The Driftless Area (8 page)

SIX

W
HEN 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?”