SIX
WHEN THE driver of the pickup woke it was dark outside, and the light on the roof of the truck was on. A woman had hold of his foot and was shaking it.
He was upside down with his head under the dashboard on the passenger side and his feet up by the steering wheel. His head hurt. He put his hand to his hair and it was matted like straw.
“You’ve been in an accident,” said the woman.
“Yeah,” he said. “What time do you have?”
“It’s about nine o’clock. I was on my way home from the cemetery. I put flowers down, you know. But today I got busy and didn’t get to it until late. But I don’t feel right till I do it, so—anyway. Do you have anything broken, do you think? Not that you’d necessarily know. I’m sure glad I stopped.”
He reached up to open the passenger door and he crawled out and came around to the driver’s side where the woman was standing.
“Why did you stop?” he said.
“Oh, my husband. He drives the wrecker in town and he’s supposed to pick up any cars and tow them in should they be wrecked or abandoned. So anyway I thought I better see what the deal was because I didn’t want him making the trip for nothing. What’s your name?”
“Bob Johnson,” he said.
That name was made up. He might have come up with something better but he was not thinking very clearly. His name was Shane Hall.
He noticed then that the hood was up and he didn’t like the look of that. So he walked up beside the truck and felt around behind the battery. He doubted that the money would have fallen out on impact, but he got down and looked around and under the truck.
“What are you doing, Mr. Johnson?” said the woman. “Do you want me to call someone?”
“No, I’m all right,” said Shane. “But there was someone else. I remember now. In the truck. I don’t know where he is.”
“Maybe he was thrown out. I’ve heard of that happening. I’d better go call someone. I don’t like this at all.”
“No, help me, now. We can’t panic. You look around here, I’ll look back in the trees.”
Shane walked up to the woman’s car parked on the shoulder of the ramp, but she had locked the door. So he returned to the truck and got behind the wheel but the keys were gone.
“This isn’t fair,” he said.
He saw the rock on the seat, picked it up, and stared at it.
“I don’t find anyone,” she said.
Shane got out of the truck with the rock in his hand.
“Yeah, me neither,” he said. “Listen, I need to take your car. I have to go the doctor’s. I think you’re right about that. So let’s have the keys.”
“You’re in no shape to drive,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a concussion. I’ll drive you into town and we’ll get the ambulance in no time. I know where there is one.”
“Give me the keys to your car. Don’t make me hit you with this rock.”
“You would do that?”
“Yeah, I would.”
“But how will I get home?”
“I don’t know. Christ, figure it out. You’ll walk, I imagine. Why is everyone always expecting me to take them somewhere?”
She got her ring of keys out and took the one for the car off the ring and gave it to him. “What about this other guy, that was in the truck.”
“He’s dead. He doesn’t know it yet but he will.”
“Oh, my.”
“Yes. I know. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Shane drove the woman’s car up the ramp and turned east onto the highway. It was a very smooth ride—much better than the truck with the shot out window. Plastic trays of dead flowers were on the seat and he picked them up and threw them out the window and watched in the mirror as they bounced and broke apart on the asphalt.
Simple as his mission seemed, he knew it would not be simple at all unless he happened on the hitchhiker along the highway. He had not really caught his name although it thought it might have been Pete or some lame name like that.
He drove for several hours. The flat country gave way to hills, and the road climbed, and valleys opened on either side, and in the valleys there were towns every so often.
To go into any one of them and start looking around would be pointless, as Shane well knew, lonely little places hunkered in with streetlamps marking the passage of the nothing night.
Shane was torn between ignoring the stupid thing he had done and berating himself for it. He had waited around like a fool, no question about it, but who could have predicted the hitchhiker would have such an arm, or something to throw?
He had seen the rock on its way. All he would have had to do was duck, or even stay still, for he had turned his head and hit the gas, and the truck had moved, it must have, which meant that the throw would have gone wide had he done nothing.
Everything had happened exactly as it had to for Shane to lose the money—it seemed both inevitable and ridiculous—and after that all was lost in stony sleep until the cemetery woman woke him by shaking his foot.
When he got to the river at the border he knew that he had gone too far, so he went down into a town and stopped at a bar on piers over the river. He sat drinking beer and looking out at the dark plane of water with boat lights moving over it.
The worst thing was that he had put the money at risk for nothing, some dope’s backpack of junk; it was galling as hell as he considered it.
“Penny for your thoughts,” said the waitress, as she brought him another draw.
“Just put the beer down and get away from me.”
He stopped at a pay phone on his way out of the bar. He called a guy he knew in Chartrand, forty miles to the south, and told him he needed a place to stay.
As the evening had turned cooler, he picked up a jacket and hat from hooks on the wall, and outside he put them on and went on his way.
“So this is it,” Pierre said.
He put the sack of money on Stella’s table and she pulled it over and looked inside.
“What will you do with it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe invest it.”
“At so many percent.”
“Yeah. Not really.”
“Because she said. This woman you met,” said Stella. She had her hair in two long ponytails and she wore a blue denim shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons.
“If she found a lot of cash. Her words.”
“And the rock.”
“Yeah. She gave me the rock.”
“Well, I don’t know, Pierre. I guess it’s meant to be.”
“But even if it isn’t. Say she didn’t know about the money. Because it isn’t humanly possible. Why not give it to her anyway?”
“Just that she might throw it away.”
“Everybody who has money might throw it away,” said Pierre. “A lot of them do. But nobody ever worries about it unless somebody who doesn’t have any is about to get some.”
