Driftless (27 page)

“I shouldn’t be so very late,” said Violet, looking back at her sister and marveling at how remarkably small she was. “The last time Byron showed slides, everyone fell asleep after the first wheel.”

Violet closed the front door behind her, carrying a hot peach pie inside a covered pan.

Olivia picked up the telephone and a half-hour later the Countryside Taxi Service arrived. The driver, wearing a heavy gray scarf over an unzipped leather jacket, pounded his gloves together to keep his hands warm as he waited for Olivia to open the door.

“Please take these out to the car,” she said, holding out her handbag and a plastic shopping bag, “and then return for me.”

Olivia taped a note to the front door and he pushed her down the long ramp leading from the porch.

“Nice evening,” remarked Olivia.

“Yeah,” said the driver. “Will you require assistance getting in the car?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I will also require assistance getting out of it.”

Though he easily could have set her eighty-nine-pound body on the back seat, he nevertheless allowed her to guide his assistance so that she played the major part in making the transition. Then he folded her chair and put it in the trunk.

In no time at all, she was riding into the starry night. The interior of the cab smelled of cigarette smoke and other coarse, earthy odors, not unlike the inside of her uncle’s old jacket in the hallway. From the back seat, the headlights seemed tightly focused, stretching way out in front of the hood like a tunnel through a forest.

SEEKING HELP

A
MOVEMENT OUTSIDE CAUGHT JACOB’S ATTENTION AND HE cracked open the kitchen window to better listen. The moon, partly hidden by clouds, provided a murky light and the trunks partly hidden by clouds, provided a murky light and the trunks of trees appeared black against the snow. A moving sliver of light winked out of the darkness, accompanied by low, unintelligible murmuring and the sound of breaking snow.

Stepping onto the back porch, Jacob watched seven men emerge from the timber on the hill. They wore hooded jackets with leather gloves and carried several wooden crates between them. Most were bearded—members of the militia.

“Hello, Jacob,” said the first, turning off his flashlight.

“Hello.”

“We brought a couple older M60’s for you to check over.” Four men came forward, setting the wooden crates heavily on the porch floor. “They’re still packed in grease.”

“I’ve been pretty busy lately, but I might have some time next week,” said Jacob. “Hope you’re not in a real hurry.” He went inside and returned with the half-full bottle of bourbon. “Cold out here. Want a drink?”

His visitors, in heavy green jackets, sat on the open porch and passed the bottle and glass between them, their breath misting before their faces.

“Nice place you got, Jacob,” said the leader, Moe Ridge, a large man with a graveled voice. “Private. A man can do what he wants here.”

“That’s the idea.”

“I suppose you’ve heard about that killer cat—chewed up some cattle yesterday.”

“I heard they were feral cattle.”

“Cat’s a killer. Some people put up a reward. No one’s safe as long as it’s around.”

“Maybe not.”

“We want a computer system at the camp, off-grid, satellite link—something like what you have here. Can you set it up”?

“I’ll need to know how much you can afford to spend,” said Jacob. “Also depends on what you want to do with it.”

“We may not have much time, the way things are going in this country.” He took a long drink and passed the bottle and glass to the man sitting next to him. “Damn government.”

A sweeping arc of headlights moved through the trees in the east and the men stood up, drinking the last of the whiskey. Someone had turned off the road. In the distance several dogs barked.

“You’ve got visitors, Jacob,” said Ridge, handing back the empty bottle and glass. “You should come to one of our meetings. Next Friday night some men from Iowa and Missouri are coming to talk about forming a national federation, an alliance. More and more men realize it won’t be long before someone must take a stand for the principles this country was founded on. We’re meeting in Snow Corners.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Thanks for the drink.”

“You’re welcome.”

Jacob watched as the men walked out of his snow-filled back yard and into the dark timber. When the sounds of the approaching vehicles grew louder, he stepped off the porch and walked out to greet two pairs of slow-moving headlights nodding and lurching along the winding, narrow lane through the snow.

