Biting the Moon (16 page)

“The coconut custard was the best I've ever tasted.” Andi smiled at him.

When Mary said nothing, he gave her a searching look. She said, “What? Oh, sorry, oh, yes, it was really good.” Apple pie was apple pie to Mary, but she tried to think of something in particular to compliment him for. “The crust was—really short!” It was a cooking term Rosella used when she made crust. Mary thought it meant
flaky.
Mary never cooked much, even though Rosella tried to interest her in cooking.

“My secret is, you use lard instead of butter.” He winked and rolled the toothpick around.

Somehow that didn't sound very mouth-watering. But she nodded and thanked him for the secret. Andi had collected her change and was hefting her backpack up and over one shoulder. She had already left a big tip under her pie plate for Darlene.

“Trouble with butter is, it can separate. There's where you get your tough crust.” Sagely, he winked and nodded.

“I never knew that,” said Mary.

Andi jimmied her backpack farther up her back, preparatory to leaving.

Darlene was raking change out of the cash drawer. “You'd best take Herb's route. If there's one thing he knows besides cooking, it's the
Salmon.” She banged the drawer shut, started counting out quarters. “Good luck, girls.”

Andi lowered her pack and looked at him, momentarily speechless, as if he were someone utterly new. “Are you talking about the Salmon River?”

“Maybe not the
best
white water in the U.S. of A., but it's my personal favorite,” said Herb. “Someone likes white water wouldn't pass up the Salmon.” He picked up the rag Darlene had put down and started wiping off the counter. It was hard for him to keep still.

Andi was slipping onto one of the counter stools. “Maybe we will have another cup of coffee.” She glanced at Mary, who took a stool herself, and smiled at Darlene. “If you don't mind?”

“Oh, my, no.” Darlene was pleased to set out fresh cups and saucers.

Finished with his bit of counter wiping, Herb slung the rag over his shoulder. “It's a good thing I got this a-vo-ca-tion, for there ain't nothin' to do around here 'cept stare at the hills or go out to the reservation and play Bingo with the Injuns—'scuse me, I mean Native Americans.” Herb rolled his eyes.

“Do you know a lot of people in Salmon? I mean, if you've gone white-water rafting a lot, I guess you get to know the people.”

“Yeah, well, not exactly in Salmon but I sure come in contact with people in the business.” He frowned. “Why? You got kin there?”

“Yes, we—” said Andi.

“Cousins,” said Mary at the same time. “The Breads.” She was looking at the loaves on a shelf above the glasses. “Jim and Jerry Bread.” She felt her neck grow hot with the lie. Was she getting to be as bad as Andi?

He gave this some thought. “No, I don't remember no Breads. Whereabouts do they live?”

“Oh, I don't know. We've never visited before.”

Andi smiled. “They're taking us rafting.”

“You ever been?”

They shook their heads.

Darlene seemed content to lean against the pie shelves and have another cigarette. Thoughtfully, she blew the smoke away from them.
“Lord, Herb, as many times as you been to Salmon I'd'a thought you knew everybody.”

“Well, not ever'body,” Herb said with a hearty chuckle. “But the ones in the business, yeah, I know them.”

“You mean the boat-trip business?”

He nodded. “We call 'em
float trips.
Listen, you're in for one of the greatest times of your life. Since you never been before, probably your cousins, they won't take you into the wildest rapids. But you can work up to that gradual. I talked Darlene once into going and she liked it, right, Darlene?”

Darlene nodded. “Real excitement. Well, you need something after you hang around this place day in and day out.”

Mary smiled and wondered again just what Darlene and Herb's relationship was. “What's the best place to get equipment and stuff?”

“Oh, your cousins probably got their favorite.”

Thought Mary,
Lying's a tricky business.
“No, they aren't taking us. I don't think they're much into rafting.”

Darlene gave the cook a playful punch with her elbow in his side. “Herb, he's even got a kayak.”

