by Jim Dodge
‘You realize, of course,’ I said softly, ‘you’ll have to kill me. I’m not giving up. This is something I have to do.’
‘No you don’t,’ she said. ‘But you probably will. That does not mean you’re going to do it here. I was calling the sheriff about the time you were putting the shovel back. I told him I thought there was a prowler. I doubt if he’ll hurry – I’m not popular with local law enforcement – but he should make it in twenty minutes or so, and then you can discuss rights and wrongs with him. Or you can hurry and change your tire. Or you can try to take this gun away. I won’t kill you – believe me or not, I’ve never killed anything in my life. But you might live the rest of yours without a knee, or the ability to reproduce.’
‘I was wrong,’ I told her. ‘You didn’t shoot your husbands – you froze ’em to death. Or froze ’em out so bad they were glad to vanish.’
Though she didn’t reply, her shoulders seemed to slump. I think I could’ve gotten to her in half an hour, but I didn’t have the time. If she was bluffing about the sheriff, she was bluffing with the best hand. ‘I have a spare in the trunk,’ I told her, hoping a new tire was all I’d need.
She held the shotgun on me as I fumbled the spare tire and tools from the trunk, and kept it on me till I was down on my belly digging out a place for the jack. While I can usually change a tire in five minutes on dry ground, I didn’t know how long it would take in the snow, so I ignored her to concentrate on my work. There was no reason to slow things down with more nasty exchanges. We were done talking. I’d be back. She had to sleep sometime.
I set the jack solid under the axle and then crawled out to spin off the lug nuts. I glanced in her direction to see how close I was covered, and for a strange, splintering instant I thought she’d disappeared. But she was there, all right, sitting cross-legged in the snow, gun cradled across her left arm, her head bowed against the snowfall – a few flakes blowing from the storm’s edge, a handful of stars glittering where the sky had cleared – and she looked for all the world like an old buffalo hunter hunkered down to wait out the weather.
I went back to work. The tire was shredded. There were pellet dents in the hubcap and a few concave dings in the fender, bare steel glinting through the chipped white paint and primer. I slipped the lug wrench over the first nut and twisted, leaning into it. The nut broke loose with a tiny shriek. I spun it off and dropped it clattering into the hubcap.
The sound had barely faded before she began to speak. I was stunned by the change in her voice, that hard edge turned to a delicate keening. ‘I loved them all, you know. Kenneth was the first. We were young, two years married. He had a lot of debts, a lot of doubts about himself, and we had some troubles – but when it was there for us, it was really there. I thought he’d just walked away from it. Snapped one moment and just kept going. Men can do that. I never tried to look for him. I was six months pregnant and somehow believed the baby would bring him back. The baby was stillborn. The minister and I were the only ones at the funeral, and the minister was there because he got paid. I used to visit the grave every day, hoping I’d find Kenneth waiting. I never did.
‘Joe, my second husband, disappeared out rounding up strays on the Arizona-Mexico border. The sheriff thought he might have been killed by drug smugglers. Stumbled on them by mistake and tried to stop them. Joe would have: he was big and rough, not a drop of sentiment in him, but he was so decent he was almost fragile. I knew he hadn’t just kept riding.
‘I remember pacing in the ranch house as it got later and later. Praying on the flagstone floor that he was all right. Beating on it with my fists.
‘I looked for Joe. Months after the posse had given up I was still out there every day. People said I was crazy, hysterical, a ghost-chaser. I looked in every baranca, arroyo, draw, and canyon, behind every tree and boulder for thirty miles. I never found a trace. But after a while out there alone in the mountains, looking so hard, so devoutly, I got so I could ride up a gully and feel the presence of death – tendrils, subtle odors, a particular stillness – and after three years of looking I could feel death where only a hair remained, or a fleck of dried blood, and soon I could feel it when there was nothing at all. You called me a hard woman; well, it’s a hard knowledge.’
‘Ma’am––’ I started to defend myself, but she sliced right through it, the old flint in her voice, ‘You listen while you change that tire. If you want to talk, talk to the sheriff.’