“And then you’ll be free of it,” said Stella. “I like that. It’s Robin Hood and yet it’s not.”
“Well, I did take it. Is it stealing? I’m not sure what it is. When you take money someone stole, while he’s also trying to steal from you. What is that?”
“That is the way it goes.”
“I mean it’s not like I wanted it.”
“I don’t fault what you did, Pierre. You followed your instincts. Does he know where to find you?”
“No.”
“Because he will try.”
“You think so.”
“I’m certain of it. This is probably all the money he had in the world. Or maybe he owes it to somebody. He wakes up, the money’s gone, he can’t drive. What would you do?”
“Well, he won’t know to look in Utah.”
“Do you have an address?”
“I don’t. I thought I would call the bar I met her in. Or the hotel.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“No.”
“It’s all right if you did.”
“I didn’t. I’d tell you. That’s why she gave me the rock.”
“Okay, good. Now, do you have any weapons?”
“For what?”
“To defend yourself, I suppose.”
“I have a twelve-gauge and a rifle, but I’m not planning to use them.”
“But what if you need to?” she said. “It’s like the rock. You weren’t planning on that, either, but it’s a good thing you had it.”
“A rock is one thing.”
“I’m not sure you understand,” said Stella. “Do you see this? This is a fortune.”
“I need a cardboard box.”
She went and came back with a box in which Habenaria bulbs had been shipped. This seemed ideal because no one inclined to steal from the mail would get excited about flowers.
That night at the Jack of Diamonds, Pierre made some calls to the town of Cassins Finch, Utah, and got the woman on the phone.
“Hey, I remember you,” she said. “We were looking for a ladder that night.”
Pierre leaned over the bar with pen and paper. “Give me your address. I’m sending you something.”
“Bad or good?”
“Good.”
“I don’t want the rock back.”
“It’s not the rock.”
* * *
Shane followed the river south and arrived around midnight in Chartrand, a city laid out along the water and one that had a reputation for shadiness because of its unusual concentration of dealers and fences and bookmakers. The man he went to see was called Ned Anderson, short for Edmund.
Ned’s trade was partly legal and partly not. He ran a car rental place at the regional airport and sold methamphetamines in the form of little white pills. It was a solid and quiet living that he made from the two enterprises. He could have cleared more selling modern drugs but believed that the white cross drew less attention from cops and competitors.
He had the speed flown in from California, bypassing the fly-by-night meth labs, which he considered shabby and unreliable. The rental operation provided a clandestine freight depot for the speed. Ned thought of himself as a regular businessman and made it a point to donate to charities and political candidates.
Ned lived in a ranch house in a low-slung neighborhood where only the mailboxes were ornate. Shane knocked on the door and was ushered in by a woman with a red wool blanket drawn around her shoulders. Without a word she led him back to the kitchen, where she took her place at an oval table of quarter-sawn oak.
There she and Ned and two others were trying out a batch of amphetamines. They crushed the tablets with the edges of coins and inhaled the powder through rolled dollars. With the money and the white dust on the sturdy table, they looked like employees in the last days of banking.
Ned stood at the head of the table, tall and imposing with a big stomach that seemed to symbolize power rather than excess weight, though that’s what it was. His hair and eyebrows were wavy and dark red and his head tilted forward with a serious squint to his eyes. He wore a coarse gray suit and a blue tie loose at the collar.
“I got a car out here you should get rid of,” said Shane.
“Why don’t you get rid of it?” said the woman who had brought him in. She had black glossy bangs that came down to the top of her eyelids.
“I’ll leave it where it is if that’s where you want it,” said Shane.
“Here, here, let’s not fight,” said Ned. “What do you want done with it?”
“It’s your town, you decide,” said Shane.
“Get the car out of here,” said the woman in the red blanket.
“We haven’t been introduced,” said Shane.
“This is Luanne Larsen,” said Ned.
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Shane.”
“We know who you are.”
Ned introduced the two others. One was Jean Story, who sat with her arms folded in a shirt of light gray cotton and smiled fiercely with hard green eyes. The other was Lyle Wood-Mills, whom Shane had met before, a mechanic who made deliveries for Ned and coordinated his network of dealers. In Shane’s view, Lyle was a complainer, who viewed any given situation as a nest of negative implications for Lyle, but Ned considered him capable and even essential to both his businesses.
“Join us,” said Ned. “This stuff isn’t bad.”
“It’s fresh,” said Jean, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. “It has a certain quality.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Luanne. “It’s all right. I don’t love it.”
“I think I’ll clean up and go to bed,” said Shane. “We have something to talk about, but we can do that tomorrow.”
“What kind of thing?” said Ned.
Shane went to the refrigerator and got a wedge of Swiss cheese and stood at the counter slicing it with a knife. “Money,” he said.
“What happened to your head?” said Jean.
“I was in a car accident.”
“Get the car out of here,” said Luanne. “He can’t stay here. Tell him, Ned.”
“Leave it, Luanne,” said Ned. “I owe him. Shane’s troubles are my troubles.”
“Yeah, they probably will be,” she said. “I know. He went to jail on your behalf or some stupid thing like that.”
“Never mind what,” said Ned.
“I didn’t go to jail,” said Shane.
“Lyle, move the car, will you,” said Ned.
“Where?”
“Take it that place we took that other one. And get the plates. Jean, you follow Lyle.”
“Will do, Ned.”
“It’s a Buick,” said Shane. “Where do I go?”
