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“Anything she wants,” Wade said. “Nursing, marketing . . .”

“Geology?”

“Wendy is going to be a writer,” Stephanie said. “Where have you been?”

“Wendy?” Larry asked her.

“I want to be a writer.”

“Seriously?” Wade said.

“Seriously,” she said. “I want to write stories or for a paper, something.”

“Don't you feel, though, that we're just kids?” Wade said.

“We are kids,” Larry said. “This is the way kids talk. This is the way everybody in here is talking.”

“Bullshit,” Wade said.

“See,” Larry said. He signaled the waitress and asked for takeaway boxes. “We're going to have some groceries.”

“A writer,” Stephanie said. “That's cool. You've always written well.”

“It's just something I want to do,” Wendy said. “I'm not very good, but it's what I want.”

Wade said, “That's obvious.”

“What?”

“You spend a lot of time on your homework or whatever.”

“I see you almost every day,” Wendy said.

Wade swirled his drink and drank it down. “Let's blow this place.”

“Let the birds finish,” Larry said.

•   •   •

Crossing the parking lot, Larry said to Wade, “I'll drive. Allow me.”

“I don't think you'll be driving my truck, big boy. Gimme that bottle.”

“Keys,” Larry said.

“You're flipping out too,” Wade said. He pushed past Larry and got into the driver's seat and started the truck. “You're fucking flipping out. What is it, time to flip out? Get in, everybody. Let's cruise.” The three young people looked at Wade, who had closed his door and was setting his CD player for Byton Hartman, the country singer.

Larry assessed his friend, and it was fully decided in him. He felt it as a shock in his elbows: he didn't like Wade. He had his hand on the smooth glass bottle in his suit pocket, and he knew for the first time in his life that he didn't like someone, and he was sure it was a good decision.
Flipping out?
Now that phrase made him angry. He felt again at the top of a big wheel slowly turning. “How dumb can you be?” he said quietly to himself. “You dumb bunny.” It was a phrase of his mother's.

“What?” Wade said. “What'd you say?

“I'm talking to myself, Wade. Again.”

The girls' short rabbit fur coats bristled in the cold Wyoming breeze. A week ago it had been warm. “He's okay,” Wendy said. “I've seen him drive worse than this. Let's just go.” She went around and climbed into the cab of the truck. Larry looked at Stephanie, and she leaned against him and said, “It's okay, Larry. Come on.” In the narrow backseat, she slid against him for warmth, pretending to chatter her teeth. “Turn on the heater,” she said to Wade. “It's cold.”

“I sort of thought it might be raining,” Wendy said. She was sitting with Wade in the front seat. “It's been raining in there for two hours.”

Wade wheeled them onto Main Street and said, “We can't go to Wendy's. Her mom waits up, and she'd get us all in a big game of Scrabble.”

They passed Fendall's and the gaggle of shiny cars parked there. The big front windows were full of the A group having coffee and banana splits, the girls in primary colors going from table to table sampling the ice cream, their shoulders shining. Larry felt he was seeing some time capsule cartoon of a life he had known. He wondered how they could breathe in that bell jar. Wade then drove them down Main Street and through the gravel parking lot of the Dome, naming the cars there behind the old pool hall, a dozen friends inside in fancy clothes playing eight ball. You could drink there if you were careful. “Just drive,” Wendy said. “We're not going in there tonight.”

“There,” Larry pointed. “Pull into the Trail's End.” The old motel was dark as charcoal in the night. The windows of the office were broken out, and weeds grew along the walkway in front of all the rooms. “Should we get a room?” Larry said.

Wade was confused and did a U-turn to drive into the littered parking lot of the ruin.

“Yes. They told us to get a room, and we should get a room,” Wendy said, laughing.

“I don't know how many people just told us to get a room,” Stephanie said.

“Twenty. ‘Get a room,' they said,” Wendy added. “Twenty people. Trusted individuals.”

“I get that,” Larry said, “and it sounds like good advice. Who doesn't like a room? But what exactly do we do with a room? I've already got a room.”

“Me too,” Stephanie said.

“What is it?” Wade said.

