Colleen O'Casey stood in her doorway and stared down the long gray ribbon of road, eyes tight in the desert sun. Late again, she thought. Does the lad ever think of his mother? Her eyes were practiced and familiar with every nuance of the road leading into Bitterroot, because an approaching car usually meant a customer for the Blind Luck, the only establishment for thirty miles in either direction. The old café had originally served as a train depot for the town, but the once-active rail line was now just an unused spur, and being the manager of a roadhouse in the middle of a big stretch of abandoned Arizona desert meant you couldn't be too choosy about your customers.

But it wasn't an approaching car or even the thought of ringing cash registers that stirred Colleen's heart on days like this. It was the sight of her son, Liam, making his daily bike trek from the bus stop at the crossroads back to the little house they shared behind the Blind Luck. Even though he'd never failed to come home, whether from school on weekdays or from one of his weekend rides, she was always relieved when she caught sight of his lanky frame in the distance balancing on the pedals of his mountain bike.

Often, when she'd see him racing home on his bike, she thought he might be dreaming of riding a horse, like so many of the rancher's kids in the area did. Maybe leading some kind of hoof-beating charge, or racing along on a dirt bike, or some other small boy's fantasy of speed and drama. But Colleen's projections of her son's imaginings were themselves flights of fancy; the boy rarely disclosed his deeper musings. Even with his mother, he was cautious with his thoughts, guarded with his words. I never know what he's thinking, Colleen thought. She shook her head and the afternoon sun flared off her fiery red hair.

Besides her long weekend hours, Colleen worked two weekday evening shifts at the Blind Luck, the best schedule she could manage. Finding good employees in Bitterroot was difficult, and when she did, she had to accommodate their needs too.  This meant that Liam often came home to an empty house, and that the house stayed empty until past two a.m. Colleen had asked that he not come into the unsavory environs of the Blind Luck unless it was an emergency, but she called home every couple of hours to make sure he was all right, and she even had the sheriff from Locust drive by whenever his patrol took him out that way.

Still, she worried. At least Liam was levelheaded, almost too levelheaded for a child not quite ten. Sometimes he'd go an entire day without saying more than a few sentences, or without letting go of even a smile. He's just sit by himself, daydreaming, or drawing in the dirt with a stick, or playing with the trinkets he kept deep inside his pockets. But despite his independence, he was a good boy. That she knew. She looked at the clock again and grimaced. Great, she thought. He's really late now. She left the house and walked slowly toward the café.

At the same time that Colleen was staring at the clock, Liam was sitting on his bike, peering through a crack in the wall of an old shed, and watching three boys he knew from school wreak havoc inside. The shed was several miles from the school – a dilapidated clapboard outbuilding on what used to be a small cattle ranch. The boys had failed to break into the boarded-up house next door, but the shed had obviously been a success. Liam watched them celebrate by shouting and bashing old planks against the walls.

The boys were much older than Liam, eleven or twelve, but their school was a combination of grammar school and middle school, so it hosted a wide range of ages. In the years that Liam had been in Bitterroot, he hadn't made any close friends at school or at home. The desert put distance between houses, and Liam's natural reserve had put distance between these boys and him.

"Dude, these windows shatter like, like glass. I mean, they really explode!" said Billy Tanrum, the leader of the group. He had just shoved a broken rake handle through the shed's one unbroken window, raining bits of dirty glass onto the hardscrabble below. He swung the handle around and started pounding it against one of the walls where time and age had opened a gap between the boards. The whole structure creaked and groaned, and Billy fell to his knees laughing. Just when he was about to leave the shed, he saw Liam peering in at him.

"Hey, that little O'Casey kid is spying on us," Billy shouted. The three moved outside and stood in front of Liam. "Can't you find your own stuff to do, punk?" Billy said, poking the rake handle at Liam. "I mean, what do you do besides follow us around?"         

"I do lots of stuff," Liam said, shrugging his shoulders. He slid his hands into his pants pockets and slumped on the seat of his bike. "I built a fort, and I put together some models of animals." The other boys gathered closer, made a semicircle around him.

