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set over the rimrock. Down where we were, it was already dark.
    “Forever,” I said. “That’s what they think. It’s insane.” We’d been at it for an hour, working each other into greater states of righteousness.
    “We should talk to them about it,” Josh said.
    We tried to follow Mom’s directions but they were typically unclear, relying on vague landmarks instead of road names and numbers—
turn right at the second fork after the tree that got struck by lightning
—and we arrived late to a remote expanse of land just off an Apache reservation, in a part of the state known for high school football, wildfires, alien abductions, and an apocryphal creature called the Monster. The sign for Gabaldon pointed into a stand of pines overlooked by the bare peak of Mount Baldy glowing in the moonlight. We drove in. The first four campsites were eerily deserted in the headlights, scattered with ash and half-burnt firewood. Just as Josh and I had begun to exchange worried looks, we saw the white horse trailer through the trees, and a flicker of firelight beyond.
    My mother walked haltingly into the beams of light, shielding her eyes with a sideways hand, sticking to the side of the road, as if she were afraid of something. Maybe they’d gone feral way out here, away from civilization, started to view other humans as a threat. But she knew we were coming, and she had Ray with her: what was she scared of?
    I parked my truck next to hers and Josh and I got out, hugged our mother, shook hands with Ray. Chance came padding over to lick my palm. We ate grilled steaks and baked potatoes wrapped in foil. After dinner we sat around the picnic table and played games in the harsh light of an electric lantern. Josh and I were on one side of the table, Ray and Mom on the other. Ray and Josh were drinking wine from a box. Mom andI had water; she rarely drank and I pretended for her benefit not to be the binge-drinking college freshman I was. It wasn’t late but the black ring of forest around us and the starry sky above made it seem like the middle of the night, and a vast silence gaped beyond the popping of the fire. It was easy to believe that there were no other people in the world but us, and I wondered if that was how my mother and Ray felt on their Adventure, spending so much time in places like these. I didn’t think I could live that way, but I could almost understand why they did.
    Mom suggested Scrabble. For an unschooled family—Josh and I were the first to attend college—we were pretty good at Scrabble. Mom didn’t read much except for self-help and spiritual books, but she did crossword puzzles, had a thing for words. She had read to my brother and me in the womb, and she bought us lots of books, so we grew up reading: Josh was into war history, and I liked mysteries, adventures, Westerns.
    Ray was not an educated man. He’d gone straight from high school to the Marine Corps. I sometimes saw him reading paperback versions of the classics—years later I would take a copy of Plato’s
The Republic
off my shelf while I was moving, see his name inscribed on the inside cover, and throw it across the room—and I admired his impulse to self-educate, his curiosity about worlds beyond his own. I’d first been drawn to books by a similar desire to discover something beyond the bizarre hermetic world of Tombstone.
    But Plato hadn’t helped Ray’s Scrabble game. He stared at the board for minutes at a time, lips moving, fingering his tiles, clearly overmatched. We should have taken pity on him. He could do things none of us could; he was a genius at the steering wheel, could back a horse trailer through a gate blindfolded. He just wasn’t good with words. But Josh and I were long-warring rivals averse to mercy, and my mother had anasty streak in competitions of any kind. And even though we all liked Ray, he was the latest in a long line of men, and the three of us treated him the same as we’d treated all the rest: he