But Morris was only so much fun, and seven pages, as I told Barbara Phillips, was more than a day’s work. Later that day I was seized with a strong urge to get out of the Halfmoon for a few days, perhaps get back to Stick Around, visit Dan’s grave and put some flowers on it, and—why not admit it?—see if I couldn’t find the local girl named Denise McWalter, talk to her, and compare her actual self with the girl I was creating in the story, as well as verify the traces of any of the McWalter family lineage that I had once envisioned for Cathlin.
I called Sharon and asked her if she could come and get me. Oh, she’d have loved to, she said, but the thing was, she’d sold Cam, her decrepit Chevrolet, and was trying to see if she couldn’t, in the process of simplifying her life, do without an automobile entirely. “Matter of fact, I got the idea from you,” Sharon said. “After all, you’ve managed to get along without a car, even now that you could own a Rolls or a Ferrari.”
“I just never learned how to drive,” I said into the phone, staring at Morris, whose expression suddenly somehow reminded me that once upon a time I’d been required to drive Ingraham’s Blazer across the high bridge over the Mississippi River into St. Louis. As I’ve indicated, I suspected, even then, that Daniel Lyam Montross had “taken possession” of me during those hectic moments.
“There are driving schools,” Sharon suggested. “Aren’t there any in the Yellow Pages?”
No, there was no driving school in Arcata Springs, nor in Harriman, nor in Fateville. I called the local Ford dealer and said I’d like to buy their most expensive vehicle but I didn’t know how to drive and wondered if they could help me. I was told that the nearest driving school was in Springfield, Missouri, a hundred miles off, and I was given their number to call, a Thompson’s A-1 Driving Academy. I called and asked if they would be willing to send an instructor that far, for whatever number of lessons would be required for someone without any experience.
“It will cost you a good bit extry,” they told me. How soon could we start? I asked.
The next morning there arrived at the Halfmoon a bright yellow vehicle with two steering wheels and on its roof a marquee that warned, DRIVER’S EDUCATION, to other motorists, letting them know that a neophyte was doing dumb things. The instructor was a young man, about my own age, who sat with me in the parking lot of the Halfmoon for a long talk before we started out. He gave me a manual that I would be required to read, but, because of my insistence that time was short, I could have my first lesson behind the wheel, without benefit of reading all the fundamentals of vehicular operation, maintenance, and safety. “Have you ever driven a car before, at all?” he asked.
“I once drove a Blazer over the Mississippi Interstate bridge that leads into St. Louis,” I proudly declared.
“Really?” he said. “Well, then, I guess you know the difference between the brake pedal and the gas pedal.”
I thought I did, but I wasn’t sure. The back streets of steep Arcaty are not the best place to learn driving. Coming from mostly flat Springfield, the instructor himself had never seen streets so precipitous, and before the afternoon was over I had thoroughly terrified him. He was visibly trembling when the day’s session ended, and I tipped him fifty dollars for all his trouble and dismay and fright.
He agreed to come back the following day, but he didn’t. When I phoned to complain, they sent out a different instructor, a woman, who said she wouldn’t “go out” with me unless I knew the fundamentals first. I’d had time to read the manual more than once, and at her questioning I was able to satisfy her that I knew how to use the parking brake to start off from an inclined position, and how to downshift an automatic drive to low, and how to pump failed brakes. Still, we wound up with the front half of the car teetering over a retaining wall high above Leatherwood Creek, and saved ourselves by climbing into the back seat and out the back doors, and had to have a wrecker come to drag the car away from the precipice.
The manager himself (or was he “principal” or “dean”?) of the academy came for my third and subsequent lessons, possibly enticed by the news of the tips I was giving his employees, or simply fearful for their safety. He asked me to call him Jim. Jim and his wife, he said, visited Arcata for a weekend every June, and he was familiar with its treacherous, tortuous roadways, and he knew when to rest his hands upon the second steering wheel on the passenger’s side.
