The Driftless Area

by Tom Drury

  Pierre stepped into the shed. It was empty but for a wooden table with a drawer and some old bamboo rakes in a corner. Rafters ran crosswise beneath the peaked roof. He opened the drawer, which was divided into slots by intersecting wooden lath.

  “Come on, Pierre,” said Charlotte, from the doorway. “I don’t even want to be here, let alone traipse around in some godforsaken building.”

  Then a voice called out Pierre’s name and he jumped in the darkness of the shed, but it was only the radio in the pocket of his coat.

  “Man found,” said Telegram Sam. “All is well. Come back. Subject in good shape.”

  Charlotte took the radio from Pierre’s coat, pressed the button, and said, “Who found him?”

  “The dogs.”

  They walked down the abandoned road, a green tunnel through the trees, reasoning that it must go down to the highway. Prairie grass and maple saplings filled the roadbed. After a quarter mile Pierre ran into a chain hidden in the grass and fell over it. He got up and lifted the chain and saw that it ran across the road anchored to trees on either side.

  “They ought to give you some warning on that,” said Charlotte.

  Their long walk had taken Pierre and Charlotte Blonde up and around the Jack of Diamonds and when they came to the highway they were on a bend of the road south of the tavern and knew where they were and walked up around the bend to the parking lot.

  There a pack of tricolor beagles strained at their leashes and bayed at the old man, Tim Geer, who sat eating a grilled cheese sandwich in the back of one of three police cruisers now in the lot. The dogs did not seem to realize that their job was done or maybe they only wanted the sandwich.

  Pierre crossed the parking lot and stopped and put his hand on Charlotte’s shoulder.

  “I know that guy,” he said. “He was in the park in Desmond City on New Year’s Eve.”

  “Talk to him,” said Charlotte. “All he’s been through, he could probably stand seeing someone he knows.”

  Pierre walked over to the police car. The old man was sitting sideways on the seat with his feet on the ground and a Jack of Diamonds plate on his lap.

  “Do you remember me?” said Pierre.

  Tim Geer looked up with his calm and buried eyes. “Oh, yes.”

  “I got in trouble that night.”

  “You told me you knew what you were doing.”

  “I might have been exaggerating. So where were you?”

  “All over the place. Once I got off the trail I sort of lost track of time. Spent the night in a little house.”

  “In an orchard.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “You should have gone down the road that runs by it. It comes out eventually.”

  “Then you wouldn’t have found it, would you?”

  “The road or the house?”

  “Either one.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Think what you could do with a place like that.”

  “Start an orchard, I guess.”

  “I’m telling you as plain as I can. And I know it ain’t that plain. But you have to think about it. What you could do.”

  “Hunter.”

  Pierre turned. Telegram Sam was waving him away from the patrol car.

  “Mr. Geer’s exhausted,” he said. “Come with me.”

  * * *

  They went around the Jack of Diamonds and sat down at the cable spools in back.

  The state trooper lit a Chesterfield and flipped open a notebook. “Gee, it’s great when things work out,” he said. “Ain’t it? I mean, we practice shit that doesn’t go this well.”

  “Yeah,” said Pierre. He had never heard Telegram Sam speak in sentences before.

  “I’m thinking maybe you can help me, Pierre. I’m thinking of this knife incident over to Arcadia and maybe you might know something.”

  “What I heard, that’s about it,” said Pierre.

  “All right, I’ll tell you what I’ve found out and we can speak together in candor, I hope. On August the eighteenth you were riding in a pickup truck that ran off the interstate at the intersection of Highway 233. You were hitchhiking on the interstate, which is illegal, but I don’t care about that at this time. The driver of the truck stole your suitcase but was rendered unconscious and so you got your suitcase back and went along your way. Am I right so far?”

  “Who’ve you been talking to?”

  “Never mind that. I’m right or I’m not.”

  “You are,” said Pierre. “A backpack, but yeah.”

  “Now, the truck was registered to a Shane Hall, comes from up north, and, as near as we can tell, Hall was in fact the driver. Later that evening, which you may not be aware, Hall, or the man we believe to be Hall, stole a car driven by a woman who had stopped to determine whether the truck in the ditch needed towing. Now the stolen car later shows up in the Quad Cities in an accident, and it would appear that it had passed through several hands by that time, and we’re working on that part of it. Or I’m not, but someone is. But the important thing about the car is that this Hall may be around here somewhere and operating under the alias of Bob Johnson or Bob Roberts. And that therefore he could be the guy with the hunting knife that went after Pete Marker, perhaps thinking he was you.”

  Pierre stretched his legs under the picnic table. “Well, yeah, maybe,” he said. “I don’t know how much of it’s true.”

  “Nor do I. And normally we would say, two guys fighting over a backpack, you know, who gives a damn. But we have business with Hall if we can find him. The cops in Minnesota say he tied some guy to a radiator and put him in the hospital a couple days before you met him. So this then is my question to you. What was in that backpack?”