“There’s a room upstairs with an exercise bike. You can have that.”
“I work out there,” said Luanne.
“I wonder if there’s one thing you wouldn’t have to fight me on,” said Ned. “It could be anything. I’ve been waiting. I hope it appears one day.”
Shane went upstairs and took a shower and lay on a couch in the exercise room with the coat he’d stolen from the bar as a blanket. Sometime later he woke to find Jean in the room. She stood by the door in the gray cotton shirt, which seemed to float in the darkness.
“We took care of your car,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“Ned said come tell you.”
“All right, then.”
“And see if you want anything else.”
“I’m all set.”
“Any old thing.”
“Oh, I get it.”
“Yeah, I seen the light bulb come on.”
“What kind of place is this?”
“It’s Ned Land. You want to get laid?”
“I guess, if you want to.”
“Not especially.”
“This is real seductive.”
“I know my pulse is racing.”
“Skip it. You don’t have to. Ned isn’t anything.”
“He’s my boss.”
“Where?”
“The rent-a-car.”
“Don’t you have your own place?”
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead.”
She sat on the arm of the couch. Her lighter was one of those little blow-torch numbers that hiss and emit a spear of blue fire. She tilted her head back and blew smoke at the exercise bicycle. “My hubby and me had a falling out.”
“How come?”
“He’s got a girlfriend. You know. So I said either she goes or I go. So anyway, I went. And then Ned said it was okay here.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know. A year ago, maybe.”
“Do you and Ned . . . you know. . . .”
“Oh, God, no. He’s too old for me. ’Course he’s too old for Luanne too, but Luanne lives in her own space. You saw what she’s like. Everything to look out for Ned, to the point where she almost despises him.”
“So what do you do, sit around doing speed the whole time?”
“Not really. I mean, I’ll have it, it makes me kind of happy, but I’m not a fanatic about it.”
“So why’d you stay?”
She thought the question over, staring into the room. “I think I’m depressed,” she said. “Maybe that’s it. And this is a good place for that. No one tells you to get out of it. We keep the shades down in the windows. We watch the vids. I ride to work with Ned. It isn’t so bad.”
“What would you do if you had to find someone? And you didn’t know their name.”
“I don’t know. Probably look on the Internet.”
“He lives north of here.”
“That’s not much to go on. What else?”
“Just got back hitchhiking from California.”
She took the cigarette from her lips and gestured with it and nodded. “Now, see, that,” she said. “That is something you could work with.”
“On the Internet.”
“Well, no. Just talking to someone. Unless he has a blog.”
“What’s that?”
“An online diary,” said Jean. “Do you think he might?”
“I don’t know. I fucking doubt it.”
“Yeah, probably not.”
“You could help me,” said Shane. “People tell women things they wouldn’t tell men. Or if you have contacts up there. I’ll pay you.”
“How much?”
Shane thought for a minute. “Couple hundred. If I find him.”
“Yeah, I don’t know. I’ll sleep on it.”
“Stay a minute.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“I want you to sit on my back.”
“Is this a sexual thing for you?”
“No. I’ve always had problems with it. I think I hurt it when my truck went off the road.”
“Okay.”
Shane lay on his stomach with his head turned to the side and Jean sat on his back. She reclined and rested her arms on the top of the couch.
“How’s that?” she said.
“Good. Much better.”
“What did you do for Ned? That he was alluding to.”
“Why do you want to know? You wouldn’t want to sit on my back anymore.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“It’s right up there.”
“Tell me.”
“I burned a house down,” said Shane. “It was a job for hire. Supposed to be empty. But there was somebody in it and she didn’t get out.”
“Wow.”
“Told you.”
“That is bad.”
“I know it.”
“Who was she?”
“I don’t know. She was watching the house.”
“And you didn’t know?”
“No,” said Shane.
“God.”
“And what do you do?”
“What?”
“For Ned.”
“Oh. Nothing. I bump people up.”
“What’s that?”
“They come in, they want the economy car, I—and she died? This person?”
“Yeah. It was a couple years ago.”
“Did Ned know?”
“No. We all thought it was empty. He said it was my fault. That I should have known. But what were you saying? The people come in—”
“And I just—I just bump them up to something more than they want. A different car.”
“How do you do that?”
“It’s easy. Talk low, talk slow. Wear a gold necklace with your shirt open a couple buttons.”
“And then what?”
“That’s it.”
“Just in the appearance.”
“Yeah. Everyone knows this.”
“The men.”
“Men, women . . . businessmen, it makes no difference,” said Jean. “Of course it doesn’t always work. But I think most people kind of want to be bumped up anyway.”
One Thursday night, the Reverend John Morris of the Church of the Four Corners came into the Jack of Diamonds and sat at the bar to have supper. He did this most every week. He would have the venison and onions, or the red snapper with grilled tomatoes, and red wine with his food and Calvados after.
The pastor liked to eat and drink. Yet he was old and troubled. He had absorbed the problems of the congregation and some of his own. His wife had left him several years ago for a younger minister, and though she had returned after a few months, he was never quite the same. The past was in his eyes, and he walked stiff shouldered and full of regret.
“Hi, pastor,” said Pierre. He had two glasses in either hand and slotted them up to dry.
“You know that little white convertible your dad used to drive?” said John Morris.
“Sure. The MGA.”
“Sweet car.”
“It was.”
“Whatever happened to it?”
“I don’t know. It got sold when the house got sold.”
“How come you didn’t get any of that stuff?”
