Several weeks earlier a stone had kicked up and cracked the windshield of the International Harvester. Within a couple of days the crack had lengthened and grown a curve. It hadn’t taken too much inventiveness to detect the shape of Utah there on the glass. As soon as Harry was able to imagine that, his old toy soldiers came to life, marching their leaden way back and forth across the windshield through the towns he had grown up in. He was happy to have his old friends returned to him, the buglers and the flag bearers, the Johnny Rebs. But in keeping him company they also stripped him down to loneliness. He was about at the end. Then there came the mother and these two children. And now there was Jo. Harry wondered how he had ever made it these past six years, traveling alone. The crack all of a sudden was starting to bother him.
On their way back from Jimmy Splendid’s he stopped the truck at the cache point and refueled from one of the large canisters he had stored. Jo helped him lift the canister. “I guess you two can handle it?” the mother said. The gasoline gurgled in. He and Jo were frozen in awkward positions, straining to angle the canister into the gas tank. They watched the mother and Charlie trudge away.
“They’re off again,” Jo whispered.
Harry nodded.
“You don’t know what it is?”
Harry shook his head again. He took this exchange of confidences as an opportunity to lean closer. “Has she talked to you?”
“She’s hardly said more than hello to me. She hates me.”
“She likes you. That’s just the way she is.”
“How long have you known her?”
“Three days.”
Jo smiled.
“Three or four. You get a sense of her pretty quick.”
The mother and Charlie were still visible as bobbing heads over the scrub pine.
“That’ll do,” Harry said, easing the canister down. He looked around for Beth, but she was off somewhere. He started loading up the equipment. He had done pretty well at Splendid’s camp. He fantasized about selling it all, all at one stop, every single compressor, that would be something, wouldn’t it, then going back for another full load, selling all of that, and all the detection instruments and jackhammers, and give us every single shovel and pick you got, too, Harry. He could start thinking like that and it could be like some game he was addicted to. That must have been what had kept him going all this time. Just one time, selling every single thing in his truck at one place. The game seemed pretty stupid in light of all the bad things in the world. Of course he could tell himself that, but the game was still important to him and he kept on playing it. Just like selling that whole box of Good & Plenty back at Splendid’s—his heart had spun with the thrill of it. He had figured out this thing, that Navajos like licorice, and taken a chance on it and boom, just like that, a bushel of it sold! Tomorrow he was going to a new mining camp to try out his luck. Maybe Jo would go with him. Something was wrong with Charlie yet he was thinking of Jo and he was thinking of the two of them traveling in his truck together and he was thinking how beautiful she was and how he was waiting for her to tell him about her terrible, unhappy marriage. And how he kept expecting her words to come out in a Southern drawl. She had that look. And how he was still a little caught out each time she spoke and there was a clip instead of a softening. Yet he was also convinced that he was in love with the mother. He could go back and forth, shocked at how easy it was, worried that he had polygamy in the blood. Traits were passed down in families, he knew that. Believing that polygamy qualified as a trait was foolish—he knew that, too—yet he often felt foolish enough to believe anything. He resembled his mother in almost every way, physically, emotionally. She had hated in secret the whole idea of celestial marriage. Harry had always wondered what he and his father had in common, what little thing. Harry couldn’t even throw a ball the regular way; he was the only man he knew who couldn’t cock it like a guy. He always thought fate was trying to make it perfectly clear to him that he should stay away from his father’s habits.
“I’m surprised to find someone like you out here,” he finally said to Jo.
“Why’s that, Harry?” she asked, her voice still a surprise to him.
“I don’t know. You seem . . .”
“I seem?” The way she helped him along. She’d gotten a lot of this. Attention, that is. She probably got attention wherever she went.
“Oh, a party girl.”
“A party girl? I’m not a party girl.”
That was the only way he could explain it to himself about Jo and the man she had chosen to marry: a party (Georgian mansion, white columns, martinis floating in buoyant rings across a swimming pool), having too much fun, out of her head fun, and a revolting creature named Leonard Dawson suddenly on the scene, resembling something acceptably good at a moment when everything else seemed exceedingly wonderful.
“How did you meet him?”
Jo made a face. She peeked around the corner of the truck. “Where’s Beth?” she asked.
He shrugged. “She likes the shade.”
“I was a farm girl, Harry. He got me off the farm. How many times have you heard that story?”
“It doesn’t have to be a permanent situation.”
“I don’t know about that, but it’s the situation I’m in. It’s not great. It’s not even good. But it got me off the farm. All we did was work. I barely knew my dad was my dad. We were just his hired hands.”
“You’re stronger than you look. I guess that explains it.”
“Not hired actually. He got us for free. I can tell you one thing: he was sorry to walk me down the aisle.”
The Geiger counters and scintillators were last to go in. He always kept a few at the ready, just in case he met some hope-addled dogstakers along the road. He still couldn’t believe himself back at the camp, how he had packed the fan belt way in the rear of the truck. He was always so careful—except whenever he had an opportunity to shoot himself in the foot. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t made half a fool of himself in front of Jimmy Splendid—and now in front of the ladies, too. Everyone thought he just sold compressor bits, but he sold the whole compressor, too, and all the parts for the Chicago Pneumatic and Jagger. How many times had he tried to make that clear to Jimmy and Jimmy didn’t listen? And now Jimmy had cut him off once again and Harry was reduced to selling him shovels—shovels!—all in front of the ladies. Maybe polygamy wasn’t a trait, but by God ridiculous shovel-selling must be.
“Lot of stuff in this truck,” Jo said.
“I have a new mining camp to go to tomorrow,” Harry said. “Guess I’ll try them out.”
“I wish I’d been a man ten years older so I could have gone off to war. England or France or Germany. I would have stayed. I never would have come home. Do you believe that?”
“I believe you,” Harry said.
“That’s what I wish.”
“I’m leaving this evening,” Harry said.
“You’re not staying the night?”
“Got to get a head start.”
“I hope it pays off.”
“I do, too.”
“I have a tent.” Harry chanced a glance into her eyes. “You could go with me if you’d like.”
“What, and leave my husband?”
“I’m a gentleman,” Harry said. He’d always been quite sure of that whenever he’d said it before.
Jo fixed the pleats of her dress, removed a sandal, and shook out a stone. “Then I’d have to leave you, Harry. And then the next person and the next, all the way to England.” She kept her head down, concentrating on the pleats.