The Driftless Area

by Tom Drury

  Now you bring flowers and rocks from a rock polisher, when they can help only you. Where were the presents when I was alive? I did get a yellow rose at a dance once but it broke off and I stepped on it while trying to pick it up. Some said I must have been high to trample my rose that way, but I knew there must be some cure from this terrible uneasiness of the young. That time in U.S. History class, for example, when I made the mistake of saying “Tens of thousands of families gathered up their meager belongings and set out for the Oregon Territory in a single covered wagon.” I realize now how it sounded. And you laughed, first some of you and then many, although you knew what I meant, because we had all read the chapter. The laughing hurt, you wouldn’t believe how much. So while you drive by now and you might say, How nice, how sad, and think that something has been resolved, I can tell you that it has not. Bring me back, if you want to help. I would be the one who came back. It would be good if one person could. I would speak out at public forums against alcohol and cars. Whatever you want me to say. Out here it’s just the birds and the sun and the grasshoppers that zap around in the air. It’s strange that this would end up being my place when I was only here for such a short time.

  “Now, Pierre, I know you have resisted these sessions,” said the counselor. “That’s been obvious. And you’re a bartender. You have a vested interest. But this essay. This essay is just weird.”

  “Is it?”

  “For a number of reasons, yeah. But let me hone in on just one. You say she would speak out against cars.”

  “Right.”

  It was the last day of class, and the counselor was meeting with the students one by one to tell them whether they had passed or would be required to take another session. He and Pierre were in the office and the counselor sat behind the desk, worrying his earring and tapping a thick black pen slowly against a clipboard.

  “Why cars?”

  “Well, I just think that if you took away cars, a lot of the problems that people have with alcohol they wouldn’t have. I mean, they might have other problems, but they would be less likely to kill somebody.”

  “How would they get from place to place?”

  “I mean the cars we have now. They’re already working on ones that won’t crash no matter who’s driving—even if nobody’s driving.”

  “Alcohol is the problem with alcohol, Pierre.”

  “No, I get that. But you have to admit, the transportation system is insane.”

  “What about you? You weren’t driving. Instead, you broke into somebody’s house.”

  “No, I didn’t. The door was unlocked. I was just mistaken.”

  “And still are, Pierre. And still are mistaken,” said the counselor. “You might think you’re unique, but let me tell you something. You are not. And I don’t say this harshly. But you’re just like a thousand people who come through this program. You think something outside yourself is going to fix you up. Be it a drink. Be it a drug. Be it a relationship. And then you’ll be all right. But you will never be all right. Never. Until you know why you need fixing up in the first place. Does any of this make sense to you?”

  “Not really.”

  The counselor shook his head and picked up the clipboard. “That’s about what I figured.”

  “You’re not going to pass me.”

  “That’s correct. My recommendation is one more session. So all I need you to do is sign this document.”

  He handed the clipboard to Pierre.

  “I don’t want any more classes.”

  “That’s why this is only a recommendation.”

  “I don’t want to sign it.”

  “Well, you don’t have to.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “I’m asking you to.”

  “No.”

  That night the political screamers were on television, screaming about Social Security with their small faces in motion beneath Monster’s ashes. Nothing of what they said made any sense at all, yet they said it with such volume and such determination to drown each other out that it became entertaining.

  Pierre drank from a green bottle of beer and set it on the floor beside his chair. He tried to think of anyone he knew who worried about Social Security or even gave it a moment’s thought.

  No, there wasn’t anyone.

  After a while Pierre fell asleep in his chair. He could sleep anywhere and it did not matter if there was light or sound. If you liked sleep and music, he thought, you could always be happy enough. . . .

  He dreamed that he and Stella Rosmarin were walking through her house and, though the hallway was dry, all the rooms were flooded. There were Dutch doors, and the top halves stood open so you could see the water that filled the rooms and lapped against the walls.

  “Strange, huh? Now look at this,” said Stella.

  She flicked a wall switch and flames lit up the perimeter of the ceiling. They started in a corner and ran all the way around as if in some unconventional natural gas setup.

  “That doesn’t seem right,” said Pierre.

  Then someone knocked on the door in the dream and the sound got louder until Pierre woke up and found that someone was knocking on his door.

  It was Roland Miles, who was married to Carrie Sloan.

  “What time is it?” said Pierre.

  “I don’t know,” said Roland. “Eleven thirty? Twelve? Twelve-thirty?”

  “You want a beer?”

  “Carrie hit something with her car.”

  Pierre wiped the sleep from his eyes. “Is she all right?”

  “Yeah. The car isn’t, though.”

  “What’d she hit?”

  “The car’s all messed up on the side. I don’t know. A gas pump. The station outside Arcadia.”

  Pierre got two beers from the refrigerator and they stood in the kitchen and opened them.

