by Will Weaver
He ate a chunk of bread, an apple, gave the crust and the core to the bird. Then walked again toward the freeway. He had thirty dollars in his right pocket. He wore jeans, boots, a red and white plaid flannel shirt. A feed cap. The sun was warm on his neck and shoulders.
His rides came intermittently. A step van whose racks of fresh bread he smelled even before they came to a full stop.
A farmer headed to Valley City for plow parts.
An old woman in an immaculate ’69 Bonneville that drifted lane to lane as she talked.
Two Indians in a rusty ’58 Buick who first asked him for gas money. When he shook his head and stepped back from their car, they drove on, but then stopped a few blocks ahead and waved him forward.
Mandan.
Wibaux.
A four-hour wait just outside Hebron. He crossed the North Dakota–Montana border in an air-conditioned Oldsmobile driven by a businessman who smoked Tiparillos and read the Wall Street Journal as he drove. “Help yourself,” the man said of the little cigars.
“Thanks,” Guy said. He lit one.
That evening he had a hamburger and a beer in the American Legion Club on the main street of Glendive, then walked west. At the edge of town was a small park with good bushes and thick grass for his sleeping bag. But there was still an hour of sunlight. He put out his thumb again. A dark blue Saab with New York plates passed. A woman drove. From her sunglasses and the Saab’s tinted glass, he could tell only that she had dark hair and very white skin. She turned her head at him briefly but her car did not slow. In a few minutes the blue Saab returned. This time it slowed. The woman swiveled her head to stare. For a moment the Saab’s brake lights flashed on. Guy began to reach for his pack but then the brake lights went off. The Saab continued west, picked up speed, and disappeared into the twilight.
He kicked a stone into the ditch, shouldered his pack, and walked on.
“You can’t sleep here,” someone was saying loudly while shaking Guy’s arm. A fat man in an apron. The manager of a cafe. A cafe in—where was he?—Bozeman. He had eaten three hamburgers and a malt, then leaned back and closed his eyes just for a moment. In the park in Glendive the mosquitoes had eaten on him all night.
“Don’t want no vagrants in here. Keep moving,” the man said.
Guy shook his head and looked around. A family, three small blond-haired kids and their parents, stared at him from the next booth. He nodded to them. The children leaned behind their parents.
South into Idaho.
Dillon.
Lewisville.
Blackfoot.
Between towns. Five hours in the sun with no water. Finally a ride from a balding carpet salesman who asked him if he ever dreamed about naked men.
Fort Hall.
In a half-sleep in a swaying truck seat he opened his eyes and saw a sign for Idaho Falls.
“Idaho Falls,” he said quickly, sitting up. “Have to get out at Idaho Falls.”
“Suit yourself,” the driver said.
It was the afternoon of Guy’s third day on the road. He had eighteen dollars left. The sky was clear and blue, the temperature somewhere near sixty. He could smell a river. He walked toward the town. A quarter mile ahead, on the outskirts of Idaho Falls, he saw a fruit stand along the highway. He was hungry and he walked faster.
He neared the small, white, wooden building with colored fruit shapes painted on the side. Red apples. Orange oranges. Green and red watermelons. And yellow peaches. The stand was ringed with crates of peaches tipped up for inspection. He jogged forward, his pack bouncing heavily on his back. In the sunlight the peaches glowed as if they were eggs on a lighting tray. He knelt before them. He ran his hand over their pink curves, held one’s downy belly up to the sun. But it was bruised underneath.
After several minutes he found it. The peach was heavy in his palm, nearly the size of a cantaloupe. Sunrise pinkish yellow. Cloudless, unbruised. One green leaf still clung to its stem. He paid for it, then carried it with him for several blocks until he came to a park bench next to a small fountain.
He smelled of the peach, then hefted its weight again. Finally he took a deep, slow bite. Its juice ran down his chin and onto his wrist and all the way down his arm until it dripped off his elbow. He ate it down until he could taste the rough bitters of its pit. When all the pink meat was gone he thought of walking back and buying another. But didn’t.
Pocatello.
Salt Lake City.
