The Driftless Area

by Tom Drury

  The face gave him trouble. Faces always had. Sometimes he would leave them blank, which looked more artistic than it sounded. Eyes were hard to get right. Too much detail, they looked crazy. Too little, they looked like coal. In this case, he tried to convey the Distinguished Expert’s evasiveness by having his eyes look to one side. But it only seemed that something interesting was happening off the edge of the page.

  He remembered what he had thought of the driver based on his face. That he was dishonest and felt sorry for himself and used this feeling to motivate and justify whatever he felt like doing. It was often self-pity that made people greedy and made them mean. But Pierre had little luck translating these impressions back to the physical characteristics that had made them. He drew and erased over and over. Artgum crumbs littered the paper and the desk.

  Even at the height of his drawing powers he had not been able to draw faces.

  It’s an odd and disconcerting thing to imagine that someone is pursuing you without any evidence beyond the assumption that they probably would be.

  You put yourself in the mind of the imagined chaser, try to guess what he is thinking. You almost end up pulling for him or offering helpful advice. Why not call the bars? That’s how I found the woman I sent all your cash to.

  Maybe he was a self-taught artist too, and had drawn a picture of Pierre, and now the two faced off over an unknown distance armed with their crude and unrecognizable sketches.

  Pierre slept with a pipe wrench near the bed in case he had to get up and smack somebody with it. He listened for footsteps outside the door, and, when he heard them, stepped out to make sure it was nothing, not bringing the wrench because he knew he could never really hit anyone with it, and thus ending up in the worst position if it had been something, which it never was.

  He wondered how it would end, imagined the different ways. On the shore. On a hill. On sand, grass, soft wooden boards. Or in a house, with threadbare carpet and a candle guttering on the sideboard.

  The sun goes down and the wind gusts outside the door. There is a certain amount of standing around. Guns go off like sounds on TV. Someone dies and there they are, dead forever, hard to believe as it may be. Music plays, distant music.

  Truly, he thought that nothing would come of it. For that is usually the case. People spend their lives imagining the worst and best things when more typically it’s the middle thing that happens.

  Probably because he had kept the money for less than a week, it did not seem that real to him. And as he had read somewhere, money is only a symbol of what it can buy. But $77,000 is a symbol of a lot of things that could be bought.

  He wondered who first thought of money and whether they didn’t have a hard time, at first, getting people to take the idea seriously.

  Pierre resented the time that thinking of these things required. He liked to start each moment fresh, not worrying about something from two months ago or even ten minutes ago. He wanted to keep his eyes to the front and be free of the past.

  Nonetheless, he joined a self-defense class in Desmond City.

  The instructor was a short and rather wizened man named Geoff Lollard who had a storefront by the railroad yards. Lollard was getting up there in years and his meager appearance was a selling point. He must be really good because he didn’t look that good at all.

  Lollard and Pierre sat on folding chairs and talked before Pierre’s first class. The course was called Strike, Deflect, Marginalize and the students did not wear white robes because Lollard thought they created a false sense of achievement, although, he said, he could have made a lot of money selling white robes over the years. He said that the martial arts movies had given people unrealistic expectations. You would not be able to fly or run across a lake or stand around in willow trees, as in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

  “But what a great movie,” said Pierre.

  “Perhaps,” said Geoff Lollard. “But you don’t know what was great about it. When you’ve trained for one year, watch it again, and you will see the great parts.”

  “I like the ending.”

  “That isn’t one of them.”

  “It really got to me.”

  “I suppose. I wasn’t watching for emotion but for more technical aspects. Now, tell me, Mr. Hunter. You are in a fight. What’s the goal?”

  “To win.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then I don’t know.”

  “Think of a fight as two floors of a building. The first floor is the beginning of the fight, the second floor the ending. There is an escalator and there is an elevator. Which do you want to take?”

  “The escalator,” said Pierre.

  “And I prefer the elevator. Do you get that?”

  “Not really.”

  “There is your way, and your opponent’s way, and they’re not the same. The fight is the process of finding out which way it’s going to be. If you only think of winning, you’re looking past what you need to see.”

  “You want them to play your game.”

  “Yes. That’s what is meant by marginalizing. Now, I think we should do some sparring so I know where your skills are. Try to hit me in any way you’re comfortable with.”

  “With a fist?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Lollard wound an egg timer and they went around for ninety seconds. Pierre spent most of the time backing up and laughing, painful though the experience was. It embarrassed him to be battered around the mat by this strange little martial arts teacher. Finally Lollard jabbed a heel into Pierre’s solar plexus and Pierre stood with his hands on his knees gasping for air.

  “Did not see that coming,” he said.

  “The kick is one of the easiest things to deal with if you know what you’re doing,” said Lollard. “Maybe we’ll begin with kicking.”