“We're good,” Larry said. “I just wanted my date to be able to say I took her to the Trail's End.”

“Do you have a room?” Stephanie asked Wade.

“Let's can it, boys and girls,” Wade said, and he floored it and spun his wheels onto the highway out of town. They felt the old prairie darkness swallow the car. He turned at the lane for the cemetery and eased, lights out, up the hill and around the fenced property. There were no other cars on the dark plateau. Usually on weekend nights in good weather there was a car or two parked off from each other above the speckled lights of town.

“I guess we're all alone,” Wade said.

For Stephanie, Larry pointed out at the graveyard and whispered, “Except for.” She was in his other arm, and he could feel her hand on his hot rib cage. There were a dozen antelope bedded down in the poplar grove behind the cemetery, and they were watchful but didn't get up. Byton Hartman was singing a song about his country and how much it meant to him, by god, and how it would always mean a lot to him. He had a voice so deep, it seemed to have been machined. Wade set the vehicle in park and left it running and pulled Wendy across to him. The cab was large but small, the rear seats close but separated by the high seatbacks, and the dark warm space smelled of the dry floral scent of the girls' perfume and the newness of the heater and soy sauce and ginger.

Larry saw Wendy slide to Wade, and then he turned to Stephanie, who had lifted her face up for the kiss. She had somehow gotten her hand inside his shirt, and he felt the impossibly smooth surface of her palm on his fevered ribs. For a while everything was shifting satin and breathing and the singing, a nonsense bass thumping, and the windows screened with condensation, and Larry let go a little and then a little more with Stephanie against him, sweet and more muscled than he'd imagined. He hadn't imagined anything really, and here now she arched up as if she had made a decision. She bumped his chin with her forehead in such a way that he knew to unzip the back of her dress a stroke. “Larry,” she whispered into his mouth, “be careful of my dress,” and she helped him slide his hand along the moist side of her breast; she gasped, or it seemed she did, and he stopped breathing to feel the weight of her, the contour and the wonderful warmth. Their kissing was seamless. He could hear the couple in the front seat, and he realized his ears were out for every noise from there, Wendy's breath and Wade's little directional “uh's” every once in a while.

•   •   •

The night wind on the old garage on Berry Street sucked and rattled the door like a visitor, and Jimmy woke with his lamp still on. He opened his eyes and heard the familiar rattling of the entry door with a clarity that surprised him. His head was clear. When he rolled his head, it didn't hurt or drift, and he sat up and saw that it was midnight exactly. He drew a breath and then another, and he felt as if he had slept all night. He hadn't felt this well for a year. He pulled his legs up and took his bare feet in both hands and stretched his neck down, and it didn't burn. “I don't know what this is,” he said aloud. He put on his slippers and his robe and the jacket with a kind of pleasure, and he stood up, and his vision did not swim. The door still tapped, and he went to it and pushed a folded paper into the jamb, and it was silent. Then he opened the door and felt the fresh night in his face. He sat on the bed again and pulled the new walker over and tested it. There were wheels and a brake and a basket and a little padded seat that folded down. It was deluxe.

•   •   •

In New York he and Daniel would walk to the river sometimes instead of going straight home from the paper. Daniel would come to the office on West 22nd Street, and they'd strike west, kicking and talking about their days. Daniel had once done a piece for a slick travel magazine on the theme of island getaways, and he'd included a famous sketch of Manhattan, referring to the various possible beaches up and down the East and Harlem rivers and then the Hudson, making each shoreline something out of the guidebooks, cabañas and piña coladas optional. Jimmy would have already been to some off-off Broadway play and then come back to the office to write it up, and it was wonderful to be out in the late night, especially in winter, the streets theirs all the way to the water. Even after Daniel got sick, and he was sick a long time, they still went down to what they called the beaches when they could, arm in arm to the waterfront, the new docks on the old piers, and the luminous water and the serious smell of the Hudson, and the lights of New Jersey in electric palisades.

