Читать книгу Komatke Gold - Benjamin Vance - Страница 8

I didn’t have a million bucks in the bank, but had managed to keep a few dollars. My beltway boss relinquished his hold on my ass for a few months, I put my valuables, mostly photographs, in storage, and headed south on I-95 toward Hopewell, Virginia. It was nice to leave D.C. for anywhere with real mountains. I had to prove my identity at the Bank in Hopewell, but I got all my stuff, including the map, and turned southwest toward North Carolina and that strip of I-85 that would steer me more and more westward. I chose to take I-10 to I-8 just so I could go through Yuma again and re-trace the U.S. 95 route I’d taken so often back then. I had plenty of time to think as well.

I guess most people do their best thinking while driving. I sure do. I’ve often wondered why long-haul truck drivers don’t own most of the patents in this country. Maybe they get the ideas, but don’t have the eleven thousand bucks to get a patent. Who does? In any case, before I made the outskirts of Atlanta, I’d deduced a scheme to visit my fathers’ grave, and to quietly investigate the whereabouts of one Myra Page. Visiting my relatives and old friends in and around Phoenix took a distant third. So did visiting my father’s grave.

Of course, I fantasized endlessly about the meeting. Would Myra float gently into my arms after all those years, would she try to kill me, would she even remember me? She’d probably have older kids, and perhaps even be a fat grandmother. What if alcoholism or diabetes had taken her? My God, how short our lives are. I believed the worse possible scenario would be that she would treat me with a kind, detached indifference. How that would sear my useless soul.

All these things I pondered and more. Forever selfish is the ego! Never did I question my right to even talk to her. Never did I wonder if she’d think me evil or repulsive for not having the guts to divorce my wife and go to her like I should have. What impact would my arrival have on her family or her children? She never mentioned it, but what if we had a child she was too proud to share with me? What would my arrival do to her reputation within the reservation community, and why should she have to deal with it at her age? Never did I try to think like her. I just blundered into Parker at 2:00 a.m. on an unusually wet, cool breezy night in February. Nothing really looked the same, but I saw a familiar motel sign and the smell of desert was in my head again. I was nothing short of giddy.