Valentine, 1976

Gloria

Begins out there in the oil patch, a few minutes before dawn, with a young roughneck stretched out and sleeping hard in his pickup truck. Shoulders pressed against the door, boots propped up on the dashboard, his hat pulled down far enough that the girl who sits less than ten feet away can see only the left side of his jaw. It is bone sharp, freckled, and nearly hairless, a chin that will never need a daily shave, not really, no matter how old he might live to be, but she is hoping he will die young.

Gloria sits perfectly still—she is a mesquite branch, a half-buried stone—and she imagines the roughneck facedown in the sand, as she has been these past few hours, lips and cheeks scoured, teeth shaky. The roughneck jerks, then shifts roughly against the truck’s door, and she can see his jaw clenching, the muscles working, bone on bone. The sight of him is a torment, and she hopes again that he will die before his time. Gloria keeps her eyes on the pickup truck while the sky lights itself up, turning blue-black, then blue, then old-bucket slate. On this morning the sky is the same as it always is, stretched tight above the earth’s perfectly straight seam, gray and unending. It is a sky that won’t quit, and it is the best thing about the place, when you can remember to look at it. Gloria will miss it when she goes. Can’t stay here. Not after this.

The fingers on her right hand begin to count. They keep track of the numbers by pressing themselves gently against the sand. They are trying to keep Gloria from making any sudden moves, to keep her from giving herself away, to keep her among the living for another day, and she understands that the only reason the roughneck hasn’t gone ahead and killed her is that he passed out before he could get around to it. Or maybe he only pretends to sleep. Maybe he is waiting for her to make a move. Gloria can’t know for sure, so she keeps her eyes on his jaw and she sits in the dirt, still as a carcass, save for the fingers pushing against the sand, counting. One, two, three, four, five, six—

When she reaches a thousand, Gloria tells herself, she will move. Because how long can a man pretend, just to catch a girl when she tries to run? So she watches his jaw move and the sun, that small, regular mercy, heaves itself over the earth’s straight edge, and her fingers keep on.

Out there the land goes on forever and then some. Daylight reveals miles of pumpjacks and oilfield litter. Barbwire and jackrabbits. Diamondbacks and copperheads, denned up for winter. When morning has come all the way in, Gloria perceives a road and behind that, a farmhouse. Maybe it is close enough to walk to. Hard to say. Out there one mile can look like ten, ten could be twenty, twenty might be two, and Gloria knows only that this body—yesterday she would have called it mine—sits in a pile of sand, somewhere in the oil patch. Her eyes scan a row of derricks to the south. She thinks her hometown may be over there, but she cannot see the cooling towers at the plant where her mother works. Did he drive them as far as Notrees? Kermit? Loving County?

Twenty thousand square miles of the same old, same old. She could be anywhere. And because the oil patch is mostly quiet on a Sunday morning, even during one of biggest oil booms in history, Gloria hears only the roughneck’s occasional sighs, his teeth grinding, and the intermittent cries of a winter songbird somewhere out in the fields. She looks again at the farmhouse. The narrow dirt road will lead her to the front porch. Nice people there. A woman, maybe. When her fingers push the last number into the sand, a shaky one thousand, and she is as sure as she...