Bill, Wyoming

“I was standing there in the doorway in your way, talking about a lover’s crazy dream and all the things in between. You were standing there in the highway in my way, screaming out a message to the sky and all your reasons why.”

—“Your Point of View” by songwriter Angie McClure

This evening your children watch a Discovery Channel feature on Yellowstone Park. Indian-style on the floor in front of you, they press handprints into your apartment’s neutral, stain-resistant carpet. You fold into the corner of the couch behind them, peeking around a set of pigtails at bears, buffalo, and Old Faithful. Pools of steaming color. Waterfalls. You pore over your day at work: pulling apart a Styrofoam coffee cup in spaced intervals to break your cubicle’s monotony.

You long for beef tips and noodles, but your wife’s not home and you can’t cook. Maybe she’s your ex-wife. Maybe the kids are on loan for a week or two. The boy is ten, the girl eight. Vibrant colors and bear cubs on TV, no doltish Gallery Furniture (will save you money!) advertisements. You stretch, yawn deep, waddle to the kitchen for a box of Kraft mac & cheese. None. The kids are lost in Yellowstone, so you open the door to the balmy world and walk to the car, keys jingling. Your aging Taurus wagon’s air conditioning will be powerless against greenhouse temperatures for the short drive to a nearby Kroger grocery. You fall into the driver’s seat, one foot on the concrete. The door-ajar chime pinches your ears.

You keep a rolled atlas in the glove compartment. A 1993 Rand McNally, cover torn away the day your wife drove to Columbus to cook beef tips and noodles for someone else. Or was it stir-fry? On page 108, you trace Wyoming roads with your middle finger, the habitual “fuck you” gesture she abhorred. Your bird glides north above Interstate 25, then lands at Douglas before flying west to Yellowstone’s white block in grid B-5.

The pause startles you. Wander. Tiny letters at the center of grid D-12, pull the map close: Bill. You smile, maybe feign a laugh. Say it. Bill. Bill, Wyoming. Grin. Kick the open door’s armrest with your loafer and ignore the chime. Bill’s just a dot on Highway 59. A glance at the mileage chart and you know the place is thirty miles from nothing in every direction. Remember sophomore geography? Remember your solution to prison overcrowding?

“Put a hurricane fence around Wyoming,” you said. “Rolls of razor wire up top. Send them all there!”

You thumb past Canada to the population index on page 128. Frontier, Wyoming, claims 150 inhabitants, but Bill is too small for the register. Chuckle. Toss back twenty pages and tap your “fuck you” on the dot. You don’t know that you’ve ignored other laughable names—Yoder, Halfway, Point of Rocks.

You visualize. Imagine a trip.

Four days on unfamiliar roads, roughly 1,600 miles from here to Yellowstone. Stops in Denver and Casper, traveling companions and ghosts. Bears and buffalo and Bill. Curiosity piqued, you exit at Douglas, refuel at a Conoco station. You sidetrack north on Highway 59. Only thirty miles out of the way, right? Flat grassland and low hills. Maybe green, maybe brown. No trees. Snow fences along the roadside to divert winter winds. Fresh black pavement and bright yellow stripes. Your tape deck, attached by wire to a hand-me-down Kenwood CD adapter, plays Sheryl Crow. You wish you owned a digital camera to capture this vacuum for a long-overdue geography project.

Maybe it’s late afternoon. Southbound trains grind past your window. The locomotive chains are a mile long each, cars loaded over the top with neat rows of ebony coal. Your children press against the windows, your daughter leans over your lap and tugs at the wheel, imagination steering toys on scaled-down railroad tracks. They ask about the BNSF logo on the engines’ sides. You don’t know about the Burlington Northern...