Читать книгу Extra Indians - Eric Gansworth - Страница 8
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE:
Fall Out
THIS IS A TRUE STORY.
The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.
At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.
Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
—statement from opening credits, Fargo
Tommy Jack McMorsey
The first thing you should know is that the papers got it all wrong. Well, some of it’s, you know, public record and there is no disputing that she ain’t ever coming back this way again. But it’s the way things happened. That’s what I’m talking about. Yes, I know they asked to interview me, but if words you’ve spoken have ever wound up in a newspaper at any time, or if you’ve found yourself on film or videotape that they’ve cut and rearranged, you already know what I am saying here about the inexact relationship between language and the ways we truly experience the world.
Even some of the basic things, the papers didn’t get right. I don’t know, maybe they thought it would be weirder or more interesting if she took a cab from Bismarck out to Fargo, or was it a bus to Fargo and a cab to Detroit Lakes? Wasn’t it weird enough that she flew into the Twin Cities and by winding up in Bismarck, she totally overshot where she was going by hundreds of miles? I don’t know, can’t ever remember the way they tell it, because I know the truth. I was the one who found her in the first place, both times, and maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut the second time. None of these new problems would have started for me, and I’d be living out my life the same way I have for the last twenty years or so, but I had to do it, make my yearly wish, hoping one falling star would come through.
I could tell right away when I pulled into the Oasis that she wasn’t your average lot lizard. I know that’s not too flattering a name to call a lady who will do all kinds of nice things for you just to share some time breathing the same air you do, but I didn’t make it up. That name is not one I generally use. It’s just one of the many things you learn on the lonely roads of this country. The lizards like to call themselves truckers’ wives. They like the way you maybe can’t tell if that label means being connected to just one trucker or maybe to an undisclosed number. There are men who wander the lots too, looking for the same thing those women are, but drivers use the standard names for those guys and as often as not, give them a taste of fist instead of the body part they’re interested in. I just tell those men no thank you. Who am I to be critical about what you want to do with another person, so long as no one gets hurt?
But as I was saying, this woman was not like those other women, though. They have a particular look about them. Hers was not that different, mind you, but different enough so’s you’d notice. She was not the type of woman who would share the back of your sleeper cab in trade for conversation, a meal, and a ride to the next place. For most of those others, the “next place” was only a minor matter. They didn’t care all that much about where it might be, and they were grateful if you helped them find their next ride after you. If you let them, they’d spin through your CB dial, like some kind of lottery-drawing emcee, risking nineteen if the others come up dry.
There’s a lot of good old boys out there. You get to know a man’s disposition on the road sometimes watching the way he eats his biscuits and gravy of a morning. The ones who eat with a smile, give you a nod from the next counter stool, flirt with the waitress, those are the boys you might ask about the weather or any Staties taking pictures from the median.
But there’s other fellas, too. You can see them at the stops just as often. They blame the cook and waitress if they don’t like the food, but they keep eating on it, grinding that food into nothing—chicken-fried vengeance. If they treat a piece of meat like that, I am afraid to think of how they might receive people. When they’re sitting at the next stool, I let the sky tell me directly what it might deliver and I watch the road myself for unmarked cars.
If a lady riding with me asks for help finding her next ride, I offer the radio. I let her run through the channels to find her own next rides into the routes. Chickenshit, but I do not want to be a party to sad young women looking for company and meeting the business end of a claw hammer or a tire thumper.
That’s blunt, but you can ask the wife. I have a certain way with words, Liza Jean says, and her tone lets you know she means the opposite of a compliment. Some over-the-road haulers ask these ladies if they’re riding with someone and then ask to speak to me, like I’m some kind of background check, but that’s not the way it is with me. A lady might fit nicely resting up against my belly in the night, and she might not steal anything when I’m looking elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean she’s not nuts. The only thing that had made me eligible for her talents was eighteen wheels and a full tank. That’s not too discriminating. I’m no troll, mind you, not half-bad, even—but no real prize, either. A man’s looks don’t matter to most of them.
But this lady was different, right off. I wouldn’t have done anything with her, anyway. There’s two kinds I pass right on by, those who are Asian, and those who look like Shirley Mounter. Some things in your past should just never be awakened. You don’t know if you’ll ever get them back to sleep again. Even if she hadn’t fallen into one of my categories, I still would have not considered her. It was something beyond looks.
Most lizards, when they get to a truck stop like the Oasis, they go to one of three places. There is the kind who sits at the restaurant, not bad looking, revealing leg and cleavage under those bright fluorescents. She is eating something light if she’s alone, a salad or whatnot. The second kind is a little older, a little heavier, or a little skinnier, always a little too something, and these ladies hang around the bar, where the lighting is lower and the men are drunker. The third type is much more random. You could never predict what they would look like. These are the ones the truck-stop owners like the least, because they almost never buy anything if they can get away with it. The owners pretend these women are invisible. Running the ladies off would be bad for business.