“It was part of the estate. I didn’t really get involved in it.”
“Well, I think I saw it the other day.”
“Oh, yeah? Where?”
“It was up for sale where I get my car worked on.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing it.”
“Well, it’s not there anymore. It went out the next day.”
“Too bad,” said Pierre.
“Yeah. I saw it and I thought, Pierre should have this.”
“He rebuilt it himself. I remember he had it all taken apart to where it didn’t even look like a car. There were wires laying all over the place.”
“Well, anyway, here’s the keys.”
John Morris put them down on the bar. It was the same key ring too, a little brass snaffle bit.
“You bought it?” said Pierre.
“Yeah. It’s yours. I heard you were hitchhiking again and then I saw the car and it all made sense.”
They went out of the bar and to the edge of the lot by the brook where the car was. Pierre walked beside it, trailing his hand down the long subtle curve of the fender.
“Are you serious, John? What’d you pay for it?”
“Not that much. I baptized the guy’s kids so he cut me a deal.”
After the bar closed, Pierre and the chef, Keith Lyon, took the car for a drive. They went up to the Grade and drank a couple beers and smoked a joint.
“You owe that minister,” said Keith.
“Probably I should go to church now or something.”
“A time or two wouldn’t hurt.”
“Hey, listen. Somebody might be after me.”
“For what?”
“I took something they had.”
Keith opened the glove box. “Light still works,” he said. “Well, I guess you could give it back.”
“I don’t have it.”
“What is it?”
“Seventy-seven thousand dollars.”
“Really. That’s different, isn’t it? What did you do with so much money?”
“Gave it away.”
“Stole it and gave it away.”
“No,” said Pierre. “I didn’t steal it. I wouldn’t call it that. It was more like gambling, but he didn’t understand how much he was betting.”
“You’re going to have to tell me what we’re talking about.”
They got out of the car and walked to the edge of the Grade and stood throwing rocks down at the water as Pierre explained what happened.
“So what you’re saying,” said Keith. “This guy got your clothes, and you got enough money to buy a house.”
“Well, no,” said Pierre, “because I got the clothes back.”
“It was not his day, was it?”
“No.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. Long-haired guy. Big guy.”
“What the fuck, you hit him with a rock?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you draw?”
“Some.”
And this was true. One year in the fall after Pierre finished college he had gone on an illustration kick. He read up on perspective and shading and how to measure distant objects using only a thumb and pencil. He got a sketch pad and blue 2H pencils and did some very passable drawings of women and chairs and sneakers before losing interest.
“Maybe draw a picture of the guy,” said Keith. “We could make copies and hand them around a little bit.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“You have some friends. Roland Miles would probably love anything to do with the possibility of violence. Does he know?”
“Yeah.”
“And there’s the police.”
“I don’t want to tell them,” said Pierre. “The first thing they’d want to know is where the money is. And if you don’t say anything about the money, there’s nothing for them to act on. You know, ‘There’s this guy, maybe, I don’t know his name or where he is.’ Hell, they wouldn’t even write it down.”
“You know Telegram Sam?”
Nicknamed for his terse manner of speaking, Telegram Sam was a state trooper operating out of the Gamelon barracks who came into the Jack of Diamonds sometimes.
“I’ve seen him,” said Pierre.
“You should tell him.”
“I’ll think about that. Did you ever have anybody after you?”
“One time, yeah,” said Keith. “There was this friend of mine, and we were in a bar in La Crosse, and somebody was giving him a hard time about something. I don’t remember what anymore. This was years ago. So anyway I told the guy to shut up, not my friend but this other guy. And he did. Backed right down, which was kind of a lesson to me, and I thought that was that. But then him and his friends found me a couple of weeks later in another bar and beat me up pretty good. You know. They’d come off from working in a factory and I was sort of drunk, so you can imagine how it went. That was the night I lost my hat. First hat I ever bought on my own. Got it at a men’s store for, like, twenty-nine dollars.”
Keith was silent for a moment, remembering his hat.
“So don’t do what I did,” he said. “I did nothing. That was a mistake.”
That night Pierre went home and attempted to draw the driver of the pickup. He sat at his big steel desk with a goosenecked lamp and paper and pencil and Artgum eraser. He worked on the drawing for over an hour, sketching the figure as he remembered it behind the wheel of the pickup and half turned toward the viewer.
The face gave him trouble. Faces always had. Sometimes he would leave them blank, which looked more artistic than it sounded. Eyes were hard to get right. Too much detail, they looked crazy. Too little, they looked like coal. In this case, he tried to convey the Distinguished Expert’s evasiveness by having his eyes look to one side. But it only seemed that something interesting was happening off the edge of the page.
He remembered what he had thought of the driver based on his face. That he was dishonest and felt sorry for himself and used this feeling to motivate and justify whatever he felt like doing. It was often self-pity that made people greedy and made them mean. But Pierre had little luck translating these impressions back to the physical characteristics that had made them. He drew and erased over and over. Artgum crumbs littered the paper and the desk.
Even at the height of his drawing powers he had not been able to draw faces.
It’s an odd and disconcerting thing to imagine that someone is pursuing you without any evidence beyond the assumption that they probably would be.
You put yourself in the mind of the imagined chaser, try to guess what he is thinking. You almost end up pulling for him or offering helpful advice. Why not call the bars? That’s how I found the woman I sent all your cash to.