Two blond, young Mormon men heading to Nevada repeatedly offered him a Bible from a box of the same. When he declined, repeatedly, the Mormons let him out in the middle of the Salt Flats. He threw a rock after their car as it shrank away west into the colorless, shimmering haze.
Winnemucca.
Sparks.
That night he slept on a gravel streambed with stray dogs creeping toward him. He would awaken, shout, throw a stone. The dogs would scare. But every time he awoke they were close to him again.
Emigrant Gap.
Gold Run.
Seven dollars left.
Up and up the Sierras.
He reached Donner Pass late at night in the front seat of a Winnebago running hot. The driver pulled over, popped the hood, went inside to sleep, and locked the door. Guy shouldered his pack and walked on. A sign said Continental Divide. The night air was cold and crisp, like Minnesota in November. A truck passed and left behind a sweet-smelling contrail of onions. He was hungry.
He walked forward on the flat dome of Donner Pass. There was thick, black forest on both sides of the highway but the cut of the roadway shone with faint light, like a doorway to a big room beyond. He walked toward it. As he passed around a black grove of trees, he sucked in his breath and halted. Below, in a flat grid of lights, lay California’s Central Valley. Sacramento lay glowing like the settled center of a midnight camp-fire. Smaller towns stretched away, embers escaped from the center, larger coals closest, smaller sparks flung farther away, but all of them fallen on dry tinder, where they burned on. Beyond the valley west was the faint, broad glow of San Francisco and the Bay cities.
Guy stared at the lights. He was an astronaut. An astronaut newly landed on a mountain of a strange planet. The lights pulled him forward. He was no longer hungry and tired. He forgot to put out his thumb to the cars that passed. From the downward grade his steps lengthened of their own accord. Soon he was jogging, then bounding. His pack was weightless. On great strides he floated downhill. Eyes on the lights, he followed the long, descending glide path. He was coming in to land.
II
16
Eastbound, April 5, 1984, Guy held his gray Mercedes sedan at ten over the speed limit. It was 3:00 AM. He was in Minnesota now, close to home. Close to trouble. He thought of Helmer’s letter. He let the Mercedes’ needle creep to eighty.
Twenty minutes east of Moorhead the dark plane of the freeway began slow undulations. The Mercedes whispered down the long grades into river valleys where clumps of basswood and elm rose up in the periphery of his headlights like great black mushrooms. As the car slung itself upgrade the trees shrank, thinned, disappeared. To the sides lay farmland. The moonlit fields were a crazy quilt of black and white, of plowed earth and snow. Only a couple of weeks until planting time. Not that it mattered to Guy.
In the back seat Kennedy’s stomach rumbled and he twitched in his sleep.
“Hang on, Jack. When we get to the farm Madeline will fry you a burger all your own.” Kennedy awoke and yipped once.
Soon Detroit Lakes appeared on the horizon like a thin cluster of grounded stars. Detroit Lakes marked the end of the western plains. Beyond the town the land changed from open farmland to rolling hills of maple and white pine. Helmer’s farm lay twenty miles northeast, where the plains made one last attempt to reassert themselves. Failing, the land around Flatwater and bey
ond gave way to the rocky hill and lake country of northern Minnesota.
Guy slowed for the city limits of the town. He thought back to the summer nights at the dance pavilion on the lake. Bobby Vinton, Roy Orbison, the Uglies, the Trogs, the Buckinghams; the air inside the wooden hall syrup-thick with cigarette smoke, perfume, and, later, patchouli oil; outside in the humid darkness the thump of rock ’n’ roll through the walls, the shriek of skinny-dippers along the shore; in the dark park across the street the clink of beer bottles; the soft giggles deeper in the trees. He went to the pavilion often after Tom left. He went alone. Returned alone. Sometimes in between he found a girl to dance with or kiss with in his car, but mostly he just watched.
The last streetlight fell away. Only twenty miles left. Guy reached back and touched Kennedy’s smooth coat. In ten minutes he turned off the main highway onto the narrow tar road that zigzagged north to the farm. A large green sign with white lettering leaped luminous in his headlights:
Entering White Earth Reservation, Home of the Anishinabe.
