Highway 61 (2 page)

I once went to the Lowertown Music Festival in St. Paul to catch Moore By Four by myself and to Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis to hear bluesmen Tinsley Ellis and Big Daddy Cade, and there have been plenty of Minnesota Twins baseball games, but those events took place in the afternoon and I only went alone because most of my friends were at work—such is the lot of the idle rich. But drive alone 350 miles from the Twin Cities to Thunder Bay just to hear some tunes?

“No,” I said.

He seemed surprised by my answer.

“I heard you were a music guy, like me,” he said. “I guess all this is because I love music. I love it even more than Nina does. That’s what attracted us to each other in the first place, you know, our mutual love of music.”

Truhler paused as if he expected me to comment. I refused. If I admitted that I also harbored a deep affection for music, then we’d have something to bond over, and I didn’t want to bond with him.

“Get to the point,” I said.

*   *   *

According to Jason Truhler, it had been one of those summer days that Minnesotans dream about when it’s January and the snow is blowing and the wind is howling—seventy-eight degrees with a light breeze wafting off of Lake Superior and not a cloud in the sky. Truhler entered Marina Park where the blues festival was being held from the pedestrian bridge spanning North Water Street, a blue canvas camping chair folded into a blue canvas bag slung over his shoulder.

He had checked in at the Prince Arthur Hotel the evening before. The hotel was a hundred years old and reeked of old-world charm—that was the word he used, reeked. He did not care about the hand-carved woodwork, the vaulted ceilings, or the early twentieth-century appointments. Nor did Truhler care that he had a spectacular view of the Sleeping Giant, one of Thunder Bay’s most popular tourist attractions, a natural rock peninsula jutting into Lake Superior that resembled a giant lying on his back when viewed from the city. He stayed there solely because of the convenient pedestrian bridge that abutted the hotel’s parking lot. Truhler was all about convenience.

He ignored the daredevils riding skateboards in the retro-California-style swimming pool bowl at the bottom of the bridge and the nearly 250 boats moored in slips at the marina to his right. His destination was the new, improved band shelter several hundred yards to his left where the bluesmen were holding forth. To reach it he crossed yet another bridge; this one arched above a small inlet that separated the marina from the rest of the park.

That’s where he met the girl.

Her hair was the color of red roses and wheat, her eyes were big and brown, and her skin was pale and unblemished. She was wearing a light blue sleeveless blouse over khaki shorts that had a flap of fabric in front to make them look like a skirt. Her legs were long and slender.

The girl was leaning against the railing at the center of the bridge and looking out toward Lake Superior. When Truhler reached her, she turned her head and smiled as if she had been expecting him. Her eyes twinkled.

“What kind of ducks are those, do you think?” she asked.

Truhler stopped and glanced over the railing. Beneath him was a large duck with a pale brown head and body, a dark brown back, a dark bill, and a subtle cinnamon neck ring. A squadron of ducklings surrounded it. While he watched, the large duck dove headfirst into the lake. The ducklings followed. They stayed under water for nearly ten seconds before popping up like bubbles. The girl giggled when they dove and giggled even more when they reemerged.

Truhler said he didn’t know from waterfowl.

The girl said, “I think they’re ring-necked diving ducks.”

“If you already knew, why did you ask,” Truhler said.

“Do you mind that I asked?”

No, Truhler didn’t mind. Nor did he mind when she asked other questions—where was he from, where was he staying, was he alone? The more he answered, the more the girl smiled, and the more she smiled, the more Truhler felt compelled to be polite—that’s what he said, he was being polite.

“Are you here for the blues festival?” she asked.

“I am.”

“So am I.”

Perhaps she would like some company, he said.

She said she would like that very much.

The girl had a folding canvas chair in a bag of her own. She retrieved it from the bridge deck, and together they followed the winding path until they reached the main entrance to the festival grounds. Truhler offered to treat the girl to a thirty-five-dollar ticket, but she already had one. They found a grassy knoll in the back with a clear view of the stage and set up. He offered to buy her a beverage. Beer, or perhaps a Jack Daniel’s Country Cocktail. She liked the idea of a Black Jack Cola.

