by Kent Meyers
I was going to.
His face got even thinner than usual, like it was stretching to help him remember.
Maybe I wanted to see them geese, he said. You think?
When I paid Pat the fifty he bent up a dog-eared corner of the bill and smoothed it out, and then, like I was paying him for his opinion, said, Never seen a car so goddamn stuck. Thought I wasn’t gonna getter out. Thought I was gonna hafta getta goddamn semitowing rig. That mud was suckiner back down every time I gotter hoisted up. Christ! You’d think that goddamn car loved water the way it was rooted down in there. Like a goddamn hog.
Then Myrna, flipping through her channels, trying to protect David or maybe just being worried and weird, came up with that car’s history and more or less proved Pat right.
Good as she was at remote-control gymnastics, Myrna couldn’t keep every one of them TVs on Iraq all the time. She was bound to come across other news. And what she comes across is this segment about a couple of states, South Dakota was one, trying to figure out who got to execute the I-90 Killer. They caught him here, but his first murder was in Montana, even though that was one of the last bodies found, so there was this argument about who had rights to him. Of course Myrna paid attention when this segment come on. The Zimmerman girl had gone to work in Rapid, and those freeway towns, every kind of person goes through them, all kinds of people getting away from all kinds of things. You live in one of them towns, there’s more strangers than locals, in tourist season at least. Anyways, it was national news, so I guess I’m saying what everyone already knows, dead girls, all of them real thin, all of them with broken bones, start showing up in the borrow pits or the pastures off I-90 all the way from Washington to Minnesota, someone mowing the grass finds one, or someone stops with engine trouble and looks up from his radiator and sees what he thinks is some old clothes dumped in the ditch.
It took a long time for the police to put it together, all them states and all that distance, and they didn’t really find out till the guy’d been caught how he was locating them girls on the Internet, pretending to be a woman and advising them on how to stay skinny, so by the time he shows up he knows everything about them. The only reason he got caught was because this rancher out to Kadoka’d been drinking enough to forget to turn his headlights on driving home at two in the morning, and he comes over a hill and sees a car along the shoulder and realizes his lights are off and flicks them on and right there, blam, is this pudgy guy staring into the windshield, holding a body with blood dripping off the tips of the fingers, and something shining by his feet. He was parked at the top of the hill, thinking he’d see cars coming for miles, never counted on someone driving without lights, and with his head in the trunk and all he couldn’t hear the rancher’s tires.
Anyways, he tries to correct one wrong mistake with another. He throws the body back in the trunk and takes off after the rancher. Maybe he’d seen Fargo, that’s what we figured, where that murderer chases down those kids and kills them, and he figured he’d do the same, only he wasn’t counting on the rancher having a cell phone and a rifle and knowing how to use them. So the rancher’s already called his wife and she’s called the police by the time the murderer gets the body back in the trunk, and when the rancher sees those headlights pull onto the highway behind him, he floors his pickup, it’s only a six-banger and it can’t stay ahead of a dark blue Continental with a good V-8. The rancher sees those headlights getting bigger and bigger in his mirror, so he stops, grabs his rifle out of the cradle behind him, and hides on the other side of the pickup. When the murderer pulls up and jumps out to Fargo the guy, he discovers he ain’t in a movie, and all he gots is a knife while his intended victim has a deer rifle.
Not only that, the murderer leaves his headlights on, so the rancher waits for him to get illuminated nice and pulls the trigger, puts a bullet right through his hip. When Leonard heard that part he said, He couldna been too drunk, shooting like that, and I said, Unless he was aiming at the guy’s head, and Leonard allowed how that would be pretty bad shooting, especially with a deer rifle, unless maybe the lights blinded him some instead of helping him out, but even then. Of course it didn’t much matter to the murderer whether it was a good or a bad shot, it had pretty much the same effect.
Anyways, I was saying how Myrna sees this segment on these states fighting over rights to this guy, and the news has pictures from way back when it happened, and in the background of one of them pictures is the car the guy used. I suppose it’d been confiscated as evidence and then auctioned off when the trial ended, and Miner’s Good Deal Cars thought it was a pretty good deal. And wouldn’t you know that Leonard Sends For Him would be the guy to find it and bring it back to the last place it ought to be.