 "Oh! Big dude! Little Liam built a fort," said Billy. His thick shock of short, moussed blond hair shook with false laughter. "Do you play cowboys and Indians, too? Which one are you anyway? You look like you're more the Indian. Maybe your dad is an Indian. Do you even know what your dad is?"

Liam looked up at Billy, who towered over him. "He is my dad," he said. "You don't know anything about him. He's bigger than you or your dad, and smarter too." Liam kicked at a stone near his foot, sending it skittering to the nearby wall. "I don't have to tell you anything about him."

Billy gave Liam's shoulder a shove. "Yeah, right," he said. "You don't have to tell us anything about your dad 'cause you don't know anything about him."

Liam started to turn his bike to leave.

"Yeah, get your ignorant punk ass outta here, ladyboy. You're just a little twig anyway, a fatherless twig. Now blaze!"

The three boys stood staring at Liam, who stared back, lips compressed and fists balled. He turned and pedaled hard toward Lost Corners, the unfinished road that intersected with the crossroads, the fastest route back to his house.

I'm not a fatherless twig, Liam thought as he rode. How could I be fatherless when I have a father? Billy doesn't know anything; none of those boys know anything. He looked at his strong, stubby arms, the fine black hairs standing up from his brown skin. My dad probably has arms like thick tree branches.

Liam made it to Lost Corners, then sailed onto the rough pavement. Unbeknownst to his mother, his fantasies did shoulder a variation or two; sometimes he was a comic book hero saving an imperiled city with a titanic showing of strength. Sometimes, he was a famous pirate, steering a massive ship full of treasure into the wind. But the thoughts that occupied the vistas of his imagination, that clustered in his head, the thoughts that were almost like breathing to him, those thoughts all centered, inexplicably, on rhinoceroses.

Liam couldn't remember when he hadn't thought of rhinos, or why he had even thought of them in the first place. He just knew that rhinos had meaning for him. He looked up at the fleecy clouds scudding across the sharp blue of the sky on a high desert wind. The lead cloud looked like a horned beast; smaller minions flanked its bulk. It's a huge rhino, Liam thought. A huge white rhino with lots of baby rhinos. A family. By the time he made it to the crossroads, he was no longer thinking of the harsh words of the boys.

Colleen arrived at the Blind Luck twenty minutes late. Katherine, who had been waiting to be relieved, gave her a small smile and a nod. "Sorry, Kathy," Colleen said. "I've been trying to get it together, but it seems I can't quite stick to a schedule, whether it's work, the house, or getting Liam to come home on time. A day late and a million dollars short, that's me on most counts."

Colleen looked into the sparsely populated barroom as Katherine set a tray of dirty glasses on the counter and lit a cigarette. The seventy-five year-old depot had stood vacant for years before a retired rancher decided he was tired of driving into Locust just to get a drink. He'd knocked together a long counter and bar, trucked in some mismatched tables and chairs, managed to get a liquor license, and hand-painted an awkward sign that hung on the roof. He hadn't bothered to wash the windows. Colleen was still trying to get around to that.

Katherine turned to Colleen. "Hey gal, it's been quiet. Nobody's thrown up, I've only broken one glass, and no one's tried to tell me I remind them of their girlfriend back home yet, so I'm willing to call it a good night and head home." She stubbed out her cigarette and grabbed her purse from behind the bar. "You do have one anxious customer, though. Calhoun has it in his mind to bring the Blind Luck to the masses. He's been hanging around waiting for you to show up. I think he's in the bathroom."

Just as she said this, a scruffy man in his mid-sixties limped from the men's room door and made his crabbed way up to the counter. He waved a flapping napkin around as he approached. "Colleen, Colleen, this is it! This will bring all the business back to the Blind Luck. Take a look!" He pushed the napkin across the counter toward Colleen.

Colleen glanced at Calhoun's crudely drawn pencil sketch of the Blind Luck, the napkin ripped and frayed from the force of his artistry. On top of his rendering of the old café he'd drawn a huge sign with violent, emanating horizontal lines to indicate its dazzling illumination. The sign read: See It All at the Blind Luck: Drinks, Dining and Dancing. Every Drop Is Worth the Drive! Calhoun leaned toward her from his slumped stance at the bar. "The wording might need an edit or two, but I could help with the phone book ad, too!"

