The morning before his brother’s funeral, old Aidan Mitchell removed from a chest of blankets at the foot of his bed two items: one bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label that a politician once gifted their father, and a plain wooden carton of cigars that his grandson brought back from Santo Domingo. He placed these items on the small table in the entryway so he wouldn’t forget them when, that afternoon, he and his wife Carmela would bundle themselves up in scarves and old army coats and drive their pick-up to Jackson’s Saloon over on Second. There they planned to sit and brim with the booze, telling war stories as afternoon dusked into evening, stopping only when the brisk black night wore out its welcome and they’d tumble back home. This had been his brother Brendan’s tradition, unearthed whenever his pistons were misaligned, but Aidan and Carmela were no teetotalers and this was as good a night as any to pay homage to dead men’s shadows.

The saloon sat firmly in the center of Canyon Crossing, a town of three avenues and seven streets that crisscrossed each other with remedial simplicity before their limbs stretched out in all directions to farm homes, factories, and the jagged creek running slow and turbid to Palo Duro. Placing wagers with the old-timers as to which had appeared first, the Mitchells or the saloon, was never advised. It was a trick question. The dual rows of brick facades along Second went up in ’24, and it was this construction, spotted across the scarred plain, that first attracted the pioneer Mitchells to canyon country. The town, its mortar, and all those bastard Mitchells hardened together.

Nowadays, Jackson’s was as good and dark a place as any in town to drink whiskey and watch football, some nights fútbol. The corner flatscreens provided strobes of color, the jukebox a whiff of history, and Jackson, stoic as carved boulders, tended his own bar for the likes of his favorite regulars: Jessup Farragut, Conrad McMillan, and whichever Mitchell brother showed up. They were his best customers and hogged the smooth cherry bartop night after night like wrinkled mystics indifferent to the games and prevailing language—gargoyles protecting the church of drink.

That night Aidan had gotten such an unusually early start with Carmela that by evening the premium scotch and cheap cigars were burning exceptionally bright in his head. Carmela talked with Jackson and the other regulars, while Aidan retreated into himself, quietly blinking at his ghostly figure in the barback’s mirror. The image—face pocked and veiny, a grizzled beard and thinning wisps of silver atop a freckled crown—was certainly no match for the bucking bronco he once was. There was the photograph taken of him in the Spring of ‘64, posing with Brendan and their father on the day the rubber factory doubled its footprint and its new wing went online. Tight-fitting flannels and denim, steel-toed boots and sharp white helmets so bright the shadows never seemed to darken their strident amber faces. Only two of those photos still existed, one crammed with other mementos at the union ballroom, the other in a frame on Aidan’s mantel. It was this second one that Carmela had blown up onto poster board, the one that sat patiently on the mortuary easel waiting to greet everyone at tomorrow’s show.

As the hours rolled along, Aidan mumbled a few slivers of a eulogy he’d been trying to compose. It lacked anything to latch onto and he could feel the line constantly slipping. Carmela kept yapping with Jackson and the bar’s younger patrons distracted him with their easy laughter and the way they chugged and jeered at the games. Flunked and drunk and full of spunk, Brendan would say. They all conspired to make the hiccups come again, the ones in Aidan’s head that made all the pictures slide a little. He could feel them coming, could sense the way the bar would look and feel filled with old friends instead of strangers. Anything was possible when the jungle came into focus.

Normally Carmela would feel something amiss in her husband’s rhythms, would recognize when these visions were coming, Aidan’s eyes vibrating in search of false horizons. But she took no notice of him until at last he stood, grabbed the scotch bottle and tucked it firmly into the crook of his arm.

“Going outside,” he said.

She looked at him as though he were a stranger, which often he was, then shook her head and patted his brow with the sleeve of her sweater. He squinted, trying to see the street beyond the two front windows, the tiny panes old and warped with sagging glass. He thought he saw what the whole town had been expecting: a rare dusting of October snow that would blanket Canyon Crossing and bring a sense of calm out where the atoms were slow.

