by Jim Dodge
Her attention locked on the map. After a minute of hard scrutiny, she stabbed with a crooked finger and asked, ‘Here? The X?’
‘Yes, ma’am. The man who drew that map for me saw the wreckage before it was cleared, and came back many times afterwards.’
‘The map’s wrong.’
I hadn’t even considered that possibility and was momentarily confounded. ‘Well, now,’ I began with feigned reluctance, ‘you say it’s wrong. He claims it’s right. He was here and you weren’t. You say you felt it. He saw it. It seems awfully relative to––’
‘If you want to discuss philosophy,’ she bluntly interrupted, ‘I suggest you try the university – they’ve made an institution out of mistaking the map for the journey.’
‘I’m not trying to be offensive, Mrs Nogardam. All I’m saying is you could be wrong. That’s all. That it is possible you’re mistaken.’
‘Then go look for yourself. You have till dark. No tricks.’ She shut the door.
The door was white, and shutting it had the bizarre effect of making the porch seem brighter. I stared at it, all at once pissed off, crushed, set to explode, dejected, gutted, wrecked, enraged, and lost. I headed back to the Caddy in a dazed stomp, mumbling aloud, ‘Why, why, why, why, why, why did it have to be some batshit old lady culled from the geriatric ward, some vestal guardian of corn stubble? Fuck her, goddamn it anyway … just get in the Caddy and crank it up till the head glows and turn it loose right through the motherfucking fence out into the field and grab your shit and touch it off and run like hell…’ mumble grumble till I was standing next to the Caddy. The air seemed to have thickened. I gazed out into the field toward the general area of the X on Tommy’s map. ‘“Go look for yourself.” What the holy shit does she think I’ve been doing?’ I opened the Caddy’s door, slid in, and slammed it behind me.
The sound of the slamming door carried across the harvested field. As if precipitated by the sonic disturbance, big fat flakes of snow began to fall. Just what I needed. Was it meant to cover the clues I was supposed to seek, or was it supposed to cloak my getaway? Or was it a shroud to conveniently cover that old witch’s body should I follow my deepest impulse and beat her to death with a ball peen hammer? Did it in fact signify anything other than what it was? Snow.
I was getting all wound up for another bout of metaphysical babble. The snow was swirling thick, silent, peaceful. I leaned forward, my chin resting on my hands on the wheel, and gradually relaxed as I watched snow swaddle the field; mound on the fenceposts; settle then melt on the Caddy’s hood, still warm from engine heat; stick to the windshield for a heartbeat, the intricate crystals dissolving into slow rivulets sliding down. Within fifteen minutes, about the time the snowflakes began sticking on the cooled windshield to obliterate my view, a weary calm came over me. I decided to try it her way first; maybe I’d learn something. I zipped my jacket all the way up and slapped on my new earmuffs.
I must’ve spent a couple of hours in that field searching for physical evidence that was perhaps being obliterated as I sought it, and for some sort of metaphysical evidence that I wasn’t sure I’d recognize even if I were capable of sensing it. Wild, dense, relentless, the snow fell, cutting visibility to the length of a stride. I tried to approach the task methodically, crossing back and forth between the east-west fences, trying to maintain roughly parallel lines, but when the tracks of your last pass are buried before you can start back, when you can’t see the fences till you twang into them, when you’re essentially following your frozen face, that method is doomed. I had no idea whether I was constructing a crisp, evenly proportioned grid or merely lurching back and forth in the same groove. But I did know that I was rapidly losing feeling in my extremities in absolute direct proportion to the feeling of immense futility swelling in my heart. By the time I floundered back to the Caddy I couldn’t even feel the cold anymore, just a powerful desire to lie down on the front seat and sleep. Maybe even die. It was all the same.
But first I had to get into the car, and to get the door open took a good jerk, and then another to free my bare hand from the frozen handle. It was almost as cold inside the Caddy as in that forsaken field. After considerable crude fumbling with the key, the Caddy turned over torpidly, then caught. I used my elbow to turn the heater up to cook and spread my hands in front of the vent.
