by Tim Wirkus
“All told,” she said, “it’s not the life I anticipated for myself, but I’m far from unhappy.”
Gazing down at his bobbing gut, a reclining Sérgio considered Harriet’s account in contemplative silence.
In my own corner of the hot tub, I stared down into the water, refusing to look Harriet in the eye. Her story had left me feeling edgy and defensive. The whole thing seemed wrong somehow—inaccurate, I mean. I didn’t think she was lying outright or anything like that, but her experience of Mormonism was so radically different from my own that I felt an impulse to challenge her story, to stand up for my church and for Craig D. Ahlgren, my recently acquired ally.
“But that’s enough of that,” said Harriet before I could muster a response. “I wasn’t fishing for sympathy with that story—merely commiserating—so before either of you feel obliged to offer condolences that I’m not looking for, I’ll wish you good night. If you’ll excuse me then.”
“Of course,” said Sérgio. “And thank you for commiserating.”
Harriet extricated herself from the hot tub, steam rising from her ghostly-pale body. Wrapping herself in the vast motel towel she’d left on the little stairway leading up to the tub, she slipped her wet feet into her shoes and made her way toward her lodge through the steadily falling snow.
“Ugly business,” said Sérgio once Harriet had gone.
The look of disgust on his face was too much for me.
“You know what, Sérgio?” I said, a little more abruptly than I’d intended. “The whole thing’s a lot more complicated than Harriet made it out to be.”
Sitting up a little straighter, brow furrowed, Sérgio said, “How so?”
An old pickup truck rattled down Main Street. I actually had no idea. All I knew was that I was ready for this stupid road trip to be over—Harriet’s story had sparked a fire of resentment in me, a resentment whose target I couldn’t quite discern.
After an uncomfortable moment of silence, I said, “It’s just complicated.”
Sérgio regarded me through the steam like he was meeting me for the first time. I lifted myself from the water.
I dried off with the scratchy motel towel, my resentment expanding beyond my own doughy body, beyond Sérgio, beyond Harriet, beyond this hot tub, and the sorry confines of Fremont Creek to encompass something much, much bigger. I felt it so intensely that I was almost surprised its heat hadn’t melted all the fresh white snow around me.
Wrapping the flimsy bath towel around my shoulders like a cloak, I stormed off to my room, leaving Sérgio alone again in the hot tub to watch the relentlessly falling snow blanket the parking lot.
XV
I woke up to the sound of someone pounding on my door. I’d been dead asleep, dreaming of an idyllic camping trip I’d once taken with a few friends the summer before I’d graduated from high school, but then the dream had been interrupted by a series of urgent knocks.
I sat up in bed and remembered where I was: the Teton Motor Lodge in Fremont Creek, Idaho.
“Daniel,” came Sérgio’s voice through the door. “Are you in there?”
“Yeah,” I said, lying back down.
“We leave in five minutes,” called Sérgio. “There’s been a development.”
I pulled the blankets more tightly around myself.
“I’m going to sit this one out,” I yelled toward the door.
“What?” yelled Sérgio.
Thanks in part to our conversation in the hot tub the night before, I’d reached that inevitable road trip saturation point where I couldn’t stand the thought of spending another minute with my traveling companions. Sérgio and Harriet were both fine people probably, but I’d spent just about every waking moment with them for the past five days, and I was ready for a break.
“I’m not coming,” I called out.
There was a pause, and I burrowed down further into the blankets, trying to recapture the soporific warmth they still contained.
“I’m not sure you understand,” yelled Sérgio. “We’ve found someone who might know Salgado-MacKenzie.”
“That’s fine,” I yelled. “Let me know how it goes.”
I fluffed my pillow and turned over, closing my eyes before sleep could entirely escape me.
There was a long pause.
“If you change your mind,” yelled Sérgio, “we leave in five minutes.”
I did not change my mind, and instead of joining them on another wild goose chase, I slept until 10:30 a.m. When I got up, I took a long hot shower, the water pressure in the jaundiced tile bathroom surprisingly strong. I ate a kingly late breakfast at the Spud. The Sunrise Bonanza: scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese, bacon, sausage, country potatoes, ham, and onions all griddle-fried together and then topped with white sausage gravy—an unforgettable meal. Then I headed down the bright, snowy street, listening to the new Tinted Windows album as I walked, an undeniable bounce in my step. At Fremont Creek’s tiny public library, I found an open computer and spent a couple of hours planning out my new, improved life. I looked for apartments in Salt Lake. I read up a little on the LSAT and studied law school rankings.
I’d been crushed for so long under so many failures that I’d forgotten how good it felt to have real ambitions. I liked feeling smart and competitive and promising, and I loved the straightforwardness of the new path I’d chosen: How do you get into a good law school? You get decent grades as an undergrad, and more important, you do well on the LSAT. That’s pretty much it—easier said than done, maybe, but undeniably more straightforward than what I’d been doing for the past few years.
