IN JUNE OF 1965 I left a friend’s home in Santa Fe at dawn, drove north through Abiquiu, where Georgia O’Keeffe was then living, passed slowly through a lovely valley high in the San Juans that holds the town of Chama, and turned west for Durango. I crossed the Utah border west of Dove Creek, and ate lunch in the Mormon stillness of Monticello.
I was twenty, headed for Wyoming to work the summer on a friend’s ranch, wrangling horses. And I was innocently in love, as perhaps you can only be at that age. The young woman lived in Salt Lake City. Anticipating each encounter—with her, beginning that night in Salt Lake, and the months afterward working with horses in Jackson Hole—made the sense of covering miles quickly in good weather an exquisite pleasure.
The highway north from Monticello runs ribbon-smooth through bleak, wild country. When I left the cafe I fell back into a rhythm with it. The performance of the car, the torque curves through all four gears and so the right moment to shift, was well-known to me. Flying down U.S. 191 and double-clutching out of the turns eased the irritation that had grown in me in Monticello, under the stares of cafe patrons. “No, sir, we don’t serve any coffee,” the waitress had said. And, “No, sir, we don’t have any ashtrays. We don’t smoke here.”
I rifled over the road course, holding a steady seventy through the turns and rises. The only traffic was a pickup or a car, sometimes a tractor-trailer rig, every six or eight minutes. I had a Ruger Single-Six .22 magnum pistol under the seat. In a leather case in the trunk was a rifle. In those days in that country a young man traveled with guns as a matter of course, with no criminal intent.
The two-lane highway passed clean beneath the hiss of new tires. Wind coming through the windows vibrated softly in the interior of the car. I remember the sight of the chrome tachometer, fitted to the steering column, gleaming in the sunshine, the spotless black nap of the floor carpets. I can recall the feel of the rolled seat covers under my thighs. In the seat opposite me sat my dog, a mongrel coyote I’d caught in the woods of southern Michigan as a pup. We’d driven the country for days at a time together, trips to New York City, to Helena, to Louisiana, the wind roaring at the windows, the tires whispering and thudding over rain-slicked concrete roads, the V-8 engine with its four-barrel carburetor, guttering through straight exhaust pipes.
A small, nondescript hill rises just south of Moab. The road climbs its gentle southern slope for several hundred yards and then falls off so abruptly a driver headed north confronts for a moment a blind spot. I hit the hill at probably eighty, imagining details of the evening ahead with Jan in Salt Lake. I saw a police car making a K-turn in the road a hundred yards in front of me as I came over the rise. The steering wheel seemed to stiffen, to resist in that moment, but that is likely a false memory. I never touched the horn, there was no time, no point. I focused on missing him, as he continued to back up slowly across the midstripe. I hurtled past on the left, going off the road in a spray of sand and dirt and whacking sagebrush with the rear fender as I tried to pull the car back on the road. It being the police, I thought it best just to keep going. His barn-size stupidity was a flat trade-off, I figured, with my speeding. I got the skidding car back up on the road and drove on to Moab at a touch under the legal sixty, with the police cruiser right behind me.
I slowed to the designated thirty-five at the city limit and a few blocks into town turned in to an A & W Root Beer stand. The police car went by. I tried to detect from the corner of my eye without turning my head whether he was turning his and staring at me through his sunglasses. He was. I continued to study the hand-scripted legend on the menu board in front of me. When the waitress came over I ordered a hamburger and what many people then called a black cow, a root beer float.
The air beneath the awning where I was parked was still and cool. I could feel the sweat drying on the back of my thighs. I got out and took the dog without a leash to a patch of dry grass and weeds in the harsh light at the edge of the parking lot. I noticed two young women there while I waited, sitting in a black 1960 Thunderbird backed up against a fence.
I ate my lunch slowly, scanning my Utah map and scrutinizing its detailed diagram of the streets of Salt Lake. I had the radio on. From time to time I glanced over at the two women in the Thunderbird. They had a child with them, a boy just a few years old. The women and I made eye contact once or twice. I smiled.
It occurred to me the cop would have had a tough time trying to force a ticket on me for speeding.
The sound of a door closing made me look up. One of the women in the Thunderbird, the one on the passenger side, had gotten out and was walking over. She looked seventeen or eighteen. She was very pregnant. My dog sat still in her seat as the woman approached the window. She leaned down and looked in, but didn’t say anything. I reached for the dog and at my touch she turned and stepped nimbly into the backseat. Without a word the woman opened the door and got in.
“Hi,” I said, conscious of being very casual.
“You live around here?” she asked.
“No. I’m coming from Indiana, from school there.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Wyoming.”
She stared ahead in silence. I remember seeing the sweat beaded up on her small hands, her stout fingers, the maternity blouse billowing in a pink-and-white pattern over her lap.
“What do you think you might do for a woman?”
“What’s that?”
“For a woman that might be in trouble, might have lots of trouble.”
In the cool air under the metal awning, out of the glaring desert light, her language seemed dreary, detached.
“What kind of trouble is that?”
“Family trouble.”
“You need money?”
“Would you kill my husband?”
The ebb of my nonchalance in this conversation was now complete. I sensed a border I did not know.
“I’ve got a gun over there in that car. He’s in a garage outside of town, working on his car. All you have to do is walk in there, walk right up to him, and shoot him. He won’t know you. There’s no one else there. No one could hear.”
I stared at her, her pallid cheeks, her full breasts.
“I’m not a liar. He’s there. And I want to kill him.”
She turned halfway to me, for the first time, no longer speaking to the windshield. Her milky blue eyes were both desperate and distant.
“He’s working on his car. He doesn’t care.” She inclined her head. “That woman over there? Her sister’s gonna have his kid too. I’d kill him myself, but I can’t. I’d screw up. He’d beat me up so bad, I’d lose the baby.”
I was afraid to say anything, make any movement. Her voice edged on hysteria, on laughter.
After a few moments of my silence her hand went to the door handle. “If you want to do it, no one would know. You could throw the gun away. I wouldn’t say anything. I don’t even know your name.”
When the stillness hung on she said, “Well, forget it. Just forget it. Forget I even got in here.” She got out, closed the door firmly, and walked away, reaching across to her right temple with her left hand in a prolonged, deliberate movement to sweep her blonde hair off her face, a movement that carried her across the sunlit lot to the Thunderbird. She sat there sullen and tight-lipped. When the boy came to her from the backseat she shoved him away, as if he were a younger brother she had to baby-sit.
I paid for my lunch and left. The peculiar tone of muscle in my young body, the quickness of my hand reflexes that made driving seem so natural, so complete a skill, was gone. I drove slowly north through town. The same officer sat austerely in the same car, parked just past the bridge over the Colorado River at the edge of town. I drove under the speed limit for more than an hour. I passed one or two buildings that could have been garages, but there was no sign of life.
I crossed the Green River and turned north for Price on U.S. 6. After a bit I pulled over and let the dog out. She bounded with exuberance through the sage and, a time or two, stood poised, looking back at me. I leaned against the car, smoking a cigarette. I couldn’t remember if I’d loaded the pistol the night before when I was putting things in my car in Santa Fe. I thought of being with Jan that night and, suddenly impatient, whistled for the dog with exasperation.