by Larry Watson
The truck finally comes to rest. Laws, properties, and sequences are restored to their natural order. Roy Linderman’s first utterance, “Shit,” comes out of his mouth as it must—as close to ship as shit—spoken through the space where his front teeth were only seconds ago. He rolls onto his back and takes a cautious breath, deep, deeper, right up to the pain and then past it. He exhales slowly, and the air whistles and seems to scrape bone on the way out. He struggles to sit up. He raises both arms over his head as if he’s signaling the gravedigger: “Hold your shovel, I’m alive, I’m alive!”
He must have skidded face-first out of the truck because when he spits, he tastes not only blood but also dirt. He clears his vision by delicately wiping away the veil of blood that has slipped down his forehead. He won’t touch his broken leg; the bone might be poking through the skin. The leg’s rapid swelling feels as if it’s tightening its own tourniquet.
Roy can’t rise from that sitting position. He can’t walk, and he can’t crawl, but if he stays where he is, he’ll surely die—and so he pulls his way up the hill, his hands and elbows digging into the earth below, and his leg dragging uselessly behind. He moves along the route lit by the one headlight, though its beam, never strong, will soon leave him.
What is time out here, far from all the clocks and measures of human purpose? If only that storm would come closer, its flash and thunder a means to calculate both minutes and miles, but it won’t move from the distance it has settled into. Nevertheless Roy begins to count, “One, two, three, four, five.” And rest. “One, two, three, four, five.” And rest. Each five count moves him perhaps three feet. “One, two, three, four, five.” And rest.
He’s not the first man or the last to be confronted with the futility of trying to move forward and the futility of staying put.
THE HI-TOP TRUCK Stop and Diner has only two customers sitting at its counter: Edie Linderman and an old cowboy who bends down so low to his slice of huckleberry pie, it looks as though he might slurp it right off the plate. Nothing but coffee for Edie. She’d stopped just to use the restroom, a smelly, begrimed, cinder-block closet for both gas station and café customers. But once she headed back to the car, fatigue caught up to her.
Now she swivels around on her stool to face the plate-glass window and its view of the highway. When Roy comes along, she figures, he’ll doubtless see his white Impala parked under the gas station’s bright lights and stop. Maybe he’ll want a piece of pie too. At the Spur he said he was going to end his meal with coffee and dessert, but they’d left before he even finished his steak.
The waitress refills Edie’s cup without being asked. She’s as big and wide as Edie’s mother-in-law though closer to Edie’s age and with similarly short hair.
“You sure he’s coming?” she asks Edie and chuckles. “It’s awful late.”
“I’m sorry,” Edie says. “Are you closing?”
“Didn’t you see the sign? Twenty-four hours gas and food. I get paid if I don’t do nothing but sit on my ass all night long for the two or three customers who walk through the door.”
“You have some long nights, I bet.”
“I got my trucker regulars,” the waitress says. “And lonely cowboys.” She laughs in the direction of the old cowboy. “And just a week or so ago, a carload of young folks—not much younger than you and me—come in about three o’clock in the morning. Headed to Missoula, they said. Five girls and a guy. Can you imagine? And he had hair down to his shoulders. I kind of wanted to ask him what kind of shampoo he used. This was about the prettiest, shiniest head of hair I ever seen. I’m guessing you’re like me,” she says, pointing to Edie’s close-cut hair. “Sick of trying to deal with it, so you chopped it all off.”
“Something like that,” says Edie.
“What does he think of it?”
“What does . . . who?”
“The fellow you keep looking out the window for. What does he think of your crew cut?” When the waitress laughs her shoulders bounce up and down. “Hell of a time to be meeting someone out here in the middle of nowhere. Can’t say it don’t happen though. This here’s a Greyhound stop. But if no one’s getting off or on—whoosh! The bus keeps right on a-rolling.”
“My brother,” Edie says. “We were up in Bentrock on family business. He was supposed to be following me.”