Colleen smiled. "Calhoun, I've already spent this month's marketing budget on new menus, but I'll think about it. How 'bout a drink courtesy of the management?" When she turned to the bar to set him up with his usual shot of rye, she saw her reflection in the wall's mirrored glass, and the memory of why she'd fled to the desert came flooding back.

It was six-and-a-half years ago. Liam was still a baby – a stocky, happy boy with thick black hair like his father, Jesus. Jesus and Colleen had been married for two years, but they'd only been in the little town in northern Idaho for six months. Colleen was happy, having secured her first job as a reporter with the Laketown Gazette, the town's only paper. Jesus was happy for her, too, but troubled. The sight of the beautiful, willowy Colleen with her dark-skinned baby and her handsome Mexican-American husband had brought visible, even verbal reproach from some of the townsfolk. Theirs was a town that, until then, had had virtually no mixing of the races.

For a month, Jesus quietly urged Colleen to move away, warned her that something bad could happen. But Colleen had brushed off the warning, eager to get started in her new career. The town never gave her the chance.     

Having left a restaurant after a good meal, their young family was walking down an alley toward their car. Liam had been exceptionally well behaved in the restaurant, and Jesus and Colleen had both enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine. Colleen was carrying Liam and laughing about something Jesus had said earlier. Neither of them paid any attention to the footsteps behind them until a shout rang out.

"Hey, what's a beaner doing walking next to a white woman? That doesn't happen in our town. Why don't we see if Jose wants to play a little baseball?"

There were three men, two carrying bats. Jesus had barely turned around when he was hit on the head by the biggest of the three. He fell to his knees. The next blow sent him to the ground. The final blow caved in his head.

It took Colleen years to stop hearing the sound of her screams that night. In her head, she screamed through the trial, through the convictions, and even through the long nights alone with her baby in the house. It was as if she would never stop screaming at all.

"Colleen, are you okay? You're a million miles away." Calhoun was standing at the bar, holding his drink. "Are you thinking about my ideas for the café?"

Colleen hadn't even noticed that she'd poured a drink for him, or that tears were trickling down her face. She brushed them away with her hand and forced a smile. "Yeah, Calhoun, I'm thinking about the café. I'm thinking that maybe it's time the whole place had some fresh ideas. Why don't you come by my place sometime and we'll talk about it." She turned her back to the bar and began wiping the counter. It's stupid, anyway, she thought. Does it make any sense to stick it out here just because of Jesus, for Jesus, in memory of Jesus?

Colleen had originally come to the desert as a sort of forced isolation. In the distractions of the city it had been too easy to forget the indifference of the universe. She wanted to be alone, needed to be alone, alone enough to bathe in her guilt – for not listening to Jesus, for not saving their son from the loss of a father. She knew she would never come clean, and this was her penance.

The hardest decision for Colleen had been deciding not to tell Liam about Jesus' murder. Much as it pained her, she vowed he would never know the circumstances of his father's death, or, in fact, any detail of Jesus' life. No matter how much Liam begged, she only told him that his father was gone. His questions about his dad's height, weight, walk, talk, whether he would return, was remarried, or had other kids – were either met with silence or a vague answer. I don't know, is all she would say, or He was just an ordinary man, or He was a nice man, but now he's gone. Colleen felt that if Liam found out how his father died, it might be damaging to him, so she vowed to tell him nothing. She loved her son, but as long as she had anything to say about it, his father's life would remain a mystery. She told no one in Bitterroot about her past, either, and brushed off questions with either a laugh or a tall tale. People had let it go at that. Now it was just her and Liam, and her ghosts.

There was only one small crack in Colleen's wall of isolation, and that crack had just opened the Blind Luck's door and brought his long, weedy frame to the bar counter.

"Ms. O'Casey, surely there's a wee dram behind the counter for a sufferin' man, Christ willin'," said Evan Custer, mangling the Irish accent with an indifferent grin.

