The Driftless Area (12 page)

“Kind of, yeah.”

“Miles might have been larger than life, but now he’s just life size. I was more of a loser.”

“You are a loser.”

“Probably so. But a beautiful woman loves me. So there is that.”

“Why aren’t you working?”

“We found a guy in the woods today.”

“Dead?”

“No. He was lost. They brought in dogs. He’d been in there overnight.”

“That’s lucky.”

“It wasn’t ever going to happen any other way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take a coin. No, forget that. Take two coins. Put them on the bar. One heads, one tails. On the bar.”

Little Kevin leaned sideways on the bar stool and dug into his pocket and put two quarters between his drink and Pierre’s.

“Good,” said Pierre. “Now, think of something that you wonder if it will happen or not. Okay? Are you thinking of it?”

“Yeah. My disability claim.”

“What’s your disability?”

“A metal press fell on my arm at work.”

“You don’t seem disabled.”

“No, I am. Trust me. For certain things I have to do I’m pretty disabled.”

“Well, that’s rough. What else is new?”

“You were doing something with these coins.”

“Oh, right. You want to know about your disability.

Let heads stand for yes and tails for no. Now ask yourself, can they both be true?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can both coins? In other words, can you both get and not get the disability on your arm?”

“Well, no, of course not.”

“So what you’re telling me is one of these coins is accurate and the other one’s a big liar. Even though the answer is in the future. And how could that be? Because the future has already happened.”

“No, it hasn’t.”

“The coins say different.”

Kevin picked up one of the coins and stared at it. “Nah, I don’t buy that,” he said.

“I just thought of it.”

“It doesn’t tell you anything if you think about it for very long.”

“If all the events from the beginning of the world to the end were laid down from the start, I wouldn’t call that nothing. And we just travel across them. Think of it.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Maybe the future’s like someplace you’ve never been. Like Sydney, Australia. You ever been there?”

“I never have.”

“Exactly. Me neither. But we wouldn’t say it hasn’t happened yet just because we haven’t been there. We wouldn’t say it might be a big city or it might be a dump by the side of the road, and it won’t be either one till we arrive.”

“That’s true. But if things have happened and nobody knows what they are, what difference does it make? It amounts to the same thing as if they haven’t happened.”

“I didn’t say nobody knows. Maybe you and me don’t. But if we knew how to see it. If we remembered how.

Maybe we could.”

“Fortune tellers.”

“Real ones, though.”

“You believe in that?”

“I’m beginning to wonder.”

Kevin Little left and then came back after an hour or so. Pierre sat drinking gin and was pretty well drunk by now. Whenever things were changing he was wide open to inebriation.

“Where’ve you been, Kev?” he said.

“I went to get these,” said Kevin Little. He showed Pierre his shoes, which were made of orange leather with brass buckles. “Guy I know bought them but they were too small.”

“Interesting.”

“I know.”

“I’ve been thinking,” said Pierre. “Forget what I said before.”

“About what?”

“The coins. All that. I was just talking through my hat.”

“Too bad I already wrote it all down while it was fresh in my mind.”

Pierre laughed. “That’s pretty good, Kevin.”

Half an hour later Pierre looked up to see that it was midnight and the bar was empty but for three guys playing cutthroat at the pool table. He picked up his drink and went over to the ship part of the bar and sat on a bench at the long table looking out at the cars going by in the street. He wished his friends would show up with white boxes of food tied with strings and they could have
a party. Charlotte, Keith, Stella, Roland Miles, Carrie, and even his mother and father, since it was only imagination. Monster could nose around for dropped food. Pierre could see the wine and candles and hear the laughter around the table. He would talk into Stella’s ear. His parents would be proud to see them together.

“You could do something like that,” he said.

The bartender came over and collected Pierre’s empty glass. “Hey, Hunter, I hate to do this, but no more for you.”

“No, that’s okay,” said Pierre. “My God, I understand. I of all people.”

