GENE LEANED INTO the turn and accelerated around a bend in the road. He felt more alive and full of purpose than he had since Desert Storm. His bike roared beneath him, eating up the asphalt as he drove south on Route 1, between the Little Wabash and Saline River. In a heartbeat and a blink, he sped through sad little towns, some already dead, some a few seasons away from dying. Omaha, Ridgeway, Lawler, Gibsonia. In Junction, he stopped at Patton’s Truck Stop to fill his tank. He noticed as he swiped his card that his hand shook, which he hadn’t seen happen since he drove a tank through the Iraqi desert.
At the pump he saw no one and interacted with no one and quickly returned to the road, passing a pile of rotting stuffed animals, balloons, and curled cardboard hearts stuck to a fencepost—all adding to the end-of-the-world feeling that threatened to undermine Gene’s sense of purpose. The last time he’d stopped there, no more than a year ago, the pumps were all being used and the parking lot teemed with teenagers who had nothing better to do than hang out at a truck stop, but at least the area had been full of life. Now, Route 1 strung together a series of ghost towns, dingy outposts on a once bustling byway. In a hundred years, they would all crumble back to nature, like the untouched humps of brown he’d passed in the Iraqi desert, vague gestures of abandoned civilizations no one remembered.
The Little Wabash eventually dumped into the Wabash to his east. Gene crossed the Saline River a few miles before it too dumped into the Wabash at Saline Landing, and then passed the sign marking the northern boundary of Shawnee National Forest. The further south he rode, the fewer oil wells he saw, the sparser the towns grew, and the more trees began to thicken on either side of the road. The flat bottomlands bulged here into a hill or bluff or scooped there into a valley or holler as the terrain grew rockier and hillier.
Mesmerized by the road and lost in memories and family stories, Gene rode up over a hill then came coasting down almost into a herbicide or pesticide spray system towed by a tractor. The tractor was making a slow right turn onto a field, and the sprayer took up more than a lane. There was no time to stop. Gene had just enough time to swerve to his left and swerve back into his lane to avoid an oncoming old Jeep Cherokee.
No one honked or yelled. The driver of both the Jeep and the tractor turned their heads in disbelief to watch Gene’s back take another hill and grow smaller in the distance. If he hadn’t held a bone-white grip on his machine, he would have smacked the side of his helmet for being stupid and losing focus. His heart pounded for miles, his legs shook with adrenalin as they perched on their footpegs, and sweat coated his body, dripping down his sides and back toward his flanks. A few miles later, he felt the sweat cool as invisible threads of wind wrapped around his body. He was always careful on the road, never took risks, and never daydreamed. Until now.
Regaining focus, he looked toward the turnoff on his right and saw a large green sign with white lettering: Wiley Road. He laughed, thinking of Wile E. Coyote’s endless desert road of hope and failure and anvils dropped on the head. Then he remembered Miller’s notes and the one address he could make out. He slowed and pulled over to stop the bike on a weedy shoulder that leaned precariously toward a deep ditch. Taking out the chicken-scratched yellow page from his jacket pocket, he unfolded the note and peered at it again: 1009 Wiley Rd. If he hadn’t almost wrecked, he would have flown right past the sign, likely paying no attention. Hoping this address might give him some answers, Gene wheeled his bike around and headed down the newly paved road, a smooth contrast to the heavily-patched highway he’d been on the past hour.
He passed a couple of farms, one of which looked abandoned, a few pastures dotted with dozing cows, and a boarded-up church before winding into wooded hills thick with undergrowth. Small houses with larger gardens and laundry hanging on lines sprawled to his left and right. After making a right hairpin turn to continue to the top of the hill, he came to a massive iron gate. It was connected to high yellow stone walls that circled the property. There was no mailbox, but fastened to a bear-sized slab of yellow rock were black metal numbers that read 1009 Wiley Road.
Gene imagined a house made from the same yellow stone as the wall, but he couldn’t see one. The trees and plants covered the hill and the house, though he thought he could make out a blue-gray slate roof. It was probably one of those yellow stone McMansions, brand new, judging from the walls and gate, but who would live in a house like that out here? If someone had enough money to buy property like this, why would they live in the middle of rural Southern Illinois? It made no sense. It was like a castle fortress perched high on a hill looking down on the village peasants scraping out meager lives below. The gate had no doorbell, no call box, and no way to contact the owners. He imagined there were security cameras but didn’t see anything obvious. There was nothing to do but turn around. Several times before he rejoined the highway, he looked back to see if he could see a house or anything at the top of the hills, but he saw nothing except thick green trees and blue sky. The castle, if there really was a castle, was completely hidden.