Over the next three weeks, Jim returned to the Halfmoon for a full afternoon eleven more times, and I completed the course with only one accident, when my concentration wavered as I was rounding a curve and thought I spotted Travis up ahead and ran into a ditch—but without any injury to either of us or serious damage to the training car.
If that was Travis, it was the only glimpse I’d had of him since evicting him from the Halfmoon.
II
Upon my completion of the driving course, Jim told me it was customary for the instructor to accompany the pupil for his driver’s license examination, but the state law required that the driver be tested in his or her own vehicle. I needed to purchase a vehicle, and asked Jim what he would recommend, especially for the rough back roads of the Bodarks. He suggested a Jeep. He offered, at the conclusion of my last lesson, to drive me to Springfield, where there was a Jeep dealer, as well as a number of other dealers, “in case you decide you want something different,” he said.
As it turned out, I did want something different, something that cost twice as much as the finest Jeep. I saw her in a Springfield dealer’s window and fell in love with her, and Jim assured me she was certainly a respectable vehicle, albeit an expensive one. A forest green Range Rover. I called her Silvia, “of the silvan wood or forest,” and she almost replaced Morris in my affections. Equipped as she was, she would get only eleven miles to the gallon of gas, and driving her was almost like driving a bus rather than a car, but she was “loaded with extras” and would go any where.
Jim rode with me in Silvia and gave me some tips on the special handling of her. Even the state trooper in Harriman who gave me my driver’s test (which I handily passed) was impressed with Silvia. (“You’ve got yourself a dandy set of wheels here, lady,” he said.) With my license in my purse, instead of returning immediately to Arcaty, I set out for Stick Around…but got only as far as the village of Parthenon before I realized that my having passed the intensive course in driver education and having passed the state driver’s examination did not in any way qualify me for finding my way around. Jim had taught me nothing about map reading, or map acquiring, or even asking for directions. (Nowadays, eight-year-old Silvia, still going strong, has in her rear compartment a complete set of U.S. Geological Survey topographic survey maps, 7.5-minute series quadrangles for the entire Bodark region, but when Silvia was new she didn’t even have a state highway map in her glove compartment.)
I got badly lost. On all of my many previous trips to Stick Around, I’d been driven by someone else, beginning with Ingraham, who, I now recalled, had become lost himself on that first attempt to find the place and had been required to maneuver his Blazer, four-wheel driven but vastly inferior to Silvia, on some terrible logging trails before finding his way out of the woods. Now I tried to spot any familiar landmarks, anything that I might have noticed when someone else was driving me. Being your own driver gives you a totally different view of the world.
One rough road I followed for what seemed like four or five miles south of Parthenon came to a dead end in the yard of a backwoods hovel, a squalid derelict of an old house, which appeared inhabited, at least by dogs: there were a dozen of them in the yard, and they surrounded Silvia, barking fiercely at her and even scratching her with their forepaws. I was tempted to ask directions of the owners, but I didn’t dare get out of Silvia, nor did I want to subject her to any more claw marks, so I quickly reversed and drove away from there and retraced the road to its first westward turning, which led eventually into a logging trail that began, in time, to seem to me like the path on which Ingraham and I had been lost on
that first trip to Stick Around. This trail, which obviously hadn’t been used for years, meandered up hill and down vale all over the countryside, like the sledge paths of my homeland’s Mount Layla, and as I marveled at Silvia’s ability to handle the steepest incline and the muddiest bog with dispatch, I began to have a fantasy of someday taking her back home to Lisedi.
But Silvia’s ability to handle the roughest terrain bred overconfidence in me, and I steered her up into a defile that was little more than the dry bed of a plunging gully, full of boulders that not even she could negotiate. Silvia lost her footing for the first time (and one of the last times) in her life, slipped, and dropped one of her rear wheels into a fissure where it had no purchase, scraping her undercarriage up on top of a rocky ledge. The drive of the front wheels, with all their power, could not pull that rear wheel out of its hole.
