The Driftless Area (7 page)

“Why not?”

“Well, see, I hitchhike.”

“But you have a car.”

“It would never make it. It’s too far. And you can actually go faster without one, because you don’t have to stop. But I don’t know. I’m twenty-four now. Getting kind of old for it.”

“Twenty-four is nothing.”

“And besides, you’re here.”

“You should do whatever you were going to do,” said Stella. “Don’t not go for me. And then you can come back and tell me the stories.”

“I’ve wanted this since the day we met,” said Pierre. “Even on the day we met.”

“You were so cold.”

“I’ve forgotten.”

“I remember everything.”

“That’s quite a lot.”

“Some things I’d just as soon forget.”

“This helps, though, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, because it’s only us.”

“And who are we again?”

“A guy and a gal, lost together in this funky world.”

“How pretty you say that.”

“We should take it slow,” she said. “Really slow—like this—until it’s just unbearable. . . .”

At around five o’clock the light began to seep into the room and the birds to sing in tentative phrases as if to find out who else was awake. Pierre got up and shut off the erratic lamp, and as he did so he got a shock that leaped all the way to his shoulder. He walked back to the bed, kneading his knuckles, and then they went to sleep and did not get up until the afternoon.

“I heard you had one cart,” said Roland Miles. “Carrie seen you in the store.”

“So?”

“Well, you know what that means.”

They were up on the stone tower in the state forest behind the Jack of Diamonds. Roland was patching the mortar between the stones where it had cracked to white ash and fallen out, and Pierre was leaning on the wall and looking out over the country.

“Two people, one cart,” said Roland.

“No, what does it mean?” said Pierre.

“That you’re living together.”

“What if we are?”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Okay, then.”

“I took her to get some groceries.”

“How kind of you. Carrie said you were in the hair care aisle and looking pretty goddamned cozy.”

“She should’ve come over.”

“Well, you know—you don’t want to interrupt people when they’re deciding which conditioner gives that allover shiny feeling.”

“I like her.”

“That’s good,” said Roland. “You should like someone. It’s the way people are. And she likes you?”

“Seems that way.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure,” said Pierre. “There’s some deer down here.”

“What are they doing?”

“Just walking around. Now they’re running.”

“Any fawns?”

“I don’t think so.”

“They’re probably near, they usually are. . . . I’m not saying you’re on the bottom of the barrel. I’m sure you would stand out to somebody, just given how many people there are, and the laws of probability.”

“Yep,” said Pierre. “It’s a mystery.”

“Well, don’t listen to me.”

“I’m not.”

“I can see that.”

Pierre had learned something in college that he always remembered, and this was that everything that succeeds creates the conditions for its own demise.

A professor with a prematurely bent posture and white beard had said this about an ancient kingdom that had disappeared, and Pierre thought it was true of many things.

A simple example would be a fire, which burns the fuel that feeds it and goes out. Supposedly this would even happen to the sun. Or a hero, who rights some great wrong and finds that his services are no longer needed.

It was the only philosophy that he had, although he was not sure it was philosophy. It meant that nothing sufficiently good or bad can last. The only things that might last are things that make no difference.

Yet it was like Pierre to magnify simple questions into large abstractions about which nothing could be done. All he meant in thinking of this formula for dissolution was that if he and Stella moved in together, they would put an end to the living apart that made them want to live together in the first place.

So he never raised the issue, and neither did Stella. They spent many nights at her hilltop house and one at his apartment in Shale before he left on his trip to California. These nights and mornings seemed so luminous and urgent as to exist separately from the rest of his life. It was as if they were beginning the world from nothing every time they met. Where had he been all this time? That was the question that went through his mind when he and Stella were together. And where was he now?

FIVE

P
IERRE HAD
never really got a bad ride. The worst that happened was that a driver would share an unexpectedly powerful strain of grass and play some song like “Tecumseh Valley” and Pierre would become sort of comatose. Much of the music was old, as were most of the drivers, who remembered a time when the roads were jammed with people thumbing rides.

He made fantastic time. The hitchhiker may appear carefree and open to experience, but in Pierre’s case this was deceptive. He got ruthless on the road, greedy for miles. He did not have to be anywhere in a hurry, but he hurried anyway.

He remembered some of the people who had given him rides—a quiet, serious man who went from track to track gambling on horses, another man with a rusted tub of crawdads in the backseat, a woman in a tan Karmann Ghia who laughed beautifully and lit up a
metal hash pipe, winking like Santa’s sexy niece as the white smoke curled around her face.

But in each case the ride had ended and he had gone on—he did not attend the crawdad bake (or fry, or however the crawdads would be prepared), or learn to interpret a racing form, or spend the night with the hash smoker.

Sometimes he thought it would be better if he had done these things. Not that he could have done them all. Only the gambler had offered. But there may have been signals that Pierre in his transient nature had missed. To turn your life on a dime seemed to him the essence of American thought. But he had never been able to do so until now.

He made Utah in two nights, and there he met a tragic sort of woman in a mountain town. She was thirty years old or so and drinking in the bar of the dark and worn down hotel where he had checked in for the night.