The waitress’s face puckers with disappointment. She glances over her shoulder at the clock. “Maybe he had car trouble.”
“Maybe.”
“Or you had a hell of a head start.”
“We left at the same time.”
The waitress looks out the window with concern that matches Edie’s. “How far you have to go tonight?”
“Gladstone.”
“You still got a few miles ahead of you. You wide-awake now?”
“I believe I am.”
“You know what this trucker I know does? When he’s feeling sleepy? He pulls out nose hairs.” The waitress bends down to peer into Edie’s face. “You could maybe do eyebrows.”
Edie opens her purse. “How much?”
“Free with a meal. Ten cents without. Refill’s free.”
Edie puts down a fifty-cent piece. “I don’t need any change.”
The waitress picks up the coin, flips it in the air, catches it in her palm, and slaps it onto the back of her other hand. “Heads or tails?” she asks Edie.
“What? Oh, heads. Heads.”
The waitress peeks under her hand but keeps the coin out of Edie’s sight. “Heads it is. You’re a winner.”
Edie smiles. “What have I won?”
“Hell if I know.” The waitress’s shoulders bounce up and down again.
EDIE DOESN’T GET back in the Impala. She paces the Hi-Top’s parking lot, pausing occasionally to look down the highway. The air has grown cool. She hears the faint, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of thunder.
No, it’s not thunder. Parked not far from the Impala is a truck and horse trailer, probably the rig belonging to that old cowboy. And there’s a horse in that trailer, stamping a hoof against the boards with a rhythm so regular it could be a message in Morse code. Finish your pie. It’s time to go.
Edie drives out of the parking lot, heading north, back toward Bentrock.
ROY STARES AT the dirt, weeds, and stones only inches from his face and continues to haul himself across a landscape that seems to vary only in offering different patches of dirt, weeds, and stones. All around him are faint noises, the scratching, scurrying, crawling, creeping sounds of creatures hunting and being hunted, yet Roy has not seen another living thing.
Edie drives the length of highway that she drove earlier, waiting and watching for an indication or a sign she can’t even be certain she’ll recognize. How, in this world—with its immense empty spaces—can people find each other?
That white shirt.
The creature least suited for negotiating this terrain, Roy moves at perhaps one mile an hour. Past his swollen lips and gums, each breath heaves out and in. The taste of blood is like a mouthful of copper pennies. The blood drying on his forehead and down the side of his face cracks like parched earth. Either during the truck rollover or in the repetition of pulling himself forward, something has happened to Roy’s right wrist—and each time he curls his fingers, the muscles in his forearm cramp and rebel with pain. Both the physical sensation of his broken leg and the thought of it sicken him, and just as he starts down the other side of the hill, he has to stop, raise himself farther off the ground, and vomit. The retching causes so much pain he cries out and has to lie down in the tall grass. After a few moments of rest, he begins again to creep forward.
In the days and weeks to come, when she tells her story of this night, Edie will say again and again that she has no idea how she managed to see Roy. No idea. She was driving slowly, yes, but she had no reason to believe he was out of the truck, much less lying out on the prairie, almost a hundred yards from the highway.
But that shirt, that white shirt.
>
The highway, of course, is Roy’s goal, his reason for crawling forward for one agonizing hour after another. Occasionally cars speed past—the sudden welcome pour and sweep of headlights, then the red blink of taillights.
Now Roy sees a different light, a bouncing searching beam, almost as though it’s in flight.
Then the light has a voice and its voice is Edie’s, fainter than a whisper across the dinner table. “Roy? Roy? Oh God, Roy, Roy!”
She’s running toward him, running through the coarse, sharp silver sagebrush with her bare legs and those flimsy sandals.
When she bends down toward him, he can see that she has brought not only his flashlight but also his revolver.
“My leg’s broken.”
Edie puts both flashlight and gun down in the dirt and reaches for him. “Oh God, what happened? What are you doing out here?”
“What the hell are you doing out here?”
