Silent Retreats (17 page)

Out on the road, though, thinking about that blond, he could only really think of the good things: that he had loved her so much, that there wouldn't ever be another like her, so playful and evil in bed, that he was better for having known her. He didn't want any part of most of his wretched past any more, but he wouldn't have minded plucking that blond girl out of his memory and standing her up there on the road and telling her he'd be hers forever if she just promised to love him the way she did back in Louisville in law school and not lie like a lot of women. He tried hard to resurrect the texture of her right out there on a highway in Nebraska at nightfall twelve years later.

He was headed for Long Pine, never to be seen again. Fiona, it happens, had lived in Long Pine. She waited tables and sang in some dive there—it was where she met Yank, in fact. She'd talked about it being a hide-out town, full of rogues and crazy women drinking all day and all night. She said it was a town Jimmy Hoffa might be buried in, if he was buried in Nebraska at all, or where the guys who got him were hiding, because it was so weird, disgusting and far from everything else. Nobody from most places had ever heard of Long Pine. The way Fiona talked, Long Pine was the most dreaded, worthless place you ever saw, so Skidmore was headed there to be disgusting like he deserved if he couldn't even get a simple vagabond woman to take a simple picture off her goddamned wall.

Skidmore raised the bottle of Jack Daniel's again. He looked back down the road to see if Indian braves were trailing him. He squinted, looking way, way down. In Long Pine he wouldn't have to worry about any of his Fort Robinson past, including all the Indians and white boys who'd threatened to get him if they ever got out of the slammer, including that damned exasperating Fiona, poor, confused ratty little girl holed up above a sleazy downtown Fort Robinson cowboy bar all knotted up over her novel, which she already knew could never be as good as
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
. Poor Fiona, cornered by art.

It was bad enough that she absolutely refused to remove the picture of her and Yank from the wall above her bed. (The picture showed Yank with his arm around her, his left arm, the hand down lightly on her breast, a menacing look in his eye. They were drunk, toasting the camera with cans of malt liquor. Yank was wearing the elastic band from his jockey shorts around his head.)

"You gotta take that picture down," Skidmore had said to her. "I don't mean to complain, but you have to cut that picture off the wall."

"Get tough," she told him, laughing. "He's a friend of mine. It was a time in my life—I like to remember it. I like to remember the farm."

"He left you without notice."

"That's just the way he was," she said.

"I'm asking for some consideration here. Couldn't you hang it in the hall, or the bathroom, if it has to hang on the wall around here, and not over the bed?"

"Put it out of your mind, Mister. I'm my own boss and interior decorator. I hang what I want hung. The picture stays."

The look in Yank's eye in the picture would sometimes intrude into Skidmore's daydreams—a rough, wild-ass look, like the sky was the limit. Skidmore had argued a lot of Indians and white boys into jail who had a look like that in their eye, and he always knew it wasn't the argument that got them—it was the look. And in the picture there was a look in Fiona's eye, too. She loved Yank. She was completely accustomed to his desperate style of life. It gave her material to write about. Skidmore could tell she was intrigued by old soldiers like Yank, the romance of having lived on the edge, as opposed to lawyer types like Skidmore who wrangled CO status and wimped out the sixties in the Caribbean. How could Skidmore compete with Yank? That damned picture, it was a real problem.

Then came the day when the straw broke the thing's back. They were going to have a real date, and he would come over and they would walk to a movie or something, stroll in the old cavalry fort just outside of town, and he trudged up the hill from his trailer to her apartment, and what happened? She wasn't there. They had a date! Well, if she felt so free as to run roughshod over an actual date, well then, screw her. Skidmore hit the road. No one was ever better to her, for sure not Yank. Skidmore couldn't live that way anymore. He hit the road. Now
he
was going to live the risky life. He knew her standing him up was the sign she didn't love him with the all-encompassing devotion he required of his women. He knew very well that women will lie to you if you aren't careful. Just by looking at her, you never think a woman will lie (especially if she's one of the types that curl their eyelashes, one of the types that look at you with that one kind of look certain girls look at you with), but she will, she'll lie and keep lying even after that if she wants to, because women, Skidmore was thinking to himself out on the road, are a bunch of liars if you aren't careful. He swallowed four square ounces of Jack Daniel's and another hit for good measure. Then he thought someone was right behind him with a tomahawk and he stood up and whirled around fast, letting out a loud war whoop and at the same time letting fly a karate kick, but he was wrong—no one was there. In the last light of day, he sat on his suitcase watching a magpie eat a smashed jackrabbit a hundred yards down the road. The white in the magpie's wings flashed pinkish in the setting sun.

