Free North of Montana by April Smith

built man with blondish hair and aviator glasses, wearing a white lab coat.
    “Is that the good doctor?”
    Tom nods.
    Dr. Eberhardt—a nice-looking man with the soft underchin of middle age—keeps the hand on her shoulder so she won’t run away. She is wearing a red sweat suit, sneakers, and a red turban that completely covers her hair. He is taller, younger, stronger; but she is strong too—a dancer and still lithe. He is maintaining an authoritative posture, talking calmly although she seems distraught.
    “The whistle blows,” Tom says, tossing the uneaten yogurt into the dumpster.
    He positions the limo in the middle of the alley, then, leaving it running, gets out, opens the door, and waits. She doesn’t even have to look in his direction for him to know the correct moment to make his move as she finally pulls away from the doctor with an expression of willfulness so he can be right there to gracefully take her hand and guide her over the torn asphalt. As they approach I can see that her sweatshirt is decorated with a pair of kittens batting a yarn ball. It is a real yarn ball and the kittens are furry with big glittery eyelashes. They pass right in front of me. The actress’s skin is dove white against the crimson knit, reflecting a brilliant smear of color in the immaculate black shine of the limousine door; she is her own annunciation, creating in this smelly alley a moment of startling vivacity that could not have been outdone by a hundred performing troubadours dressed in gold.
    The limousine pulls away. Dr. Eberhardt is gone, the gray steel door sprung shut. I wonder if the doctor’s wife knows how intimate her husband is with his famous patient; how he kept his hand on her shoulder the whole time and how, although she was angry, she did not move away as long as she felt his touch.
    I pull out of the alley, picturing Claire Eberhardt leaning against the other side of the mahogany door of their home, innocent of this, crying a river of penitent tears over a poor Salvadoran housekeeper.

PART TWO

    DESERT CLARITY

SEVEN

    IN THE DESERT everything is clear.
    It doesn’t hit until you are two hours out of Los Angeles, past the tangled hell of downtown and the protracted ugliness of San Bernardino, beyond the world’s biggest freeway interchange where the 605 meets the 10 in swooping parabolic ribbons of concrete. It starts somewhere out there when the shoulders of the road turn to white sand and there are no more sky-blue town-house colonies popping up in the distant wasteland; when the air, thinned of pollutants, becomes light and transparent and you can see amazing details like rockfalls on the slopes of snow-topped mountains miles away.
    Slowing down off the freeway, suddenly quiet enough to hear your very tires chewing over feathers of sand blown across the off-ramp, as the setting sun shoots every tiny needle of every single cactus with scarlet backlight, it hits. Desert clarity. The absence of motion, pressure, traffic, and people. A mysterious monochromatic landscape speckled with life. Your body settles down. The air feels spiritual—that is, filled with spirits that a tacky little town can’t restrain. Rolling down the gamy main street of Desert Hot Springs you want to shout just to hear how your own voice would sound as a loose uninhibited coyote wail instead of the tight pissed-off squeak with which you usually address your fellow man.
    Poppy’s condominium is no great shakes for what it cost, set up on a ridge looking west over an empty shopping center with a Thrifty Drug and a Vons market, a KFC and video rental store, all new construction—clean black asphalt without a tire mark and spindly palms in redwood boxes. Carrying groceries to my car (if I don’t buy my own supplies, I wind up drinking Seagram’s at night and gagging on All-Bran in the morning), I enjoy the mild breeze and calculate that by the time the town grows big enough to actually support this overblown supermarket Poppy