She’d slept late that day, past noon. Since she’d lost her job there wasn’t much reason to get up early. Late afternoon she bathed, pulled on jeans and drifted over to Jimmy’s, taking a seat at the end of the bar. She was a pretty girl, with a reputation, a body, and star tattoos climbing the right side of her neck. The place was quiet, just a few of the regulars, plus three or four trainees from a nearby Army base, feeding quarters to the jukebox and dancing with the local girls. Lights from behind the bar shone unevenly on the polished wood.

Twenty minutes later, he walked in. A hipless cowboy in snakeskin boots and a straight-ahead stare. He slid onto a stool and ordered a Bud and a shot of Cuervos. She watched as he drummed his fingers on the bar, showing little interest in the crowd around him. She waited for him to notice her. When he failed to look over, she gathered up and moved next to him. “Wanta guess my name?” she asked.

He turned in his seat and adjusted his hat to the back of his head. He took his time before he answered. “Well, I expect it’s something like Star.” He said it without smiling.

“That’s a wrong guess.” She glanced at herself in the long mirror that hung behind the whiskey bottles, the apricot-colored blouse cut low in the front, the fleshy bosom. She thought somehow she’d look different now that she was 32; less edgy, more resolute. She couldn’t help but think that her sister could get a guy off his barstool in four seconds flat. “My name’s Mavis,” she said, turning back toward the man. “I have a sister named Marge who was first runner-up to Miss Ft. Worth.”

That made him smile. He reached over and shook her hand. “Okay. I’m Eddie.”

The good smell combination of beer and cigarettes filled the bar. Mavis and Eddie drank shots of tequila until they had a buzz on, then put money down for the bartender to keep it going. Eddie told her he’d been living on disability checks and planning his next step, which he’d been doing for the past three or four months–since he got busted up working cattle on a ranch in northern New Mexico.

“How’d that happen?”

“Got sloppy.”

“I’m planning my next step too,” she said, “cause I’m out of a job.”

“What’d you do?”

“Worked the counter at Denny’s.” What she didn’t tell him was that her dog had died, and she was behind in the rent. And that, in spite of a wayward life, she believed with her whole heart that Jesus was her personal savior.

By that time Eddie was beginning to slur his words. They stayed until closing time and when he stood to leave, she noticed he favored his right leg.

“So am I gonna see any more of you?” she asked, knowing by then that he had a house he rented and a truck and a German Shepherd named King.

Unsteady on his feet, Eddie scratched his ear. “Well, hell yeah, baby. I’m taking you home.”

Three weeks later Mavis was still with Eddie, in a house that sat by itself at the edge of town. A porch looked out on blue mountains and lavender wildflowers growing against a sagging picket fence where tall yellow grass and a pomegranate bush grew. She could pluck the fruit and split it open with her hands, suck out the seeds and chew the bittersweet taste.

She made herself useful, cooking the meals, washing the clothes, and turning on the one, lone sprinkler to throw water at the yellow grass. She replaced a missing button on one of Eddie’s shirts and planned to buy beige-colored yarn in town to knit him a scarf for when the weather turned cold. She cleaned up after his dog.

Even though Eddie drank to fall asleep and needed the radio on all night, and the large German Shepherd moved silently through the house, watching her every move, she knew she wanted to stay right where she was.

On a bright sunny morning during the fourth week, she said, “Don’t I wish I had a little house like this,” she said, noticing a crack in the ceiling. “You’re surely on the lucky side.” They’d just finished breakfast.

Eddie, seated across the table, tapped his plate with his fork, then pushed it aside and shook a cigarette out of a pack in his shirt pocket. His lower lip was split, and the skin below his hairline was burnt from the sun. There were creases down one side of his face from where he’d slept.

“How long you had this place?” she asked.

“Long enough.” His eyes flashed out at her. “You ever been married?”

“Not so far.”

“Why’s that?” Eddie sat back in his chair, staring hard at the bowl where Mavis had made dough for biscuits. The floor was swept. There were wildflowers in a jar on the table, as well as over the sink.

