The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (11 page)

Once when Rudy was fifteen, he went with his cousin Mark to a fortune-teller at the county fair. The woman was so beautiful Rudy got an erection when he looked at her, and he had to pull his jacket down so far the zipper never quite worked the same after that. She looked into his eyes and ran her fingers back and forth across the lines that seemed to swallow up every inch of his hands.

“You a fine boy,” she told him in a hokey kind of foreign accent. “Someday, you make a lotta people, women specially, bery, bery happy.”

Then she winked at him and told him he would travel and see the world and that he would marry a woman with golden hair and have two big sons.

Sitting in his car now, with the sun barely touching the top of his forehead, Rudy traced the same lines in his hand and wondered at what point in his life he had stopped believing that beautiful woman. Was it when he goofed off his last two years in high school and lost any chance he might have had of getting into a good university? Was it two years after that when he flunked out of a small state college and ended up working at a tape plant eight hours a day where he used a big stick to separate rolls of gray tape that hung in sheets? Was it when he forgot to return Margo Blatten's phone call, Margo being the most beautiful woman he had ever met?

When he looked up, the reporters were way up ahead of him on the highway, walking slowly, but at least 150 yards behind what he decided must be the women walkers.

“Oh, piss!” He grabbed for his radio again. “Brocter!” he yelled into the microphone. “The mama ducks are airborne.”

“Ten-four, Big Quacker,” responded Brocter, laughing at his own ridiculous joke. Then he waited for Rudy to say something back, but Rudy didn't.

“Rudy? Yo, are you there?”

“Yeah, hey, Brocter, do you think I should walk behind them or drive in my car?”

“What?” Brocter was stunned that a deputy had bothered to ask his opinion.

“They're walking so slowly, it seems stupid to follow them in this big car.”

“Well, jeez, maybe you should ask them what would bother them the least. It seems like the Sheriff doesn't want them bothered, so you'd better ask them.”

“Yeah,” said Rudy, shaking his head up and down as if Brocter could actually see him. “Hey, I never thought of that. Thanks, Brocter, that's a great idea.”

“Yo,” said Brocter, shaking his head the exact same way but in total disbelief at the conversation he was about to end.

“Hey, Brocter,” said Rudy.

“What now?”

“Did I ever say thanks for all the shit you do all the time to help me out when I don't know what in the hell to do?”

“No man, you never say jack shit, just like everyone else.”

“Well then, thanks, Brocter.”

Rudy signed off then and flexed both hands in and out, as if the palms needed to be exercised. Then he pushed the magic button on his car that instantly rolled down every window in the squad car. After that, he just sat with his head out of the window, trying with all his might to hear the footsteps of the women walkers.

When he thought he had heard something, just a soft tap like someone might have stumbled and caught a heel that made them drop onto their toes, he inched the car forward slowly. As Rudy moved toward the women, he thought about being happy, really happy. So happy that you couldn't wait to get up in the morning. Then he thought about smelling the wet sagebrush in Arizona, and how his mother would look if she saw him standing at the door. He saw her reaching out her stubby fingers and bringing her hands to his face.

“Still got that mustache?” he imagined she would say while his father bellowed, “Who the hell is it?” in the background.

From out of nowhere, these thoughts about different places and people and himself started moving through his head, and for once Rudy knew why. He was elated that he had an answer for at least one of the questions that was floating around inside of him. “The footsteps,” he said out loud. “It's those damn footsteps of those women walkers.”

As the wind kicked up from the fields, the thoughts kept coming, flooding his mind. He thought about working with small children, and coming home at night to just one person. He thought about sleeping outside in a place just like this, where it wasn't crowded and where the dew would settle right onto his face so that he would feel damp and salty when the sun hit him at daybreak. He thought about telling everyone who had ever been nice to him that he was grateful. Asking could he do anything for them. He thought about driving his mother to the rim of the Grand Canyon and buying her one of those pink visors at a gift shop.

Getting out of the car when he was close to the women walkers was not easy. As light as he had felt talking to the reporters, he felt unmovable now, shy and scared. Without taking that one thought any further, he pushed his legs onto the asphalt and came up behind the last walker.

