The Driftless Area

by Tom Drury

“If you can see it, you can be it.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Beer school.”

  “So you’ve abused substances too,” she said.

  “Oh, many a time.”

  “Do you think it’s true?”

  “What?”

  “If you can see it, you can be it.”

  “No. What time is it?”

  “Two o’clock.”

  “For example, you can see a llama,” said Pierre. “But you couldn’t be one.”

  “That’s taking it pretty literal.”

  “I’m going to sleep now.”

  “You have passed your test,” she said.

  “I didn’t know I was taking one.”

  “You didn’t ask for anything or come jumping all over me. You were true to what you said, and you’re sleeping in some scuzzy chair. I admire that.”

  “You can’t spend the night in your grandmother’s car.”

  “Hey, I got news for you. That wasn’t even her house.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “What if there had been a ladder?”

  “That would have been interesting, wouldn’t it?”

  “What are you, crazy?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Probably pretty crazy.”

  “Are you going to sleep now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good night.”

  “No. You know what? I’m giving you something.”

  She rummaged in her purse and then leaned way out from the bed, with one hand on the floor, and handed him a round yellow stone about the size of a tennis ball and covered with small depressions like the moon.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “It’s my lucky rock,” she said. “I found it in a quarry. I think it was made by heat or something.”

  “You should keep it.”

  “No, it’s too heavy. I’ve been looking for somebody to give it to. It has a good feel to it. You’ll like it. Go ahead, throw it up and catch it. You’ll see what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” said Pierre. “It’s kind of sandy.”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  And for the rest of the trip, all the way to the coast and back, he carried the rock in the pocket of his safari coat, and he would throw it up and catch it while watching the road for rides.

  Pierre’s cousin and her family lived in a small house in northern California with peeling redwood trees growing in the back, and they would pitch a tent in the yard for Pierre to sleep in.

  His cousin owned a company that made custom skateboards endorsed by an apparently famous skateboarder Pierre had not heard of, and her husband had a repair shop specializing in Saabs, and he drove old Saabs and thought Saabs were about the greatest thing.

  Their children were good souls and backgammon prodigies who would beat Pierre almost every time they played. He thought he was a fair backgammon player but he was nothing compared to these children, who were five, seven, and nine years old.

  Even the youngest had a keen understanding of how to block, and when to hit blots or leave them alone, and when to double. It was extraordinary.

  Pierre stayed with them one week and it never got crowded or uncomfortable, on account of the tent. They would chop wood for their winter supply and go to the ocean near Big Sur, where the children ran through the tidal pools.

  His cousin had an unorthodox style with an ax. She would not toss the blade to the side and swing, as most do, but begin with the ax hanging motionless down her back and bring it up and over her head with gathering speed. And in this way, though slender and not very tall, she could split blocks that Pierre would barely dent.

  His cousins had the sanest family life that Pierre had ever known. The kids called him Uncle Pierre, and the day before he headed up the coast, they drew their faces on paper plates and gave them to him so he would remember what they looked like.

  So now he had the rock, and he had the paper plates, and everything was in place for what would happen next, although Pierre did not know what this would be, or even this it would be anything.

  It happened when he was nearly home. He got a little careless as he often did at the end of the journey. At a truck stop in Minnesota, he took a ride from a man in a battered sky-blue pickup who asked if he would split the gas money.

  Both the shape that the truck was in and the driver’s request for money might normally have made Pierre wait for another ride. Sharing the cost was fair in theory but, from what he had seen, drivers who made a point of asking up front tended toward the mercenary.

  As for the truck, the panels were dented and scraped, the dashboard was delaminating, and there was no glass in the back window. But it was late afternoon and he had only 125 miles to go, so Pierre took the ride.

  The driver was a large man with long hair in a shade between yellow and white. Of Pierre’s age or maybe a few years older, he wore a green Boy Scout shirt with the arms sawed off at the shoulders and a royal blue insignia identifying him as a DISTINGUISHED EXPERT, though in what field it did not say, and probably the shirt had not belonged to the driver when the award was earned anyway.

  He had a round and sunburned face and jutting brow, and he would not look Pierre in the eyes but always seemed to be thinking of some other situation, and sometimes he appeared laid back and at other times, for no reason, a look of alarm would flicker across his face.

  And as they went along the driver said he was going down to San Antonio, to help his brother, who had found a lot of money in a car wash. Or rather than saying it he yelled it, or nearly so, to be heard above the highway sound that rolled through the missing window.

  “How much is it?” said Pierre.

  “Thousands. Tens of thousands.”

  “And somebody left it in a car wash.”

  “So he tells me.”

  “What is it, drug money?”

  “Well, we don’t know. But ill-gotten gains of some kind. It was in a paper sack from a grocery store.”

  “What if whoever left it wants it back?”

  Pierre was only making conversation. The story sounded made up, though it was not that unusual for something you would hear while hitchhiking.