These always come in, order a water, and not that bottled water, just the tap water they give you in the little round juice glasses. They ask where the ladies’ room is, knowing the ladies’ room and gents’ are generally down the hall that leads to the “truckers only” area, with the lounge and courtesy showers. The showers are never a courtesy for everyone and you have to show your license and some rig ID before they give you a key to a shower stall. It’s not a bad deal, six bucks usually, or they give you one free if you fill up your rig using their preferred customer cards. These ladies, they’ll do almost anything for a hot shower, anything, or so I hear. They try to make their way down that hall unnoticed and go to knocking on doors, or just try them to see if any’s unlocked.
This lady did not fit any of those three categories, so my eye was up in a different way immediately. It ain’t often you pull into the big back lot reserved for rigs and see a woman wandering around the landfill just beyond the bar ditch, particularly not in the November snows of North Dakota. She was looking for something, and since I was running a little ahead of schedule, was just gonna catch some tube or maybe even a shower, I figured I’d help her out. Maybe with two sets of eyes, we would find whatever it was, just a little quicker, and get her out of that relentless wind.
Out there, the state, or whoever, highway department, maybe, tries to hide the fact that they build landfills around the truck stops. Guess they figure no one is going to notice the smell seeping from them in all the diesel clouds. They try to beautify the fills, planting trees and such toward the edge of the lot. These get used for more than beautifying in the warmer months, but that day, the wind was way too sharp for any two people to be thinking about dropping their drawers for some connecting time, no matter how big an urge they might have. Most prefer the back of the sleeper cab in general, but I’ve seen them in the bushes often enough to know it happens.
That poor lady and I were the only ones there, among the exhaust tubes jutting from the landscaped hill, sending nastiness in invisible sheets. Her tracks were like the small, hard deer prints I’d seen in New York, all those years ago when I used to spend some regular time in the northern climes. Her tracks came and went in all directions, sometimes crossing each other, sometimes stopping abruptly and heading in another direction.
“Uh, miss? Ma’am?” She didn’t hear me, the wind being what it was. If the snow had not thawed and refrozen a couple of times before that day, her tracks would have all but disappeared from behind her, even as she made them.
“Ma’am?” She turned, hearing my shout this time. She was Asian, Japanese, as you know from the news, but at the time I wasn’t sure exactly which variation. I could tell people who were Vietnamese, even half-Vietnamese and half-American, right off, but I always had trouble with others. I could spot differences if you lined some up, but couldn’t say which was which. I can’t even do this at home.
Now, the wife says she can tell which Texans are Scottish, which ones are Irish and such, and even claims she can tell who is whose daddy and who ain’t but all that’s bullshit. There’s some children she’s looked right at and not recognized who their real daddy is but maybe that’s selective on her part—hard to say with the wife. Liza Jean McMorsey likes to see things just the way she does.
She’s always been that way. Whenever she demands I cut the damned lawn because of mosquitoes, she says I scared all the birds away with my noisy engine afterward. She suggests we need an ass-kicking push mower, the kind with rotating blades that eat around like really sharp teeth. When I tell her the birds leave because the mosquitoes were their food, she laughs, drinks another Big Red, and goes back into the house to watch for birds from her big old picture window.
So wouldn’t it just kill her to see the exotic bird I found in the winter dusk of a North Dakota night? The wife was the one who sent me there in the first place, in a manner of speaking. Usually, I do the short haul, local runs only, Big Antler to Lubbock, Lubbock to Amarillo, and the like. Every now and then, she says I’m getting on her nerves again and lets me know it’s time for me to accept one of the over-the-road runs. So this time, things worked out for both of us. She got a break from me and it was the time of year I go out for a few days by myself, anyway. Where I wind up depends on the night skies, so this was just as well. I always try to bring her back something nice. For the longest time, it was those Lladró porcelain figurines that she loved so dearly and put in the china cabinet as soon as I gave them to her but those only dredge up bad memories now, things I do not want to bring back at all.
I put in for an extended haul with several suggested cities and got an assignment immediately. Who else wants to go up to Bismarck in November? I wanted a vacation from her anyway, so I was glad to let her think she had come up with the idea of me taking the load. She even packed my bag, looking to make sure there weren’t any rubbers in my shaving kit, like they weren’t available in every drugstore and rest area john along the way. Even the idea of someone else looking at me in my boxers gets her crabby and cross-eyed, though she hasn’t had a look for me in them for over ten years.
Anyway, when I spoke that second time, this lady came on over, opening up this rucksack thing she carried on her back, pulling out a sheet of notebook paper, like the kind you rip from a spiral-bound, raggedy teeth blowing in the wind. The sheet might have flown from her hand, but she kept a firm grip on it. There wasn’t a damn thing on it except for a straight line and something that might have been a tree or a stick of some sort, both drawn in pencil. Inside that bag, she was pretty well stocked with cash, though, and that was about when it was clear she was not American.
