by Brian Benson
Five minutes before closing, some headlights cut through the wall of water. A blurry form scampered in front of them, then burst through the café door. A woman in her midforties, her soaking wet hair dripping onto a sweatshirt and mom jeans.
“Hi, Kim,” the owner said, smiling. She pulled a couple of paper bags onto the counter. “You’re right on time.”
Kim smiled, mopped her brow with a sleeve, and pulled a couple of bills from her pocket. “This is some storm,” she said. “There must be three inches of water in your lot.” She turned toward us. “Are those your bikes out there?”
We nodded as if we’d been asked to identify bodies.
“Yeesh,” she said. “Where are you sleeping?”
Four shoulders shrugged.
“The storm kind of caught us off guard,” I said. “We’re not really sure what to do.”
Kim hesitated for a second, as if conceding a point in an argument only she could hear. Then she took a breath, smiled, and told us she had a camper parked outside her house. We could sleep there. We would sleep there. I managed a, “We don’t want to impose . . . ,” but she cut me off with a head shake, freeing me from going through the whole we-couldn’t, okay-maybe-we-could, actually-we’d-fucking-love-to charade.
A half hour later, we were sitting in a warm living room with Kim and her husband, Chris, listening to our clothes tumble in the dryer and eating a too-midwestern-to-be-true dinner of ham and scalloped potatoes and cola. While Chris, a short, muscled guy with crazy hair and crazier eyes, watched TV and yelled at their two whirling-dervish kids, Kim talked about her little town, about commuting to Carrington and juggling jobs, about running for mayor of Sykeston. She was in the midst of her campaign and was, at that point, the sole candidate.
As soon as we cleared our plates, Kim snatched them up. She refused to let us help with the dishes, filled our arms with linens, and showed us to the trailer, one of those tiny models in which each thing was actually many things. A couch folded into a bed. A table became a box spring. A toilet stall was also a shower. It resembled, I thought, the Scamp my uncle had bought a few years back. I’d fallen in love with that trailer, or at least the idea of it, had dreamed of taking it on a road trip. And now, here I was, with Rachel, in a Scamp-like trailer, on a road trip of sorts, all because of the rain that even now was pounding onto the roof.
We tucked ourselves under moth-eaten wool blankets. I leaned in to give Rachel a this-has-been-a-great-day-and-I’m-exhausted-so-let’s-go-to-sleep kiss, and she responded with a maybe-we-could-stay-awake-a-little-longer earlobe nibble, and so I came right back with a fuck-it-we’re-in-a-lightning-lit-trailer-and-I-want-you caress that began at her neck and found its way to the skin that, even after a thousand miles of Lycra imprisonment, had surrendered no softness.
We had barely kicked away the covers when the tornado hit.
A deep, syrupy bass note pulsed through the air, as if someone had hit the lowest black key on the world’s biggest keyboard. Gradually it rose in pitch and volume, hitting its crescendo at an earsplitting high C. Back in my hometown, a siren like this meant one of two things: either it was lunchtime at the lumber mill or the sky was about to shatter. Sykeston didn’t have a lumber mill, and it sure as hell wasn’t lunchtime. We needed to get out of this trailer.
We ducked into the rain, ran through the yard, and burst into the house. Kim and Chris were sitting in the living room, watching the nightly news. “Um,” I said, wondering how I hadn’t yet noticed our hosts were fucking insane, “shouldn’t we get downstairs or something?”
They both looked at me blankly, as if I were speaking a foreign language.
I pointed dumbly toward the sky. “Doesn’t that mean there’s a tornado?”
Kim frowned, then chuckled. “Oh no, honey. That’s just the ten o’clock siren.” She turned back to the TV.
I wish, so much, that I’d had the wherewithal to ask what she meant by a “ten o’clock siren.” But I was too baffled to speak, and apparently so was Rachel. We scurried back through the rain, to the trailer, into bed, under the covers.
I lay silent for a moment, then asked, “Did that just happen?”
“Yep,” Rachel replied. “And I love the way she answered you. ‘Just the ten o’clock siren.’ Let’s make sure to not act surprised when she sounds the eight o’clock breakfast gong.”
I wondered whether there might be an eight o’clock breakfast gong. I kind of hoped so.
