The Driftless Area (9 page)

“The rent-a-car.”

“Don’t you have your own place?”

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead.”

She sat on the arm of the couch. Her lighter was one of those little blow-torch numbers that hiss and emit a spear of blue fire. She tilted her head back and blew smoke at the exercise bicycle. “My hubby and me had a falling out.”

“How come?”

“He’s got a girlfriend. You know. So I said either she goes or I go. So anyway, I went. And then Ned said it was okay here.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know. A year ago, maybe.”

“Do you and Ned . . . you know. . . .”

“Oh, God, no. He’s too old for me. ’Course he’s too old for Luanne too, but Luanne lives in her own space. You saw what she’s like. Everything to look out for Ned, to the point where she almost despises him.”

“So what do you do, sit around doing speed the whole time?”

“Not really. I mean, I’ll have it, it makes me kind of happy, but I’m not a fanatic about it.”

“So why’d you stay?”

She thought the question over, staring into the room. “I think I’m depressed,” she said. “Maybe that’s it. And this is a good place for that. No one tells you to get out of it. We keep the shades down in the windows. We watch the vids. I ride to work with Ned. It isn’t so bad.”

“What would you do if you had to find someone? And you didn’t know their name.”

“I don’t know. Probably look on the Internet.”

“He lives north of here.”

“That’s not much to go on. What else?”

“Just got back hitchhiking from California.”

She took the cigarette from her lips and gestured with it and nodded. “Now, see,
that,
” she said. “That is something you could work with.”

“On the Internet.”

“Well, no. Just talking to someone. Unless he has a blog.”

“What’s that?”

“An online diary,” said Jean. “Do you think he might?”

“I don’t know. I fucking doubt it.”

“Yeah, probably not.”

“You could help me,” said Shane. “People tell women things they wouldn’t tell men. Or if you have contacts up there. I’ll pay you.”

“How much?”

Shane thought for a minute. “Couple hundred. If I find him.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. I’ll sleep on it.”

“Stay a minute.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“I want you to sit on my back.”

“Is this a sexual thing for you?”

“No. I’ve always had problems with it. I think I hurt it when my truck went off the road.”

“Okay.”

Shane lay on his stomach with his head turned to the side and Jean sat on his back. She reclined and rested her arms on the top of the couch.

“How’s that?” she said.

“Good. Much better.”

“What did you do for Ned? That he was alluding to.”

“Why do you want to know? You wouldn’t want to sit on my back anymore.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“It’s right up there.”

“Tell me.”

“I burned a house down,” said Shane. “It was a job for hire. Supposed to be empty. But there was somebody in it and she didn’t get out.”

“Wow.”

“Told you.”

“That
is
bad.”

“I know it.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know. She was watching the house.”

“And you didn’t know?”

“No,” said Shane.

“God.”

“And what do you do?”

“What?”

“For Ned.”

“Oh. Nothing. I bump people up.”

“What’s that?”

“They come in, they want the economy car, I—and she died? This person?”

“Yeah. It was a couple years ago.”

“Did Ned know?”

“No. We all thought it was empty. He said it was my fault. That I should have known. But what were you saying? The people come in—”

“And I just—I just bump them up to something more than they want. A different car.”

“How do you do that?”

“It’s easy. Talk low, talk slow. Wear a gold necklace with your shirt open a couple buttons.”

“And then what?”

“That’s it.”

“Just in the appearance.”

“Yeah. Everyone knows this.”

“The men.”

“Men, women . . . businessmen, it makes no difference,” said Jean. “Of course it doesn’t always work. But I think most people kind of want to be bumped up anyway.”

One Thursday night, the Reverend John Morris of the Church of the Four Corners came into the Jack of Diamonds and sat at the bar to have supper. He did this most every week. He would have the venison and onions, or the red snapper with grilled tomatoes, and red wine with his food and Calvados after.

