Just North of Nowhere (3 page)

She was closing on something.

County H lifted for a moment; for a moment she felt the roadway rise under her ass. The moment carried her with such authority. She felt the car bank, so lovely, felt the Saab take the curve at speed so perfect, felt the earth sink, just so, as she swooped, straightened out and closed upon a small iron suspension bridge. The tires hummed as she rolled across.

Then they stopped. No humming. The car made a jerk of a stop. Something had gathered ahead, an invisible soft something, brought the car to a quick rolling halt. No harm, no injury. But, by the powers, she stopped and the car died.

Stopping woke her. Silence. Immobility. She figured she’d awakened. She’d been in a roadway fugue-state, driving like that. Suddenly aware, she sat dead in the middle of a black iron bridge in the middle of nowhere in the heart of the night. Then the rain poured.

“God damn car,” she said, then, “Yipes,” she said. The rain on the roof was hard. In its noise she felt its fall from a great height. The road ahead was clear. The way back?

She looked.

A door had closed behind her. Not a door visible, but a door had shut, nevertheless and she was on this bridge. It assessed her, the bridge. No back up. “Severe Tire Damage back there,” she said. “
News at Eleven!
”

Ahead, the roadway steamed in rain and glare.

The face that appeared in her headlight above the grasses at the end of the bridge should have given her concern. It did not. It was a man’s face. It needed a shave. It squinted at her light. It was not friendly. It was trying to figure.

“Huh,” she said.

The face rose to become a hairy man, a naked man. No, she’d only thought he was, but, now, she saw he was only mostly naked; streaming and muddy as though risen from the river over which this bridge, no doubt, passed.

She saw clearly now: he wore cut-off jeans. No shirt. No shoes.

“Whatcha stopping for?” he yelled from the edge of her headlight.

“I am not stopping,” she called back.

He walked down the beam toward her. His toes seemed to grip the wet asphalt. “Musta,” he called, “'cause you got here and now you ain't leaving.”

“The car stopped. I didn’t!”

He stood by her door. The rain shoved his hair across his face.

“You are wet,” she yelled through the closed window.

He shook his head. “It's raining,” he said. “Pop your hood.”

She blinked, then released the catch.

The man disappeared into the Saab's mouth. The car clanked and bumped as he. . .as he did what it was men did with engines!

“Give her a try,” his voice rose above the rain.

The engine coughed, started, stopped.

“Don't be shy, cripes, give her some!” he yelled.

The engine turned, caught, coughed, then raced to full life.

He slammed the hood shut. His hands were black with oil. He didn't wipe them. He didn't mind. She knew he didn't. She cracked the window. “May I?” she began but didn't know what she was offering.

“Nup. I’m where I’m at.”

He was weighing something. She read that. He wasn’t thinking of what he could get for his service. He wasn’t looking at her as a women. No. His eyes were not overtly intelligent, yet they weighed her. He was deciding about some part of her she didn’t know that she possessed.

“Get off the road and get yourself up to Einar's, there. In the morning!”

“Einar's?”

“Place up the other end of town, there.” He pointed at a sign on the roadway, ahead. In a few more seconds, the sign would have been a green and white blur, passing. She couldn't read it from where she sat.

“Einar's. It used to be the Amoco, now it ain't. It's Formerly. Einar's lousy but he'll have the part you need. Don't let him charge an arm for her.” For the first time, he looked at her like a man would. “Well, he’ll figure he can! What you need is a butterfly spring. Not a whole carb!”

His eyes held more.

“May I offer you...” she looked at his greasy hands, the soaked cut-offs. She still had no idea what she was offering.

“Nope. I got what I need for now.” He jerked his head over his shoulder to show her the bridge, the night. “I'm here. You getcherself to Bluffton, there, and see Einar in the morning. He’s probably still up, but he’s a little goofy, nights.”

Then he was gone and the bridge released her.

She rolled into town. Into
Bluffton, Pop. 671
. Green sign, white letters, potted with buckshot-rust.

“Thanks,” she said to the night.