“It’s a lot easier when you drink from the swill, honey. We didn’t need to bring our own,” Carm said, shaking her head at him.

“I’ll be back.”

Outside, Aidan realized that there was no snow. Another hiccup, perhaps. It was the starkness of the new lights in the Fairway parking lot that had tricked his eyes. But these imaginary glows hadn’t been the only things playing tricks with Aidan’s mind of late. On his long morning drives to the West Amarillo VA, Aidan had begun to see flocks of swifts, flitting in all directions like bats escaping dawn. They’d bob and dance, surrounding his car, then disappear along the endless wires as quickly as they’d appeared. Aidan called them hiccups because they were simultaneously jarring and harmless. But Aidan had begun to wonder if they forbode something else, something coming his way now that brother Brendan had shuffled off and he was on his own.

Aidan sat on a rusting iron bench, one of several along the main strip that the town voted to install but rarely maintained. He unearthed a fresh cigar from his pocket, clipped the leafed-over end with his teeth and took several short, cloudy drags as he lit it. Across the street, crowding the front window of the restaurant across Second, he could make out Frank Gilchrist Sr. and his wife and their growing family—Frank Jr. and wife, ugly Wendy and her ugly husband, and all the loud, coarse grandchildren.

“You coming?” his wife asked, appearing beside him on the bench as she pulled out her Salems and smacked her pack against her palm.

“Gilchrist on a cross is over there.” Aidan closed one eye and pointed his cigar as though to singe Frank’s little face in the window.

Carmela watched her husband closely as she lit her cigarette.

“They’ll run you out,” she said. Her voice was dark and gravelly and danced on Aidan’s temples like a migraine. She ashed in the planter. “Brendan won’t be in the ground more than ten seconds and Frank’ll call that vote.”

“He can’t without me,” Aidan said.

“They can count to five. They’ve been waiting for one of you Mitchells to die.”

“They can have it—” he spat out flecks of cigar. “That old factory means no more to me with Brendan gone than it did when he was alive. Pop left us with every rusty piece of junk he’d never quite paid up on and that there’s the last of ‘em.”

“Yes, well, that may be, but I don’t like the way this place has marked you, Aid. It’s unchristian is what it is.”

“Has nothing to do with none of that, Carm. It’s this town,” he said, looking up the block as though it might trigger a more comforting vision, a hiccup to make sense of Canyon Crossing. But the lights of the town were already extinguished. The farm roads were dark and only the steady east-west drone of headlights along 275 filled Aidan with any kind of relief. Not everyone feels stuck in this place. His head pounded harder and he closed his eyes.

Carmela patted Aidan’s knee hard and stood up. “The adventure’s been lovely, but we’ve got more to do on the house.”

“Don’t kill yourself. Nobody’s coming but Beverly.”

“Well don’t go wasting time on Frank and his lot, either, Aid.”

Aidan knew he had long since passed the point of ever learning what it was you said to the ones you loved to make them go away.

“You look like shit.”

“Jackson’ll drop me off home. Go,” he said. And she did.

Jackson pulled the scotch bottle out with a fresh shot glass as Aidan sat back down. Jackson shook his head, but didn’t say anything.

“What?” Aidan said, clutching the bottle and pouring a shot. The old regular, Jessup, switched stools and slid in next to him.

“Never seen her before,” Old Jessup whispered, close enough that Aidan could smell his warm dog breath.

“Course you have, Jessup. Jesus. Been married to that old bitch for six years.”

“Not Carmela, Aidan, her.”

Aidan followed Jessup’s gaze. Standing with her gloved palms on the jukebox glass, as invading a vision as any hiccup, was a tall stranger wrapped in a dark fur coat ringed in white ermine. With each strum of Dolly Parton’s Appalachian twang, the woman swayed her hips, letting her head tilt from side to side. She never let her hands leave the jukebox. Aidan thought her hands alone must be summoning the music.

My mistakes are no worse than yours, just because I’m a woman, Dolly warbled, struggling to be heard over the crowd.

