The Lantana, Blooming

In the year before Daniela leaves him, the first and only year of their marriage, Jay often finds himself staring at her, wondering, weighing, marveling. He feels that he has married too well, though Daniela laughs whenever he mentions it, tells him: I used to swim naked in the cow ponds and burn the leeches off with a match. In fact I'm still doing it. Don't act as if I'm a queen, Jay McFaddin, love of my life. Be a good man, leave your boots outside.

At the end of their marriage, she does a very simple thing, so simple Jay wonders how it never occurred to him that she might: she hitches a ride in a semi-truck and disappears. His friend Grady says that from inside the gas station, where he was buying cigarettes, he saw Daniela climb into the cab of a Mack truck with Arizona plates. He will tell Jay that he thought she was only talking to the guy. Jay will punch Grady in the jaw as he says this and walk away, feeling righteous and wronged.

Before she gets in the truck, Daniela will take Jay's handgun out of the sock drawer, wrap it in a few of his t-shirts, and stuff this all in the bottom of a backpack with a few boxes of bullets. Then she will leave. He will not understand why she does it; but still, he thinks, he should understand. The answer is there, if he can just find it.

But now, before all that, before she gets into a stranger's truck and vanishes, they are eighteen, just married, living in a cabin that belonged to Jay's father, as caretaker for land owned by a big oil man from Houston. There is a trailer for the kitchen, a shed for the house, and Jay's father presents it to him solemnly, as if it is his to give: Jay is to earn his keep by periodically driving the fences for his father, but also to be prepared to leave at a moment's notice, should his father be evicted from the place he now rents in town. It is, Jay thinks, an appropriate present from his father, a man whose nomadic days are barely behind him, days his father mourns; a man who would never realize that, as a wedding present, temporary tenancy could leave something to be desired.

After Jay outfits his father's shell of a shed with a wooden floor, a handmade frame for the bed—even curtains on the window—his friends move in, friends he has known since childhood. The friends bring sheds, like Jay, or the trailer from a semi-truck, or even just a tent. Most of them live in rented rooms in town when they are not at camp, or in additions off the back of relatives' homes; just until I get on my feet, they say, just until I get a real job. Some, the ambitious ones, speak of houses, most of trailers. They are old friends and new adults, weighing whether they will join the Army or the Marines, one about to take over his father's car repair shop, poised in the moment between childhood and adulthood; none but Jay married, none but Jay ever accompanied in the camp by a woman, although Jay knows the women are there in the background, indefinite but present.

The ranch is better for hunting than for working cattle, which is just as well, as the oil man will never run nearly enough head on it to use it all. Since he grew up bombing around it in his father's beat-up Jeep, Jay knows the property better than the rancher himself: the irregularities, the side of the railroad tracks where the fences break, the uncertainty on the edge of a ranch too big for its owner, the place where he or his friends can trespass into the good neighboring hunting grounds while maintaining plausible deniability. There is enough range between boundaries here—between the railroad tracks, the potholed two-lane highway, and the barbed...