“I sure do. Saved up for it for two years, but it's sure worth it. Why, you get in them rapids around Hell's Canyon or shoot the Salmon Falls—
eeee-oowwww!
” He shot a fist in the air.

“Hell's Canyon?”

“That's the Snake, not the Salmon,” said Herb.

“Maybe you met up with a friend of mine sometime,” said Andi. “For he's always making those trips, and he talks a lot about Hell's Canyon; he's—”

“Hard to say, so many people goes on them trips. It's gettin' to be one helluva tourist pastime—excuse my French. One thing is, you gotta be careful what outfit you get as guides. There's a lot of people in the business don't know what they're doing. A lot of them, they're hardly more'n right out of college, taking people out on what's probably some of the best white water in the country, and that means the Salmon's got all degrees of difficulty. They're not experienced enough to go where the water's the best—or the worst, depending how you
look at it. A lot of 'em, they don't know the bad holes or the backwash in 'em, ain't good at scoutin' the rapids. So I'm tellin' you be careful what outfit you get to take you down the Salmon. Most dependable people is Wine's outfit. That's Harry Wine, and if you can get
him, personal,
why he's the best of the best.”

Mary could sense Andi's terrible frustration: how could she ask about a man whose face she couldn't see and whose name she didn't know?

Andi chewed her lip through all of this. “This friend's got dark hair, blue eyes, and he's maybe about your height.”

It was a description of the driver of the pickup truck. Mary guessed he was the only one she could describe.

Herb grunted. “Well, I mighta seen him. Lots of fellows could answer to that description. That a truck pullin' in?”

They all turned to look as a big man hopped down out of the cab of an enormous truck and came toward the café.

“We servin' still, Darlene?”

“Well, why not?” She shrugged.

The door opened then and the driver came in, came over to the counter, and sat down. He seemed weary. The four of them looked at him as if he were the actor whose part was crucial to the playing out of their drama. Mary thought of
The Petrified Forest.

He pulled out a menu from between the aluminum prongs holding it and said (more to himself than to the cook or the waitress), “Well, what we got here?”

They seemed to be waiting for him to speak the rest of his lines.

“How 'bout just the ham on rye—too early for dinner—and a Bud. You got beer?”

“Sure,” said Darlene. “You said Bud?” When he nodded, she reached around to the soft-drinks case. “Coming right up.”

The cook looked at him with some puzzlement, as if he'd never seen a truck driver in here before, as if he were almost exotic, a foreigner, an alien. Rolling a fresh toothpick into his mouth, the cook asked the driver, “What's your cargo out there?” He nodded in the direction of the parking lot.

The driver hit the first syllable hard: “
Ce
-ment.” They still all looked at him. The cook started to say something, then changed his mind. Darlene opened her mouth too, as if to comment, but closed it.

There was just not all that much you could say about cement.

The cook slapped back through the swing door to the kitchen; Darlene set a bottle of Bud and a glass in front of the driver. Ignoring the glass, he picked up the bottle and took a long pull at it. Darlene walked almost aimlessly to the window and looked out at the truck, as if it were a new factor that had to be fitted into some equation of emptiness.

Mary went to stand beside her. The truck was dead white and reminded Mary of old bones picked clean. There was no identifying logo or company name or anything else to testify to a place of origin or a destination. It sat there huge and ghostly and added to Mary's sense of suspension, as if she were a drop of oil in a glass of water. She went to the door and stepped outside, expecting the land, the horizon, the highway to restore her sense of reality. But it didn't. She could look in any direction and, except for the cars moving silently along the interstate, there was no obstacle in her line of vision. In the distance the collection of dwellings shimmered like a mirage in the heat. The loneliness she felt seemed bred of the land and impersonal.

Darlene's face had disappeared from the window, and in a moment Andi came out carrying both of the backpacks. She wanted to drive, she said, and Mary let her. Before she got into the car, Mary opened the screen door and said good-bye to everyone, even the truck driver.

•   •   •

Twenty minutes later, on the interstate, the skeleton-white truck passed them on a downward slope, doing a little jig with its horn, a little dance with its lights.

