Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  ‘Sure,’ Tanner said. ‘Put him on.’

  ‘Tanner! Good to hear your voice, brother. Hope I didn’t wake you.’

  ‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘What’s shaking, Hat?’

  ‘Funny thing,’ I said. ‘I just found your number in a bus station.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. “For a good time, call Tanner.” What can I say? My fans are legion. What bus station? Where are you?’

  ‘Richmond fucking Virginia. Enjoying the balmy Southern weather. But I’m heading west, and I was wondering if you could still use a drywall man.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Tanner said.

  My spirits surged. Thank God, he was someone I’d never screwed over. I only wished I could say the same about Bobby Bats. I was already far enough from Manhattan to quit worrying about him tracking me down, but that didn’t make me feel any better about how I’d left him hanging. No way to shuck it – that was baggage I’d have to carry with me, however far I travelled.

  ‘How soon are you coming?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m thumbing it, so figure three days, maybe four?’

  ‘Okay, great,’ Tanner said. ‘Call me when you get to town and I’ll give you directions to the job site. You can crash in one of the empty condo spaces till we find you a place of your own.’

  ‘Awesome,’ I said. And it was. A job and a place to crash! What more could I hope for? ‘Thanks, Tanner, I owe you big time.’

  ‘No sweat,’ Tanner said, like he hadn’t just saved my bacon. ‘Anyway, after the solid you did me in Nepal, I’d say I’m the one who owes you. Try not to catch any rides with axe-murderers. I’ll see you when you get here.’

  I was glad Tanner had brought up the favour I’d done for him. It made me feel less guilty about sponging off his generosity. A few years back, when Tanner was still in the import business, I’d arranged for him to meet a Dartmouth classmate of mine who was related to the Nepalese Royal Family. On his next ‘buying’ trip to the Himalayas, Tanner stopped off in Kathmandu to look my classmate up, and while they were making small talk Tanner happened to mention that he was an avid fly fisherman. That was all my classmate needed to hear.

  Next thing Tanner knew, they were bumping along in a Land-Rover, heading up into the hills outside the city to try their luck in a private lake reserved for members of the Royal Family. On his very first cast, Tanner hooked the biggest trout of his life – a sixteen-pound German brown that put up a tremendous fight. And that was just the start of the fun. Tanner caught so many big fish that day, when he got back to the States he couldn’t stop raving about the ‘monster browns of Nepal’.

  I was grinning ear-to-ear when I returned to the coffee shop. And there were no cops in sight to spoil my mood. ‘There you are,’ Charlene said. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’

  ‘I had to make a phone call.’

  ‘Way you’re grinning, must have been a good call.’

  ‘An excellent call,’ I beamed. ‘I just landed a job in San Francisco.’

  ‘Well, good on you,’ Charlene smiled. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks. I guess you’d better cash me out. It’s time I got moving.’

  ‘Sorry for bending your ear all night. I don’t usually yammer on to strangers like that, but you’re a good listener. Good luck out on the road. Collect a lot of stories for your book.’

  ‘Good luck to you, too,’ I said. ‘I hope you get Kylie back real soon. I’ll keep a good thought.’

  The sun was up when I stepped out of the bus station, and in the clear light of day I suddenly realised I had no idea how to get back to I-95. Then I remembered I’d seen a local street map posted in the station. I hurried back inside to consult it, and that’s when I noticed that the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University wasn’t far away. VCU! Why hadn’t I thought of that sooner? Kate had attended VCU for her first three years of college, and we’d visited Richmond several times while we were married to see friends she’d made as an undergraduate. One of her friends, a painter named Brett Stuart, had taken a teaching position in the Arts Department after graduation. If I could find him, I was sure he’d float me a small loan to tide me over till I made it to the coast. His number was listed in the phone book. Big relief. I jotted it down and set off on the three-mile hike to the VCU campus through the cheek-stinging cold. At that early hour, the streets were nearly empty, and by the time I reached the Quad I’ll bet I passed more statues of Confederate war heroes than I did pedestrians. And every one of those snow-mantled statues was only slightly stiffer than me as I stood stamping my frozen feet outside the locked doors of the Arts building, reading a handwritten sign that said all classes had been cancelled till further notice. At least Brett’s got the day off, I thought. Might as well give him a call right now.

