"It's three in the morning in Hawthorne, Nevada," Coralee said. "Everybody in this town is lying awake waiting for the Russians. We've got a while."
So he told her.
He had married Vada Pettit in McGill in 1952, when he was thirty-six and she was twenty-four and worked behind the counter at the company store. Jolynn was born in 1958, late, after they had stopped hoping. Vada died in the winter of 1964 of something in her head that burst while she was hanging laundry on the line behind the company house on Fourth Street, in the snow, and Ozias came home from the smelter and found her and the sheets frozen stiff on the line beside her like boards.
"And I drank," he said. "I drank before. Every man in McGill drank. But after that I drank like it was a job."
Jolynn was six. By the time she was eight she was packing his lunch bucket. By ten she was cooking supper and signing her own report cards and lying to the schoolteacher about where her daddy was on parents' night. By fifteen she was drinking with him. He told that part looking at the table.
"I'd come home and there'd be two glasses out," he said. "I never said nothing. I'd sit down and she'd pour. I told myself it was company. I told myself it was better she drink at home where I could see her than out in some car with some boy. That's what I told myself." He turned the cup a quarter turn on the Formica. "It was company. That was the God's honest truth of it. I was lonesome, and she was the only one left that'd sit with me."
She left McGill at eighteen. Went to Ely, then to Elko, then to Ely again. There was a man who worked a season at the smelter before Kennecott started laying off, a good-looking boy from Utah who played guitar at the Hotel Nevada, and in 1977 there was Dovie, and then the boy from Utah was gone back to Utah and there was just Jolynn in a single-wide on the edge of Ely with a baby and a job dealing blackjack downtown and a bottle under the sink.
"I wasn't no help," Ozias said. "I'd go over Sundays. I'd hold the baby. Then I'd go to the Bank Club. She'd call me sometimes at three in the morning crying and I'd be too drunk to drive the thirteen miles."
In March of 1981, a neighbor woman in the trailer park heard a child crying through a wall for most of a night and in the morning called the sheriff, and the deputy found Dovie, three and a half years old, alone in the single-wide in a wet diaper with the oven door open for heat and a box of Cheerios she had climbed the counter to get, and Jolynn turned up at noon from somewhere she could not afterward remember. White Pine County took the baby. Ozias drove over in his work clothes and stood in the hallway of the county building and asked for her.
"I was drunk when I asked," he said. "Ten in the morning. They could smell it on me. The woman there, the social worker, she looked at me like I was something on her shoe. And she was right to. And I went home and I sat down in my kitchen and I took the bottle I had and I drank the whole rest of it, sitting there, I'll tell you the truth, I didn't pour it in the sink like the fellas in the movies. I drank it. And then I didn't drink no more."
"Just like that?"