Mom would collapse into herself a hundred times a day, wouldn’t be able to work any shifts for a year, for two, and I would walk down to the bus stop with a two-by-four, and I wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left of any of them down there. And then the sheriff’s deputy would come for me like he’d always known he’d have to someday, and Mom would take off with me in the Buick, just driving straight across the pasture, for the mountains, for the memory of mountains, both her hands on the steering wheel, and this is already the way Indians have been dying for forever.