Skidmore didn't feel bad at all, leaving Fort Robinson forever. It had been a terrible town, and it held bad memories. He was a terrible lawyer and he knew it, but he knew he could be better if he could just leave his past behind him, these women and all his problems. From where he was standing now, Fort Robinson was eighty miles off to the west and Long Pine was ninety miles off to the east and he couldn't get a ride, and, the sun gone down, the highway finally disappeared in the dark and he was sitting there on his suitcase and all there was, all there was at all, was sky. So that's what he thought about, staring up. He didn't know the name of any of the stars, or which was which. He tried to spot a constellation but couldn't see a one. Somehow, in this mood, he knew if the stars could shit they'd shit on him. His soul was sad, he thought to himself. The road, the land, the deep, black, living void above, they were all silent, and looking up Skidmore began to feel as though he might be pulled right off the earth. What would that feel like? He would disappear straight up, into the sparkling black sky. For a moment it seemed like that would be okay, but then it was terrifying to him. The black well rumbled above him like Judgment Day. He looked down at the ground instead.

It must be guilt, he thought to himself, that keeps me from properly communing with nature. He ran his fingers through his hair and scratched at his scalp. There was a time when he was a little boy and did a lot of camping that he had struggled to become nonchalant in the presence of nature—pushed hard to become nonchalant, in fact, and almost achieved it. Now nature was strange to him.

It must be guilt, he thought to himself. He knew well that women weren't the only ones who lied. He took a drink. Deep in his heart it occurred to him that maybe he was mean, like all his old friends used to accuse him of before he took off. McFarland still told him he was mean when from time to time they would chance to meet. Sometime, he thought, I'm going to have to stop being dishonest and lying to a bunch of people all the time. He knew the ambivalence toward truth hammered into him in law school was not the problem. He had been particularly acclimated to that way of thinking long before law school. Truth to tell, when he went by to pick up Fiona and she wasn't there, he kind of smiled. He thought it was pretty spunky of her. A little revenge for all the times Skidmore said he'd be there and didn't make it. But you expect that sort of thing from a man—freedom is part of his soul. For Fiona to turn around and do it back—she really got him, he thought to himself, and laughed grudgingly.

Well, whatever. He determined that when he got settled in Long Pine he would examine his poor hurting soul and by an act of will become a better person. He decided to have a glass of red beer when he got to Long Pine, and he'd tell them that he was there to start a law office, and he'd never let them talk him into playing on their goddamned redneck softball teams and chasing women the way all the guys in their thirties did out in Nebraska, usually at Godfather's Pizza or a certain bar, usually after the softball games but sometimes after church or on nights when nothing was scheduled. Television had ruined the whole culture out there, he thought to himself. Everybody tried to act like they were in a Lite Beer commercial.

Skidmore was feeling drunk and lonely. What do they want from me? he thought, pretending that he was a tragic character caught in the complexity of the human dilemma. He tried shouting it, "What do they want from me?", out across the sandhills. Then he thought he heard something in the bushes and sat perfectly still. Maybe it was Jesus answering his painful cry—Jesus appearing to him at last and asking him to become an apostle. "Where have you been, Lord?" Skidmore said aloud. He waited. But nothing supernatural happened.

He loved that blond, he loved her more than anybody else in the world, more than anybody before her and certainly since. Maybe she had fired a couple of shots at him, acts of pure womanly passion—but never, never had she willfully stood him up. He tried to recall her name. He tried hard. She had a strange name, it was Mary, no, it was Helen, no, rhymed with Helen, no, it was Alice, no, what was that name? he thought to himself and the whiskey went down his throat, rolled down, tasting like gasahol.

