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residents liked it. Maybe they had found a set of values different from that of hustling, hungry Boulder just across the county line; then again, maybe they hadn’t. Most of the homes were small bungalows huddled under large cottonwoods, but here and there newer apartments ruptured the tree line, stark and boxy and hinted of pending change.
    At the north end of the street, I found the post office. It was the newest structure in town and looked like the central warehouse of a lumberyard, with its low-pitched roof, wide eaves, and freshly stained boards. The woman behind the counter scratched a pencil in her heavily dyed black hair and said, “Just a minute,” when I showed her Taylor’s address and asked where it was. She came back with a county map glued to a square of cardboard and covered with plastic film.
    “Here we are.” A smudge of ballpoint ink was “here.” Her finger traced a line of road. “You go down Briggs—that’s right out front there. Where it turns east, go down to County Road Five and turn south maybe half a mile. You’ll see the mailbox on your left—says ‘Wilcox,’ but they’re the original owners. Don’t live there now.”
    “Do you know Mr. Taylor?”
    The blue-black hair shook no. “Only people I see regular are those with boxes or who use general delivery.”
    I thanked her and followed the ragged and lumpy asphalt strip around to the graveled county road. A thin haze of dust hung over the glare of dirt and stone to powder the weeds that filled the roadside ditches. Treeless land rolled gently toward the horizons. Here and there were patches of dark green corn or silage crops watered from narrow irrigation ditches, the glint of aluminum siphons leading off between rows from the water running down the concrete slit. But for the most part, the land was brown and dry and empty of everything except an occasional wire fence that swung past like a long pendulum anchored to some point at the edge of sky. To the west, ranges of mountain, blurry with dust and heat, lifted abruptly from the yellow of prairie to the blue and gray of icy rock. Already, clumps of white clouds rose like billows of smoke from behind the farthest peaks, and by early afternoon they would build into towering thunderheads that would sail, stately and slow, toward Kansas. That was the rain promised by Uncle Wyn’s arthritis, and if the prairie was lucky, a curtain of water from the dark bottom of one of those swelling columns would sweep across the cracked and gaping clay. Aside from a white-chested hawk that hung wagging above a gentle rise of land, I was the only thing moving in the shallow bowl formed by the grassy ridges.
    The mailbox, anchored in a rusty milk can, had the route number nailed to the upright and the name Wilcox painted in faded red on the metal. Beneath it dangled an orange newspaper box labeled “Times-Call.” A two-rut road led across a narrow cattle guard and wound over a knoll to make a pair of dimples in its crest of tall, dry grass. I pulled the rented Subaru onto the weedy shoulder and walked up the lane. The heavy sun pressed down on the tawny swell of earth, and the grass sang with the high-pitched keen of insects.
    From the ridge, the ruts led down into the next shallow valley toward a cluster of dull tin roofs surrounded by a small stand of cottonwood trees. I squatted in the high grass, using binoculars to study the farmyard and buildings. The house itself was a roofed basement whose walls lifted about four feet above the earth. It was the kind that people built to get started, moving into the basement and planning—if the floods didn’t wash away the crops or the drought blow them away—to eventually add a main floor and then maybe a second one, and to rise in the world with the house.
    Apparently, things worked out for the original owners only enough to justify a peaked roof over the basement and a porch lined with rusty metal chairs in the shape of seashells. Close to the house,