At the intersection of Wiley Road and Route 1, he stopped and considered his options. This was probably the first of many dead ends. He thought about saying the hell with it, turning left on the highway, and going back to Carmi. He almost turned his wheel left, but the image of Miller sitting there dead in his hog shed flashed through his mind. He turned right and accelerated toward Metropolis.
As he crossed the line into Gallatin county, Gene decided he’d never cared much for the people in these southern counties, the people who lived in that gated house being no exception. Not even a doorbell or mailbox—how neighborly. Everything out here seemed like a big Fuck You.
He’d once dated a girl, Marci, from Eldorado, over in Saline County. She was a girl he’d met on the internet several years ago—shy, a little pudgy, possessing an almost childlike naiveté. In her mid-twenties, she had gone to pharmacy college for a year, dropped out, worked at Walgreen’s, and still lived with her parents. Marci happened in his life several years after Gene had come back from the war, when he was working at diesel repair shops. Despite her shyness and not overly talkative nature, he liked her well enough, especially her easy laugh and almost childish simplicity, and had taken her to dinner a couple times at the Red Geranium in New Harmony, Indiana, with his mom. It was the nicest restaurant for a hundred miles. He’d often visited with her parents when he picked her up or they invited him to their house for dinner. He laughed remembering the first time. They’d just purchased a piano at a church sale, but nobody in their family knew how to play. Marci’s father was immensely proud of it and showed him almost as soon as he walked in the door.
“We just got us a pie-anner! You play the pie-anner any, Gene?”
Gene had snorted then and he snorted again recalling it.
“No,” he’d said. “I don’t play the pie-anner. I can play the piano a little, but never tried with a pie-anner.” He’d taken lessons up through sixth grade, though he’d hated it and was never any good, and Elizabeth finally let him quit as much for the family’s sake as his.
One evening, he and Marci were eating pizza after a movie in Eldorado. It was at Rock-o’s, pizza by the slice, and Marci could put away the slices like nobody Gene had ever seen. He was amazed she didn’t weigh more than she did.
“I have some good news for you,” she said into her lap after her first slice of pepperoni, before finally looking him in the eye. “You’re going to be a daddy!”
Gene set down his slice and studied her face, his insides growing colder and darker as if someone was shutting down his emotional faculties section by section. Marci fidgeted in her seat and wrapped a paper straw sleeve around and around her finger.
“I am? Geez. How’d that happen, Marci?”
Marci blushed a little.
“You know how that happens, silly,” she said. “I’m pregnant. Aren’t you happy? Genie, you’re going to be a daddy!”
“Oh I am, huh?”
“Isn’t that great?”
“Sure, I guess it’s great for you, but I’m not going to be anyone’s daddy.”
“What do you mean, Genie? Don’t you want to be a daddy?”
“Nope. And you know what else, you lying little bitch?” Gene stood and rummaged through his pockets. He had the strange sensation he was delivering lines from a stupid soap opera. “It’s not mine. I guess I never told you—I can’t have kids.”
Gene went up to pay at the cashier’s window. He was pissed with himself, more than anything else, for being taken in by the childlike naiveté. On his way back through the restaurant, he saw that Marci looked like she had just started to cry. No tears had struggled down her cheeks yet, but her eyeliner and mascara were already blurred, and her eyes had begun to redden and swell. Before he left her at the restaurant, he couldn’t resist saying, “At least now you have a good excuse to eat for two.”
“Asshole,” she spat back as he left through the front door.
That night there had been two messages on his answering machine, one from Marci and one from her father. He deleted both without listening and never heard from them again.
Assholes, he thought, and pushed deeper into Shawnee National Forest, running over a two-foot black rat snake slithering across the road. He watched it thrash and writhe in his rearview, felt bad about it, and turned around. It upset him to kill something, even more to watch it suffer, especially an animal. He ran over the long cord of agony again, this time slowly, crushing its skull, which burst beneath his wheel. The more he thought about it as he headed toward Cave-in-Rock, the more he hated the whole area. The only thriving industry was crystal meth. The people smiled at you with decaying teeth while they stuck a knife in your kidneys or conceived someone else’s baby. If they weren’t smiling with deceit, they were mean and surly, put up high walls with no doorbells. The people down here didn’t care for the land, either—trash, rusting cars, refrigerators, bathtubs, and appliances cluttered front yards and backyards, gullies and ditches. He couldn’t wait to head back north, but not without some answers first. Also, right then he needed to stop, eat some jerky, drink some water, and regain his focus for the rest of the trip. Stretching his legs, which were getting tired and starting to cramp up a little, wouldn’t hurt either.