“Oh, and I forgot to tell you. You’re getting your harmonica back.”

Pierre wondered if harmonica was the latest word for mojo or karma. “What are you talking about?” he said.

“Some woman found it in her car.”

“I don’t have a harmonica.”

He got up and headed for the door. He had to concentrate on walking in all its aspects, it’s really quite complicated when you have to think about it, and halfway across the bar he stopped and put his hand flat to the pool table for balance.

But in so doing he messed up the lay of the table and the cutthroat players objected and a fairly incoherent argument followed. They had bet on the game and so they wanted Pierre to pay them ten dollars for throwing
it off, but, since there were three of them, he could not understand how they had arrived at ten. Finally they told him to leave, and he said he would, as that’s what he’d been trying to do anyway.

Pierre walked out to the MGA and put the top down. He felt all right to drive. The lights and houses of Desmond City fell away and the road curved on into the darkness between land and sky. The air was cold yet his face was hot and sweaty. Halfway home he pulled over and walked down beside the road and was sick in the ditch. Then he stood up and looked up and down the blacktop, feeling empty of all gin and confusion.

The next morning Pierre woke early to the happy and undeserved news that he had not a trace of hangover. And he thought it was true what they said about clear liquors.

He made coffee with sugar and fried some hash browns and put milk in the coffee and ketchup on the hash browns and sat in the kitchen eating and reading the
Register
and listening to the Old 97s on the CD player.

When he washed the dishes he sang along with the song about being born in the backseat of a Mustang on a cold night in a hard rain. Then he took his shotgun and the thin aluminum case that held the cleaning kit from the broom closet and set them out on the table.

At midday he went down to the alley and took the MGA out into the streets of Shale. They were getting ready for Bank Robbery Days weekend, with banners across the street. This was an annual event celebrating Shale’s sole bit of historical fame, a failed heist of 1933 about which songs had been written and a book as well.

The robbers were three brothers who set out to copy the Dillinger raids but had no luck at it. One left a coat with his name written inside the collar in the bank. Another gave their getaway car a flat tire by throwing nails on the pavement to hinder pursuit. Finally, late in the day, the brothers found refuge by taking over a farmhouse with a family in it.

The high point of the weekend was a play staged in a machine shed on the site of the original farm. Entitled
Hostages to Fortune,
it told how the robber brothers broke in on the family and during a long tense evening came to understand that their situation was not too promising.

Pierre had seen the play many times. It was funny even when it wasn’t trying to be. The big scene was a chess game played between the youngest robber and the father of the family, whose fear of the intruders has by this time turned more to scornful exasperation.

Pierre ended up at the golf course where Carrie Miles was in her office writing names on a chalkboard. Roland’s graduation picture hung on the wall. He
looked wary in the photograph, as if listening to a complicated offer that might be a ripoff.

“Hey, you,” said Carrie.

“Let’s go for a ride.”

“Where to?”

“Nowhere special.”

“Let me finish these, then I will,” she said. “Our last big weekend is coming up. You can read my poem while you wait. It’s the longest one I’ve ever done.”

She said she had entered the poem in the Bank Robbery Days poetry contest. It was called “Lust for Larceny,” and this is how it began:

The hapless brothers fell upon the town

Set on taking the People’s Bank down.

But every wild dream that you’ve ever seen

Was sheer eloquence compared to their scheme.

Incapable from start to finish, they

Barreled ahead with the vault robbery,

Ignoring somehow the mezzanine guard

Who, coming down behind the banister,

Managed to fire a tear gas canister. . . .

Carrie’s poem ran on for many lines and three pages. It described the robbery and getaway and ended in a bit of a twist by questioning the town’s obsession with bank robberies.

For I wonder if we are not lame

To glory in faded criminal fame.

Or, on the other hand, it just might be

That we retain a lust for larceny

Born in the old times of prehistory,

When what you lost was better for me.