“You are old enough to drink, aren’t you?” he asked.

She giggled at the question. “Of course I am, silly.”

“I thought that meant she was over twenty-one,” Truhler told me. “I didn’t realize until later that the drinking age in Ontario is nineteen.” I asked him if it mattered. He said it did. “What kind of guy do you think I am?” I didn’t say.

They sat through several acts—I was surprised to hear Minneapolis blues band Big Walter Smith and the Groove Merchants was among them—and downed several cocktails that Truhler said didn’t affect him at all. Toward late afternoon, the girl slid a blunt wrapped in cherry-vanilla paper from her purse and lit up. After several tokes she offered the blunt to Truhler. He took a long drag, hoping the people around him wouldn’t notice that the thin cigar had been hollowed out and filled with grass. They passed the blunt back and forth until they could no longer hold it without burning their fingertips. The girl sealed the remains inside a plastic 35 mm film canister and dropped it into her purse. Truhler laughed. He asked the girl where she got the canister. He hadn’t seen a roll of film in years.

The next thing Truhler remembered, he was naked and lying facedown on a bed in a motel room.

He woke up slowly, so slowly that at first he didn’t realize he was awake. He kept his eyes closed. There was a throbbing pain above his eyes, and he knew from experience that when he opened them, the pain would increase. He remembered the cocktails and he remembered the dope and then he remembered the girl and wondered if she was still there. Truhler swept his arms slowly across the mattress, pleased that his fingers did not find her—it would be so much easier if she was gone. He touched his own body and found that he was naked. It didn’t entirely surprise him. He was cold. He reached out for a sheet or bedspread to cover himself, but his hands came up empty. He opened his eyes. The dull pain in his forehead increased, as he knew it would, followed by a stabbing pain at the base of his skull. He closed his eyes, reached back, and rubbed his neck. His fingers found a bump that was sensitive to the touch. Where did that come from, he wondered.

Truhler rolled onto his back and opened his eyes again. There were cracks in the ceiling. A bare lightbulb in a chipped fixture glared at him. That wasn’t right, he told himself. He raised himself up on his elbows and glanced around the room. Truhler didn’t know where he was, but it sure as hell wasn’t the pristine and elegant Prince Arthur Hotel.

He thought about the girl. What was her name? Hell, did she even tell him her name? Truhler couldn’t remember. He called out. “Hey.” Maybe she was in the bathroom. “Hey.” There was no answer. He collapsed back on the bed.

Truhler had never suffered a blackout in his life, he told me. Not once. He said that sometimes his memory had become a little fuzzy, especially when he was a kid and hitting the booze like he would live forever. Yet waking up in a strange room without knowing how he got there—that was a new experience, and he wondered if the dope had something to do with it.

He called out again. “Hey.”

He sat up and looked around. It was definitely a motel room, and not a very expensive one. Regulations and pricing information were attached to the back of the door. There was a battered credenza with a TV and cable box mounted on top. A table tent next to the TV advertised X-rated pay-per-view movies with the promise that the titles of the films wouldn’t appear on the bill. The drapes of the window were tightly closed. A small wooden table stood in front of the window. There was a wooden chair set on either side of the table. He could see that his clothing was piled neatly on top of one of the chairs and the girl’s clothes were just as carefully stacked on the other. Truhler wondered about that for a moment. If he had screwed what’s-her-name, the girl, he couldn’t imagine being tidy about it.

He stepped off the bed. His foot touched something wet and sticky on the floor. His first thought, was that he had stepped into a spilled drink. He looked at the floor. It was a lake of blood. The girl floated below him in the lake. She was naked and curled into a fetal position with her hands clutching her throat. Her throat was deeply slashed; he could see a black hole beneath her fingers. Her lifeless eyes were open. They seemed to stare at him.

Truhler screamed and fell back onto the bed. He frantically wiped the blood off of his foot with the bedsheet and screamed some more. The instinct for self-preservation kicked in, and he covered his mouth with both of his hands to keep from screaming again, praying that no one had heard him; that no one would come knocking on the door demanding to know what was wrong.

