<p>Sim was quick to jump at any opportunity, you see, because when Sim sees an opportunity, there was no other possible steps for him to take. ‘Cause that’s just how Sim works. Sim jumps.</p>
<p>Sim jumped when there was that convenience store. He jumped because the gun was under the seat in that shitty beater and the convenience store had a totally empty parking lot and the lights were on and he couldn’t see the clerk. Hell, it wasn’t just empty, it was nigh on abandoned. Isolated; you know the type? One of those buildings that sits squat by the side of the road and probably a ton of truckers come through there and the clerks are busy from, we suppose, seven to eleven, but it’s not big enough to actually be a 7-Eleven, but then the truckers’ clocks run out and they all go pull over at one of the big TransAmericas down the road where they’ve got the showers and the hot meals and the reasonably attractive waitresses in that homey, no-nonsense way.</p>
<p>See, one of those places, after the day truckers’ clocks run out and before the night truckers come by, there’s these few hours where everything’s quiet and the clerk is just sitting behind that counter, behind that plexiglass or whatever they put up there, and he could call, sure, but he’s far enough away from everything that he was basically told in training to let robbers take everything and trust the cameras to get the plate details and only then call the cops.</p>
<p>Sim saw the opportunity, Sim jumped, just how he’s built.</p>
<p>And where Sim jumped, there was Ursula. Sim was the brains, he’d say, he’d run the plan by Ursula three times whether or not she got it on the first time through, and she was the muscle. Big old bear like here, nothing getting past if she needed to block the door, and if she need to knock heads, Sim said, she would just have to knock some heads.</p>
<p>But here, this convenience store job, something had happened there. Sometimes you just gotta go, you know? You’ve been holding it for until all those truckers’ clocks ran out because you were too busy and the owner was too cheap to hire anyone else, so you had to steal a moment of quiet at eleven thirty or whatever, and you run off to the bathroom out around the back of the building.</p>
<p>Only this time perhaps you forgot to lock the front door and forgot to close out the drawer.</p>
<p>And this is the time when a ferret and a bear come barrelling down the highway and slip right up to the front of the store all nice like, quiet, no uncouth squealing of tires. The hop out like maybe they got just a quick errand to run, and you figure you’ve got enough time to finish up, but they’re in and out real smooth.</p>
<p>“Shit, Ursula,” you may hear, that reedy tenor can cut through anything. “How fuckin’ perfect is this? All laid out for us.”</p>
<p>A mumble, maybe? Someone with him?</p>
<p>“Grab a snack, girlie, I don’t care. Hell, grab all the snacks, anything you need.”</p>
<p>A mumble.</p>
<p>“Christ, of course grab the drawer first.” A pause, then a high laugh. “Fine, ya big dummy. I’ll get the drawer, you grab our snacks or whatever. Oh, shit, yeah, grab me like a whole box of Snickers or whatever. I’ll mow through those.”</p>
<p>And you hear drawer and your drawers are down around your ankles and you cuss and cuss and cuss and maybe start crying, but at this point it’s just too late, so you keep sitting your skinny ass down on the toilet until you hear the rev of an engine, the thrum of something with a couple hundred thousand miles on it, maybe got fifty more in it, and then you hear it fade into the dark, and only then do you call.</p>
<p>“Do you see this? Hah! Did you get a load of that take?” says that weasel as the unassuming minivan trundles down the road, no more’n five over the limit. “Shit, poor fella in there probably didn’t even have time to hit the safe after his shift, and were was he anyway?”</p>
<p>Ursula, she keeps her eyes on the road, turns once, turns again, and then they’re up in the Rockies, poking along through the scrub and the sand and the rocks. Nothing out here, course, not even a tent or trailer. Just a place to park.</p>
<p>And Sim, he’s already jumped from the passenger seat. He’s already dancing and twirling around the front of the van, those parking lights catching him only from the waist down — always such a dancer, that ferret — but you can surely imagine him pirouetting along between sagebrush and scrub pine, laughing away.</p>