Colleen straightened and shook her head with a little sniff. "That accent would chip my mother's teacups, Mr. Custer, if not her eardrums. Maybe you should stick to Pa Cartwright, or John Wayne, or some other blustery Western legend, rather than defame my ancestors."

Evan was the only person in Bitterroot who knew about Colleen's past. He was the caretaker at nearby Elysian Fields, a natural desert spring that had been a popular resort with the Hollywood crowd some forty years before. He lived in a double-wide mobile home on the property, and made sure the spa's lights still worked and the faucets still turned.

Evan was also a regular at the Blind Luck, and although Colleen had never returned his obvious affections, the two had become close friends – Liam and Evan as well. One night, hours after everyone else had left the bar, she matched Evan drink for drink and told him about Jesus, about her vow never to tell Liam. Evan had tried to talk her out of it. "Your ancestors would probably be on my side in this matter, or at least on my side of the bar," he said, running a hand through his thick graying hair. But Colleen had finally sworn him to secrecy.

Colleen poured Evan a drink while he continued talking.

"Listen, I know you're working tomorrow evening, but why don't you come out to the Fields in the morning for a swim? There are only a couple of customers right now, and it's supposed to be a nice day. I know Liam would enjoy playing in the pools. Last time he was by, I caught him out in one of the ponds dipping his head under the water, snorting, and holding his hand on top of his head, like this." Evan put his hand on top of his head so that it formed a vague horn. "Told me he was a rhinoceros."

 "A rhinoceros?" Colleen said. "Well, he eats like one at times." She put an iced whiskey on the bar and shook her head. "He's no shortage of imagination. And he has a love for wild animals, that's for sure."

Evan sipped his drink. "He's got a particular love for the rhino, seems to be his favorite. He's rhinoed this and rhinoed that to me on a number of occasions. No evidence of a horn, yet, though. I've looked."

Colleen leaned her elbow on the bar and her chin on her palm. She looked at the Blind Luck's doors. "Rhinos, is it? The lad's been no closer to a rhino than I've been to a queen. And I'm no scientist, but I'll hazard there are few rhinos in the Arizona desert this spring night." She laughed a bit and then looked up, drawing her hands through her glinting red hair.

"Wait, I take that back. Liam has seen a rhino. Actually, several rhinos. But there's no chance he could remember. He was but a year and a half old when Jesus and I went to the San Diego Zoo. It was just a couple of months before the accident." She was staring at Evan, but her eyes were fixed and inward. "Liam was delighted with the rhinos. He laughed and pointed while he sat in his father's arms, and he cried and cried when we took him away from their enclosure. I remember how surprised Jesus and I were at his reaction." She looked at Evan, then gave him a quick smile that just as quickly disappeared.

As Evan and his mother talked, Liam sat on an old bench behind his house, facing the desert's edge. A faint hum from nearby power lines hung in the air, but mostly there was just the deep drawer of silence carrying the desert air on a spring evening. Liam watched the trail of a dying star; the other stars winked like glittering metal chips in every angle of the sky. Liam imagined he could step from star to star, leap in a rush to save foreign worlds from destruction at the hands of unseen evils. He held a small rhino in his hand, gripped the toy tightly while he danced a path through the stars.

Late the next morning, from his vantage point in the olive tree he was pruning, Evan could see Colleen's truck kicking up dust on the entrance road to Elysian Fields. Liam's bike bounced in the truck bed. He squinted to see whether Liam was in the truck, too, and glimpsing the boy's dark shadow, resumed his labor with the handsaw.

Colleen and Liam pulled up to the main building, the only Elysian building still open to the public. In its heyday, there had been a main lodge and clubhouse surrounded by rustic cabanas, which ringed a series of beautiful pools and lush foliage. Most of the cabanas had been torn down and the lodge had become an inexpensive motel, though with the area's biggest swimming pool. Fewer and fewer tourists came through, and much of it had fallen into disrepair.

Colleen and Liam got out of the truck and walked up to Evan in the tree. "Evan, I've come to take advantage of you one more time," Colleen said. "That's not an admission I'd make with any other man in this valley. Is the swimming pool free of scorpions today?"