She’d had some hard times. Something begins to fade from the eyes after too much of anything. She had thick dry reddish hair and white scars on either side of her face as if she had been attacked by a bear.

In fact, she said, she’d done this with her own fingernails one time after going too many days on speed. Pierre did not know what to say to that, but she smiled and nodded, as if the pain had faded, leaving only a sort of impersonal amazement.

They danced in the bar and then, wanting to see the town, Pierre walked her home, to the house where she said she lived with her grandmother. The house was close to the newly paved road that fell away from the town. The door was locked, and she knocked and called out, but nothing happened.

“She does this if I come home late,” she said. “But there’s a ladder in the garage. Come on. You can help me carry it.”

So they went in the garage and she turned on a light and looked around. There was a big yellow Cadillac but no ladder that they could find.

She stood with her hands in her back pockets and looked all around the garage. “Clever,” she said. “She must have taken the ladder in the house. Good one, Grandma. That’s thinking ahead for you. This is kind of a game we play.”

“Why don’t you come back to the hotel?” said Pierre. “You can sleep in my room.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t swing that way.”

“You don’t have to swing any way,” said Pierre. “You can stay there, that’s all.”

“Really? You would do that for me? You must be a religious kind of guy. ’Cause what I normally do if I can’t get in is sleep in the Cadillac.”

“Well, you don’t want to do that.”

“No, that’s for sure.”

So they went back to the hotel and stayed the night, all on the straight and narrow, she in the bed and Pierre in a chair with a blanket.

“And how are you doing over there?” she said.

“Very well, thanks.”

“You might be interested to know I’m off the crank now.”

“That’s good.”

“And here’s a promise I made to myself. That someday, when I find a pile of cash, I’ll take it to a plastic surgeon and I’ll say, ‘Make these scars go away.’ ”

“They probably can.”

“Oh, these days? It’s a snap, I bet. They probably do it all the time.”

“The cash is the tricky part,” said Pierre.

“I think it will happen, though. I can just see it.”

“If you can see it, you can be it.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Beer school.”

“So you’ve abused substances too,” she said.

“Oh, many a time.”

“Do you think it’s true?”

“What?”

“If you can see it, you can be it.”

“No. What time is it?”

“Two o’clock.”

“For example, you can see a llama,” said Pierre. “But you couldn’t be one.”

“That’s taking it pretty literal.”

“I’m going to sleep now.”

“You have passed your test,” she said.

“I didn’t know I was taking one.”

“You didn’t ask for anything or come jumping all over me. You were true to what you said, and you’re sleeping in some scuzzy chair. I admire that.”

“You can’t spend the night in your grandmother’s car.”

“Hey, I got news for you. That wasn’t even her house.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Uh-uh.”

“What if there had been a ladder?”

“That would have been interesting, wouldn’t it?”

“What are you, crazy?”

“Yeah, I guess. Probably pretty crazy.”

“Are you going to sleep now?”

“Yeah.”

“Good night.”

“No. You know what? I’m giving you something.”

She rummaged in her purse and then leaned way out from the bed, with one hand on the floor, and handed him a round yellow stone about the size of a tennis ball and covered with small depressions like the moon.

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s my lucky rock,” she said. “I found it in a quarry. I think it was made by heat or something.”

“You should keep it.”

“No, it’s too heavy. I’ve been looking for somebody to give it to. It has a good feel to it. You’ll like it. Go ahead, throw it up and catch it. You’ll see what I mean.”

“Yeah,” said Pierre. “It’s kind of sandy.”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

And for the rest of the trip, all the way to the coast and back, he carried the rock in the pocket of his safari coat, and he would throw it up and catch it while watching the road for rides.

Pierre’s cousin and her family lived in a small house in northern California with peeling redwood trees growing in the back, and they would pitch a tent in the yard for Pierre to sleep in.

His cousin owned a company that made custom skateboards endorsed by an apparently famous skateboarder Pierre had not heard of, and her husband had a repair shop specializing in Saabs, and he drove old Saabs and thought Saabs were about the greatest thing.

Their children were good souls and backgammon prodigies who would beat Pierre almost every time they played. He thought he was a fair backgammon player but he was nothing compared to these children, who were five, seven, and nine years old.

Even the youngest had a keen understanding of how to block, and when to hit blots or leave them alone, and when to double. It was extraordinary.

Pierre stayed with them one week and it never got crowded or uncomfortable, on account of the tent. They would chop wood for their winter supply and go to the ocean near Big Sur, where the children ran through the tidal pools.

His cousin had an unorthodox style with an ax. She would not toss the blade to the side and swing, as most do, but begin with the ax hanging motionless down her back and bring it up and over her head with gathering speed. And in this way, though slender and not very tall, she could split blocks that Pierre would barely dent.

His cousins had the sanest family life that Pierre had ever known. The kids called him Uncle Pierre, and the day before he headed up the coast, they drew their faces on paper plates and gave them to him so he would remember what they looked like.

So now he had the rock, and he had the paper plates, and everything was in place for what would happen next, although Pierre did not know what this would be, or even this it would be anything.

