From the Black Hills

by Judy Troy

  “Do you plan everything you do?” Mike said. “Don’t you ever do anything by accident? I mean, just by chance?”

  Tom thought before he spoke. “Yes,” he said. Then, “No. Probably not. Not for a long time.” He zipped up his jacket and said, “I’ll call you in a few days. I’ll tell you whatever I can. Meanwhile, go back to school. Go to your classes. The worst has already happened.”

  “Because of us,” Mike said.

  “No. Because of what your father did.” Tom looked at Mike for a few seconds. Then, hesitantly, as if he weren’t sure what Mike might do, he rested a strong hand on his shoulder. “Be careful driving back to Brookings,” he told him, then opened the door and stepped out into the cold.

  TWENTY-NINE

  MIKE stayed there for a long time after Tom left. He noticed, without thinking about it, that the snow had stopped and that a quarter moon was visible. And he noticed that now, because of the moon, he could see farther into the pasture across the road than he’d been able to before. But he didn’t feel much of anything. The part of him that had been preoccupied with his father was now vacant, just emptied out. There was nothing else inside of him, he thought. Next to him on the seat was the card with Tom’s phone numbers on it, and Mike picked it up and put it in the glove compartment, out of sight.

  Finally he just started driving. Two miles east of the state line, remembering about the license plate, he turned into a parking lot next to a church. He drove to the back of it, where the snow was untouched, and as he replaced the Minnesota plate with his South Dakota one, he remembered his father saying, “I don’t believe there’s a God. Not many people are brave enough to say that.”

  That struck Mike now as a foolish thing to say. But what did he, himself, believe in? He didn’t know. He looked at the small cemetery next to the church, a layer of snow as thin as paper on top of the gray stones. He put on his seat belt when he got back in his truck.

  He drove mile after mile through the darkness. Then, his stomach still queasy, he stopped near the interstate and bought a 7-Up at an all-night convenience store.

  “I guess the snow’s stopped,” said the short, older woman behind the counter. “That was the earliest snow I can remember in a lot of years.”

  “Me, too,” Mike said.

  “You’re too young to know what a lot of years means,” she told him.

  A man in a cowboy hat came in just before Mike left. “I guess the snow’s stopped,” the woman said to him. “That was the earliest snow I can remember in a lot of years.”

  That should have made Mike smile, at least, but he barely registered it. He walked to his truck, got in, and pulled onto the flat, straight highway that would take him into Brookings. He drove automatically and not very carefully. He realized that there was something wrong with the way he felt. He should have been having some specific reaction, he thought, like relief, if nothing else. But he couldn’t say that he felt relieved. What he did know was that he was tired and cold. He never, maybe, had been that tired.

  He turned on the radio and listened to a country station: songs about love of one kind or another. There was a commercial for the Corn Palace, in Mitchell. Mike had been there with his parents, but Donetta had never seen it. “My father was going to take me,” she’d told Mike more than once. “It was on his ‘things-to-do-next-summer’ list.”

  Unexpectedly, the sadness of that affected him, and made him see what he hadn’t seen before. There were too many things on that list. Donetta had named nine or ten over the years since her father had died. He never would have done any of them, Mike understood now. Summers would have come and gone, and all he would have done was kept writing them down.

  Close to Brookings now, watching the highway, Mike started to cry. Tears, unaccompanied at first by emotion, ran down his face, and when he no longer could see the road he pulled off to the side of the highway and wept. It was the only time he ever had. Hearing that word Mike would have thought that he knew what it meant, but he wouldn’t have known that it was like this. Tears were only salt water, Donetta’s father had said, but he had been wrong about that, too. What they were made of, Mike knew now, didn’t tell you what they did. They brought up to the surface what you had pushed down to the bottom. They let you know how much of you there was.

  It was a while before they stopped. Then he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket and looked out at the flat, open land along the highway. He was homesick for the fields near Wheatley. He was homesick for the Black Hills, from where he had taken the high, narrow roads that led down to the outskirts of Wheatley. From the Black Hills he had seen, sort of, himself. He didn’t know yet how he would get that back.

  IN Brookings, he drove down the empty streets to Hansen Hall and parked behind it, next to his motorcycle. The lobby was deserted except for a couple making out on a couch in a dark corner. Mike tiredly climbed the stairs. Raymond was asleep, though he woke up when Mike came in. “I thought you weren’t coming back until tomorrow,” he said.

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “No reason,” Mike said. Then he said, painfully, “No. There is one. But it’s too much to explain. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  He went down to the rest room, returned, and locked the door behind him. He undressed and got into bed. For the most part, the dorm was quiet. He heard a door slam, then the sighing sound of the heat coming on, which stirred the curtains. He could see the outline of his desk and chair, and the shapes of his books—the familiarity of things that belonged to him.

  Across from him Raymond yawned and turned over. “Your girlfriend called,” he said.

  “Did she?”

  “Twice.”

  Mike lay on his back in the darkness, picturing his father’s face, and the three state police cars going past, one after the other, after the other. Too many things had happened. Too many of them had revolved around Mike. But that was over now.

  And gradually, without effort, as Mike let himself move toward sleep, he realized that whatever happened to his father was not connected to him. There weren’t unbreakable strings between people in families. Mike had thought there were, but when his father had pulled on them too hard, had counted on them unfairly, they’d broken.

  He closed his eyes. He thought about driving up into the Black Hills on the curving roads; about his bedroom at home, with its view of the Hylers’ house across the street; and about the Hylers’ cats—the outside ones—waiting patiently on the broken-down porch for their dinners.

  And finally he reached for his Walkman and headphones and listened to the tape Donetta had made for him. The first thing on the cassette was her voice. “It’s three o’clock in the morning,” she said. “I can’t sleep, I can’t dream, and I can’t stop thinking of you.”

  He rewound and rewound it, listening to her voice until he fell asleep.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Judy Troy was born in northern Indiana. She has taught writing at an alternative high school, Indiana University, and the University of Missouri. Her collection of stories, Mourning Doves, was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award, and she received the 1996 Whiting Writers’ Award. She is now Alumni-Writer-in-Residence at Auburn University.