  “Nothing. Clothes. He didn’t know what was in it. It was just something he could steal.”

  “Did you take something else from this guy?”

  “Did I take something?”

  “Because the way I see it, when you put it all together it doesn’t make sense. That he would be chasing you, okay. But.”

  “I never said he was chasing me.”

  “Well, there are those who think he might be. But why? That’s the part I don’t understand.”

  “I did knock him out.”

  “And how’d you do that?”

  “Threw a rock.”

  “Into a moving truck. That’s pretty good.”

  “Who told you it was moving?”

  “Was it?”

  “It was stopped.”

  “Okay, Pierre. Some people decide to do something if it makes sense or not and nothing’s going to stop them. That does happen. But if you know more than you’re telling me this is your chance to say so.”

  “I took the backpack and what was in it,” said Pierre.

  Pierre left work early that night and went to the Ship’s Harbor in Desmond City.

  This was a downtown bar with a maritime theme. A ship’s prow and cabin projected diagonally from the corner of the building, and you could sit inside the ship on a raised platform and look out the windows. But Pierre sat at the four-sided bar next to a kid named Kevin Little who had been two years behind him in high school.

  “Hey,” said Pierre, and called him Little Kevin.

  “Cut it out, I hate that,” he said.

  “It was your nickname.”

  “I always hated it.”

  “You should have said something.”

  “You were upperclassmen.”

  “Larger than life,” Pierre suggested.

  “It seemed that way.”

  “Really.”

  “Kind of, yeah.”

  “Miles might have been larger than life, but now he’s just life size. I was more of a loser.”

  “You are a loser.”

  “Probably so. But a beautiful woman loves me. So there is that.”

  “Why aren’t you working?”

  “We found a guy in the woods today.”

  “Dead?”

&
nbsp; “No. He was lost. They brought in dogs. He’d been in there overnight.”

  “That’s lucky.”

  “It wasn’t ever going to happen any other way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Take a coin. No, forget that. Take two coins. Put them on the bar. One heads, one tails. On the bar.”

  Little Kevin leaned sideways on the bar stool and dug into his pocket and put two quarters between his drink and Pierre’s.

  “Good,” said Pierre. “Now, think of something that you wonder if it will happen or not. Okay? Are you thinking of it?”

  “Yeah. My disability claim.”

  “What’s your disability?”

  “A metal press fell on my arm at work.”

  “You don’t seem disabled.”

  “No, I am. Trust me. For certain things I have to do I’m pretty disabled.”

  “Well, that’s rough. What else is new?”

  “You were doing something with these coins.”

  “Oh, right. You want to know about your disability.

  Let heads stand for yes and tails for no. Now ask yourself, can they both be true?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can both coins? In other words, can you both get and not get the disability on your arm?”

  “Well, no, of course not.”

  “So what you’re telling me is one of these coins is accurate and the other one’s a big liar. Even though the answer is in the future. And how could that be? Because the future has already happened.”

  “No, it hasn’t.”

  “The coins say different.”

  Kevin picked up one of the coins and stared at it. “Nah, I don’t buy that,” he said.

  “I just thought of it.”

  “It doesn’t tell you anything if you think about it for very long.”

  “If all the events from the beginning of the world to the end were laid down from the start, I wouldn’t call that nothing. And we just travel across them. Think of it.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Maybe the future’s like someplace you’ve never been. Like Sydney, Australia. You ever been there?”

  “I never have.”

  “Exactly. Me neither. But we wouldn’t say it hasn’t happened yet just because we haven’t been there. We wouldn’t say it might be a big city or it might be a dump by the side of the road, and it won’t be either one till we arrive.”

  “That’s true. But if things have happened and nobody knows what they are, what difference does it make? It amounts to the same thing as if they haven’t happened.”

  “I didn’t say nobody knows. Maybe you and me don’t. But if we knew how to see it. If we remembered how.

  Maybe we could.”

  “Fortune tellers.”

  “Real ones, though.”

  “You believe in that?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder.”

  Kevin Little left and then came back after an hour or so. Pierre sat drinking gin and was pretty well drunk by now. Whenever things were changing he was wide open to inebriation.

  “Where’ve you been, Kev?” he said.

  “I went to get these,” said Kevin Little. He showed Pierre his shoes, which were made of orange leather with brass buckles. “Guy I know bought them but they were too small.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Pierre. “Forget what I said before.”

  “About what?”

  “The coins. All that. I was just talking through my hat.”

  “Too bad I already wrote it all down while it was fresh in my mind.”

  Pierre laughed. “That’s pretty good, Kevin.”

  Half an hour later Pierre looked up to see that it was midnight and the bar was empty but for three guys playing cutthroat at the pool table. He picked up his drink and went over to the ship part of the bar and sat on a bench at the long table looking out at the cars going by in the street. He wished his friends would show up with white boxes of food tied with strings and they could have a party. Charlotte, Keith, Stella, Roland Miles, Carrie, and even his mother and father, since it was only imagination. Monster could nose around for dropped food. Pierre could see the wine and candles and hear the laughter around the table. He would talk into Stella’s ear. His parents would be proud to see them together.