<p>“Ursula, Ursula! Come on you big dummy, come on girlie,” he’s calling. “Come on out. Gosh! Gosh, I love you darling! I love you so much I feel like my whole heart’s gonna burst and you’d have to patch me back up again. Look at this! I didn’t want to freak you out on the road, I know you get all skittish behind the wheel, especially after a job, but gosh I love you! There’s like six thousand dollars in that take. Six thousand dollars <em>and</em> a box of Snickers!”</p>
<p>And the bear is out the van now and she’s parked her backside against the front of the grill and Sim is dancing around her, taking first one hand and then t’other, lifting her arms up so that he can twirl about beneath them, kicking up dust into the midnight air.</p>
<p>“We got it made, now.” He finally flops all along the front of Ursula, stretched up long so he can get his skinny arms around the bulk of her shoulders, and sure,she can smell the candy bar on his breath. “We can go straight now, you know? Hit up a small town, Mountain Home or Newsom or Sawtooth or something, park our asses, get out of the risky business.</p>
<p>“But listen, my darling, my dear. You gotta try’n understand my plan. There’s so much to it we gotta do first. Six kay or whatever will get us a few months, but you know you and you know me. We gotta still earn something so long as we’re not totally on our own, you know? Gotta earn our keep.</p>
<p>“I know you been wanting to go straight for years now, get out of the job-to-job life and go do something that’s day-to-day, and I love you, you big oaf, but maybe we hit up just one or two more once we get there, real sly-like without raising any eyebrows, or maybe we do it on the way.</p>
<p>“Ursula, my dear, my love, you okay keepin’ those muscles up for me a few more days? Just a few more. Just a few more runs, just a few more heads to knock together, you understand. I swear on my life, I swear up and down your body from those ears you know I love to those big fuckin’ feet of yours, you’ll get to live the straight life soon. We been on the road so many years now — what, like two decades or something? — and sooner or later you’ll bury those feet of yours in some good clean earth instead of in some poor sop’s stomach and that earth will be your very own garden. You’ll have it all for yourself!”</p>
<p>And Sim is off spinning again, spinning into the dark, and surely Ursula’s got a smile or something going on as he calls out to her —“Two gardens! A row of carrots in front cause I know you love those and maybe a whole fuckin’ mess of beets out back”— but we’ll never know, will we? Sim won’t settle his eyes on her long enough, he’s too busy jumping.</p>
<p>And suppose they managed it. Ursula dressed in those coveralls that fit her just so, standing up to her ankles in good clean earth, turned over and over with peat and that sheep shit fertilizer that somehow manages to smell like it could grow things on the moon or Mars. We can go ahead and suppose that Ursula might plow furrows herself with those handfuls of claws she keeps to herself, dropping seeds in their wake. We can suppose that she’d baby those beets until she could cradle them herself, plucked fresh from the earth. Would she kiss them, do you think? Would she sing them lullabies? Surely fresh-grown beets make a hell of a stew.</p>
<p>But still, they had got to earn their keep, hadn’t they? That’s what Sim said, would say at the drop of a hat, at the drop of a haul, every time they hopped in the van after a heist or holdup. He’d promise her late at night, and maybe he’d even call out to her across a gas station or over the hood of some poor sop’s car as the fox or cat or whatever shrieked and threw coins at her feet and recoiled in terror.</p>
<p>So Ursula kept up her routine, doing her runs in the morning and hauling some rocks around here and there just to keep those shoulders from getting too soft and brushing her fur out in the evenings. Still crunching on those carrots we all know she loves and buying cans of beets to go with the chuck so she can cook up a proper stew on the tailgate of the van just past the end of their mattress so that. Still letting Sim push her down onto that mattress after every job, cause we all know the ferret’s gotta jump every opportunity he gets, and maybe she makes a sound or maybe not, cause we also know how taciturn our Ursula is, quiet to her core, and we’ll never know her thoughts as he hunches and curls above her because Sim hasn’t the time to listen after making, he promises himself, love to her, he’s too busy jumping.</p>
<p>All we know, all we know of course, all poor Sim knows is that our Ursula’s heart beats faster.</p>
