Scottsbluff Terese Svoboda (bio) My hometown has these bluffs sticking up where a fur trapper named Scott died. His partners left him sixty miles away. To show them who was who, with his back poked all over with Indian arrows, he dragged himself on his elbows to the base of the bluffs and died. What I don’t understand is how I ever heard this story when he died alone. Who told it? The partners must have felt guilty and confessed to abandoning him, and then people found him and made him a hero, put up the monument beside the bluffs for getting there. The monument of the sower on top of the capitol building suggest what the teenagers did right after they kissed on top of those bluffs and then moved to the capital, which is all about promise that way. I did find a husband there, but a baby never happened. Now the husband’s dead and my promise is in watching out for the boy we adopted so long ago that he’s grown and making money trying to take care of people even older than I am. Everybody says a real baby would be too much work to run after at my age, but old people need a lot of help getting out of the tub and their clothes put on and picked up just the same. Believe me, the twenty minutes I had to clean a hotel room at my earlier job—that wasn’t as much of a workout as this. Besides, this old man pinches my bottom, what little I have left of it. But instead of reporting him, I feel complimented. Did a little bee just sting me? I ask. I still say No to him when he asks if I will climb into bed; I say No as if he were a snake and certainly as if he were a baby, which he is not. Last week he asked me to take him downtown and sign him up for running for senate. My husband, if he were alive, would laugh and laugh at that idea. His age? I’d sooner have a gerbil fight for my rights. But he never had a chance to know this old man who often talks sense about politics and sees the point, especially when his daughter isn’t home. She never sees the fine in anything, least of all him. [End Page 87] My five sisters always say they are doing fine, and they are always encouraging me, but now they are starting to get old too and sick, one by one, which is not encouraging. My husband not being around now, they get worried that I’m lonely so far away from Scottsbluff and tell me to get a pet, but it gets run over first thing, the dog does, and the cat gets lost, and the fish decides it has too much detergent to drink after I wash the bowl and it shows its belly. I say to them in the end: See, my adopted boy is enough. I didn’t get a baby, I got a boy, already grown some. Nice ears, not stuck out, a smile eventually, a habit of chewing on his t-shirt collar until it was good and gnawed-in, and the neck so wide the shirts always ended up fitting me. Sweet anyway, and my husband took to him. It was not his telling us after he was grown that he was in the closet and coming out of it that brought on my husband’s last depression, no it wasn’t. I myself wasn’t the least surprised by his closet, given that he didn’t go out for football in a football state and that is the mark of Cain here or of whoever keeps that closet going. My husband didn’t say Do not darken our doorway again, he did not. He swallowed and said Could you get me a wrench? because he was working on the bathroom pipes at the time. My son, who was shaking from head to foot, threw up his hands as if he would punch somebody and went wailing...