The pastor liked to eat and drink. Yet he was old and troubled. He had absorbed the problems of the congregation and some of his own. His wife had left him
several years ago for a younger minister, and though she had returned after a few months, he was never quite the same. The past was in his eyes, and he walked stiff shouldered and full of regret.

“Hi, pastor,” said Pierre. He had two glasses in either hand and slotted them up to dry.

“You know that little white convertible your dad used to drive?” said John Morris.

“Sure. The MGA.”

“Sweet car.”

“It was.”

“Whatever happened to it?”

“I don’t know. It got sold when the house got sold.”

“How come you didn’t get any of that stuff?”

“It was part of the estate. I didn’t really get involved in it.”

“Well, I think I saw it the other day.”

“Oh, yeah? Where?”

“It was up for sale where I get my car worked on.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing it.”

“Well, it’s not there anymore. It went out the next day.”

“Too bad,” said Pierre.

“Yeah. I saw it and I thought, Pierre should have this.”

“He rebuilt it himself. I remember he had it all taken apart to where it didn’t even look like a car. There were wires laying all over the place.”

“Well, anyway, here’s the keys.”

John Morris put them down on the bar. It was the same key ring too, a little brass snaffle bit.

“You bought it?” said Pierre.

“Yeah. It’s yours. I heard you were hitchhiking again and then I saw the car and it all made sense.”

They went out of the bar and to the edge of the lot by the brook where the car was. Pierre walked beside it, trailing his hand down the long subtle curve of the fender.

“Are you serious, John? What’d you pay for it?”

“Not that much. I baptized the guy’s kids so he cut me a deal.”

After the bar closed, Pierre and the chef, Keith Lyon, took the car for a drive. They went up to the Grade and drank a couple beers and smoked a joint.

“You owe that minister,” said Keith.

“Probably I should go to church now or something.”

“A time or two wouldn’t hurt.”

“Hey, listen. Somebody might be after me.”

“For what?”

“I took something they had.”

Keith opened the glove box. “Light still works,” he said. “Well, I guess you could give it back.”

“I don’t have it.”

“What is it?”

“Seventy-seven thousand dollars.”

“Really. That’s different, isn’t it? What did you do with so much money?”

“Gave it away.”

“Stole it and gave it away.”

“No,” said Pierre. “I didn’t steal it. I wouldn’t call it that. It was more like gambling, but he didn’t understand how much he was betting.”

“You’re going to have to tell me what we’re talking about.”

They got out of the car and walked to the edge of the Grade and stood throwing rocks down at the water as Pierre explained what happened.

“So what you’re saying,” said Keith. “This guy got your clothes, and you got enough money to buy a house.”

“Well, no,” said Pierre, “because I got the clothes back.”

“It was not his day, was it?”

“No.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know. Long-haired guy. Big guy.”

“What the fuck, you hit him with a rock?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you draw?”

“Some.”

And this was true. One year in the fall after Pierre finished college he had gone on an illustration kick. He read up on perspective and shading and how to measure
distant objects using only a thumb and pencil. He got a sketch pad and blue 2H pencils and did some very passable drawings of women and chairs and sneakers before losing interest.

“Maybe draw a picture of the guy,” said Keith. “We could make copies and hand them around a little bit.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“You have some friends. Roland Miles would probably love anything to do with the possibility of violence. Does he know?”

“Yeah.”

“And there’s the police.”

“I don’t want to tell them,” said Pierre. “The first thing they’d want to know is where the money is. And if you don’t say anything about the money, there’s nothing for them to act on. You know, ‘There’s this guy, maybe, I don’t know his name or where he is.’ Hell, they wouldn’t even write it down.”

“You know Telegram Sam?”

Nicknamed for his terse manner of speaking, Telegram Sam was a state trooper operating out of the Gamelon barracks who came into the Jack of Diamonds sometimes.

“I’ve seen him,” said Pierre.

“You should tell him.”

“I’ll think about that. Did you ever have anybody after you?”

