Now the radio was saying the weather was worse than the storm of ’seventy-eight. The wind-chill was going down to minus fifteen. A truck in front of him was weaving. Boogie took his foot off the gas. The truck ahead straightened out.
When he met Darlene, he had just moved to Lexington from the flat western end of the state and was living in a rooming house until he could get his bearings. By the time he did, he and Darlene were talking about how many children they wanted. After five years, they were still childless, and they were not sure why she couldn’t get pregnant. Sometimes it seemed that she held herself separate from him so that there was an essential part of her he could never reach. He wished they could act like kids again together. He wanted to boogie in the snow with her.
Boogie got his nickname when he was just a toddler, dancing to his mother’s old fifties records. Everybody found his little dance amusing. He was petted, an only boy in a houseful of girls. His nickname had always embarrassed him, but Darlene loved it. Not long ago, they saw Little Richard on TV entertaining the President at some Washington thing. Little Richard, in a black suit with sequined sleeves and gold buttons and braid, was screaming out the gospel like he’d just invented it. Darlene said, “How can President Bill just set there like a knot on a log and not get up and boogie?”
At the airport, Boogie followed a trail to the armory, where he was flagged in. Several small airplanes on the tarmac resembled seabirds, snowbound and frozen to the beach. Two large aircraft—a DC-9 and one of those windowless horse-transport planes—stirred his desire to fly. He should have been a pilot, he thought. But that hadn’t occurred to him when he dropped out of college.
He stopped at a gate and rolled down his window.
“Hey, we’re going out in the Humvees!” a heavy man in an orange deer-hunting suit said to him. “Why, you’re Boogie Jones. I knew your wife at Fort Campbell.” The guy laughed apologetically. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” A drop of clear liquid was poised on the end of his nose. “I’m liable to get myself in trouble,” he said with a muffled guffaw.
“Point the way,” Boogie said.
“It’s going down below zero tonight,” the man in the orange suit said. “That wind-chill factor is what makes it so cold. It’s going to be twenty below wind-chill.”
He directed Boogie to a plowed-out parking area. Boogie skidded into the spot a little too fast, jumping the brakes too hard. It made him angry to think of guys like that out on maneuvers with Darlene. Or in some godforsaken desert half the world away. Boogie had parked too close to a van and couldn’t get his door open, so he had to start the engine again and back up. He knew the kind of stuff that went on in wartime, but when Darlene was over there he had tried not to think about it. Instead, he had followed the maps on television, the movements of the Humvees through the shifting, whispering sands. Line from some poem? He followed the air war, then the tanks. She wouldn’t have been in a plane or a tank. She would have been in a tent or a barracks. He knew perfectly well the unspoken reality of war: It was a sexual high; so far away from home, in the face of death, anything was O.K. In fact, when she was gone, he sort of got to know Dottie Henderson next door. Her brother was over in Saudi flying Warthogs. Dottie had CNN on all the time and taped the other news programs. She had three TVs and three VCRs. Whenever a Warthog went down, Boogie went over and waited with her to find out whose plane it was. She gave him food she was always apologizing for. But she was far too old for him, and she had old-fashioned women’s interests, such as theme luncheons. Her garden luncheon featured dirt cakes—chocolate cakes baked in flowerpots and decorated with Gummi Worms.
Boogie’s partner for this evening was Glenn Forrest, an insurance salesman. “These Hummers are little tanks in jeep clothing,” Glenn said, patting the low top of the vehicle almost affectionately. Boogie grunted.
Behind the wheel of the Humvee, Boogie set forth on his night mission. It was his turn in the combat zone, he thought. In the war, her unit was called up and his wasn’t, and now, in the snow, he was on duty. But again they were apart.
In a Humvee, he could practically fly through the drifts. He wheeled around the airport, crunching through a foot and a half of virgin snow, then headed out to one of the subdivisions to pick up a surgeon who had to get to the university hospital. The doctor said he had surgery scheduled in the morning. “It won’t happen,” he said as he got in the back seat. He was carrying a gym bag and wearing jeans and a Wildcats jacket.
“What kind of surgery?” Glenn asked the doctor.
