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Show Blue Run/11 his head. Buddy told a story of how his great grandmother, Katy, was just a girl when the medicine man showed up with a band of ragged braves, camped a night on the ranch, just outside the fenceline. Katy, her brother and her sisters, had hidden an entire night inside the fireplace chimney. Next morning, the Indians were gone, vanished Geronimo ended up signing his name for quarters at the World's Fair in Seattle. Why I know all this, I don't know, but on a frosty night, Geronimo fell drunk out of a wagon and froze to death in an Oklahoma ditch All he ever wanted was to go home. Geronimo-World War II paratroopers shouted Geronimo' when they stepped out into sky. That's me, say Geronimo! and jump. Buddy was like that He got us married by a sleepy justice somewhere in the big heart of Texas, then talked all night. The radio cackled just beneath the story of his first wife, how she'd had a little baby girl then got killed by a semi-truck. The grief-sick daughter had up and quit talking, hadn't said a word since its mama died Driving between Clovis and Tucumcari, while Buddy slept and this huge land got light again, I pictured her, how I'd hold her to me and say her name and be her mama and she'd be whole again. By Los Cruces, I'd remade myself into the mother of all lonely children, and the whole wild west brightened before me. We rolled into south Tucson in April, the month when dogwood blooms in Arkansas, and everything Buddy Washer ever told me was a lie. The Washer family spread was three rusty trailers that sat out of level on a bare dirt lot by a Dairy Queen where donors from the Plasma Center slept off wine drunks with vomit on their shirts and dark circles where they'd peed their pants. Buddy's car overheated. When we drove onto the oil-stained dirt, the yard beside one of the trailers, a dwarf hopped out wolf-whistling, just like that, like this was the way all Washers |