  Seeking a warm place with a pay phone, I followed the scent of frying bacon to a funky bar and grill on the edge of campus, where the ceiling instantly caught my eye. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world, I smiled, as I stood there gawking at the amazing collection of hats that were tacked to the acoustic tiles. Everything from coonskin caps to Laurel and Hardy bowlers, and quite a few felt fedoras just like the one on my head. Naturally, I took it as a good omen. Magical thinking, yet how could I resist? I’d been a hat fan ever since Aunt Mary, my spinster godmother, gave me a French beret for my tenth birthday. But when I dialled Brett’s number, all I got was a recorded message that his number was no longer in service. What now? I frowned. Then I remembered someone I could call to check on Brett’s whereabouts – his mentor, Morris Yarowsky.

  Morris was an accomplished abstract painter and long-time member of the faculty in VCU’s Art Department – and a fellow Dartmouth alum. If anyone could help me locate Brett, it would be Morris. But when I called him, Morris said Brett had resigned his teaching job the previous semester and moved to Ohio.

  Well, that’s that, I thought, and was on the verge of hanging up when I decided to throw a Hail Mary. ‘Listen, Morris, here’s the thing,’ I said, and explained my situation. Half an hour later, I was on the road again, hiking to the interstate with two crisp twenties in my wallet.

  Morris had shown up at the restaurant within ten minutes of my call. After offering his condolences for Kate’s death, he surprised me by handing over double what I’d asked to borrow. His generosity humbled me, but in my heart I knew it was really Kate I had to thank – and it saddened me to think I’d traded on her memory to raise a bit of pocket change. One more debt I could never repay her. I could only pray she’d understand.

  I’d had my fill of trudging through snow by the time I got back to the interstate, and I couldn’t wait to put Richmond behind me, but the town refused to cut me loose. For the next three hours, as I lost all feeling in my toes, car after car passed me by, and I began to suspect my Untouchables hat – as Charlene had called it – was jinxing me. By then I was desperate enough to believe a change of hat might change my luck, so I reluctantly backtracked into town to search for a clothing store. I found my way to a run-down neighbourhood that was obviously well outside the watershed of Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down economics’. Whole blocks of storefronts stood empty, their windows soaped-over and hung with ‘For Rent’ signs. It didn’t look promising.

  I pressed on anyway, and eventually spotted a little shop that sold discontinued stock from a local woollen mill. The outlet occupied a storefront that had once been a dry cleaner’s, and the faded letters on the facade above the doorway spelled out the slogan: Alterations While U Wait.

  Here we go, I grinned. A timely alteration was exactly what I needed – preferably, a knit watch cap like the one my dad wore in the old snapshots from his navy days. But when I stepped inside and asked the counter clerk if she had any watch caps in stock she scratched her cornrows in confusion and admitted she didn’t know what I meant. I described what I was looking for and finally her eyes lit up. ‘Oh, I get you,’ she said. ‘You want a toe-boggin.’

  Now it was my turn to scratch my head. ‘A
toe-boggin?’

  ‘Yeah, you know, a hat you wear when you go sledding.’

  I almost laughed when I finally figured out she was saying toboggan, but I kept my composure as she pointed me toward a fifty-gallon cardboard barrel full of mittens and scarves and knitted hats, all dyed in such hideous colours it was easy to see why they’d ended up in a remainder bin. I picked out the least garish cap I could find and, for the princely sum of one dollar, I walked out of the shop the proud new owner of a bile-yellow toe-boggin. Okay, proud is probably stretching it – the thing was uglier than poisoned-rat puke. That didn’t stop me from ditching my fedora in the nearest trash can, just as I’d done with my drug paraphernalia on the bus. Little by little, I was shedding my New York persona. And I was glad to see it go.

  It was mid-afternoon when I made it back to the ramp. I prayed I’d catch a ride before nightfall, otherwise I’d be forced to blow Morris’s money on another Greyhound ticket. I would hate to do it, but, now that I had a job waiting in San Francisco, wasting another night in Richmond was out of the question. I needed my new toboggan hat to work its magic fast. And damned if it didn’t come through for me just minutes later, when I heard the jingling crunch of snow-chained tyres easing to a stop behind me. Before I’d even had a chance to stick out my thumb. An old blue Suburban. Seemingly conjured out of thin air!

