The Driftless Area

by Tom Drury

  “To kill you. Your strategy is no better than you are.”

  “I’m not dead yet.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  Pierre was the last one she found. The grass was dark and glistening with the blood he’d lost.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, damn.”

  She fell to her knees and took him by the shoulders and pulled him to her. And there she held him until the light began to come up in the orchard.

  TEN

  TELEGRAM SAM the state policeman came up at dawn on Sunday morning and ran yellow tape from tree to tree across the road where it opened into the orchard. He unfolded plastic sawhorses and arranged them in a line and went back to his cruiser and took a tape measure from the glove box.

  A sheriff’s deputy walked up with coffee in a Styrofoam cup. “They’re all three here,” he said.

  “And dead,” said the trooper.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Edmund Anderson said one, when he left.”

  The deputy poured the coffee on the ground and shook the cup out. “Well, there’s three now.”

  “Pierre Hunter?”

  The deputy nodded. “According to his license.”

  “Shane Hall.”

  “And some other guy.”

  “Do you have a camera?”

  “I was just getting it.”

  “You know I maybe could’ve stopped this.”

  “How?”

  “I’d heard things. About this Hall, and him looking for Hunter.”

  “Well, you heard it, sure.”

  “We all did.”

  “I didn’t. I don’t even know who they are. But my point is, you hear a lot of things.”

  “I agree with that.”

  “I probably hear about ten things a day that I could look back at any one of them after the fact and say ‘Oh, sure.’ But I don’t know which ones, versus the vast majority of stuff that’s just nothing.”

  “Well, you don’t know.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “I did talk to him, though.”

  “Hunter.”

  “Yeah. Tried to get it out of him—what was going on.”

  “You can’t help those who will not help themselves. What’d the guy have it in for him about?”

  “Oh, some deal. You know. Chance encounter. Unresolved incident from the highway.”

  “Well,” said the deputy, “it would seem to be resolved now anyway.”

  The reporters began arriving in the bright morning and they stood shifting their legs like eager horses at the boundary of tape. They looked with longing into the gnarled gray trees where the bodies were.

  “All right,” said Telegram Sam. “We will start. And you will have to be patient. There’s a lot we don’t know.”

  The Reverend John Morris woke up that morning and got out of bed at the parsonage and showered and shaved and got dressed and sat in the kitchen eating toast and listening to the news on the radio.

  At first they said only that some people had been killed and then a little later while he was washing the dishes they broke in on the music to give the names.

  He sat down again and smoked a cigarette. He had a flimsy red metal ashtray with fluted edges that kept sliding away from him on the table. So he laid the burning cigarette on the linoleum, got his toolbox from under the sink, and nailed the ashtray to the table, and the ashes bounced all over the place as he hammered.

  He picked up the cigarette and ground it out in the immovable ashtray. In a time like this he knew it was customary for a minister to say something profound to the people. And a good minister would do that, he thought: ditch the sermon and come up with something deep and moving—all the more moving most likely for its spontaneous quality.

  And God love the ones who can pull that off, but I am not among them, he thought. You’d have to be calm and wise, and look at me; here I’ve driven a nail into a perfectly good table.

  In the afternoon he went to the Jack of Diamonds. It was closed and Keith Lyon and Charlotte Blonde were hanging a black sash across the front below the windows. The pastor helped them, gathering the cloth and holding it off the ground as they worked.

  Then they stood back by the road and saw that it looked all right and somber and they went into the tavern, where they sat at a table and drank Ouzo from heavy octagonal glasses that bent the light, and they hardly spoke, because there was nothing to say.

  Pierre and Stella walked along the road arm in arm. The dirt was soft and gray and the shadows of the leaves made dark patterns on the ground. They could hear the sound of a stream ahead. Moss colored the stones and elaborate mushrooms sprouted from the bark.

  “And then what?” said Pierre.

  “You go down them,” she said.

  “Down the stairs.”

  “Right. And you walk for a long way, and then you come to a room.”

  “At the bottom of the stairs.”

  “No. You go down the stairs and then you walk for a long way. To a room, with a light and a bed.”

  “Like a motel.”

  “Yeah, kind of. Like a hotel.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No, that’s what it is. So you will know it. And you lie down. Which you’ll want to do because you’ll be very tired. And so you go to sleep. And what you dream becomes your new life.”

  “Will I remember this?”

  “Probably not. Most people don’t. But I will. And I’ll find you. I promise.”

  “Maybe I’ll remember.”

  “When I see you again you will. Maybe not all of it. But enough.”

  They crossed a low stone wall and walked down to the stream they’d been hearing. There was a small island in the center with the water crashing around it, and a fallen evergreen formed a bridge from the bank. They walked across, holding their arms out for balance. In the center of the little island white boulders framed a slanted green door like that of a storm cellar.