“Why you figure she dressed all in black?” Jessup whispered in Aidan’s ear.

“Why don’t you ask her?” Aidan said, swiveling his stool back to face the bar.

“Maybe she’s going to a funeral,” Jessup said, savoring this last word.

“Yeah, Jessup, she’s saying goodbye to that limp johnson of yours. Leave me be.”

Jessup crawled off his stool and Aidan watched as the town’s oldest bastard walked over to the stranger. Moments later, old Jessup left abruptly without a word. Then the stranger unglued herself from the jukebox and her silhouette floated toward Aidan so deliberate and lithe that Aidan was reminded of Kim Novak’s curves coming down the hotel hallway in Vertigo, once she’s completed her transformation for Jimmy Stewart. This new stranger was Aidan’s height, maybe taller, and for a brief moment he both wanted her and hated her intrusion.

“What can I get you, ma’am?” Aidan heard Jackson say.

“Tanqueray and tonic,” she said, her voice deep and resolute and tickling the musty air the way his wife’s lower octaves did.

“The man that was sitting here,” she hoarsely whispered to Aidan. “He a friend of yours?”

“No ma’am.”

“That’s good. I wasn’t very kind.” Jackson placed a lime wedge on the lip of the stranger’s drink and placed the cocktail on a napkin. With the back of one white-gloved hand, she pushed up the gauze that encircled her black pillbox hat and raised the glass to her lips. Aidan stole little glances at her over his shoulder. The lines on her neck aged her somewhere in his own neighborhood. Who was she?

“You’re not from around here,” he said.

“My, you’re a sharp one,” the stranger said and sipped again.

“Nice get-up,” he said, lips disappearing as they pressed into his teeth. He didn’t want to look at her and yet he wanted to charge straight at the hiccup’s bluff. Mourners would be coming from all directions for Brendan’s show tomorrow, but not tonight, not this early. It had to be his wires getting crossed again. The woman said thank you, but it sounded muted and faint and Aidan half-expected her to fade out like in the movies or crack open, swarms of swifts flapping and shitting and breaking all the windows. Aidan would play along for the moment.

“You and all the rest of them,” he said. “You come here to dance on Brendan. I get it. He screwed a lot of women in a lot of dead-end towns. The man was a shit. I’ll give you that. But you’re a day early for those fancy dreads. I passed it by Father Ryerson and he said there’d be no midnight mass for our mother-trucker.”

“I packed in a hurry.”

“Did you even know him?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know why anyone who did would be anywhere near this place.”

“I knew him,” she rasped, her lips cracking a smile. “Once upon a time I knew all of you.”

The boys in back cheered loudly at their game.

“What’s that?” Aidan asked, leaning closer to her.

She pulled off both of her gloves and laid them neatly on the counter. Her hands were firm and large, but wrinkled with little splotches. Her hands trembled a little as she stroked the white fur of her collar. “I said I knew you, too, Aidan.”

“No ma’am. I don’t think so.”

“It’s true.”

“Now listen here. We Mitchells have known plenty of folks, but there isn’t a single woman he and I both been with, you understand? You come to get a piece of him, that’s your business, but don’t go dragging me into it.”

“It’s not like that,” she said, stroking one of her earrings and massaging the back of her ear as she sipped her cocktail. “No one’s dragging anyone, Aidan. Listen. Pop was the one that always dragged Brendan, wasn’t that right? Then Brendan dragged you and on down the line, you dragged Quentin.”

Aidan’s arms alit with gooseflesh at the mention of Quentin. He swallowed more scotch. If this was just in his head, why couldn’t he turn it off?

“Sometimes it was you and Quentin doubling up against pop and Brendan. Isn’t that how it was?”

Aidan narrowed his eyes and felt the scotch slosh in his head. “What do you know about Quentin. How dare you? Fucking hiccup.” He reached for her hat and the gauzy curtain encircling it like a cloud.