  “Yeah, my brother’s kind of worried about that aspect of it,” said the driver, with his hair dancing around in the back draft of the missing window. “But once he gets it to San Antonio those bastards can’t touch him.”

  “I thought it was in San Antonio.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Pierre’s backpack was then riding along in the bed of the pickup, in violation of a fundamental rule of hitchhiking, which is not to get separated from anything you don’t want to lose.

  The end of the ride showed the reason for the rule. When they came to the turnoff for the highway that Pierre would take east the 70 miles to Shale, the driver went halfway up the exit ramp and stopped there on the shoulder.

  “Why don’t you pull up to the stop sign. I’ll get out there,” said Pierre.

  “No, thanks, this is fine.”

  Pierre looked across at the driver, thinking he had not understood. “You’ve got to go there anyway.”

  “Yeah, I don’t care.”

  “Just right up here,” said Pierre.

  The driver turned in his seat, set his back to the door, and kicked Pierre in the shoulder.

  “Get the fuck out of my truck,” he said.

  “Well, okay, but it seems goddamn small after I gave you gas money.”

  “And don’t forget your stuff.”

  Once he said that Pierre saw his mistake. Still, there was nothing to do but get out. He opened the door and began to step down and the truck took off, throwing him on the pavement.

  But then the driver made a mistake of his own. Instead of leaving as fast as he could, he stopped a little ways off, and looked back through the glassless window, and yelled something, Pierre could not tell what, but it seemed to end with the word fool, which was hard to argue with under the circum
stances.

  The backpack held nothing of value, but Pierre hated the thought of the thief getting the paper plates with the drawings. So he jumped to his feet, took the lucky rock from the pocket of his coat, wound up, and threw the rock at the truck.

  Sometimes things happen that seem to defy the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all systems move toward disorder. Once Pierre had dropped a lighter on the sidewalk, and it landed standing up. Another time, lying in bed with Stella, he asked what she would do if he could toss a quarter across the room and into a coffee cup sitting on the dresser by the Gokstad ship, and she told him, and he threw the coin, and it went in the cup.

  And now the pickup began to move, tires spinning for a hold on the pavement, but it didn’t matter, because the rock in its flight seemed to know what it was meant to do, and it followed a low arc and tailed off, going through the window frame and hitting the driver. The truck went on up the ramp for a short while, losing speed, and then veered west and down a grassy embankment, where it rolled for a while, missed some trees, hit another one, and stopped.

  Spellbound, Pierre walked down the bank and through the trees to the truck, where the driver lay partly on the seat and partly in the foot well under the dashboard. Pierre watched him awhile to make sure he was breathing, though he had no idea what he would have done if he were not.

  Then he got his pack from the truck bed and went up and pulled the latch beneath the steering wheel and opened the hood. His thought was to tear out the ignition wires, but their location was not as obvious as he had hoped. But while surveying the various webs of wires he saw a package that had been secured with duct tape behind the battery.

  He pulled off the tape and took the package from the engine well. It was a paper sack, folded over and bound with more tape, and when he got that off and opened the bag he found that it was full of faded green bills bundled by ink stained-rubber bands.

  Pierre thought for a short while and then opened his pack and pushed everything down and laid the sack of money in on top. Then he went back to the sleeping driver and pulled the keys out of the ignition and flung them into a bean field and walked away.

  He put the pack on his shoulders and went up the exit ramp. He walked for several miles under the light-banded sky and eventually a man driving a Royal Crown truck stopped to give him a ride.

  SIX

  WHEN THE driver of the pickup woke it was dark outside, and the light on the roof of the truck was on. A woman had hold of his foot and was shaking it.

  He was upside down with his head under the dashboard on the passenger side and his feet up by the steering wheel. His head hurt. He put his hand to his hair and it was matted like straw.

  “You’ve been in an accident,” said the woman.

  “Yeah,” he said. “What time do you have?”

  “It’s about nine o’clock. I was on my way home from the cemetery. I put flowers down, you know. But today I got busy and didn’t get to it until late. But I don’t feel right till I do it, so—anyway. Do you have anything broken, do you think? Not that you’d necessarily know. I’m sure glad I stopped.”

  He reached up to open the passenger door and he crawled out and came around to the driver’s side where the woman was standing.

  “Why did you stop?” he said.

  “Oh, my husband. He drives the wrecker in town and he’s supposed to pick up any cars and tow them in should they be wrecked or abandoned. So anyway I thought I better see what the deal was because I didn’t want him making the trip for nothing. What’s your name?”

  “Bob Johnson,” he said.

  That name was made up. He might have come up with something better but he was not thinking very clearly. His name was Shane Hall.

  He noticed then that the hood was up and he didn’t like the look of that. So he walked up beside the truck and felt around behind the battery. He doubted that the money would have fallen out on impact, but he got down and looked around and under the truck.