Jimmy directed the walker out to the driveway now in the windy midnight neighborhood. All Wyoming was night. The air quickened everything and Jimmy was thrilled to be out this way. There was no moon, and the wind kept finding the leaves in ranks and rolling them past him. “‘Pestilence-stricken multitudes,'” Jimmy said, the old Shelley poem. It was cold, and at first it was pure tonic, and then it settled on his neck and his forehead and his hands. “Go on,” he said. “I'm walking to the street. A person walks to the street. Just to the old street and back.” Halfway he realized he should have worn gloves, and his hands cramped and opened and cramped. And then he felt a sickening pain rinse through his body, as if he'd spilled something on his shirt; he wasn't able to be able to be able. You're sick now, mister
.
It was a long way, he saw. He might have made a mistake.

•   •   •

At that hour Larry listened. He held Stephanie Barnes, but now sometimes her head was in his shoulder, and they sat close. In the front, he could hear Wendy and Wade whispering a little now and again, something like whispering. He kissed Stephanie, and she was smiling at him, and he was happy too, he supposed. He should be. He heard Wendy whisper, “Not here.” Stephanie heard it too, and to cover, she kissed Larry and embraced him, shifting her weight then suddenly and sharply to her hand on his ribs. The white light went right to the tops of his eyelids, and he said a sharp “Oh!” and Wendy's face appeared over the seat.

“What?”

Wade pulled her sharply back, and she said, “Goddammit, Wade, no.”

Wade said something that Larry couldn't hear, and Wendy's face was there again. “Are you all right?” she asked Larry.

He was breathing through his teeth, and Stephanie was apologizing, and then Wendy was jerked away, and she swore again, and then Wade said, “Okay,” and then after a silence he said loudly, “Fuck this! Just fuck this!” It was loud, but Larry was not surprised. Wendy scrambled back to the passenger side, and he came across for her, and Larry said, “Wade. Hey, buddy.”

Wade said to him, “Don't you talk.”

Wendy said
no
again and
no
again, and Larry could hear them cuffing and pushing.

“Wade.” Larry sat forward. “Wade, let's go back. Let's just go back.” He saw Wade put his hand against Wendy's face and push her head back against the window. “Stop it, man.”

“Don't you talk, you shit.”

Larry slid to his door and jumped out of the truck, opening Wade's door and dragging him out onto the windy hillside. “Leave it,” he said. “Cool down, and let's go home.”

Wade hit Larry below the eye, following with his right hand to the ribs, and Larry went down, and Wade jumped on him, swinging down now and missing. Larry's chest was on fire, and he threw Wade off and tackled him, rolling in the dirt, beyond angry, way beyond like some old man looking at himself, and then standing and lifting his teammate by the arm and the collar and throwing him in a spin to the ground.

The girls had climbed from the truck. “Stop,” Wendy said. The antelope had risen silently and leaped the cemetery fence and drifted through the tombstones, disappearing. “Stop.”

Wade sat splayed on the ground and then got up. “Fuck you, Larry.” Wade stood up, scooping up the little bottle of whiskey, and stepped into the driver's seat. He revved the engine and backed without closing the passenger door, rocking it closed when he wheeled out of the lonely place and down the hill toward Highway 31.

“Are you okay, Larry?” Stephanie asked. His eyes wouldn't quit watering from the pain, and he sipped shallow breaths as he brushed himself off.

“Yeah,” he said. “We're good. I think I cracked a rib in that game today, but right now I can't feel a thing. I think, however, I might have torn these fine trousers.”

Wendy had a hand over her face, her shoulders naked in the night wind. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

“Oh god, Wendy,” Stephanie said, “it's not your fault.” Wendy had left her purse and jacket in the vehicle, but Stephanie had hers. “I'll call my dad.” Larry shrugged out of his suit jacket and put it on Wendy and pulled the collar up and buttoned the two buttons while she looked up at him, and then he tied the sleeves in a loose knot in front.

“And he'll be happy to come out in the night and find us up here at Memory,” Larry said.

Stephanie smiled and fished her cell phone. “His daughter knows what she's doing,” she said to Larry. Her face was bright and flushed in the dark. She turned so Larry could pull the back zipper up those five inches. “He'll be glad I got this far.” She took his arm, and the three walked the perimeter fence with the wind at their backs.