“Hiccup?” she said, swatting his hand away with strength that surprised him. “What’s a hiccup? Aidan, to be perfectly honest, I—”

“Honesty is never perfect, lady. I don’t know who you are or what’s going on in my head, but why don’t you take that stupid hat off and show us your face. That’d be a perfectly honest start. Okay?” He grabbed at her hat again and again she moved his hand away. Then she obliged, removing several pins from the hat and pulling it off. Her straight black hair fell straight and limp as drapes around her cheeks. She snapped her head up and looked straight at him.

Her face was unremarkable, long and plain with as many lines around the mouth and temples as Carmela had and just as much makeup on her thin face to suppress the same vagaries of age. Her eyes were tender and green, but seemed to change colors in the twinkly bar light. Something was off with one of them, too. Her right eye had been matched for color, but was made of glass and reflected the light differently. The eyes, Aidan thought, were the one piece of our clunky selves that stayed the same size from cradle to grave. The stranger’s eyes held him in their orbit for a good long while. Then with a sudden intake of breath, Aidan leaned back and the lines disappeared from his brow. How did she know the Mitchells? How did she know Quentin? This is something different, he thought. This is no ordinary hiccup, but I’m going to have to ride it a good long while to find out. He let her talk.

“You remember when Brendan turned fifteen?” the stranger began, leaning into Aidan as though daring him to touch her. “Quentin told me this story. You won’t mind if I tell it again.”

“Go on,” Aidan whispered.

“Pop was supposed to take him scrounging for catfish on Old Meyer’s Pond with the tackle box uncle Abe gave him. Only one of the guiding belts at the factory ripped off its shaft, killing Tom Geiser in a split second and lacerating Jimmy Widmore’s face so bad he nearly died, too. You remember all this?”

Aidan nodded.

“Pop went off to Amarillo to be with Jimmy because that’s what you do, that’s what one did. Only he was supposed to go fishing with Brendan for Brendan’s birthday and, understandably, Brendan was upset. Wicked and restless, that kid was. He didn’t want to wait until Pop was back. Who knew how long that would be? Could be days. Brendan certainly didn’t want to wait to go fishing or for permission to use the pick-up either. He’d been driving it since he was ten, after all, earlier than you or Quentin learned. He also didn’t care about the mud track between Old Meyer’s place and the ranch, didn’t care that it could throw you and stick you and that there wasn’t much you could do about rescuing yourself without a tractor or waiting ‘til summer.”

Aidan slurped his scotch and lit another cigar, knowing there was no shutting off of the valve now. “Proceed,” he said through puffs of his cigar.

“With Pop gone away, Brendan was even more determined. He dragged you head first into his scheme, roped you with the promise of Hershey’s and a peek at one of those dirty magazines he kept hidden in the baseboard. But you were always a little more cautious than he was. You got to thinking what it would be like if Ma or Pop found out you’d taken that pick-up. You said if it was going to be one of us gets in trouble, it might as well be all of us. You bounced around the house until you exploded into Quentin’s room, said to put on overalls and get some lures. It’d taken you all morning to find worms enough to fish with and you all knew you’d be spotted by someone in town if you went to buy some.

“Wasn’t the town we were worried about,” Aidan said. “It was Ma.”

“How old was Quentin then? No more than eight. He was excited and scared, but he didn’t really have to go. You dragged him into that one. You dragged him. Three rods and room for three in the front, but you and Brendan made Quentin sit in the cab to keep things from bouncing off. The two of you whooped and hollered the whole way, telling Quentin what you’d do to him if any of the equipment broke. You laughed as the truck jerked and heaved in the mud and Quentin struggled to keep things put. When at last you made it to the pond and Quentin vomited from the ride, you laughed. When Quentin asked about poison oak out there in the tall grass where there was nothing of the kind, you snickered and pointed at the way Quentin rolled up his overalls to the top of his thighs, watching and shaking your heads as he stood on two thin white legs at a spot along the pond’s murky shallows, fishing with the quaint delicacy of a girl.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Aidan said under his breath.