That shut me up. I spun off another lug nut as she continued. ‘I might still be riding that border if Duster hadn’t come along. His wife had died of cancer six months before and he was traveling around hunting and fishing, trying to let go. He stopped by the ranch house asking for permission to hunt doves down by the pond. We talked a bit, and the next day he came to hunt again and asked me out to dinner. I warned him about my husbands disappearing but he took it the same way he took my heart, with a kind of crazy, carefree seriousness. Duster was a rare man. He knew who he was, so he loved you for who you were, not something he wanted you to be.
‘Twenty-one years Duster and I were together, most of them around here. And one day he went out pheasant hunting over at the Lindstroms’ place and disappeared. I can’t tell you how hard that was. The police kept after me for months. I couldn’t blame them. But what could I tell them? I didn’t know what to tell myself. But I made up my mind I’d find Duster, and when the hullabaloo died down I started looking. I looked every night for seven years. Every single night.
‘You see, Mr Gastin, that’s how I learned to sense the dead, to feel the earth reveal the spirits it’s claimed, to sense the presence, read the signs. I learned it by looking for those dearly lost to me.’
I had the spare on the axle and was finishing the lug nuts. ‘Did you find him,’ I asked.
‘Mr Gastin, I’m sorry I have to be so stern with you. You are foolish, yet I admire your spunk.’
‘Then give me another chance at it when it’s not snowing. You had years of practice.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘not here.’
‘Then where?’ I asked, cinching down the last lug nut.
‘I don’t know. You can always try to get back to the beginning, but I’m sure you understand how difficult that is, and dangerous. Take it where you find it – that’s my advice.’
‘I’m not sure I understand,’ I told her politely, ‘but that’s hardly a new state of affairs.’ I worked the jack out and stood up. She stood up with me, the gun barrel pointed down at the snow, but she watched closely as I put the blasted tire and the tools back in the trunk, then back around and into the car. As I closed the door she stepped around to the driver’s side. When the gears meshed, as simple and smooth as that I understood what she was guarding in the field. I powered down the window. ‘Maybe I haven’t earned the right to deliver the gift,’ I said, ‘but I do think I’ve earned the right to ask you what you’re protecting here. I just can’t believe it’s the ghosts of three rock musicians.’
‘I’m protecting my ignorance,’ she said.
That wasn’t what I’d expected. ‘I thought ignorance was my affliction.’
‘You’re hardly alone.’
‘What is it you don’t understand?’
Her head turned slightly to gaze out across the field. ‘I told you I looked for the spot where Duster vanished, looked for seven years, and this is where I found him. I was sure of it. In the center, near where you found the antler. Of course, the antler wasn’t there then. This place is about nine miles from the Lindstroms’, in the opposite direction from where we lived at the time, but the feeling was powerful and clear. I thought maybe he’d been murdered and his body buried here.’ She closed her eyes, then immediately opened them. ‘The truth is, I hoped he’d been murdered … I wanted a reason, you see––’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘I thought it was your husband you were protecting. Now it makes sense.’
‘Don’t be so sure,’ she said sadly. ‘When I dug down that night, yes, th
ere it was, a human skull. But it was the skull on an infant, Mr Gastin, a baby less than a year old, and it had been there long before my husband or your musicians died. There were no other bones. Just the skull. You could almost hold it in the palm of your hand. So you understand why I couldn’t let you drive this car out there and set it on fire? There are forces here beyond my understanding, so I had to insist that you prove yours.’
I felt my skull shining in the moonlight. I finally managed to say, ‘I’m not sure I wanted to know that.’
Mrs Nogardam leaned her hooded head to the open window and gave me a quick, dry smile. ‘Neither did I. It only added to the confusion. But if we don’t want to know, why do we seek?’ She smiled again, almost girlishly, then stepped back from the car, the shotgun swinging up level with the grille to remind me to act intelligently.
