It’s logical that in a brothel there are all different kinds of women, and even more so here in the Nevada desert, whose monotony, the most barren in the whole of the American West, makes necessary certain exotic palliatives. Sherry’s having makeup applied in the ad hoc backstage out back, beside the now-dry well. She doesn’t trust the light-bulb-frame mirror they provided her with and, as when some client shows up unexpectedly, she glances in the rearview mirror of a rusted, broken-down Mustang. The sun and snow have been eating away at the vehicle since a man who was never seen again left it there. His name was Pat, Pat Garrett. He showed up one November evening, just as the temperature was about to drop, asked for a girl, the youngest they had, and Sherry stepped forward. Pat’s thing was collecting found photos, anything as long as it was found and featured a human figure; he went around with a suitcase full of them. When they were lying in bed together, as he gazed up at the wall he told her how he’d worked in a bank in L.A. before unexpectedly coming into an inheritance, at which point he’d quit. His penchant for the photos came from his time at the bank, from seeing so many people; he always found himself imagining what their faces would be like, and their bodies, in a context beyond the teller window—itself somewhat akin to the frame of a photograph. But after receiving the inheritance money, his other penchant, gambling, had seen him lose almost the entire sum. Now he was headed east, to New York, in search of more photos. Here in the West, he said, it’s all about landscapes, but there it’s all portrait. Sherry didn’t know what to say. He opened the suitcase and began passing her photos. Picking one from the deck, she was confronted with the unmistakable visage of her mother. She was smiling, with her arm around a man who, Sherry understood, was the father she had never met. Her head subsided onto Pat’s chest and she held him tight. He stayed on for several days after that, during which time she stopped charging him, cooked his food, and neither of them set foot outside the room. The night Pat left he couldn’t get the Mustang started, but he managed to thumb a truck headed for Kansas. The next day, having discarded the possibility that he had fallen down a well or gone to Ely for cigarettes, she sat and waited until nightfall with her sight fixed on U.S. Route 50’s last divisible point. When she couldn’t take it any longer she wept, sitting on the hood of the Mustang. She checks her lips in the rearview mirror and the makeup artist gives her the call, One minute till we’re on air! A Nevada TV news show is doing a special program on freeway prostitution. Into the microphone they ask: What are you proudest of, Sherry? Love is a hard job, she says, loving is the hardest thing I’ve done in my entire life.