stabbing at the sky, a veritable forest cloaked year-round in green—not the verdure of leaves, but the rustling come-hither of ready cash. First came the ubiquitous pump jacks common even around Magpie, grasshopper heads ducking rhythmically as metronomes toward the earth as their mechanisms turned slow-motion revolutions. Closer to the patch, flames heralded Lola’s approach, waving like flags atop flare stacks beside rigs, burning off the natural gas that was a byproduct of oil drilling. Traffic picked up. Lola goosed the truck up an incline and steered it into a turnout. A supersize truck hauling a proportionate flatbed was parked there. Lola looked up and up. The equipment it carried—something round and metallic; part of a tank, maybe, or a pipe seemingly large enough to funnel the ocean—towered three stories above. She pulled her gaze back to the road with its surge of tankers and pickups and big rigs like the one parked behind her. There were panel trucks and fifteen-passenger vans, standard tractor trailers dwarfed by the double-and even
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