  The sign on the door said:

  THIS DOOR IS

  TO BE KEPT CLOSED

  AT ALL TIMES

  NO EXCEPTIONS

  “This is it,” said Pierre.

  “I can’t go with you.”

  “Really.”

  She put her arms around him and kissed him. “I’m sorry, Pierre. I love you.”

  “Maybe you can go with me partway.”

  “I can’t.”

  Pierre reached down and took hold of the brass handle of the door. “It’s locked,” he said.

  “Use the key,” she said.

  He took the key from his pocket and turned it in the lock. Then he opened the door and let it down easy on the white rocks. Stone stairs went down into the darkness.

  “Well, they probably couldn’t make this much scarier if they tried,” he said.

  “I know.” She was crying.

  “I would do it all the same,” said Pierre.

  He went down the stairs and she watched him go, and when she couldn’t see him anymore she closed the door and sat down on the rocks. She stayed on the island through two nights of rain. Late on the third night she appeared at the Jack of Diamonds, where Charlotte Blonde gave her a change of clothes and Keith fixed her supper and Charlotte took her down to the storeroom and made up the pullout sofa for her to sleep on.

  * * *

  The rain stopped in time for Pierre’s funeral. Musicians came down from Desmond City to play Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, which Pierre had once played in church. Allison Kennedy and the Carbon Family performed “When the Roses Bloom Again.”

  And John Morris gave the eulogy, part of which went like this:

  “These are the days when we say ‘at least,’” he said. “Perhaps you’ve heard this in yourself, or a remark that someone has made. ‘At least Pierre was in love.’ ‘At least he got the men with the guns away from the crowded play.’ ‘At least his parents did not live to see what would happen.’ That is one I find particularly strange. Yet this is what we do. We try t
o find a plan in operation and when we don’t find one we make it up. Ladies and gentlemen, we make it up. This is not to say that there is no plan but only that we in our limited vision cannot see it. How could we? For we are inside a great and wondrous machine that is more or less of a mystery even to those who think about it.

  “One man passing through, another coming home. A random moment on the highway. A rental car that collides with a chain in the dark of the woods. Where was this body in relationship to that body. Scraps and maps and rumors in the newspaper. We say that we owe it to Pierre’s memory to know the smallest detail. But I must say I don’t believe it. What happened in that orchard can’t be known and it can’t be undone, as much as we would have it otherwise.

  “What may be in our power to undo, however, is our tragic avoidance of the brevity of life,” said the Reverend Morris. “A friend of Pierre’s told me that in one of their last conversations he expressed the opinion that living is ‘fun.’ ‘How do you mean?’ she asked him. His answer came in three parts, which I would characterize as art, love, and nature. More specifically, Pierre said he found it fun ‘when leaves move.’ Now we may at first glance say, ‘How childish is that?’ but maybe there is something to it. Perhaps what he meant is that this planet and these lives that we have been given are opportunities we do not comprehend. And so we misuse them, day by day. I expect he was only finding that out himself and wanted to tell someone. We look around in space and what do we see? Nothing. No leaves, no life, for who knows how far. And here we are. Are we doing the best we can for each other? For ourselves? Or can we find it in us to be more than we have been? Let us pray.”

  It was after the eulogy that the trio from Desmond City played the Elgar song. The music rose like thunderclouds, gathering in the rafters and breaking open in a storm on the lake.

  One afternoon, Keith Lyon was sitting and smoking on a bench in the sun when a red-haired woman drove into the parking lot of the Jack of Diamonds and got out of her car wearing a tan suit with green stitching on the lapels.

  “We’re not open till five-thirty,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I’m here about Pierre Hunter.”

  “Well,” said Keith.

  “I know,” she said. “I called his apartment the other night and the landlord answered the phone. He told me what happened. Said the place was left a terrible mess.”

  “It was, too,” said Keith. “I’ve got to get over there.”

  “I met him in the summer,” she said. “I live in Utah and he was going through town and we spent the night together. Then later he sent me some money in a box.”

  “So you’re the one.”

  “Well, I’ve wanted to talk to him for a while, but it’s taken me this long to find out who he is. The hotel had a record but they couldn’t find it.”

  “Are you hungry? Can I make you an omelet or something?”

  “No, that’s all right,” she said. “Maybe you could just tell me how to get to the cemetery. I have some flowers I want to lay down.”

  “I’ll take you there,” said Keith.

  “My name is Linda,” she said.

  “I’m Keith, Linda.”

  They got in the car and drove down to South Cemetery. It was a warm afternoon and the trees had turned colors all along the hills. Keith felt he might fall asleep in the warmth of the car. He had been very tired lately.

  They came to the cemetery, which was high and isolated with a valley reaching out to the west, and they walked out through the stones to a bank of black dirt.

  Keith wondered if there was such a thing as a spirit that went on and he doubted it but at the same time wanted to think there might be.

  The woman from Utah knelt before the grave and put down the orange lilies she had brought.