“I’m just always hittin’ the road,” Mavis lied. She decided she better slow down, not scare him off.

She stacked the plates and carried them to the sink, but instead of running the tap, she gazed out the window at the dusty road that ended abruptly past the house. She returned to the table. “Your dog over there.” His paws were bigger than her feet.

King raised his head to look at Eddie.

“Reminds me of a time I lived in Tucumcari, north of here.”

It was winter, Mavis was working in a little diner, when one day a stranger walked through the door, stomping snow off his combat boots. He took a seat at the counter, alongside a bunch of large men in windbreakers, and ordered coffee. Soon enough he started talking. Mavis listened, filling his cup, and, before she knew it, he’d talked her into taking his dog. That was the kind of talker he was.

“People turn into great talkers when they want something,” Eddie said.

Mavis remembered, “He said he wanted her to have a home before he turned himself in to the authorities. He didn’t look like any criminal element, it was a nice town.” Mavis laughed and finished her coffee. “She was part blue heeler, and smart. Wouldn’t let me out of her sight. Carried my slipper around in her mouth. I had her about four years before she died.”

Mavis stared straight ahead, remembering how she’d carried the dog in her arms to a quiet spot in the desert and left her there, asking Jesus to care for her soul. “I don’t know why I told that.” She rubbed at something on her sleeve, then gave it up. “I called her Lady,” she said.

Eddie reached down to stroke King’s head. “I worked around Tucumcari,” he said.

“Oh yeah? Doing what?”

“I worked the Bar Double B Ranch.” Eddie gazed out, pulling on his cigarette, his eyes on the horizon. “Funny, isn’t it? How life can change on a dime? Broke my ankle falling off a fence.”

Mavis searched his eyes to see how he was doing. To see how she was doing. She didn’t mind the silences that sometimes rose between them while they were having a conversation. She’d known cowboys who’d suffered head injuries and struggled to regain their thoughts. Maybe it was like that for him.

“Look, I may be leaving in a couple of days.” His eyes narrowed on something, it seemed, beyond her left shoulder.

Mavis felt a shift looming, the way the air gets damp and cool before a storm. His expression had already forwarded itself to someplace far away. She took the paper napkin in her hands and worked it with her fingers. “Where to?” she asked.

“Up north.” Eddie pushed himself back from the table, stood up, and walked to the door. He unlatched the screen and stood in the doorway. King closed the distance between them. “There’s someone I need to see.” He tossed out his cigarette and closed the screen. The lines in his face looked deeper. “No hard feelings?”

Rubbing her eyes, Mavis looked first at the yellow-painted cabinet in the corner with its mostly empty shelves she’d hoped on filling, then at the curtains at the windows she’d hoped to replace.

“You’ll be okay. It’s not like you haven’t been to the rodeo once or twice,” Eddie said.

She was quiet for a time. “The rodeo?”

“You’ve got family, right?” Eddie asked.

“A sister.” Mavis picked at her cuticles. She visited her sister twice after she married and moved to California, where she lived in a house by the bay and a light-spangled bridge, with views of the city hills. Two years ago, Marge’s husband drove off the road, killing her sister. Mavis still couldn’t think about her dead, so she pretended Marge was fine and living still by the bay.

Mavis glanced around for some comforting object to look at and settled on Eddie’s green-and-brown-checked shirt, the one she’d sewn the button on. She could still smell the scent of her childhood, the heat and dust. The oleander and iodine. As for her mother, she hadn’t seen her in several years – not since she’d taken up with a musician and left the country to settle in Germany.

“King’s my family.” Eddie put a hand on his dog and rubbed his ears.

“Let me come with you. I won’t be any trouble,” she blurted. “I can help drive. I’ll look after you real good.” Mavis rose, stepped past the dog, and leaned her head into the hollow of Eddie’s shoulder. She put a hand in his back pocket, palming the cheek of his ass.