• • •
At dawn, pre-gong, we rolled back onto Highway 200. The storm had left its mark. The sky was still overcast, but the purple-puff anvils had disappeared, leaving a gray, deflated cloud-carpet that was as flat and dull as the landscape below it. Floodwaters buried farmland, and wheat stalks rose from the murk like marshland cattails. Brown-blue puddles filled potholes and pavement cracks, and the asphalt itself looked revived, like a Zamboni-polished strip of ice. Unblemished. Slick. Ready to be attacked.
And attack we did. From the first pedal stroke, riding felt easy. Yes, we had been riding for three weeks and had barely broken thirty miles the previous day. We had strong legs, revived legs. But this was a different kind of easy: a meteorologically explicable kind of easy. Wind was whipping the wheat, the world was hushed, and moving forward felt less like riding than falling.
“I know this is your line,” Rachel said, “but I’m pretty sure we have a tailwind.”
We did have a tailwind. An absolute monster of a tailwind. Even better, there were no distant thunderheads, no signs the current would shift anytime soon. And it didn’t. All day it stuck with us, carried us past that rest stop, through the tinier-than-Sykeston town of Chaseley, and over what appeared to be hills, the first we’d seen since Minnesota. The speedometer told me I was going eighteen and twenty and twenty-two miles per hour, and I pushed harder and harder, laughing aloud. A gap began to open between Rachel and me, but I didn’t let up. These miles were easy for both of us, and for once I didn’t feel obligated to do anything but move forward.
After thirty miles, we stopped in Goodrich and prepared lunch on the lawn of a graying church. While fixing sandwiches and beer-can cooking some soup, we blubbered—both of us, Rachel just as excited as I was—about the wind. By now I was feeling guilty about having left her behind. I asked if she minded me taking some stretches at my own pace.
“Brian,” she said, “I would be thrilled if you did that more often.”
I nearly spat out my soup.
“You think I can’t see you checking the rearview every three seconds?”
I raised an I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about eyebrow.
She replied with a give-me-a-fucking-break snort.
“You’re like fifteen feet taller than me. Which makes you faster. I get it. It’s fine.”
I blinked.
“And I appreciate that you try to ride my speed. But sometimes I just want to ride how I want to ride and not worry about slowing you down.”
I blinked.
“How about this? If you want to ride ahead, you don’t need to stop and hug me and tell me you love me. Just go. Maybe try to stay within sight. But really, if you wanna go, go.”
I nodded and, unsure of what to say, took a jaw-distending bite from my sandwich.
Rachel smiled and squeezed my arm. “I’m glad we had this talk.”
• • •
Back on 200 the wind was still tumbling westward, and within seconds, I was floating along at eighteen miles an hour. I dropped a hand from the bars, grabbed the top tube, and suddenly felt like a cowboy racing across the open plain, one hand on my saddle horn, the other working the reins. I took a deep pull of prairie air and swept my eyes up from the road to the distant hills to the big open sky. Blue-gray clouds lay over me like blankets, and I felt tucked in. Cozy and contained. Alone.
I found myself thinking of Galen, wondering if this was
his every day—if he always felt so free, so powerful, so . . .
I shook off the thought. This was my moment. I wasn’t going to spend it worrying over Galen or Rachel or anyone else, wasn’t going to pay attention to that rhythmic click in my pedal or the gritty whine of my unoiled chain, wasn’t going to question Wisconsin behind or Portland beyond. No, I was just going to be here, alone, doing what I was doing because I wanted to do it.
And so I rode, aware only of the pavement below and the hills ahead and those wind-tickled wheat stalks that were so pretty when pointed not at my face but at my horizon. For four miles, or maybe forty, I moved through this landscape, utterly alone, floating far ahead of Rachel and into a sort of trance. My legs kept a steady beat and my breath slowed and I felt like I was focusing not on any one thing but on all of it at once. I took in the plentiful-if-polluted ponds and the distant tractors and the grayscale skyscape and the charcoal tongue of the highway, and they became one thing. They became where I am.