I backed out to the paved road, swung to the left, and got on it as fast as the snow allowed. For someone with nowhere to go I sure found myself in a hurry to get there, although on reflection there was a place I wanted with an overwhelming desire to reach, and that was far away from all the madness, the ghost salesman and ghost guardian and the moonlit skulls of children and a gift that didn’t seem to want delivery – but most of all I wanted away from my continual inability to make sense out of any of it, and my tumorous fear that there was no sense to make.
When I met a sheriff ’s car at the first crossroads – had she actually called, or was this a routine patrol? – I came very close to turning myself in. I stifled a powerful impulse to put a broadslide block on his cruiser and jump out jabbering, ‘Officer, this Caddy’s so hot the paint’s runny and that bottle of white stuff on the front seat is pure Hong Kong heroin I sell to schoolchildren and the papers in the glovebox still have wet ink and the baby’s corpse in the trunk is missing its head and my goodness is that an open container in my hand, you child-molesting Nazi cock-sucker. Oh, pretty please: lock me up! Yes! I need custody.’
But I didn’t. We eased past each other on the snow-slick road. I watched his taillights in the rearview mirror as they disappeared into where I’d been, the point from which I was unraveling. Where next, and why? Drive, I said to myself, for Christsake find out where you’re going. Yet even that pure injunction was stymied: because of the snow, the roads were so treacherous I had to doodle when I wanted to jam. I couldn’t even get it up past the posted till I hit 135, freshly plowed and sanded. I took it south, back toward Des Moines, mainly because there were more stars in that direction.
I don’t want to give the impression I was flying apart. In fact, I was fairly stable, paralyzed as I was by the triangulated suck of stark confusion, dread, and depression. It was just as Gladys Nogardam had so coldly put it: I’d failed. If I was smart, I told myself, I’d simply shoulder my duffle bag and walk away from the whole fucked-up mess. Quit while I was only behind. I’d entered that state of mind where flight is spurred by the vulnerable belief and poignant hope that what’s chasing you is worse than what’s waiting ahead. But if I wasn’t smart enough to cut my losses, at least I was bright enough to stop and catch my breath.
After knowing Joshua Springfield, how could I possibly have resisted the Raven’s Haven Motel on the north edge of Des Moines? The office reeked of the liver-and-onions frying in the manager’s adjacent apartment. On a small table opposite the business counter was a stuffed, ratty-feathered raven mounted on a jack-o-lantern. The manager kept eyeing me nervously as I signed in, then examined the registration card closely as I dug in my pocket for money.
‘Ah, under occupation here, Dr Gass … what sort of pharmaceutical testing do you do?’
‘Freelance,’ I explained. ‘But right now I’m working for the Feds. Some of them damn beatniks are putting ground-up marijuana in Saint Joseph’s Baby Aspirin. Found a batch up in Fargo this morning. Company says it was a split shipment, Fargo and Des Moines, so I’m down here to check it out. I’ll try to run it down in the morning. Haven’t slept in two days, that’s why I’d appreciate it if I wasn’t disturbed. I get disturbed easily. And whatever you do, don’t tell anybody – no need to start a panic. They might not even be on the shelves yet. But just between you and me, don’t give your kids Saint Joseph’s.’
‘I thought marijuana was green. That should make them easy to spot.’
‘It is green, pal, in its natural state – and I’m glad to see an alert citizen – but they’re bleaching it with mescaline tritripinate.’
‘Somebody ought to shoot the lousy bastards,’ he said with disgust.
‘Tell you what: we break the case, I’ll give you the names of the jerks as soon as I get them. Maybe try to work something out with the Feds to take their time, know what I mean? You can close the case before the shithooks even have a chance to call their fancy New York lawyers. You got a card with a number where I can reach you on short notice? You should be ready to move on it in a hurry.’
He gave me his card along with the room key, though he didn’t seem particularly eager to give me either.
‘Citizen involvement,’ I told him as I headed for the door, ‘that’s what separates the sheep from the goats.’ I turned around at the door. ‘Another thing: you on city water?’
‘Yes,’ he said uncertainly.
