Vaughn studied the western sky as if it held vital information. He rolled his head from one shoulder to the other. She heard his neck bones grind. “Look at them starlings up there.”
The flock swirled and folded upon itself, transmuting from granular to solid and back again. A hillside of fluttering aspen leaves became a ribbon tying itself in a slipknot.
“It’s called a murmuration.” The beautiful word felt strange on her lips. Starlings were aliens here, like the tamarisk, like the white man.
Vaughn grunted, as if she’d offered him a tea cake. “There’s a big raven in the cloud. You can see it when they divide.”
The larger bird beat a slow circle through the maelstrom, disappearing and emerging, neither on the attack nor very intent on escape. The starlings at times seemed to tease it, ignore it and swallow it. Finally, the raven broke from the veil and as it lazed away, a small escort took turns dive bombing it from above.
“He’s pissed but he’s leaving,” Vaughn said. “Squatters don’t want trouble either. I’ll take care of this here.”
Meg killed a thousand screensaver starlings with a keystroke and called up a browser to fly her southwest. She found the highway that ran through the Hopi reservation and tracked it to the town where Brian’s school was one of the main industries. No sign of pueblos or ancient plazas, but newer compounds stood in bright geometric clusters that might have passed for a lunar space station: a sewage treatment plant, tribal police and business offices, government housing inside a security fence. On the school grounds, the empty parking lot was crisply lined like a circuit board awaiting components. Netless red and green tennis courts languished under whorls of dust that had also airbrushed one curve of the running track. It circled an artificial-turf football field with end zone markings and yard lines legible from space. She wondered if Brian still ran, and whether he circled this field or struck out across the desert. Around and around or point-to-point, he’d be pushing against that unbroken wind. She clicked back the zoom and watched the BIA roads disappear, then the specks of green, the names of the villages, the line marking the state highway and finally, the sacred mesas, reduced to sand-colored smudges on a green planet.
Light and dark provide cues vital to wellbeing. Make your bedroom a sanctuary where you control their influence.
—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style
The moment belonged in light and she had always kept the photograph where the sun could find it. Her sister’s soaring exuberance and Meg’s bemused distraction overlapping and forever fused into a third, inscrutable presence. The image and her memory also flew into each other. Both were fading now.
A sand-footed retaining wall charcoals a flat horizon against a dull grey sky. A lie told in black and white; the sky was a cloudless sapphire. The shoeless lookalikes in winter-hued summer dresses scrawl their crisp shadows across the concrete—one galloping, the other poised, heron-like. Helen flies at the camera, hanging in midair, arms spread, chest thrust forward, bared legs coiled, an exploding halo of trailing hair, while Margaret (Meg came later) perches with one hand locked in an Indian grip with her sister, her other hand anchored atop the wall.
Margaret’s wariness seems self-preserving rather than protective of her younger sister. Her knees are pressed together, her right foot probing and her left planted, as if she intended to slither down the five feet to the ground. Their father’s camera had beautifully captured Helen’s blissful leap and foretold Meg’s unmooring, yet it was a deceptive photograph. Meg was certain she had laughed, too, as they tumbled into the sand.
On the winter day she discovered her house, this sunlit room had been a selling point. July sun, however, was brutal and the gates of hell yawned in August. To reduce the bleaching, perhaps she should let the photo summer on the bookcase away from the windows. Clearing a new place, she discovered a dust jacket spine had been bleached green from its original brown. The mauve cover next to it ripened to bright blue when she slid out the book. To her dismay, the chair, the carpet, everything had suffered sun damage. Moving Helen into the kitchen’s northern exposure would safeguard her image but make a point about domesticity she didn’t care to press. Her bedroom? Unwise to seed her dreams with a glimpse of the fallen.
A tubular-bell gong in the hallway broke her from indecision. She’d long meant to install a more cheerful timbre, but the reminder came so rarely. She stood in shadow where she could judge the visitor’s silhouette through the door’s frosted glass. A woman. Meg placed the photograph on the entry table and opened the door.
Pandora Cox, her amber streak now a bluish-black. Minus her stage presence, too. Hands joined primly over her belly, she planted one foot, the other toed, her thighs pressed together.
“Pandora! Come in. What a surprise.”
Pandora turned back toward the street and waved to the driver in a white pickup with a cab-over camper.
“I thought it was best to thank you in person,” she said, stepping just inside the door. She peered around as if in search of the powder room. “I knew you’d have a beautiful home—oh, for cute! Is this you?”
“My sister and me.”
Pandora lingered over the image. “Which is which?”
“I’m the…pensive one.”
“I knew it!”
Process of elimination, no doubt.
“I loved your ‘America the Beautiful.’ I’m sorry I missed you at the event.”
“Me, too.” Pandora bit her lower lip, released it. Despite the scholarship between them, they were still strangers. “I was wondering if there was any way I could get some of the money now.”
Meg looked out at the truck, its running lights on and the diesel clattering. She closed the door.
“It doesn’t quite work like that. The money goes to the school directly. CU-Denver will get the payment when you enroll.”
“Oh.” Pandora twisted the bottom of her t-shirt. “Well, I’m not going there, it turns out.”
It turns out? This might be the fastest washout yet.
“So where would you go instead?”
“Williston. Cody’s getting a job on a rig in North Dakota and I’m going with.”
“I meant college. The money’s for school, you know.”
“Oh, I know. There’s a college there—Williston State. The cash would just be for gas and get-started money. I can pay you back once he gets his paycheck.”
“Have you thought about where you’ll stay? Winter in that camper won’t be much fun.” According to a recent news story, a one-bedroom apartment in Williston averaged close to twenty-five-hundred a month if one could be found.
Pandora’s smile was a sly one. She squeezed the fingers of her left hand. A band with a minuscule chip of something shiny. “Cody thought of that already. I applied for family housing at the college. It’s only seven-fifteen a month. If we don’t get a student apartment, I’ll get a dorm room. It’s perfect!”
Well, at least it was clever.
“He told me I was crazy to ask for the money now, but I said you believed in girls following their passion.”
Yes, if the girl knows where it leads.
“You’ll be following him to a small town overrun with oil workers. And if Cody’s working and you’re in school, you won’t see much of each other. Does Williston have the music program you wanted? It won’t be like in Denver with all its opportunities. You have something to offer the world but talent has to be developed. You should go where you can learn and connect with other musicians.”
“Whatever talent I’ve got, I’ll