Maybe the Old Rattler Ken, needed just that little bit of a nudge to start seeing again. Maybe Cristobel could do magic. What the hell, who knows?

Old Ken had been blind since just after the century's turn. That’s the OLD century, damn near a hundred years,
that
long. He was that old.

Blind, maybe, but Ken kept pictures of his life. The pictures were in his head and they moved like a flicker show at the Kiddorf’s Magic Light. Ken had never seen a flicker show, but he'd heard about them. Anyway, the Kiddorf was gone since 1950-something, but the pictures of Old Ken’s life moved like he figured the Magic Lights had done.

Now, the movie picture he sees in his head every morning of his life is about an hourglass—one of those old things, counts time. His daddy had one. The hourglass in Old Ken’s head-picture hangs in blackness. It shines and doesn't much move. Here's how it works: Every morning the sun rises over the bluff. Day crawls down the town from stock pens to the bend of the river. By and by it gets to Old Ken's flop on upper Slaughterhouse Way. When it reaches his window, sunlight slips into his hotbox room through a rip in the shade – just a squiggle of bright day, about the length of a bloodworm. That warm beam wipes itself on the old guy's sleeping face.

He doesn't see it, no he doesn't, but he feels how hot. When the heat gets him, he remembers what sunlight was; remembers rosy warmth on his cheeks from almost a century back when he was a boy. When that happens, Old Ken's body jerks, remembers a boy's urge to be out, up among the trees, or walking the furrows on the Amish farms. He remembers hunting snake. God! Hunting snake!

Memory jolts his body. The pain that follows drags him awake, plops him into the smelly bed he's flopped on these last decades, into tar-stinking morning beneath the asphalt roof of the dump he lives in on Slaughterhouse and at that moment. . .

KERRRR-THUD

. . .one thick yellow grain of hourglass sand falls from the nearly empty top to the almost full bottom.

That
is the movie picture of Old Ken's life.

Bedded in his own stink, Old Ken takes the fingers of both hands, pries open his caked-shut lids, turns his face to the heat, already starting to wiggle off to other parts, and confirms: “Ya, still blind!”

Then he hauls himself up, gets moving.

When he'd been a young shit, the Rattler's morning picture was something else. Need a sunbeam to wake
him
? A
boy
? A boy brings his own sun to each damn day. Mornings were a thumping blaze of hot spit, flapping shirts and snake-taking gear, ready to fly and flail; something else, again! In Ken’s mind's eye, aged eleven and running, life was diamondback and timber snake, their skins nailed, pretty much living, to daddy's parlor walls. In his head, he saw bluff snake, hognose rattlers, snakes seven, eight feet and longer! Sixteen rattles flicking at the end of some, a dry-bone, hailstorm to chatter the dead awake. All them critters, every one, shaking like life, alive and writhing as they'd been one twitch before he’d stripped the meat out of them and tossed it to the hogs.

That was a moving picture to keep in your head!

Cold-blood, be damned! In Young Ken the Rattle-Killer's dreams, the hot living skins shook daddy's parlor walls, ceiling to floor. Snake he'd shot, speared, gaffed, fish-hooked, trapped, pinned, stoned, back-snapped, whip-cracked, or just plain stared down to the death shivered the whole damn house. Cold-blood? Ha! In Ken's young dreams, each vengeful head clacked a white wet jaw at him as he moved between the pissed-wriggling walls of daddy's house. Cold blood, hell!

Now that was dreams!

And another darned thing! Each dead critter was a hot new dollar. And that was no dream! No. He loved metal dollars! But dollars were just, what'd you call 'em? Receipts! Markers for the real wages. Life's true measure was snakes themselves, a growing house of dry and lively skins.

Soon, the skins in the pictures in his head had filled daddy's place, every wall of it. Then they filled the outside walls, every inch. From porch to turret to bellied roof and chimney, the building writhed in spitting angers. Soon, in his dreams, enough rattling, chattering, flickering snake skins there were to cover every wall of every building on the home place, the hayracks and barn, the tack rooms and stables where daddy's precious horses stood waiting, being born, standing, chewing, crapping, snorting, whatever the hell! Oh for crineoutloud, every wall in Bluffton could have been nailed over by the snakes Ken killed in his head and heart!

