by Larry Watson
Edie reaches across the picnic table and covers Roy’s hand with hers. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yep,” Roy says. “I know.”
He drops his cigarette and grinds it out in the gravel. He stands up. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s see if I can make it to Bismarck now without having another nicotine fit.”
As they walk to the car they both wipe away tears with an identical motion, a quick swipe with the heel of the hand.
“Hey, you asked,” Roy says, and they both laugh. Through their tears they laugh.
EDIE SAYS, “WHAT’S that cologne you’re wearing, Roy?”
“Dolce & Gabbana, I think.”
“Well, you’re wearing too much of it. I could smell you even when we were outside.”
“You need me to open a window?”
“I’m just saying. For future reference.”
“Shit.” Roy raises his hand and with his index finger makes a check mark in the air. “Another one on the debit side,” he says and turns the fan up on the air conditioner.
“God, Roy. Still?” Edie shakes her head sadly.
“Sorry, kid. Can’t turn it off.”
“Does Carla know what you’re doing today?” Edie asks.
Roy whoops a laugh. “Carla! We haven’t exchanged so much as a how-d’ya-do for maybe ten years. Believe me when I say Carla doesn’t give a shit what I’m doing. Not today or any other day.”
“What happened?”
He runs his fingers loosely around the steering wheel. “About a year after Dean died Carla and I moved to Billings. A Realtor there wanted her to come work for him, and he made her an offer so damn good she couldn’t say no. So off we went. The move was okay with me, even though I couldn’t land anything with a dealership in Billings. But I got something with a used car dealer. And, as it turned out, Mr. Jeff Joseph, of Joseph Realty and Associates, wanted Carla to come work for him not just because she was so damn good at selling houses. He was trying to save some money and cut down on his time on the road. If she was right there in Billings he wouldn’t have to keep driving up to Gladstone and checking into a motel for a night or two for their dates.” Roy laughs again. “Dates. That’s the word Carla used when she finally broke the news to me. ‘I’ve been dating another man,’ she said. Dates. Jesus Christ. I still can’t get over it.”
“I’m sorry, Roy. It doesn’t sound like Carla.”
“I think what you mean is that it sounds exactly like Carla. She saw an opportunity to improve her circumstances and she took it. But we’d all have put money on it being my shenanigans that would break us up. The hell of it is, once Carla and I moved in together, I more or less changed my ways.”
“So when you and I saw each other at the nursing home, you and Carla were—?”
“That’s right. Which was what you no doubt saw as the hopeful look in my eye.”
“Why didn’t you say something then?”
“Would it have made a difference?”
“We’re friends, Roy. And family.”
Roy groans. “Oh Christ, Edie. Don’t do me like that.” He reaches across the space between them and jostles her shoulder. “The next thing you’ll be telling me you think of me as your goddamn brother. Besides, you never told me that you and—what’s his name?—had split.”
“Gary. But you knew I was back in Gladstone.”
A few miles pass before Edie says, “At least you were spared the indignity of marriage counseling. My God, what a shit show that was. I don’t know how many times Gary would look up and say, ‘Excuse me?’ What? I was never sure if he really wasn’t listening or if that was just the impression he wanted to give. One time I looked over at him, and he had his little pocketknife out and he was cleaning his fingernails. But our therapist, Dr. Snell, bless his heart, kept plugging away. Gary’s indifference. My . . . I don’t know what it was. Stubbornness? Like giving up on our marriage was some kind of failure on my part. I’d already failed with Dean. No, no, don’t say it. I know, it takes two—but that was how I felt. I just wanted to keep this second goddamn relationship alive. If it died it wasn’t going to be because I quit. And then one day our therapist was working so hard and finally he leaned forward and said in his high squeaky voice, ‘But you two love each other—I know you do.’ And I said, ‘No. We don’t.’ And that was that. I guess all we needed was for one of us to say it and make it official. Gary was gone in no time.”
“What a fool.”
“Come on. You have no idea what living with me would be like. No idea.”
“I’m guessing you wouldn’t let me smoke.”
“That’d be the least of it.”
“And what was his problem anyway? Your husband. Indifferent, you said? I have a hard time believing that.”
“Just resign yourself to the fact that some things will always be a mystery to you.”
They drive into the Dakota Badlands, and though the violent eruptions of rock are similar to those on the Montana side, every formation here is tinged with orange as if the fires that created this country have only recently been extinguished.
“Scoria,” Roy says. “A hell of a lot of petrified wood out there too.”
“We had a big chunk of it in the garage when I was a little girl. Something my dad picked up and brought home for God knows what reason.”
“Frowned on now. Supposed to leave it out there.”
“One more way the world’s changed. Now we’re not supposed to take away anything that belongs there and make sure we don’t leave behind something that doesn’t. Erasing our tracks. I think I’ve been pretty good at that.”
Roy pats his pocket as if to reassure himself that, though he can’t smoke, his cigarettes are still there and waiting for him. “Can I tell you about something, Edie? Something that happened long ago? Hell, you probably won’t even remember it, but it’s been bugging me all this time.”
Edie says, “Are you sure it’s not something we’re supposed to leave out there?” Then she sighs and asks, “How long ago?”