July Montgomery climbed out of his white pickup and stood holding a grocery sack. Behind him parked a newer pickup with dual back wheels. A small man limped forward, not recognizable in the dim light.

“You know Rusty Smith,” said July.

“Hello, Rusty.”

“Yup.”

“Hope you’re not busy, Jacob. I brought some of that fancy coffee
they sell at the health food store, doughnuts, and cigars. What’s in these crates?”

“Nothing important,” said Jacob. “Come inside.”

The three sat by the stove, drinking the coffee.

“Rusty has a problem,” said July. “He wants to find his brother and hasn’t seen him in—how many years?”

“Sixty,” said Rusty Smith, poking an unlit cigarette into his mouth, his face as wrinkled as a baked apple.

“I told him I knew someone with a computer who could probably find him on the Internet.”

“I thought you had your own computer,” said Jacob.

“That’s what Rusty here thought, and I do, but I don’t have Internet service—too much advertising.”

“Go to the library,” said Jacob. “Genealogy questions are routine.”

“Nobody likes going into libraries,” explained July.

Rusty took the cigarette out of his mouth and placed it behind his ear. “I’ll pay you,” he said.

“Librarians are trained—”

“I already told him you’d do it,” said July.

“It might take a while. And I’ll need as much information as you can give me.”

“Give him your paper, Rusty.”

Rusty took a folded piece of lined notepaper from his pocket and handed it to Jacob.

“Not much here,” said Jacob, staring into the scribbled words. “Too many people have this last name.”

“Do what you can,” said July, passing the bag of doughnuts around.

“I’m going,” said Rusty.

He went out and the sound of the truck in the snow faded.

July bit into a doughnut. “You don’t seem quite like your usual self,” he said.

“I’m not,” said Jacob.

“How about a game of chess?”

“No thanks.”

“What’s this?” July asked, picking up the photograph album.
Jacob quickly leaned forward in his chair, as though to take it away from him, then sat back again. “What’s it look like?” he said.

“This a picture of your wife?”

“Her name was Angela.”

“Tell me about her.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Do it anyway.”

Jacob lit one of July’s cigars and talked about her.

THEODYSSEY

O
LIVIA SAT IN THE BACK SEAT OF THE RURAL CAB AND TRIED to relax. The driver seemed competent enough, despite an alarming disposition to occasionally take his right hand completely off the steering wheel and rest it along with his entire right arm on the top of the front seat.

After about ten miles Olivia ceased worrying that she would be identified by someone standing along the road or looking from a window with binoculars.

The problem, as she understood it, lay in her limited experiences—her confinement. There had been too few opportunities for God to show favor to her. She had to be available, in a place for God to do His Work.

It wasn’t that God didn’t love her. It was that she, Olivia, had never put herself into a place where the myriad ways through which God communicated favor could reach her. All her life she had waited for God to seek her out, heal her body, and give her a new life. But waiting for God’s Grace to knock on her door hadn’t worked, so now she was going after Grace. She would follow her theodyssey wherever it led.

It was, as Saint Augustine had so succinctly pointed out, a problem inherent to time. In each successive moment, something brand-new came into existence while something old died away, simultaneously. Something from the past continued; something else perished. Christ appointed those things He wished to continue, as well as those He allowed to discontinue. To know if one had His Blessing, one needed to place oneself at the cutting edge of time—to find a situation that could not help signaling approval or disapproval, continuance or discontinuance. She needed to take a chance.

Failure, for Olivia, had gradually become inconceivable. To fail
would mean God did not maintain control, which simply could not be true, and even if it was true—the abysmally small possibility that everything right and good simply wasn’t—then what did she have to lose? The risk of failure could only be weighed in a universe of meaningful value, but if God didn’t exist and life had no value—if time had no divine edge and things just happened willy-nilly—there was nothing to risk.

The only real danger lay in giving doubt a fair hearing.