That was a picture to keep and he kept it. In Young Ken's dreams, he had stood sweated and breathless on the edge of Morning Bluff by the Amish fields beyond the Picture Man's castle. The town below danced in sun's heat as daylight touched the colored critters nailed everywhere to every wall. The town quaked in their throes and hissing hatreds, scales flashed spud-russet red, sky blue and eyeball yellow, flicking rings of black and diamond orange winkered, set the whole valley unfolding in color mad summer breeze.

His doing! The wriggling and thumping snake skinned town, below in the rainbow sunrise. He’d done it
eHH
. Yes sir!

He couldn’t remember that picture becoming this cold hourglass and its daily fall of a single grain of sand but, bit by bit, through the blind century, it had. Every day, now, that grain dropped – KERRRR-THUD – a cold, still clock.

For a while, Ken figured if he could cry, tears might could wash away even blindness. Then there'd be the town again, alive and twitching.

He couldn't cry, of course. Hell? What was there to cry over? Besides. The town was still there, out in the dark. Even after nearly a hundred years it was there.

A boy, Ken crossed the town in a few pumps of his legs; a couple of heartbeats and it was gone.

Took an hour, now, for the Old Rattler to totter from his flop on Slaughterhouse down to Commonwealth. The right turn took a couple, three minutes, then fifteen-twenty for the fifty-two uphill steps to the Restrant, another ten up the steps and to the door, two or three to the booth, the same where Old Ken sat at about the same time for the past how many years? By God, since the day Olaf Tim opened the place!

Now, that was a story. Olaf Tim had called the joint
The White House Restrant, Great American Pies Our Specialty!

Ken called it the White House, since, or just “the Restrant,” like Olaf had before he lost his brains. Ken knew the place when four fluted columns supported the porch roof. The columns went in the little fire of ’45 and the name had stopped being the White House Restrant before that, ever since the Tim family, Republicans all, put some distance put between their business and THAT man in Washington.

Through his tenth summer, Young Ken had watched the little bandy-rooster Swede, Olaf Tim, build his Restrant. Now and then, Tim got a town layabout to hold one end of something, while he nailed the other end in place, but, pretty much, he did the whole thing himself.

Ken had watched the scrawny Scandahoovian crawl all-fours over the building, fitting, cutting, rabbeting, trimming, joining, putting board skin over the skeleton he'd framed out, battening the wide boards, then laying soft layer upon soft layer of wet white paint on dry white paint, taking every crack and seam out of the grainy wood with thick thick white.

When Olaf took delivery of a fancy sign reading “White House Dinner, Great American Pies Our Specialty!” the Swede stood in the street and stared at the building, then at the sign, then at the building. Back and forth, for ten minutes. A GOOD ten minutes.

Ken watched.

The ten minutes up, Olaf got to work. In a couple days there were four fluted columns in place of the plain pillars that had held up the porch roof.

Olaf covered the columns with more layers of white paint—changed his sign from “Dinner” to “Restrant”—did it himself, thus the personalized spelling—then nailed the white and gold thing to the porch roof and that was that. He was done.

Through that short summer, Mrs. Tim had sat in a rocking chair by a tree in the street. She attended her knitting, watched her husband labor, and got fatter day by day. She nodded to Ken every morning as he passed on his way to snake the bluffs, but never said anything.

Ken passed, nights, on his way home, a string of rattlers clacking down his back, and there'd be Olaf Tim, still working. Mrs. Tim, fatter, would nod to Ken as he passed.

The day the White House opened its door, Ken was there, ready for breakfast.

After a summer of wondering, breakfast was less than might be expected. The eggs were slippery, hard and shiny, the bacon, limp and chewy. The spuds were just north of raw. All the grub smelled like wood shavings and turpentine and the coffee, soapy and hot, tasted like what paint might. He figured things would improve when the place was broke in a little.