By midafternoon, I’d worked up an appetite with my research, so I walked back up the street to the Spud for lunch. Inside I found Harriet sitting at the counter reading the weekend edition of the Fremont Creek Crier. She had shed several layers of wooly outerwear and draped them over the low, padded back of her barstool, but still wore an itchy-looking sweater and a cable-knit beanie, which, together with her wire-rimmed reading glasses, lent her the air of a shabbily genteel deep-sea fisher.
I was not thrilled to see her. Before I could back out the door, though, she looked up from her paper and waved me over.
“Daniel,” she said. “I couldn’t find you back at the motel.”
She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater.
“I was at the library,” I said.
“Well, feel free to join me,” she said, nodding at an empty, ketchup-smeared plate, and a half-full basket of fries. “I’m just finishing up my lunch.”
I rummaged for an excuse not to stay, but Harriet knew as well as I did that I had nothing else going on.
Defeated, then, I sat down at the barstool next to hers, and the waitress behind the counter asked what she could get for me. I ordered a huckleberry milkshake and a BLT and hoped silently that Harriet would leave soon.
I was surprised to see her there without Sérgio, and in spite of my still-lingering resentment, I felt a pang of concern for the man, given his gloomy spirits the day before.
“Where’s Sérgio?” I asked Harriet.
She closed her newspaper and folded it in half.
“Chasing a red herring, I’m afraid,” she said, unhooking the stems of her glasses from behind her ears—they were those kind of glasses—and removing them from her face.
“But he’s okay?” I said.
She set her glasses on top of the newspaper.
“I hope so,” she said. “He’s somewhere near Lodgepole.”
Lodgepole was an old resort town about forty miles up the road.
“What’s he doing in Lodgepole?” I said.
“Near Lodgepole,” she said, tapping the newspaper with her glasses. “I’m not sure where exactly. I left him in Lodgepole, though—that’s the last place I saw him.”
“And this was the lead he was so excited about this morning?�
� I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I came over here for breakfast a little past seven and found Sérgio already halfway through a stack of pancakes. He wasn’t happy by any means, but he did seem a little more resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to find Salgado-MacKenzie—you know, starting to come to terms with it, at least. We talked about maybe throwing in the towel on our search and heading up to Yellowstone for some sightseeing before Sérgio had to fly home.
“We were just about to leave when a couple of old-timers we hadn’t seen before came in the diner. They looked like locals, so in the name of due diligence, we asked if they knew any writers in the area, or if not, any Brazilians. Boyd and Vern were their names, and they’d been off fishing all week, which is why we hadn’t met them yet.
“They thought over our question, and although they didn’t know any writers, Vern said he remembered a couple by the name of Fordis who’d lived here in town about twenty, thirty years back. They’d only lived here a year or so, but he was a hunting and fishing guide, and she sometimes helped out with the books at the old barbershop. Vern said he was pretty sure she was Brazilian.”
“The barbershop connection sounds promising,” I said, feeling drawn back into the search in spite of myself.
“Yes,” said Harriet. “But then Boyd said that Mrs. Fordis wasn’t Brazilian, she was Spanish. Vern said no, he didn’t think so—he was pretty sure Anne Fordis was Brazilian, or at least her people were. Boyd disagreed and they went back and forth for a minute, until I stepped in and asked if it would be possible to get in touch with Mrs. Fordis and let her settle the debate herself.
“Boyd said he didn’t see why not—the Fordises still lived in the area, just up the road in Lodgepole, in fact, but he could save us the bother, because Mrs. Fordis was definitely not Brazilian, she grew up in Spain. Vern said no, the woman definitely spoke Portuguese, but Boyd said Vern was completely mistaken on this one—she was Spanish of Spain, and old Gus the banker always used to sing a song about it, which was why Boyd was so sure she wasn’t.
“Sérgio and I had already gleaned the information we needed, so before we could be drawn any further into their debate, we thanked the men for their help and went and found a regional phone book. The Fordises were listed and Sérgio gave them a call. Anne Fordis answered and Sérgio introduced himself. When he explained what we were looking for, Mrs. Fordis got cagey. She said she had lived in Brazil for a while when she was a girl, but when Sérgio asked if she’d ever heard of Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie, she wouldn’t answer him one way or the other. Finally, she said she didn’t want to talk about it over the phone, but if we wanted to come by the house she might be able to tell us more.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s a big break.”
“That’s what Sérgio thought,” said Harriet. “But I was much more wary—if this woman knew anything about Salgado-MacKenzie, why wouldn’t she say so over the phone? All signs pointed to Mrs. Fordis being very eccentric at best, potentially dangerous at worst. But Sérgio had to find out what she claimed to know, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. So we walked back to the motel to get the car and wake you up—we figured you’d want to come along.”
“I was very tired,” I said.
“So I heard,” she said. “We got the car, though, and made it up to Lodgepole in about an hour. We found the Fordises’ house just at the edge of town—a handsome A-frame with red trim and a nice, wide porch.
• • •
I could tell Sérgio was nervous (continued Harriet). He’d asked me about fourteen times on the ride up if I thought this was a legitimate lead, and I told him each time that I didn’t think he should get his hopes up. He knew that, I’m sure, but he obviously couldn’t help himself. Once we arrived, he was so keyed up that he just sat there looking at the house, drumming his fingers on the sides of his legs.