Mary wondered where he was going with all that cement.

They sat, each of them propped up in a king-size bed, eating take-out pizza. The neon waterfall of the Riverside Motel had lured them in on the other side of Pocatello. Once settled in the room and on their way out to get the pizza, they had found the river and decided it looked prettier on the neon sign.

Nevertheless, Mary was glad they'd finally stopped at a motel. It wasn't because of Andi's driving—which had improved little over these hundreds of miles—but because every time she saw a police car or a state trooper, she was sure they'd be pulled over. Andi said she was paranoid; Mary said she had good reason to be: That
was
some kind of government agent they'd barb-wired to a tree. There
had
been a helicopter circling in the sky, the pilot of which could have seen them.

“You don't know that helicopter had a single thing to do with old Bub, so-called government agent.”

Mary took another bite of pizza. “No, and I don't know it
didn't
either.” She bit through several overlapping pepperoni slices and considered. “So-called? Don't you think he was a government agent?”

Andi shrugged. “I'd hate to think he's what the U.S. government pays to do a job.”

Mary shook her head. She watched the murderous antics of some television cartoon, surfed back and forth through the channels, and came to rest on a news program.

Andi watched the news, said, “Do you ever remember seeing me on there? I mean, as a missing person?”

Mary thought about it. She hated to say no. “I just can't remember. Anyway, I don't watch it much and neither does Rosella. So don't go by me.” It was the saddest thing. Hadn't anybody looked for Andi?

Andi separated another pizza slice from the half left in the box and sat back and ate it, turning the toes of her feet out, in, out, in like a metronome. “I guess they can't put all of us on TV, the missing people.”

“What about those milk cartons? You know, they put pictures on them of missing persons.”

Andi stopped eating and turned to look at her, curiously hopeful. “Do you think you saw me on one?”

Again, Mary wanted to lie and say yes but settled for, “I don't drink much milk.”

“Oh.” Andi nodded.

Mary felt herself dozing off, shook herself. She should be able to do more by way of helping Andi, for she didn't doubt for a moment that Andi must feel (just as she herself had felt when her parents died) a crushing sense of loss. Andi didn't even know if her parents were alive. Or whether she had sisters and brothers. Or what city or town she lived in, or what her house looked like. Nothing. Andi had no past. It had all been stolen away. Mary felt herself drifting off again. Then came awake wondering, for the first time: Had it happened? She hadn't even questioned, until this moment, the truth of Andi's tale. Not that she believed the story was made up. She was sure Andi was convinced that what she said happened had happened.

Then Mary remembered (with real relief) that there was a witness to confirm it: Patsy Orr. Patsy Orr couldn't confirm everything in Andi's story, but she certainly could testify that “Daddy” was real. He
had
come back to Mi Casa and gone crazy when he found she wasn't there. From these essential facts, what detours could Andi's mind have taken? Dr. Anders had wondered if “Daddy”
was
her real father. No, he couldn't be. The first thing a father would do would be to call the police or (as Andi had said) take her to a hospital. Besides, there was the dealer in Cripple Creek who had played with a man who looked like the driver of the pickup truck. But that was a weak link. Still, if “Daddy” existed, there was no reason to doubt the rest of the story. The story seemed at times simply fantastic and at other times grittily real.

Andi stirred, blinked herself awake. “I fell asleep. How long was I asleep?”

“Maybe five minutes. Don't sound so anxious about it.”

Andi resumed eating the pizza slice she was still holding in her hand.

“Listen,” said Mary. “We can get to Salmon tomorrow morning—”

“Uh-huh.”

“I hate to say this, but—”

Andi turned toward her, waiting.

“Well . . . what if he's not there? What if we can't find him? What do we do then?”

Andi had the remote now and was surfing again through the programs. “Keep looking.”

This was so exasperating! “Andi, if you're not sure what he looks like, and you don't know his name, how can you identify him?”

Andi settled on a hospital show. “There's the pickup driver, remember? Mel certainly did.”