At this she laughs and sobs in relief as if the humor of his remark is the best indicator not only that he will live but will live as himself.
She shines the light on him, and Roy flinches away from its brightness. “Don’t look at me,” he says.
She sends the flashlight beam searching across the prairie. “Where’s the truck?”
“Totaled.” He spits out a small clot of blood, and a fragment of tooth flies out with it.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You don’t have to talk. But we have to get you back to the car. We have to get you to the hospital.”
She kneels down next to him and runs a hand gently down his back. “Can you get up? I can help you.”
“My leg’s broken.”
“I know, I know. But first things first—we have to get back to the car.”
Their world has shrunk down to these few square feet of Montana prairie, this small plot of land barely larger than a grave site, this land and the two people on it, their concerns a single concern: we have to get you back to the car.
Roy has to roll onto his back to sit up, and once he’s sitting up, Edie tries to lift him—and then he pushes himself up until he’s standing on one leg, and he has an arm across Edie’s narrow shoulders. Then, as a broken, bleeding, three-legged creature, they hobble toward the highway. Roy holds the flashlight and keeps its small circle of light fixed on the ground a few feet ahead of them.
Somehow Edie is able to open the back door of the Chevy and maneuver him inside.
He lies down across the seat. He says again, “Don’t look at me.” He drops the flashlight, and it bounces and rolls under the front seat but continues to send out its weakening beam.
“I think I’m going to pass out.” Pass comes out as path.
“Don’t, Roy. Stay awake. Stay with me. We’re going to the hospital.”
“Not in Bentrock,” he says. “Not in Bentrock. Go back to Gladstone.”
“It’s so far . . .”
“Just go. Go.”
Edie goes. She puts the Impala into gear and speeds onto the highway with a tire-spinning lurch and a spray of dirt and gravel.
In the back seat Roy groans, and Edie says, “I’m sorry I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” Roy will still not touch or even look at his broken leg.
“Tell me if you need to stop.”
“Just keep going.”
A car approaches, and Edie’s tears spangle and blur its headlights. With her thumb she wipes the tears from her cheeks.
From the back seat comes Roy’s voice: “Hey, Edie.” It’s weak and the words come out slowly, but its tone is calmer, as though Roy has reconciled himself to something. “What were you doing with the gun? You didn’t bring it out there to put me out of my misery, did you?”
“The gun! Oh God. Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I forgot your gun out there!”
After a long pause, Roy says, “That’s all right. What the hell do I need a gun for?”
The miles pass. The lightning comes no closer. The car radio remains silent. Nothing distinguishes one mile from another but the broken or unbroken highway line. And time passes with the miles, enough time for a man to black out, to lapse into a coma. Enough time for a man to die.
But then from the back seat comes a voice. Her name again, its syllables sweeter to her now than if whispered during lovemaking.
“Hey, Edie?”
“Yes?”
“We don’t have to tell anyone about the Bauer brothers, do we?”
“I suppose we don’t.”
ONLY THE BEDS on the sunlit side of the ward are occupied, and Dean’s brother’s is at the far end next to a window. Their mother is at Roy’s bedside, and when she sees Dean she waves him over.
On his slow walk down the aisle of beds, Dean must pass the two other patients on the ward: one an older man whose eyes are closed and whose skeletal body seems sunk into the mattress and the other a boy who is sitting up while a heat lamp dries the cast covering his right arm from wrist to shoulder.
Like the boy’s arm, Roy’s leg is encased in plaster. And it is held above the bed by an elaborate system of weights and pulleys. But the sight of the leg in traction is not what’s most startling. Nor is it the contrast of that elaborate mechanism and the heavy white cast with Roy’s torso, bare above a girdle of gauze. It is Roy’s face that’s most shocking. Above his left eye his forehead is purple and swollen, as if an egg has been sown under the skin. The sutures closing the gash alongside that bump look like miniature train tracks. His mouth hangs open, his lips are puffed out as though he’s trying to form a word, and between his swollen lips is the dark space where his upper front teeth once were. His face looks made of mismatched parts.