“Well,” he said after a minute. “I think I’m ready.”
We approached the front porch with some trepidation, walked up the three steps, and knocked. Anne Fordis herself answered the door, a hearty woman in her late sixties. She didn’t look eccentric—she was dressed conservatively in heavy slacks and a simple blouse—but really, what does that prove? She thanked us for making the trip up and showed us into the house. In the kitchen she introduced us to her husband, Ed, a big salt-of-the-earth-looking guy in a plaid shirt and work pants who sat at the kitchen table shelling nuts from a glass bowl and watching football on an ancient portable TV.
When he saw us, he held out a wide strong hand.
“I’d get up but my knees are shot,” he said.
We said that was fine and shook his hand.
Anne said, “We’ll just be in the living room if you need anything, Ed.”
So far, she hadn’t said a word about Salgado-MacKenzie, which worried me. I tried bringing up the purpose of our visit—Sérgio was being very deferential—but instead, Mrs. Fordis dodged the question, explaining instead that Ed had a lot of trouble getting around these days, which drove him crazy. He’d always been so active. Until fairly recently, in fact, he’d made his living as a hunting guide. Sérgio listened politely, but I could see him fighting back his curiosity. I was curious too—I wanted to get right down to business and find out if Fordis had anything useful for us or if she was just a lonely woman desperate for company.
In the living room, Sérgio and I sat down on a wide, floral couch. Anne sat across from us in a matching floral armchair.
She said, “Tell me again—why are you looking for this Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie?”
At least she remembered his name. That was a good sign, I had to admit. Sérgio recapped his history with the writer, and I explained about the translation I’d done for the Faint Constellations anthology, and the letters that Salgado-MacKenzie and I had exchanged.
Mrs. Fordis listened carefully, hands crossed and resting in her wide lap. When we’d finished explaining ourselves, she gave an evaluative huh and then looked us over for what felt like minutes. Then she stood up from her armchair and left the room.
Another tick mark in the eccentric column.
Sérgio said, “Do you think she’s all right?”
I said, “All right in what way?”
Before he could answer, though, Anne Fordis returned wearing snow boots and a long wool coat. She held a pair of gloves and a stocking hat in one hand and a set of keys in the other.
She said, “Where we’re headed, you need four-wheel drive. Your little Toyota isn’t going to make it in this snow, but I have room for one of you in my truck.”
Sérgio said, “Excuse me?”
“Which one of you is coming with me?” said Fordis, a little louder. “I only have room for one, and we don’t have all day.”
“Going where?” I said.
“You?” she said, pointing at Sérgio. “Or you?” She pointed at me.
I said, “Can you give us a little more information, please?”
She said, “You’re looking a gift horse in the mouth right now. The third option is that you can leave right now, both of you.”
“Could you give us a moment?” I said.
“You know I have other things I could be doing right now,” said Fordis.
I said, “Thirty seconds, please.”
“Well, we can’t just dawdle away the morning,” she said.
“Thirty seconds,” I said.
With an exasperated sigh, she left us alone in the living room.
I turned to Sérgio.
“I don’t think you should go,” I whispered, fairly certain that Anne Fordis would be listening in on us.
“You want to be the one to go?” said Sérgio, who, to his credit, sounded willing to entertain the possibility.
“No,” I whispered. “I don’t think either of us should go.”
“Why not?” he whispered, not very softly.
I took a step closer, lowering my voice even further.
“Because Anne Fordis gives every indication of being a crank,” I said. “The only question for me at this point is whether or not she’s also dangerous.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Sérgio, looking away.
“Sérgio,” I said. “Use your head. She won’t tell us what, if anything, she knows about Salgado-MacKenzie. She acts put out when we ask her questions, and now she wants to take you somewhere in her truck, but she can’t say where you’d be going or who you’d be meeting with. How do you know she doesn’t plan to drive you into the mountains and kill you? Make a coat out of your skin or something?”
“You honestly think she’s going to skin me?” whispered Sérgio.
“Okay,” I said, “she probably won’t skin you—although we don’t know that she won’t—but I do think she’s going to disappoint you.”
Fordis came back into the room, slapping her gloves together.
She said, “Have you made your decision?”
“I’m coming with you,” said Sérgio.
“It’s decided then,” said Anne Fordis.
I said, “It is, although couldn’t you have told us over the phone that only one of us should come?”
She seemed offended by this question and said she’d needed to make sure we were the right kind of people. Then she nodded at Sérgio and said, “Are you ready?”
He said, “Absolutely,” and jumped up from the couch.
On their way out the back door, Sérgio turned and said over his shoulder that he’d meet me back at the motel. And then the door closed and that was that.
I let myself out of the house—I waved to Mr. Fordis as I passed the kitchen, but he was engrossed enough in his football game that he didn’t notice—and then I headed back here to Fremont Creek.
• • •
Harriet dipped a stale French fry into the little ketchup tub and tossed it into her mouth.
I’d missed the most exciting development in days. I almost regretted sleeping in.