“You didn’t even notice when Quentin wandered away, did you? Y’all went fishing in earnest. Quentin did so far away from the two of you so he’d be out of striking distance and so he could keep his pocketful of lures a secret. You remember what happened? You remember what happened next?”

“Get out of my head,” Aidan said finally, brimming, chest heaving.

“You remember how much fish you caught, Aidan?”

“We didn’t,” Aidan mumbled.

“Not a one?”

“Mosquitofish. Mosquitofish is all we got,” Aidan said. “Little silver suckers, small as guppies and limp.” Aidan suddenly knew the point of the stranger’s story, and he knew what she wanted to hear, what his hiccup wanted to pull from the deep recesses of his brain: “You know the ending,” he said. “Quentin caught all the big fish.”

“Quentin?”

“That’s what I said.” He thought she’d go by now. He thought he had released it.

“How’d he do that?”

“If you know, then why are you asking me?”

“There was a trick he had, wasn’t that it? A trick to catching the catfish? Tell me. I’m an old woman and I’ve forgotten this part of the story.”

“You haven’t forgotten.”

“What was it? How did he do it?”

“Earrings,” Aidan said. “He used Ma’s earrings.”

The stranger stroked the back of her own ear again. She was playing it fake and over the top. Aidan hated fake and over the top.

“That was it, wasn’t it?” she said. “Caught so many it was like the fish leapt straight out of Old Meyer’s pond and into the little grass basket Quentin’d lined with newspaper.”

“Something like that.”

“He lose any?”

“Brendan threw them all back.”

“No, the earrings. Did he lose any of them?”

“No.” Aidan remembered Brendan cutting the fish apart, slicing their bloody mouths open one by one until he found the missing earing. Brendan then made Quentin suck the fish gunk out of the earring to clean it. Made him suck out those fish parts until he threw up again.

“You boys get in trouble?”

“Damnit! Stop it!” Aidan cried and the bar turned briefly to notice the old man, then ignored him. Aidan shut his eyes. He wished that the woman would trickle out of his brain the way all the other hiccups did. But as he counted to ten, he could see in his mind’s eye his father coming toward Quentin, striking him and striking him with the back of one cold, callused hand. He could see Quentin’s burnt cheeks streaked with tears and Brendan and he just watching, saying nothing.

There was a rush of cold air as Frank Gilchrist Sr. came into the bar, kicking his boots dry and waving one big, bulky hand when he saw Aidan. Aidan stood up. Sweat had returned to his brow and his eyes welled with tears. The stranger was still on her stool. He didn’t want to be boxed in by her or by Frank.

“Aidan,” Frank said, slapping Aidan’s back. “What’s the matter with you? You’re white as a sheet.” The din of the bar began to ebb from Aidan’s ears. Flaccid and faint, Aidan barely heard as Frank introduced himself to the stranger, jostling her hand up and down as though he were back switching levers at the factory. She introduced herself as Christina. Christina. It was a name that summoned little from Aidan’s booby-trapped memory. But wouldn’t that name have to be familiar? How could Christina or anyone in this town know so much about Quentin?

“What’s the matter? All of you are the matter,” Aidan spat. He stared downward, not wanting to look at anyone for the redness in his eyes.

“Aidan you’re upset. I was just across the street and thought I might find you here. I want you to know how sorry I am. Carol and the boys and everyone, we’re so sorry for your loss.”

“Thanks, Frank,” Aidan said, sitting back down to remove the hand from his back.

“Now, no hard feelings, Aid,” Frank said. “If you need anything, the board’s only too happy to help.”

The board, thought Aidan, will be happy to help me buy my own coffin.

Aidan was surrounded by the hard stool beneath him, the wood bar pressing into his ribs, the strange woman from out of his head who called herself Christina and dusted off pictures of his brother Quentin. That ghost. A sissy. A draft dodger, lost in his own jungle. A coward. Aidan felt as though all the eyes of Canyon Crossing were upon him. He snatched the bottle of Blue Label, and leaned his scotch breath into Christina. “You staying here in town?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Good. You must be at Gail’s place, then. The Canyon Lodger up on Fourth?”