“Just a splenectomy. It’ll probably be rescheduled.”
“My wife had her appendix out,” Glenn said. “She almost died because they waited so long to go in. They thought she had food poisoning.”
Boogie said, “My wife and I went to the clinic there last summer.” He hesitated, wondering whether to ask this doctor’s opinion. Then he blurted out all about the fertility tests he and Darlene had taken.
“My sperm count was over ninety million,” Boogie said. “They told me that was great.”
“Wow,” Glenn said. He took off a glove and blew on his fingers.
“That’s good,” the doctor said, leaning forward from the back. “What did your wife’s test show?”
“They said there wasn’t anything they could find that was keeping her from getting pregnant. Just takes time, I reckon.” Boogie glanced back at the doctor. “Wouldn’t you think if you shot off ninety million bullets at once, one of ’em would hit the target? And that’s ninety million in about one drop. There’s billions!”
“Depends on your aim!” said Glenn with an explosion of laughter.
Boogie wanted to ask the doctor whether something could have happened to Darlene in the Gulf War to cause her infertility, but he lost his nerve. The doctor thanked him for the ride when he got out.
As Boogie fooled with the windshield wiper knob, Glenn said, “This is the kind of night that makes you think it’s time for Jesus to show up again. Don’t it look like the end of the world? If Jesus was to come back here right in the middle of this snowstorm, boy would he be mad! He’d start making a list. First, he’d want to know why families ain’t at home together of a night and why all the children’s carrying guns to school. And then he’d go through all the murders and sex crimes. And he’d want to know why there’s not enough snowplows in Kentucky.”
“I imagine,” Boogie said. He let Glenn continue with Jesus’ list while he concentrated on his driving. There was so much crazy talk going on these days anyway, Boogie just let it swirl. The shifting, whispering sands kept drifting through his head.
He had a job to do. As he smashed through snowbanks, he pretended he was piloting an F-14, the Tomcat. He carried Phoenix and Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles. Birds and snakes. He was on combat air-patrol loiter time, he figured, waiting for the action. From the TV news, he had learned all the aircraft over there. The snowed-over DC-9 at the airport had twin engines on the sides like the A-10 Warthog. The Warthog was the ugliest plane ever built, yet it could pirouette. It could waltz and swing. It could probably even boogie. It had a cannon protruding from its nose that was powerful enough to kill a tank or a Scud launcher. It would fly in low, and so slowly that its tight moves were beautiful.
Back then, when Darlene was over there, he found out that the letters in THE PERSIAN GULF could be rearranged to spell U.S. FIGHTER PLANE. For months, he kept thinking there was surely some significance in that.
All evening, Boogie was busy saving lives. He ferried some nurses to Good Sam Hospital, on Limestone, and transported a woman to the emergency room after she had fallen on ice. The ambulances were slipping and sliding, too. He called the state police to see if he could get word about Darlene. They said traffic on I-75 was backed up for thirty miles. The governor had closed the interstates.
“I could drive this thing right on out to I-75 and find her,” Boogie said to Glenn.
“The cops don’t want us out there.”
“Th
ey probably couldn’t catch us in this. We’d hum right up the median.”
Glenn lit a cigarette and blew out clouds. He said, “I bet them rigs stuck on I-75 are mad as hell.”
Boogie nodded. Ernie, the truck dispatcher at the plant, would be full of tales of truckers trying to get their shipments through the mountains south of Lexington.
A stranded motorist cussed at Boogie for refusing to drive him to the mall. “Sorry, buddy,” Boogie said with a wave. “Hospitals have priority.”
At one of their stops, a nurse handed them slices of pizza and paper cups of coffee. Gratefully, they gulped the hot food. Boogie felt warmer. He wondered if Jesus would like pizza. A moment before, Glenn had pronounced Jesus a Republican. Glenn was a one-man talk show.
