The road from Big Antler to Los Angeles is a long one indeed, and though the one from Bismarck to Fargo ain’t even remotely as bad, it’s still a haul, and I was getting drowsy. This young lady might have been from Asia, but she seemed to like the tapes I was playing, mostly old country standards, Hank Williams—the old one—Bob Wills, all those guys. After a while, even my old reliable music failed me and I’d found myself drifting. I started to tell her all this nonsense, in even more detail, a story I usually only tell myself on this trip every November, whenever the showers come. Through her fragments of English, it must have sounded like a hodgepodge, most of the time, a few familiar terms here and there. Maybe my voice temporarily chased away whatever ghosts had dragged her to this dreadful place.
“We met in the war, and though Liza Jean could never understand how that could make you stay connected to someone, I admit it’s more complicated than that. It never starts out complicated. If a familiar face is all you got, that is what you go with. Fred was the only one I recognized from basic.” I laughed a little and she tried to laugh, too. “I’m not for sure when we moved from being friendly to being friends, probably around the time I saved his ass, though.” She was gone again. Sometimes her eyes would follow something at the roadside and if I had ever offered to stop, she would have been out there in a second, wandering in the snow.
She probably didn’t need to hear this kind of stuff, anyway. I’ve been to the Trinity Site in New Mexico, where those first atomic tests were done, and of course have gone and found some of my buddies up on the wall in D.C., but I have always wondered what that Hiroshima museum must be like. I hear they have a watch there, a pocket watch or wristwatch, I am not for sure which, that survived the blast, but stopped ticking at that exact moment the bomb went off. Everyone should see that. I bet this lady has. Even if she hasn’t been to that museum itself, she’s seen it. It’s the same way you can see the name of someone you knew, who never came home from Vietnam, written neatly in that black surface, you can feel the depths of those etched names under your fingers, as you run them across, even if you have never been down to see it in person, to stand in front of the wall. That is the nature of the way we lose some things in our lives.
“We’re here,” I said.
“Fargo? Here?” the girl asked, gathering up her little backpack.
“Yeah, you just hang on, missy. I got to find somewhere reasonable for you to stay.” Fargo can be a bad scene, and that was all this girl needed, to let the wrong person see her. If she still wanted to continue her crazy search in the morning, that was her business, but for my part, I got her to safety and it was time for me to make my yearly trip to the designated wide-open skies. Fargo would have been okay for me any other night of the year but the light pollution would be too strong for my purposes that night. Coming into it, or really coming into any of the cities at night, was like flying into Phu Bai that first time. The firebases, and particularly the rear, just seemed to be begging for enemy fire, all lighted up in the dark jungles like that, but the NVA could never get it together enough to go that deep into our territory without getting caught. These hot spots in the dark Dakota winter also drew all sorts of their own trouble, with the promises of alternatives, and this girl would not be able to make it on her own, I was sure.
I know, she had made it all the way from Japan to the Twin Cities and then on to Bismarck in the first place, so who was I, telling her she couldn’t make it? But like I said, Fargo is a tough place. The Mainline just off 94 was pretty decent, continental breakfast, you know, bad coffee and stale doughnuts, but it was something to eat, if you wanted it, and you could actually see the river from some of the rooms there. It would be fine for her, and besides, I really had to get a move on if I was going to make Detroit Lakes in the time I wanted. I don’t know why she didn’t just fly to Fargo in the first place, but she must have had her reasons for doing the things she was doing. Everyone does, whether you agree with them or not.
“You just head right in there, where it says office, o-f-f-i-c-e, see?” I said, pointing to the glowing sign above the lobby door, “and they’ll take care of you. Tell them, one night.” I held up my pointer finger again, this time, straight up, and tried to get her to do the same. I touched her hand and folded the other fingers under, into a fist, and then she got it.
“Come?” she asked. Actually, I only assumed she was asking, as about all of her brief sentences seemed to be questions. She might have been commanding, for all I know.