• • •
Late afternoon we rolled up to Turtle Lake. Population 510. A Dakotan metropolis. The town sat to the north, tucked behind a grove of oak, and its main street, which looked more like a farmhouse driveway, cut through the trees to meet 200. At the intersection was a skyscraping pole that displayed the American flag I’d seen from a mile away, and beneath it a bus-size, solid-bronze turtle. “Rusty the Turtle,” according to the plaque. I climbed atop his shell, hugged his head, rode him like a stallion. Rachel snapped a photo of me straddling his neck, waving an imaginary lasso. It was a great shot, this ridiculous reptile sitting in the prairie, and me on top of it, the wind whipping my hair so hard it actually appeared that Rusty and I were moving.
And that’s exactly what I wanted to do. Keep moving. We’d already covered seventy-eight miles that day, but with the tailwind, I felt like we’d just started. I could ride all night, and I told Rachel as much. She nodded but said nothing.
“It’s only twenty-eight more miles to Riverdale,” I said.
No response.
“We can probably make it there by dusk,” I continued. “What do you think?”
She looked past Rusty, toward town. “I don’t know. I’m kind of ready to be done.”
Something like anger rose to my throat. I was feeling invincible, and now I was going to have to sit around and twiddle my thumbs during the prettiest part of the day, all because Rachel didn’t want to push herself? I took a breath, managed to remind myself that I had no idea whether she had, in fact, been pushing herself all day; that I was, as she’d put it, like fifteen feet taller; that she’d given me the green light to cowboy up all afternoon; and that since I’d done exactly that, maybe a little compromise was in order.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I could stop too. This does look like a cute town.”
We set up in the tiny, tree-lined park and cooked up some couscous and veggies, then strolled downtown and headed into Betty Boops, the local watering hole. As we sipped pints of watery pilsner, the bartender, Tina, a pretty blonde with a gravelly voice and a seen-it-all-thirteen-times perma-smirk, told us all about Rusty. Apparently, a few years before, the town had optioned a cash reserve and given residents the choice between a community pool and Rusty. Families wanted the pool. Old folks wanted Rusty. The old folks won, and now, on ninety-degree summer days, Tina found herself wanting to murder an inanimate reptile.
She invited us to join in the nine o’clock bingo game. Rachel and I went in together on four cards and lost terribly. When the game wrapped up, some old-timers shuffled over to a table in the corner, and I asked Tina what was happening. “Blackjack,” she replied. “Blackjack?” I asked. “Blackjack,” she repeated. Apparently, gambling in bars, not just video poker but actual card games, was legal in North Dakota. Rachel wasn’t into it, but I sat down, rationalizing that I’d been really good about sticking to my ten-dollar daily budget and could afford to have some fun, and that playing cards for money in a bar was a fleeting experience, to be seized and savored.
To my surprise, I’d won thirty bucks by the end of the first shoe. And to my deeper surprise, I actually stood up and left, rather than gambling my winnings away.
It was almost midnight when we left Betty Boops. Rachel grabbed my hand, and as we strode through side streets, back toward the park, I felt like the king of North Dakota. Like I was being rewarded, over and again. The gods had discovered where I was, and what I was doing, and why, and how, and they had been pleased, had showered me with tailwinds and table winnings and the admiration of this strong, proud, ass-kicking woman, and now we were standing together at the gates to a magical new world, a world where life was and would always be getting better, where each new mile would build upon the one before it, would be richer and sweeter and simpler, until the final mile was not a mile but an answer to all my—
Rachel squeezed my hand. “Hey,” she said. “What are you thinking?”
I wasn’t sure I could get all that to come out right, so I squeezed back and nodded up at the night sky and said, “Just that I’m so happy we’re here.”
“Me too,” she said. “This is always my favorite part of the day.”
“And which part is that?”
“The not-riding part. Being in these small towns. Being done.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, yeah, you know I love small towns, but I more meant the whole—”
“I know.” She traced her fingers up my arm, around my back, and kept walking.
I opened my mouth to say more, to try to convince her that every part was the best part, that mine was the right kind of happiness. But I thought better of it. Happiness was happiness, and we’d both found it in this moment, and that, I thought, was enough.
