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BLM road that leads to the radio towers and relay station on top of Sarpy Ridge. The snow is deep and less sooty up there, well above me. Through my monocular I’ll see her trudging through thigh-deep drifts, kicking, slapping at the white with her fists, throwing it, daring the earth to move. The snow dampens her screams of anger—anger because she is under fire for what her husband did and anger because she is not an Indian-riding redhead with big tits and shit for morals—until she gradually disappears into the blackening winter sky. By daylight the wind has wiped clean her tracks, footprints that from down here are only sixteenths of an inch, millimeters apart. Wayne says her mind deals in the concrete and they are concretely married and he still comes home most nights and still puts his dishes in the dishwasher.
    Up there maybe there’s less chance her prayers get trappedin the inversion of wood and coal smoke that sometimes hangs over the valley. But maybe those prayers blow to Utah. She copes. Robin is from California, where they have real earthquakes.

    I’m grading some horrid red-pen term papers and watching aerobics, which I can still get on ESPN, and drinking a beer. It’s ten o’clock or so now, but I’ll skip the news. Women. The knock at the door is Wayne in overalls. Before I answer he mounts the ladder with the new fifteen-millimeter nut he promised me this afternoon and I’m in my living room with the remote control and the window open. I set the control box to Galaxy 4, Channel 17. Fuzz, snow, snow, okay! “That’s it!” Three French women have cuffed a no-clothes policeman to the radiator and are smearing him with ice cream and licking it off to some kind of psychedelic Wagnerian fugue,
dow daw dowww, whokaneeow, whokaneeow.
Wayne tightens up the nut on the antennae, pounds across the metal roof and back down the ladder. I go outside to meet him, to thank him. He’s breathing hard and looking through the window at the TV. “You know,” he says, “what does this tell you about the state of our nation?”
    “This is France,” I say.
    “That’s right. Use your phone?”
    Wayne checks in with Robin. I can feel the weight of her disappointment on the other end, Wayne’s excitement on this end.
    “You still with me here, man?” asks Wayne.
    “I thought you were going to get some new equipment. From your dad?” I’m stalling for myself, but I know I’m in. Wayne doesn’t even hear me. The dogs are running tonight.
    This is a problem I seem to always have had: How do I know how much I have? And how do I know when I am losing it? I get up and pull my coveralls on, go out to the truck, and we’re off. “Hey,”says Wayne. “You can hear those UFO freaks from that Albuquerque station on your phone.”
    We park in the sage on the other side of U.S. 30. The only traffic is an occasional semi, so there is no real effort involved in keeping unseen. It’s clear and the moon makes it possible to pick up outlines well without being seen from a distance.
    “Look at that honey moon,” says Wayne. “Magical.” It creates a shadow over everything we do. A bolt cutter makes short work of the lock on the cyclone and barbed-wire gate. I muscle the ladder off the truck and drag it to the base of the tower. Wayne fixes a bandanna over his face like a nineteenth-century highwayman, turns his cap around, throws a climbing rope over his shoulder, and nods at many quarts of paint, the pressure regulator and tanks—twenty pounds of gas in heavy steel cylinders, three of them—in the rusty truck bed, nothing lightweight from the Idaho dad. I just get the ladder telescoped and steady and, like a kid on a beer buzz hell-bent to spray his girlfriends name on the tank, bad-back Wayne scoots a quarter of the way up, to where the caged ladder starts, before I get to the bottom with the clumsy tanks. Over my breathing I can hear soft pings like hail on aluminum as Wayne takes to the top like a house spider. I