The Driftless Area

by Tom Drury

  Shane’s criminal career tailed off beginning then. He felt cheated by the death on his hands. He became random and blunt where once he’d been deft and professional. He started breaking into cars again, and sometimes he would only cut up the seats and kick the dashboard apart without taking anything.

  His good money was gone in little over a year. He lost a car to the bank and his landlord took him to court to have him evicted. But then a security guard he knew told him a story. It seemed that the manager of a car wash in Limonite had been skimming from the receipts for years and putting the money in a safe inside his house. The guard speculated that he and Shane might break into the house and open the safe with a cutting torch.

  Shane talked him out of it. Too risky, he said, and the money would probably burn in the process. The guard did not read between the lines of Shane’s refusal. Had he been aware enough to do so, he probably would not have mentioned the safe to Shane anyway. The guard didn’t want to do the job, he only wanted to dream about doing the job.

  But a few nights later, Shane went in his old blue pickup to the house of the manager of the car wash and got him to open the safe. It took about half an hour of yelling and knocking him around. He was a thin man in his forties with a large collection of sports memorabilia and stubborn with the years of squirreling the money away and knowing it would always be there. Shane tied the man to a radiator before he left but he didn’t tie him very well, it turned out, because as Shane was driving away the man came out of the house with a rifle and shot a hole in the window of Shane’s truck.

  At first you could hardly see where the bullet had gone through the glass but overnight the window cracked into a thousand pieces and Shane pushed them out into the pickup bed and swept them onto the ground.

  “Did you hear about Pete?” said Roland Miles.

  “Pete who?”

  Pierre and Roland were walking north out of Shale in the right-of-way beside the railroad tracks. They had their rifles and were going to a grove a mile out where they would shoot at bottles.

  “Oh, you know. Pete. What the hell’s his name.”

  Pierre studied some jet contrails that had fanned out against the light blue arc of the sky. “Pete at the hardware store?”

  “No,” said Roland. “He’s always at the Clay Pipe Inn. Sells, I don’t know, cleaning products door to door or some shit. It’s like one of those jobs you can’t figure out how he got it or how he makes any money.”

  “Pete Marker.”

  “Yeah. Why couldn’t I think of that.”

  “Why, what’d he do?”

  “He got robbed.”

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  “Well, he’s leaving the laundromat in Arcadia the other night, getting in his car, you know, and it’s just like in the movies, ’cause there’s some guy in the car already, down in the backseat, with a knife.”

  “I thought Pete Marker drove a pickup.”

  “Yeah, but extended cab.”

  “So what’d he want?”

  “Money. Had some big folding knife. And, of course, Pete Marker, you know, he’s got like four dollars on him or something. Guy never has any fucking money. He owes more money than you could possibly steal off him.”

  “He must have been scared.”

  “Hell, yes, he was. He went back in the laundromat all shaking. They didn’t believe him at first. They’re, like, ‘Calm down, Pete.’ ”

  “And where did the knife guy go?”

  “Got away.”

  “Strange,” said Pierre.

  “Isn’t it? When’s the last time somebody got stuck up with a knife in Arcadia?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “For four dollars? That’s right, because it never happens. So I was thinking. Pete Marker. Pierre Hunter. Some Pierres are actually called Pete. This might be the guy you took the money from.”

  “That would make more sense if he knew my name.”

  “I know, you said that. But you ride all the way from Minnesota and never once, ‘Hi, I’m So-and-so?’ It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, you don’t hitchhike. It’s not like the Chamber of Commerce.”

  “Somebody stops, you know, ‘Here, get in. What’s your name, stranger?’ and you’re like, ‘Fuck off ’? I don’t get it.”

  “Oh, I might have told him,” said Pierre. “I don’t care if I did. I’ve been working out at the Geoff Lollard school.”

  “I hope you know what a joke that sounds like.”

  “I do. That’s why I said it. But it is a good workout.”

  “What if he has a knife?”

  “There is a way to get a knife. You take hold of the hand it’s in and smash it against something until they let go of it.”

  “And you can do this?”

  “Well, I don’t know, but this is the first I’ve heard of a knife.”

  They walked along with the sound of their boots on the gravel beside the railroad ties.

  “I laugh in the face of danger,” said Pierre.

  “You do.”

  “Yeah. You should hear me.”

  Roland raised his hand as if taking an oath. “What’s that?”

  Pierre stopped and listened. Something was moving away from them in the grass between the tracks and the fence. Roland saw the animal first and then Pierre did too as it ran along the fencerow with its champagne coat shining in the sun.

  “What is that?” said Pierre.

  “I would say that is a badger,” said Roland.

  Stella sat at the edge of land beyond the trees, and the lake lay below her with the moon’s reflection riding on the water. Tim Geer knelt nearby, idly flipping a knife off the back of his hand so that it turned over once in the air and landed point down in the dirt.

  “How much longer will it be?” she said.