Boogie’s toes felt frozen. He couldn’t seem to get any heat from the engine. The Humvee was canvas-topped, so the cold came right in. On the desert, it would have been the heat. Darlene had told him it was so hot she thought she’d die. She got an infected sunburn, despite precautions. It was so dark in Desert Storm, he thought as he headed out Nicholasville to Man o’ War. He recalled his fear the night the ground war began. The vision of all those tanks rumbling along seemed even darker and more hazardous than the air war. When planes like the Tomcat and the Strike Eagle took off at night, you could see a dim silhouette on the runway, in the blackness, but mainly all you saw were blinking lights and long plumes of blue-white flame bursting from the afterburners. In combat, the afterburners would glow again. Now he felt his afterburners charge. He imagined fireworks and speed.
He turned down a side street. A snowplow had created a bank of snow at the entrance to the next street. He busted effortlessly through the three-foot dune.
“Hot damn!” cried Glenn. “My little boys would sure love this.”
When they arrived back at the armory, a news team was on the scene, its familiar van topped with a satellite dish like a huge suction cup. An attractive woman was waving a microphone at him. She was standing by a snowbank. He recognized her face from the evening news—gorgeous Shelley Collins. He hadn’t realized she would be so tall. She was tall like a camel.
“Could I talk with you a moment, sir? We’re live on camera.”
Carefully, Boogie picked his way through the snow toward the woman. He didn’t want to fall on television. He shivered with cold.
“What’s your name?” she asked. She didn’t even have a hat on. Her glowing blond hair was round like a helmet. Snowflakes buzzed around her face like moths.
“Boogie Jones,” he said. “William Jones, actually, but everybody calls me Boogie.” Did he have to explain this? He felt embarrassed. Who would care what his name was or even whether he was embarrassed?
“Well, Boogie, I see that you have been helping to get some emergency errands done. Can you tell us a little about what it’s like to ride around in one of these Humvees that we see behind us here?”
“Well, they’re powerful machines,” Boogie said, stomping the numbness from one foot. “You can drive ’em anywhere. The Humvee can go just about anywhere you want it to go except straight up.” He laughed. “It would put a billy goat to shame.”
“And how warm is it inside there? Pretty chilly?”
Boogie laughed again. He could imagine sailing easily into the deep waters of flirtation. He said, “It’s got a manifold heater, meaning the heat comes off the engine? And it ain’t much. It’s about like having a dog breathe on your boots.”
He was about to add that he was looking for his wife, that she was lost in the snow, but Shelley Collins thanked him briskly and said, “Now, back to you, Murray.”
Ten minutes later, inside the armory, as Boogie hovered over a radiator trying to get thawed out, a state policeman came in calling, “William Jones. William Jones.” Boogie jumped.
“Got word from your wife,” the officer said with a smile. “She saw you on television and got a cop to radio in. She said to tell you she’s fine.”
Darlene didn’t get home until early Wednesday, when the interstates opened. She had been stranded north of Lexington and hadn’t gone to Pineville. She came in chattering and complaining that her hair was dirty. She went to fill the bird feeder first thing and saw that he had filled it. She seemed edgy and impatient. It was sort of fun, she told him after she had made some coffee. She had been holed up with about fifty people—mostly truckers—in a motel lobby. The motel let them have cots and bedding.
He gazed at her, his wife, imagining her sleeping in a motel lobby with a bunch of truckers. Or in the desert with an army. They had never really discussed what she might have done in Saudi Arabia. Whenever he brought it up, she snapped something about trust. He recalled her words when he met her at the airport on her return. All smiles, she had said, “There’s my rootin’, tootin’, boot-scootin’ Boogie!”
“There were some little kids at the motel,” she said now, handing him a mug of coffee. “Their parents were bored stiff, but the kids were so full of life. I made a snowman with a couple of little boys. One of the kids was named Shane and the other one was Jade. I told them a story about the Great Snowman. I told them to make a wish and the Great Snowman would bring them something nice. Their daddy watched me like a hawk. You can’t even carry on a conversation with a child these days without everybody jumping on you.”
She began to sob. A rigor surged up Boogie’s spine, like a snake swishing. He grasped her and held her tight, as if he were catching her as she was falling.
“I was so worried about you,” he said, his face brushing her ponytail. Her hair was oily and smelled of tobacco.
“I couldn’t get word to you,” she said. “I should have stayed with Mama.”