He looked back and forth, up and down the road. He was completely alone. Yank would come after him. Cut him up for leaving Fiona without notice. Skidmore shook his head. The dark was making him paranoid. He mumbled the Lord's Prayer to himself, a low vocal drone, over and over, and he relaxed. A couple of hours passed in which he was a complete blank. Finally a semi came along.

"Hey, boy, you're gonna die out here if I don't give you a ride," the driver said when Skidmore opened the door on the passenger side. "And I'm gonna die if you don't give me a hit off that bottle in your shirt."

"Kill it, it's yours," Skidmore said, handing it over, then climbing up into the cab and pulling his suitcase up behind him. "We're both gonna die sometime."

"You're right about that, hoss," the driver said. He put the bottle between his legs while he pulled the rig back out onto the highway and shifted up through the gears.

"I've been out there since three this afternoon, I swear. Goddamn! Nobody wanted to give me a ride." They had to talk pretty loud.

"You oughtta stick your goddamned thumb up in the air sometime, you jerk! It's the sign you wanna hitch a ride with somebody. I was watchin' you when I was comin' up—thought you was a commemorative statue. This Jack Daniel's shit"—he waved the bottle—"it does that to your brain." He rolled his eyes like it already did it to his brain.

"You're drinkin' it all right." Skidmore situated the suit case against the door so he could lean on it. He considered strapping himself in but didn't. "What're you haulin'?" Skidmore asked him. "Pipe, looks like."

The driver held up the bottle. "Yeah, I used to drink this stuff back in Jackson, everybody did in fact. You'll throw your guts up 'fore the night's over. Me, too, probably."

"So what're you haulin', pipe or what?"

"What's it look like?" the driver said, and laughed way bigger than Skidmore could figure out why. "Steel pipe, to Omaha—where're you headin' for?" the driver asked him.

"Long Pine," Skidmore shouted.

"Long Pine?" He had truckers' head-buzz, too much road, popping too many reds, spaced out on daydreams of the bra straps through the white dresses of truckstop waitresses bringing him meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

"You been there?"

"Long Pine? Nope—and I ain't goin'," the driver said. "You joinin' 'em for the festivities?"

"Which ones would those be?"

"C'mon. The hooker rodeo."

"Don't know of it," Skidmore said. He planted his feet for a truck-driver joke.

"C'mon Jack, don't bullshit the bullshitter. The hooker rodeo."

"I ain't lyin'. . ." Skidmore noticed he was adopting the dialect of his host. "C'mon," he said, looking over at the driver with a big sixteen-wheel smile, "what is it? Some kind of big-time rodeo?"

"Five hundred hookers ropin' calves in one little half-assed town—I GUESS it's big time. You got more disease in Long Pine this week than exists in all South Dakota during the warm months of the year, except on the reservation. Established fact. The hooker rodeo. Never heard of it?"

"Place is crawlin' with whores?" Skidmore said.

"You're gettin' the picture," the trucker said, giving Skidmore a chance for a hit off his own whiskey. "I'm surprised you haven't heard, goin' there and all." Skidmore took a huge swig, bottoms up, then handed it over to the trucker, who waved it as he talked. "Why, hell, there's posters up in every truckstop from here to Boise." The trucker was getting such delight out of conveying this information that Skidmore suspected the hooker rodeo did not exist outside the cab of this truck.

"Call up somebody on the radio and ask 'em," Skidmore said, pressing the guy with a challenging smile. "Catch some trucker and let's see if he's ever heard of it."

"Sorry, you're just goin' to have to believe me because there ain't nobody out here to call up and I wouldn't be here myself if I didn't have to be." The trucker looked solemn then. "I'll giveya a ride to Omaha, forget Long Pine. Bad place, bad. Don't go to that old hooker rodeo. You don't need a woman that bad."

"Well," Skidmore said, staring out into the small zone the headlights cut for them on the prairie. He was touched by the driver's sincere concern about his welfare. "Well, I don't know. I feel like I wanna go to Long Pine—I been hearin' about the place for a long time. I'm feelin' hopeless and footloose, you know what I mean? Ever get your mind set on something?"

The trucker looked at him. "How come?"