“Uh, no.” I shook my head and reached over, opening her door for her. “I got things to do tonight, and I gotta get a move on, if I’m gonna make it. Now you watch your step getting out. There’s a little platform for you there, watch. Don’t fall.” She just sat there, the cold wind blowing in and filling up my cab with the smells of Fargo, industry, greasy food, diesel, the works. I never drive with a coat on, so I reached back over her, shut the door, grabbed my jacket from behind me, and hopped out myself, climbing on up on the passenger’s side and reopening the door.
We were beginning to draw some attention from inside the lobby. The night manager even lifted his remote and I assumed turned down the volume on his little television set. I guess what we were doing was more interesting than the goings-on in a black-and-white Mayberry. I had a sense it might turn out to be a good thing, later, that the night manager saw her refusing to come down from my cab. Now, when I’m alone on the drive and need to take a leak, I do what most do and just use Ziplocs until I come to a convenient service area to dump the full bags. You get agile with the trick after years of practice but I was guessing that would be a bit impolite with my passenger. I also wanted that night manager to know my passenger was with me not only willingly, but defiantly, so he’d be able to say so with certainty if authorities started asking after the circumstances of that evening. I just had a sense I was already into something a lot deeper than I had planned to be. So I went in and asked if I could use their john and gave him the quick rundown, suggesting she might be back in a cab later on.
I didn’t have time for this kind of nonsense. I already had the key to the place I’d reserved for the next couple of nights, had them mail it to me when I paid in advance. It had been sitting in the upper compartment of my truck’s cab for almost a month. As soon as the astronomers had made their predictions, I had picked up the phone and made a couple calls. I got lucky on the second try. Though they tend to be booked up solid for summer by mid-March, there’s not a lot of winter demand for those little cabins around Detroit Lakes, and they were just the sort of thing I was looking for.
“Look, miss. I really need to get a move on. I’m running late. My load don’t need to be to the Twin Cities until tomorrow, but I have got to get going, and I won’t be making a stop back this way again. This here is the place you wanted to be. This is it.” The coat she wore wasn’t much, looked more like a spring jacket than anything else, maybe even silk, bright pink. She shivered as I stood in the door holding my hand out to her, all the time watching my dashboard clock too. I was about out of hand gestures other than the “come here” motion and to point to the ground.
“How save friend ass?” she said.
“What?” Her voice had been so quiet, the wind almost took all of it away, but I knew that she was speaking relatively coherent English. I had not imagined her fluency. She held her shoulders close, looking down into her lap. The map was gone, I guess, into her bag. I shut the door, shrugged my shoulders at the night manager through the big plate glass doors, and he shrugged his shoulders back and returned to Mayberry. I went around and climbed into my seat.
“His life. There was no donkey involved. It doesn’t matter. Really. In the end, I don’t guess I did a very good job of it anyway,” I said, looking out in the yellow-gray night of Fargo.
“Where . . . now . . . friend?” Yeah, I know it sounds like I’m mocking her, but I remember the few words she spoke to me, clearly. She did understand English pretty well, it seemed, but the way she
spoke it was in these long, long pauses, and big chunks of clumsy language. Why she didn’t speak before, to me or to the troopers, I do not have an answer for.
“I have to go. Missy, I am guessing you have a pretty good idea of what I’m saying after all, and you’re welcome to come with me. I’m sure there’s plenty of room where I’m staying, and I promise, I will not lay a hand on you. I got other things on my mind tonight, anyways, but if you do not get out of this cab in the next minute, I am pulling out, and this will be the last you see of Fargo with me.”
“Where friend?”
“He’s dead. Been dead about thirty years now. As I said, I guess I didn’t do too good a job of saving him in the end, or his boy for that matter.” I put the rig in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. “The wife and I haven’t seen the boy in over fifteen years. And that is surely my fault.” I found US-10E out of town pretty easy and Fargo disappeared in my side mirrors, the blackness of the night taking over as we made our way out to Detroit Lakes and the cabin I had reserved three weeks before, when the Leonid predictions were made public.