‘A word to the wise: get bottled. A retarded baboon could dump a vial of chemicals in the water supply any time he took the notion. Lysergic acid, hashish extract, opium crystals – a pound of any of that shit in the water supply could take out Des Moines for a week. You have a cup of coffee one morning and ten minutes later you’re up on the roof here trying to plug your dick into the neon sign. Don’t think I’m kidding.’
‘Bottled water,’ he repeated.
‘You got it. In this day and age, you can’t be too sure. Hard to be sure at all, in fact.’
I fetched my duffle, a six-pack, and the bottle of crank from the trunk and then started looking for #14. I wondered about my perverse delight in jacking around the Harveys and Bubbas and Walter Mittys of the world. To beat up on the defenseless didn’t show much character, nor much heart. No wonder I failed or fucked-up at every opportunity.
But the self-flagellation, meant to raise the welts of self-pity, stopped the moment I stepped into my room – not that it was breathtakingly spacious or tastefully appointed. Standard issue down to the smoke-yellowed floral wallpaper, a linty-green Sear’s close-out carpet, Magnavox fifteen-inch black-and-white TV bolted to the desk, and a lumpy double bed that had probably known more sexual joy and despair in a month than I had in twenty years – but # 14 offered the welcome sanctuary of transient neutrality, space without claims.
I locked and bolted the door, set my bag on the luggage rack, opened a beer, and moseyed into the bathroom hoping to find a spacious tub. The tub wasn’t luxurious, but it was adequate. I wiggled the bead-chained plug in tight and opened the hot water all the way. As the steam curled, I stripped off my grungy clothes and pawed through my duffle looking for something I hadn’t worn recently. Making a mental note to do laundry in the morning, I grinned at my display of confidence. But indeed, this was the trick – to carry on as if everything was normal. I needed rest, especially rest from thinking, but had to make some decisions about what to do now that I’d failed the delivery and lost my way.
In the time it took me to shut off the hot water, I decided I believed Gladys Nogardam or else was scared shitless of her, either of which was sufficient reason not to attempt a midnight run on the crash site, a notion I hadn’t realized I was still seriously considering. Nope, I was in over my head with Mrs Nogardam. But the point she’d made about returning to the beginning made more and more sense. In the spiritual inflation of enlarging the gesture – abetted by the baseless paranoia inspired by Double-Gone that Scumball’s goons might be awaiting me – I’d lost my original purpose and therefore my way, the simple, uncomplicated point of delivering it to the Bopper’s grave and then quietly slipping away.
According to the information I’d found at the Houston P
ublic Library, the Bopper, as I’d assumed, was buried in Beaumont. The obvious move was to drive down and make delivery, and that’s what I decided I’d do after a good night’s sleep. While this amounted to a two thousand-mile detour, I could chalk it up as a learning experience. That was the ticket: get up early and back on track, rested, refreshed, and wiser. And no picking up any hitchhikers along the way or talking to anyone who might possibly deflect me from that simple task. I was too suggestible, too vulnerable to my own doubts. And another decision: if I didn’t pull it off this time, I’d just forget it and walk away. Abandon the journey as a fair try that failed, a victim of my own fuck-ups and fate. Sad, but no cause for shame.
I went in to check the bathwater and jerked my hand right back out – I wanted to soak myself, not cook lobsters. I was reaching for the cold water handle when it crossed my mind that I didn’t know which Beaumont cemetery had won the Bopper’s bones. It was about 8:00 and I was fairly sure Texas and Iowa were in the same time zone. With any luck the Beaumont Library was still open.
If the bathwater had been 20° cooler, I wouldn’t have phoned the library before it closed and my story might’ve ended up in a different place altogether. The temperature of water – such a simple thing. Everything intimately and ultimately involved, millions of convoluted contingencies, none of them meaningless, any one potentially critical, and potential itself subject to the infinite dimensional intersections of time, space, and luck. Obviously a mind is not enough.
I sat my bare ass down on the desk chair, put the beer within easy reach, then dialed information through the motel office. The number in Beaumont was busy, so I asked the operator to try Houston. The call went through smoothly, answered by a woman on the second ring: ‘Houston Public Library, may I help you?’
