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“Aw-raaat!” he sang out, and beamed a bright row of white.

That was how Nub introduced me to chaw and how I finally learned to spit. It took more than once—a great deal of hollering along the way—but I got so that months later, by the time I left Wyoming, I could hold my tobacco and squirt it from the side of my mouth just like him.

Hit the cowpie. Squeet! And Nub would hold his sides and laugh so hard I thought he’d fall off the fence and die.

“You know what you look like? You look like some pea-size cowboy on a drunk, that’s what!”

“Oh, yeah? How about a llama?”

“A what?”

“A llama. Aw, Nub, c’mon, you know—the Peruvian animal I was telling you about.”

“They chaw?”

“Naw, you dummy, but they spit!”

“Haw!”

“Yeehaw! Watch this. Just like a llama. Peeew!”

“Well, I’ll be damned. More like a whale, I’d say. Out the ole blowhole. Pow!”

I reckon it was the ole blowhole that did it. In any case, something was pushing. I pulled up my shirt, aimed my belly at the stone cliffs, and howled, “Qosqo-o-o-o!”

Nub gawked at me as if I were mad, his eyes glittering and wide. Then he threw back his head and roared his big laughter into the sky.

WHILE THE SKY was getting our attention, it turned out there was much going on in the landscape. A strange phenomenon was under way, underfoot, in Wyoming. Nothing familiar. Nothing we understood. Nothing like shifting plates of subterranean rock. Nothing like forces that had bucked us before. Nothing like those moments in Peru, when Pachamama heaved and buildings collapsed and glass flew and we would run screaming for our lives.

No. This wasn’t rambunctious or noisy. This was coal fire, silent and eerie, smoldering just below the earth’s surface. Burning, with time on its hands.

We were told that the prairie could fool you. Sage and grass sitting innocently out there as if all were right in the world. Mirages. Beneath them, a quicksand inferno. One wrong step—like Persephone’s encounter with Hades—and you’d drop to the hellfire below.

There were stories about trucks crossing to Hanna, between Walcott and Medicine Bow. Without warning, the earth had caved in and swallowed them up with a yawn. We imagined the drivers descending. We imagined trucks sinking and rocking, the way camels go down on their knees. We imagined men watching their cars melt, just before they were sucked into ash.

On one of those anxious evenings when worry festered behind an illusion of calm, I burned my mother’s incense and prayed that no harm would come to cousin Nub. He had been known to get in cars and take off across prairies with a bottle or girl by his side. I blew on the incense and watched its red eye wink at me from under a pointy white hood.

“What are you doing, Marisi?” my father asked me. Qué haces?

“Thinking about Nub,” I said. George was on the floor, pushing a toy truck down an imagined road.

“Come here, then; I have a job for you.”

“What?” I said, and walked over to where he lay on the couch with a newspaper, the Saratoga Sun, splayed out on his chest.

“Aquí.” He bent his neck up and motioned me under it. “Sit, put my head in your lap.”

I did as I was told.

“You see what this grand all-American vacation is doing to me? You see those white hairs on my head?”

I leaned in and saw them—a dozen, not more—sprouting from the V of his hairline. “Yes,” I said, and smiled at the thought of him searching the mirror. An engineer with nothing to do.

“Pull them out. I’ll give you five cents for each one that you show me.” And greedily, I set to work.

I was like this, curled over my father’s head, when Mother and Vicki came in. “They did it,” said Mother, lowering herself into a chair. “They took her off to the hospital.” My father patted my hands and sat up.

“Unconscious?”

“Barely breathing,” Mother said. Her eyes were sunken, jaundiced.

There was a silence then, as we shouldered the weight of her news. Papi folded his newspaper into a neat square and set it carefully on his lap.

“Well, well,” Mother said