I was reasonably certain I wasn’t a pervert and marginally if not reliably responsible, but Pedro couldn’t have known that. It was a toss-up between anger and fear and when the anger subsided I knew I would be left with only fear—for the girl, and with enough extra for Pedro as well.

6

My next stop, about twenty-five miles down 117 from the diner, was Dan Brew’s place, which had originally been a dirt house, or a sod house, as they were called on the prairies, dug out of the ground with a roof of wild grass. Dan’s had been made by a settler before the turn of the last century and he hadn’t added much except a metal carport and a cheap solar array. He had tunneled back into a rocky hillside to add a couple rooms.

No indoor facilities, which meant an outdoor privy and no running water. He kept a cistern to catch rainwater. There had once been a seasonal well but it had gone dry over a year ago. Cool in the summer and warm in the winter, a dirt house was about as basic as you could get in the desert. There was smoke chugging out of his chimney pipe that I could see for most of the half mile of rutted road that wound itself around two low hills before ending up at his front door.

Like most people who lived off 117, Dan probably wouldn’t notice or care much if the world ended. He’d been married and divorced several times since I had first met him, and last I knew he was working on number seven, or maybe eight. He was the kind of man who seemed to prefer to share his loneliness with a partner and while there apparently was a never-ending supply of women, usually from big cities, who saw a certain romance in the beauty and solitude of his lifestyle, sooner or later the daily diet of beauty and silence always wore thin. It usually started with the missus wanting to go to town more often and ended one day when she went to town and failed to return.

I knew more about Dan than most of the people I delivered to on 117. In fact, I knew more than I cared to know, courtesy of accidentally coming upon a meeting of the Dan Brew ex-wives club. I had heard that a few liked the area enough they wanted to stick around the desert, though just not around Dan’s Happy Acres. There were three of them, ranging in age from late thirties to late forties, sitting around an outside table at a restaurant on a sunny weekend in downtown Price. Unfortunately, I happened to walk by. I hesitated to accept their invitation to join them, and after I did I knew why and wished like hell I had kept walking. Every sentence began with “I loved Dan, but—”

Years before in a bar I’d heard a WWII vet who had been in the Normandy invasion describing what a grand thing it was and how proud he was to be an American and what a bloody mess it was. When he finally ran out of war stories he finished with “It was a million-dollar experience that I wouldn’t pay a nickel to do again.” Each one of the wives had survived Normandy, and listening to those three for five minutes was the longest day of my life. Somehow I managed to feel sorry for all of them, including Dan and his dirt house. Dan might not have been a Nazi, but at least for those three women sharing his life in the Utah desert, it was a beachhead of sorts.

Dan was waiting for me in his open doorway wearing a dirty bathrobe with no drawstring, no shirt, and nothing but a pair of tighty-whiteys, that weren’t all that tight and far from white—and worn cowboy boots that had seen better days twenty years ago. I’m not exactly a fashion icon myself, but underwear, bare legs, and cowboy boots was never a look I much cared for, though I’d seen it a few times, and not just on men, I’m sorry to say. As a manner of dress, even in the desert, it seemed to make a quiet statement about life that made you afraid to get too close for fear of attitude contamination, and your own good hygiene. It wasn’t a look I’d seen on Dan before, and while I guessed his age in his late forties, his attire made him timeless in the worst way.

With perhaps a bit more conviction and an earnest please I told the girl and the dog to stay inside. Dan had been expecting me and stood his ground in the doorway as I walked up to him. “It’s a little cold for sunbathing, isn’t it?”

He ignored me. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it,” he said. “I could use that drum of water.”

I bit my tongue. He did need to use some water, preferably hot and soapy. “I usually make it.”

Dan offered to give me a hand and together we strolled across the frozen ground to the rear of the trailer, his robe flapping in the breeze. The power lift gate worked fine.