Had he killed the girl?

He couldn’t remember.

Truhler began to tremble with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold and his own nakedness. They’d blame him, he knew they would. The cops would come and they would see the girl and they would see him and they would point their fingers and say, “You did it.”

Except he could not have killed her. He could not have done a thing like that.

He swept his body with both his eyes and his hands. There was no blood. Nor was there blood on the bed except where he had wiped his foot. Yet there seemed to be blood everywhere else. How could he have killed the girl like that without getting blood on himself, slashing her throat with, with what? He looked about for a knife without leaving the safety of his island bed and found none. He tried hard to avoid looking at the girl.

What had happened? His last memory was of sitting in his canvas chair at Marina Park. John Németh, maybe the best white blues singer in the business, was holding forth beneath a blue-and-yellow-striped canopy. He had been joking with the girl about her film canister. Truhler could remember all that. Then it was as if he had blinked his eyes and magically appeared in the motel room.

For a moment Truhler thought that maybe it was all just a bad dream, a hallucination brought on by the blunt. He hesitated, glanced over the edge of the bed, looked down at the girl. The nausea hit him like a sucker punch. Without warning, he doubled over and began to vomit. He tried to stop, only he couldn’t. He kept throwing up until there was nothing left in his stomach to throw up, and then he went through several minutes of dry heaves.

He felt the icy fingers of panic gripping him, squeezing him. He had to do something—but what? Truhler covered his head with his hands. If the pain went away, maybe he could think of what to do. It didn’t. He needed a cigarette. He needed a drink. He needed—he needed to get out of there. He had to run. That was as far as his thinking could take him. Get out of the room. Get away from the girl. The dead girl.

I asked him why he didn’t call the police, why he didn’t call for help.

“I was going to,” he said, “but…”

“But what?”

“I was afraid.”

Truhler slid off the far side of the bed and tiptoed as quickly as he could around the blood. He grabbed his clothes off of the chair and went to the bathroom. The bathroom was all white and clean and bright from the overhead light. He carefully examined his clothes and found that the blood had not splattered them. Truhler dressed quickly. He checked his pockets. He still had his wallet, his cell phone, his cigarettes, the card key to his room at the Prince Arthur, his money—he counted his money and found that it was all there.

He tried to tell himself it was a dream. It had to be. Then he asked, Why him? Why was this happening to him? What did he do to deserve this? It wasn’t fair.

Truhler stepped back into the room. He searched for his canvas chair. He couldn’t find it. He looked at the girl one more time. A sudden wave of anger crashed over him. Why was she doing this to him? He reached for the door handle and hesitated for fear of leaving fingerprints, then decided it couldn’t be helped.

“I just had to get out of there,” Truhler told me.

He stepped out onto a second-floor balcony, carefully closing the door behind him. Truhler noticed the room number for the first time. Thirty-four. It meant nothing to him. He stood outside the door and waited, he didn’t know for what. It was night. His cell told him it was two thirty in the morning. All he could hear was the low rumble of an air conditioner. That was why it was so cold in the room, the air conditioner. He shivered. It was warmer outside, but not by much. The parking lot below the balcony was quiet and still. A dim light seeped through the window of the motel office at the foot of the metal and concrete staircase. A much brighter pink light flashed the name
CHALET MOTEL
and
NO VACANCY
just above the front door. Cars moved along the well-lit street beyond the motel’s driveway, but they were few and far between.

Truhler walked the length of the balcony as quietly as possible and carefully descended the stairs. When he reached the office, he glanced quickly through the window and pulled his head away. He looked again. The office was empty. He wondered briefly if he had used his own name when he registered. He wondered if he had registered at all. The girl must have, he decided. If it had been his choice, he would have taken her to his hotel.

Without thinking any more about it, Truhler sprinted across the parking lot and began to run along the street, putting as much distance between him and the dead girl as possible. He did not know where he was. He did not know where he was going. Truhler ran for nearly a block before he realized he was making a fool of himself. People would think he’d done something wrong if they saw him running. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Stop running, he told himself.