My fingers resembled some mad confectioner’s display of blueberry popsicles. As they thawed toward tingling, I thought about energy and its wondrous, manifold, interpenetrating forms: thermal, kinetic, moral, hydraulic, metabolic, all of it. The energy required to warm you, maintain you, move you. Ergs – that basic grunt unit – in waves, calorie, current: x ergs required for each step on the journey, each turn of the wheels, each prayer uttered, answered, acted upon. The energy captured, transformed, released. The energy just to drive the welter of transactions. This was a melancholy contemplation, because while the world plainly vibrated with energy, personally I was just about out, the flesh sorely overdrawn and the soul about to be foreclosed. What remained to me as possible energy, the power I would need to act on the intractable Mrs Nogardam and answer her psychic pop quiz, was energy that I, with sad realism, understood was false: money, amphetamines, and madness. But I’d said I’d give it everything I had.
Once my fingers were again semifunctional, the tips alive with a burning ache, I dug out my bankroll and counted out $2000 in a hundred $20 bills. I folded and wadded them in my jacket pocket, flexed my fingers a few times, and headed back to Mrs Nogardam’s lair to talk business. I left the Caddy running in case the negotiations dragged on; I didn’t want to come home to a cold house. Besides, I had plenty of gas and nowhere left to go.
She’d seen me coming and had the door open, her gold eyes boring into me through the screen, only this time I saw her, too, and didn’t knock. Instead, the hand I raised contained $2000. Fanning the bills like a deck of cards, I pressed them against the screen for her authentication. ‘What you see, ma’am, is what you get. That’s two grand, a considerable dent in my cash assets – leaves me enough for a half-dozen grilled cheese sandwiches and a Greyhound ticket home. And it’s all yours, right now, if you let me honor the dead.’ I tapped the money lightly against the screen. ‘So what do you say we cut the horseshit here and both make ourselves happy?’
‘You can’t buy it,’ she said, her voice flat as Iowa. The door closed.
I kicked the aluminum-framed bottom of the screendoor, screaming in frustration, ‘Be reasonable, you old cunt!’
The door flew back open. ‘You mind your foul mouth, Mr Gastin, or your time will be up right now. Do you understand?’
The fire in her eyes had the paradoxical effect of forming ice in my scrotum. I flapped the money weakly, then tucked my hand into my jacket pocket as I nodded my meek understanding.
She continued, ‘I made the conditions clear. It is almost three o’clock. By five it’s dark.’
‘But ma’am,’ I pleaded, ‘it’s a snow storm out there.’
Her eyes didn’t leave me. ‘So it is.’ The door closed.
I trudged back to the Caddy through snow up to midcalf, though it seemed to have slackened a bit. Before getting back in my snow-bound landrocket I scraped the crust off the windshield with my coat sleeve. Softened by the heat from inside, it wiped right off.
I leaned back behind the wheel, a clear view through the windshield now, and watched the snow fall like cold confetti on my stalled parade. I felt utterly, dismally deflated. To try and buy it had been stupid. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the options, but either my concentration was shot or there weren’t many options. I could leave, try to find Tommy, and bring him back with me, though he’d probably come on-shift at 6:00 and was gone for the day. Besides, I’d have to convince him to drive out and tangle assholes with Granny, and there was no guarantee the old hag would acknowledge Tommy’s memory of the crash. Nope, I decided, it was pretty much down to satisfying her or running her over, and I didn’t have the
energy for either job.
Well, not on me. The trunk, however, wasn’t that far away. After all, it had taken me this far, and I sure didn’t seem to be getting anywhere without the help. I would take three – no more – to freshen up. I promised myself that if I took them, I’d try her way one more time before resorting to mine. I reached down and turned off the engine and was withdrawing the key when I noticed that in the course of my brief reverie it had stopped snowing. The sky was still leaden, but the scene to my eye was silent, pristine, clear. Looked like a sign.
When I opened the cooler in the trunk and seized the bottle of crank like an osprey nailing a fish, I perceived a small problem. Instead of a bottle of small, neatly cross-hatched white tablets, I had a bottle about a quarter full of a pale white liquid: I hadn’t screwed the lid down tight and water from the cooler had trickled in, dissolving the tablets into a thin slurry. Well, as long as only the form and not the substance had been altered, I’d merely have to make a careful guess at the proper dosage. Recalling from high-school chemistry that alcohol lowered the freezing point, I fished a six-pack out of the cooler while I was at it, and then closed the trunk.