Disappointed or not, Ken paid with a hard bounty dollar. He took his change and left a nickel; said he'd probably be back. Mrs. Tim was nowhere he could see. Her chair was gone from the street.

Later that morning, while Ken was in the woods that verged on the Amishman Amos Dreibelbies's place up on the west bluff, two things—among many—happened in town: Mrs. Tim gave birth to the boy that had been making her fatter and fatter. She had screamed through a night-long delivery over at Doc's parlor. Once the boy came out, she told Doc that if the young one lived, he ought be called Timothy.

“Timothy Tim?” Doc said. By then she was asleep.

The other thing that happened was Olaf Tim blew his head off. After serving that first meal, Olaf dragged his wife's rocker into the new kitchen, took off both boots, sat them by the stove, stuck his double-barrel into his beard and pulled both triggers with his two big toes. Took doing, but folks were like that then: determined.

Mrs. Tim was fine. She got one of the layabouts to clean up, repaint the kitchen and fix the mess on the ceiling. She hired a fat girl to take the money and tend baby Timothy Tim while she cooked. The Restrant reopened the day after the funeral. That day she started rising at 2:30 in the A.M. to make the great American pies promised on the sign her husband had ordered from Mankato.

“A man promises, py Gott someone’s got to keep it,” she told Young Ken her first day on the job. She shoved a slice of apple in front of him and waited.

Ken agreed: Nora Tim made pretty good pie.

“But it’s great?” she asked.

Not wanting her to go barefoot to Olaf’s two-barrel and leave little Timothy a whole orphan, Ken took another bite, considered, then nodded. “Ya. Great,” he said.

Since Bluffton was in America, that covered that: at least one great American pie!

Pretty soon, the scent of baking smothered the whole river bend end of town from the dark of morning until Nora was damn-well done. In a week, pie smell had rolled the stink of fresh paint all the way to the bank of the Rolling River. Like it did most things, the river flushed the smell out of town.

Least, that was how Ken pictured it.

Mrs. Tim and the fat girl made pretty good breakfast, too. Ken reckoned it an improvement over the one Mr. Tim had made, his last thing on earth. Maybe that was why he shot his brains: sudden knowledge that the light of his talent lay in building a thing, not in making it work! And what else was there left to build in Bluffton? Not much and that was a fact.

Maybe that was it, maybe not. Ken wasn't sure. He'd spoken only that one time to Olaf Tim, ordering breakfast and asking for “a second mug of that soapy coffee, there.”

After what was left of Olaf was in Lutheran ground up on Morning Bluff, Young Ken never missed breakfast at the White House. Even on the day he went blind. That was a few weeks later, a month, maybe, maybe a little more.

Way that happened: One day Ken woke before sunup, leaped from bed in a sweat to be off to the Amish fields, jumped into his clothes, slicked back his hair with morning sweat and was halfway turned three times around when he realized, holy shit, he couldn't see himself in the mirror. Holy shit, he couldn't see anything! All morning, he kept trying to; tried over and over to pry his lids further open. Nothing. He washed his eyes with water, made them burn with soap, he swiped his lids raw with a clean kerchief and nearly popped the eyeballs, rubbing with his knuckles.

Nothing.

Daddy finally took him to see Doc. Doc looked and told him he was blind. Maybe his sight would come back, maybe not. Probably not.

That was it. Why was he blind? Who knew? Maybe he'd been snake-bit and didn't know. Maybe he'd picked up something in the bushes, a tick, a scrape from something might have poisoned his blood. Something got infected he never noticed, maybe. Pastor Ingquist from up at the Lutheran said maybe all those years, him handling poisonous vipers and such other serpents as God had put there in Bluffton and in its hills around, had taken their toll, their terrible, inevitable toll. Maybe neither man nor boy should make his way in the world on killing. Might there be a touch of witchery in it?

Who’d he pissed on lately, Daddy wanted to know? The Amish? One of them Aufderheidens up there? A Lurgos?

Everyone had a thought. Everybody made their point.

Point was, he was blind.