text: “SEEKING: Card Players, Bootleggers, and Shady Characters. $30/day, $240/week.” The wanted section of the Weekly never fails to make you smile. It’s the kind of thing that you enjoy about Rosebud County, it’s why you came here in the first place. You’re none of the three, but the idea that Shady Characters are out there, clipping the classified ads just like everyone else, makes the mundane a little more exciting. The fact that the phone number below has too many digits just sweetens the deal. You put the ripped-out ad in your back pocket, to be reexamined after you finish the crossword, once you’ve found your five letter word for a tree that can’t be trusted. (Not the kind of clue you’d get back home.) After finishing your oats you head downstairs to open the store, only fifteen minutes late. Start being too on time and we might lose our charm, you joke to the mostly empty shelves. You open the lock boxes and start unloading all the food and hardware too valuable to leave unsecured after sundown. By ten the store looks like a store again and you settle down behind the counter. A scarecrow comes in and buys a set of new buttons. For an extra 70 cents you sew them on to his ripped sleeve. The barman from the piano hall picks up his daily order of peanuts. A timberman comes in for some nails, and suggests that your tree is probably a Larch. Never met one he could trust, he says. You pencil it in but it doesn’t work with the rest of the clues. You’ll come back to it later. After the morning rush, you take out the wanted ad and plug in the store’s old telephone. You try dialing the number as written, but it doesn’t go through. (It would have been a bit of a let-down if it had.) You try truncating the number in various ways, some of the calls connect but all are deadends. Not many people in the County use phones anymore, it’s possible that the number means something else entirely. You boil water for tea and sell a ten pound bag of rice to a man with round glasses and a long coat. You consider asking him about the ad, but you don’t want to come across any particular kind of way. You make your tea out of pinyon pine and juniper berries, native to this high arid steppe. Pinyon is what the crows like, it makes you sharp. You’re not sure what juniper does, but they always come as a pair. (Locals say that juniper is for the lizards, but no one remembers why.) You write out the digits from the ad on a long sheet of receipt paper. You circle the 9-7-9 of the Rosebud area code, a good place to start. Back in the day they handed out numbers in order of importance, you always like that the County was last. It’s another reason you came here, really. Of all the dusty dream towns of the steppe, you might as well pick the last. You stare at the numbers and drink your tea. The sun passes overhead and the dust kicks up outside. Thursdays are always slow in the afternoons, it’s a long time since last week’s paycheck. You rearrange the digits to see if they take any other familiar form, longitude and latitude, a time and place, a lock combination, nothing jumps out. There are too many numbers, anything works. Idly, you rearrange them into your old phone number, then your old zip code and street number. You get frustrated and sweep the pieces into a drawer. (Puzzles are only fun while they can keep you distracted.) You close the store and go out for a walk. \*\*\* Your mother sighs as she stands outside your room. The movers have packed up the rest of the house but this room was for her hands only. Everything is still and silent as she turns the knob. She holds her breath as she crosses the threshold, breaking the invisible seal that had formed over the last seven years. (She cries for hours.) Packing takes so much longer than she had expected. As painful as it was to think about the process, the practice just bled details she had missed. Disassembling your bed, your dresser, your blue chair. All the books on your bookshelves. (What an avid little reader you were once.) The clothes and shoes you outgrew but insisted on keeping. You grew so attached to everything. Someday, your mother thinks, you’ll come back and yell at her for getting rid of it all. (She regrets the thought immediately). The sun set and rose to find your mother’s puffy red face surrounded by stacked boxes and neatly labeled pieces of furniture. She holds in her sore hands a picture, stares at it for a long time. You’re in it, glowing beside your parents, in front of a soft yellow forest full of identical silver trunks. You were so excited to learn about those trees, joined together at the roots, one single organism stretching miles across. (Your mother can’t remember what they’re called now either.) She cries one last time then begins packing the car. She carefully piles everything you left behind into her station wagon. The thought of coming across a stranger wearing your clothes is too much, so she drives to a thrift store two hours away. It takes another hour to unload everything, for the clerk to mark which set of screws and bolts and wooden slats go together, to decide one final time what stays and what goes. The sun is setting by the time she ends up at her new apartment. The movers have already come and gone, unpacked everything in the time it took her just to take apart your old bed. She sits outside, not moving. (Hours just tick by these days.) Next to her in the passenger seat are two boxes, the remnants of your existence she couldn’t bear to give away. One box is labeled with the words “THINGS TO KEEP” in neat block letters. The other box just says “HOPE.” Your mother sighs angrily, and scribbles out the words. \*\*\* On Thursday afternoons, when the whole town is saving nickels and the piano hall is empty, you like to stop in and play. They never made it past ragtime out on the steppe, and folks think it’s some kind of magic when you play the jazz you grew up with; it makes the jack rabbits skittish and the donkeys bray. Eventually you decided it’s best to just keep your spells between you and the empty bar. Today the hall is clear except for the man with round glasses and a long coat. Again something makes you think he’d know about your strange ad, but you leave him be. (You never lost your good manners.) Instead you sit down at the piano and slowly warm your fingers. Your mind drifts as they wander over the deeply worn keys, playing pieces you forgot the names of years ago. It amazes you what your mind holds on to and what falls away, that you can remember ten thousand notes but not the three words that hang above them. (More puzzles.) In a moment