“It was strange,” he said. “When you were over there in the war, I kept looking for you on television and never could find you. And this time you found me on television.”
She stopped crying. “I had a dream about the war,” she said, breaking away from him. “I thought I was in the barracks again. For a second, I thought a Scud had hit.”
She sat down on the couch. He moved aside a pillow and sat close to her, putting his arm around her. She squirmed.
“It was just the snowstorm,” she said. “There was lightning, and the thunder woke me up. I couldn’t believe it was thunder. How could it be thunder?”
“It was thunder snow,” Boogie said soothingly. “When you have lightning and thunder in a snowstorm, they call it thunder snow.”
“I thought it was old So-Damn Insane after me.” She laughed and blew her nose.
“No, old Saddam won’t ever get you, not if I can help it,” said Boogie, grinning.
He remembered the fireworks over Baghdad, the dark sky above Kuwait, the black oil slick—all the pictures he had seen on television. He didn’t know what she had seen over there. It would have been entirely different, he realized. It wouldn’t have been those pictures at all.
“I wasn’t crying over the war,” she said. “I wish you would just forget about that. I wanted to make snow cream with those little boys. I wanted to do that worse than anything. You’re not supposed to make it anymore, everything’s so dirty, but that new snow looked so pure. I haven’t had snow cream in forever.”
“I bet we could make some,” said Boogie hopefully. “We could dig down and get some clean snow out from underneath.”
“I don’t think we’ve got any vanilla,” she said.
“We haven’t got any milk either,” he said, disappointed. “I forgot to get any.” For a moment, he felt inadequate, as if the best he could do for her was reassure her that thunder could indeed occur in a snowstorm. But he knew he could do better than that. It struck him that he had to stop hovering over her so much, so a clear avenue would open up between them. Then they would have a baby. It had to be this gulf between them that was keeping a family from taking root. He knew it would seem silly if he said that aloud, but there was truth to it, he was sure.
Darlene stood up, shivering, like a tree shedding sno
w from its branches in the wind. Her hair was pulled back with a ruffle of gauze, a glorified rubber band. Her eyes had slightly blue shadows under them. He stood beside his wife, speechless, as she vibrated with energy.
She said, “As soon as the roads are clear, I’m heading down to Pineville with Fentress’s medicine. I’ll have to take off from work again, but she’s got to have it by tomorrow night.”
What flashed into Boogie’s mind was the Tomahawk cruise missile, sailing directly above a Baghdad street, with tiny little fold-up wings like some weird bug’s. It cruised along as if it had a mind of its own, and when it reached the corner, it turned left.
Rolling into Atlanta
Each night when Annie got in from work, she watched the late movie on TV and ate a cold boiled egg with a Coca-Cola, sometimes with sesame crackers if she remembered to bring a few packets from the restaurant where she had been a hostess for the past two weeks. She had been drifting off to sleep between one and two, and at five o’clock a loud noise somewhere in the building always woke her briefly and made her visualize a door slamming on her past. That she translated every sensation into metaphor nowadays was perfectly appropriate, she thought.
She was staying in a rent-free condo. The owner, a lawyer named Clayton Scoville, was white-water rafting on the Zambezi. She had never met him and didn’t know what he looked like. There were no photographs in the place, just undistinguished oil reproductions (a mountain, a waterfall, birds in flight). She wasn’t used to such luxury—Mexican-style tile, curvilinear cabinets, halogen lighting, bottomless carpet, two bathrooms. Red parrots cavorted in the emerald jungle print on the shower curtains. The lawyer used black bath soap, bright green towels. He subscribed to Outside and Time and Smart Money. A closet was crammed with sporting goods, mostly items that didn’t seem to belong here in Atlanta—ice skates, skis, ski clothing, a fur-lined cap with fold-down earflaps. She imagined he was a person who could pick up and leave, a person like her. She had arrived with two suitcases and within hours had bought a secondhand Honda Civic that had been repossessed by a finance company. In the car’s trunk were a pair of baggy-style shorts and a matching loud-pink floral shirt—size ten, too large for Annie—and a tattered copy of Freaky Deaky.
Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail Page 7