“Miss? You might want to keep that there bag closed,” I said, not wanting to reach for it, but if she kept flashing that stack around the Oasis, she was not long to have it. I won’t try to repeat the things she said to me, not because they were outrageous, or anything like that. Well, they were outrageous, but not in a nasty way. She just did not seem to have a very good grasp of English, you would say. Her peculiar version of the language sounded almost like she maybe got it from watching movies on TV through bad reception. It seemed logical, considering all that eventually happened.
I assumed I didn’t understand what she was saying because the idea was so darned way-out-there. I was sure she was joking on me, like Candid Camera was hiding in those trees at the landfill’s edge, just to see what I would say to an Asian lady who could barely speak English telling me she was looking for the ransom buried by some character in a movie. Well, I showed them.
“First,” I said, “you ain’t even in the right town. Why don’t you come on in, with me, get a little warmed up, have something hot to drink, and we’ll go from there.” I reached for her hand but she acted like I wanted her map and pulled away, just enough to let me know she was not being led anywhere.
I was wishing Fred Howkowski was with me. He would have known the ins and outs of whatever she was talking about, even with only her passing snag of English. I remember the story of Fargo, but just barely. I must have been missing something awfully important that this girl saw. Fred would have been able to tell me right off what I lacked. He knew all the movies, used to talk about them, compare everything we did together to movies. How he saw that damned many is anyone’s guess.
A lot of shows, he watched silent from the back fences of the drive-in movie places where he grew up. He’d hitch a ride out from the reservation to those neighborhoods when he was young, get dropped off at a gas station or whatever, then wander around. When it was dark enough, he’d make his way over to the Star-lite, or the Auto-vue, and watch them play out through holes he had carved, himself. I asked him how come he never just jumped the fence and watched from the concession stand where they had speakers mounted on the outside walls.
He liked it better speaking his own dialogue, making up the stories to suit the things he saw up on the screen. Sometimes he would do this after we’d gotten to know each other in Vietnam, when we were back to Camp Hockmuth near Phu Bai once a month at the rear. In the mess hall of an evening, they mostly showed us wholesome-type, inspirational movies. Who needed that nonsense with the things we were witnessing and participating in daily?
Those jokers inside the hall would be eating that bullshit up, Doris Day and all. Fred and I would be outside the back windows, sparking a joint if no one else happened to be around. He would make Doris say all kinds of things to her leading men, and the things they would say back, man, I was sore from laughing most nights by the time we went to bed. He was just crazy about the movies. Listening to him there, or in the nighttime fields, talking about his favorites, was sometimes all that kept me going. His voice, in those sweaty jungles, allowed me to forget things were crawling into the poncho we used for a tent when I would doze on patrol nights.
English was not an option with this girl, so I tried any kind of sign language I could conjure up. I’d thought I’d gotten somewhat handy with it in the war. I could only remember a few real phrases now, “didi-maow,” “boo-coo,” some others, and generally mispronounced them so bad that the locals there had no idea what I was saying. I was reduced to hand signals: “let your fingers do the walking”; “how much for this”; “do you have anything to drink”; “anything to smoke”; rubbing my hands together and blowing on them for cold—my toolbox of sign language was pretty limited. Eventually this lady recognized one of my attempts. I held an invisible cup of coffee, then pointed to the building. Finally she let me put my arm around her shoulder and we went inside. The light skeleton beneath her jacket felt on the verge of breaking apart so I lifted, floating my arm an inch above her real body. She mostly just warmed her hands with the cup of hot chocolate I bought her. My cell phone was not getting any reception inside, but I didn’t dare leave her where I couldn’t see her, so I called the state troopers from a pay phone.
“Uh, hello, hi, my name is Tommy Jack McMorsey, and I drive for Martin Romero shippers, out of Lubbock, Texas,” I started.
“Yes sir, how may I help you?” the dispatch said, her voice flat, thinking this was just another call from a holy roller driver, complaining about the lizards. I hate those guys. They’re not getting any—by their own choice, I might add—but they don’t want anyone else getting any either. They’re always filing formal complaints, particularly about those ladies falling in the fourth category. Those really aggressive ones tap on your passenger-side passing-mirror window and show you a little skin before they try the door to see if you’ll unlock it.
“Well, you see, I’m calling from Oasis, on eastbound I-94, just out of Bismarck, and—”
“Yes, sir, I know where you’re calling from, how may I help you?”
“Well there’s this young lady here, and she—”
“Has she asked for money in exchange for services, sir?”
“Uh, well, no, she has her own money,” I said. “Look, could you just send someone out here? I think she needs help, and I am pretty sure I’m not the one she needs it from.” I gave her my tag numbers and told her I had to go, that the young lady had just wandered out the front doors and I wanted to keep an eye on her.
