As Dom drove north, Troy settled into a new arrangement of events. There were three, maybe four primary players which he pushed around, changing their relationships until he and Charlene were almost totally separated. An acquaintanceship, a couple of favors, a few beers at Jackson’s, that was the extent of Charlene Russo. His mission was to find the girl who shot him, killed Charlene, and stole her car. That would be Ruby Ryan. The story was working but the painkillers made him drowsy. Each time he woke, there was another puzzle in his reconstituted past.
He asked Dom, “You ever heard of pressed memories?”
“Re-pressed,” Dom said.
“Know what it means?”
The young man chewed thoughtfully on a banana chip. As company, Dom had started to wear thin. In Troy’s opinion, he fell into a category of men who talked too much about things no one wanted to hear and when asked a direct question, refused to open his mouth. However, Dom couldn’t be rushed. He waited until the chip had been thoroughly masticated before he spoke.
“After a bad thing happens, sometimes it’s so bad you don’t remember. Maybe your mind chooses not to remember. You repress it. You with me?”
“Copy,” Troy said.
“It’s like a pancake in your brain. When you repress, it gets flatter and flatter and sinks to the bottom of all your other memories. Then, it disappears. It happens all the time. That’s why they call it a ‘syndrome.’”
“Syndrome,” Troy mumbled. “I got a case of that syndrome.”
“You probably heard about daddies and daughters? The worst part, I mean the second worst part is they can’t remember daddy doing anything bad.”
“Kids forget all kinds of things,” Troy said. “What about adults who can’t remember?”
“Like amnesia?”
“Let’s say, a grown-up puts something out of his mind. Right now, I got a bad feeling but I can’t wrap myself around it. It’s at the end of a tunnel. I try to reach out to touch it but I’m scared shitless. Something like that?”
Dom’s eyes moistened with concern.
“Sound like one of those syndrome things?”
“Did it happen a long time ago?”
“It just happened.”
“My buddy who went to Iraq, he’s doing EMDR for PTSD.”
“Too many initials,” Troy said.
“But everything is coming back to him. It’s working.”
“This is right before I took it in the knee.”
“Your hunting accident?”
“I have a feeling I forgot the most important part.” Troy clutched his stomach. “Can you stop the car?”
Dom pulled into a rest area. Troy lifted himself out and hobbled on a crutch a few yards away.
“Better,” he shouted, limping back to the car. “The mind is strange. Suddenly, she was there.”
“Like who?”
“She wanted to go hunting with me. My mistake but she was pretty. Half-breed of something.”
“The prettiest,” Dom agreed.
Troy’s voice grew low as he recalled. “We drove north of Santa Fe to Zamora. You know Zamora up in those Blood of Christ mountains? I stopped to see my friend. She wasn’t home, but her teenage daughter asked if she could come with us. She likes guns.”
“It’s all inside the tunnel,” Dom coached. “Keep going, you’ll get there.”
“I think we stopped for a hitchhiker.”
“Hitchhikers are trouble,” Dom said. “My cousin was tortured by a hitchhiker.”
“This hitchhiker? Maybe he did something bad to the women. Maybe my friend’s daughter did something bad. All I know is I’m shot.”
“That’s a lot of recovery.”
“I should talk to the police,” Troy cried out. “They might need me to identify something.”
Dom mustered every shred of reasoning available to him. “It doesn’t make sense to go to police in Utah for something that maybe happened in New Mexico. But I can take us back to Albuquerque if you want.”
“I sound like a nut case.” Troy said, slapping his good knee.
“Especially since you can’t say what it is that happened.”
“You convinced me, buddy. I’m putting this foggy tunnel aside and going fishing.”
“Let your mind relax,” Dom touched Troy’s belly.
“You ain’t queer, are you?”
“Relax,” Dom said. “If you exhale from your navel, things will get clearer.”
Outside Salt Lake, Troy insisted on a deluxe motel. The next day, refreshed and well-fed, they drove through beautiful high desert country, irrigated farms, tidy Mormon towns, dry red mounds of rock that stretched in the distance to dry red mountains. Troy was in a good mood. Things were falling into place.
In Twin Falls, while Dom telephoned his girlfriend, Troy went sightseeing at the local gun shop. He picked up a spiffy S&W double action .38 special. From Twin Falls, he pointed Dom north, as if his hand were on a tiller, meandering though Sun Valley and continuing on back roads across the valleys of the Sawtooth Mountains. North to the little town of Salmon, a dot on the map that Ruby and Kate used to discuss. The place Ruby held up as a refuge from Zamora. Details that Troy remembered with a kind of genius.
“I got a friend in Salmon,” he said. “Somebody I helped out at a rest stop in Oregon. Paul told me to come visit if I was ever in the neighborhood. At the time, I didn’t think that was likely, but you never know, do you?”
“Seems like you helped out people all over the place,” Dom said.