Free Stop That Girl by Elizabeth Mckenzie Page A

did—?”
    “Look at this receipt! I bought out the store!” She waved a long tail of paper at me, like a pesty kite.

    In the morning we were off, my mother and sister and I, climbing into our loaded-down Buick before dawn. Roy stood in the headlights clutching his de-elasticized pajama bottoms in one hand, waving to us with the other. He’d join us later in the summer, as soon as he possibly could.
    “Bye!” we cried, driving away.
    “See you soon!” Roy faded.
    Where were we going? It was a place to which people by the long caravans and busloads rolled out year after year, to take pictures, buy postcards, cross off their lifetime lists. I knew I should have been more enthusiastic, more agreeable, more supportive and glad, but when you hear about this place the rest of the year too, see books lying around about it, have
rare prints
of it all over your house, just how much longing can you drum up?
    Anyway, I had other names for it:
Sublime Cleft, Exalted
Fissure, Noble Crevice, Overvalued Crack.
    The ice chest squeaked the whole distance. In Barstow, we fueled up at a certain gas station that Mom had claimed for years contained an unattributed mural by Orozco. “I’ve seen his work at the Dartmouth College library, and I’m certain it’s his,” she pompously liked to say. The morning sun was shimmering on the concrete, making optical illusions that reflected like glass. Tumbleweeds and dust devils skittered over the crusty ground. The wind carried grit in it, as the earth dried up and flew away.
    The Park Service compound turned out to be a cluster of brown cabins next to a parking lot full of gas tanks and government vehicles. Our one-bedroom cabin was stuffy and dilapidated, with old vinyl flooring curling away from the baseboards like unhealthy toenails, revealing a mat of dead insects, dust, and hair. The kitchen smelled like propane, and the bathroom was equipped with flaking fixtures and a shower stall so cramped you knocked your elbows sudsing up. In the living room, Kathy and I slept on canvas cots reminiscent of battlefield stretchers, positioned around a potbellied stove that was rough and corroded and smelled like it had been used to burn human protein in. Forget television. We were lucky to have a lamp. All along the tops of the log walls, pockets of nesting materials—pine needles, newspaper scraps, kapok—dangled and bulged like half-extruded dung.
    Behind the cabin sat a big white block of salt, there for the purpose of luring mule deer forth from the woods to lick it, in a bright patch of sunlight coming through the aspen and pine. It worked. Morning and night we saw their thin pink tongues flickering from their black-lipped muzzles, necks craned, frightened of being so close to the cabins but driven by their need to sample the white rock.
    “What’s wrong with you anyway?” Mom asked me, our second day there.
    “Something’s been biting me all over.”
    “Stop sulking,” she said. “Get out and take a walk. Try to absorb your surroundings. Isn’t it great, being away from that metropolitan morass?”
    “It’s not that great. I have nothing to do.”
    “I just told you what to do,” she said.
    “But I don’t want to do that.”
    “Suit yourself, then, if you want to waste this chance. By the way, did I tell you girls our friend Angus Frey will be visiting sometime soon?”
    “I like Angus Frey,” said Kathy.
    “Where’s he going to stay?” I said.
    “At the lodge,” Mom said. “He won’t be in your way, will he?”
    “Why is he coming?”
    “He’s never been. Is that good enough for you?”
    “I thought he’d been everywhere,” I said.
    She said, “Isn’t it nice to know you still have so much to learn?”
    “Have you called Roy yet? When do we get to talk to him?” I always tried to get the last word with my mother.
    She was revising the text of her campfire talk, practicing in front of the mirror in her room. She had a tape recorder, and she was taping