The odor of landfill is its own special rot, and I could smell it before I caught up to her. The only thing it reminds me of is that industrial sauerkraut they used to keep in the stainless steel flip-top buckets at the drive-in movie concession stand. The condiments were nastier than the roller-dogs, those orange hot dogs that spun and spun inside the glass case. It is truly the only smell that landfills remind me of. That, or maybe the lingering odd smell in the air after someone sneezes and you are unlucky enough to be nearby.
This girl didn’t seem to mind it, though. The nasty steam crept out of those white PVC pipes releasing gases from all that waste dissolving into who knows what below us. She pointed to these pipes and she would walk around them, shake her head, point to the presumed tree on her sheet of notebook paper, and head on off to the next pipe. I followed her to every damned one of them, trying to figure out what she was looking for, holding my coffee up to my nose and hoping for the best. This is the way the troopers found us when they eventually got there.
“Mr. McMorsey? Tommy Jack McMorsey?” the first trooper called, from the lot. Even in the gray, his holster hand was plain to see. It was near dark by that time, and for a minute I was not for sure who was calling my name. The girl’s belief was so strong that I examined the damned exhaust pipes with her, for some discriminating features, believing I could see differences in them, and I had no idea what she was even looking for as she touched their lips, rubbed their sides, studied the perimeter around them, decided against them, and moved on. I’m not saying I was deluded enough to think we were going to find that Fargo ransom and be set for life, but there was something about her belief that somehow the act of looking was enough to keep her going for at least one minute more. And sometimes, what more can we ask for, right?
I’ve seen that look a lot in my life. Out on the reservation Fred Howkowski came from, it was on practically every other face I looked at. He had that look most of the time I knew him, first along the firebases and out on patrols in the war and then home, when he’d headed out to Hollywood trying to join those movies he loved so much.
“Yes, that’s me. I’m the one who called.”
“This the woman you reported?” the trooper asked as he came closer. He looked tired and wanting to get out of the cold and only in seeing his face did I realize how cold I was, how my bones ached. The time we had been out there at the fill had got by me.
“Well, I wasn’t exactly reporting her, more concerned is all,” I said. He stepped up between us and spoke to the girl. Her eyes opened wide when she saw the North Dakota emblems on his uniform, and she showed him the map right off, I guess not afraid he was going to take it from her.
“We’ll handle it from here,” he said, taking away the fact that she was a person, just like that. She was another situation, another incident. They took a statement from me, how I’d found her and such, but then they strongly suggested I go back about my business and I know what a suggestion from someone in authority means. They took her away and couldn’t get much out of her either, I guess. They said they were going to look around town for someone who could speak her language. I have been around Bismarck and I have not seen too many a Chinese restaurant even, let alone one of those sushi bars like they have for the yuppies in Dallas. They dismissed me pretty clearly. Though I waited outside for a while, an eighteen-wheel rig is not an easy thing to hide and they came out, asking me to move along.
I headed back to the Oasis and sat in a window booth. It wasn’t all that long before she reappeared and sat back down with me. You don’t see a lot of people paying a cab to get to the stops. Even the lizards catch rides in some other way, either hitching on the entrance ramps or even walking to some of the stops, but the Oasis is pretty far out from where anyone might live. This is where the official story gets all lost, even though I was about as clear as I could be when they asked me questions. According to the troopers, they couldn’t get her to change her mind in looking for the ransom, or get her to understand it was just a movie, that no money existed. She kept insisting, as I understand it, that the movie opens saying it is a true story, and she was sticking to that.
All her papers checked out, passport, visa, whatever, and they must have gone through her purse to see she had enough money to at least survive a reasonable amount of time in the country, and they did try to do her a favor, I have to give them that. They took her to the bus station and showed her how to buy a ticket to Fargo. Even as messed up as she was, she knew certain things to be true. Among them is that a Greyhound is not going to stop along the highway from Bismarck to Fargo so you can go treasure hunting, no matter how much you might ring that emergency bell. And if they did, they sure as hell wouldn’t idle there long so you could dig around in the snow.
A cab couldn’t have been too hard to find. There’s usually a bunch of them around the bus station, taking home people who do not have loved ones to come and pick them up from wherever they’ve been wandering. She came right in and tried to get me to go back out with her to the landfill, but I’d had enough of her nonsense. I have had to be out on a cold night, waiting for the tire guy if I’ve gotten a blowout somewhere along the way. As a general rule, if you’re not out there when he gets to your truck, he just moves on along to the next rig with a blowout. There’s never any shortage of us around. So you stand and wait and flag him down and once he starts to working, he keeps asking you something or another, dragging your ass back out into the cold. He figures if he’s got to be out there on your account, you’re going to be out there keeping him company. Since I had no official business with this young woman on the fill hill, I wasn’t stepping through those doors until it was time for me to get my ass back on the road.
