The four older guys in the two pickup trucks that Lisa and her friends had met at the after-work Mixer in Park City, had been cool enough. Then they had gotten to Oakley, the seven of them, in a condo right next to the government building, down the street one entire block from the post office, the gas station and the Ken’s Kash town store.

Then it got dark.

Beer was pushed aside for High West whiskey.

Licorice vape pens were set aside for crack pipes and lines of cocaine...and the one decent guy left, not decent enough to offer them a way out.

Three 18-year-old girls, three jerks and one truck, between Lisa and home in Stawberry, on the other side of Heber towards Duschene.

Jackie was crying, drunk and knowing she had made a mistake already. Big Jill, trying to be protective, was set down on her butt on the coach by the big blonde guy. Out came her palm phone to call for help and it was taken by the rat-faced half-Mexican.

They were rich boys.

Home-schooled and a Christian, Lisa had not dated; now this, these creeps. Her coworkers Jackie and Jill had talked her into this and she was in no mood to save them, even if she could, and she could not.

The bearded man with the small green eyes and thick black beard in skinny jeans, grabbed her but and spun her around and cupped her breast.

Lisa recoiled and pulled her self back between the couch and the table with the lines of coke being snorted up by Jackie, who was all of a sudden fine with getting violated by these jerks.

“What?” he looked at her offended.

Lisa snapped, “I haven’ kept my virginity for it to be taken by the likes of you—you, you, piece-of-shit!”

The blond guy and the rat-faced half-Mexican laughed harshly as Lisa pushed out through the door, ran down the polished hardwood stairs, out into the just-lit street and began to walk, fear of being overtaken haunting her every move. She hurried down to main street and then made a left towards Kamas where she hoped some businesses would still be open.

Lisa stopped outside the post office under the beating flag in the breezy, early September night, reached into the front left pocket of her blue jeans, intending to slide out her flip phone. That phone was the mark that she was a freak, that she was an outsider, that she was not trying to fit in and get along and bob her pretty head—and it, her flip phone, her filer against the world and her smoke signal in case of peril, wasn’t there.

“Shit, I put it in Jackie’s purse!”

‘There it stays,’ she thought grimly, with a resolve she had not been sure she possessed until now.

Looking over her shoulder she saw none of the three creeps following her, so made her way towards Kamas, walking along State Route 32, determined to find a diner or some place like a coffee shop where she could ask for help, for a call to Mom or Dad, at least. They could pull themselves away from the TV for that long, she was certain.

‘You two, I love you. But how could you home school me, protect me from this propaganda world of Satan and then spend your retirement watching TV?’

What sounded like a lawn mower, a big one, buzzed behind her on the road—the wrong side of the road. Lisa turned to see a hunched, elderly woman in gray slacks, a white pink-flowered blouse, and hair that had once been long and blonde and beautiful, cut neat and short and as steely as her sparkling eyes, “Get in Young Lady, while I’m breaking the law.”

Lisa sped into action, walked around the agricultural buggy, like a golf cart version of the ATVs that people used for recreation on the old mountain logging roads, and shut the plastic door behind her, not bothering to buckle up.

“Are we good on your end, sweetie. I can’t turn my head that way, they done fused my neck after I fell off the roof cleaning the rain gutters last year.”

Lisa looked back up the road to the right, off north, and nodded, “Clear.”

They buzzed out into the falling night along the asphalt strip. The lady, whose hands and feet were crippled from arthritis, her feet so bad that she wore rubber clogs in the gathering mountain cold, shouted above the mechanical din, “Name’s Deb—where too, pretty young thing in distress?”

“The phone store, Please!”

“Gotcha!” and they were off, like a woman of before and after skating across the roof of the world, the image of youth past looking appraisingly at the image of youth present, as if a Future Farmers of America judge might examine a prize animal.

Lisa blushed and arranged her blue blouse so that it was not obvious that she had been groped and her savior grinned and shouted, “Oh, your fine. I was just wondering if you were the weather girl on Channel 13—hard to tell, she always wears a dress.”

Lisa blushed again, “Oh know. I work at the diner in Heber, the old one.”

Deb grinned, “Thanks for the adventure, ...?”

“Oh, I’m sorry—Lisa!”

Down a subdivision lane off of the main route they raced and across a cool river bridge. Deb then let it coast past some nice ranch houses and said, “Listen, the sand hill cranes are lifting off at sundown—getting out of Dodge ahead of winter.”

Lisa could hear the call of birds, which she had heard before over Strawberry in the fresh night, but had never thought to identify.

Tears wet her cheeks, thinking of Mom and Dad at home watching TV, assuming that Lisa had just become one of the general herd, seeking diversion and pleasure and belonging—and that she almost had, by fraud and then force, been brought into the empty soul of a dying world.

Deb was watching her, driving along now as the sound of the buzzing motor drowned out the last of the departing cranes, birds she had never recalled seeing but would never forget their call. The older woman spoke as one who knew, “I have two daughters, three granddaughters, a great granddaughter and I had sons, and a husband who always chaffed until he set things right. I can tell you, and I think you just found out, that there are few men left in the world, and that what’s left playing at being men, they don’t deserve to get their wicked paws on you.”

Lisa sniffled and rode along in silence as Deb picked her way into town. In what seemed far too short a time, they were stopped before The Phone Store, a place bustling with customers at animated kiosks and at the counter where the overworked attendants each had a line of customers willing to wait for human attention concerning their hand held connection to the rest of their kind.

Deb looked up at her from her hunched and pained position, her tanned face creased with lives birthed, lived and lost that Lisa could not even imagine, and the old dame said, “This ought a do yah. They got it all—‘ill even put the phone in ya, I hear. I’ll be right here. In case I doze off, don’t be shy. Just got my shot today and don’t wanna miss the rest of our adventure.”

“Thank you!” Lisa blubbered and slid out of the cart and walked gingerly towards this outpost of what’s new, her legs still shaking as an old leather-faced, man in a white cowboy hat stood towering over her and held the door for her with his right hand as across his left wrist the images of two blonde-haired boys spied her and chirped from the wrist phone screen, “Whose that, Grandpa?”

For the third time in the longest breath Lisa had held in her life, she blushed, wishing only that she not be noticed in this strange unchristian world.