Whippoorwill (13 page)

“Any destination in mind?” he asked that Wednesday morning when I climbed in. Wally sat in the back seat, happy and drooling. Holly wasn't there, but it was possible he intended to go pick her up.

“I'd like to go see my mom's statue.”

“Where's that?”

“Bolston. It's north of here. It's a fishing village.”

“How far?”

“I don't know. New Hampshire isn't that big, but it's probably pretty far.”

“I've got a map in the glove compartment. Start navigating and I'll get us going.”

It was that easy. He didn't mention Holly and neither did I. I was on my way to see my mom's statue. That seemed incredible.

Danny wore a pair of jeans and a red flannel shirt untucked over a blue T-shirt. He drove north according to a bubble compass on the dash. I unfolded the map and spread it on my lap, but it took me a while to find Bolston. It was way up on Route 3, the center spine of New Hampshire, up in the Pittsburg area.

“I don't even know if the statue is still there,” I said after we had a rough route planned out. “They might have taken it down by now.”

“Your mom did it?”

“Yes, but I don't know much about it. It's kind of like a family legend.”

“I know about those.”

“You never talk about your dad. Or about your mom.”

“Not much to say about them.”

“Anyway, we might be driving all that way for nothing.”

“It's only an hour or two and it gives us someplace to go.”

“As long as you feel that way.”

“We need to walk Wally soon. Not sure where he's at on the bathroom continuum.”

“Okay.”

“Was your mom an artist?” he asked. “I mean, I know she taught art, but did she, like, do her own stuff?”

“I guess so. They paid her for the statue we're going to see. Something, anyway. It's a fishing village.”

“You mean like an Indian village?”

“No. I don't know exactly. That's what they always said about it. I guess it's a place where people go to fish. Something like that. The subject of the statue is fly-fishing. But I guess she used bicycle parts, and it got a little write-up in the newspaper.”

“Cool.”

“It's her only professional piece.”

“And you've never seen it?”

“Nope, just pictures.”

“Well, that's good then. We can grab some sandwiches and we can try to find it. It will be like a treasure hunt.”

We drove. Eventually the road numbers started making sense and I was able to direct him better. Danny played me a variety of blues, music that he admired, and he talked about why he valued it. I liked seeing him that way. He said the blues were sad, but hopeful, too, because as glum as the lyrics might be, as much as the songs were often about loss, the beauty of the rhythms spoke to the pleasure of transformation. Something like that.

As he talked the day grew warmer and we wound down the windows, and Wally stuck his goofy head out the back, and it felt good, it all did. I didn't mind the way I looked, and I liked how Danny treated me respectfully, and didn't think because we had kissed that we were now in some torrid sex contract. I decided that I liked Danny, although I wasn't sure if it was “like” with a capital
L
or small
l
. He was okay. And I also decided it didn't matter, that I could let it go, just ride it along and see where it took me. That maybe we would be friends, and maybe we would be more, but I didn't need to direct anything or try to shove it in any certain direction. It was a relief to come to that conclusion.

For a long time we rode north and I held Wally's head over my shoulder, like the world's biggest, goofiest parrot, and it was pretty outside. The trees had turned green and the rivers ran full, and going north always felt like progress. I was heading to see my mother's statue, if it still existed, and that felt good too. Danny had made that possible. I had to give him that.

We walked Wally on the forty-fifth parallel, halfway from the equator to the North Pole. Danny spotted the sign along the highway, and it took us a moment to understand what it meant.

“We're halfway to the North Pole,” Danny said when we backed up and looked at the sign again. It was hard to comprehend. We pulled over to a dirt turnout. Obviously, people stopped and took pictures next to the sign.

“And halfway to the equator.”

“The world's big,” Danny said.

Wally surged to get out. We walked him along what would be a cornfield in a couple of months but right now was only a dirt meadow filled with last year's stubble. Wally did his business and we walked over and stood against the latitude sign. Danny took pictures of me and Wally, and then handed me the phone and let me take pictures of him. Then we did some silly shots, both of us pointing to the sign and covering our mouths in surprise, joking around. He showed me the different shots on his phone, and we laughed, and I noticed that his phone seemed to be ringing a lot. He checked it each time it rang, but he never answered it.

“Who's trying to get through to you?” I asked when we got back in the car, wondering if maybe it was Holly.

“I don't know. I don't recognize the number, but I'm going to turn it off anyway.”

“You have a girlfriend?”

“I don't know. Do I?” he asked.

It slowly dawned on me that he meant me, and I felt my face flush. I kept looking forward. I didn't answer and he didn't pursue it. But he also didn't turn off his phone and he kept checking it as we drove, never answering it but always pulling it out of his pocket and glancing at the number.

We hit Bolston a few minutes before noon. It was a tiny village off the main drag. One look around made me doubt the statue still existed. A sign directly over the town line said it was the
PROUD HOME OF THE EASTERN BROOK TROUT
. The Connecticut River ran through the town, and I realized this is what the article meant when it called it a fishing village. It was a destination for trout fishermen. Counting the number of signs about moose and deer, maybe it attracted hunters, too. The houses on either side of the main road appeared rundown and cheap. Some of them had been painted wild colors, as if old hippies lived there, and they had the usual whippoorwill yards, with beat-up cars and junked engines, broken hammocks and plastic Wiffle ball bats, leaning against trees. I couldn't see any town center, or common, where a statue might be located.

“I'm going to ask this guy about the statue,” Danny said, pointing to a guy on the left-hand side of the road. The guy had his head in the mouth of an old car, his body jackknifed in to reach something.

“I don't think it's here anymore.”

“You never know. Can't hurt to ask.”

“I'm beginning to think it was taken down.”