The drive was going to take a little less than an hour, even with creeping my speed up some, and I was about sick of Bob Wills. The radio offered not a lot up there, though I eventually found a classic rock station playing the Stones so I left that. Sometimes you hear a line and there you are, back where you thought you had left, many years in the past. I was home by the time this song came out, but I knew what they meant. Sometimes it is just a shot away.
“Ha. We used to listen to these guys in the bunkers, and I bet there was no joking about the lyrics there. I can tell you, not too many people would have been singing along in the jungle. We were definitely always looking for shelter. Well, we got out of that and came home, but he didn’t just love the movies, like you. He didn’t just want to chase them, he wanted to be in them. That was where I lost him, when he headed off to Hollywood.
“The last time I heard from him was a letter he’d mailed with a key to his apartment. You cold? You want me to turn up the heat?” She nodded and by this time had stopped looking out the window. “Here, put this on,” I said, and that was the one and only time I shared the blanket Shirley Mounter had given to me, the last time I left her, after Fred Howkowski’s funeral. Nobody else but me and the boy even knew it was there, and I wasn’t talking, and these days, surely he was not talking, either. Maybe he’d even forgotten it after all these years. For me, though, every time I unlock the cab and climb on up, that blanket is the first thing I look for, to make sure it’s still with me. It is the one thing I have left to remind me of the happiest period of my sorry-ass life.
Handing it over off the cab bunk just then was the only time I had let anyone else use that blanket, ever, and even at that moment, I didn’t like the idea too much. But Shirley had given it to me that final time so I would have something to hang on to, and I thought that girl needed something to grab just that moment too. Probably, she looked at me instead of the window because we were no longer on the movie tour route for her, but I liked to think it was something else. I adjusted the heat and opened up my flannel. The T-shirt underneath was about fine for the temperature she liked but there was no way to get that flannel off while I was driving. You learn some talents for the road, but those that involve your safety belt and the steering wheel are too big a challenge even for a lifer like me.
“Hang on, we’re here.” I pulled up to the registration office and filled out some paperwork. The place was totally deserted, not a single car or foot track in the snow, but they had left all the right stuff in a drop box on the door as promised and the cabin was easy to find. It was perfect, just what I was hoping it would be.
I offered the girl the bathroom first, while I unpacked a little and made some entries into the logbook, and then I cleaned up, myself, when she was out of there and sitting by the fire I had started. We had made good time, and still had an hour before the first real wave, when we headed out to the fields. I gave her the spare coat I always keep in the cab’s storage. The occasional snowmobile whined off in the distance, but even that settled down by midnight, when the first streaks started appearing across the sky. We had nearly this whole area to ourselves.
“Look! There!” I pointed, and her eyes followed my hand. “Make a wish.”
“Wish,” she repeated, arching her neck back, nearly being swallowed by my bulky winter coat.
“Don’t tell me or it won’t come true. Hell, I probably already know what your wish is, anyway, but I don’t think you’re gonna find that money.”
“Wish . . . someone . . . hear . . . me.”
“I’m near you,” I said, stepping up behind her, wrapping my arms around her tiny waist and resting my chin on her shoulder, my beard scratching against the shiny material. Even in that bulky coat, she felt like a bird.
“Hear me . . . no . . . not . . . near you . . . hear . . . me.” She pulled away and ran a few yards from me.
“I hear you,” I said. “I hear you.” Watching the meteors always killed my neck and this was the longest-lasting patch I had seen in years, lots of ways for my wishes to ride into reality.
I lay down in the snow and watched them for a while until the wave eased up. The next big shower was scheduled to start in about four more hours, so I was going to go in, set the alarm clock, and catch some shut-eye. Just then, I remembered something and started doing those lying-down jumping jacks you can do. “Hey,” I yelled to her, “watch this.” The snow out there was a little stiff, not as bad as it had been in Bismarck, but also, not very dusty. No matter, it was for sure no challenge against my two hundred pounds.
