And for some reason it made me laugh just hearing her, and we both stood there behind the cab in the dark, laughing at the gold mine in the desert, me with my arm around her and Cheryl out rusding up Little Duke and the cabdriver smoking in the cab and our stolen Mercedes-Benz, which I’d had such hopes for in Florida, stuck up to its axle in sand, where I’d never get to see it again.

“I always wondered what a gold mine would look like when I saw it,” Edna said, still laughing, wiping a tear from her eye.

“Me too,” I said. “I was always curious about it.”

“We’re a couple of fools, aren’t we, Earl?” she said, unable to quit laughing completely. “We’re two of a kind.”

“It might be a good sign, though,” I said.

“How could it be? It’s not our gold mine. There aren’t any drive-up windows.” She was still laughing.

“We’ve seen it,” I said, pointing. “That’s it right there. It may mean we’re getting closer. Some people never see it at all.”

“In a pig’s eye, Earl,” she said. “You and me see it in a pig’s eye.”

And she turned and got in the cab to go.

The cabdriver didn’t ask anything about our car or where it was, to mean he’d noticed something queer. All of which made me feel like we had made a clean break from the car and couldn’t be connected with it until it was too late, if ever. The driver told us a lot about Rock Springs while he drove, that because of the gold mine a lot of people had moved there in just six months, people from all over, including New York, and that most of them lived out in the trailers. Prostitutes from New York City, who he called “B-girls,” had come into town, he said, on the prosperity tide, and Cadillacs with New York plates cruised the little streets every night, full of Negroes with big hats who ran the women. He told us that everybody who got in his cab now wanted to know where the women were, and when he got our call he almost didn’t come because some of the trailers were brothels operated by the mine for engineers and computer people away from home. He said he got tired of running back and forth out there just for vile business. He said that 60 Minutes had even done a program about Rdck Springs and that a blow-up had resulted in Cheyenne, though nothing could be done unless the boom left town. “It’s prosperity’s fruit,” the driver said. “I’d rather be poor, which is lucky for me.”

He said all the motels were sky-high, but since we were a family he could show us a nice one that was affordable. But I told him we wanted a first-rate place where they took animals, and the money didn’t matter because we had had a hard day and wanted to finish on a high note. I also knew that it was in the little nowhere places that the police look for you and find you. People Fd known were always being arrested in cheap hotels and tourist courts with names you’d never heard of before. Never in Holiday Inns or TraveLodges.

I asked him to drive us to the middle of town and back out again so Cheryl could see the train station, and while we were there I saw a pink Cadillac with New York plates and a TV aerial being driven slowly by a Negro in a big hat down a narrow street where there were just bars and a Chinese restaurant. It was an odd sight, nothing you could ever expect.

“There’s your pure criminal element,” the cabdriver said and seemed sad. “I’m sorry for people like you to see a thing like that. We’ve got a nice town here, but there’re some that want to ruin it for everybody. There used to be a way to deal with trash and criminals, but those days are gone forever.”

“You said it,” Edna said.

“You shouldn’t let it get you down,” I said to him. “There’s more of you than them. And there always will be. You’re the best advertisement this town has. I know Cheryl will remember you and not that man, won’t you, honey?” But Cheryl was alseep by then, holding Little Duke in her arms on the taxi seat.

The driver took us to the Ramada Inn on the interstate, not far from where we’d broken down. I had a small pain of regret as we drove under the Ramada awning that we hadn’t driven up in a cranberry-colored Mercedes but instead in a beat-up old Chrysler taxi driven by an old man full of complaints. Though I knew it was for the best.