Evan placed his saw in the crook of a branch and wiped his forehead. It wasn't yet noon, but the temperature was nearing one hundred degrees. "On a day like today, I think I'd share the pool with the scorpions, and the snakes, too," he said. "You're welcome to head over, and welcome again to join me for lunch after you've a cooler head."

Colleen nodded and laughed. "Redheads are constitutionally disinclined to cooler heads," she said. "Or don't you employ your customary stereotypes on the weekends?"

Liam stepped up to the tree and patted Evan's boot, stretching his little frame up the side of the trunk.

Evan watched the two of them walk through the old lobby and out toward the pool. The boy's got more to him than most children, or maybe less to him, he thought. No tantrums, no whining, no me, me, me. Evan adjusted his position in the tree and shook his head. And when you talk to him, he listens closely – like words have real weight and shouldn't be flung about. He's quite a kid. He climbed out of the tree, and when he made the last jump to the ground, it came to him: Despite his vow, despite his affection for Colleen, it was time for Liam to know.

They had lunch together in Evan's mobile home. Evan always cooked on these occasions, and Colleen cleaned up. The two adults were still finishing their meal when Liam left to go for one last look at the pools.

Evan wiped his face with his napkin, set it down and laid his hands, palms flat, on the table. He cleared his throat and looked out the big window to the low line of mountains in the distance. "Hey," he said. "I cut down a couple of good-sized mesquite trees the other day. It's strong stuff. I could probably replace a couple of the Blind Luck's tables with ones that would last a hundred years."

Colleen looked at her plate and said, "You know, Evan, I feel like I've been at the Blind Luck for a hundred years. I'm thinking about moving on from my high-level managerial duties. It just doesn't do anything for me any more."

"Huh," he said. "I'm not sure I get you. But speaking of moving on, and I know we've been over this before and you've given me what you call your final answer, but what I don't know is whether your answer continues to serve any purpose." He turned toward her just as she rose from the table. She leaned stiffly over and took his plate, knocking the fork to the carpet. When she bent to pick it up, he could see the cord of muscles in her neck tighten.

 "The boy has got to know, Colleen," he continued. "I realize you're his mother, and I know you're doing what you think is right, but I'm your friend, god damn it, and friends are allowed to tell you when you're wrong. The boy has got to know." He turned again toward the window. Their backs were to each other – Colleen making quick, choppy motions with the dishes and dishcloth; Evan staring out at the empty landscape, hands clasped behind his head, his heart beating fast.

Colleen turned off the water; her shoulders slumped. She stared at the soapy dishes in the sink. "He's not going to know," she said softly. "He doesn't need to know, and no one is going to tell him." She straightened and turned the water back on. "Evan, I know you care for Liam, but on this issue, I call the shots. Essentially, and I don't say this meanly, it's none of your business." She spoke the last sentence a little too loudly; it echoed in the close confines of the narrow home.

Evan rose and moved toward Colleen. He stood behind her, then took a deep breath and said in a slow, measured tone: "You don't know how much of my business Liam is. You don't know that every time I see him we have conversations about who his father might be, if his father would like him, if he would take him to ballgames, if he was tall, short, skinny, strong – anything! The boy is dying to know the smallest shred of information about the man. He'd give anything for it. The boy needs to know!" Evan's voice gathered momentum as he moved closer to Colleen. His last sentence had been almost a shout, and Evan had noticed as he said it that he was clenching his fists. There was no movement from either of them, the only sound a breeze as the afternoon moved into its center.

Colleen whirled and faced Evan. She was shaking. But then she relaxed and leaned back against the edge of the sink. "Evan, look," she said. "Look at me. I have thought about this every day since Jesus died. No one has thought about it more." She pushed her hair from the side of her face, exposing her reddened eyes. "I know you care about Liam. I know you care about me. But he's just not ready."

Evan moved to the open door. He looked out at the low mountains, crisp against the cloudless sky. "Colleen, you look at Liam and see a little boy who needs protection. But he's not the same little boy any more. He's hardly ever been a little boy, at least in the time I've known him." He ruffled his hand through his hair, not looking back at Colleen. "I know it's time for you guys to go. I'll go and get him."