“Hold on one second,” Danny said, and pulled the car over. “No reason to jump to conclusions.”

He climbed out of the car and ran up to where the man was standing. They talked. I couldn't hear what they said, but Danny looked back the way we came, made a motion with his hand to say which side of the road, then nodded and said thanks loud enough that I heard it.

“We passed it,” he said, climbing back in. “We passed the statue. It's right on the town line.”

“It's still there?” I asked, my heart beating hard.

“I guess so. It's on your side. It's grown over is why we didn't see it.”

We drove back the way we came, and I saw it this time without trying. Vines had covered it, looping up and obscuring it, but I knew it was my mom's work even before Danny stopped the car. It looked like my mom, strangely enough, although I didn't even know myself what that meant. It had her essence, somehow, with all the movement and bicycle parts, and vines tying it to the bushes behind it. It stood about double my height on a metal I-beam sunk into the earth. The wind tried to make the statue move, and I realized it was meant to swing like a weathervane, turning with the breeze, and some of the gears down below—down where the fisherman's belt was located—had been designed to turn. It was sort of a mobile, and sort of a weathervane, and I liked the way it looked, the way it stood, and I found myself smiling even as my eyes filled.

“There you go,” Danny said. “What do you think of that?”

“It looks pretty good, doesn't it?”

“It's kind of cool. We could cut away the vines and then it would move more.”

“I can't believe we found it.”

“Why wouldn't we?”

“I don't know. I guess I was starting to lose hope.”

“You want to clean it off?”

“Do you have any tools?”

“We could buy some clippers or something. I have a knife with a saw blade.”

“Let's just use that. Maybe we can come up some other time and do a complete job on it. Now that I know it exists, I mean.”

“Some people might like the vines. It makes it look pretty cool.”

We tied Wally to the I-beam, and while he peed his brains out to mark his territory, we used Danny's stupid Swiss Army knife saw blade to hack away at the vines. They were honeysuckle vines, we guessed, and no one had cut them in a long time. They came away fairly easily, though, and it didn't take long to chop down the front vines. It reminded me of the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz,
because every time we got another vine cut away, the statue tried to move more. I imagined plenty of people in Bolston probably didn't comprehend the statue was supposed to move, if they knew about its existence at all. It felt good liberating the statue, and Danny was a champ, climbing up and nearly killing himself to get the tallest vines off. Slowly the statue began turning again, just a little, and one of the middle gears rotated too. Danny jumped down after he'd sawed the last vines free and he nearly landed on Wally. Wally skittered to one side, then he jumped up on Danny.

“It needs some oil and stuff, but it was meant to turn with the wind,” Danny said, patting Wally.

“It's kind of pretty, isn't it?”

“It's very pretty. All from old bike parts.”

“Mom loved junk.”

“I'm sorry about her. About how things went with her,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It was a car accident? How long ago?”

“A little more than three years ago.”

“And an accident?”

I shrugged. That had always been a question. The police said her car showed no sign of braking before it rammed into the bridge abutment out on Route 25. They said usually there would have been tire marks or some sign that she had realized what was about to happen, but they couldn't detect anything in this instance. Still, they filed it as an accident, mostly so the insurance companies would cover the loss on the vehicle at least. My father said Mom had no life insurance, so he used the car repair money to cremate her.

“Yes, an accident,” I said.

“I'm sorry.”

“So am I.”

We didn't talk much after that. We watched the statue turning slowly in the wind. Mostly it teetered back and forth, not sure which direction to go.

It turns out, Wally could swim. Of course, nearly all creatures can swim, but Wally had enough Labrador retriever in him to make him crazy about water. I knew that much from looking up his breed characteristics online. As soon as we pulled into a small picnic area and let him off his leash, he flopped into the Connecticut River and took off. With the spring runoff, the water was pretty high, and I worried when he flattened out and really started swimming toward the center of the river. I figured he might keep going until the river emptied into the ocean somewhere. His ears dragged in the water. Then I remembered how strong he was, how determined he could be, and I smiled when I saw him bend in a big arc and come back toward us. He had spotted something in the water, a stick or a piece of debris, but it had drifted away before he could snag it, and so he came back.

“That's a boy,” Danny said, and broke off a big piece of wood from the underbrush and threw it into the river.

Wally took off. It was impressive to see. He meant business this time, and he flew off the bank and landed with a huge splash.
This is what he was born for,
I realized, and I forgot what I had thought about his blood containing bloodhound or Great Dane. He was a Labrador retriever, at least his instinct was, and he deserved to live near water where he could swim. He was good on land, and strong, but seeing him swim was an entirely different matter. I wondered if his paws were webbed.

“Man, he likes that,” Danny said, watching him and smiling. “You hungry?”

“I am. I'll grab the sandwiches. You keep throwing for him. It will be good to tire him out for the ride home.”

“He's going to smell up the car.”

“That's what owning a dog is all about.”

“I notice he's not getting in your car.”

“Keep him exercising.”

I set the sandwiches out on the picnic table. The table was in rough shape; the picnic area in general was in rough shape. Bolston looked like better times had passed it by, and I wondered about my mom spending her childhood up here, not far from Canada, a young girl in a fishing village. I knew her dad had worked in a mill, and some grandfather had been a logger, but beyond that it was all a mystery. In any event, people weren't flocking to Bolston to picnic any longer, so the town had let the area run down, and the statue had taken on vines, and that was the way it was.

We had two turkey sandwiches and a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips and two orange sodas.

“That dog can swim,” Danny said, coming over and propping himself up on the tabletop once I had the sandwiches set out. “I mean, really.”

“We can take him to some lakes down at home.”

“We're going to have to. That dog is intense.”

“Eat,” I said.