“I’m heading on, going, driving,” I said, eventually. Again, with the hand signals, I wished I had a little toy rig on the table, so I could move it from the salt shaker to the sugar canister, something like that. I settled for the invisible steering wheel and making the rumbling engine noise all boys learn when they play with toy cars. “Driving, yes, driving to Fargo,” and I said this last, slowly, thinking she might catch it. She grabbed my hand and decided it was time for us to leave. I held her for a minute and, given our sizes, she was no match. There was a story about the meteors coming up on the cable news that I wanted to see before we headed out, making sure the initial predictions had not been off the mark.
Again, you probably already know this from the final reports, and this part, they sort of got right. It was the night of the Leonid showers, those meteors that come on time every year, where you get a chance to see hundreds if you are of a mind to, are in one of the good areas of the country, and can stand the weather. I always made it a point to see them, if I could, no matter where I was, and I was usually willing to travel some distance on the night they were coming through, set an alarm clock, whatever, to see them.
“When Fred Howkowski made it out there to Hollywood,” I said when we’d been on the road for a bit, startling my passenger at first, “he actually got a lot of work as an extra, pretty quickly. You know, westerns were still pretty much in demand then. I think even John Wayne was still alive and making movies, but I’m not for sure. He’d call me collect whenever he was going to be in a movie. He’s the reason we’re heading where we are. Well, he’s the reason I’m headed where I am, Fred, not John Wayne. Keep trying to take care of one last thing.” Most times, his movies never got out to our rinky-dink movie house back home, which is surprising since we’re in ranch country. You would think the ranchers might like them, but maybe they see enough cowboys on the job that they don’t want them for entertainment, and in Big Antler, the less said about Indians, the better.
Nothing particularly bad ever happened, I suppose, at least as far as anyone’s still alive was concerned, but Indians and whites just don’t mix too much down there, hardly any Indians at all, I can remember, except Fred’s boy, who became mine when Fred gave him up to me. So, anyway, whenever Fred would call, I would get the Lubbock paper for a few weeks, and when his movie would come out, Liza Jean and I would take the boy into the city, get us something to eat at a nice place, and look for his daddy up on the screen. Sometimes we could see him, sometimes not, even when he told us where he was supposed to be.
“Well, he got word one time they were making a movie out of some book that was supposedly about Indians. He’s like you, just loved the movies. But like most of those movies and books from what I have seen and what I’ve heard about, they are usually about some white guy adopted by Indians who then grows up and out-Indians the Indians, does everything they can teach him to do but only better. This one was going to be no different but Fred was happy.” The girl continued staring out the rig’s passenger-side window, occasionally glancing at me to let me know she was hearing my voice.
“Liza Jean was growing annoyed at all the collect calls. Back then, calling state to state was something only the rich or famous could do and we were neither of those things. So I paid those bills out of my junk-business profits to keep the peace around the house. I’d taken to garage sales since I had gotten home, have a pretty good eye, and I’d buy stuff up enough to have one of my own or do it as an estate sale or sell to antique shops and you can turn a pretty decent profit if you pick only the stuff that has some staying power.” By her outfit, it looked like this girl was one of those who watched the fashion shows and made a point of getting new things when they came out. My clothes are a lot like the stuff I hunt for, old and reliable. That trendy stuff just never lasts.
Once people get bored with little under-stuffed bears, for example, you would be stuck with the samples you hoarded for at least another ten years when interest would somehow just spark up again out of nowhere. I stuck with other stuff that was pretty much guaranteed to grow and grow in scarcity, like real art deco, or art nouveau, no knockoffs, no reproductions. I didn’t touch anything made after 1953, unless it had some of that signature “fabulous fifties” look that was getting bigger all the time. So with that cushion, I didn’t mind paying for Fred’s calls keeping us connected, and since Liza Jean never helped me with the estate sales, she never got a say in what I did with my profits from them, either.
“He got the call from central casting, and with his looks and his list of movies, they even said he had a good shot at some lines. He had his SAG card, he said, whatever that was, and that meant he could do the lines if they offered them to him. He said the star was a young guy, making it big, and was always nice to the extras, letting them hang out in his honey wagon, signing autographs and whatnot. I bet you would like that. Probably be carrying that around in your rucksack there,” I said, tapping her little pink bag. At first she jumped and reached to grab it and then must have thought better, easing off and smiling at me more frequently, but only for a second or two before returning to her scan of the roadside.
“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.
“We met in the war, and though Liza Jean could never understand how that could make you stay connected to someone, I admit it’s more complicated than that. It never starts out complicated. If a familiar face is all you got, that is what you go with. Fred was the only one I recognized from basic.” I laughed a little and she tried to laugh, too. “I’m not for sure when we moved from being friendly to being friends, probably around the time I saved his ass, though.” She was gone again. Sometimes her eyes would follow something at the roadside and if I had ever offered to stop, she would have been out there in a second, wandering in the snow.
