Plainsong by Kent Haruf Page A

phone out on its cable as far it would allow them and writing their figures on pads of paper. Now it was dark. The sun had gone under two hours ago and a sharp cold winter wind was blowing dirt across the highway in brown skeins, pushing it into ridges along the gutters at the curbing. The new yellowish streetlamps were burning all along the empty blacktop, showing the entrance into town. She called for information in Norka, where he came from, the next town going west from Holt. The operator gave the number that was listed for his mother.
    When she dialed the number, the woman on the other end answered at once, and the woman sounded angry from the outset.
    May I speak to Dwayne? the girl said.
    Who is this?
    This is a friend of his.
    Dwayne isn’t here. He doesn’t live here.
    Is he in Denver?
    Who is it wants to know?
    Victoria Roubideaux.
    Who?
    The girl said it again.
    I never heard him mention that name before, the woman said.
    I’m a friend of his, the girl said. We met last summer.
    That’s what you say. How do I know that? the woman said. I wouldn’t know you from Nancy Reagan.
    The girl looked out across the highway. There was a scrap of paper blowing along the gutter, tumbling with the dirt. Can’t you just give me his phone number? she said. Please, I need to talk to him. There’s something I want to tell him.
    Now you listen to me, the woman said. I told you, he isn’t here. And he isn’t here. I’m not giving out his number to everybody that wants it. He’s got his privacy to think of. He’s working a job and that’s what he needs to be doing. Whoever you are, you leave him alone. You hear me? She hung up.
    The girl put the phone back. She felt very alone now, cut off and frightened for the first time. She was not sick in the morning very often anymore, but she still wanted to cry too much of the time, and lately her jeans and skirts were so tight at the waist that she’d begun wearing them unbuttoned with a little piece of elastic strap pinned inside, holding them together, a solution that Maggie Jones had given her. The girl looked up and down the highway. It was empty save for a big tanker truck that was rattling in from the west. She could hear the whistle of its brakes as it slowed, passing under the first streetlights. When it rattled by, the driver sitting up high in the tractor cab looked her over thoroughly, his head turned sideways like he had a broken neck.
    Across the highway and up a block toward town was Shattuck’s, and she decided to go there. She didn’t want to go back to Maggie’s yet. She would still be out of the house at a teachers’ meeting, and the old man was there alone. The girl started walking back toward Shattuck’s. She felt emotional and softhearted toward it, as though she were being pulled there by the past. It was where he had bought hamburgers and Cokes for the two of them in the summer, and afterward they had taken the sack of food in the car and driven out into the flat open country north of town on the unnamed gravel roads, driving out alone at that hour when the sky was only beginning to deepen and color up and the first stars were just coming clear, when all the scattered birds of the fields were flying homeward.
    Shattuck’s had a narrow room at the side with three café tables positioned along the wall where you could sit and eat your food if you weren’t ordering from a car. When she entered this room there was a young woman with two little girls eating at one of the tables. The woman had stiff red hair that looked dyed. She was eating chili from a Styrofoam bowl and the little girls were each having a hot dog and sipping chocolate milk from straws.
    At the order window the girl asked for a Coke and old Mrs. Shattuck brought the glass to the counter and she carried it to the table in the corner where a window looked out on the highway. She sat down and put her red purse on the table. She unbuttoned her coat. She took a drink and looked out toward the