  “I never got to thank you,” she said. “So . . . you know, thanks. But I couldn’t go through with it.”

  She turned to Keith, who was standing with his arms folded in the sun.

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “I have the money in the car.”

  “Go through with what?”

  “Oh, okay. I had told Pierre I might have plastic surgery someday. You know, just casually. And we said it would be expensive. So then two weeks later all this money comes.”

  “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but—”

  “For the scars,” she said. “On my face. Don’t you see them?”

  Keith held his hand out to her and she took it and got up.

  “Well, a little bit I do,” he said.

  “I talked to some doctors and they said they could maybe reduce them a little but they couldn’t take them away entirely. It’s much less of a sure thing than Pierre and I thought. So I figured if I’m going to have scars anyway I might as well have the ones I made.”

  “That makes sense. They’re really not that bad.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Anyway, I have the money. Maybe it should go to his estate.”

  “I don’t think he has one.”

  “Or family.”

  Keith shook his head. “His mother and father are right here.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did the money have to do with what happened?”

  “Yeah, it did. But you shouldn’t feel bad. I think he would have done that no matter what.”

  “I don’t feel bad. But strange, I guess. I don’t know how to feel.”

  “There’s a lot of that,” said Keith.

  They drove from the cemetery back to the Jack of Diamonds. Keith opened the door to get out but said, “The more I think about it, keep the money. He gave it to you. He never told me for what. I think he wanted you to do whatever you wanted.”

  “Let me think about that.”

  “Just keep it.”

  On the next day Linda met Keith at Pierre’s apartment in Shale. It was ransacked as bad as anything either of them had seen.

  “See what they did,” he said.

  Everything that could have hidden money and a lot that couldn’t have was gutted or smashed or torn or kicked in or knocked over. It was a universe of shards, shreds, and splinters. You could hardly see floor anywhere.

  He traced a flat gray cord from the wall and fished the telephone from the debris and dialed to order a Dumpster. As he waited to talk to someone, he brushed his free hand on his pants and looked at it.

  “There’s this silver dust all over everything,” he said.

  Keith had brought push brooms and a flat-blade snow shovel and they spent most of the day pushing everything down the length of the apartment and onto the back porch, from which it could be dropped two stories to the Dumpster in the alley. It did not take long for them to see that it would take more than one day.

  Around five o’clock Keith’s back began to hurt and he went down the hall and into the bathroom to look for an aspirin. When he opened the medicine cabinet he found this note taped inside the door:

  1883 silver dollar to Charlotte Blonde

  guns to Roland Miles

  MGA to Carrie Sloan

  gray felt hat to Keith Lyon

  ice skates to Stella Rosmarin

  Keith called for Linda and she joined him in the bathroom and stood there reading the note.

  “We should look for these things,” he said.

  “These five get the money,” she said. “Divide it up equal.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Then give it away. You said I should do what I want with it and that’s what I want.”

  She left the bathroom and Keith took an Advil and cupped his hand under the faucet for the water. When he went back into the kitchen he saw that she had found the gray felt hat and was wearing it.

  Roland and Carrie Miles sat at the end of a pier on an island off the western coast of Florida. They were on vacation and it would be cold back home. The pier was long and at the end there rose a square building with a bait shop below and restaurant above.

 
; Roland was smoking and fishing and Carrie leaned back on her arms with her face turned to the sun. The water moved past in silver swells that went on and turned to foam on a white beach lined with little houses.

  “We should move here,” she said.

  Roland reeled in an empty hook and put a shrimp on it and cast it back under the dock. There was supposed to be a barracuda that lurked there, appearing every once in a while to steal a fish off a line.

  “All right,” he said. “You find a place and I’ll bring our stuff down in a yellow truck.”

  “We could wear sandals and have a fire on the beach at night.”

  “Come on, you old legendary barracuda.”

  “And you’d come home at night with fish in a bucket and I’d say, ‘What did you catch, my love?’ ”

  “Find a place with French doors.”

  “And I would say, ‘Look, darling, look what I found. It’s a sand dollar.’ ”

  Roland flicked the rod and spun the reel and the hook danced up clean and jangling. “The bastard took my bait again.”

  “And we would never fight. Because it’s too hot and we would be in tune with the rhythm of life.”

  He got up and handed her the rod and reel. “Here, you try for a while,” he said. “Do you want a beer?”

  “Sure.”

  She baited the hook and looped another sinker on the line and cast far out into the ocean, away from the pier, thinking she would show him how it’s done.

  They were renting a cottage on the beach on the other side of the island. That night Roland wanted to walk to a bar down the road and Carrie told him to go ahead as she felt like staying in.

  She sat out on the patio and wrote by the light of an orange lamp on the table.

  Bank Robbery Days won’t come again,

  Which this year came too true:

  The killings three I could not foresee

  When I gave the phone to you.

  It’s cold and gray in Shale now

  And still I drive your car.