by Alan Davis
We went west. The weather channel had mentioned a warmer front in that direction. The temperature did rise a few degrees, but after three hours the sky was still slate-gray, the horizon still the color of dirty laundry.
At a gas station an attendant, stocky as a steer, grunted when I asked his advice. “Let me get this straight,” he said, lips downtumed, gruffness quick-frozen, shipped from the Scandinavian tundra. “You not going anywhere? You just looking for the sun?”
“You bet,” I said, signing the credit slip. “Am I going to find it?”
He considered my question. “Not once it gets dark.”
At the motel I pulled out the map and spread it on one of the two rumpled beds. For a few minutes I talked about routes, figuring mileage and driving time, leaning close to the unfolded, crinkled paper to make out place names: Medina, Williston, Miles City, towns of mud engineers, farm implement manufacturers, owners of greasy diners.
I folded the map and jammed it into the slip pocket of the nylon suitcase. Stevie, twice Margaret’s age, was teaching her how to turn the second bed into a trampoline. Audrey had her hair down, one arm outstretched like a guard rail near Margaret, who landed on her back and squealed.
“Maybe we ought to forget about it,” I said.
Neither of us fell in love with anyone else. “We don’t have a marriage anymore,” I remembered shouting. “We have a family.” In some ways an affair would have made sense. But Audrey was busy with two kids and I was too tired to be interested. Instead, I rented an apartment near the plant where I worked.
“I have one baby crying for a bottle and another screaming for a bath,” Audrey would say over the phone. “When the hell you coming home?” The line would go quiet. “You’re deserting me, aren’t you?”
“No,” I would say, tapping the windowsill. “I’ve been working fourteen hours. Don’t you appreciate that?”
I sat on the balcony, some nights, once it got warm, and drank, and watched the stars.
*
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I disappear in the middle of your plans?”
“No, it’s not that.” I shrugged, running my fingers over the pasteboard cover of a Gideon Bible. I opened it at random: “Will you judge them?” I read. “Will you judge them, son of man? Then confront them with the detestable practices of their father and say hem.” Stevie took Margaret into one comer of the motel room. Beneath a picture of mountains, all rosy in the late afternoon, he tried to change her disposable diaper. She started crying when he snatched it and waved it like a flag. “Hey!” I shouted.
“Were you serious?” Audrey asked later, the kids asleep. She rested her chin on her knees, still steaming from the shower. “Because the trip is a good idea, Rod. The weather’s okay now, not dangerous. What the hell.”
The empty thermos floated in the basin. Water dripped from the faucet. “Thinking about it makes it weird,” I said. “Going after the sun is something a kid might do.”
She shifted on the bed. “So what? Weird is good. People up here, they’re afraid to be weird. You start to think the Nazis won the war.” She sipped the last of the day’s hot coffee. “Let’s move,” she said. “Let’s get back down South, maybe Louisiana, where people aren’t so bored with their lives.”
The next day we passed a couple of old missile silos, concrete slabs in the middle of nowhere surrounded by heavy-duty fences. We peered into the heavens now and then, beyond the snow and stufeble, but the flat fields stretched for miles. We could hardly tell in the mist where ground stopped and sky began.
“Audrey?”
“Hmm?” A magazine jostled on her lap.
“What happened with us?”
“You want an answer?” she asked. Far ahead, on the road, someone flailed his arms, as though doing side-straddle hops. “What the heck is that?” Stevie wondered. “A midget?”
“He’s just far away,” I said, slowing down. A car had its hood up a half mile or so beyond the waving figure. And then I saw the hair falling from her knitted cap. “She’s had a breakdown.” On the upper plains, you feel you’ve fallen off the edge of the world. Houses, grain silos, even people take on a two-dimensional tiltiness. The sight of a polar bear lumbering across desolate fields would be disorienting but not entirely unexpected, while the woman, snowsuited, waving her arms, shocked me to attention.
She ran toward our car. I snapped on the emergency lights and inched to the roadside. Shoulders slumped, she stopped several feet from us. “Wait here,” I said absurdly, zipping up my coat.
We talked on the edge of the flat snowy fields, and I knew from her tone of voice, even before I made out the words, that her companion had left the car. It’s the one thing you never do in such weather, not ever. You pack slow-burning candles, sleeping bags, high-energy grub in case of breakdown. But leaving the car is taboo. The cold makes you tired, sluggish; not even an arctic expedition would have better than even odds if the wind started up again.
The skin on her cheekbones was purple and raw, tears of frustration frozen beneath her eyes. Her old car could have been propped up with a pair of two-by-fours.
“Have you seen him?” she shouted.
He was dead. I found out next day. The two of them had a fight. He decided to cool off, fast, in his windbreaker, and got frozen against a fencepost. He looked alive in the picture—jeans snagged on barbed wire, one hand scratching at his scalp.
Over her shoulder a squad car U-tumed across a strip of neutral ground. Lights flashing, it pulled beside her disabled vehicle. My eyes stung in the wind as I pointed to the officer. She turned to see the hooded bear-like figure walk to her car, peer inside, then spot us.
She squeezed my arm. “Thanks.” We stared at each other. She had pale determined features, lips indrawn, eyes hard-set. Under different circumstances, I might have found her quite lovely.
Before I could offer a lift, she was halfway to the squad car, running bow-legged for balance.
*
“The police are out on a day like this,” I said, with authority, but Audrey and I exchanged glances.
Later we stopped again. In the distance we saw a mountain range. “We’ve gone far enough, haven’t we?” Stevie asked.
“Besides,” added Audrey, “I think I see the sun.”
Huddled around the car, we argued. In the far distance, through a geometry of high-powered telephone lines and scaffolding, there was something, though it provided little heat or light, just the barest trace of a disk, something noticeable only because it was different from what had been there before. It was like the way you can tell in a dark room, by heartbeat or breathing, whether you’re with people you care for or not.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Davis received a doctorate from the University of Denver and a master’s degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His third collection of stories, So Bravely Vegetative, won the Prize Americana for Fiction 2010. His other two collections are Rumors from the Lost World (1993) and Alone with the Owl (2000), both winners of the MVP award. He also co-edited ten editions of American Fiction, an anthology of short stories that in 1998 was chosen by Writer’s Digest as one of the top fifteen short fiction publications in the United States.
Davis was born in New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi, into a large Catholic family of Italian, French, and Irish ancestry. He has received, among other honors, two Fulbright awards (to Indonesia and Slovenia), a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, and a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in Creative Prose. His work appears in The New York Times Book Review, The Hudson Review, The Sun magazine, and many other print and online journals.
He now lives in Minnesota, near the Mississippi’s headwaters among Garrison Keillor’s Lutherans, where he’s a professor in the English Department and M.F.A. program at Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM). He is also on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. program at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
Davis also serves as senior editor at New
Rivers Press. The press was founded in 1968 by C. W. “Bill” Truesdale and has published more than 330 titles. In 2001, after Truesdale’s death, Davis was instrumental (along with Wayne Gudmundson, photographer and professor in Mass Communications) in reviving and relocating the press to MSUM, where its dual mission is to publish new and emerging writers and provide learning opportunities for students in partnership with MSUM. The press honors Truesdale’s progressive spirit by publishing work with a strong sense of place that speaks to our troubled times with satyagraha (the truthforce), empathy, and aesthetic courage.