“One time, yeah,” said Keith. “There was this friend of mine, and we were in a bar in La Crosse, and somebody was giving him a hard time about something. I don’t remember what anymore. This was years ago. So anyway I told the guy to shut up, not my friend but this other guy. And he did. Backed right down, which was kind of a lesson to me, and I thought that was that. But then him and
his
friends found me a couple of weeks later in another bar and beat me up pretty good. You know. They’d come off from working in a factory and I was sort of drunk, so you can imagine how it went. That was the night I lost my hat. First hat I ever bought on my own. Got it at a men’s store for, like, twenty-nine dollars.”

Keith was silent for a moment, remembering his hat.

“So don’t do what I did,” he said. “I did nothing. That was a mistake.”

That night Pierre went home and attempted to draw the driver of the pickup. He sat at his big steel desk with a goosenecked lamp and paper and pencil and Artgum eraser. He worked on the drawing for over an hour, sketching the figure as he remembered it behind the wheel of the pickup and half turned toward the viewer.

The face gave him trouble. Faces always had. Sometimes he would leave them blank, which looked more artistic than it sounded. Eyes were hard to get right. Too much detail, they looked crazy. Too little, they
looked like coal. In this case, he tried to convey the Distinguished Expert’s evasiveness by having his eyes look to one side. But it only seemed that something interesting was happening off the edge of the page.

He remembered what he had thought of the driver based on his face. That he was dishonest and felt sorry for himself and used this feeling to motivate and justify whatever he felt like doing. It was often self-pity that made people greedy and made them mean. But Pierre had little luck translating these impressions back to the physical characteristics that had made them. He drew and erased over and over. Artgum crumbs littered the paper and the desk.

Even at the height of his drawing powers he had not been able to draw faces.

It’s an odd and disconcerting thing to imagine that someone is pursuing you without any evidence beyond the assumption that they probably would be.

You put yourself in the mind of the imagined chaser, try to guess what he is thinking. You almost end up pulling for him or offering helpful advice.
Why not call the bars? That’s how I found the woman I sent all your cash to.

Maybe he was a self-taught artist too, and had drawn a picture of Pierre, and now the two faced off over an unknown distance armed with their crude and unrecognizable sketches.

Pierre slept with a pipe wrench near the bed in case he had to get up and smack somebody with it. He listened for footsteps outside the door, and, when he heard them, stepped out to make sure it was nothing, not bringing the wrench because he knew he could never really hit anyone with it, and thus ending up in the worst position if it had been something, which it never was.

He wondered how it would end, imagined the different ways. On the shore. On a hill. On sand, grass, soft wooden boards. Or in a house, with threadbare carpet and a candle guttering on the sideboard.

The sun goes down and the wind gusts outside the door. There is a certain amount of standing around. Guns go off like sounds on TV. Someone dies and there they are, dead forever, hard to believe as it may be. Music plays, distant music.

Truly, he thought that nothing would come of it. For that is usually the case. People spend their lives imagining the worst and best things when more typically it’s the middle thing that happens.

Probably because he had kept the money for less than a week, it did not seem that real to him. And as he had read somewhere, money is only a symbol of what it can buy. But $77,000 is a symbol of a lot of things that could be bought.

He wondered who first thought of money and
whether they didn’t have a hard time, at first, getting people to take the idea seriously.

Pierre resented the time that thinking of these things required. He liked to start each moment fresh, not worrying about something from two months ago or even ten minutes ago. He wanted to keep his eyes to the front and be free of the past.

Nonetheless, he joined a self-defense class in Desmond City.

The instructor was a short and rather wizened man named Geoff Lollard who had a storefront by the railroad yards. Lollard was getting up there in years and his meager appearance was a selling point. He must be really good because he didn’t look that good at all.

Lollard and Pierre sat on folding chairs and talked before Pierre’s first class. The course was called Strike, Deflect, Marginalize and the students did not wear white robes because Lollard thought they created a false sense of achievement, although, he said, he could have made a lot of money selling white robes over the years. He said that the martial arts movies had given people unrealistic expectations. You would not be able to fly or run across a lake or stand around in willow trees, as in
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.