Run

The rain blew itself out in the night and the front went through and left the world washed and cold and hard-edged behind it, and they came on south out of Medicine Bow over two more days of walking through country going bare and brown toward winter, and on the evening of the second day they came up onto a long rise in the failing light and there was Laramie below them at last, the thing the whole map had been pointing at, spread gray in the dusk with a few lights burning in it where no lights had any earthly business burning, and off to the north the black stack of the power plant with its slow feather of smoke going up into the cold, and on the near edge the great oval bowl of the stadium with a ragged field of tents spilled around it like something knocked over. She got the cart off the road and back into a stand of cottonwoods on the rise and made a cold camp with no fire, and while Henry slept she lay and watched the impossible lights and made herself ready, and being ready meant remembering.

She had been to Laramie only a few times, and only in The Before of it, when it was still a town and not a thing that had happened to a town. But she knew the shape of what it had become, because Papa had gone down into it one last time two years back and had come home changed and had told her the whole of it, so that she would know the country she might someday have to cross. She lay in the cottonwoods above it now and she went over his telling the way you go over a map before a hard road. This was how he told it.