  ‘Where you headed, son?’ the driver asked. He was a big-bellied, middle-aged man with close-cropped hair and a jowly face bracketed by bushy mutton-chop sideburns.

  ‘San Francisco,’ I said, and the driver’s brows wedged up like frost heaves.

  ‘That’s quite a trip,’ he said.

  ‘It should be, if I can ever get moving. I’ve been stuck in Richmond since three-thirty this morning.’

  ‘Well, I can take you as far as Petersburg. It’s only sixty miles down the road, but it’ll get you out of Richmond. Up to you. Would you rather hop out and wait for a longer ride?’

  That wasn’t happening. No way in hell. He could have been one of Tanner’s axe murderers, with a goddamn bloody axe sitting right there on the seat beside him, and I would still have taken my chances. ‘No, Petersburg sounds good to me,’ I said. To someone named Pete, how could it not?

  ‘Name’s Randall,’ the driver said. ‘What’s yours? Might’s well not be strangers.’

  ‘Pete,’ I said.

  ‘Pete, huh? Well, then, maybe Petersburg will bring you luck,’ he smiled.

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ I said. ‘Is Petersburg where you live, Randall?’

  ‘Yessir, all my life. I teach wood shop at the high school, but they cancelled classes today, so I came up to Richmond to visit my sister. Poor gal just had a hip replaced. I was on my way home from the hospital when I spotted you.’

  ‘Thank God you did,’ I said. ‘I was starting to think I’d get frostbite before anyone stopped.’

  ‘I do quite a bit of travelling myself,’ Randall said. ‘In the summertime, mind you, when there’s no school to tie me down. Never been to the West Coast, but I’ve been all over the South, doing Civil War reenactments. Been my hobby nearly fifteen years now, and it never gets old.’

  It was hard to picture a man of Randall’s girth surviving on field rations of hardtack and hominy, much less charging across a battlefield, but it turned out Randall never had to charge very far because he was a specialist. As most reenactors are, he informed me. Randall’s specialty was getting gut-shot and dying on the field of glory – preferably as early in the skirmish as possible. Whereupon he’d do his part for the Rebel cause in a supine position for the remainder of the battle.

  As we rode south, Randall entertained me with accounts of his many deaths. At Manassas (‘First and Second’). At Shiloh. At Chickamauga. At Vicksburg. The man was a veteran campaigner. Some of the battlegrounds he mentioned I’d never even heard of, but Randall knew the terrain of every one by heart, even those yet to be graced by his bloodied corpse. Like a mountain climber who sets his sights on summiting the highest peaks on every continent, Randall was a man driven by a vision – a vision as ambitious as it was macabre. He dreamed of dying gut-shot on every sacred battlefield in the Confederate States. Odd as his quest seemed to me, I had to admire his persistence. Maybe that’s why the road sent him my way. To drop a hint. I’d certainly need plenty of persistence to make this fresh start work.

  ‘My sister thinks I’m crazy,’ he grinned, as we turned off the highway at Petersburg. ‘She says I’ll never pull it off. But you know what I tell her?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If I can’t die at all of them, I can always die trying.’

  ‘I’ll be rooting for you, Randall,’ I laughed. ‘I wish you many deaths before you die.’

  Smiling, I took up my post beneath a streetlight on the southbound on-ramp – where I stood clouded in my own frozen breath for the next two hours, feeling as abandoned as a dumpster baby, while the temperature sank into the teens and not a single car passed my way. Lucky namesake town, my ass! Persistence was getting me nowhere, except closer to hypothermia. I was shivering so hard my muscles were cramping, and I knew I had to make a move. Ten minutes more and I’d have dropped from the cold like poor Neal Cassady.

  The only shelter in sight was a quarter-mile up the road, where a blue neon ‘Vacancy’ sign was pulsing outside a small motel court. I started shuffling toward it, and as my numb feet crunched through the crusty snow I gave thanks for Morris’s generosity.

  The money he’d lent me was about to save my life.

  CHAPTER 3

  Room 29 at the Pine Tree Inn was no luxury suite, but it had its own electric heater and that was luxury enough for me. ‘What a day!’ I groaned, as I cranked the thermostat and slumped into a chair in front of the blower. Who knew it would take sixteen hours to make sixty miles of headway? At this rate, I’d be lucky to reach San Francisco by Paddy’s Day. I doubted it would come to that, but who could say?