“Well, we were out of high school, but you and Dean weren’t married yet. Maybe the summer after we graduated?”
“Jesus, Roy.”
“Yeah, well. Like I say. It’s something that’s been bugging me. But if you don’t remember—”
“I didn’t say that. You haven’t told me yet.”
Roy shifts in his seat. “Okay. We were at a party. Out at Dennis Rooney’s ranch—”
“Which wasn’t a real ranch. Stables, as I recall.”
“Well, everyone called it the Rooney ranch. Anyway. Dennis’s folks were out of town, and we were down in their basement rec room.”
“I remember that basement. All the trophies on the walls. Everywhere you looked, some dead animal was staring at you. Deer. Elk. A moose, I think. Maybe even a bear?”
“Yeah, the Rooneys were big-time hunters. But let me tell this now, damn it.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
“You were wearing a dress, a summer dress. Does that help?”
“Yes. Yes! Doreen Mueller’s wedding. She married that soldier from Laramie. What was his name? Older guy? Everyone knew Doreen was pregnant. The wedding was on a Saturday afternoon, and after the reception at the church we drove out to Rooneys’. And you’re right. It was the summer after we graduated. Doreen was a year older.”
“This isn’t about Doreen. I don’t give a damn about Doreen. This is about Dennis Rooney. Dennis Rooney and you.”
Edie shrinks back in surprise. “Dennis?”
“We were sitting around in the basement. Sort of in a circle. You and Dennis were sitting across from each other. A cooler was on the floor right by you, so Dennis asked you to get him a beer. And another. And another. And he asked you to get one for whoever was sitting next to him. Might have been me since I was sitting across from you too. And he kept asking because you had to bend down to open the cooler and reach around inside, and when you did Dennis got a look down your dre
ss. A damn good look, if you know what I mean.”
A Chevy Tahoe pulls alongside them, and for as long as it takes that vehicle to pass, Roy falls silent. Once the Chevy is well ahead of them he continues, “He’d ask for a beer, you’d bend down and get one, and every time he’d laugh his ass off. And here’s what really got me. Dean saw what was going on, and he didn’t say a goddamn thing.”
“Was that,” Edie says, “why you and Dennis got into that little scuffle outside the bowling alley?”
“You remember that? It didn’t amount to much. Some shoving back and forth. But yeah. It was. Not that I said so to Dennis. I was just needling him, trying to get him to maybe throw a punch so I could kick his ass. But that should have been Dean’s job.”
“His job?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Dean was supposed to pick a fight at the bowling alley?”
“Come on, Edie. Dean should have put a stop to it.”
“Can I tell you something about your brother? Dean once said to me he thought he wasn’t supposed to be jealous. So he tried not to show it. Gary on the other hand once told me that if he was jealous it was because I was doing something wrong. But why wasn’t it my job, Roy? It was my dress he was looking down.”
“You didn’t know—”
“Are you sure? Maybe I liked it. The attention. I looked pretty good back then. Maybe I was testing my powers.”
“Oh Jesus, Edie, you looked—”
“And you must have gotten a pretty good peek yourself, right? Since you knew what Dennis was doing.”
“But it was a trick. He tricked you. It was a fucking stunt. He was taking advantage—”
“Roy, Roy. Will you listen to yourself? You’re talking about something that happened almost fifty years ago that didn’t mean much to me then and means nothing to me now.”
“‘Nothing—’”
“Nothing! Except that you’ve had it tucked away all this time. It makes me worry about you, it really does. A boy looked down my dress. My God, Roy. Let it go.”
“Hey, you think I haven’t tried? You don’t think my life wouldn’t run a hell of a lot smoother if I didn’t keep replaying scenes like this? I could make a movie out of these memories.”
“I think,” she says gently, “you’d be the only one who’d want to watch that movie.”
A mile passes, perhaps two, before Roy answers. “Dean,” he says. “Maybe Dean would have watched.”
They leave the Badlands behind and are back among the low treeless hills and tawny prairie grass. Edie looks out at the distant fields where oil wells dip their beaks over and over into the earth. “I remember that dress,” she says. “Pale blue with little white flowers. I loved that dress.”
THEY’RE STOPPED ON the interstate. The two lanes heading west are shut down, waiting to be resurfaced, and now the eastbound lanes are stopped as well and a line of cars waits for a massive road grader to cross in front of them.
“You ever been to Bismarck?” Roy asks Edie.
“I don’t believe so.”
“You’ll like it. Nice city. Clean, bright. I used to go there fairly often. Did a lot of business with a fellow who had a used car lot on the south side of the city. I think we both thought we were screwing each other, so it was a pretty good working arrangement.”
Edie checks her phone again.
“Dean and I once went to Bismarck together,” Roy says, “so he could run their marathon. Did you know he started running again? Before the cancer of course. The Bismarck race was in September, and the day of the race was ungodly hot. The route took them along the Missouri River, so it was humid too. And the only day in North Dakota history when the wind wasn’t blowing. Runners were dropping right and left. Dean finished though, by God. Later when he was sick he said dying wasn’t as hard as running the Bismarck Marathon. ‘You don’t look as bad either,’ I told him.”