Her chalk made a soft insistent sound on the board as Pierre finished the poem.

“This is epic, Carrie,” he said. “I mean it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Yeah, thanks. I read up on it,” she said. “Of course I know it will never win. It challenges too many assumptions.”

“It ought to win. But I think the way that prize works is old ladies giving it to other old ladies.”

They rode out in the MGA, which Carrie had not seen since Pierre got it back. They passed the old Hunter house and went up to the power plant and parked by the fence as they had seven years before.

“How strange this seems,” said Carrie. “Why were we here? Was it Skip Day? I remember being here, but why?”

“Rebecca Lee sent you to break up with me.”

She turned sideways in the seat with an excited grin. “Oh God, that’s right. I was so mean to you! I remember now.”

“That wasn’t mean,” said Pierre. “I didn’t really even care that much. I thought it was kind of nice that you wanted to go for a drive.”

“We were all mean. It was in our nature. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

“I saw Kevin Little last night. Turns out he hated being called Little Kevin.”

“Wouldn’t you?” said Carrie.

“Yes, I would.”

“This car is like a time machine. You can forget everything that’s happened.”

“How’s Roland?”

“He’s going on a canoe trip to the Boundary Waters. We can’t use the dining room table because it’s covered with pemmican and ripstop nylon.”

“He’ll miss the show.”

“Oh, you know him; he hates it anyway. Says it’s fakey and crowded. He’s so moody. One of these times he’ll go and not come back.”

“Maybe that’s what you want, you say it so much.”

“Well, it is, sometimes. But I think I would be lonely if it happened. It’s just that I thought life was going to be fun. That was really the impression that I had.”

“It is fun,” said Pierre. “Don’t you think? I mean it’s not like Adventureland. But you write your poems, the leaves move, you get laid sometimes. Isn’t that fun?”

“The leaves move?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Oh, joy, the leaves are moving.”

“Honest to Christ, I believe that.”

“I know you do.”

Then Pierre heard a muffled sound and Carrie took a silver cell phone from her purse and checked the number on the screen and shut the phone off.

“Let me see that,” said Pierre.

She handed it to him.

“Very modern,” he said.

A train of five lime green barges was going through the lock on the river, a deliberate process yet impressive in the way of all things that move slowly but with great mass.

The barges were long and sealed and immaculate, and a man stood on one of them with his foot up on a hatch and his arm resting on his knee.

Pierre and Stella sat on a bench on the observation platform watching the bargeman’s incremental approach.

“What do you have on there?” Pierre called.

“Gypsum,” he said.

“Hard to believe there’s call for all that gypsum in the world,” Pierre said to Stella.

“I don’t know how much call there is for gypsum,” she said.

“I think they use it in cement.”

“Pierre.”

“What?”

“I want you to go away for a while.”

“Yeah?”

She slid down with her legs straight before her and her head resting on the back of the bench. “Go back to California. Go anywhere. For a week. Then it’ll be done.”

“What will?”

“How did you put it?
The hour is upon us.
It is. They’re coming for the money.”

“They.”

“The one you got it from and two others.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. I have since the winter.”

Pierre looked at the man on the green barge. He was about twenty feet farther down than he was before, and beyond the barges the iron-green river turned in deep and beveled circles.

“The winter,” said Pierre. “Stella, I’d never even met the guy in the winter.”

“I knew you would fall through the ice,” she said. “I knew that you would find the one with the money and bring him here.”

“I kind of put that together. You said have weapons. You said get ready. And I got ready.”

“I don’t think so, Pierre. I don’t think you were ever going to be. This guy is badder than you think.”

“You’ve been after him awhile, I take it.”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he do?”

“He burned down a house in Wisconsin. Killed the house sitter. And walked away from it.”

“What’s supposed to happen to him?”

“He dies. But it doesn’t have to be you that does it. I think he’ll bring it on himself some other way.”