“Fathers,” Mom finished, and her hand closed on the edge of the table. “Your uncle Lyle. His brand on the door of that white pickup, the Rocking H. I would know it anywhere, Jimmy. I saw it on the cattle I fed for fifty years.” I sat very still. My uncle Lyle, the younger brother of my father, who ran the little family ranch outside Hot Springs and had come to the funeral in a pressed shirt and held my mother by the elbow through the whole thing. Lyle, who had said, standing at the grave, “Do not worry, Edna. Family takes care of family.” I felt the chili turn to stone in my stomach.
Mrs. Red Cloud came back to the house the next morning, and we all sat at the kitchen table. I told her what Mom had said. She wrote it down without a word, and when I finished, she picked up her phone. A detective named Voss from the sheriff of Pennington County met us at nine thirty. He asked to see the printout from the bank again. “All of these,” he said, “fall within a day or two of a Friday. Fridays are payday at the casino. Somebody is learning to pick the times when nobody is watching.”
That afternoon, the detective drove out to the ranch of Lyle in Hot Springs with two deputies, and I rode in the back seat. We parked at the gate. The white pickup sat in the yard with the brand on the door. A man in suspenders was feeding horses by the barn, and when he saw the cruiser, he turned his head and went on forking hay for an extra half minute, as though he had not heard. Then he set down the pitchfork and walked toward us, slow and deliberate, wiping his hands on a rag.
The coldest night in a truck bed can be survived by anyone who is sure that someone is coming.
“Jim,” Lyle said, with a smile that I had known all my life. “I heard you were home. How is your mother?” Detective Voss stepped out of the car and told him why we had come. The smile of Lyle did not flicker. He said he had driven some young people to Deadwood a few times, because Denise had asked him to be their driver. He had no idea what they were doing at the casino.
It was Kayla who undid him. The deputies had found her the previous night at the home of a friend in Rapid City, red eyed and shaking, and by morning she had asked to talk. She said it had all begun at the Fourth of July picnic, when my uncle noticed that her mother was behind on her rent. He offered a deal. If Kayla would copy the PIN of her grandmother, he would drive her to the casino and take a share of whatever she withdrew. Her mother, she said, did not know at first. Then Denise found out and wanted a piece.
Kayla gave a full statement. She said Lyle had a gambling problem, that he owed almost sixty thousand dollars to a man in Sturgis, and that he saw my mother as a bank he could draw on without anyone noticing. “He said she was old and would not remember,” she said, crying. “He said he was just borrowing it from family.” The detective asked her why she had cried every time she brought my mother a sandwich. “Because I knew,” she said. “I knew it was wrong, and I could not stop.”
Lyle was arrested at the gate of his own ranch, and he went along quietly. The judge sentenced him to nine years for theft, exploitation, and conspiracy. Denise received four, and Kayla, because she had cooperated and because she was nineteen, was given probation and an order to complete a program for young offenders. In the corridor outside the courtroom, she asked to speak to my mother. Mom took her hands in both of hers. “Child,” she said, “you made a mistake. Do not let it be the story of your whole life.” Kayla collapsed against her shoulder and sobbed.
The court ordered the sale of a pasture belonging to Lyle, and the proceeds restored the stolen money, with interest, to my mother. I used some of it to pay for the funeral stone of my father, which she had said for a year she could not afford. The divorce from Laurie was quiet. She came to the house one evening for the rest of her things, and she stood in the kitchen looking at the table for a moment, and she said, “Jim, I am sorry.” I said, “I know.” She cried. I handed her a dish towel. She took the good dishes, the dog, and the china of her mother, and she was gone by dark.
I went to work for the utility company in Rapid City, a day job, in the office, planning routes for the crews. Home every night by five thirty. I took the camper shell off the pickup with a borrowed hoist and gave it to the church for a youth group trip. The truck bed itself I scrubbed with a brush until the metal gleamed. Then I parked it in the driveway, where it sat, empty, in the October sun, looking much too clean.
On the first Saturday in November, I drove Mom up into the Black Hills in that truck. Not in the bed. In the front seat, with a cushion, a blanket, and a thermos of coffee. We climbed through the pines to an overlook that my father used to take us to when I was a boy, a flat stone ledge above the valley, with the whole country spread out below in red and gold. I parked and cut the engine. We sat together in the quiet. The sun was setting, and the shadows of the hills lengthened over the plain.
“Jimmy,” she said, after a while. “Do you remember what your father said when we first brought you up here?” I shook my head. “He said, ‘Son, a man who has a view like this has no business being poor.” She chuckled. “He was wrong about the money, but he was right about the view.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “I never told you,” she said, “but on the worst nights in that truck, with the lantern and the cold, I used to think of this place. I would shut my eyes and see it. And I would tell myself, my boy will come.” She patted my knee. “And here you are.”