Hunting, Fishing, Berrying Permits Required for Non-Tribal
Members. Violators Arrested. $500 Fine for Theft of
or Damage to This Sign.
This was new. When Guy left the prairie twelve years ago it was not important where the reservation began and ended. Someone with a can of white spray paint had changed the sign’s letters to read, “Humping and Pissing Permits Required.” On the lower right corner crawled a dull spider of a shotgun blast.
Guy smiled at the shotgun’s pattern. The reservation road signs, from bullet holes, had always made better spaghetti strainers than signs. There were lots of guns up in Minnesota, maybe more on the reservation than anywhere. He could feel them in the dark. Winchester .94s and Remington .30–06 deer rifles in gun cabinets and bedroom closets. Dusty single-shot twelve-gauges standing in the corner of the garage nearest the chicken coop. Twenty-two-caliber pistols lost under the seats of pickups. Guy had always carried a shotgun in the trunk of his Chevy. If he saw a partridge on the road around No Medicine Lake, he stopped. If Canadian honkers lit in a field of winter wheat he parked a mile down the road and crawled back toward them in the ditch. Once at night he hit a deer with the Chevy and broke its back. He was glad to have the gun to stop the doe’s buckling lunge down the center stripe of the tar.
But there was no gun in the Mercedes. He did not hunt in California. People in California had strange ideas about guns. Once at his house, at a party, Guy talked with a man from Red Lodge, Montana. The man hunted, loaded shells, and had in his car a Winchester Model Twelve twenty-gauge with a low serial number. He brought the gun inside to show Guy. When the man walked back into the room with the gun and some hand loads, talk died. It died as if the voices in the room were on tape and someone had pulled the plug. Near Guy’s picture window a man with frizzy black hair and wire-rimmed glasses jumped to his feet, pitched Guy’s coffee table through the glass, pushed a woman through the hole, then jumped after her. The pair leaped from Guy’s deck ten feet to the ground. Limping, stumbling, they clambered into a Volvo and sped away.
Charles Manson he was not, but at the sight of his broken window and shattered coffee table, Guy grabbed the Winchester, ran to his deck, and fired two rounds of quail shot in the general direction of the window-leapers’ taillights.
Which did nothing for his party. With effusive thanks for a wonderful evening, his guests—Susan and a couple of her Stanford friends among them—were gone within five minutes. The man and his girlfriend from Red Lodge stayed, and the three of them shot beer bottle skeet from the deck until a police car came nosing up the hill from Palo Alto.
Guns and this road, he knew. Heading north, he pinned the Mercedes accelerator to the carpet. As he knew it would, the square, unbanked curve came up fast—too fast. The rear tires broke loose from the cold asphalt. Kennedy barked. Front wheels pulling west, rather than brake, Guy accelerated through the apex of the curve up onto the flat road west.
Indian Killer Curves. On a map this road looked like stairs. One mile north. One mile west. One mile north, another mile west. So on for ten miles. The road had been built by Scandinavian farmers. Helmer had operated a horse and tin gravel boat for most of one summer. The road scrupulously followed the section lines; in that way it left square fields, straight fences, even rows. One mile of the road had been built at great labor, and two men drowned in a swamp when a curve of no more than a hundred yards would have carried it onto higher, safer ground. The square-cornered road killed a half-dozen Indians and one or two drunken whites every year.
As Guy navigated the corners his stomach rumbled again. He saw the white and rounded enamel belly of Madeline’s refrigerator, then inside it. He saw cold chicken pieces poking up from a brown glaze of gravy. He saw a fat loaf of homemade white bread with thick, egg-brushed crust. He saw a tall jar of homemade garlic dills. He saw a wide bowl of strawberry Jell-O lily-padded with banana slices.
He saw Martin.
“Wake up, Jack.” He hoisted Jack onto the front seat and stroked his back.
Light from a passing farm pulled his eyes from the highway. The Woods farm. There had been four boys, all older than Guy. The sign by the mailbox still read Herb Woods and Sons, but the last s on Sons had been crossed out.