  Pierre worked out three times a week in the novice class through the month of September. There he reached a kind of peaceful exhaustion that he had not known since his football days in high school. Afterward he would go to a bench in the park where he had gone before his arrest on New Year’s Eve and drink a bottle of Foster’s. Face hot from the exercise, he would sit in the shadows of the afternoon.

  One day the Carbon Family were setting up their instruments for a concert in the park. The lead singer, Allison Kennedy, came over and sat on the bench in a white crepe dress with red and black flowers.

  “Hey, I heard you’re seeing my cousin,” she said.

  “Stella,” said Pierre.

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s your cousin? I didn’t know that.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “What should I?”

  “Just be careful. That’s all I have to say.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, now, she fell; you know that.”

  “No, I didn’t. Fell from what?”

  “A ladder. She was taking down storm windows and she fell off the ladder. The oil guy found her beside the house. It was pretty bad. She was in the hospital a long time. They didn’t think she would even live.”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know. A year and a half, I guess. Not last spring but the spring before.”

  “She seems all right now.”

  “I hope that’s true,” said Allison, “but I wouldn’t know. See, because, when she got out of the hospital, she was like another person. She didn’t want anything to do with her family. I tried to go see her; she wouldn’t come to the door. Instead, there was some old man there I’d never seen before. He said she wasn’t taking visitors. I gave him some flowers, you know, that were for her.”

  “Was this here or in Wisconsin?”

  “Here. At the lake. What about Wisconsin?”

  “She’s from there. She told me.”

  “No, she isn’t. Stella always lived here. This is what I mean, Pierre. Something went wrong in her mind; I’m sorry, it did. The doctors said they had no reason to keep her. But they would’ve had plenty of reaso
n if they knew her.”

  “Maybe she wanted to forget what happened. And this was her way of doing it.”

  Allison Kennedy held her hand out and he put the Foster’s in it and she took a drink and handed back the bottle.

  “Look, you want to forget something, you forget it,” she said. “You don’t hide inside your house and tell people you’re from Wisconsin.”

  Ned’s rental-car business was in a square box of a building out on the edge of the airport. Jean was talking on the phone as Shane leaned on the counter and listened.

  “A harmonica,” she said. “Yeah. Very nice one. Silver with—um, inlays. I found it down beside the seat and I thought, Now, where did this come from? So that’s when I remembered this guy I gave a ride to. But the problem is I didn’t get what his name is. It might be Pete. Or it might be Pat. All I really know is he was catching rides back from California and lives somewhere around you. So I’m calling all over the place hoping to find him because I know he would want this harmonica back. It seems like a family heirloom maybe. . . . Yeah. . . . Okay.”

  She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “They’re checking,” she said.

  Shane picked up a red stapler and sprang back the top to see if there were staples in it. “What if he doesn’t have a harmonica?”

  “How would they know that? Maybe he just started playing.”

  “You should say it’s a check, you found a check.”

  “Wouldn’t that have his name on it?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Hello?” said Jean. “Yeah, hi. . . . You do? Really? . . . Uh-huh. California. The state. . . . Yes, that’s possible. Well, does he hitchhike? . . . Sure. Anyone would. Okay, and what’s the name again? . . . Great. He’ll be so happy to get that harmonica back.”

  She hung up the phone and wrote something on a pad of paper.

  “They know him?” said Shane. “Who is he?”

  She tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to him. “Don’t make too much of it. This could be him but I wouldn’t bet on it. They said he goes to Wyoming to fish and maybe California, but they weren’t sure.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “A fireman in some place called Arcadia. And he said this guy might hitchhike, but probably only if his car broke down.”

  “Why him?”

  “Fire departments know everything in these little burgs.”

  “Hmm, I don’t know,” said Shane.

  “It’s the one lead I have so far,” said Jean.

  A stack of maps stood on the counter, and Shane took one and stapled it to the piece of paper. “Keep calling, okay?”

  “I will.”

  Just then a man came into the office. He wore a blue suit coat and tan pants, and his hair was white shading to yellow and combed into a crest above his head.

  “I’m Mr. Bromley,” he said. “I just got in from Milwaukee and I should have a Malibu reserved, I think.”

  Jean shuffled the papers on her desk. “Why, yes, Mr. Bromley, here you are. I’ll need to see your driver’s license and a credit card.”

  He took these from his billfold and handed them to her, and she looked thoughtfully from the license to the man and back to the license.

  “Is something wrong?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jean. “I was just confused, because you look younger in person than in your photograph. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You know, security and all.”

  “No, I understand that. I’m in the security business myself.”

  “Well, thank God someone is these days.” She touched the links of her necklace. “The things you read, you don’t even want to read them. By the way, we have a special today on the Park Avenue. I’m not trying to force it on you, but some people want to know, because the Park Ave’s just a little nicer.”

  “But you have a Malibu on the lot.”

  “Oh, yes. It’s back by the fence,” said Jean. “Supposed to be very peppy.”