  “What are you doing, Mr. Johnson?” said the woman. “Do you want me to call someone?”

  “No, I’m all right,” said Shane. “But there was someone else. I remember now. In the truck. I don’t know where he is.”

  “Maybe he was thrown out. I’ve heard of that happening. I’d better go call someone. I don’t like this at all.”

  “No, help me, now. We can’t panic. You look around here, I’ll look back in the trees.”

  Shane walked up to the woman’s car parked on the shoulder of the ramp, but she had locked the door. So he returned to the truck and got behind the wheel but the keys were gone.

  “This isn’t fair,” he said.

  He saw the rock on the seat, picked it up, and stared at it.

  “I don’t find anyone,” she said.

  Shane got out of the truck with the rock in his hand.

  “Yeah, me neither,” he said. “Listen, I need to take your car. I have to go the doctor’s. I think you’re right about that. So let’s have the keys.”

  “You’re in no shape to drive,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a concussion. I’ll drive you into town and we’ll get the ambulance in no time. I know where there is one.”

  “Give me the keys to your car. Don’t make me hit you with this rock.”

  “You would do that?”

  “Yeah, I would.”

  “But how will I get home?”

  “I don’t know. Christ, figure it out. You’ll walk, I imagine. Why is everyone always expecting me to take them somewhere?”

  She got her ring of keys out and took the one for the car off the ring and gave it to him. “What about this other guy, that was in the truck.”

  “He’s dead. He doesn’t know it yet but he will.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Yes. I know. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  Shane drove the woman’s car up the ramp and turned east onto the highway. It was a very smooth ride—much better than the truck with the shot out window. Plastic trays of dead flowers were on the seat and he picked them up and threw them out the window and watched in the mirror as they bounced and broke apart on the asphalt.

  Simple as his mission seemed, he knew it would not be simple at all unless he happened on the hitchhiker along the highway. He had not really caught his name although it thought it might have been Pete or some lame name like that.

  He drove for several hours. The flat country gave way to hills, and the road climbed, and valleys opened on either side, and in the valleys there were towns every so often.

  To go into any one of them and start looking around would be pointless, as Shane well knew, lonely little places hunkered in with streetlamps marking the passage of the nothing night.

  Shane was torn between ignoring the stupid thing he had done and berating himself for it. He had waited around like a fool, no question about it, but who could have predicted the hitchhiker would have such an arm, or something to throw?

  He had seen the rock on its way. All he would have had to do was duck, or even stay still, for he had turned his head and hit the gas, and the truck had moved, it must have, which meant that the throw would have gone wide had he done nothing.

  Everything had happened exactly as it had to for Shane to lose the money—it seemed both inevitable and ridiculous—and after that all was lost in stony sleep until the cemetery woman woke him by shaking his foot.

  When he got to the river at the border he knew that he had gone too far, so he went down into a town and stopped at a bar on piers over the river. He sat drinking beer and looking out at the dark plane of water with boat lights moving over it.

  The worst thing was that he had put the money at risk for nothing, some dope’s backpack of junk; it was galling as hell as he considered it.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” said the waitress, as she brought him another draw.

  “Just put the beer down and get away from me.”

  He stopped at a pay phone on his way out of the
bar. He called a guy he knew in Chartrand, forty miles to the south, and told him he needed a place to stay.

  As the evening had turned cooler, he picked up a jacket and hat from hooks on the wall, and outside he put them on and went on his way.

  “So this is it,” Pierre said.

  He put the sack of money on Stella’s table and she pulled it over and looked inside.

  “What will you do with it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe invest it.”

  “At so many percent.”

  “Yeah. Not really.”

  “Because she said. This woman you met,” said Stella. She had her hair in two long ponytails and she wore a blue denim shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons.

  “If she found a lot of cash. Her words.”

  “And the rock.”

  “Yeah. She gave me the rock.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Pierre. I guess it’s meant to be.”

  “But even if it isn’t. Say she didn’t know about the money. Because it isn’t humanly possible. Why not give it to her anyway?”

  “Just that she might throw it away.”

  “Everybody who has money might throw it away,” said Pierre. “A lot of them do. But nobody ever worries about it unless somebody who doesn’t have any is about to get some.”

  “And then you’ll be free of it,” said Stella. “I like that. It’s Robin Hood and yet it’s not.”

  “Well, I did take it. Is it stealing? I’m not sure what it is. When you take money someone stole, while he’s also trying to steal from you. What is that?”

  “That is the way it goes.”

  “I mean it’s not like I wanted it.”

  “I don’t fault what you did, Pierre. You followed your instincts. Does he know where to find you?”

  “No.”

  “Because he will try.”

  “You think so.”

  “I’m certain of it. This is probably all the money he had in the world. Or maybe he owes it to somebody. He wakes up, the money’s gone, he can’t drive. What would you do?”

  “Well, he won’t know to look in Utah.”