Maybe he was a self-taught artist too, and had drawn a picture of Pierre, and now the two faced off over an unknown distance armed with their crude and unrecognizable sketches.
Pierre slept with a pipe wrench near the bed in case he had to get up and smack somebody with it. He listened for footsteps outside the door, and, when he heard them, stepped out to make sure it was nothing, not bringing the wrench because he knew he could never really hit anyone with it, and thus ending up in the worst position if it had been something, which it never was.
He wondered how it would end, imagined the different ways. On the shore. On a hill. On sand, grass, soft wooden boards. Or in a house, with threadbare carpet and a candle guttering on the sideboard.
The sun goes down and the wind gusts outside the door. There is a certain amount of standing around. Guns go off like sounds on TV. Someone dies and there they are, dead forever, hard to believe as it may be. Music plays, distant music.
Truly, he thought that nothing would come of it. For that is usually the case. People spend their lives imagining the worst and best things when more typically it’s the middle thing that happens.
Probably because he had kept the money for less than a week, it did not seem that real to him. And as he had read somewhere, money is only a symbol of what it can buy. But $77,000 is a symbol of a lot of things that could be bought.
He wondered who first thought of money and whether they didn’t have a hard time, at first, getting people to take the idea seriously.
Pierre resented the time that thinking of these things required. He liked to start each moment fresh, not worrying about something from two months ago or even ten minutes ago. He wanted to keep his eyes to the front and be free of the past.
Nonetheless, he joined a self-defense class in Desmond City.
The instructor was a short and rather wizened man named Geoff Lollard who had a storefront by the railroad yards. Lollard was getting up there in years and his meager appearance was a selling point. He must be really good because he didn’t look that good at all.
Lollard and Pierre sat on folding chairs and talked before Pierre’s first class. The course was called Strike, Deflect, Marginalize and the students did not wear white robes because Lollard thought they created a false sense of achievement, although, he said, he could have made a lot of money selling white robes over the years. He said that the martial arts movies had given people unrealistic expectations. You would not be able to fly or run across a lake or stand around in willow trees, as in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
“But what a great movie,” said Pierre.
“Perhaps,” said Geoff Lollard. “But you don’t know what was great about it. When you’ve trained for one year, watch it again, and you will see the great parts.”
“I like the ending.”
“That isn’t one of them.”
“It really got to me.”
“I suppose. I wasn’t watching for emotion but for more technical aspects. Now, tell me, Mr. Hunter. You are in a fight. What’s the goal?”
“To win.”
“No.”
“Well, then I don’t know.”
“Think of a fight as two floors of a building. The first floor is the beginning of the fight, the second floor the ending. There is an escalator and there is an elevator. Which do you want to take?”
“The escalator,” said Pierre.
“And I prefer the elevator. Do you get that?”
“Not really.”
“There is your way, and your opponent’s way, and they’re not the same. The fight is the process of finding out which way it’s going to be. If you only think of winning, you’re looking past what you need to see.”
“You want them to play your game.”
“Yes. That’s what is meant by marginalizing. Now, I think we should do some sparring so I know where your skills are. Try to hit me in any way you’re comfortable with.”
“With a fist?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Lollard wound an egg timer and they went around for ninety seconds. Pierre spent most of the time backing up and laughing, painful though the experience was. It embarrassed him to be battered around the mat by this strange little martial arts teacher. Finally Lollard jabbed a heel into Pierre’s solar plexus and Pierre stood with his hands on his knees gasping for air.
“Did not see that coming,” he said.
“The kick is one of the easiest things to deal with if you know what you’re doing,” said Lollard. “Maybe we’ll begin with kicking.”
Pierre worked out three times a week in the novice class through the month of September. There he reached a kind of peaceful exhaustion that he had not known since his football days in high school. Afterward he would go to a bench in the park where he had gone before his arrest on New Year’s Eve and drink a bottle of Foster’s. Face hot from the exercise, he would sit in the shadows of the afternoon.
One day the Carbon Family were setting up their instruments for a concert in the park. The lead singer, Allison Kennedy, came over and sat on the bench in a white crepe dress with red and black flowers.
“Hey, I heard you’re seeing my cousin,” she said.
“Stella,” said Pierre.
“Yeah.”
“She’s your cousin? I didn’t know that.”
“What do you know about her?”
“What should I?”
“Just be careful. That’s all I have to say.”
“Why?”
“Well, now, she fell; you know that.”
“No, I didn’t. Fell from what?”
“A ladder. She was taking down storm windows and she fell off the ladder. The oil guy found her beside the house. It was pretty bad. She was in the hospital a long time. They didn’t think she would even live.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know. A year and a half, I guess. Not last spring but the spring before.”
“She seems all right now.”
“I hope that’s true,” said Allison, “but I wouldn’t know. See, because, when she got out of the hospital, she was like another person. She didn’t want anything to do with her family. I tried to go see her; she wouldn’t come to the door. Instead, there was some old man there I’d never seen before. He said she wasn’t taking visitors. I gave him some flowers, you know, that were for her.”
“Was this here or in Wisconsin?”
“Here. At the lake. What about Wisconsin?”
“She’s from there. She told me.”
“No, she isn’t. Stella always lived here. This is what I mean, Pierre. Something went wrong in her mind; I’m sorry, it did. The doctors said they had no reason to keep her. But they would’ve had plenty of reason if they knew her.”
“Maybe she wanted to forget what happened. And this was her way of doing it.”
Allison Kennedy held her hand out and he put the Foster’s in it and she took a drink and handed back the bottle.
