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Also by Eric Gansworth
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“Fred kept saying he would get me an autograph that I could sell, and such, but he never did. That was the way of it with him.” Even the time I visited him, he kept pretending that he was looking for that autographed picture he got for me, but we both knew it only existed in his head. Finally I said something like, well, it will surface, once we get this stuff cleaned up some, figuring maybe we could get his dump into reasonable shape, if we gave it an honest try, though I don’t think it would have stayed that way for long after I had left. When he saw me off the next week, he said that he’d let me know about his speaking part, that he was supposed to hear back soon.
The road from Big Antler to Los Angeles is a long one indeed, and though the one from Bismarck to Fargo ain’t even remotely as bad, it’s still a haul, and I was getting drowsy. This young lady might have been from Asia, but she seemed to like the tapes I was playing, mostly old country standards, Hank Williams—the old one—Bob Wills, all those guys. After a while, even my old reliable music failed me and I’d found myself drifting. I started to tell her all this nonsense, in even more detail, a story I usually only tell myself on this trip every November, whenever the showers come. Through her fragments of English, it must have sounded like a hodgepodge, most of the time, a few familiar terms here and there. Maybe my voice temporarily chased away whatever ghosts had dragged her to this dreadful place.
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