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   A hot wind blew the day Cynthia’s father died, metallic tang of storm in the air. She and Wes drove west into it, leaving behind Cortez and the distant San Juan Mountains. Demaris had found her, phoned. 

   They picked up the San Juan River from just across the border in Utah and followed it, lost it again in Cow Canyon, and came down off the Colorado Mesa into Valley of the Gods, following 163 south. Cynthia didn’t recognize it. They drove through the town of Mexican Hat and Wes looked at her. She had a look of deep reckoning on her face, and he turned back to the road. 

   They’d found each other in the dark of a bar, the kind that encouraged anonymity, sexless and murky. Tables disappeared into black walls, and bare bulbs over the bar cast an oily yellow light. He sat in the back corner, furthest from the bar, a couple of skinny old guys at the other end, one passed out at a table. Stench of bodies and age and despair. Men broken in irrevocable ways. The bartender watched a horse race on the old tube tv. 

   Wes picked at a guitar in his lap, a picker by nature. He played some old Carolina folk songs, “Ain’t Got No Honey Baby Now,” “Wilson Rag” mixed in with some Smokey Mountain blues. He didn’t look up when he heard the boots tracking towards him. Cynthia moved slowly but with great purpose, as though she’d been dared. “Do you play old songs or what?” she demanded. Wes didn’t bite.

    “Hey, John Lennon.” Cynthia waved a hand in front of him. “You in there? I asked, what do you play.” It was difficult to know if she was looking for a fight, for sex, or for both at once. 

   “Bob Dylan, actually,” was all he said before striking into the raging tempo of “Don’t Think Twice.” 

   “You play like a stray comet.” The words pulled out, then snapped tight at the end.

   “Is that good or bad?” he asked her.

   “It suits you.” 

   “What are you?”

   “I’m more of an eclipsed moon.”

   “It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why,” she told him, meaning it. Her voice was pure and clear and when she sang, everything else dropped away. Velvet and rust. 

   The old Ford Galaxy came down from the Mesa along a dirt track with switchbacks, dusty and ticking in the heat of the sun. Cynthia hard at work steeling herself. Beside her, Wes felt cool and still. 

   The town was named Mexican Hat for the shape of the striated sandstone rock formation that overlooked the San Juan River from the upper ridge of the canyon. Its Navajo name was Hoskinnini Mesa, Angry One. Cynthia’s identification more with the Navajo and Ute names than the colonial ones grew out of their chilling descriptive accuracy. The sandstone hoodoos as unearthly as their names.

   Cynthia was sweating, opened the window for the breeze. Grit peppered her skin and stuck to her sweat, stung. Tangled branches scumbled past. The cabin came into view on the right, Cynthia not looking at it, watching her hands twist and clench in her lap. Wes stared at the wrecked cabin. He couldn’t see Cynthia there. When she was ready, she lifted first her eyes, then her head, to meet it on her own terms. Just the thought of this cabin had owned her for so long, and she felt victorious when she didn’t crumble.

   That first night after Demaris’ phone call, Cynthia’s sleep was broken, and she sweated, and dreamed of all the men she has ever known, marching at her command into a vast conflagration which she knew in her dream to have once been a distillery. None of the women she has slept with are in the marching column, or even in the dreams. When she awoke in the predawn, she lay completely still, for she knew that to move would be to obliterate the dream. Instead, she closed her eyes again, hardly aware of the wet sheets, or of Wes beside her. She wanted to finish the dream; to see what happens, how it ends. 

   Wes stopped the car forty feet from the verandah, turned the engine off. A woman came out onto the verandah. Stout and short, barefoot, she wiped her hands on a towel, squinting to see who was in the car.

   “I’ll stay here,” Wes told Cynthia.

   She nodded, didn’t take her eyes off Demaris. Her gait was quick and strong, hesitating near the verandah. “Come, come” Demaris whispered, holding her hands out. Cynthia took the hands in her own, stepped forward, touched her forehead to Demaris’. 

   “Oh, my girl, you came.” 

   “I came for you,” Cynthia responded.

   “I know, I know.” Demaris took Cynthia’s face in her hands, looked hard into it. 

   “You’re the same,” she told her.

   “Am I?” asked Cynthia, knowing it to be untrue.

   “Yes. To me.”

   “You’re the same. I think I even recognize that dress.” Cynthia managed a smile.

   “No, look!” Demaris smacked her hips. “There’s more of me now.”

   “But you still have your beautiful, long hair.”

   Demaris sighed. “Aaah, but it is so grey!”

   Cynthia caught the older woman’s eye, smiled genuinely this time. 

   “I’m so happy to see you at last! Who is with you? Is he going to sit all day in the car?”

   “He’s a friend, but we can’t stay long.”

   Demaris turned and opened the door. Halfway through it, she asked, “You coming in at least?”

   “Let’s sit outside. Let’s have some iced tea and sit outside.” Not yet ready for whatever lay beyond the door. 

   “Hokay. You get the boy. I will get the tea.”

   Cynthia turned to the car, could see Wes trying to grasp the bleakness of the landscape, the dereliction of the cabin. She whistled with two fingers. 

   “We’ll sit for a minute,” she told him. “Sit and have an iced tea with Demaris. Just talk a bit.”