  “When was this?”

  “Couple days ago.”

  “She hit a gas pump.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Either that or something near it. She’s got to be the most careless person I’ve ever known in my life. And she wonders why did this happen, why did that happen. She didn’t look where she was going. That’s how it happened.”

  “It doesn’t sound like anything.”

  Roland took a drink and his eyes widened, as they do when you’re in the middle of a drink and have something to say.

  “You wake me up, scare the hell out of me,” said Pierre.

  “Why are you scared? Do you like her?”

  “’Course I like her.”

  “Yeah, I know you do.”

  Roland Miles had been all conference as a halfback for the Shale-Midlothian Lancers but had wrecked his knee in his second year of college and had come back from Nebraska on crutches and proposed to Carrie Sloan.

  She said yes and Roland quit college and stayed on in Shale. That was four years ago now. When his knee had healed, he got a job with the parks department, which was a reliable employer of former sports stars.

  Pierre could not figure out what Roland’s area of responsibility was, and Roland did not seem especially concerned about this himself. He was always driving pickups around with rakes and barrels and sawhorses in the back and no evident requirement to get anywhere.

  Roland and Carrie’s marriage was famously combative. You would always see them fighting in one parking lot or another. Once they argued with such sarcastic cruelty while playing on opposite sides of a volleyball game that the other players walked away in embarrassment.

  They’d each had one affair that Pierre knew of but seemed somehow unlikely to divorce. They were simply two emphatic personalities who were fated to marry and find out what that was like and fight about it.

  Pierre and Roland had not been friends that long as they had more or less hated each other in high school; once Roland had even broken Pierre’s nose by throwing an elbow at him in football practice.

  No one thing cleared up the animosity. It was more that others of their age had moved away or disappeared
into parenthood and so they ended up becoming friends through attrition. Plus they were both hunters, and Roland had a sense of honor about hunting that Pierre admired.

  A good example would be when some kids from out of town began sneaking up on farmhouses around Shale and picking off tame ducks and geese, and Roland responded by shooting out the windows of their car with bow and arrows while they were in the White Hart bar in Rainville.

  Pierre and Roland sat drinking beer with their feet up on Pierre’s table.

  “I saw Eleanor Carr tonight,” said Roland.

  This was a woman in town whose son had died several months ago on an island in the Pacific Ocean. It was said to have been a diving accident, but there were also rumors of foul play and nobody knew what the real story was.

  “What was she doing?”

  “She had these garden shears and she was walking around cutting weeds.”

  “In her yard?”

  “No. The sidewalk. Not even her sidewalk.”

  “I thought she wouldn’t leave the house.”

  “That’s what I thought too.”

  “What did her son do?” said Pierre.

  “Somebody said he might have been working for the government.”

  “The U.S. government.”

  “What I heard.”

  “Maybe it was the Department of Agriculture.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Weights and Measures.”

  Roland got up and dropped his beer bottle in the galvanized garbage can near the door. “I wouldn’t want to die on an island,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” said Pierre. “If you have to die, an island wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “I think I’d take a mountain over an island.”

  Pierre drove out to the lake one Saturday at the end of June. He told himself this was all he meant to do. Just see the lake. And there it was. A wedding was taking place on a houseboat a hundred yards from shore.

  The wedding party stood on the boat in their tuxedos and white dresses and the bride’s veil and gown moved around like streamers in the wind.

  It seemed a little contrived but at least they would always have something to talk about.

  He left the beach. The Lake Road took him to the turnoff for Stella’s house. Of course this was why he’d come. He drove up into the evergreens where the road was striped with light and shade.

  In the clearing of the yard Stella lay in a red bikini and dark glasses on a beach towel in the grass. She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees when she saw him.

  “I knew you would come,” she said.

  “How?”

  “You left your skates.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Pierre. “I’d forgotten all about them.”

  Stella’s house stood far above the lake, but you could see the north shore through the trees if you knew what you were looking at. In the winter Pierre hadn’t noticed how run down the place was. There were gardens on either side of the house, and they had grown up and fallen into wild tangles of dead vines and new roses.

  “Lay out with me awhile,” she said.

  “I’m not really dressed for it.”

  She lay back down, and because of the sunglasses he couldn’t tell if she was looking at him or not. “Take off as much as you want,” she said.

  Pierre sat down and pulled off his boots and socks and lay beside her on the grass and closed his eyes.

  “You’re a modest guy, Pierre,” she said.

  “I never do this,” he said.

  “You should. You’re pale.”

  “I used to work on farms. And that’s how you got your tan. So I always felt like you should get it by working.”

  “What strange ideas you have,” said Stella. “What did you do on farms?”

  “Oh, pick up rocks. Bale hay. The usual farm things.”

  “And what would you do with these rocks, once you had picked them up?”

