PART I
Day One
A visit from nobody : Sunday stillness : Vicarious education
Byron Ashdown was twirling the small plastic skull that hung from the rearview mirror of his turquoise Ford F-250 when the old woman shut the front door. He sat up and tried to slap his brother, who dozed with his cheek smeared against the opposite window. His hand wouldn’t reach, and Byron wasn’t the kind of person to lean, so his hand swiped the air.
“Hey, Lonnie,” he said, “she’s leaving,” but Lonnie didn’t wake up. Byron watched her cross the covered porch of the old pioneer home and stop. She opened her handbag and rooted through it.
“Okay, what now? What now?” Byron said.
She walked back to the door, hesitated, looked through her bag again, then opened the door and went back inside the house. Byron cursed once and kicked the floor.
Lonnie bolted awake and looked around, shouting, “What, what?” Then he said, “Come on, I was asleep.”
“She came out, then went back inside.”
“She still in the house?”
“Do you see her anywhere?”
Lonnie rubbed his eyes, then squinted. The old white house sat back from the street behind a wide strip of lawn with a cluster of tall spiraling dandelions on the north side.
“That’s it. We’re hosed,” Byron said, pounding the steering wheel. “She saw us.”
Lonnie turned and looked through the gun rack that covered the rear window. The street was empty. A few cars were parked on the wide gray pavement, but most were garaged. The sun was a thick yellow bead lying on the palisade of red rock that surrounded the town. He looked back through the windshield and saw more of the same. The sky was free of clouds. It was going to be a hot one. “What’s to see? Just two guys sitting in a truck. That’s pretty much the only thing that happens around here,” Lonnie said. “If the cops come, we can tell ’em we had to pull over to read our texts.”
“And they’ll just think we’re a couple of Boy Scouts, right?” Byron checked the time on his banged-up flip phone. It was five to eight.
“You should get a smartphone,” Lonnie said.
“So they can find me? No thanks,” Byron said. “Look, I just want to get in there, get the stuff, get out, get paid.”
“Getting worked up won’t do nothing,” Lonnie said, frowning at a fast food hash brown patty half-eaten in its crumpled wrapper.
Byron started rocking anxiously in his seat, then unconsciously he took the tip of his thin ponytail and painted it in figure eights across his cheek. Lonnie watched him do it and tried not to comment.
After a few minutes, the old woman reemerged, her handbag snug in the crook of one arm. Byron noticed the addition of a hat. She closed the door and slid her hand along the wrought-iron rail as she stepped carefully down each of the three steps.
“Get down,” Byron said, hunching below the dashboard. Lonnie joined him. “What’s the hat for? Where’s she going? We’re screwed,” Byron said. Together, they listened to the car start, then to the squeal of the steering pump, then to the silence.
“Man, she’s just going to church. Old ladies wear hats,” Lonnie said, sitting up first. “The coast is clear.”
As Byron sat up, Lonnie unfolded the hash brown wrapper and ate the rest of the patty.
“You eat like a dog,” Byron said. “That’s why your gut hurts all the time.”
“That nurse said my flora was off.”
“I’m not getting into a thing about your flora. Can you just stick to the plan so we can make a little money?”
“There’s more of them than there is of us,” Lonnie said, “like ten times more.”
“Of who?”
“Bacteria.” Lonnie crumpled the paper and belched. “I should’ve had a yogurt.”
They got out of their truck looking nervous. Byron’s head cleared the hood of their truck by a few inches. His body was thick and squared off, like a roast. Lonnie was almost a foot taller, thin and stoop shouldered. His strides were twice as long as his brother’s, and he crossed the street before Byron was halfway. When they got up to the house, they tried to look like they were supposed to be there.
“Where’s the guy?” Lonnie asked.
“Supposed to be out of town,” Byron said. They gathered at the door. “Tell me the plan one more time,” Byron ordered.
“Go in, find where he keeps the maps. Grab anything that says Swallow Valley or has that Indian word on it.”
“Almost,” Byron said. “If we only take one kind of thing, then they’ll know what we were after. We need to grab any cash, watches, whatever. Break some stuff. It needs to look like we had no idea what we were doing.”
“But we don’t.”
“Then we’re headed in the right direction.”
Byron went in first and Lonnie followed, the door opening into a hallway that ran straight back into the house, past a set of stairs on the immediate right, which went up a half flight and turned just above an old color photograph showing a young couple sitting together in the red rock, the man holding up a whole and complete yucca sandal, the woman wearing sunglasses with a scarf tied around her neck, leaning back on her hands, taking it all in.
“Where’s the stuff?” Lonnie whispered.
“Shut up,” Byron said, creeping forward. He looked into each room as he went past. When they both got to the end of the hall, they saw a kitchen in one direction and more hall in the other. Byron turned and put a finger to his lips.
“But there’s nobody here,” Lonnie said.
“What’s that?” somebody said from an open door at the end of the hall.
Byron and Lonnie froze, then tiptoed toward the sound.
“Did you forget where you were going again, my love?” the voice continued.
Lonnie leaned and looked around the doorframe. He saw a man reading with a large magnifying glass. He was surrounded by pottery, baskets, books, stones, tools, coils of rope, apothecary jars, bundles of papers tied up with brown string, accordion files, and dusty terrariums filled with dirt, gravel, and a multitude of cacti. Many places on the shelves sat empty, though they were cataloged with tiny numbers on small slips of paper.
It took a few seconds before the man thought to pause his reading. “You were on your way to church, dear. If you need me, I can take—” The man glanced up and saw Lonnie staring. “Who in the Sam Hill are you?”
“We’re nobody,” Lonnie said, stepping into the open doorframe so he wasn’t leaning over. Byron squeezed past and into the room. “Leave the questions to us, old man.”
Lonnie followed his brother into the room and became instantly distracted by the books. “I’ll bet a reader like you knows where that joke came from,” he said.
“What joke?” the old man asked.
“The nobody joke.”
“It’s from the Odyssey, you moron,” the old man said.
“That’s enough about minivans,” Byron said. “We’re here on business, and you were supposed to be at some Indian pot nerds meeting.”
“How would you know that—” The old man’s face went red, then changed. “Frangos,” he said, huffing. “Frangos sent you. She needs to—you know what—I think you better leave.” He stood weakly, his robe open, exposing the scooped neck of his T-shirt and his white chest hair.