I got out and surveyed the situation, which appeared discouraging indeed. I opened the owner’s manual, searching for a chapter called “How to Get Out of Impossible Situations,” but there was none. I may have been miles from the nearest house, and the sneakers on my feet were not meant for hiking. Late afternoon was coming on, reminding me of that first trip with Ingraham—and indeed it was almost exactly four years since that trip.
I was surrounded by second-or third-growth forest, the trees not really enormous but dense, thick, unmanaged; the configuration of the woodland reminded me of the uplands east of Stick Around, and I realized I couldn’t be too far from that glade where there was a lone grave and headstone for Daniel Lyam Montross.
“Help me, Dan!” I called aloud, desperate and forlorn. Then I realized that if indeed Dan had taken up incarnation in the person of Morris Cat, he was seventy miles away at that moment, snoozing comfortably on the cushions of my conversation pit.
…Or maybe he was capable of manifesting his spirit wherever I happened to be. There was no wind blowing through the woods at that moment, not even any breeze, and yet the pages of the owner’s manual that I held in my hands began to flutter as if being rapidly blown or flipped by an unseen hand, until they abruptly stopped turning and remained open at a page upon which was, Location and Operation of the Winch. I knew that I was being led to read that page, although I hadn’t the faintest idea what a “winch” was. My course in driver’s education had included nothing on the use of the winch, but diagrams in the manual showed me how it was embedded in the front bumper and how to release it…but not what to do with the hook once it was released.
Dan must have been guiding me, because I don’t see how I could have thought of this myself: By looping the hook around a sturdy tree higher up the slope and hooking it back onto its cable, and then pushing the proper button on the dash, I could slowly but surely hoist Silvia out of her hole.
“Thanks again, Dan,” I said aloud as I drove on. I was careful not to overtax Silvia’s abilities thereafter, and I got us back onto a trail that even had the impress of recent tire tracks on it and led eventually to a dirt road that seemed to have been at least graded and maintained. I followed that road for miles, with dark coming on, until I reached a blacktop highway. I knew there were no blacktops within any distance of Stick Around, but I followed the highway until I came to a sign, DEER, which referred not to any animals crossing the road but to the village of that name, where there was a lone store-and-service-station. I stopped and obtained, for two dollars, a state highway map that did not have Stick Around on it but did have Deer—in the extreme southern part of the county, twenty miles or so from Jasper, the county seat. “Could you tell me how to get to Stick Around?” I asked the woman who was running the store.
“Not this time of night,” she replied, leaving me to wonder whether she meant that she wouldn’t be able to give me directions at this time of night, or that I wouldn’t be able to find it at night.
So, by a circuitous route on the meandering highways of the Bodarks, I returned that night to Arcaty, getting home just in time for bed.
“Well, Morris—or Dan, as the case may be,” I said to the cat, who didn’t seem any more glad to see me than he usually was—that is to say, was more or less indifferent—“I’ve done some seeking today, and not much finding, and I think I’m ready to do a bunch of short stories.”
III
Most of that spring I spent seeking. Silvia took me, every day, up and down the back streets of Arcaty. My new routine would begin after breakfast in the Crystal Room, where I would usually be the only diner until the tourist season resumed in May, and then I would stop at the desk, ask Lurline for my mail or messages (she was always perfunctorily courteous but diffident, and I wondered how much she had disapproved of the time Travis had spent with me); then I would announce to her, “I’m going for a little spin,” and go to the parking lot where I’d left Silvia, and I would take my lovely Range Rover for an hour or at least half an hour of exploring all the streets of Halfmoon Mountain, East Mountain, the village proper, the lower reaches of Leatherwood Creek, and the highway. Silvia and I became a familiar sight to the permanent residents of Arcaty.