It’s a haunted car, I told Leonard.
I was kind of proud to’ve picked up on the bad spirits of that car when I first touched it, and I wanted Leonard to admit I was right. But he just said: Cars can’t be haunted. Cars move.
So? I asked.
Ghosts like to know where they’re at. They don’t go visiting. They don’t say to each other, Tell you what, I’ll haunt your place tonight and you haunt mine. They like to stay put. Like it so much they don’t even move away when they’re dead. You got to have a ceremony to make a ghost move. So a car can’t be haunted. All cars do is move. Maybe a car that didn’t run, had its wheels off, could be haunted, though.
It was a kind-of point. But maybe what’d happened to them girls was so awful their spirits couldn’t leave that car in spite of it moved. Or maybe it was the car itself. They’d found five different kinds of blood in that trunk. Even a car might want to get rid of that.
That car’s trying to get clean, I said. It don’t care how. It’ll drown you, even.
We were outside the Kwiker-Fil, and Leonard had just bought a sixty-four-ounce Dew. I’ve told him he drinks too much of that stuff, it’s going to give him diabetes. He took a big slurp out of the cup and did his donkey imitation, Eee-ahn, Eee-ahn, Eee-ahn, cars ain’t cats, they don’t clean themselves.
He waved his Dew to emphasize his point and right then he tripped and the entire cup splashed over the trunk and bubbled and fizzed down the paint.
I tripped, he said. That’s all.
I looked at the parking lot. New asphalt, laid last summer. Not a crack in it.
Leonard and I knew each other from when we were kids. Even when I got married it didn’t put nothing between us, even though Bonnie got tired of him coming around and asking me to do things for him. With him, I’d tell her. I’m doing things with Leonard, not for him. As I saw it, with Leonard and me, the difference between with and for wasn’t any.
It’s something when a car can do more to ruin a friendship than a woman can. That car totally unbalanced things. I started finding excuses not to ride in it, and Leonard knew it. It was like he’d found a woman he liked, and I quit coming around because she had a screechy laugh I couldn’t stand. The more I avoided that car, the more he latched on to it. We were really heyoka-ing each other over it. I shoulda maybe got some cedar and put it in that car, but that mighta made things worse, fooling around with powers I don’t know much about.
Then came the fire hydrant. I thought for sure that’d make Leonard see my point. He says he was reaching down for a can of Dew that was rolling around on the floorboards. He always had some explanation, even if they always amounted to he was a lousy driver who didn’t pay attention to where he was going or what he was doing, and I’ll be the first to agree with that—but he never ran his Citation into a fire hydrant. Anyways, he claims he was reaching for that Dew, and the can rolled away from him, so he leaned further and musta pulled on the steering wheel, and boom! He runs right into that fire hydrant out by the abandoned bowling alley.
You’d think between a car and a fire hydrant the hydrant would win, but it just shows how desperate that Continental was. It sheared that hydrant off and was squatting over it like a pig—Pat was right—soaking up water, and the dent the h
ydrant’d put in the bumper made it look like it was smiling, the headlights like eyes and the bumper crumpled up at the ends and down in the middle. Greggy Longwell gave Leonard a ticket for careless driving and did a Breathalyzer on him, even though Leonard ain’t drunk nothing but Dew for seven years and Longwell knows it—but hope springs eternal, as the saying goes.
They got the water shut down eventually, but not before the entire town had come out to see, white kids and Indian kids both in their cutoffs running in and out of the water vaporizing against the car and turning to rainbows over it, and the parents standing around in the sun talking. People even went back home and returned with coolers and lawn chairs, and it turned into a fountain party and a relief from the drought, and people got to wondering why that hydrant was necessary anyway, if the bowling alley burned down how much loss would it be, being’s it’s been abandoned for who knows how long, might even improve the town if it burned, and be a lot cheaper’n taking a bulldozer to it.
I was the only one made the point maybe the car itself was the problem. Everyone else thought it was just Leonard being Leonard, trying to do two things at once when doing one thing at once stretched his concentration limits. Up to then I hadn’t talked to anyone else about my suspicions about that car, but I decided it was time people knew, and maybe if enough of us pressured Leonard he’d get rid of that car before it killed him.