Evan found Liam on his hands and knees at the edge of the largest pool, splashing the clear water with a stick. The Elysian pools were like small miracles in the sere landscape of scrub and dust. Tall, broad-leafed plants flourished at their edges, as did trees with flowering vines creeping up their trunks.

 "Hey buddy, you'll never catch a fish that way."

The boy continued to draw the stick rapidly through the water. "I wasn't trying to fish, Evan. I was pretending I was rowing a boat down the Amazon, past some hippos. Hippos can tip some boats over, you know." He looked at Evan and smiled.

Evan sat next to Liam on the bank of the pool, drew his knees up and rested his head on his arms. He turned toward Liam twice, but each time turned quickly back to the pool, having recollected Colleen's serious face. Finally, he spun around, stood, and faced the boy who had also risen from the bank. "Liam, there's something I'd like to tell you about your father."

Liam dropped the stick on the bank and looked with expectation at Evan.

"Something happened to your dad a long time ago, something bad. Your mom didn't think it was good for you to know about it, because it's very bad, and very sad too. She still doesn't think you should know about it, and I'm going to be in a lot of trouble when I tell you." He stopped looking at the waiting child and stared out beyond the old cabanas, lips tight.

 "Where is my dad, Evan?" said Liam. "Do you know where he is?"

 "I do know, Liam. A long time ago, when you were still a baby, some bad men hurt your dad and he died. Your mom felt so terrible about it that she just didn't think she should tell you." He reached over and held Liam's shoulder, looked into the boy's face.

Liam pulled back, throwing off Evan's arm. "What bad men? What bad men?" he said, his voice rising sharply. "You're lying! My dad's not dead!" Evan moved forward to calm the boy, but Liam took off running toward Evan's house. When he had reached his mother's truck, he flung the tailgate down, then reached in and dragged his bike to the ground.

When she heard the commotion, Colleen came to the door. She opened the screen and stepped out onto the porch just in time to see Liam racing down the dirt road on his bike. "Liam, where are you going?" she shouted. "What's going on?" Her sharp eye caught the emotional momentum in Liam's face and gait. She stared at his peddling figure, her breath coming in painful stabs to her chest. She knew Evan had told him. She wanted to run to the truck and follow Liam, but instead, she stood gripping the porch rail and watched as her son moved away from her at top speed. She was furious. But oddly, in the midst of her anger she felt a stirring – not relief exactly, but a lifting, a lightness.

Liam didn't look back. He shot across the road, barely pausing to see if any cars were coming, and headed into the bumpy desert scrub where he knew his mother and Evan could not follow. He soon arrived at the edge of the road that led to Lost Corners, then rode blindly past the abandoned intersection, tears welling in his eyes. He thought about going to his fort, but he had already passed the turnoff. He swung onto the old blind road, a road that had been created for a development that was never built. The unfinished road, originally planned as a shortcut to the highway, now led to nothing, its dividing stripe still visible after years of searing sun.

Liam biked to the end of the road where the final edge of asphalt was pocked and bitten by wind and sun. He continued west, into the desert, thinking he'd keep riding until he dropped off his bike and died. The desert sands would quickly conceal his body, like the earth that now covered the body of his father.

He cried soundlessly, taking sharp, shallow breaths while he pedaled around dusty sage and sharp-needled scrub, his head bobbing from the unevenness of the terrain. He moved steadily up an incline that led toward a narrow pocket canyon, a place of infrequent rain but occasional violent flooding. He strained against the increasing tilt of the land.

Tears blurred Liam's vision so that when he had crested the hill leading to the canyon's rocky wash, he didn't see the hole that had been scooped from the bank by years of scouring wind and raging water. His front tire spun on the loose dirt at the edge of the hole. Liam slipped forward and then down. The impact pitched him completely over his handlebars and he landed heavily on his shoulder. His bike continued to the bottom of the wash, coming to a stop amidst a thicket of brush.