I ended up having a wonderful wake in the front seat: three sips of speed, four beers, and a solid hour of Golden Oldies turned up so loud they blew the snow off the Caddy and loosened the siding on Granny Nogardam’s house. I listened to everything I had of the Bopper, Buddy, and Ritchie, hoping the sound of their music would stir their lingering spirits to help me.
A love for real not fade away!!!
‘Not!’ I screamed. ‘Not! Not!’ I hoped Granny was listening.
I stumbled from the Caddy and headed out to the field in the long-shadowed dusk. I hadn’t left myself much time. As I went over the fence I yelled, ‘Bopper, my man! Buddy Holly! Ritchie! Talk to me. Tell me where to deliver this load of a gift. Got love and prayers for you. Got ’em from Harriet. Got ’em from Donna, Ritchie – she’s sending her best. She’s sort of fucked-up in Arizona right now, but she’s trying, man. Everybody’s trying, you guys hear me? Double-Gone, Joshua, Kacy, John – they all send their love. The real kind that doesn’t fade away. So even if it doesn’t matter to you guys now, don’t mean shit to your gone spirits, it matters to me, to us. So talk to me. Guide me. Tell me where you want this monument to love and music burned, where you want the dark lit up.’
The snow started falling again, lightly, a few drifting flakes. No voices answered, inside or out, but I felt a faint tug of direction and began walking, starting around the fence-line and then spiraling inward, closing as the snow fell faster, thicker, until I could hardly see my own feet, till I felt like I was vanishing, and then my left foot came down on something solid. I knelt and searched with both hands in the snow until I touched it, slick and cold, and lifted it close to my face for a look. I bit back a scream when I realized it was a bone; then laughed with crazy relief when I recognized it as an antler, a deer’s shed horn, a thick main beam forked into two long tines, weathered a faint moss-green, nicked here and there with sharp, double-incised grooves where rodents had chewed it for minerals. I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Great. Just what I needed. A fucking deer horn. Don’t you guys understand I already got enough pieces for the puzzle? Probably got more fucking pieces than there is puzzle. Come on, now: help me out, don’t mess me around.’ I brandished the horn to emphasize my point. It slipped out of my numb hand, burying itself base down in the snow, tines spread upright like the forks of a river joining to plunge straight down into the earth. And there it was, by sheer accident, right in front of my face: a divining rod, a witcher’s forked stick, a wand to dowse the spot where their ghosts broke free of their broken bodies. The key, or at least a tool to pick the lock.
With snow mounding on my flamingo hat, piling across the plaid shoulders of my jacket, my hands, feet, and face frozen beyond feeling, I worked the field with the bone wand held steadily poised in front of me, my whole being condensed to the receptive tip, waiting for its plunge. I spiraled slowly out from the center of the field, wired to the slightest stirring, faintest sense, a pulse, a trembling, anything. And I didn’t feel the slightest quiver of response – nothing; zilch; zero. It was solid dark when I gave up.
The porchlight was the only sign of life at the house. I expected her to be waiting behind the screen, but the door was closed. I knocked. Coming back defeated across the field, I’d tried to compose a new plea, but it no longer seemed to matter. When she opened the door I didn’t even look up.
‘Well?’ she demanded, friendly as ever.
I felt the tears coming and, afraid my voice would crack, shook my head without speaking.
‘You’d better go now,’ she said, and for the first time, I sensed a hint of sympathy in her voice.
Not much, but it encouraged me to give it a try. ‘I’d guess somewhere near the center of the field. It’s the only place I felt anything. I found a deer horn there, close to where the X is on the map. But you already said that was wrong.’
‘It is.’
‘You couldn’t be mistaken?’
‘It’s unlikely.’
‘Would you tell me where the spot is?’
‘No. You agreed to the conditions. You didn’t fulfill them. Now kindly leave.’
‘I want to come back tomorrow and try again.’
She didn’t answer or give any indication she’d heard.