  If today’s ordeal had taught me anything, it was that the road is full of surprises. I mean, what were the odds I’d spend my first hours in Richmond lending a sympathetic ear to a fellow junkie? Yet there Charlene was, waiting to kick off my trip with a sad story so much like mine it was hard not to think I’d been fated to hear it. And what about Tanner? Who’d have predicted I’d find his business card just when I needed it most? Or that Morris, a man I barely knew and hadn’t seen in years, would reappear in my life and humble me with his generosity? Maybe fatigue was messing with my head, but it all seemed somehow preordained. As though the road were saying, if you want to change your life, here’s how you start – with empathy, with loyalty, with charity.

  Real or imagined, it was good advice, and I knew if I didn’t take it to heart now there was little hope I’d get another chance. I couldn’t let that happen. I was sick of treating others shabbily and blaming booze and drugs for my bad behaviour. More than anything else, what I wanted from my fresh start was to wake up every morning without regretting what I’d done the day before. Was that too much to ask? I hoped to God it wasn’t, because otherwise I’d be just as miserable in San Francisco as I’d been in New York – and that was a future too depressing to contemplate.

  As soon as I thawed out, the heat in the room began to make me drowsy, and I could barely keep my eyes open as I polished off the last of my bread and jelly. But, tired as I was, I couldn’t turn in for the night just yet. Not until I’d scrubbed my clothes in the bathtub and hung them to dry by the heater. With all my spare clothes now on their way to becoming abandoned property in a Penn Station pay locker, the clothes on my back were all I had, and I didn’t want to hit the road in the morning smelling like a goat. What kind of fresh start would that be?

  Now, this is more like it, I thought, grinning to myself as I slipped between the sheets butt naked – blissfully unaware that I’d have one more surprise to deal with before the night was through.

  When I woke to use the bathroom several hours later, I immediately sensed that something wasn’t
right. Except for a glimmer of moonlight peeking through a gap in the curtains, the room was as dark as a root cellar. What had happened to the lights I had left on? And why was the room so fucking cold?

  I was already shivering beneath the covers, but as soon as the words power outage registered in my groggy brain I felt a fresh chill hit me. Jumping out of bed, I pulled back the curtains to confirm my fears. Sure enough, the motel’s sign was dark – and so was every streetlight in the neighbourhood. This can’t be happening! I cursed. I felt like that jinxed character in the Li’l Abner comics, Joe Btfsplk, the poor bastard with a perpetual cloud of misfortune hanging over his head. I had no idea when the power might be restored. All I knew was that I was freezing my bare ass off in a room with a now-useless electric heater. But what could I do about it, except hunker down and try to survive? So I threw on my overcoat, tugged my knit cap down over my face and burrowed in beneath the covers, hoping I’d stop shivering long enough to catch a few more hours of sleep.

  Despite the cold, I eventually did nod off and I didn’t open my eyes again until after dawn, when I was abruptly awakened by a flat Midwestern voice reciting the latest prices for soybean futures. What the fuck? Then I remembered I’d left the TV on when I’d gone to bed, and I realised the power must be back. Hallelujah! I’d finally caught a break! But my good mood quickly soured when I hopped out of bed to check my laundry and discovered that all my clothes were still sopping wet. There went my plans for an early getaway. What now?

  Collect lots of stories for your book. Weren’t those Charlene’s parting words? Well, my first day on the run had certainly provided its quota, and while I waited for my clothes to dry I filled several sheets of motel stationery with notes for my road journal. It had been ages since I’d felt the excitement of throwing myself into a new project and in the end I was glad the power outage had delayed my departure. I’d been dreaming of making my mark as a writer ever since I’d got my first taste of literary acclaim in Miss Heit’s third-grade class, for a rhyming story I’d written that mimicked the Dr Seuss classic And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Unbeknownst to me, Miss Heit had entered my story in a state-wide creative writing contest, and it placed in the top five in the grade-school category. Several months later, to my surprise, the principal called me to the stage during the year-end school assembly and presented me with a gilt-edged certificate of merit from the New York State Teachers’ Association. From then on, whenever anyone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer never varied. (Oddly enough, ten years later I wound up mimicking Dr Seuss again, by enrolling at Dartmouth College – Theodore Geisel’s alma mater. Wheels within wheels . . .)