Middleton. Terrel and I will both be hoping.”

I waved to her as I walked out into the darkness toward the car where it was hidden in the night.

The cab had already arrived when I got there. I could see its little red-and-green roof lights all the way across the dry wash, and it made me worry that Edna was already saying something to get us in trouble, something about the car or where we’d come from, something that would cast suspicion on us. I thought, then, how I never planned things well enough. There was always a gap between my plan and what happened, and I only responded to things as they came along and hoped I wouldn’t get in trouble. I was an offender in the law’s eyes. But I always thought differently, as if I weren’t an offender and had no intention of being one, which was the truth. But as I read on a napkin once, between the idea and the act a whole kingdom lies. And I had a hard time with my acts, which were oftentimes offender’s acts, and my ideas, which were as good as the gold they mined there where the bright lights were blazing.

“We’re waiting for you, Daddy,” Cheryl said when I crossed the road. “The taxicab’s already here.”

“I see, hon,” I said, and gave Cheryl a big hug. The cabdriver was sitting in the driver’s seat having a smoke with the lights on inside. Edna was leaning against the back of the cab between the taillights, wearing her Bailey hat. “What’d you tell him?” I said when I got close.

“Nothing,” she said. “What’s there to tell?”

“Did he see the car?”

She glanced over in the direction of the trees where we had hid the Mercedes. Nothing was visible in the darkness, though I could hear Little Duke combing around in the underbrush tracking something, his little collar tinkling. “Where’re we going?” she said. “Fm so hungry I could pass out.”

“Edna’s in a terrible mood,” Cheryl said. “She already snapped at me.”

“We’re tired, honey,” I said. “So try to be nicer.”

“She’s never nice,” Cheryl said.

“Run go get Little Duke,” I said. “And hurry back.”

“I guess my questions come last here, right?” Edna said.

I put my arm around her. “That’s not true.”

“Did you find somebody over there in the trailers you’d rather stay with? You were gone long enough.”

“That’s not a thing to say,” I said. “I was just trying to make things look right, so we don’t get put in jail.”

“So you don’t, you mean.” Edna laughed a little laugh I didn’t like hearing.

“That’s right. So I don’t,” I said. “I’d be the one in Dutch.” I stared out at the big, lighted assemblage of white buildings and white lights beyond the trailer community, plumes of white smoke escaping up into the heartless Wyoming sky, the whole company of buildings looking like some unbelievable casde, humming away in a distorted dream. “You know what all those buildings are there?” I said to Edna, who hadn’t moved and who didn’t really seem to care if she ever moved anymore ever.

“No. But I can’t say it matters, because it isn’t a motel and it isn’t a restaurant.”

“It’s a gold mine,” I said, staring at the gold mine, which, I knew now, was a greater distance from us than it seemed, though it seemed huge and near, up against the cold sky. I thought there should’ve been a wall around it with guards instead of just the lights and no fence. It seemed as if anyone could go in and take what they wanted, just the way I had gone up to that woman’s trailer and used the telephone, though that obviously wasn’t true.

Edna began to laugh then. Not the mean laugh I didn’t like, but a laugh that had something caring behind it, a full laugh that enjoyed a joke, a laugh she was laughing the first time I laid eyes on her, in Missoula in the East Gate Bar in 1979, a laugh we used to laugh together when Cheryl was still with her mother and I was working steady at the track and not stealing cars or passing bogus checks to merchants. A better time all around.