  “Soon,” he said. “Have patience. I have one more bit to do, but your part is done. In fact it’s more than done.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re too close to Hunter, that’s what I mean.”

  “I want to tell him everything.”

  “He won’t believe it if you do.”

  “I just feel like we set him up.”

  “Set him up? You pulled him from that water, where he was going to die.”

  “But for what? I’m saying. To die another way.”

  “I don’t know that he will.”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “He took the money. I didn’t make him do that.”

  “You knew he would.”

  Tim took the knife from the dirt and wiped the blade by drawing it between the thumb and finger of his left hand.

  “Two different things,” he said.

  “You said you have something left to do,” she said. “What is it?”

  “I have to get lost.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I better not say.”

  They got up and walked back through the evergreens toward the light of Stella’s house. At the edge of the clearing the pale form of a barn owl flopped in the grass and lay still and flopped again. Stella picked up the owl with her hands around its wings and looked into its dark and divided eyes. Then she raised her hands and opened them and the owl flew up and on its way.

  Tim drove off and Stella went into the house and up to bed. She lay in the dark thinking for a long time. Tim had a point. Pierre would not believe what had happened to her. No one would.

  Fifteen months ago she had wakened in a burning room and made for the window. But the fire moved the same way, washing over her and pushing her to the floor, and only when she emerged from the window and did not fall did she understand that she had gone between lives. She had done this before, she knew what it was, but never from violence.

  For weeks she traveled the countryside with no more form than a shadow. She was looking for Tim Geer. He was not easy to find, because very few could hear her when she spoke, and even fewer were brave enough to answer.

  Yet those w
ho did answer tended to know Tim, or they had heard of him, or they knew of someone who had met him, and day by day she made her way toward the Driftless Area, where late one afternoon she found him in his backyard on the outskirts of Eden Center, tending a trash fire with a stick.

  “Can you help me?” she said.

  He looked around. “I’ll try.”

  “You hear what I say.”

  “Clearly.”

  “I’m in kind of a predicament.”

  “You’ve died,” he said. “There was a fire.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “And I have to find the one who started it.”

  “Maybe it was electrical.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I would know more if I could take your hand. But for that you would need hands.”

  “Yes, that’s the other thing.”

  “You come back tomorrow,” he said.

  She returned the next afternoon at the same time. Tim was walking around the kitchen of his house sorting returnable bottles and cans and putting them in wicker baskets.

  “I talked to a nurse I know,” he said. “Asked for hopeless cases to pray for. So she names this person and that one. Mostly old, like me. Then she says they got this young lady Stella Rosmarin in the hospital down in Desmond City. Awful story, really. She fell off a ladder and hit her head. They’ve had her on a machine of some kind for two months.”

  “She won’t get better?”

  “Doesn’t sound that way. And if she will, you’ll know.”

  “Can you take me there?”

  “Sure,” said Tim.

  They rode to Desmond City in Tim’s car, an old beige Nova with woven seat covers. The receptionist at the hospital said Stella Rosmarin was in Five South and no one but family could see her.

  She said goodbye to Tim and went up to the ICU and found Stella in a silver bed where her life was being carried on by mechanical means. The transfer was unstoppable, once she was near, like gravity, like the completion of the fall she might have made from the window of the burning house. She lay quietly for a while, feeling the robotic rhythm of the machine and the sadness of two deaths.

  Then she wrenched her hands from the rails where they’d been bound by light blue tape. She pulled off the mask of the respirator and sat up, drawing air into her lungs. A man in sea-green hospital clothes came and stood looking at her, saying nothing.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t need these things.”

  Then more doctors came. They passed a clipboard around and stared at the clipboard and at the red numbers of the monitors and at her.

  “Where are you?” said one.

  “In a hospital.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I came up the stairs.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Stella.”

  SEVEN

  STELLA’S BICYCLE leaned on its kickstand by the door of the Jack of Diamonds. She was standing in the kitchen with Keith Lyon, who was introducing himself by showing her how he chopped onions.

  With a red-handled knife from Sweden he made a series of incisions until the onion was crosshatched like a globe but still in one piece and then with a sweep of the blade he spilled an array of perfectly diced pieces on the cutting board.

  “I don’t believe that,” said Stella.

  “I’ll do another one,” said Keith. “Watch closely this time.”

  “I was watching closely.”

  “Hey, Keith,” said Pierre. He stood in the doorway. “The state cop’s out here. Telegram Sam.”

  “For what?” said Keith.

  “I don’t know.”

  Pierre, Keith, Stella, and Charlotte Blonde gathered in the bar. The state trooper stood before them in tall black boots and with his hands resting on his utility belt.

  “Looking for a man,” he said. “Timothy Geer of Eden Center. Seventy-four years old. Last seen yesterday afternoon at Small Art Cinema. Arrived forty minutes early for the matinee. Informed ticket taker he would take walk in woods before movie. Headed down road in this direction. Presumably took one of the trails between here and there. Never came back near, as we know. His car still at movie house. Subject is five ten, hundred and eighty pounds, wearing black-and-green plaid coat. Anyone seen him?”