  The sunlight pressed on his eyelids and the smell of her suntan lotion was warm and summery in the air.

  “Throw them in a loader. They come up in the fields and you have to get rid of them or you can’t cultivate or something.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” said Stella. “I’ve been wishing somebody would come by and see how I was doing. Or bring me something they’ve read and say, ‘Have a look at this. It’s pretty interesting.’”

  “You should get out more,” said Pierre.

  “Mmm. I know it.”

  “I just read a book. I could bring it to you.”

  “Is it interesting?”

  “Yeah, but sort of confusing.”

  “I don’t mind that.”

  “The idea of the book is that time doesn’t exist. And everything that ever happened or ever will was here from the start. And even, I think, different versions of what will seem to happen. Or, not here, but somewhere. That’s the confusing part. As to where it is exactly. But all at once.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “I might if I could understand it,” said Pierre. “But even while I was reading it, I would turn the page and think, Well, what is that?”

  “If not the passage of time.”

  “Right.”

  “Yes, bring that, and I’ll give it a read.”

  Pierre opened his eyes. The colors of the grass and sky seemed to vibrate. He propped himself up on one elbow and turned toward her.

  “Stella.”

  “Yes, Pierre.”

  “Would you like to go somewhere with me sometime?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I need to be here. But you can come back whenever you want.”

  Then she got up and went into the yellow house and came out carrying the ice skates.

  “What did you do to them?”

  “Treated the leather, scoured the blades.”

  “Thank you,” said Pierre. “This is something else I owe you for.”

  “You’d better learn to ride that horse.”

  Stella lay out a while longer under the sun and then went into the house and put the white robe on and took a string of lights from a cupboard in the kitchen. She arranged them around the bonsai tree on the table and plugged them into the wall with an extension cord. They were small decorative lights in the shape of acorns, with cloth leaves and wire vines attached to the cord between the lights. Some of the lights were shaded light green and others bronze. There was nothing special about them, but she had found them in this house and they helped her to think.

  She sat at the table looking at the lights. Sharp at first, they began to blur and pulse as she watched. Her hands lay flat on the table and her breathing slowed and made no sound. She raised her head and closed her eyes but the lights remained in her vision, dimming slowly to darkness. And after a while a series of images began to play in her mind. Some of them she’d seen before, some not. And they always began the same way.

  A gloved fist breaks a window

  An armchair begins to burn

  Walls blister, shatter, and fall

  The bed rises, an island in a lake of fire

  Now Stella’s breath became rapid and broken, and her eyes darted back and forth beneath closed lids.

  The Driftless Area at night, ridged and green like the folds of a blanket

  Pierre skates on the lake

  A child’s hand draws in blue crayon on a paper plate

  A round stone flies through the air

  Pierre sits sleeping in the forest, a gun across his legs

  She opened her eyes, and wiped her face with the lapel of the robe, and put her hand over her hammering heart.

  Carrie Miles sat down at the Jack of Diamonds and dropped her keys on the wood.

  “Hey, bartender,” she said. “How about a Phillips Screwdriver.”

  “Well, all right, then,” said Pierre.

  He made her the drink and gave it to her with a red straw and she drank a third of it right off.

  “Guess what,” she said. “Roland’s sh
utting me down again.”

  “Since when?”

  “I don’t know. A week or so.”

  “How will you pay for this?”

  “Good question. I can’t.”

  “All right.”

  “Pierre, I swear, if you told me right now I could snap my fingers and make him disappear, I would do it.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  She set the drink down, raised her hands on either side of her face, and snapped her fingers.

  “You’d feel like shit if he really disappeared.”

  “Well, he’s not going to, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “He gets mad, you get mad, it’s a vicious cycle.”

  “He told you he was mad.”

  “He mentioned something about the car.”

  “Well, yes. The car. And fuck him. He should marry that if he loves it so much.”

  “That you hit a gas pump.”

  “No. A cement post at the gas station that’s, like, the most deceptive post ever. So he says no money until that’s fixed.”

  “You work. Why don’t you just cash your check?”

  “Oh, because we have this idiotic system, which I let him talk me into a long time ago. That if one of us makes more than the other, they’re entitled to everything the other one makes. But they have to dole it out fairly, of course. Like it’s fair that I don’t even have five bucks for smokes.”

  “Never heard of such a thing.”

  “Well, according to Roland, it’s common practice among couples.”

  “Hell, I’ll give you five dollars,” said Pierre. “I’ll give you fifty.”

  “Really? You have that much?”

  He took his billfold out and opened it. “I’ve got twenty-three dollars.”

  “Give me eighteen. I don’t want to take all your money.”

  Pierre counted out eighteen dollars and gave it to Carrie and put his billfold away.

  “Something’s different about you,” she said.

  “I graduated from beer school,” said Pierre. “That was a rite of passage.”