of whimsy, you put the ad on top of the piano and start to play the phone number, as if it were a chord progression written down by an erratic piano instructor. It sounds awkward at first but with the right mix of major sevenths and accidentals you can start to hear some halfway decent jazz hidden inside. You just keep repeating the twelve bars, changing the key, the tempo, the melody, continuously circling around something. It’s soothing and nostalgic in a way that is unexpected but pleasant. You circle deeper and deeper, and don’t notice the round glasses in the corner of the bar fix themselves on you. You float back down to find the man standing next to you, waiting patiently for you to finish. “Aspen,” he says, as you stare up at him confused. “The tree that can’t be trusted.” He smiles and pats the piano fondly, then walks out of the bar. You sit frozen for a long time, then rush back to the store. You pull out the crossword but you already know that it will fit. As you write it in dark black ink you’re hit with a wave of memory. A high forested plateau. The sun shining through countless yellow leaves. Identical white trunks, tied together below the ground, stretching for a hundred miles. You have no idea where and when any of it is but you know you were there. \*\*\* Your mother enters her new two-bedroom walkup and sets down your boxes. She looks around at the job the movers have done, impressed how closely everything matched her instructions. There are still some odd boxes that need to be put away but it feels remarkably like walking into someone else’s home. (Into someone else’s life, already in progress.) She tours around the place and feels unexpectedly light, like a ghost, or a spirit floating out of one body into another. She feels like dancing. She sets up an old record player and attaches it to the speakers already mounted in the living room. She opens a box looking for her records and recoils when she realizes it's one of yours. Then, with sudden confidence, she goes back into the box. She had found one of her old swing records hiding on your bookshelf, and now she takes it out and wipes off the dusty sleeve. A pile of memories that threatens to bury her, but she feels unstoppable now. (She’s a ghost!) She twirls around the room as the horns dip and dive. The old vinyl cracks and pops, but the ride cymbal keeps its rhythmic shuffle. Your mother’s dark hair flies behind her, her bare feet glide nimbly below. She hasn’t slept in two days but somehow it only lends to her grace. The music builds and then falls, and she closes her eyes and sways as it fades between songs. She opens her eyes and rushes to unpack the rest of your boxes. Nothing more can be hidden away. Now is not the time for closed doors, for holding back, for waiting. Now is a celebration. (Hark! A new moon rises.) It was an eclectic mix of your possessions that she managed to keep, childish and out of place here, but that doesn’t phase her. She places the rest of your records by the turntable, cleaning their jackets and wiping the grooves. On top of the piano she places two of your stuffed animals, a donkey and a hare, and almost imagines they’re listening to the music. Her eyes twinkle as she takes each one for a whirl around the room. (Swing dancing is best with a partner.) At the bottom of one box is a rolled up poster that sat behind your door, another memory from a trip out west. It’s a huge scene of an expansive prairie, nothing other than a few juniper bushes to break up the flat, arid plain. Crows circle above and a magpie hops along the dusty ground. She never really understood the appeal, but now hangs it directly across from her own bed. She lies down and looks deeply into the vast western expanse. Her eyes droop as she looks, trying to see what you saw in all the emptiness. (She finally drifts off to sleep, still searching.) \*\*\* A distant sun is casting long shadows when you shake yourself out of your head. You pace around the store, packing away lock boxes, misplacing everything. You talk to yourself, about aspen trees mostly. You shutter the store and go upstairs. You push aside your rusty cot and pull out a scratched up wooden crate. You wipe the dust off and open it. You’re not sure what you’re looking for but with shaky breaths you leaf through your old life. Everything has a distant familiarity, but nothing clicks. You spread it all out on the floor. There are notebooks and journals and reams of sheet music, all fading slowly away. You can no longer remember why any of this is here, or what might have been left behind. You strike the crate in frustration and down flutters a photograph, knocked loose by your anger. You pick it up and the world spins. You are fixated first on the forest, yellow aspen trees glow in the soft autumn light. The trunks and branches are exactly how you remembered them, bright silver, all neat clones of each other. You knew you were there once. Then, nervously, you let your eyes drift to the three smiling faces in the center. You recognise yourself instantly, but your mother and father come as a much slower realization, a tide rushing in. (Waves crash, everything is spinning.) You sit down and feel like vomiting. You look away and look back. For a second you try to pretend it might not be them, you might be mistaken, but the illusion falls away. Memories flood over the high walls you so carefully built. They crumble under the weight. You stare at your mother, her hand on your shoulder. She looks back, smiling, comforting. The sun catches her long dark hair. She looks so young, so happy. You remember how much you once wanted to hurt her. And how much you once missed her. Your father doesn’t remember these things, at least not here, smiling on your other shoulder. He is tall but gentle. He looks cold, with a hat and gloves on, and a coat that goes down to his knees. Still, he looks happy too. He is beaming back at the camera, his eyes glowing behind his round glasses. \*\*\* You sit on the floor for a long while, thinking about where you are, this strange county of card players, bootleggers, and shady characters. You think about crows and donkeys and jack rabbits, about jazz music and pinyon pine, and the right and wrong kinds of puzzles. You hold the ad in your jittery fingers. You know you’re never going to figure it out. You knew that from the beginning, but you did what you could to put it off. Now, it’s time. You flip it over the cut out piece of paper, and look again at the other side. At your name printed neatly in capital letters. At the message copied below, “please come home.