   “Sounds all right.” 

   There were some old wooden chairs, bone white from the sun. Wes set them down near the door, stood again when Demaris opened it. It was a single step for him to reach her, and she set the iced tea on a chair, wrapped her arms around him. Something about Demaris made this normal, and he put his arms around her too. She didn’t even reach his shoulders.

   After they’d sat through a long silence, Wes addressed Demaris, “What will you do? You know, now?”

   “I could go to my sister’s, on the reservation. She married a Navajo. But I don’t know. A lot of kids, and now grandkids.”

They fell silent again.

   “I could go to my brother. He lives in St. George. Big house, no kids. Maybe I will feel trapped in a city though. I’m used to here.” She waved an arm. “I like this more.”

   “Can’t you stay?” Wes asked, looking at Cynthia.

   “Alone?” Demaris cried.

   “Well, is that bad?”

   “No. No.” As though that resolved it.

   Another long silence, Cynthia’s voice, hoarse, uneven. “Where is he?”

   “Where.” A statement, as though answering her own question. Demaris nodded toward the window behind Cynthia. A stack of ice cubes collapsed in a glass, clicked. A crow, or a vulture, screeched. The hollow tapping of sand and dirt against the cabin. 

   “You believe, Wes,” Demaris turned to him, “in this desert I have a garden! Not much, but for here, this place, a miracle.”

   “You must be good at it.”

   “Come, Wes, see.”

    They stood, stepped off the verandah, left Cynthia alone. The garden lay in the afternoon shade cast by the cabin. He would have bet on nothing growing here. Nothing edible. In this garden were lettuce, peppers, Southern peas, cowpeas. They picked some cilantro, lettuce, peppers. 

   Demaris broke the silence uncertainly. “You can stay. Stay. For a while.”

   Wes didn’t hesitate, falter, waiver. “How many of these do you want?” he flourished a carrot at her.

   “Nine, ten.”

   “She won’t stay.”

   “She might.” Demaris glanced at Wes. “She might. If you want to stay.”

   “She won’t.” 

   Demaris turned to the plants, snorted derisively. 

   The living room, immediately, overwhelmingly familiar, turned her back into a child. Nothing had changed, not the dust, not the old, planked floor, not the furniture, not the smell. This was the original structure, built, her father had once told her, by a distant relative, in 1880. Various rooms, randomly added over time, gave it a patchwork look. Destitution or apathy rather than craft. She wondered if her ancestors had felt suffocated too, felt the wind slowly eroding them, as it did the earth all around. 

   Against the far wall, perched between two kitchen chairs, sat the pine coffin. He was laid out in his only suit, frayed cuffs, shiny lapels. Demaris had opened the windows to stir the air, but Cynthia closed them now against the wicked heat of the day. 

His face looked plastic and didn’t wear the anger that it had for her whole life. There would be a service, something. She couldn’t imagine who would attend, but it would be as much, or more, for Demaris than for him. She already knew he would be cremated. He’d dwelt openly on his own death when on bourbon. The certainty of cremation seemed fitting.

   Cynthia heard the soft pat of bare feet, spoke without turning. “Do you remember that time he took off, didn’t come back, days probably? It wasn’t until then that it occurred to me that maybe my mother had done the same thing. Run off. He would never answer me when I asked, but I never believed she was dead.”

   “He didn’t tell me. I tried to ask, but you know…”

   “He never spoke of her. I came home from school one day and all her things were gone. All the nice things. He used to do that a lot, before you came. Leave. Five and six years old, he’d leave me alone for days. I think he was hoping I wouldn’t be there when he came back.”

   “Poor baby.”

   Cynthia seemed not to hear, turned and looked at Demaris. “I thought there were two of you. One who was with him, and one who was with me. In my head, there really were two of you. I hated one and I loved one. I could never reconcile the two into one.”

Demaris listened, squeezed Cynthia’s hand. 

   “You let me hate you. That you.”

   “I knew it wasn’t me, honey. I knew it was your father you were afraid to hate.”

   The sound of Wes’ picking came to them, stolen on the wind.

   “I know this is hard for you too.”

   “No, honey. When it’s time, it’s time. He was ready. He was already rotting from the inside out.”

   “Demaris, I think you should stay here.”

   “You are okay with that?”

   “Of course.”

   “Will you come back? Visit me?”

   The bluegrass notes of “Goin’ Down the Road” floated in and Cynthia felt tempted to sing. Instead, she heard Wes, low and quiet, “Goin’ down the road, feelin’ bad, honey, bad,” turned toward his voice. She was grateful right now for his consistency.

   “I’ll visit,” she said finally, and meant it.

   “Maybe he’ll come too?” Demaris gestured toward the porch.

   “Yes. Maybe.”

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   Cynthia’s need to know how the dream ends, what it means has dissolved. But it revisits her one night weeks later, in a brittle sleep in El Paso. In this second dream, she follows her former lovers, now the grown men she had known in life, and she, the child, hurries them into the blaze. The only sound, the roar of the conflagration. Flames lick at her legs, embers under her feet. She feels not heat, not pain, or fear. Relief. She turns from the fire, away from her burning lovers. Behind her, stands Wes. Cynthia walks toward him. When she draws abreast of him, he turns and steps into her rhythm.

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