  “And how much more is the Park Avenue?”

  “Twenty-nine dollars and change.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do.”

  “What will you do, Mr. Bromley?”

  After the customer departed in the Park Avenue, Jean said, “And that is how that’s done.”

  “If that guy’s in the security business, you can see why there’s no security,” said Shane. “I need a car.”

  “Take the Malibu.”

  Pierre and Stella were sitting on the sofa reading at her house one night toward the end of September. It was cool in the room and a table fan turned slowly on an old wooden crate because they liked the sound. Stella read the time book that he’d given her and Pierre read Stories of Red Hanrahan, that had been written by Yeats “with Lady Gregory’s help.”

  After a while Stella put her book down. She reached for the ceiling, tilted her head, and yawned. Her eyes widened, her hands curled into fists with the knuckles touching overhead, and she said “Yow” in a high soft voice.

  It was the most beautiful yawn Pierre had ever seen. She was wearing an off-white and sleeveless linen dress with an orange flower on the front. He’d been reading how Hanrahan lost a year’s time after his meeting with the daughter of the Silver Hand.

  “Was I ever here before, or where was I on a night like this?” said Hanrahan in the story.

  “Where are you from in Wisconsin?” Pierre said.

  “Around the Dells,” she said. “Why?”

  “I talked to somebody I know. Allison Kennedy.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “She said she’s your cousin and that you always lived here.”

  Stella got up and walked around barefoot around the room. She made a steeple of her fingers and pressed them to her lips and then brushed the front of the linen dress.

  “What else did she say?”

  “Is she your cousin?”

  “Yes.”

  “That you fell off a ladder and almost died, and after that you weren’t the same.”

  “That’s true too,” said Stella. “And that of course is what hurt them and why they tell stories about me. They said I had changed. And I had. I’m sorry this is painful. But I can’t bring back that day. I can’t bring back the person they knew.”

  “It’s all right, Stella.”

  “But when they say I never lived in Wisconsin, I don’t understand it. How would they know? Have they written down every place I ever was? Were they following me around with a notebook?”

  “I doubt it,” said Pierre.

  “People change. They move from state to state. Is this really so hard to believe?”

  “Look, I don’t care where you’re from. And I’m sorry you fell but that doesn’t change anything for me.”

  She took the book from his hands and put it with the other one on the wooden crate, and she lay on the sofa with her feet up on the back.

  “Except I want to put up your storms this fall,” said Pierre.

  “Will you come here?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Will you please?”

  Sometimes Shane dreamed about the woman who died in the fire. Once he was crossing a field beside a river and she followed him at ten paces and never said a word, except finally to ask where he was going, and he said San Antonio, and she said that’s what he thought.

  In another dream she appeared as an angel of revenge in a horse-drawn chariot coming down backlit by a full moon over a party in someone’s yard. She was just a speck at first but grew to fill up the moon. The happiness of the crowd at seeing an angel turned to pure running fear as she began firing tridents upon them from a longbow.

  Strangely enough, Shane liked the second dream better. He preferred to imagine space as the home of superhuman warriors rather than an endless emptiness with broken rocks spinning through on their way to nowhere. Even if the warriors were coming for him.

  Yes, he thought. It is how they said.

>   He’d grown up in an honest family in the city of Limonite near the Canadian border. Two brothers, three sisters. His father managed a hatchery and his mother was a paralegal. Shane started stealing electronic equipment in college and had saved $19,000 by the time he got a bachelor’s degree in communication. After graduation he went in for housebreaks. He learned about silver and gold and porcelain and furniture and began to know what was worth having and what wasn’t. Sometimes he would drive down to Chartrand, where the money was good, and that’s how he met Ned, who then had an antiques store along with his other businesses.

  * * *

  The house fire was simple on paper and to do. It was a vacation house in the town of St. Ivo, Wisconsin, and the owner wanted it destroyed so his wife would not get it in a divorce settlement. He said the house had been empty for months and his wife was on a cruise to Alaska so she wouldn’t be there. It seemed like a pretty bitter enterprise but, as Ned said, you see everything at one time or another. He gave Shane a map and an address and a picture of the house, and Shane drove the three and a half hours to St. Ivo and found the house in late afternoon. It was an old place out in the country with silver shingles and trellises and dormers all around.

  Then Shane went east another hour and got a motel room and returned to St. Ivo in the middle of the night. He broke a basement window and pried off the lock plate and opened the window and climbed inside. He shone a flashlight around the basement, found an old stuffed chair, pulled it over by the stairs, and jammed newspapers down in it. Then he laid some wine bottles around for misleading evidence and started the newspapers on fire and left the house. He stood in the treeline long enough to see the fire coming up in the windows, and then he drove back to the motel.

  Ned called Shane in Limonite some days later and told him that a house sitter had been hired by the wife. She had been a ski instructor and had died in a bedroom on the third floor.