At the entrance to the Lake Delton Casino, the driver helped Olivia into her wheelchair and she paid him with a single bill taken from the plastic shopping bag.

“Wait,” said the driver, coming back out of his cab and stopping her just before she entered the building. “Let me take you back home. I don’t think this is a good idea to be here alone. I’ve seen this before. Let me at least call someone.”

“Get behind me, Satan,” said Olivia and wheeled through the automatic doors.

Inside, a large man in a very red jacket greeted her with a smile. She rolled past him and sat for several minutes in the lobby, looking into the great, pavilion-sized room.

She had anticipated the blinking colored lights and carpeting, but the cleanliness surprised her. There were no smoke-filled rooms, at least that she could see, nor half-shaven men in green sunglasses hunched over tables served by lascivious women with much of their legs exposed. They had a cafeteria, though, with cloth napkins.

People streamed in and out of the front doors. Some went straight into the casino, others moved toward the cafeteria, restrooms, and Indian gift shop. If anything, older people were in the majority, and she saw several other people in wheelchairs.

Olivia assumed it would take some time to become oriented. Gambling took many different forms and she was unfamiliar with them all. Raised in a family that believed playing cards with faces had been purposefully designed to undermine the plan of salvation, she had gleaned what little she knew of gambling from television, which of course never explained anything.

She found a glass panel on a wall with all the pertinent state laws
and rules spelled out in detail. Pamphlets explained how the games worked. And there were the many friendly employees determined at every change of her direction to assist her.

She purchased a small bucket of quarters and parked herself before one of the gambling machines. The coins slid into the shiny, welcoming slot in a pleasing manner, and in a very short time the machine released several handfuls of quarters that rattled to the bottom, accompanied by electronic bells. The quarters in the bottom chute were too numerous to fit back into her bucket, so she did as she saw others doing and played them from where they were. Soon she had lost all of them and nearly her entire bucket as well, but then the machine let loose another internal rain of coins and she was back to almost where she had started.

She stretched and rubbed her neck. The nearby clock read nine-thirty.

It didn’t seem possible. She had been playing for over an hour. Time had sped up. A woman with a black string tie and red jacket asked if she would like something to drink, but Olivia shook her head, gathered her quarters, and went deeper into the casino.

She found a roulette game, and after buying a hundred dollars worth of “chips,” Olivia learned there were a variety of bets that could be made. Each bet—referred to as a “transaction”—was accomplished by putting a chip, or several chips, in different places on the table. All involved guessing in which slot a ball tossed onto the moving wheel of slots would end up. There were thirty- six numbered slots, eighteen red and eighteen black. There were also slots marked 0 and 00.

You could bet on the ball coming to rest on a certain number. If the ball came to rest there, you won thirty-six times whatever you bet. Or you could wager on the ball stopping on any red- or black-numbered slot. You could also bet on a number and a color, or a color and a group of numbers.

The mathematical probabilities, or odds, for each type of bet were clearly explained in the pamphlet. And though the print was fairly small, there was no further attempt to disguise the fact that the
odds stood against the player. This seemed commendably honest, like the sheet of contraindications in a box of prescription drugs.

There was a commotion behind her. Bells rang and lights flashed. Several people hurried toward the noise and Olivia followed them. A woman about her own age stood next to a very large slot machine with tears streaming down her face. The machine accepted hundred-dollar tokens and the flashing on the blinking plastic window read $$$10,000$$$. The woman could hardly stand up, and several strangers came to her rescue. “Way to go,” they said. “Congratulations.”

“I did it,” she said, shaking and sobbing. “I walked by this machine and I just knew. I knew. I just knew.”

“You did it!” others said, hugging her, letting her cry into their clothes. “You did it. Good for you.”

After the woman stopped crying momentarily, the people congratulating her went away. She took the winning token from the machine, carried it to the cashier’s booth, and went to another slot machine with a bucket of quarters. Olivia followed her and watched as she played, intermittently sobbing and holding her hands against her face, then placing another coin in the slot.