For a few minutes they sit silently. Edie stares at her phone as though attentiveness alone will be enough to bring forth a communication. Roy watches a trio of highway workers, two men and one woman, sitting on the back gate of a pickup truck and drinking water from a plastic gallon jug.
“Can I ask you something?” Roy says.
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean really ask you something. Can you put the phone down?”
She slips the phone into her purse, but she doesn’t look at Roy. Instead she looks out the window. A few antelope are out there, perhaps a hundred yards away, and one of them lifts its head to look in their direction. It cocks its head as if trying to puzzle out what these machines and creatures are, so slow-moving in a landscape that seems to offer no impediment to motion.
“All right,” she says. “Ask.”
“Now I know I put this to you on another occasion, but I think you’ll agree things are a little different now. What do you say we just take off? Leave it all behind us. You and I will go make a new life together. We have clothes in our suitcases. I’ve got money in my pocket and more in the bank. Just you and me. We can keep heading east—Minneapolis, maybe Chicago. Or we can turn around and go west. Seattle, Spokane. San Francisco. Or maybe some little town where no one knows us and we don’t know anybody.” Roy holds up a hand as though he’s the one assigned with stopping traffic—“Wait. Just let me get this out. I’m not asking you to do anything more than what you’re doing right now. Just be by my side. The two of us.”
He stops abruptly as if the words of his speech have suddenly congealed and stopped in his throat. He’s the one who looks away now, over to that torn-up stretch of highway, its concrete pulverized to rock, gravel, dirt, and sand.
“Go ahead,” Edie says.
He laughs a little and turns his face back to hers. “All I’m saying is I wouldn’t put any conditions or make any demands on you. Hell, I can’t even count on getting it up every time. I just want to be with you, Edie. I don’t know how many days I got left, none of us do, so . . . Shit. You know what I’m saying. I just want to make sure you understand what I’m proposing.”
“Don’t be dramatic. If you take after your mother, you’ve got a lot of years left. And what about your mother?”
“She doesn’t know I’m alive. She sure as hell wouldn’t know I’m gone. Don’t bring her in on this.”
“Let me see if I have this right. A man is asking me to run off with him and he says sex won’t be part of the bargain. Whoa! Whatever I might have had once I guess it’s gone now!”
“That’s not what I said. I just meant—”
“That I shouldn’t get my hopes up? Where’s the Roy I used to know? The man who’d promise anything if it’d help him close the deal. Do you ever watch that TV show? What is it, The Apprentice? I don’t believe you’d last more than a single episode.”
He reaches over and takes a gentle hold of her wrist. “Please, can you be serious about this? I just want an answer. And if it’s no, I’ll never ask again.”
She stares at his hand on her wrist, her gaze so unwavering it has the power to make him release her. When he does, she says, “I’m going after my granddaughter. That’s all I have in mind right now. I appreciate your willingness to accompany me, but if you can’t concentrate on the task at hand . . .”
Roy shakes his head slowly. “You don’t even know—”
“We’re moving!” Edie says, pointing to the car ahead of them. “At last.”
Within minutes they’re back up to highway speed. Roy’s vision is locked on the road ahead, his jaw clenched, his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly at ten o’clock and two.
THEY SIT IN a booth in Perkins. The lunchtime crowd has come and gone, diners drifting back to their offices and their retail jobs in the stores in the neighboring Gateway Mall.
“What do you suppose this is the gateway to?” Roy asks.
“The West?” Edie suggests.
“What about us? We’re heading in the other direction.”
“The East then.”
“May
be that’s why people live here. So they don’t have to decide.”
“Maybe.” Edie flips open her phone again.
“Anything?”
She shakes her head no and closes the phone.
“What’s the plan then?” He sips his coffee. “You’re in charge here. I await your orders.”
“Well, a farm north of the city. The Solon farm? That’s the name she said was on the mailbox.”
“A farm? We’re in North Dakota, for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I keep waiting for something more.”
Roy finishes his coffee and swipes the bill off the table. “What the hell. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find her standing on the side of the road somewhere.”
THEY DRIVE NORTH on winding River Road. Off to their left the wide Missouri River blinks in and out of view whenever there’s a gap in the towering cottonwoods. A high grassy bluff hems them in on the right.
“Whatever became of Carla’s boys?” Edie asks.
Roy opens the shade on the sunroof. “Troy’s down in New Mexico. Teaching high school. Married to a pretty Mexican woman. They’ve got two girls, and Carla’s down there every chance she gets. They call her—shit, I can’t remember now. Something Spanish for grandmother. Brad’s still in Billings. He had an accident waterskiing a few years back. So now he’s got a brain injury, though you’d never know it to meet him. But that’s what the doctors say, so who am I to argue. And that’s supposedly the reason he can’t hold a job. I think it’s mostly bullshit if you ask me but then nobody did, so I keep my mouth shut. Carla pays all his bills. Out of some crazy sense of guilt, I guess. She’s got a few things to feel guilty about, but not where those boys are concerned. Maybe if I had kids myself I’d get it, but I don’t.”