“Look, you want to forget something, you forget it,” she said. “You don’t hide inside your house and tell people you’re from Wisconsin.”
Ned’s rental-car business was in a square box of a building out on the edge of the airport. Jean was talking on the phone as Shane leaned on the counter and listened.
“A harmonica,” she said. “Yeah. Very nice one. Silver with—um, inlays. I found it down beside the seat and I thought, Now, where did this come from? So that’s when I remembered this guy I gave a ride to. But the problem is I didn’t get what his name is. It might be Pete. Or it might be Pat. All I really know is he was catching rides back from California and lives somewhere around you. So I’m calling all over the place hoping to find him because I know he would want this harmonica back. It seems like a family heirloom maybe. . . . Yeah. . . . Okay.”
She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “They’re checking,” she said.
Shane picked up a red stapler and sprang back the top to see if there were staples in it. “What if he doesn’t have a harmonica?”
“How would they know that? Maybe he just started playing.”
“You should say it’s a check, you found a check.”
“Wouldn’t that have his name on it?”
“Oh, right.”
“Hello?” said Jean. “Yeah, hi. . . . You do? Really? . . . Uh-huh. California. The state. . . . Yes, that’s possible. Well, does he hitchhike? . . . Sure. Anyone would. Okay, and what’s the name again? . . . Great. He’ll be so happy to get that harmonica back.”
She hung up the phone and wrote something on a pad of paper.
“They know him?” said Shane. “Who is he?”
She tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to him. “Don’t make too much of it. This could be him but I wouldn’t bet on it. They said he goes to Wyoming to fish and maybe California, but they weren’t sure.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“A fireman in some place called Arcadia. And he said this guy might hitchhike, but probably only if his car broke down.”
“Why him?”
“Fire departments know everything in these little burgs.”
“Hmm, I don’t know,” said Shane.
“It’s the one lead I have so far,” said Jean.
A stack of maps stood on the counter, and Shane took one and stapled it to the piece of paper. “Keep calling, okay?”
“I will.”
Just then a man came into the office. He wore a blue suit coat and tan pants, and his hair was white shading to yellow and combed into a crest above his head.
“I’m Mr. Bromley,” he said. “I just got in from Milwaukee and I should have a Malibu reserved, I think.”
Jean shuffled the papers on her desk. “Why, yes, Mr. Bromley, here you are. I’ll need to see your driver’s license and a credit card.”
He took these from his billfold and handed them to her, and she looked thoughtfully from the license to the man and back to the license.
“Is something wrong?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” said Jean. “I was just confused, because you look younger in person than in your photograph. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not.”
“You know, security and all.”
“No, I understand that. I’m in the security business myself.”
“Well, thank God someone is these days.” She touched the links of her necklace. “The things you read, you don’t even want to read them. By the way, we have a special today on the Park Avenue. I’m not trying to force it on you, but some people want to know, because the Park Ave’s just a little nicer.”
“But you have a Malibu on the lot.”
“Oh, yes. It’s back by the fence,” said Jean. “Supposed to be very peppy.”
“And how much more is the Park Avenue?”
“Twenty-nine dollars and change.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do.”
“What will you do, Mr. Bromley?”
After the customer departed in the Park Avenue, Jean said, “And that is how that’s done.”
“If that guy’s in the security business, you can see why there’s no security,” said Shane. “I need a car.”
“Take the Malibu.”
Pierre and Stella were sitting on the sofa reading at her house one night toward the end of September. It was cool in the room and a table fan turned slowly on an old wooden crate because they liked the sound. Stella read the time book that he’d given her and Pierre read Stories of Red Hanrahan, that had been written by Yeats “with Lady Gregory’s help.”
After a while Stella put her book down. She reached for the ceiling, tilted her head, and yawned. Her eyes widened, her hands curled into fists with the knuckles touching overhead, and she said “Yow” in a high soft voice.
It was the most beautiful yawn Pierre had ever seen. She was wearing an off-white and sleeveless linen dress with an orange flower on the front. He’d been reading how Hanrahan lost a year’s time after his meeting with the daughter of the Silver Hand.
“Was I ever here before, or where was I on a night like this?” said Hanrahan in the story.
“Where are you from in Wisconsin?” Pierre said.
“Around the Dells,” she said. “Why?”
“I talked to somebody I know. Allison Kennedy.”
“Oh, yes.”
“She said she’s your cousin and that you always lived here.”
Stella got up and walked around barefoot around the room. She made a steeple of her fingers and pressed them to her lips and then brushed the front of the linen dress.
“What else did she say?”
“Is she your cousin?”
“Yes.”
“That you fell off a ladder and almost died, and after that you weren’t the same.”
“That’s true too,” said Stella. “And that of course is what hurt them and why they tell stories about me. They said I had changed. And I had. I’m sorry this is painful. But I can’t bring back that day. I can’t bring back the person they knew.”
“It’s all right, Stella.”
“But when they say I never lived in Wisconsin, I don’t understand it. How would they know? Have they written down every place I ever was? Were they following me around with a notebook?”
“I doubt it,” said Pierre.
“People change. They move from state to state. Is this really so hard to believe?”
“Look, I don’t care where you’re from. And I’m sorry you fell but that doesn’t change anything for me.”
She took the book from his hands and put it with the other one on the wooden crate, and she lay on the sofa with her feet up on the back.
“Except I want to put up your storms this fall,” said Pierre.
“Will you come here?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Will you please?”
