Finding Somewhere

by Joseph Monninger

  “He was my lover man, Hattie,” Delores said, and bumped her shoulder into mine. She almost made me slide off the hood. But I knew her history. She had been crazy for Eugene for about three days. Then she cooled like a lava flow. She became all rock, all pumice, with bright holes in her surface, as though the heat had been too much. She never even gave Eugene a reason for breaking up. She just trapped him in her heat, like the people in a village at the foot of a volcano, and he looked charred and stunned for weeks afterward.

  We lay against the windshield without speaking. In the quiet, we heard a tiny brook running somewhere in the forest. Cold air moved over the campsite, and the fire glowed red. I played with the image of the red fire, clicking my eyes back and forth and turning it into an eye of a dragon lying flat on the ground and looking up, then into the top of a volcano on a midget island where no one grew taller than four feet and the biggest houses only came up to your waist. That was the kind of thing I thought about when my mind washed around. That shift of mind hurt me in school a lot. Teachers usually wrote home and said I was dreamy or a woolgatherer. They were probably right, but I liked chasing my own thoughts. I always had.

  We dozed and fell asleep. I woke twice to listen for Speed. Once I heard him chewing, and another time I heard his lead knock against his water barrel. I imagined climbing onto his back and feeling his wings sprout from his shoulders and great rays of light coming out of the sky to pull him home. All horses become Pegasus at the moment of their death. That’s what my first riding teacher told me, and that’s what I believed.

  DELORES’S PHONE WOKE US.

  It rang and rang and eventually Delores slid off the hood and pawed through the truck cab until she came up with the phone. The sun hadn’t fully shaken free of the land. It still peppered through mist and fog and everything looked gray and quiet. Speed had settled on his stomach, but the sound of the phone brought him up onto his feet. He took his time getting there. He moved like an old man.

  “What?” Delores said into the phone. “What are you saying?”

  I slid off the truck hood. I felt stiff and lumpy. I folded the two sleeping bags and put them in the truck. Then I found a few more pine twigs and put them into the smoking ashes from the night before. I blew on them and they caught easily. I built the fire while Delores talked into the phone. She slid into the truck cab eventually and leaned her head back against the window, listening.

  When I had the fire solid again, I worked Speed over with a rubber curry brush. I concentrated on his sides and hips, where dirt had worked its way under his hair. When I finished with that, I used a dandy brush on him to get the last of the dirt. He took it without complaint. It was a good moment, actually, with Speed. The air came fresh through the meadow and forest, and the sound of the fire behind us made it cheerful. I brushed him quietly and he leaned a little into me. I lost myself in my hands, let them do whatever they wanted, because having a horse in my care made more sense than anything else I could think about. A horse lives in the present, right now, right this minute, and when I moved my hands over Speed, I felt quiet and calm inside. I finished by giving him a couple carrots, and he took them with a big nod each time I let him nibble one into his mouth.

  “That was Larry,” Delores said when I went back to the fire. She had plopped down on the picnic table. Her hair looked wild and uncombed. She had fed the fire a little higher, and it burned easily, cracking the mist that rolled around at our feet.

  “What did Larry want?”

  “Oh, he tried to be all fatherly for me. Mom put him up to it. How am I supposed to listen to a guy with an El Camino and a mullet?”

  “Awkward,” I said, sitting next to her on the picnic table.

  “I want pancakes,” she said.

  “We can get pancakes. You okay?”

  “Larry said they talked it over and he’d volunteered to call because maybe I’d be calmer with him. You know, like he’s Mr. United Nations or something.”

  “Why so early?”

  “They figured they would get me that way. I looked at the number and almost didn’t answer, but then I wondered if something important had happened.”

  “So, what was his advice?”

  “He didn’t have any, really. He called to say they had decided to try to get in touch with my father. They thought maybe I should go live with him a little if they can track him down.”

  “In Oregon?”

  She nodded.

  “Well,” I said. “Least that’s not as lame as it could have been, right?”