She probably didn’t need to hear this kind of stuff, anyway. I’ve been to the Trinity Site in New Mexico, where those first atomic tests were done, and of course have gone and found some of my buddies up on the wall in D.C., but I have always wondered what that Hiroshima museum must be like. I hear they have a watch there, a pocket watch or wristwatch, I am not for sure which, that survived the blast, but stopped ticking at that exact moment the bomb went off. Everyone should see that. I bet this lady has. Even if she hasn’t been to that museum itself, she’s seen it. It’s the same way you can see the name of someone you knew, who never came home from Vietnam, written neatly in that black surface, you can feel the depths of those etched names under your fingers, as you run them across, even if you have never been down to see it in person, to stand in front of the wall. That is the nature of the way we lose some things in our lives.
“We’re here,” I said.
“Fargo? Here?” the girl asked, gathering up her little backpack.
“Yeah, you just hang on, missy. I got to find somewhere reasonable for you to stay.” Fargo can be a bad scene, and that was all this girl needed, to let the wrong person see her. If she still wanted to continue her crazy search in the morning, that was her business, but for my part, I got her to safety and it was time for me to make my yearly trip to the designated wide-open skies. Fargo would have been okay for me any other night of the year but the light pollution would be too strong for my purposes that night. Coming into it, or really coming into any of the cities at night, was like flying into Phu Bai that first time. The firebases, and particularly the rear, just seemed to be begging for enemy fire, all lighted up in the dark jungles like that, but the NVA could never get it together enough to go that deep into our territory without getting caught. These hot spots in the dark Dakota winter also drew all sorts of their own trouble, with the promises of alternatives, and this girl would not be able to make it on her own, I was sure.
I know, she had made it all the way from Japan to the Twin Cities and then on to Bismarck in the first place, so who was I, telling her she couldn’t make it? But like I said, Fargo is a tough place. The Mainline just off 94 was pretty decent, continental breakfast, you know, bad coffee and stale doughnuts, but it was something to eat, if you wanted it, and you could actually see the river from some of the rooms there. It would be fine for her, and besides, I really had to get a move on if I was going to make Detroit Lakes in the time I wanted. I don’t know why she didn’t just fly to Fargo in the first place, but she must have had her reasons for doing the things she was doing. Everyone does, whether you agree with them or not.
“You just head right in there, where it says office, o-f-f-i-c-e, see?” I said, pointing to the glowing sign above the lobby door, “and they’ll take care of you. Tell them, one night.” I held up my pointer finger again, this time, straight up, and tried to get her to do the same. I touched her hand and folded the other fingers under, into a fist, and then she got it.
“Come?” she asked. Actually, I only assumed she was asking, as about all of her brief sentences seemed to be questions. She might have been commanding, for all I know.
“Uh, no.” I shook my head and reached over, opening her door for her. “I got things to do tonight, and I gotta get a move on, if I’m gonna make it. Now you watch your step getting out. There’s a little platform for you there, watch. Don’t fall.” She just sat there, the cold wind blowing in and filling up my cab with the smells of Fargo, industry, greasy food, diesel, the works. I never drive with a coat on, so I reached back over her, shut the door, grabbed my jacket from behind me, and hopped out myself, climbing on up on the passenger’s side and reopening the door.
We were beginning to draw some attention from inside the lobby. The night manager even lifted his remote and I assumed turned down the volume on his little television set. I guess what we were doing was more interesting than the goings-on in a black-and-white Mayberry. I had a sense it might turn out to be a good thing, later, that the night manager saw her refusing to come down from my cab. Now, when I’m alone on the drive and need to take a leak, I do what most do and just use Ziplocs until I come to a convenient service area to dump the full bags. You get agile with the trick after years of practice but I was guessing that would be a bit impolite with my passenger. I also wanted that night manager to know my passenger was with me not only willingly, but defiantly, so he’d be able to say so with certainty if authorities started asking after the circumstances of that evening. I just had a sense I was already into something a lot deeper than I had planned to be. So I went in and asked if I could use their john and gave him the quick rundown, suggesting she might be back in a cab later on.
I didn’t have time for this kind of nonsense. I already had the key to the place I’d reserved for the next couple of nights, had them mail it to me when I paid in advance. It had been sitting in the upper compartment of my truck’s cab for almost a month. As soon as the astronomers had made their predictions, I had picked up the phone and made a couple calls. I got lucky on the second try. Though they tend to be booked up solid for summer by mid-March, there’s not a lot of winter demand for those little cabins around Detroit Lakes, and they were just the sort of thing I was looking for.
“Look, miss. I really need to get a move on. I’m running late. My load don’t need to be to the Twin Cities until tomorrow, but I have got to get going, and I won’t be making a stop back this way again. This here is the place you wanted to be. This is it.” The coat she wore wasn’t much, looked more like a spring jacket than anything else, maybe even silk, bright pink. She shivered as I stood in the door holding my hand out to her, all the time watching my dashboard clock too. I was about out of hand gestures other than the “come here” motion and to point to the ground.
“How save friend ass?” she said.