I’d tried everything except begging, so I figured I’d give that a shot: ‘Please, Mrs Nogardam. Please?’
‘I told you no, Mr Gastin. Now I want you to leave.’
I slammed my fist against the screendoor frame, jolting it open for an instant before the spring whipped it shut again. ‘Damn your cold ass,’ I wept. ‘How can you possibly judge what I’m all about, what this means to me, how much …’ but I stopped because she hadn’t even flinched, not a blink, a start, a step back, nothing. Just watching me with those dark gold eyes.
I wiped at the tears with my sleeve, some clinging snow from my stingy-brim plopping to the porch floor. ‘Why can’t I make you see how much this matters? And not just to me, either. Donna, Joshua, Double-Gone, my friends in San Francisco – what do I tell them?’
‘Tell them you failed. Tell them pity is a polite form of loathing. Tell them I didn’t pity you.’
‘What fucking right––’ I started to rage but she suddenly lifted an arm and pointed past me into the darkness. I stopped cold.
‘Mr Gastin, if you want to work off your anger and confusion there’s a snow shovel leaning against the back of the porch. You’ll need it to clear a path to get out. Good night.’ She shut the door.
I picked up the shovel on my way back to the Eldorado. I started the car to let it warm up, took a little gulp of speed to lubricate my muscles, then started shoveling. There was about 200 feet of driveway out to the main road and I dug right in, not a thought in my raving mind except moving snow, and without thought there was no confusion, just the scrape of shovel against the gravel roadway, the grunt of breath as I lifted, pitched, and took another bite. In about twenty minutes I finished, walked back down the cleared drive, and replaced the shovel, figuring that I was, if nothing else, a success as a human snowplow.
Back across the drifted yard, I used my forearm to wipe snow from the corners of the windshield, then wiped the same forearm across my sweaty face. I was so warm, in fact, that when I slipped behind the wheel, I had to turn down the heater. I took another gritty swig of speed to replace lost fluids, turned on the wipers to clear the slush from the windshield, clicked the lights to highbeams, dropped it into reverse, and came off the clutch. The drive wheels spun for a second, then gripped. Aiming between the bullet taillights, staying light and steady on the gas, I backed out to the road.
When I felt the rear wheels on the pavement I stopped, slammed it into low, and screaming ‘Oh baaay-beeee, you know what I like!’ I stood on the gas. There was a shuddering second before the rubber fastened the power to the road and then I was smoking ba
ck down the driveway like a silver bullet, a dead bead on the fence, hoping I’d have enough speed to crash through into the field.
I never found out. Just as I nailed it into second and felt the Caddy leap forward in a spray of gravel and snow, a blast of flame exploded from near the porch and the Caddy’s right front end collapsed, the momentum snapping the rear end around so hard I felt it wanting to flip, but I squared it away as best I could and whipped around through a full 360°, showering snow. Then, I cut the lights and engine and bailed out, still uncertain what had happened.
Mrs Nogardam was standing in front of me in a white parka, hood drawn tight about her face, the shotgun in her hands pointed at my throat. ‘I asked you to leave,’ she said with a mean, even patience.
‘Ma’am, that’s what I was doing.’ I couldn’t keep the pounding of my heart out of my voice.
‘No, you were just being foolish.’
‘I stand corrected,’ I said, beginning to relax – she wasn’t going to shoot. ‘And it looks like I might be standing here corrected for a while longer, because I think you just shot my way out. Where were you aiming?’
‘Where I hit: the right-front tire.’ She lowered the gun slightly. ‘If you’ve got a spare, change it. If not, it looks like you’ll have to use some of that money on a tow truck.’
The possibility of that irony made me reckless.
‘Ma’am,’ I asked mildly, ‘is that by any chance a Remington twenty-gauge pump?’
‘It is.’
‘I had one just like it when I was a kid growing up in Florida. Used it on quail. You use yours on your husbands?’
Reckless, but it got to her: her eyes flashed and the gun barrel came back up to lock on my throat. Her voice was tight. ‘I find it difficult to believe you grew up, Mr Gastin. I find about as much evidence for your maturity as the police found for my involvement in my husbands’ disappearances. None. Because there was none.’