And the light was different too. Dark before, now the Woods farm was lit up like a shopping mall in San Jose. Mercury vapor security lights hung from the silo, from the machine shed, from a pole beside a barbed-wire compound that enclosed the gas barrels, from the gable end of the Woods house. Guy wondered how they slept. He squinted away. When he had passed into dark fields again he saw across the prairie one mile, two miles, other farms similarly illuminated. The lights were like giant fireflies on the land.
Suddenly Guy swerved the Mercedes. Along the road people were running, dark shadows moving in the ditch. In his periphery he saw a pickup, still upright, sideways in the ditch.
Accident. He braked hard. He began to back up. But suddenly the truck, a newer Ford with a tall wooden rack in back, roared alive. It lurched onto the highway and sped lightless down the road.
Guy stopped and stared. About to drive on, in the red wash of his brake lights he saw the glint and curl of fresh-cut barbed wire. Something in the ditch. He swung the Mercedes’ lights around, then walked forward between its beams.
A Hereford cow, brown with a white mask, lay on the frozen grass and snow. A tall arrow rose from its chest. Blood bubbled from the Hereford’s nose and ran into an open eye, which did not blink.
Guy touched the arrow. He put his foot on the Hereford’s chest and pulled it free. A long aluminum shaft. A four-point broadhead half the size of Guy’s hand. He guessed it was shot by some kind of mechanical crossbow.
He stood up and looked around. Rustlers. So who was rustling? Whoever it was knew cattle. The Hereford looked to be a younger steer not far from market weight. He looked down the highway after the truck. He would recognize that truck when he saw it again.
He drove back to Woods’s farm and pounded on the door. In a minute a light came on upstairs and in another minute Herbert Woods appeared at the front door dressed in his long underwear and holding a pistol straight down. Guy explained. Woods listened without expression. Then he nodded and put the pistol on the sill above the door. He closed the door and soon reappeared dressed in coveralls, boots, and cap. He carried a long, thin skinning knife. In the yard Woods swung the knife at the darkness beyond the farm. The blade glinted in the glare of the vapor lamps. Between clenched jaws he said, “Fucking Indians.”
Guy helped Woods roll the Hereford into the front-end bucket of the tractor’s loader.
“Get him back to the yard, me and the boy can skin him. We’ll eat this one instead of the goddamn Indians.” He flopped the Hereford’s head over the side and cut its throat. Guy stepped back from the fall of blood. Woods wiped the knife bla
de on his pants leg, then squinted up at Guy. He glanced at the Mercedes, then back to Guy. “That white hair. I should know you.”
“Guy Pehrsson.”
“Sure. Helmer’s boy.”
“Helmer’s my grandfather. Martin is my father.”
“Oh.”
Woods fell silent for a moment. Nobody ever knew what to say about Martin Pehrsson.
“So how is Helmer these days? Haven’t seen him in years.”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t seen him for some time. Just on my way up there now.”
Woods stared at Guy. Behind him the other Herefords in the pasture sniffed at the cut wires. They shied at the smell of blood and blew steam in the air.
“You don’t live around here then?” Woods asked.
Guy shook his head.
“Probably better. Things here have gone to hell for a lot of people.”
Guy was silent. Behind Woods the largest Hereford stepped cautiously in the gap of the severed wires.
“Well, I got a fence to fix,” Woods said without turning. “Best get at it.”
Guy nodded and walked to the Mercedes.
“Be around here long?” Woods called.
Guy paused. “Not sure. Have to see.” As he spoke he suddenly felt the great weight of the land all around him. Heard his voice the way it had sounded twelve years ago in the cab of the pickup of the farm woman from Idaho Falls. He suddenly understood that farmers spoke in short sentences or none at all because the land weighed down their voices. The land took away speech because it was always bigger than words to describe it. The land had no need for words.
Woods lunged, with a shout, at his cattle. The Herefords bolted back into the field. Their irregular white patches tumbled across the dark field like pillowcases blown from a clothesline at night, but then the cattle slowed and turned to stare again at the door in the fence.
