At midnight the first night, they stopped at a Holiday Inn. They had ridden about four hours, mostly in silence. From time to time, Marnie had wept quietly and Jake had wanted to comfort her, but he was afraid to touch her or to say the wrong thing.
He had thought there might be an awkward moment at the motel, but when he stopped outside the office, Marnie got right out and went in. In a few minutes, she was back. She motioned for him to roll down the window. “114” was all she said, and she headed off down the length of the building. By the time Jake got the car turned around, she had disappeared into a doorway. Light streamed out, guiding his way. She came back out for her overnight bag, disappeared into the bathroom, and then climbed into the double bed closest to the window, turning her back to him. Four minutes had passed.
Jake stood there unsure, more miserable than if he’d been at home alone. Then he turned out the lights in the room, used the bathroom, and climbed into the bed near the door. He lay awake for a long time, wired from the road. His thoughts turned to Paul, the solitary figure he’d been at the kitchen table as Jake left, and his heart went out to his friend.
Jake knew what it was to live with loneliness. In childhood, he’d never known how to be easy with other people. Everybody else seemed to have figured out some secret of connection that he couldn’t. Even when he made the sports team or found a teacher who cared about him, he couldn’t bridge the divide with anything approaching openness. He came to believe that he was born without something essential, some missing puzzle piece of himself that would always leave a hole. At home, the laughter and warmth he remembered from his first years dissipated in the glare of his mother’s increasing absences. He stayed away from the cold, silent house as much as he could, spending hours in the library reading and drawing or riding his bike around town.
In junior high, he tried to have a girlfriend. Talk of girls filled the boys’ locker room after each phys ed class and he wanted one for his own. He decided on a brown-haired girl named Lauren who smiled his way a few times in math. He watched her for months, practiced what he would say, how he would act. Finally, he got up the nerve to stop her at her locker and ask her to a Saturday afternoon movie, and she had said yes. But when it came time to pick her up, he couldn’t do it. He rode his bike past her house half a dozen times until the movie had started and it was too late. He avoided her all the rest of that spring and then he heard she’d moved away.
His best friend in those years was named Buddy. His parents believed that he stayed at Buddy’s house when he was gone all night, that he left early in the morning to study with Buddy. They never seemed to notice that Buddy never came around, never spent the night with the Logans.
There was a real Buddy, but he wasn’t a friend from school. He was a long-haired yellow dog Jake had met in the woods north of town one Saturday in the fall of eighth grade. Jake had been riding around to fill up the day and had smelled smoke from the edge of the forest. He silently pushed his bike along the hiking path to see what was happening. There in a clearing was a small fire of twigs and branches crackling away. A man stood over the fire stirring something in a pot. The dog barked a warning and the man looked up and then waved at him to come closer. “Hello, young fella,” he called out, his voice musical in some way Jake couldn’t identify.
Jake came cautiously toward the man and the fire, his mother’s early warnings about strangers echoing in his mind. But he knew as long as he stayed an arm’s length away, he could outrun the old tramp, for a tramp was what the man was, his jeans filthy, his brown car coat torn and raggedy. The man had a scraggly gray beard and an equally scraggly knitted cap of faded blue and green on his head. His smile was welcoming though and Buddy came right up to Jake, wagging his tail and licking his hand.
There was soup in the pot and the tramp handed Jake some in a battered measuring cup. He ate his own out of the pot. There was only one spoon, which the man used, so Jake drank his soup from the cup while Buddy rested his long soft muzzle on Jake’s thigh.
“You been here long, mister?” Jake said after they ate and the man set the pot to boil for coffee.
“No, just passing through, though I’m resting here for a couple of days and letting Buddy rest too. His feet get sore from all the walking.”
Jake rubbed his hand over Buddy’s soft fur. “He’s a beautiful dog.”
“Found him alongside the road a few towns back. He’d been hurt somehow and I patched him up and we’ve been together ever since. You got a dog, son?”
Jake shook his head.
“Shame. Everybody needs a pet.” He got up and pulled the pot off the fire. This time he used the cup himself. As the man sipped at his coffee, he began to ask Jake questions. Did he live nearby? What was his family like? Did he like school? Did he hunt or fish? And under the warmth of his listening, Jake talked about himself for the first time, about being an only child, about the Lauren fiasco, about his plans to escape Spokane as soon as high school was through. The tramp nodded in places, looked thoughtful, spoke little. When Jake had wound down, he said, “What’s your special talent, son?”
Jake frowned. “I haven’t got one.”
“Everybody’s got one. Some boys run like the wind or know how to fight or gamble. Some of us know just how to make the ladies love us.” He grinned at Jake, who blushed. “What’s yours?”
Jake thought a moment and said softly, “I can draw.”
“Well now, that’s something very special. Will you draw something for me?”
“I haven’t got any paper or pencil.”
“You mean you don’t carry the tools of your special talent with you?”
Jake shook his head. He looked woeful and the tramp laughed. “Well, you should. How about finding a stick and drawing something for me in the dirt?”
So Jake found a good stick and smoothed a patch of ground near the fire and in 15 minutes, he had drawn a portrait of Buddy. The tramp laughed with delight.
“I wish you could take it with you,” said Jake.
“No worries,” said the tramp. “I will,” and he touched his chest.
The autumn dusk began to settle in and the tramp urged Jake to head home. Jake promised to bring sugar for the coffee and a loaf of bread and peanut butter from his mother’s pantry the next day. The tramp shrugged and nodded. But when Jake got there the next afternoon, the fire was cold and all traces of the man and dog were gone. Jake went back after school every day for a week, but the tramp and Buddy never came back.
But Jake didn’t forget them, and slowly Buddy became his friend, the dog and man rolled into one. In the lonely nights in his room, on lonely weekends riding his bike around, he talked to Buddy of what happened in his life and of all that didn’t and how he felt about it, of his special talent and his dreams of leaving Spokane forever.
In the next bed, Marnie began to snore softly, and the memories of Buddy that had kindly distracted him from her presence slipped away as easily as they had come. He listened to her a few minutes and then he drifted off into a dream of his studio, of the thick Virginia summer light coming in the windows. The portrait before him on the easel was blurred, the face indistinct. He looked over at the woman on the couch in the green silk, but it was the young girl Melissa, not Marnie, and he groaned himself awake.
He willed his breathing to slow, and he listened again to Marnie’s breathing across the room. He had dreamed for years of a deeper intimacy with her, but now he found himself at a loss. Over the summer, as she posed for the portrait, he hoped they would talk and come to know each other in a way he had always wanted, that a door of understanding might open between them. But that hadn’t happened. Now he didn’t see how anything ever could. He tossed and turned the rest of the night.