Sometimes Shane dreamed about the woman who died in the fire. Once he was crossing a field beside a river and she followed him at ten paces and never said a word, except finally to ask where he was going, and he said San Antonio, and she said that’s what he thought.
In another dream she appeared as an angel of revenge in a horse-drawn chariot coming down backlit by a full moon over a party in someone’s yard. She was just a speck at first but grew to fill up the moon. The happiness of the crowd at seeing an angel turned to pure running fear as she began firing tridents upon them from a longbow.
Strangely enough, Shane liked the second dream better. He preferred to imagine space as the home of superhuman warriors rather than an endless emptiness with broken rocks spinning through on their way to nowhere. Even if the warriors were coming for him.
Yes, he thought. It is how they said.
He’d grown up in an honest family in the city of Limonite near the Canadian border. Two brothers, three sisters. His father managed a hatchery and his mother was a paralegal. Shane started stealing electronic equipment in college and had saved $19,000 by the time he got a bachelor’s degree in communication. After graduation he went in for housebreaks. He learned about silver and gold and porcelain and furniture and began to know what was worth having and what wasn’t. Sometimes he would drive down to Chartrand, where the money was good, and that’s how he met Ned, who then had an antiques store along with his other businesses.
* * *
The house fire was simple on paper and to do. It was a vacation house in the town of St. Ivo, Wisconsin, and the owner wanted it destroyed so his wife would not get it in a divorce settlement. He said the house had been empty for months and his wife was on a cruise to Alaska so she wouldn’t be there. It seemed like a pretty bitter enterprise but, as Ned said, you see everything at one time or another. He gave Shane a map and an address and a picture of the house, and Shane drove the three and a half hours to St. Ivo and found the house in late afternoon. It was an old place out in the country with silver shingles and trellises and dormers all around.
Then Shane went east another hour and got a motel room and returned to St. Ivo in the middle of the night. He broke a basement window and pried off the lock plate and opened the window and climbed inside. He shone a flashlight around the basement, found an old stuffed chair, pulled it over by the stairs, and jammed newspapers down in it. Then he laid some wine bottles around for misleading evidence and started the newspapers on fire and left the house. He stood in the treeline long enough to see the fire coming up in the windows, and then he drove back to the motel.
Ned called Shane in Limonite some days later and told him that a house sitter had been hired by the wife. She had been a ski instructor and had died in a bedroom on the third floor.
Shane’s criminal career tailed off beginning then. He felt cheated by the death on his hands. He became random and blunt where once he’d been deft and professional. He started breaking into cars again, and sometimes he would only cut up the seats and kick the dashboard apart without taking anything.
His good money was gone in little over a year. He lost a car to the bank and his landlord took him to court to have him evicted. But then a security guard he knew told him a story. It seemed that the manager of a car wash in Limonite had been skimming from the receipts for years and putting the money in a safe inside his house. The guard speculated that he and Shane might break into the house and open the safe with a cutting torch.
Shane talked him out of it. Too risky, he said, and the money would probably burn in the process. The guard did not read between the lines of Shane’s refusal. Had he been aware enough to do so, he probably would not have mentioned the safe to Shane anyway. The guard didn’t want to do the job, he only wanted to dream about doing the job.
But a few nights later, Shane went in his old blue pickup to the house of the manager of the car wash and got him to open the safe. It took about half an hour of yelling and knocking him around. He was a thin man in his forties with a large collection of sports memorabilia and stubborn with the years of squirreling the money away and knowing it would always be there. Shane tied the man to a radiator before he left but he didn’t tie him very well, it turned out, because as Shane was driving away the man came out of the house with a rifle and shot a hole in the window of Shane’s truck.
At first you could hardly see where the bullet had gone through the glass but overnight the window cracked into a thousand pieces and Shane pushed them out into the pickup bed and swept them onto the ground.
“Did you hear about Pete?” said Roland Miles.
“Pete who?”
Pierre and Roland were walking north out of Shale in the right-of-way beside the railroad tracks. They had their rifles and were going to a grove a mile out where they would shoot at bottles.
“Oh, you know. Pete. What the hell’s his name.”
Pierre studied some jet contrails that had fanned out against the light blue arc of the sky. “Pete at the hardware store?”
“No,” said Roland. “He’s always at the Clay Pipe Inn. Sells, I don’t know, cleaning products door to door or some shit. It’s like one of those jobs you can’t figure out how he got it or how he makes any money.”
“Pete Marker.”
“Yeah. Why couldn’t I think of that.”
“Why, what’d he do?”
“He got robbed.”
“I didn’t hear that.”
“Well, he’s leaving the laundromat in Arcadia the other night, getting in his car, you know, and it’s just like in the movies, ’cause there’s some guy in the car already, down in the backseat, with a knife.”
“I thought Pete Marker drove a pickup.”
“Yeah, but extended cab.”
“So what’d he want?”
“Money. Had some big folding knife. And, of course, Pete Marker, you know, he’s got like four dollars on him or something. Guy never has any fucking money. He owes more money than you could possibly steal off him.”
“He must have been scared.”
“Hell, yes, he was. He went back in the laundromat all shaking. They didn’t believe him at first. They’re, like, ‘Calm down, Pete.’ ”
“And where did the knife guy go?”
“Got away.”
“Strange,” said Pierre.
“Isn’t it? When’s the last time somebody got stuck up with a knife in Arcadia?”
“I don’t know.”