They were on their way to Tucumcari, back to the ranch where Eddie had worked. Something about money he was owed. She didn’t care, she was glad he’d decided to bring her along. He even said he’d take her to the California coast when he was done. Rent a nice room on the beach.

“Yeah, old Harold Amis,” Eddie began, shaking his head as the maroon Dodge truck sped along. “He wasn’t anything more than a kid, with a kid’s dreams and all that bullshit expectation.” He looked out the window as the desert gave over to grassland. “He hadn’t been working too long–six months maybe–when we found him one morning on the ground inside the bull pen with a half-empty bottle of Kentucky Beau. We thought he’d hung one on and was sleeping it off in the sun. We waited for him to stand up and brush himself off, but he didn’t.” Eddie reached over and tugged at King’s ear. “He was dead as dirt.”

“What happened to him?” Mavis asked.

“Seventeen hundred pounds of bull happened to him, that’s what. Old Yellow Jacket. That old bull and him had a last dance.”

Eddie started to drive faster as they moved past Tularosa and into Vaughn. “We pretty much busted ourselves good to get Harold out of there. That’s when I broke my ankle, falling off the fence into the corral. I was lucky, if you call it that – the other guys got Yellow Jacket tied down before he got to me.”

Mavis stared straight ahead, watching the road, listening carefully. She’d heard stories like this before, of cowboys and their mishaps.

“He didn’t have any family,” Eddie said, “we just handled it. Took him down to the river and buried him ourselves, me hobblin’ along. Ray, the foreman stepped up and said something about how we commended the soul of our departed brother. Except Ray’s zipper came undone,” Eddie chuckled. “Right in front of God and everybody-and he’s there with his pecker half out. Hard as we tried, we couldn’t keep a straight face, and, before long, everyone was on the ground with it. Man, nothin’ could go right for Harold. Nothin’.”

Mavis watched the Rio Grande blur past, then fished a Coke out of the cooler and passed it to Eddie. “Is that the end of the story?”

“Pretty much.” Eddie held the can to his forehead. “Except for the get-together over at George Webber’s. He was the ranch manager. He and his wife, Ginger, had us come by. We put on our best boots and stood around with our hands in our pockets, and no one said shit. We just wanted to throw down our drinks and get the hell out cause every one of us knew Harold was fooling around with Ginger, dumb little son of a bitch.” Eddie finished his Coke. “He didn’t know about women like her, she was a sinkhole that sucked you in.”

They turned east, leaving the Rio Grande behind. Route 66, still known as the mother road, was now Interstate 40. Ahead lay the steel and wood bridge supports of the old Tucumcari and Memphis Railroad, when it served as a gateway to California, the blueprints and histories embedded in its pylons.

Late in the day they drove through the gates of the big ranch and bumped along the ruts in the road until they reached the main house. Eddie parked under a cottonwood shading the side of the house and killed the engine.

Blinking against the glare of the sinking sun on the windshield, Mavis could just make out the outline of the place. A well-tended garden led to a wide porch with wicker chairs and a pile of neatly stacked firewood. Eddie opened the driver’s side door and put on his hat. He tilted it low in the front, as was his habit. King stepped past the steering wheel and out the door, relieving himself on a tire.

“That her?” Mavis asked.

A woman walked from the house and took her place by the porch rail. Shading her eyes with her hand, she looked out at the car. She wore a simple cotton dress that revealed the lines of a spare, childlike body and earrings that caught the light. Her hair, held off her face with painted combs, fell past her shoulders in waves the color of butterscotch.

Eddie touched his hat in greeting. “Oh yeah, that’s Ginger all right,” he said, his voice low enough for Ginger not to hear him.

“I didn’t think she’d be so pretty,” Mavis said, her face puffy from the heat blowing in the car. She grabbed a cookie and got out, leaning against the fender, the air around her motionless and insect filled. That Ginger probably had a fancy electric stove and a fox coat hanging in her closet. Mavis felt all the old feelings of being plain. Uncomfortable in her tight Capri pants and bright, yellow blouse, she hoped that she and Eddie wouldn’t stay long. She wanted to get to that ocean.

