Bobbing and humming, she tried again, desperately, to see if Vivien wanted to nurse, but the baby only tried for a few seconds, then opened her mouth to scream. “Oh,” she said to her, “oh, please stop crying.” She was tired of bobbing so she began to walk her, which sometimes worked, though it worked much better outside. Her breasts hurt and her arms hurt and her back hurt from holding the same weight in the same position for hours every day. Her neck hurt. She was hungry, too. She walked around the room and up the stairs, into and out of their bedroom and then into Clare’s, where there was no furniture.
She kept walking but began now to jiggle the girl and sing the “Carol of the Birds.” Perhaps it was the change of scene, or the song, but she stopped crying. Aldine dared not stop, circling the room, leaving footprints in the dust, and softly singing the same words, “curoo, curoo, curoo.” There was a folded piece of paper on the floor, the ink showing through the back like a cheap advertisement. She kicked at it once and knocked it closer to the wall. The green paint was cracked and dingy, and there was a crumbling hole in the wall with the biggest cracks, with bits of plaster dust dribbling out. She needed both arms to bobble Vivien and keep walking, but the temptation to poke at the hole made her stop, finally, after who knew how many laps or minutes, when to her relief the baby slept, and Aldine shifted her gently, oh so gently, against her chest and used one finger to probe at the hole in Clare’s wall, still whispering, as if the words alone would maintain the spell, “Curoo, curoo, curoo.” The dust came out as she dug with her fingernail, and there was something pleasing about doing that, so she kept excavating, and then to her surprise a piece of metal tumbled out onto the floor. It was a ring or a bolt of some kind. She didn’t dare to bend all the way over—that would surely wake the baby—but she eased herself down until she sat cross-legged with her back to the wall, hoping that Vivien would be too soundly asleep to notice that she was no longer moving. She almost always woke up when Aldine tried to unclasp her arms and leave the baby in the nest she’d made for her in the bed, but perhaps because she still held her, Vivien slept on.
Carefully, she reached out her hand for the ring and studied it. The gemstone had fallen out, she thought at first, but when she looked closer, she saw that what looked like scratches in a big lead-gray hole was actually the engraved signature of Tom Mix.
She slipped the ring on her index finger and listened hard for the sound of Ansel’s tractor returning but she heard nothing, not even birds. She picked up the dirty piece of paper, laced at the edges by the nibbles of bugs and mice, and saw that it belonged with the ring. Above the white silhouette of a man in a cowboy hat (in other respects, the man appeared to be naked), the paper was labeled, Tom Mix’s Injuries. All over the white silhouette were black capital letters and X’s, as if this were a pattern for counted cross-stitch. Then she saw that the letters corresponded to a list, which began:
Danger and difficulty have never daunted Tom Mix, nor broken bones stopped him. He has been blown up once, shot 12 times, and injured 47 times in movie stunting. The chart shows the location of some of Tom’s injuries. (X marks fractures; circles, bullet wounds.)
She had no photograph of Ansel and he had none of her. Why the silhouette of Tom Mix made her think of this, she didn’t know. And now they had no photo of Vivien, which was worse, because her face was changing every day. But so, too, was Ansel’s. So, too, probably, was hers. She looked again at the diagram in her hand. Tom Mix had certainly suffered. She would give him that. The X on his temple showed where his skull had been fractured in accident. The bullet wound where his privates would have been (these details had been omitted from the illustration) was where he’d been shot by bad man while Oklahoma sheriff. The letter Y indicated where his elbow had been shot in real stagecoach holdup (1902).
The note at the bottom said, Scars from twenty-two knife wounds are not indicated, nor is it possible to show on the diagram the hole four inches square and many inches deep that was blown in Tom’s back by a dynamite explosion.
She would show this to Ansel when he got back. And the ring, too. Or maybe the ring would make him sad because it had belonged to Clare. She took the ring off and set it near her leg, and because Vivien was sleeping so peacefully, and because the injuries of Tom Mix, however fantastically exaggerated, had made their own perils seem smaller-scaled, she drifted off to sleep.
Some time later she awakened with a start. The noise downstairs, she hoped, was Ansel, but it might be the Josephsons again, so she didn’t move. The noise came again and it was, she realized, someone pounding on the front door, not someone knocking his boots on the rug after opening it. Vivien woke up and began to cry.
They would hear the baby crying and this time they would not go away.
The knock came again, and then a man’s voice.
“Mrs. Price?” said the deep voice. “Is that you?”
She didn’t answer, just put Vivien to her breast, which the baby took this time. Aldine covered her and her front with the blanket and just sat there. The door wasn’t locked. It was never locked.
“Mrs. Price?” the voice called. “It’s the police.”
Was it better to answer the police, or not to answer? She was numb with fear. Ansel wasn’t back, or maybe he was back, and they had him. So many days had passed and they hadn’t returned the car, so naturally Dr. Stober had called the police. The police had talked to Glynis. She and Ansel couldn’t have been hard to find.
“Up here,” she said, helplessly, her voice hoarse. She walked downstairs with Vivien clutched tightly to her.
One man wore a hat and a brown coat with a white shirt, not a farmer’s sort of clothes. The other was Dr. Stober. Sick was what she felt. Sick all the way through.
“Do you know where Mrs. Price is?” the man in the suit coat asked. He held open a wallet that contained a badge, and she noticed that he was missing part of his pinkie.
Aldine didn’t shake her head, and she didn’t answer. She remembered that the dress she was wearing belonged to Mrs. Price. “She’s in California,” Aldine finally said. “Where they moved last spring.”
The badge man nodded and Aldine followed his gaze around the room as he took in the greasy tractor parts and unwashed dishes on the table, the sheet-covered radio, the cat’s nest in the armchair. Then he was looking again at her, in some new way now, as if she were not part of civilization, as if she had failed her time in the Practice House. He was the type with more skin than eye, great folds of it that made him look as sad as an elephant. He wasn’t large, though. He weighed barely ten stone, she guessed. He didn’t say his name, and she wasn’t surprised. He didn’t have to tell her anything.
“Do you know who this man is?” the policeman asked her, blinking his sad, wrinkled eyes and pointing at Dr. Stober, who had his hand tucked around his neck, as if he were disturbed by something.
She nodded.
“Do you know where his car is?”