“This whole world of knowledge is being lost,” Mr. Crittenden says, touching the page of his book as if he can feel the patterns. He leans his white head into the space between them, his blue eyes feverish, pink-edged.
“Are the men the artists in your tribe?” he asks.
Cash tries not to smile. “No, the women just let me pick it up a little.”
“Do your daughters know how to do this kind of work?”
“They do it,” Cash tells him, and it’s true, they did, before Alma landed upside-down in the river and Sue landed in the hospital for the third or fourth time with a broken cheekbone and a few other presents from her boyfriend. But even before all the sadness, they didn’t do beadwork in the picture-perfect way Mr. Crittenden surely imagines. Cash’s daughters and nieces have perms and belong to Weight Watchers. If they make up a pair of earrings from time to time, it happens while they’re on the phone with each other, laughing their deep smokers’ laughs, criticizing their husbands’ friends. Cash was never entirely in on the conversation, but still, that is the world he’s sad to have lost.
Mr. Crittenden sees Cash staring at the window. “That’s a gray-tailed cockatoo. They used to be terrible pests in Australia. Wheat farmers shot them by the thousands. Now there aren’t a great many of her kind left.”
But Cash had been thinking how sad it was there was not even a plant on the windowsill in here. Not one green thing that can sit in the sun and be quiet.
The humidity rises all week. Friday afternoon feels weighted and endless, like the end of a life. By six, Cash feels desperate. He is back at the Trading Post again, waiting for Rose to finish up. Maybe they will go to a movie. Something to take his mind away from here for two hours. But Mr. Crittenden still hasn’t come in to lock up and dole out his beads.
“When was he in last?”
Rose thinks. “Didn’t he come at lunchtime?”
“No, we just went.”
“That’s right.”
Cash stands in the bay window, looking up at the birds he despises, wheeling in a tight, anxious circle. Tonight they seem to be looking for something—their own lost wishes.
New York City, maybe. He smiles to himself.
“His door’s open,” Rose says.
“Maybe we should close it up and go.”
“Maybe we should go find where he keeps all the money.”
“Rose, I swear. Just close the door. I don’t know how you listen to them parakeets all day, they would drive me insane.” He watches the gathering storm. Man, you’re already crazy, no driving needed, he thinks, just as Rose shouts: a tremulous, rising “Whooo?”
Cash’s shoulders tighten and he turns. “What is it?”
“He’s in here.”
Cash wonders instantly if Mr. Crittenden has been listening to their talk, to Rose’s gossip. Her joke about taking his money! He tries to remember what other wild thing she might have said that could lose her job for her.
“Cash,” Rose says, her face white, her voice once again a rising note, and then he understands what it is. Mr. Crittenden has not heard a thing.
Cash stays up late working on a beaded belt. He is tired, but can’t imagine sleeping. He and Rose spent a long time repeating the details to each other, as if they’d been shipwrecked in some new place where only this event existed: the police said suicide, no question, he’d taken prescription sleeping pills and left his account books organized. There is a wife, it turns out; she lives in Rock Springs and probably had nothing to do with his shirts. Her instructions over the phone were to keep the store open for the rest of the season, if possible. A management company in town will see that Rose gets paid. Cash doubts that she will have the nerve to go back. The whole time the police were there she clutched her bosom and breathed as if she’d run a mile in those high heels.
Cash wants to know things Rose hadn’t even considered: who will come get the animals, for example? He doesn’t favor the idea of her working under the same roof as a starving snake. And how long was Mr. Crittenden dead in there? He can’t get his mind’s eye to stop staring at Mr. Crittenden blue at the mouth and fingertips, frozen in his last slump while three men turned him through the doors like furniture and carried him out of the store. Did he kill himself in the middle of the night, or at dawn? Cash wanted every single how and what, in order to muffle the sound of
“Why?”
Rose has taken the Valium the doctor gave her and gone to untroubled sleep in Cash’s bed, leaving Cash alone with the bare light bulb and the wall calendar from Wickiup Hauling. The month of July shows families on a yellow river raft. They have cameras and bright-colored clothes and expressions of surprise, each mouth like a slack little rip in the face: they’re coming into white water. He recognizes his own innocence, before he came up here. Now he knows enough about shining promises to wonder who sat by the river all day slapping mosquitoes to get this picture, and what he got paid for it. His knuckles ache because of the changing weather, and twice tonight he has lost plastic beads into the orange linoleum, which is curled up and cracked in places as if volcanoes planned to erupt from under his floor. “Let them go,” he whispers aloud, but the habit of holding on to every small, bright bit of color is hard to forget.