<p>Sim, too busy jumping, never kept the batteries in the flashlight charged, though, so it’s a damn weak light that bobs and bounces its way up the dirt trail from where they’d made their camp however many days or weeks or months later, that camp an hour or so outside of Sawtooth, and it’s not from dancing now. Someone down in town told him they’d seen Ursula heading up into the mountains. Someone there said the bear’d been wandering a fair piece away from where they were camped.</p>
<p>Not dancing, no, our poor Sim is troubled, we can guess, by the way he stomps and skitters, first one then t’other, cause he was afraid of the Rockies, up where the air gets clean and bright in the nose and the trees practically shine and there’s certainly no hauls to be had or plans to be made. Afraid, perhaps, though we can guess one so used to jumping would never say so.</p>
<p>Also afraid of what folks down in town would say, seeing that big oaf tramping up through the trees. Afraid, perhaps, of what that’d do to their safety if they were to keep making their keep.</p>
<p>“Big dummy, trespassing up these hills, I’m sure this is someone’s land,” he says to that dim circle of light on the ground and to the moon up high. Imagine a big girl like her need to go for a nature hike, taking those big-ass feet of hers to bury them in pine needles or — hah! — bearberry. Imagine needing to take a vacation from bein’ stronger’n I’ll ever be. Imagine needing to take a break from having a life so easy as the one I bought for her.</p>
<p>“Just you wait–” Though who this ‘you’ Sim imagines is we’ll likely never know, maybe that very same moon. “Just you wait. She’ll be coming back looking all peaceful and full of the light of the moon or maybe she’s up there meditating on a rock like some golden Buddha you see in all those shows I’m sure she likes. Just you wait, she’ll come back with a big dumb grin on that blank face of hers, and I’ll jump up and say, ‘You been rolling around in needles again, girlie? You been out there having a romp with the deer? You climbing trees and howling at the moon?’ And I’ll say, ‘You look a fool like that, pine-cones in your ears. You look a total fool thinkin’ all your peace is bound up in quiet and not in the life I’m buying.’“</p>
<p>But far out, far out by now, Ursula ran. She plowed through the trees because she would not stop, could not stop, could not hope to stop. Nowhere to go, nowhere to be, she left a wake through the carpet of needles.</p>
<p>She ran until the trees ran out and she had to make a wake through stone and shale, through pebbles and snow, and our Ursula keep on running. She ran until the mountain beneath her feet ran out and the earth yawned open beneath her and all she had to make waves in was stars and the clean black of the night.</p>
<p>And her arms fell away in a flourish of a bow, spread in genteel a curtsey to no one but the moon, and these too became stars, they became stars of brightest white because what better color could a star ever hope to be? Stars to wrap around the moon.</p>
<p>And her legs fell away like a garment long past its prime, like those overalls that fit just so, the one she’d been mending years and years now, darning by camp stove and headlight in plain in the light of day. They fell away and burned into that crisp brightness, standing stark against the fabric of the night. They burned as bright as her arms, for every rock Ursula hauled or head she knocked, surely she’d ran a mile.</p>
<p>And she shed the mantle of the weight of the world, letting her shoulders fall off as easy as could be, as easy as Sim dancing in the lights of the van that night out in the foothills. Shoulders falling away as easy as it was to jump.</p>
<p>And thus let her belly fall away like an apron full of boulders, that ever-soft curve no longer held taut to keep Sim from poking fun at it as he fucked her, hunching and curling above her pretending like she was with child. Those boulders, too, they became stars in the sky, burning as bright as anything.</p>
<p>And at long last she was able to reach up to the moon, reach up to the moon that one last time and give the face held within a kiss, leaving behind a twinkle of her eye, one last star to show her love for the night and for the good clean earth below.</p>
<p>Nothing left of our Ursula but her yearning shadow cast upon the ground as the moon rose ever higher and Sim cussed his cusses and the lights of the town twinkled below, and all we can do is hope that at last she gets to bury her feet in good clean earth and sow her carrots and beets, and if ever someone hunches and curls above her in labor or in need or in pain or in joy, all we can do is hope that it will be out of more than a promise of love.</p>