“For four dollars? That’s right, because it never happens. So I was thinking. Pete Marker. Pierre Hunter. Some Pierres are actually called Pete. This might be the guy you took the money from.”
“That would make more sense if he knew my name.”
“I know, you said that. But you ride all the way from Minnesota and never once, ‘Hi, I’m So-and-so?’ It doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, you don’t hitchhike. It’s not like the Chamber of Commerce.”
“Somebody stops, you know, ‘Here, get in. What’s your name, stranger?’ and you’re like, ‘Fuck off ’? I don’t get it.”
“Oh, I might have told him,” said Pierre. “I don’t care if I did. I’ve been working out at the Geoff Lollard school.”
“I hope you know what a joke that sounds like.”
“I do. That’s why I said it. But it is a good workout.”
“What if he has a knife?”
“There is a way to get a knife. You take hold of the hand it’s in and smash it against something until they let go of it.”
“And you can do this?”
“Well, I don’t know, but this is the first I’ve heard of a knife.”
They walked along with the sound of their boots on the gravel beside the railroad ties.
“I laugh in the face of danger,” said Pierre.
“You do.”
“Yeah. You should hear me.”
Roland raised his hand as if taking an oath. “What’s that?”
Pierre stopped and listened. Something was moving away from them in the grass between the tracks and the fence. Roland saw the animal first and then Pierre did too as it ran along the fencerow with its champagne coat shining in the sun.
“What is that?” said Pierre.
“I would say that is a badger,” said Roland.
Stella sat at the edge of land beyond the trees, and the lake lay below her with the moon’s reflection riding on the water. Tim Geer knelt nearby, idly flipping a knife off the back of his hand so that it turned over once in the air and landed point down in the dirt.
“How much longer will it be?” she said.
“Soon,” he said. “Have patience. I have one more bit to do, but your part is done. In fact it’s more than done.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re too close to Hunter, that’s what I mean.”
“I want to tell him everything.”
“He won’t believe it if you do.”
“I just feel like we set him up.”
“Set him up? You pulled him from that water, where he was going to die.”
“But for what? I’m saying. To die another way.”
“I don’t know that he will.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“He took the money. I didn’t make him do that.”
“You knew he would.”
Tim took the knife from the dirt and wiped the blade by drawing it between the thumb and finger of his left hand.
“Two different things,” he said.
“You said you have something left to do,” she said. “What is it?”
“I have to get lost.”
“How do you mean?”
“I better not say.”
They got up and walked back through the evergreens toward the light of Stella’s house. At the edge of the clearing the pale form of a barn owl flopped in the grass and lay still and flopped again. Stella picked up the owl with her hands around its wings and looked into its dark and divided eyes. Then she raised her hands and opened them and the owl flew up and on its way.
Tim drove off and Stella went into the house and up to bed. She lay in the dark thinking for a long time. Tim had a point. Pierre would not believe what had happened to her. No one would.
Fifteen months ago she had wakened in a burning room and made for the window. But the fire moved the same way, washing over her and pushing her to the floor, and only when she emerged from the window and did not fall did she understand that she had gone between lives. She had done this before, she knew what it was, but never from violence.
For weeks she traveled the countryside with no more form than a shadow. She was looking for Tim Geer. He was not easy to find, because very few could hear her when she spoke, and even fewer were brave enough to answer.
Yet those who did answer tended to know Tim, or they had heard of him, or they knew of someone who had met him, and day by day she made her way toward the Driftless Area, where late one afternoon she found him in his backyard on the outskirts of Eden Center, tending a trash fire with a stick.
“Can you help me?” she said.
He looked around. “I’ll try.”
“You hear what I say.”
“Clearly.”
“I’m in kind of a predicament.”
“You’ve died,” he said. “There was a fire.”
“That’s right,” she said. “And I have to find the one who started it.”
“Maybe it was electrical.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I would know more if I could take your hand. But for that you would need hands.”
“Yes, that’s the other thing.”
“You come back tomorrow,” he said.
She returned the next afternoon at the same time. Tim was walking around the kitchen of his house sorting returnable bottles and cans and putting them in wicker baskets.
“I talked to a nurse I know,” he said. “Asked for hopeless cases to pray for. So she names this person and that one. Mostly old, like me. Then she says they got this young lady Stella Rosmarin in the hospital down in Desmond City. Awful story, really. She fell off a ladder and hit her head. They’ve had her on a machine of some kind for two months.”
“She won’t get better?”
“Doesn’t sound that way. And if she will, you’ll know.”
“Can you take me there?”
“Sure,” said Tim.
They rode to Desmond City in Tim’s car, an old beige Nova with woven seat covers. The receptionist at the hospital said Stella Rosmarin was in Five South and no one but family could see her.
She said goodbye to Tim and went up to the ICU and found Stella in a silver bed where her life was being carried on by mechanical means. The transfer was unstoppable, once she was near, like gravity, like the completion of the fall she might have made from the window of the burning house. She lay quietly for a while, feeling the robotic rhythm of the machine and the sadness of two deaths.
Then she wrenched her hands from the rails where they’d been bound by light blue tape. She pulled off the mask of the respirator and sat up, drawing air into her lungs. A man in sea-green hospital clothes came and stood looking at her, saying nothing.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t need these things.”
Then more doctors came. They passed a clipboard around and stared at the clipboard and at the red numbers of the monitors and at her.
“Where are you?” said one.
“In a hospital.”
“How did you get here?”
“I came up the stairs.”
“What’s your name?”
“Stella.”