“That’s right.”

“Get your things. We’re leaving. I have lots of questions and I ain’t going to ask them standing in front of this prick.”

“Aidan, you’re drunk,” Frank said, almost laughing. “What’s going on? Don’t leave, I just wanted to talk.”

“Yeah, well, I thought I did, too, bucko. I thought I wanted to talk to you about a lot of things, like Monday’s vote or how the hell you intend to keep my father’s factory from shutting it’s doors. But then”—he looked over at Christina—“then I don’t know.”

“What, Aidan? Then what?”

Aidan gripped Christina’s hand. “Forget it, Frank. Save it for tomorrow.”

Aidan stumbled from the bar with Christina on his arm until they stood outside where the air was crisp and clean.

The Canyon Lodger consisted of a long, narrow parking lot with plain squat rooms on either side, most vacant that time of year. By the time Aidan and Christina reached it, it was past eleven and had just begun to snow. The office lights were off and there were only two cars in the lot—a beat-up blue station wagon Aidan recognized as the owner’s and a large Trailblazer with Oklahoma plates—both now speckled in little white flakes.

“Rental?” Aidan said, knocking on the SUV’s back window.

“Yes,” she said, following Aidan’s gaze to the license plate. “Flights were cheaper to Oklahoma City. I drove the rest.”

“You came here from where exactly?”

“New York. I flew in this morning.” Aidan blinked, his mind tripping over the subtle familiarities of Christina’s features, the way she rolled the start of the word morning, and of course those green Mitchell-y eyes. He’d have to tell Carm more about these visions. This was turning out to be a doozy.

Aidan wandered toward the office, but Christina pulled him back.

“I have a key, Aidan. It’s alright.”

They stepped carefully through the accumulation of wet and worthless slush toward Christina’s room in the far corner. Inside, they took turns using the toilet and then they went about pouring themselves scotch in little glasses.

“What is this business about Quentin?” he said, sharply, almost soberly. “I want to know what you’re doing here and what you know about him.”

“Everything,” she said, her voice low and resolute, her hands no longer trembling.

Aidan stood up. “Then where is he? Brendan’s dead and this has got to be the seventh or eighth funeral he’s missed since—”

“Sit down, Aidan. Please.”

“My back is shot to hell and it hurts to sit on a bed like that. Tell me what the hell you’re doing here in my head!”

“Relax, Aidan.” She pulled a pack of American Spirits from her purse and lit one.

“Where is he?”

“Quentin lived in Canada for a long while. Montreal’s east end to be precise. I think you know that part. From there it was New York but he’s not really there anymore.”

“Quit circling those wagons, lady. What is it you want?” Despite the swigs of scotch, his lips were dry and spittle clung to the corners of his mouth in little white dots.

“Did Brendan ever tell you about finding Quentin in Canada?”

“No. We didn’t talk about him.”

“Why?”

“Is this a joke? Did Brendan put you on to me before they pulled his plug?” Aidan shook his head at the ceiling. “One more prank to make me lose it?”

“This is not a joke. Jesus, Aidan, don’t you see it? I’m not some spook. I’m not in your head. Brendan was furious with me. Angry I dodged, angry I wasn’t there when cancer got Ma. In 1972, the very day Brendan finished his last tour, he boarded a train in Amarillo with nothing on but his crisp uniform. He didn’t have a single bag on him and he set off by way of St. Louis or Chicago, I’m not sure, but it must have taken him a week. But it was Montreal he was heading to. You told him where I’d gone to.”

“I told him nothing,” Aidan garbled.

“You knew. You had to have known.”

“That’s right. I told Brendan how to find that son of a bitch. What does that matter now? He was…you were dead to us. I don’t believe in any resurrection.”

“Brendan found me. You know that. You know what he did to me?” She held one hand in the other and squeezed.

