Roll your window down, their father said. He wants to say something to you.
The old man stood in the cold in the sandy gravel beside the pickup and took out a soft leather purse from an inner pocket of his canvas jacket and held the purse in his hands and unzipped it. He poked around and picked out two bills. He handed them in through the opened window to the two boys. I hope that’ll be compensation, he said.
They took the money shyly and said thank you to him.
You boys can come back here any time, he said. You’d be welcome.
Wait now, their father said. That isn’t necessary.
You stay out of this, Raymond said. This is between me and these boys here. This don’t concern you, Tom. You boys, you come again any time.
He stepped back. The two boys looked at him. At his old weather-chafed face and reddened eyes under the winter cap. He looked quiet and kindly. They held the money in their closed fists, waiting, not looking at it until their father had finally said goodbye and not until he had put the pickup in motion and they were turned back away from the cattle chutes and had driven past the house and were rattling on the county road with the gravel banging up under the fenders and then were pointed toward the west where the sky was beginning now to fade. Then they looked at the money. They turned it over. He had given them each a ten-dollar bill.
That’s too much, their father said.
Should we give it back?
No, he said. He took his hat off and scratched the back of his head and put the hat back on. I guess not. That would be an insult. They want you to keep it. They enjoyed having you out there.
But Dad, Ike said.
Yes?
Why didn’t they ever get married? And have a family like everybody else?
I don’t know, Guthrie said. People don’t sometimes.
In the pickup it was warm now, driving along the county road. Beyond the ditch the fenceline passed by, thickened and snarled with tumbleweed and brush. Above, on the cross arm of a telephone pole perched a hawk the color of copper in the lowering sun, and they watched him but his head didn’t turn at all when they passed under him.
I just guess they never found the right girl, their father said. I don’t rightly know.
Bobby looked out the window. He said, I guess they didn’t want to leave each other.
Guthrie glanced at him. Maybe so, he said. Maybe that’s what happened, son.
At the highway Guthrie and the two boys turned north and it was quieter in the pickup now because they were on the blacktop, pointed toward town. Guthrie turned the radio on to receive the evening news.
Victoria Roubideaux.
When she said her name the middle-aged woman sitting on the other side of the window looked at her and said, Yes, Mrs. Jones called, and then she made a check mark on the chart in front of her and handed the girl three sheets of paper on a clipboard to fill out. She took them back across the waiting room to her seat and held the papers on her knees, leaning over them with her hair fallen about her face like a thick dark curtain, until she lifted it deftly in a motion familiar and automatic and settled it behind her shoulders. There were questions she had no answer to. They wanted to know was there cancer in the family, heart disease among her father’s people, syphilis in her mother’s relations. Altogether more than a hundred questions. She answered the ones she could, the ones she had some certain knowledge of, believing it would not be right to guess on the others as it might be if this were some test she was taking at school. When she was finished she took the clipboard and sheets of paper to the woman and handed them through the window.
I didn’t know all of these, she said.
Did you answer what you did know?
Yes.