  “It’s pretty lame. He doesn’t want me out there. He hasn’t been in touch for ten years or whatever.”

  “Can’t hurt to try.”

  “The definition of ‘crazy’ is someone who presses button A ten times, gets response B ten times, but keeps pressing A expecting a different result.”

  “You’re pretty philosophical this morning.”

  “I’m an extremely deep thinker,” she said, and grinned.

  We sat and watched the fire for a while. The temperature felt to be in the forties somewhere. I had the kind of cold face and crusty eyes you get from sleeping outdoors.

  “How many marshmallows did we eat last night, anyway?” Delores asked.

  “About a million.”

  “We ate a whole bag. We’re a pair of Hog-a-thas.”

  “We fed a couple to Speed. And we dropped a couple in the fire.”

  “How about those idiot boys on ATVs? What was their deal?”

  “Testosterone,” I said.

  “What is that, anyway? Girls would never circle a bunch of boys on ATVs and sit there gunning their engines. It just wouldn’t happen.”

  Delores shrugged.

  “I want warm food,” she said, pushing up and blowing her nose on a tissue she had in her pocket. She chucked it onto the fire. “Let’s get rolling.”

  DELORES HAD THE HEAT BLASTING—WE WERE COLD—AND everything was just getting settled on the way out of the campground, when we saw the ATVs. Four of them, all Hondas. I knew at a glance that they were our ATVs, the ones driven by the jerk boys. I recognized two of the helmets sitting out on the picnic table.

  Delores looked at me and slowed. She got her crazy-evil look and wiggled her eyebrows.

  She slowly eased her truck up to the first ATV. She put the nose of the truck right against it, then gently ladled the engine forward. The ATV skidded slowly sideways, directly into the second ATV. She goosed the engine a little more, and both ATVs skidded and chucked sideways, tipping and bouncing. I heard some crashing and breaking things, and suddenly two boys shot out of a big tent, both of them in hoodies and boxers.

  “Hey!” they yelled, but they couldn’t do anything. They ran back and forth, looking at the damage and yelling at us.

  Delores stuck her tongue at them. I did, too.

  Then Delores backed up and swung the nose of the truck away and laid on the horn. The horn was shockingly loud in the early morning.

  “Do not ever, ever, ever screw around with a woman going west,” Delores shouted.

  MY MOM CALLED DELORES’S CELL PHONE AT BREAKFAST. Delores read the number and handed it to me and made a funny grimace.

  “Indiana,” I said when she asked where we were. “I think, anyway.”

  “You don’t even know the state?”

  “Indiana.”

  “Where did you spend last night?”

  “At a campground. It was fine, Mom.”

  “I’m just sick with fear for you two. Delores was supposed to call me last night.”

  “We can take care of ourselves,” I said, letting Delores’s failure to call go without comment. Sometimes my mom forgot to come back to things if I changed the subject. “I have to eat now. The waitress brought the food just this minute.”

  “She did not.”

  “Yes, she did, Mom.”

  “I don’t get what the point of this is. Can you explain what in the world you’re doing, Hattie?”

  “We’re women g
oing west,” I said.

  “What is that, like a catchphrase?”

  “It’s a statement of fact.”

  We didn’t speak for a moment. Delores slipped out of the booth and headed toward the ladies’ room.

  “Mom, didn’t you ever just want to do something because you thought you should do it?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I love Speed, Mom. I love him more than anything. I want him to be a horse for just one minute of his life. That’s all. Then I’ll come home.”

  “Couldn’t he be a horse in New Hampshire?”

  “I want to put him on rangeland. Imagine your whole life you’ve gone in circles. Imagine what that must be like.”

  “I feel like I have, almost,” she said. “I think I know.”

  “Speed has. If he hits a trail that goes left, he takes it. His whole body knows how to do only one thing. It’s pitiful.”

  “But he can’t live on the range. The Fergusons said that was out of the question.”

  “It probably is. But I want to give him a chance.”