But when word got to Leonard what I was saying, twenty-eight years of friendship went down the tubes. It was kind of like the woman thing again. If you got a friend takes up with a woman you know’s bad for him—say you got some down-and-dirty on her—you sure ain’t gonna help the situation by telling him what you know. If he believes you he’ll be mad at you like you didn’t just tell him what you knew but caused it, and if he don’t believe you they’ll both be mad at you, so you’re best just letting him find out the hard way. That’s what it was like with Leonard and me and that car. And the more I tried to defend myself, the more it sounded like I was accusing Leonard—like trying to deny you’re in denial: it just proves the point.
And then people took sides, like Leonard and me was an old married couple getting a divorce, and for some reason most of them sided with Leonard. At least Bonnie didn’t side with him, though she wouldn’t agree with me that the car was a hundred percent the problem. I got tired of people cornering me about Leonard’s car, like they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and had to convert me to their way of seeing. Bonnie and me started going to Wall for groceries instead of Donaldson’s Foods just to avoid them. We’d wander around Wall Drug with all those tourists gawking at the piano-playing gorilla and the fake cowboy band and the Tyrannosaurus rex that wakes up every few minutes and roars at kids to give them nightmares all the way back to New Jersey. We had some fun sticking our heads through the holes in the covered-wagon scene and having tourists take pictures of us, Bonnie with a sunbonnet on and me with my stern face determined to go out West and settle on some Indian land. We had a laugh with those pictures. Leonard would’ve laughed so hard he’d have fallen on the floor, giggling like he does, and that woulda made us laugh even harder. I tried to laugh extra hard, but it didn’t work so good.
For several months the car laid low, and I thought maybe the fire hydrant’d done the trick. Then Leonard decided to go ice fishing. That’s something Norwegians do. When you think of someone sitting on a five-gallon bucket in the middle of a frozen lake staring at a hole in the ice, you think of a white guy in insulated coveralls and snowmobile boots, you don’t think of a tall, skinny Indian wearing Nikes and blue jeans and a couple of sweatshirts. It was about funnier than me and Bonnie playing pioneer. But Leonard, when he and I were friends again, claimed it was a natural thing to do. He said once the Bureau of Reclamation dammed Red Medicine Creek to make Lostman’s Lake, it was only a matter of time before an Indian started ice fishing there. I didn’t see the logic, and I didn’t bother to point out that he never actually fished.
He had the idea he could take that Continental onto the ice and drill a hole and open a window and listen to the radio and catch enough fish to live on for a while. So he packed some fishing gear and drove down the boat ramp. That car had him in a sure-enough trance. But once he hit the middle of the lake, the ice shuddered—he could feel it right through the tires, he says—and he was out of that car so fast he claims he was thirty feet away from it before he even knew he’d opened the door.
What I think is, that ice cracked loud enough to break whatever grip that car had on Leonard, and once he got away from it there was no going back, even if he hated to leave it out there with the engine running and gas over three bucks a gallon. As it turned out, the ice was strong enough to hold the car up, but Leonard didn’t know that.
It was a long walk back to shore, he told me. You think it’s possible for it to be longer one way than the other, Ian? Cause it sure was. I was tiptoeing all the way. You think you weigh less when you tiptoe? Cause that ice kept cracking and making noises, and I was trying not to weigh any more than I had to. I guess I didn’t weigh very much, huh? Cause I’m telling you about it, right?
That’s how we all came to be roasting hot dogs and sitting in squealing lawn chairs around a fire on the boat ramp. It was Myrna’s idea. All those TVs finally got to her. She realized they weren’t doing a bit of good, and she couldn’t put anything together from them anyway.
I thought I could predict the future with them TVs, she told me later. But I don’t guess TVs are any good for that. The more I watched, the less clear things got. So when I heard Leonard’s car was sitting on the ice, well, maybe I needed to get my mind off the war.