  “You could do something like that,” he said.

  The bartender came over and collected Pierre’s empty glass. “Hey, Hunter, I hate to do this, but no more for you.”

  “No, that’s okay,” said Pierre. “My God, I understand. I of all people.”

  “Oh, and I forgot to tell you. You’re getting your harmonica back.”

  Pierre wondered if harmonica was the latest word for mojo or karma. “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “Some woman found it in her car.”

  “I don’t have a harmonica.”

  He got up and headed for the door. He had to concentrate on walking in all its aspects, it’s really quite complicated when you have to think about it, and halfway across the bar he stopped and put his hand flat to the pool table for balance.

  But in so doing he messed up the lay of the table and the cutthroat players objected and a fairly incoherent argument followed. They had bet on the game and so they wanted Pierre to pay them ten dollars for throwing it off, but, since there were three of them, he could not understand how they had arrived at ten. Finally they told him to leave, and he said he would, as that’s what he’d been trying to do anyway.

  Pierre walked out to the MGA and put the top down. He felt all right to drive. The lights and houses of Desmond City fell away and the road curved on into the darkness between land and sky. The air was cold yet his face was hot and sweaty. Halfway home he pulled over and walked down beside the road and was sick in the ditch. Then he stood up and looked up and down the blacktop, feeling empty of all gin and confusion.

  The next morning Pierre woke early to the happy and undeserved news that he had not a trace of hangover. And he thought it was true what they said about clear liquors.

  He made coffee with sugar and fried some hash browns and put milk in the coffee and ketchup on the hash browns and sat in the kitchen eating and reading the Register and listening to the Old 97s on the CD player.

  When he washed the dishes he sang along with the song about being born in the backseat of a Mustang on a cold night in a hard rain. Then he took his shotgun and the thin aluminum case that held the cleaning kit from the broom closet and set them out on the table.

  At midday he went down to the alley and took the MGA out into the streets of Shale. They were getting ready for Bank Robbery Days weekend, with banners across the street. This was an annual event celebrating Shale’s sole bit of historical fame, a failed heist of 1933 about which songs had been written and a book as well.

  The robbers were three brothers who set out to copy the Dillinger raids but had no luck at it. One left a coat with his name written inside the collar in the bank. Another gave their getaway car a flat tire by throwing nails on the pavement to hinder pursuit. Finally, late in the day, the brothers found refuge by taking over a farmhouse with a family in it.

  The high point of the weekend was a play staged in a machine shed on the site of the original farm. Entitled Hostages to Fortune, it told how the robber brothers broke in on the family and during a long tense evening came to understand that their situation was not too promising.

  Pierre had seen the play many times. It was funny even when it wasn’t trying to be. The big scene was a chess game played between the youngest robber and the father of the family, whose fear of the intruders has by this time turned more to scornful exasperation.

  Pierre ended up at the golf course where Carrie Miles was in her office writing names on a chalkboard. Roland’s graduation picture hung on the wall. He looked wary in the photograph, as if listening to a complicated offer that might be a ripoff.

  “Hey, you,” sa
id Carrie.

  “Let’s go for a ride.”

  “Where to?”

  “Nowhere special.”

  “Let me finish these, then I will,” she said. “Our last big weekend is coming up. You can read my poem while you wait. It’s the longest one I’ve ever done.”

  She said she had entered the poem in the Bank Robbery Days poetry contest. It was called “Lust for Larceny,” and this is how it began:

  The hapless brothers fell upon the town

  Set on taking the People’s Bank down.

  But every wild dream that you’ve ever seen

  Was sheer eloquence compared to their scheme.

  Incapable from start to finish, they

  Barreled ahead with the vault robbery,

  Ignoring somehow the mezzanine guard

  Who, coming down behind the banister,

  Managed to fire a tear gas canister. . . .

  Carrie’s poem ran on for many lines and three pages. It described the robbery and getaway and ended in a bit of a twist by questioning the town’s obsession with bank robberies.

  For I wonder if we are not lame

  To glory in faded criminal fame.

  Or, on the other hand, it just might be

  That we retain a lust for larceny

  Born in the old times of prehistory,

  When what you lost was better for me.

  Her chalk made a soft insistent sound on the board as Pierre finished the poem.

  “This is epic, Carrie,” he said. “I mean it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Yeah, thanks. I read up on it,” she said. “Of course I know it will never win. It challenges too many assumptions.”

  “It ought to win. But I think the way that prize works is old ladies giving it to other old ladies.”

  They rode out in the MGA, which Carrie had not seen since Pierre got it back. They passed the old Hunter house and went up to the power plant and parked by the fence as they had seven years before.

  “How strange this seems,” said Carrie. “Why were we here? Was it Skip Day? I remember being here, but why?”

  “Rebecca Lee sent you to break up with me.”