  “You are too horse crazy for your own good.”

  “And Delores has to go west. Her mom is trying to get in touch with her dad in Oregon.”

  “Delores is not your responsibility. Delores has her own issues, Hattie. I’m sorry to say it, but she does.”

  “I know.”

  “I spoke to the Fergusons and they said they have friends with land in Montana. They said you could bring Speed there if you wanted.”

  “He’ll be okay,” I said.

  “I hope so. I hope you’ll be okay.”

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “We’re having pancakes.”

  “You always liked pancakes.”

  “And always will.”

  Chapter 4

  DELORES TOLD ME A HUNDRED TIMES WHICH STATE WAS which, but I couldn’t get Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois straightened out. The signs over the highways changed, and some of the road surfaces varied, but it was all just concrete and light stanchions and cars whizzing everywhere. Delores said the roads were modern rivers, and that populations grew around them just the way they did back in the day when rivers carried most of the country’s goods, but I didn’t care for her analogy.

  Late in the afternoon we passed through Chicago. We both sat up to look around, but the traffic moved so slowly that we worried about Speed. Then it started to mist, and we figured that was a relief to Speed. I had the map spread on my lap. Delores said right around the bend from Chicago we could get to Wisconsin, then Minnesota. A friend of hers had told her that the sky opened up once you passed Blue Earth, Minnesota. That the West began in Blue Earth.

  “Does Chicago look like Chicago?” Delores asked when we had assured ourselves we followed the proper route. “I mean, there should be a word for a thing that doesn’t look like you thought a thing should look.”

  “How about ‘disappointment’?”

  “Naw,” Delores said.

  “What’s Chicago supposed to look like, anyway? All cities look the same when you drive past them.”

  “The Bible says if you live among the masses, you’ll die among the masses.”

  “Well, that’s awkward.”

  On the northern outskirts of Chicago, still in traffic, we tuned in to Dr. Black, a radio psychiatrist who helped people with personal problems. Someone would call in with a complaint about their husband—he had been cheating, or his cell phone had another woman’s number on it—and we tried to prescribe the proper response before the doctor weighed in on the question. Delores was wicked good at it. Whenever a woman had a man problem, she would yell, “Kick him to the curb, sister,” but then she got a serious look on her face and tried to sort things through. She nodded as she spoke. As soon as we heard the whole problem, we turned down the volume on the radio and played at being Dr. Black.

  Mostly women called in with problems about men and children. Sometimes men called in and asked how to get a woman back after she had stormed out. Families caused their share of problems, too. A dozen calls came in about mean mothers-in-law, or fathers who needed to stop driving because of dementia, or an adolescent boy who wanted to get a tattoo.

  “I’d like to be a psychologist,” Delores said during a commercial. “You sit and listen to everyone’s problems and try to guide them. They can’t get mad if it doesn’t work, because they’re screwed up to begin with.”

  “You’d be like a dump for them, though. They’d chuck everything at you. It wouldn’t be pretty.”

  “You might feel better knowing your life doesn’t stink as bad as you thought it did. And they get paid pretty well, right?”

  “You’d be good at it,” I said.

  “You know,” Delores said, “I once watched an old Twilight Zone about a sin-eater. This guy would go to funerals, and the grieving families would lay out a big meal that no one but the sin-eater could touch. Really beautiful food back when they didn’t have great food. And the sin-eater would sit in front of it, and I think a priest would say something. I don’t remember that part so well.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then the sin-eater would eat the food. He’d just shove it into his mouth like crazy, and he’d be gurgling and crying because he was eating the dead man’s sins, too. That was the only way the dead guy would get to heaven. So then the sin-eater would collapse, but not before shoving food into his coat pockets to bring home to his family. It went on like that for a lot of years until one day the sin-eater himself died.”

  “Well, what did people do?” I asked, still looking out at the city.