“So you hurt each other. A long time ago. Whatever he did, whatever it was, it’s over, ain’t it? Whatever this is, it’s over. Tonight I’ll close my eyes and tomorrow Brendan goes in the ground. Then that factory full of Mexican boys will march right into Frank’s hands. And that’s for the best. I think I’ll get used to these cursed little hiccups. I better, because they are going to cushion my blow. Like a giant pontoon, they’re gonna float me right on down into the big canyon.” Aidan coughed and hacked, his throat burning with acid. His bloodshot eyes filled again with tears. He sat on the bed, then rolled to his side but his spasms only worsened. Christina moved next to him and began, tentatively, to stroke his back. Aidan’s coughs turned to shallow wheezes.

“Take this jacket off. You’re burning up.”

He sat up to let her strip off his coat and his thick plaid flannel shirt.

“If my wife knew I was here with you,” he chuckled.

He sat listless and barren in a white undershirt, thin from overwashing and with stiff yellow stains in the armpits. Christina could not help but take in the tattoos—emblems of his unit, thickets of roses, tigers and monkeys and big-breasted women, all of them a faded blurry green beneath the forest of hair.

Aidan followed her gaze to his arms. “I didn’t get these over there,” he whispered. “I was clean as a whistle when I got back, unlike most. Brendan took me where he got his—a joint in Wichita Falls with the hillbilly music going. It was a dive little parlor just outside the base where all the Air Force guys went. It took a full week to do them all. When we were home and the bandages were off, when Brendan saw all the things I put on there, he went at me like an animal, thought he was going to cut me right back open again and let all the ink run out. Or make me suck it out. You see, I’d put your name right next to his. See? That old dog was mad as hell.”

“You’re the same, Aidan.”

He stared at her green eyes long and hard.

“You had to go, Quentin. Jesus.”

Christina sat up from the bed and walked over to the bureau, playing with the empty drawers.

“I told Brendan you’d come back,” Aidan said. “That was at the hospital. He was already too far gone. He didn’t say anything, but I think he heard me. I didn’t know how, of course. Or when. I see it now. I see you now. I didn’t see it at first.”

“I thought you might, Aidan.”

“It’s the eyes. The eyes have it.”

Aidan found his legs and stood and clapped his hands. Christina turned to face him.

“Maybe you came here to share scars with someone, but that game doesn’t work with me. Well, actually there is no game because, by the looks of it, you’ve already won.” Aidan seized his flannel off the other bed and put it back on, fumbling with the buttons.

“I don’t understand.”

“You come here to tell me you got out of this whole mess? You come here to tell me you escaped and got to live the life you wanted. You want to rub that in my old dirty face, in the only place I know to call home? Well fuck you, Quentin.”

“It’s Christina. It’s Christina now.”

“Yeah, well, fuck her, too.”

“Aidan,” she cried out, but he was already gone, crossing the parking lot and marching like a fumbling giant through the storm.

The next morning, Aidan awoke naked and sweaty on a cot upstairs from Jackson’s Saloon, stiff sheets and a heavy woven Mexican blanket kicked to the floor. The room was a familiar refuge and the sound of its radiator hissing in the hot dry sauna of space felt like he was being born into an alien room. His headache was on simmer, his bladder burned, and the heaving of his alien lungs was the only other sound. Outside was the sharp migraine brightness of sun and snow and Aidan shielded his eyes from the small port window. He dressed and pissed and crept downstairs.

A boy, no older than sixteen, with bronze skin and a close-shaved head was sweeping the floor. The chairs were up on their tables, the stools stacked neatly on the bartop. There was a sense of order. Aidan’s dulled ears could hear the young man’s headphones from across the room. When Aidan was close enough to the door, the boy startled.

“Mr. Mitchell, I didn’t recognize you.”

“You work last night?”

“Sure.”

“Let me ask you something,” Aidan yawned. “You see a tall woman? Old, black dress, fur coat. Anyone like that?”

“No sir. I was in the back mostly, watched some of the game, but…”

“How late was your shift?”

“Jackson let me go maybe ten, ten-thirty, after the snow started. I didn’t see anybody like that, Mr. Mitchell.”