“This here is called a snow angel. See? Like an angel? The wings, the robe? We used to make them when we were kids, on those rare winter snows when we got more than an inch in West Texas.”
“Angel,” she said and shook her head a little. I guessed they don’t have angels there, where she was from.
“Uh, like a ghost, impression, imprint, something.” I got up and she looked at it.
“Ghost. Hiroshima. On wall,” she said, studying the shape I had made in the snow after I had crawled up from it. I’d heard about that, some people just vaporized in the blast, leaving only negatives of themselves on the walls around them. I had always thought it was, you know, made up for drama’s sake.
“Here, you make one,” I said, offering her the untouched snow to my right. She shook her head and began walking away. “Wait, come on, you go into the cabin. I’ll stay out here, in my rig. It’s fine, I do it all the time.” We went in and I checked the fire, made sure it would last the night. These new cabins all have the modern conveniences anyway, so the furnace would just kick on if the fire went out in the night. That bathroom even had a nice whirlpool in it I’d been hoping to use that night, but it would have to wait for the return trip.
“There you go, fire’s all set. I got the alarm set in my rig, for the next round. You want me to wake you?” She thought for a minute and then nodded. I set the nightstand alarm for the same time I’d be setting mine in the rig.
“What wish? Ghost friend?” she asked.
“ Yeah, that would be good, wouldn’t it? Fred finally getting his speaking part, but only me getting to hear it?” I laughed. “No.”
“What wish?”
“I told you, if you tell someone, it won’t come true.”
The rig’s cab held warmth pretty well, so it was still a reasonable temperature when I climbed back in, started her up, took my clothes off, and jumped into the sleeper. I wrapped myself in the warmth of Shirley’s Pendleton, the wool sliding up between my legs, giving me a rise even then, scratching against my belly as I buried my nose in the blanket and dreamt her smell was still with me, after all these years. That was the last thing I remembered until the alarm went off at a little after four, like I had planned. I bundled up in the same clothes I had taken off the night before, figuring I would change after I’d gotten myself a shower. I shut the rig off and steppe
d down into the dark. Usually I just leave it running, even if I have to hit a rest area john, but out here, it was so quiet, so removed from every part of my world that the diesel engine seemed to violate the stillness. It was just going to be me and the meteors. No snowmobiles would be flying around that time of night, or morning, or whatever.
Avoiding the neck cramps, I lay straight down to wait for the shower to peak. The rig was finishing its last hisses and ticks, but two other small noises bled through the sharp air, almost not there at all, but constant. I couldn’t place them at first, but then they came. The fire must have gone out. The lower hum sounded like a small house furnace and I could see a slight string of smoke dancing out of the chimney, but the other sound should not have been going. Even if it was, I should not have been able to hear it.
The first few stars shot through and I laid my wishes on them, like horses racing across the sky, as I do every year. I had no idea if any of them would ever come true for me, but that not knowing always allowed me to wish for things I shouldn’t have wished for in the first place.
That second sound kept bothering me, so I got up from the ground, dusted myself off, and followed it to the front door of the cabin, which was wide open. I ran in. The alarm I had set was buzzing away and I shut it off. Then only the sound of the furnace disturbed the early morning.
“Miss, are you in there?” I called. The bed was empty, but no sound came from the bathroom. My down coat sat at the edge of the bed. “Shit!” I ran outside and dug in my jeans for my penlight. It went half the world away with me to Vietnam and I actually still had it when I stepped off the plane back on U.S. soil. It wasn’t worth a damn out there in the Minnesota winter night.
Her footprints were visible in the foot diameter the penlight offered, but it wasn’t going to be much use to me. I started the rig, hit its headlights, and grabbed the Maglite from its mount on the dash. She wasn’t that far away. I found her in the angel I had made, lying there in her pink satin jacket, the backpack straps around her shoulders, the pack firmly on her back, and that map gripped tight in her hand again.
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