“What?” Her voice had been so quiet, the wind almost took all of it away, but I knew that she was speaking relatively coherent English. I had not imagined her fluency. She held her shoulders close, looking down into her lap. The map was gone, I guess, into her bag. I shut the door, shrugged my shoulders at the night manager through the big plate glass doors, and he shrugged his shoulders back and returned to Mayberry. I went around and climbed into my seat.
“His life. There was no donkey involved. It doesn’t matter. Really. In the end, I don’t guess I did a very good job of it anyway,” I said, looking out in the yellow-gray night of Fargo.
“Where . . . now . . . friend?” Yeah, I know it sounds like I’m mocking her, but I remember the few words she spoke to me, clearly. She did understand English pretty well, it seemed, but the way she spoke it was in these long, long pauses, and big chunks of clumsy language. Why she didn’t speak before, to me or to the troopers, I do not have an answer for.
“I have to go. Missy, I am guessing you have a pretty good idea of what I’m saying after all, and you’re welcome to come with me. I’m sure there’s plenty of room where I’m staying, and I promise, I will not lay a hand on you. I got other things on my mind tonight, anyways, but if you do not get out of this cab in the next minute, I am pulling out, and this will be the last you see of Fargo with me.”
“Where friend?”
“He’s dead. Been dead about thirty years now. As I said, I guess I didn’t do too good a job of saving him in the end, or his boy for that matter.” I put the rig in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. “The wife and I haven’t seen the boy in over fifteen years. And that is surely my fault.” I found US-10E out of town pretty easy and Fargo disappeared in my side mirrors, the blackness of the night taking over as we made our way out to Detroit Lakes and the cabin I had reserved three weeks before, when the Leonid predictions were made public.
The drive was going to take a little less than an hour, even with creeping my speed up some, and I was about sick of Bob Wills. The radio offered not a lot up there, though I eventually found a classic rock station playing the Stones so I left that. Sometimes you hear a line and there you are, back where you thought you had left, many years in the past. I was home by the time this song came out, but I knew what they meant. Sometimes it is just a shot away.
“Ha. We used to listen to these guys in the bunkers, and I bet there was no joking about the lyrics there. I can tell you, not too many people would have been singing along in the jungle. We were definitely always looking for shelter. Well, we got out of that and came home, but he didn’t just love the movies, like you. He didn’t just want to chase them, he wanted to be in them. That was where I lost him, when he headed off to Hollywood.
“The last time I heard from him was a letter he’d mailed with a key to his apartment. You cold? You want me to turn up the heat?” She nodded and by this time had stopped looking out the window. “Here, put this on,” I said, and that was the one and only time I shared the blanket Shirley Mounter had given to me, the last time I left her, after Fred Howkowski’s funeral. Nobody else but me and the boy even knew it was there, and I wasn’t talking, and these days, surely he was not talking, either. Maybe he’d even forgotten it after all these years. For me, though, every time I unlock the cab and climb on up, that blanket is the first thing I look for, to make sure it’s still with me. It is the one thing I have left to remind me of the happiest period of my sorry-ass life.
Handing it over off the cab bunk just then was the only time I had let anyone else use that blanket, ever, and even at that moment, I didn’t like the idea too much. But Shirley had given it to me that final time so I would have something to hang on to, and I thought that girl needed something to grab just that moment too. Probably, she looked at me instead of the window because we were no longer on the movie tour route for her, but I liked to think it was something else. I adjusted the heat and opened up my flannel. The T-shirt underneath was about fine for the temperature she liked but there was no way to get that flannel off while I was driving. You learn some talents for the road, but those that involve your safety belt and the steering wheel are too big a challenge even for a lifer like me.
“Hang on, we’re here.” I pulled up to the registration office and filled out some paperwork. The place was totally deserted, not a single car or foot track in the snow, but they had left all the right stuff in a drop box on the door as promised and the cabin was easy to find. It was perfect, just what I was hoping it would be.
I offered the girl the bathroom first, while I unpacked a little and made some entries into the logbook, and then I cleaned up, myself, when she was out of there and sitting by the fire I had started. We had made good time, and still had an hour before the first real wave, when we headed out to the fields. I gave her the spare coat I always keep in the cab’s storage. The occasional snowmobile whined off in the distance, but even that settled down by midnight, when the first streaks started appearing across the sky. We had nearly this whole area to ourselves.
“Look! There!” I pointed, and her eyes followed my hand. “Make a wish.”
“Wish,” she repeated, arching her neck back, nearly being swallowed by my bulky winter coat.
“Don’t tell me or it won’t come true. Hell, I probably already know what your wish is, anyway, but I don’t think you’re gonna find that money.”
“Wish . . . someone . . . hear . . . me.”
“I’m near you,” I said, stepping up behind her, wrapping my arms around her tiny waist and resting my chin on her shoulder, my beard scratching against the shiny material. Even in that bulky coat, she felt like a bird.
“Hear me . . . no . . . not . . . near you . . . hear . . . me.” She pulled away and ran a few yards from me.