  “They starved the daughter of the sin-eater’s family. Then one day they opened the door to a spare room, and the sin-eater’s body was in there surrounded by food. The girl tried to resist, but her mother kept whispering, ‘Go ahead, eat it, go ahead, your father needs to go to heaven.’ ”

  “Did she eat the food?”

  “I’m not telling.”

  “You are, too,” I said.

  Then Chicago ended and I had to get money for a toll. We entered Wisconsin and saw a guy driving a truck with a cheese triangle on his head.

  WE STOPPED FOR HAY AT A FEED STORE IN CASEYVILLE, somewhere between Sparta and Onalaska. Two old men sat on a porch outside the store. One of them smoked a cigar. I couldn’t blame them for wanting to be outside. The day had turned soft and warm, and the sun felt strong. A blond cat sat perched on the railing in front of the men. We were ten miles off the interstate at least.

  “Hay’s around back, if that’s what you’re looking for,” one of the men said. “Just pay Julie inside.”

  We thanked him.

  Julie turned out to be at least as old as the men. She was tall and well kept, with white hair pulled back in a spray behind her ears. She wore crisp jeans and a bright flannel shirt that had faded to white in spots. A pencil jabbed through her hair. She had a ledger book open in front of her and a pair of bifocals propped on her nose.

  “We’d like four bales of hay, please,” Delores said.

  “First cut is five seventy-five a bale,” Julie said, hardly looking up.

  I fished the money out of my jeans. I put down twenty-five dollars. Julie made change and slid the money back to me. She smelled like lavender.

  “Can you pull around back?” Julie asked, slipping out of a pair of moccasins and sliding into a pair of muck boots. “I’ll meet you there.”

  We went out.

  “New Hampshire?” one of the men said, reading our license plate. “You’re a long way from home.”

  “Looks like it,” I said.

  “You bringing a horse to someone?”

  I nodded.

  “Never been to New Hampshire,” the man said. “Farthest east I ever ventured is New York State. Went to the Adirondacks. Pretty nice country, a lot like Wisconsin.”

  “New Hampshire is pretty,” I said. “Cold and pretty.”

  We got back into the truck and pulled around behind the store. Julie waved us to a
tent where she stored the hay.

  “You girls from New Hampshire?” Julie asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Delores said.

  “I grew up in New Hampshire. Until I was five. You ever hear of a place called Rumney?”

  “That’s where we’re from,” I said. “Next town over.”

  “Small world,” Julie said, and looked at us more closely. “My father worked on a train line there. Milk train. They used to bring the milk into Boston in the afternoon. Then trucks became the order of the day and they got rid of the trains. That was a darn shame, I promise you. Dad moved us west. He always did like cows. This is all dairy country around here.”

  She pulled open a plastic flap and showed us the hay.

  “You girls are younger than I am,” she said. “Just step inside and grab four bales. You’re welcome to any loose hay if you want to sweep it up. It gets thrown around in here when people pull out bales.”

  We stuck our hands into the bales to check them for heat or mold. If you feed a horse wet or rotted hay, you open yourself up to colic; if it’s too dusty, you can cause respiratory problems. Julie watched us.

  “You girls know what you’re doing,” she said, approving. “But that’s good hay. We get it local.”

  “Smells good,” Delores said.

  “Oh, one of the best smells on earth, if you like horses. I come back here sometimes and eat my lunch sitting near it. I used to keep horses years ago. Of course, I can’t quite ride anymore. Too much up and down for these old bones. But once you like horses, you can’t get them out of your head.”

  We fit the hay under a tarp in the rear of the truck. Julie walked back to take a look at Speed. I scooped up a couple armfuls of hay and pushed it through to Speed. He looked asleep.

  “An old horse like that, you ought to put him to pasture for a day,” Julie said, her hand reaching in to pet Speed. “Let him catch up to himself. Have you been driving straight through?”

  “We took a break last night,” I said.

  “You can’t rush an old horse. Are you going far?”

  “Wyoming,” I said.

  Julie nodded.

  “You feed him any alfalfa pellets? Any concentrates?”