Leonard drove the Continental onto the lake in January, and then the weather was off-and-on above and below freezing, so it was hard to tell if the ice was getting thicker or thinner. Longwell threatened to fine Leonard if that car fell through, but that wasn’t much incentive for Leonard, since he didn’t have enough money to pay a fine anyway, and he wasn’t sure Longwell had jurisdiction over the lake and maybe the car was actually a boat since it was out there and not on a road. But it was out of anyone’s hands by then. Wilbur White Eagle had already started collecting money and writing down dates and times in that old tablet he’d dug out of a drawer, and if Leonard had worked up the courage to get the car off the ice, people would’ve made him take it back out. There’s only so much disappointment people will live with, and Leonard bringing that car in would’ve been worse than government cheese not arriving on time.
Wilbur gained a lot of authority just by being record keeper. He carried that tablet everywhere, and people would stop and consult him and look at the betting. After a while Wilbur went beyond just showing the bets to commenting on them, offering his own insights, talking about El Niño and the Farmer’s Almanac. Then someone asked him if he knew so much about the weather, what day would he bet on, and he came up with St. Patrick’s Day and, once he said it, defended it so confidently people couldn’t help but believe he was on to something.
Which is how half the Indians in Twisted Tree came to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day sitting on the shore of Lostman’s Lake waiting for Leonard’s car to fall through the ice. I’d kind of made up with Leonard, since without his car he needed someone to take him places, but it wasn’t a real made up, just him needing and me giving. I was allowed to sit around the fire long’s I didn’t hog a spot and didn’t say nothing about it being a good thing the car was finally going to be got rid of.
But then I made the mistake of not believing Wilbur’s prediction. Every time he looked at his watch and then at the next bettor who’d lost twenty bucks, I couldn’t help but make a comment about how cold it was, which didn’t make the person who’d just lost any happier, and it got so people started thinking I was hexing the weather and keeping it cold, even though that made no more sense than a Chinook wind reaching way out here from the Black Hills. I didn’t mind rubbing it in, though, that people were guessing wrong, since most of them had sided with Leonard about that Co
ntinental.
Wilbur never lost his confidence, though, even when the sun went down and the fire was the only light, reaching out to the various faces around it, and sometimes reflecting off some part of the lake out there, like the ice was burning underneath. He just kept repeating, every time someone gave him a chance: You’ll see. A big wind gonna come up. Warm one.
People stayed, based on nothing but that. I never knew Wilbur had them kind of leadership qualities. Right next to the fire we couldn’t see the car, so people would stand away from it in twos and threes and watch it, a dark spot sitting out there alone in the middle of all that white, and then they’d come back to the fire to warm up and other people would take their places. And people talked of Red Medicine Creek, and some of the elders told stories about what it was like before it was a lake, and kids fell asleep in their mothers’ or fathers’ arms, and some people speculated that Leonard’s car wouldn’t be the first one at the bottom of Lostman’s Lake, and Ted Kills Many, who’d come in from his place way out of town and was sitting talking with Norman Walks Alone, neither of them drinking beer, just smiled, and Norman allowed how he’d heard those stories, too, and that was the thing with stories, you never quite knew what to make of them, but you had to make something of them anyway.
Then about midnight the wind started blowing warm. Wilbur sat staring at his tablet and after a while he said real quiet, like he was reading it off the page, Is that a warm wind blowin? Or is it just blowin across the fire at me?
I was sitting across the fire from him, and anyone could’ve answered, but I knew. I could be proud or I could laugh at myself, and Wilbur was letting me decide.
Must be you, Wilbur, I said. I shivered and pulled my coat tighter. Feels to me like it’s getting colder all the time. Wouldn’t surprise me if it started a blizzard up.
I held my hands toward the fire and rubbed them like they were freezing, and people chuckled, and a way opened for me to be right with people again, even if I’d never actually been wrong. I kept it up—the warmer it got and the harder the wind blew, the more I bundled up and asked for more wood on the fire. I started borrowing people’s clothes they were taking off, so by early morning when the sun was coming up and the temperature had probably got to the fifties and people had moved back from the fire, I was sitting right next to it, adding wood and shivering and stomping my feet and wearing three stocking caps and two sweatshirts over my coat and three pairs of gloves and two blankets, and complaining how I was freezing to death, and little kids were piling more clothes on me. Wilbur was smiling and quiet. So I ended up playing heyoka to everyone that night, and it was a good thing, even if I’m not a real heyoka. When Leonard took off his coat and gave it to me and I chattered my teeth and thanked him, we were finally OK again, and even Bonnie smiled when she saw it.