“I hear you,” I said. “I hear you.” Watching the meteors always killed my neck and this was the longest-lasting patch I had seen in years, lots of ways for my wishes to ride into reality.
I lay down in the snow and watched them for a while until the wave eased up. The next big shower was scheduled to start in about four more hours, so I was going to go in, set the alarm clock, and catch some shut-eye. Just then, I remembered something and started doing those lying-down jumping jacks you can do. “Hey,” I yelled to her, “watch this.” The snow out there was a little stiff, not as bad as it had been in Bismarck, but also, not very dusty. No matter, it was for sure no challenge against my two hundred pounds.
“This here is called a snow angel. See? Like an angel? The wings, the robe? We used to make them when we were kids, on those rare winter snows when we got more than an inch in West Texas.”
“Angel,” she said and shook her head a little. I guessed they don’t have angels there, where she was from.
“Uh, like a ghost, impression, imprint, something.” I got up and she looked at it.
“Ghost. Hiroshima. On wall,” she said, studying the shape I had made in the snow after I had crawled up from it. I’d heard about that, some people just vaporized in the blast, leaving only negatives of themselves on the walls around them. I had always thought it was, you know, made up for drama’s sake.
“Here, you make one,” I said, offering her the untouched snow to my right. She shook her head and began walking away. “Wait, come on, you go into the cabin. I’ll stay out here, in my rig. It’s fine, I do it all the time.” We went in and I checked the fire, made sure it would last the night. These new cabins all have the modern conveniences anyway, so the furnace would just kick on if the fire went out in the night. That bathroom even had a nice whirlpool in it I’d been hoping to use that night, but it would have to wait for the return trip.
“There you go, fire’s all set. I got the alarm set in my rig, for the next round. You want me to wake you?” She thought for a minute and then nodded. I set the nightstand alarm for the same time I’d be setting mine in the rig.
“What wish? Ghost friend?” she asked.
“ Yeah, that would be good, wouldn’t it? Fred finally getting his speaking part, but only me getting to hear it?” I laughed. “No.”
“What wish?”
“I told you, if you tell someone, it won’t come true.”
The rig’s cab held warmth pretty well, so it was still a reasonable temperature when I climbed back in, started her up, took my clothes off, and jumped into the sleeper. I wrapped myself in the warmth of Shirley’s Pendleton, the wool sliding up between my legs, giving me a rise even then, scratching against my belly as I buried my nose in the blanket and dreamt her smell was still with me, after all these years. That was the last thing I remembered until the alarm went off at a little after four, like I had planned. I bundled up in the same clothes I had taken off the night before, figuring I would change after I’d gotten myself a shower. I shut the rig off and stepped down into the dark. Usually I just leave it running, even if I have to hit a rest area john, but out here, it was so quiet, so removed from every part of my world that the diesel engine seemed to violate the stillness. It was just going to be me and the meteors. No snowmobiles would be flying around that time of night, or morning, or whatever.
Avoiding the neck cramps, I lay straight down to wait for the shower to peak. The rig was finishing its last hisses and ticks, but two other small noises bled through the sharp air, almost not there at all, but constant. I couldn’t place them at first, but then they came. The fire must have gone out. The lower hum sounded like a small house furnace and I could see a slight string of smoke dancing out of the chimney, but the other sound should not have been going. Even if it was, I should not have been able to hear it.
The first few stars shot through and I laid my wishes on them, like horses racing across the sky, as I do every year. I had no idea if any of them would ever come true for me, but that not knowing always allowed me to wish for things I shouldn’t have wished for in the first place.
That second sound kept bothering me, so I got up from the ground, dusted myself off, and followed it to the front door of the cabin, which was wide open. I ran in. The alarm I had set was buzzing away and I shut it off. Then only the sound of the furnace disturbed the early morning.
“Miss, are you in there?” I called. The bed was empty, but no sound came from the bathroom. My down coat sat at the edge of the bed. “Shit!” I ran outside and dug in my jeans for my penlight. It went half the world away with me to Vietnam and I actually still had it when I stepped off the plane back on U.S. soil. It wasn’t worth a damn out there in the Minnesota winter night.
Her footprints were visible in the foot diameter the penlight offered, but it wasn’t going to be much use to me. I started the rig, hit its headlights, and grabbed the Maglite from its mount on the dash. She wasn’t that far away. I found her in the angel I had made, lying there in her pink satin jacket, the backpack straps around her shoulders, the pack firmly on her back, and that map gripped tight in her hand again.
I dug out the card of that trooper who took my statement. He’d given it to me in case I needed to do any follow-up or some damned thing, who knows. Maybe he knew. I was no longer in North Dakota and Minnesota would be out of his jurisdiction, but I had to start somewhere and he seemed as good a place as any. It was too late to do anything else. I sat with her for a couple hours, until my bones, and really, the rest of me, couldn’t take the ache anymore. “Hi, this is Tommy Jack McMorsey,” I said into my cell phone as the sun came up in her wide-open eyes.