  They shook their heads. The name meant something only to Stella, and she said nothing.

  “All right. By the theater’s count this man’s been in the woods twenty-five hours. Search dogs on way but not here yet. Two hours’ light left. Need volunteers. Pairs to walk the trails. Very simple. Go out, come back.”

  The Jack of Diamonds did not open until five-thirty, so they agreed to lock up and go. Telegram Sam led them out to the parking lot, where he divided them in two teams and gave each team a trail map and a radio from the trunk of his cruiser.

  “Preset channels,” he said. “All link to me. Stay in touch. Push is talk, let up is listen. No need to touch nothing else. One map, one radio, one team. Buddy system. Do not lose sight of partner. Do not stray from trail. One lost; don’t need more. Make noise. Call out. If you hear barking that means dogs have arrived. Nothing to fear.”

  “What kind of shoe is he wearing?” said Charlotte.

  “No idea. Immaterial. Look for man, not at ground.”

  Pierre and Charlotte Blonde were one team. They went up the green trail for half an hour, arriving at the lookout tower where Roland Miles patched the mortar. The cold and rusted stairway took them to the light at the top. They stood looking out at the hills and ragged crowns of the evergreens.

  “This radio is heavy,” said Charlotte. “I bet it cost a thousand dollars. Here. Give him a call.”

  “Should I?”

  “Yeah. He said to.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Sam.”

  “That’s not his real name, Charlotte. People call him Telegram Sam as a joke.”

  “Just say trooper.”

  “Good idea, buddy.” Pierre pushed the button. “Trooper, this is Pierre Hunter on the green trail.”

  “Go ahead, Pierre.”

  “It’s pretty windy. We haven’t seen him. We’re up in the tower.”

  “Copy, Pierre. Dogs here.”

  “What?”

  “Dogs in woods.”

  “Ten four,” said Pierre.

  “Search dogs.”

  Pierre put the radio in his coat pocket.

  “Ten four?” said Charlotte. “You ass.”

  Keith and Stella crossed the ridge a mile northeast of the tavern and the path started down. They walked along calling for Tim Geer. The forest grew dark and there was a sound high in the trees.

  “Do you hear that?”

  “It’s just the wind.”

  “They’ve got the dogs.”

  “Really,” said Keith. “Guy’s probably sitting home by the TV.”

  “Nah. He’s here somewhere.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Kind of. He helped me out when I was new in town. The last time I saw him he told me he was going to get lost.”

  “That’s a strange thing to say.”

  “I didn’t know what he meant. But now I guess I do.”

  “Who would get themself lost on purpose?”

  “Maybe he thought it would lead to something else.”

  “Like what?”

  They came to a big tree that had fallen across the trail and they sat on the bark and swung their legs across. It was getting dark but back in the woods the white rocks held the light.

  “That I couldn’t tell you,” said Stella.

  When Charlotte Blonde was nervous she would talk about her baby—what she had learned to do or say, what she had figured out how to knock over, things like that.

  They were far beyond the tower now, in a ravine, and the deep wet ground gave beneath their feet, and the wooded slopes rose left and right.

  “Her latest deal is she wants to know how everything works,” said Charlotte. �
��Like the other day she drags a suitcase from the closet and says, ‘How works, Mom? How works?’”

  “Wow, that’s cute as hell,” said Pierre.

  “Yeah. You know, so I open the suitcase, put some clothes in it, whatever, then I say, ‘This is for when you go away.’”

  “So she understood.”

  “Well, no. Not at all. She somehow thought that I was going to send her away. So I said, ‘Oh, no, honey. Not you without me. But if we went away. On a trip.’”

  “She seems kind of jumpy.”

  “Well, she is. Where are we?”

  “I don’t know,” said Pierre. “There should be paint on the trees.”

  “I’m not seeing paint,” said Charlotte.

  The trail was gone. They looked at the map and because they didn’t know where they were it was not helpful. But it seemed that if they went up the side of the ravine they might find the trail and even if they didn’t they would be moving into daylight, which seemed advisable. So they climbed the north slope leaning parallel to it and pulling themselves along by the trunks of trees.

  After about twenty minutes Pierre and Charlotte reached the top of the ravine and came out onto a high field with long grass and rows of trees snarled with vines and runners. The sun was going down behind hills that were miles away.

  “It’s an orchard,” said Pierre.

  “I see that.”

  They walked at a right angle to the tree rows, looking up and down and seeing only birds darting across the open spaces. It was quiet and strange in the orchard but they were relieved to be in a place where people had once worked. In a little while they came up behind a silvery shed maybe twelve by fifteen and walking around to the front they found an abandoned road on the other side.

  An unroofed plank floor lay before the shed and Pierre stepped up onto the soft wooden boards and opened a paneled door and looked inside.

  “This must be where they sold the apples,” he said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Charlotte. “We were asked to look, we looked. We did our part for society.”