When I confronted him he pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills and begrudgingly paid his bill. He’d stayed current since.

“It will damn well have to,” I said. “I’ll stop on my way back to Price.”

Dan tried to stare me down for a few seconds and gave up and stomped into his house and slammed the door so hard a chunk of sod broke loose and fell to the ground. I took out one of the five-gallon containers and put it near his door. I thought for a minute and then went back and got the second one and put it next to the other. I’m usually not an asshole if I take a minute to think it over. Sometimes I need more than a minute.

I pulled out of Dan’s place in low gear. As my rig crawled up the hill I began thinking how he was no different from most of my customers when it came to an income, which, if they had one, was as lowly and fragile as their desert existence. As far as I knew, which wasn’t far, some ran a few cattle, or horses, or scraped by one way or another with small gardens or crafts or, in a few cases, a few dollars in savings from another, nearly forgotten, life or relative. I was completely in the dark when it came to Dan. His means were a mystery and, to hear them tell it, a mystery to the three wives I had met.

Once, on a long ago April 15, I commented to Cal, the Rockmuse postmaster, that he should probably be getting a lot of traffic during business hours as folks pushed the deadline to file. We both had a good laugh. Then he brought out a big box of envelopes, all with various government return addresses, including the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration.

Cal told me it was one box of almost sixty going back since before he became postmaster. “If you make a ton of money you pay no taxes. If you make no money you don’t even bother to file. Hell, an IRS agent comes by here at least once a year. They always send a different new young guy all buttoned down full of himself.” He pointed out toward the desert just beyond the low buildings of Main Street. “I tell every one of them the answer to their question is out there, which is pretty much what rich people and corporations tell the government, though I’m sure they have accountants and lawyers do the talking.

“Sure, sometimes someone’s boat comes in.” He tapped one of the model airplanes swinging from a wire above his head and watched as it gently swung back and forth. “It’s usually about the same size as this.”

We both watched the little P-38 model and Cal said, “You remember Karl and Wilhelmina…hell, I can’t recall their last name.” When I said I remembered them, they had both passed a few years earlier, Cal said: “They had that little sand and rock patch out off 117 where they raised a few ponies.

“An IRS agent came in one day and asked me if I knew where to find them. I did my point and shrug show for him and he left. But I ran into Karl a couple days later and told him an agent from the IRS was looking for him. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘I gave a kidney and three fingers in WWII. I gave my son to Vietnam. You see that fellow again, you tell him I’m paid in full.’ Karl and Wilhelmina both died not long after that. They’d been dead a month out there until someone found them—next to each other in bed, or so I heard.”

I remembered. I had been the one who found them. Either Karl or Wilhelmina had put a note on the door: “Ben—come in. We’re waiting on you.” They’d ordered a new wood-burning stove and asked me to deliver it when it arrived. Six weeks later it had and I did.