Liam's face was pressed into a small mound of sandy soil, some of which had slid into his nose. His cheeks, wet with tears, were covered with clinging sand; one half of his face appeared mottled. He lay still for half a minute, feeling the growing ache in his shoulder and listening to the susurrus of the soft wind as it brushed the branches of nearby sage. Then he slowly sat up and brushed himself off, wincing when he absently massaged his injured shoulder. He stood and shakily walked to his bike, which was lodged in the brush that butted up against the canyon wall.

When he pulled his bike from the thick brush, Liam discovered a large gouge in the rock at the base of the cliff. He kneeled to look closer, and found that the gouge was actually a hole, a hole that looked big enough for him to squeeze into. He crawled on his hands and knees around the brush, lowered himself until he was nearly prostrate, then slid through the gap between cliff and ground. He found himself inside a cave – the air much cooler than outside.

"Hey!" he yelled. The reverberation told him the cave was high and deep, but it was also dark; he could only see a few feet in front of him. He scuttled forward on his hands and knees, raised both arms above his head and slowly moved them around feeling for the cave's edges. Then, supporting himself on the rough inner wall, he slowly stood.

Liam remembered he had a box of matches from the Blind Luck in his pocket. He pulled one out and struck it against the rock face. The flickering light revealed he was in a large chamber at least twelve feet high. The walls were rough and uneven, with jutting points, small ledges and indentations. Just when the first match was about to sputter out, Liam glimpsed what he thought was the back wall of the cave. He lit another match and held it in front of him. What had looked like the back wall of the cave was really an edge that curved around out of sight. Liam used his free hand to follow the wall of the cave; he moved carefully toward the curving darkness.

When he had rounded the wall, he found himself in a second chamber much like the first, except that the far wall looked as if it had been scrubbed smooth or somehow cleaned. It was lighter than the others, and covered with crisscrossing shadows. He lit another match and moved closer. When he was just a foot from the wall he lit another match, and then another. What Liam had first seen as shadows were really drawings, many drawings – long lines of figures and shapes. Many were simply fanciful loops or geometric designs. Liam only glanced at those. But when he saw the drawings of animals, he froze.

Some of the animals were sketched in clusters, while others stood alone or sequestered to one side. Some had been drawn with only a couple of lines, perhaps as an afterthought, or when the artist had tired. But many were finely detailed beasts: horses, dogs, bears, and other creatures of fantastic imagination. They lunged forward in fury, muscles straining in attack, their faces expressed with intent and purpose.

Liam was rapt. He touched the wall, which felt smoother than the other walls of the cave. He lit match after match, the sulfurous scent hanging in the close air. And then he saw it. A great beast. Broad of leg and vast of shoulder, one huge horn jutting from between its fierce eyes. The humans that scattered in its wake looked puny and frightened.

Liam lit another match and reached for the drawing. It was several feet above his head. He rubbed his hand across the grainy surface. "Rhino," he said. There were only two matches left. He held each of them close to the drawing until they burned the tips of his fingers. Even after the last match had gone out, he continued to rub the image. "Rhino," he said again.

Standing in the darkness, his first thought was to simply stay in the cave. Not eat, maybe not even sleep. He would wait until the spring floods filled the cave with blind force. Maybe they would find his body years from now. Maybe not. But if they did, maybe they would even think he had drawn the pictures. He could even be a character in one of the stories his mother wrote.

But his mother's face came into his mind, and he didn't feel angry with her anymore, or with Evan. He reasoned that she had been waiting for him to get a little older before she told him about his dad. He knew she was worried now, probably pacing Evan's kitchen floor and staring at the phone. His dad probably wouldn't have left her alone when she felt bad.

He made his way slowly around the curved wall and back into the entry chamber. The entrance to the cave was a bright shock, as if its opening had been carved from pure light. He crawled out into the desert, where everything looked fresh and strange. As he stood, it occurred to him that the people who had drawn the pictures in the cave were dead, probably dead a long time, but the pictures were still there. They meant something. Maybe his mother had pictures, pictures that would tell him something about his father.

Liam thought he would wait a while before he told his mom about the rhino. He might not even tell her at all. But he probably would. They had a lot of things to tell each other.