CHAPTER 11
The Photographer
At half past dawn in a well-treed park in a town called Hazen, I sat up and yawned and nudged Rachel awake. With sleep-swollen eyes and rumbling tummies, we dragged ourselves out of the tent and over to the Cenex station, where we holed up at one of the faux-fir booth tables by the window, and for the better part of an hour, we sat and sipped coffee and ate oatmeal and read the paper and pocketed butter packets and, whenever the clerk was distracted, which was often—the place was teeming with carpenters and ranchers and truck drivers, few of them paying for gas, most just nursing coffee and talking about the weather, the jobs they’d lined up for the week, the fish they’d caught that weekend—we tiptoed over to the airpots and topped off our cups.
After her third refill, Rachel slid back into the booth and crossed her arms on the table and said, “So, don’t get me wrong, I love cooking over a beer can and having ants in my sandwich and all . . . but how the hell have we never done this before?”
I spooned the last bit of oatmeal from my tin bowl. “I don’t know. But I say we plan to sleep within sight of a Cenex from here on out.”
“Why don’t we just sleep at Cenex? We won’t even have to set up the tent, what with the canopies, and we can huff gas right from our sleeping bags.”
I laughed, and shook my head, and said, “You’re ridiculous.”
Whenever I found myself unable to keep up with Rachel—with her wit, her intellect, her decisive clarity—I’d say those words. I didn’t, of course, find her the least bit ridiculous. But it was a way less vulnerable thing to say than “I am in awe of you.”
Now she stood and announced her plan to have a sponge bath in the gas station bathroom. I decided to follow suit. My skin hadn’t seen soap since Sykeston, but it had seen a whole lot of dirt and sun and grain dust. My torso in particular felt like it was covered in Velcro. I headed to the bathroom and locked the door and pulled off my shirt, and as I washed away the stink, I considered myself in the mirror. Weeks ago, in Duluth, I’d trimmed my beard back using a pair of kitchen shears, and now that it had grown out, I could see I’d done a particularly shitty job. The beard was bushy in a very literal sens
e: there were several little hair shrubs with their own shape and structure, and they only appeared to be one composite thing—one beard—when viewed from afar. The oldest shrubs, the ones I must have missed in Duluth, had taken on a rusty red that, I thought, contrasted nicely with the ruddy bronze of my cheeks. Add in the bloodshot eyes and Kramer hair and candy-cane-contrast farmer’s tan, and I looked like a hardened bike tourist. Or maybe a militia member. Either way, I was proud of myself.
I put on my shirt, slipped a roll of toilet paper inside it, and walked out to the lot, where Rachel was loading butter packets and jam tubs into our spice kit. I smiled, and she smiled back as I flashed the toilet paper, and then, in plain sight of a half-dozen men shooting gas into their tanks, we applied our sunscreen and our palmfuls of Chamois Butt’r. I was not embarrassed. Nor, it seemed, was Rachel, who was staring off at the western horizon, one hand on her hip, the other in her shorts. We were both just doing what we needed to do to be where we belonged. And if it bothered the bystanders, well, that couldn’t be helped.
I stuffed the Butt’r back into the bag. I put on my helmet and swung my leg over the bike and clipped into the pedals, and Rachel did the same, and I followed her out of the parking lot and onto the highway and into whatever came next.
• • •
Hazen was a border town, the gateway from farmland to ranchland. It was an instant shift, just like the forest-to-plains transition in Minnesota, and as we rode west, I marveled at our new surroundings: craggy buttes peeking through prairie grass, beef cattle behind barbed wire. Also, hills. I could see why people always called this place rugged. The earth before us seemed to have been riven and raised up like some kind of ranchland drawbridge. Rocks and livestock stood in for manhole covers and streetlamps, jutting toward us at gravity-defying angles.
Rachel and I looked at each other, took dramatic deep breaths, and hit the hill. The grade was initially modest, in the neighborhood of your average ADA-accessible ramp, but slowly it steepened, until pedaling felt less like spinning than like weight training. By my thirtieth rep, the speedometer told me I was moving at 3.2 mph, and for a minute there I thought I might have to—God forbid—get off the bike and walk. But I kept at it, one pedal stroke at a time, and as I chugged along, I found I actually kind of enjoyed this pace. It forced me to pick my head up and inhale the cow-dung hay-dust breeze and feel this rugged new world.
