Into the Valley Read Free Page A

man’s neck was a loose pink.
    â€œWell, I don’t have anything pressing in town right now. Nothing I can’t miss.”
    The man nodded as if this was clear and handed her the doughnut and paper cup.
    As she drank the coffee in the shade of the building outside, she told herself there would be no police after her. What she’d done was not big or serious enough. And she was pretty. People had always seemed to like this. Her nose was aquiline, her lids heavy but eyes almond-shaped, this combination giving her, she’d been told, a bedroom quality. She had never experienced this quality but understood it appealed to people and so drew her eyeliner out to feline points at the sides of her eyes and kept her hair blonde. She was aware from the ballet lessons her mother had required that she moved with her shoulders down and neck long, which people also took to be ladylike and contented.
    She walked across the intersection to the other street in the non-town. Two houses stood on it, one boarded up. The other was hidden by a wooden fence that when she peered inside was overrun with cacti. The cacti had clawed over a single arch of walkway to the door; everything else in the bramble dead and dry. A walnut tree bowed over the porch. The smell of dog feces baked in the sun, although no dog to be seen.
    She opened the gate. (There were things she would not have done in the city: she’d wanted to enter a yard on one of the hills and peer into the mudroom at children’s windbreakers on hooks and dirty sneakers lined up; she’d stopped herself.) She stooped under the cacti. The freeway blew; no dog barked. When she reached the door, she knocked without a clear reason. She had a sense the owner here lived alone, and she wanted to speak with him. She could tell the person she was new to the valley, ask for tips. The windows were layered in dust. She knocked again louder. On the porch under the windows was a collection: an enameled pot, several stones, tines of sharp antlers. B. glanced around. She slipped a small antler bone into her purse. For luck.
    In the car, on the freeway, the non-town was already behind her. She tried to think of some current pop song, something fresh and summery to sing, but in truth she did not like the songs on the radio now. So she hummed her favorite parts from The King and I .
    It was 1967. In the spring she had turned thirty.

3.
    B. had once watc he d a boy playing in a sandbox in the city. In a playground in her neighborhood, perched like all the playgrounds in the city, it seemed to her, precariously on a hill, as if it might fall off the side of the world. The mothers had been pretty in their makeup and scarves, their clipped, determined movements—hands darting in and out of a pram, through a small child’s hair with leaves—admirable to B. But it was too draining to watch the women; they spoke too vehemently about items and opinions she did not understand. Her attention had settled instead on the boy. He poured the sand over his hand with such concentration, such absorption at the run of the dry grains on his fingers, that nothing else mattered, nothing else touched him. Only the feel of the sand on his skin and the keeping of its cascading rhythm. B. watched the boy until the mothers called him away, and after they’d gone she felt strangely abandoned, as if she should have spoken to him. She got up and looked around to make sure no one was watching and then sat in the sandbox. Following the boy’s movements, she poured the sand over her hand, but she felt only the irritating papery sensation on her skin and when her knees began to ache from kneeling, she got up and left.
    She decided that the checks were for her like the sand for the boy, and she did not let her mind go beyond this thought.

4.
    The radio announced a heat wave for the valley. B. could not imagine it any hotter. The back of the ivory sheath had sweat through and her limbs felt swollen;