It happened when he was nearly home. He got a little careless as he often did at the end of the journey. At a truck stop in Minnesota, he took a ride from a man in a
battered sky-blue pickup who asked if he would split the gas money.

Both the shape that the truck was in and the driver’s request for money might normally have made Pierre wait for another ride. Sharing the cost was fair in theory but, from what he had seen, drivers who made a point of asking up front tended toward the mercenary.

As for the truck, the panels were dented and scraped, the dashboard was delaminating, and there was no glass in the back window. But it was late afternoon and he had only 125 miles to go, so Pierre took the ride.

The driver was a large man with long hair in a shade between yellow and white. Of Pierre’s age or maybe a few years older, he wore a green Boy Scout shirt with the arms sawed off at the shoulders and a royal blue insignia identifying him as a
DISTINGUISHED EXPERT
,
though in what field it did not say, and probably the shirt had not belonged to the driver when the award was earned anyway.

He had a round and sunburned face and jutting brow, and he would not look Pierre in the eyes but always seemed to be thinking of some other situation, and sometimes he appeared laid back and at other times, for no reason, a look of alarm would flicker across his face.

And as they went along the driver said he was going down to San Antonio, to help his brother, who had found a lot of money in a car wash. Or rather than saying
it he yelled it, or nearly so, to be heard above the highway sound that rolled through the missing window.

“How much is it?” said Pierre.

“Thousands. Tens of thousands.”

“And somebody left it in a car wash.”

“So he tells me.”

“What is it, drug money?”

“Well, we don’t know. But ill-gotten gains of some kind. It was in a paper sack from a grocery store.”

“What if whoever left it wants it back?”

Pierre was only making conversation. The story sounded made up, though it was not that unusual for something you would hear while hitchhiking.

“Yeah, my brother’s kind of worried about that aspect of it,” said the driver, with his hair dancing around in the back draft of the missing window. “But once he gets it to San Antonio those bastards can’t touch him.”

“I thought it was in San Antonio.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Pierre’s backpack was then riding along in the bed of the pickup, in violation of a fundamental rule of hitchhiking, which is not to get separated from anything you don’t want to lose.

The end of the ride showed the reason for the rule. When they came to the turnoff for the highway that Pierre would take east the 70 miles to Shale, the driver
went halfway up the exit ramp and stopped there on the shoulder.

“Why don’t you pull up to the stop sign. I’ll get out there,” said Pierre.

“No, thanks, this is fine.”

Pierre looked across at the driver, thinking he had not understood. “You’ve got to go there anyway.”

“Yeah, I don’t care.”

“Just right up here,” said Pierre.

The driver turned in his seat, set his back to the door, and kicked Pierre in the shoulder.

“Get the fuck out of my truck,” he said.

“Well, okay, but it seems goddamn small after I gave you gas money.”

“And don’t forget your stuff.”

Once he said that Pierre saw his mistake. Still, there was nothing to do but get out. He opened the door and began to step down and the truck took off, throwing him on the pavement.

But then the driver made a mistake of his own. Instead of leaving as fast as he could, he stopped a little ways off, and looked back through the glassless window, and yelled something, Pierre could not tell what, but it seemed to end with the word
fool,
which was hard to argue with under the circumstances.

The backpack held nothing of value, but Pierre hated the thought of the thief getting the paper plates with
the drawings. So he jumped to his feet, took the lucky rock from the pocket of his coat, wound up, and threw the rock at the truck.

Sometimes things happen that seem to defy the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all systems move toward disorder. Once Pierre had dropped a lighter on the sidewalk, and it landed standing up. Another time, lying in bed with Stella, he asked what she would do if he could toss a quarter across the room and into a coffee cup sitting on the dresser by the Gokstad ship, and she told him, and he threw the coin, and it went in the cup.

And now the pickup began to move, tires spinning for a hold on the pavement, but it didn’t matter, because the rock in its flight seemed to know what it was meant to do, and it followed a low arc and tailed off, going through the window frame and hitting the driver. The truck went on up the ramp for a short while, losing speed, and then veered west and down a grassy embankment, where it rolled for a while, missed some trees, hit another one, and stopped.

Spellbound, Pierre walked down the bank and through the trees to the truck, where the driver lay partly on the seat and partly in the foot well under the dashboard. Pierre watched him awhile to make sure he was breathing, though he had no idea what he would have done if he were not.

Then he got his pack from the truck bed and went up and pulled the latch beneath the steering wheel and opened the hood. His thought was to tear out the ignition wires, but their location was not as obvious as he had hoped. But while surveying the various webs of wires he saw a package that had been secured with duct tape behind the battery.

He pulled off the tape and took the package from the engine well. It was a paper sack, folded over and bound with more tape, and when he got that off and opened the bag he found that it was full of faded green bills bundled by ink stained-rubber bands.

Pierre thought for a short while and then opened his pack and pushed everything down and laid the sack of money in on top. Then he went back to the sleeping driver and pulled the keys out of the ignition and flung them into a bean field and walked away.

He put the pack on his shoulders and went up the exit ramp. He walked for several miles under the light-banded sky and eventually a man driving a Royal Crown truck stopped to give him a ride.