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Mr Rideheart replied, "Your trees are also historic"

He knew all the ins and outs of becoin, and where to go after that, to see that the river would run clean and unobstructed There was a fair amount of bureaucracy involved, but the process was reasonably speedy "Considering the aht to bear," he said, gesturing toward the , or possibly the invisible airwaves of CBS, "I think it could be done in less than two years"

He said ould need to docue and architectural character of the coraphy, and so forth can be expensive Sorants"

After a brief silence Viola said, succinctly, "We don’t need any block grants We’re rich" And that was that

At soot a letter fro to Telluride The clutch had gone out on our old Renault and he’d junked it-he hoped I wasn’t attached He was thinking of getting ato Telluride, in which case we’d get another car

I was in such a state, running on so little sleep and such dead nerve endings, I didn’t knohat to think I knew I’d have to make plans soon And I was touched that he still took me into account when hewhen I read his words;there had always been between us The words seereat distance, with the sae, compressed tone as a satellite phone call I looked carefully at each sentence and then waited for it to register All I could really get clearly was the name of the toith its resonant syllables: Telluride It sounded like a coed frouilty for being ahen the call ca love for all those days while the neas laid out like a corpse in Doc Hoot back into town We hadn’t wanted the vacation to end, so we just went straight to Loyd’s house and spent the night: Surprisingly, I’d never slept in his bed Loyd’s house was entirely his own: a ainst the cliff of upper Gracela Canyon on a masonry foundation he’d built slowly hiradually grown up over the ular stone house, overgroith honeysuckle vines

Leafless for winter, the honeysuckles made a lace curtain over the bedroos on the walls, which I watched all through the bright, htly in his sleep I couldn’t find sleephe left at dawn for a seven-day stand in Yuma, and I walked down to have breakfast at Es turned out I didn’t eat-not that day or the next By the tione to be touched

It was Uda Dell on the phone, telling one to Tucson for a CAT scan She called it a "skin the cat"

I sat up in bed, cradling the phone and pulling the red-and-black afghan aroundbreak, so my life had lost what little sense of order daily work could still i?" What I wanted to ask her was "Why did he tell you, and not uess I knew the answer to that

"No, honey, he went yesterday He took the bus" Uda seemed industrious on her end of the phone, even as she spoke Every few seconds she paused and I could hear a high ascending sound like cloth ripping

"Did he tell you how long he’d be gone?"

There was another rip, then Uda’s voice "Honey, he didn’t tellabout it I don’t think he wanted anybody to know You know Doc He don’t want anybody to make a fuss [Rip] But he come over and asked me to look after the house If you or anybody was to coone to Tucson for the weekend to get some medical supplies [Rip] Now, I knew that didn’t sound right I never heard of hiot along without for forty years we could get along without till the Judgment, don’t you think? [Rip] So I said, ’Doc, are you pullingup, ain’t it,’ and he said there was et tested for his Alsizer’s and get a Cat Skin Test done on hie to follow this trail of reason I could perfectly picture Uda: her large face, the cheeks tightly packed and shiny like a plum I rubbed the top of my head and looked at the clock, with astonishment I’d fallen asleep around 4 AM and slept an unprecedented seven hours