“That’s alright. Tell your father I say hello. Tell him he owes me twenty bucks.”

“What for?”

“He knows what for.”

“Yes, sir.”

Outside, Aidan swatted snow off his favorite bench and sat down. The cigars in his pocket were crushed and damp and there was nothing left to light, nothing to smoke. He searched his jacket and felt instead a large bulge in a cargo pocket on the outside. Very slowly he pulled out a knit red scarf. Carmela’s scarf. He smelled it and it still smelled of her, the faint stench of spice and impossibly soft. He didn’t remember taking it. Had she left it in the bar? Had she asked him to hold onto it? He couldn’t remember. He wrapped it twice around his neck and inhaled deeply. The snow made everything quiet outside in Canyon Crossing and it continued to fall and fall.

Aidan was not there yet, but he could see himself frozen at the lectern of Brendan’s funeral, trying to summon the things which should be said as you stare out at your brother’s coffin. Aidan imagined a frozen world outside the mortuary walls. Hardened glaciers in the gorge, swifts dropping from a slate sky like stunned missiles dotting the snow in one long perfect V, pointing south. When they moved the show to the grave at the cemetery, the levers on the coffin would jam and an icicle-faced Father would shrug his shoulders and give his blessing.

Or Aidan could clear his coarse throat and talk of another brother, the one that got away and vaulted a chance at rebirth, because that story might knock some of those fat fucks off their narrow pews. Aidan had a rough idea of how it could go and he chortled to himself alone on the iron bench outside Jackson’s. Carm would laugh, too, he thought, but wouldn’t our stranger in the fur coat need to be there? Wouldn’t he need her to make that bucking bronco picture on the flimsy easel complete?

Aidan practiced a new eulogy to himself.

It was hard to miss the sound of his own red pick-up’s snow tires as they crunched and squeaked their way to a stop outside Jackson’s. The truck jolted the way his father’s truck once did, the one from that fishing trip all those years ago.

“You look like shit!” Carmela yelled as she rolled down the fogged-up window. The truck idled and belched. “Gail’s got rooms. Why’d you stay in this dump?”

Aidan stood up slowly, his muscles screaming. He walked around the pickup and got in.

“Is that my scarf?”

“I like it.”

“You need a shave, Aid. You need to show those sons of bitches what you’re made of today. Where’s that scotch bottle you were sucking on? One shot of that and a shave and you’ll be right as rain.” She drove steady and slow down Second.

“Bottle’s gone. Finished. Hey, I know what I’m made of, Carm.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“Snips and snails and puppy dog tails,” he said. “Here, Carm. Turn left. I got to check something.”

She made the turn without question. “You’re all upside down, Aid. Your daughter’s been asking about you since they got in last night.”

“Turn right here. Why is Beverly upset?”

“Why is she ever upset, Aid? That deadbeat she’s with probably. You even finish your speech?”

“Gonna wing it.”

Carmela spat out the window. “I suppose that’s what he deserves. What can you say about a man like that?”

“Not much Father Ryerson’s going to let me say. I have something else in mind.”

“Where are we going?”

“Pull into the Lodger for a minute.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, Carm.”

She turned the car and the back wheels jangled a bit on ice before straightening out. On instinct, Aidan craned his neck to make sure nothing had shaken loose from the cab in back. It was empty but for a bed of snow. Carmela put the truck in park and they sat idling in the lot.

“Is it those visions again? Have you been seeing things?”

Aidan stared at the SUV from Oklahoma and the lit, curtained room beyond it. Nothing stirred in the corner window but a single shadow which dimmed the lamplight as it moved. He waited for a door to fling open, for the same flock of swifts to fly at him and splinter off, searching for grubs beneath the fallow fields of snow, all those acres of white draining into the canyon. How he wanted to fly there with them. But the motel door stood strong and still on its hinges. No birds came.

Aidan sat blinking and breathless, quiet as the canyon, and waited for the shadow to stir again.