From the back she could have been anybody. Just a short lady wearing jeans that had been washed maybe five hundred times and had shrunk to way above her ankles. Her tennis shoes were a Kmart off brand but they were so clean, Rudy thought she probably hand-washed the laces like his mother did when he was a boy, rubbing them with a bar of Fels Naphtha soap and then gently placing them on top of the cabinet to dry. This woman had short brown hair, and when she moved all the curls in the middle of her head banged together as if they were confused about which way to go.

Rudy didn't want to startle her so he tried to walk heavy and pound his big black boots on the asphalt. This didn't stop her or anyone else, so he leaned over to touch her shoulder. “Excuse me, madam,” he said softly. “I'm Deputy Rudulski, and no one is going to bother you. I just need to ask you one question.”

Rudy asked her why she was walking. He did not even know where the question came from.

The woman didn't stop, but she turned for just a moment to look into the deputy's eyes. Her eyes were as bright and blue as the ocean Rudy had seen in his
National Geographic
. If he could have jumped right inside of her at that moment, that is exactly what he would have done. Gone swimming right into those blue eyes of the woman with the Kmart shoes, as if he had planned it for fifteen years.

She put up her hand and walked backward for just a minute or two, and Rudy realized that he would have to stay in his car and follow the walkers. This woman was smiling and he smiled too, and then he stood there in the middle of the road for a long time until the woman disappeared over the hill. Then he turned his head to the southwest, right toward the spot where he was certain the sun would set like a big, beautiful red rubber ball that looked as if it were on fire.

Rudy couldn't take his eyes off the horizon. He was thinking about these women and what must have brought them out here like this. Suddenly that thought, something he would never have bothered to bring to the front of his mind an hour ago, seemed as natural to him as waving his hand in the air.

When he got back into the car, Rudy examined his own eyes in the car mirror. They were dark, and small white lines ran from the corners out toward his ears. “From squinting,” he told himself, laughing, just laughing in his police car as the footsteps grew softer and softer until they were gone, and Rudy had to pull ahead slowly to keep up. He had to protect the women, the walkers, and there were other things, hundreds of other things that he had to do.

Deputy Rudulski was still smiling as the women vanished around the corner just before the Stackowski farm. He fumbled for a piece of paper so he could jot down all the thoughts inside his head—places he wanted to go, the people he wanted to see, experiences he wanted to try. Then he slowly inched the cruiser forward again, just a few feet at a time.

STREAKER STALKS NEWSPAPER PAGES

—30—

The Elegant Gathering: Chris

Oh, for chrissakes. If I had a camera right now, I could take some pictures that would get me enough money to pay off the mortgage. Alice has on a pair of shoes that belong in the Wal-Mart Hall of Fame. I haven't seen shoes like that since 1972. Poor Alice. Her ankles are taking a hell of a beating out here. I can actually see them swelling. If we would have thought this through for more than thirty seconds, I could have bought her a pair of Nikes, which is exactly what I will do the minute we stop—that is
if
we stop. But hell, we left the house so damn fast, who thought to bring something serious like tennis shoes that were actually made for walking?

This is the kind of thing our mothers warned us about when they said to make certain we always wore our best underwear if we were going someplace. I've always wondered about that. Did our mothers have one pile of underwear for staying at home and another for going out in public? I never saw the staying-at-home pile. My mother did have wonderful underwear, a trait that was definitely not passed on to me.

My God, I used to watch her folding her little white brassieres, now there's an antiquated and formal word—
brassiere,
when was the last time you heard that? Anyway, she folded everything that came out of the washing machine as if she were fondling pieces of cloth that had touched the cheek of Jesus. Socks, hankies (she ironed the hankies), hell, my father's work pants, all my brother's geeky plaid shirts. Folding clothes for my mother was a religious experience and those brassieres, she would fold one cup softly into the other and tuck the straps inside that cup and then lift it onto the pile of her pink underwear as carefully as if she were feeding a sick baby.

My mother looked great in her underwear, too. She worked for a time as a model after she ran away from home in the late 1940s. One night I caught her trying to burn a bunch of sexy old black-and-white photos that showed her reclining, naked I think, under pieces of silky, see-through lacy satin. My brothers loved to see her run from the bathroom to her bedroom in her panties and bra. Once my father caught them and rapped them upside the head with his slippers. Then he stood there just like them, grinning as my mother ran past him and slammed the door. Last I heard, just before we hit the road out here, she was still streaking down the halls of the condo in Florida.