Of course I was looking for Travis. In the beginning I was not even able to admit it to myself, but eventually, when I found myself fabricating imaginary conversations in which I apologized to him and invited him to return to his job as my houseboy, I realized that the sole reason for my having acquired Silvia in the first place, for having learned how to drive, was to search for him, to be more mobile for the quest. Did I detect a smirk on Lurline’s mouth when I returned disheartened to the Halfmoon? More than once I was tempted to ask her if she might have any idea where he might have gone.
Finally, on one of my search excursions out of town, I found Stick Around. Or rather I arranged for help in finding it: I called Sharon and received a rather complicated but detailed description of the various forks in the road, which ones to take, what landmarks to watch for, how to know where I was, etc.; and, just to be safe, I acquired the first of the topographic survey maps in my eventually vast collection, the Murray Quadrangle, a study of which showed me how I’d taken one single wrong turning after the time Silvia had been stuck on Henderson Mountain, where I’d been only a couple of miles from Stick Around without knowing it.
I’d been looking forward to spending a week in Stick Around, visiting with Sharon, with Lara Burns, with Diana Stoving and Day Whittacker, and, it being the morel season again, the fourth anniversary of my first week in Stick Around, I wanted to do some woods roaming in search of morels. But after what was only my first night at Sharon’s, I realized that what I really wanted to hunt for was not morels but Denise McWalter…and possibly Fannie Coe, Travis’s aunt and adoptive parent. It occurred to me that Travis might have returned home. “Do you know anybody named McWalter?” I asked Sharon. But she did not. “What about Coe?” I asked. “Are there any Coes around here?”
“Stick Around used to be full of Coes,” she said. “But I think the ones that are still anywhere near here are up beyond Sidehill, a small community to the west. Vernon could tell you.”
So at my first opportunity I drove Silvia up into the hills west of Stick Around and stopped to chat with Vernon Ingledew, who drew me a map: a detailed rendering of the various forks in the road, which ones to take, what landmarks to watch for, how to know where I was in my search for Sidehill and the Coe country. He marked with a black X the most remote holler beyond Sidehill, with a crude trail leading up into it. “That’s where you’ll find Fannie Coe’s cabin. Along with Gran’s place,” he said, meaning Lara Burns’s dogtrot, “it’s one of the few log cabins of the Bodarks still inhabited.”
I found it. My heart was beating rapidly as I pulled into the yard. There was not a pack of dogs but only one dog, an ancient sheepdog too tired to bark. I had my words ready for Travis, in case he appeared. But he did not. I got out and knocked, and a woman opened the door. She was not nearly as old as I had expected her to be. Perhaps early thirties, not much older than myself, but she had lived a hard life, a frugal life, and obviously a spin
ster’s life, because she was “homely as sin,” as Travis had described her. I felt silly asking, “Are you Fannie Coe?” when it was obvious she was. She nodded, and I told her my name was Kat Kelly and—I had worked this out in advance—I was from the Bodarks Regional Children’s Welfare Division and I would like to ask a few questions about Travis Coe.
“He don’t live here no more,” she said. “I aint seed him since last fall.”
I knew that she was truthful. “Do you know anyone named Denise McWalter?”
“What’s she got to do with it?” Fannie Coe wanted to know.
“She might know where he is,” I said, “if you could just tell me where to find her.”
As it turned out, the real Denise McWalter did not live in a mobile home, as I had already written in “I Draw a Snake upon Your Back,” nor were her parents divorced or nearly as bad as I’d pictured them in the story, nor was Denise herself anything at all like my heroine, and her father had no family resemblance to the Clan McWalter that I had once conceived and described. Perhaps writers ought to be spared meeting any of their characters. Denise McWalter was a pleasant, polite, well-groomed, and fairly intelligent girl of fifteen who lived in a conventional and modest ranch-style house on the main highway above Sidehill. Her parents boasted that she was doing very well in school, especially in math and science, although she was making “only a ‘B’” in English.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 31