Ginger nodded at Eddie on his way to the porch. “People looking for you. Where the hell have you been?” she said. She eyed Mavis.

“Good to see you too,” Eddie said.

“Look,” Ginger said, “I don’t know what you want here.” She brushed at a fly.

“You know goddamn well what I want. You owe me back wages. About two thousand dollars worth,” Eddie said. He approached the steps.

Ginger took a step back. “Some people at the sheriff’s department would sure like to ask you a few questions. Like how did Harold end up in that pen, stone drunk in the middle of the night. He didn’t drink. Some think you killed him.”

Mavis, listening by the car, covered her ears with her hands.

“You still a big hit with the bunkhouse boarders?” He flashed a dangerous smile.

“You don’t know anything. You’re just one more dirt-kicking cowboy.” She put a hand back up to shield her eyes and looked away from Eddie, past the barns and outbuildings to the vast sections of land. The acres of relentless sun.

“Well, hell, lady.” Eddie fingered a cigarette from his shirt pocket and licked the end before he put it between his teeth.

A slight breeze rustled the trees and cows lowed in the distant fields. King was nowhere to be seen.

“Who’s that by the car?” Ginger asked. She had lowered her voice, but Mavis could still hear.

Eddie flicked his lighter and dragged smoke into his lungs.

The sun shone angrily down on Mavis’ head, standing there with her uneaten cookie.

“All that ass,” Ginger said. She looked straight at Mavis and smiled. “And look at the size of those tits. Jesus, is she pure heaven? You used to like your ladies smaller, as I recall. Maybe I’ve got you mixed up with someone else.”

“That wouldn’t be so hard now, would it?” Eddie asked.

“That’s what this is about,” Ginger said. “Isn’t it? You thought you were special. My special fancy man. I know you got him drunk and got him to go in that pen. And you knew what would happen.”

Mavis slid back in the car, feeling wet under her arms. There were hordes of gnats flying around and she needed to pee. She turned on the radio and fiddled with the dial, then turned it off. “Oh dear, sweet Jesus. Do somethin’ fast.”

“I’m not giving you a dime,” Ginger said. “I won’t tell the sheriff’s people where you are but you need to get on out of here.”

Eddie flicked his cigarette onto the grass and started up the steps of the porch. “Or what?” He reached the top step and lunged for Ginger. She tore at him with her nails, opening his cheek. From somewhere in the yard, King flew into sight, bounding up the steps, snarling and ripping the fabric of her dress.

Eddie, Mavis and King drove off down the road, gravel flying, skidding onto the highway. They sped through town, past an abandoned train depot that waited for better times and crossed a narrow bridge over Animas Creek. Thirty minutes later, low on gas, they pulled into a Big Chief station. Used the bathrooms. Fed quarters to the soda machine for cans of Orange Crush to put in the cooler. Kept on going. Mavis watched the day end through the window, clouds filling the sky from the north, leaving a pale strip of light across the horizon and the scrub brush silver as a moonscape. Miles flew by as it turned dark. Headlights from passing cars flashed up, illuminating the splattering of insects on the windshield. Behind them, stores closed, parking lots emptied.

Mavis stole a glance at Eddie and felt changed, as if they’d hit something in the road.

“So, take a look at the map,” he told her. “We’re going west, girl.”

Mavis opened the glove box and removed a map. She had imagined an ocean where, beyond the breakers, the water lay calm and clear and bright as ice. A beach crowded with terns and gulls. Now she wanted to go back to that house with the whispering grasses, where, in the distance, sand cranes and coyotes called out to one another, hoping, if she prayed hard, she could forget all that happened at that ranch. She switched on the interior light and spread it out, following the red line of interstate 40 with one finger. It was long and unwinding as the flatline of a failing heart, the intersecting routes a tangle of wrong turns and jump starts. She folded it up and switched off the light.