Their mother puts her hand on Roy’s shoulder. “I told you he’d come,” she says.
“Hey, little brother,” Roy says to Dean. His words come out slowly. “I finally got something and you didn’t.”
“And you can have it,” Dean replies. He grips the bed’s footrail as if he’s worried about losing his balance.
“Go ahead,” their mother says to Dean, “get a little closer. He ain’t catchy.”
Dean remains where he is. “What the hell happened?” he asks his brother.
“Compound fracture,” says Roy. “Of the femur?” He looks at his mother and she nods. Roy adds, “They pounded nails right into the bone.”
“And they’re pumping him full of antibiotics,” their mother says. “On account of infection. Because the skin was broke. And he was crawling around in the dirt.”
“I meant with the truck,” says Dean.
Their mother says, “I didn’t know bones could get infected, did you?”
“Edie didn’t tell you?” Roy says to his brother.
Dean shakes his head no. “She’s still not sure.”
“His ribs,” Mrs. Linderman says, “ain’t broken. They’re cracked. There’s a difference, I guess.”
“I rolled the truck,” Roy says. “Going too fast on a hill.”
“Yeah, but—”
“He might need another operation,” their mother says.
“I just want,” says Roy, “to get the goddamn dentist in here.”
His mother lays her hand gently on her son’s shoulder. “They won’t do nothing until the swelling goes down. You know that.”
“So,” Dean says, running his index finger along the bed rail as if he were tracing a route, “Edie had gone ahead, and then you had the accident—”
“Did you feel anything?” Roy asks abruptly. “You know, like when we were kids. You said you could feel it when Kenny Wertz nailed me with a fastball. Did you feel anything last night?”
“I—no. No, I didn’t feel anything.”
“Good,” says Roy. “I wouldn’t want you to. Not this.” His eyelids flutter and close.
Their mother whispers to Dean, “He kind of comes and goes.” She adds, “While you’re here I’ll go grab a cup of coffee.”
Mrs. Linderman lumbers across the room. When she gets to the door, she turns and
looks back at her sons. Not even in the hours after their birth, when they lay swaddled in the nursery on the floor below, could one boy be confused for the other. “Dean’s the sad-eyed one,” the doctor and nurses had said, to which the boys’ father replied, “What the hell does a baby have to be sad about?”
In another moment Roy’s eyes open, and he looks up at his brother with an expression that is, for an instant, clouded with incomprehension. “She’s gone?” he asks Dean.
“She went for coffee.”
“She’s wearing me out, man. Every minute it’s ‘How are you doing?’ ‘Feeling better?’ I think she’s worried I’ll die if she doesn’t keep checking. But I’ll probably be getting into a private room, thanks to her. And no extra charge.”
“She probably walked up and down the hall looking for empty rooms.”
“That’s exactly what she did.”
“Look,” says Dean, “do you want me to drive up there and do something about the truck? Have it towed somewhere? You said it’s totaled, but maybe something can be salvaged? Scrap maybe?”
“Fuck it,” Roy says. “Leave it. Let it rot.”
“Wrecks don’t rot.”
“Rust then. I don’t give a shit.” His eyes droop closed, and within an instant he’s asleep again, his breaths chuffing in and out past those swollen lips still traced with thin dark lines of blood.
Somewhere on the floor a bell rings, a chime that is doubtless a call of distress or complaint. Dean steps closer to the bed. Just beneath the sharp, pungent smells of bleach and antiseptic is a faint fetid odor like rotting vegetables. Dean touches his brother’s hand, its tendons relaxed, its veins like mapped routes leading . . . where? Roy wears a ring commemorating their high school and graduating class, a thick, heavy circle of engraved metal and polished stone. A sentimental adornment on the finger of a man who professes to be free of sentiment. To the heart of course. That’s where the map leads. To the heart.