The Taking of Libbie, SD (28 page)

“How the hell did I get here?” I said. “I didn’t fall from the sky.”

I circled again, moving more slowly this time, more carefully, examining the prairie grass as well as the ground, looking for bent stems, anything to indicate where a vehicle might have come from or in which direction it went, anything to follow. I failed.

Oh, this is not good
.

Would you stop saying that?

I reached down and pulled up a stem of grass. Next, I removed my watch from my wrist. I held it horizontally, pointing the hour hand directly at the sun. I took the blade of grass and placed it halfway between the hour hand and the numeral twelve. This gave me the north and south line. Due east was at ten fifteen.

“That way,” I said.

Why that way?

“It’s the direction home.”

The way my father taught it to me, you pick a point in the distance and walk directly to it, then pick another spot in the distance and walk to that. This way you’re always moving more or less in a straight line; the strength of your right leg—I was right-handed—wouldn’t push you into a circle. Yet I came to realize that I could not follow those instructions here. I could not walk with an eye to a far goal because there was no way to measure the distance I was closing anymore than I could with a mirage. There simply were no reference points. The land was without water, without trees, without rocks, without discernible hills; there was nothing to help you determine where you’ve been or where you are going. I began to feel like I was on a gigantic conveyor belt and the earth was rotating at walking speed beneath my feet so that I gained no ground.

I stopped and used my watch to align myself again.

Dammit.

What?

My watch was set to Daylight Saving Time, not the natural arch of the sun. I was hiking northeast.

Does it matter?

Of course it matters.

I reset my watch, turning the hands back an hour, and realigned myself. I decided that I could no longer look to the horizon, so I concentrated on what was nearer my feet—a tuft of grass fifteen paces in front of me, a shrub twenty paces in front of that. All the while, I scanned the horizon, searching for a fence line, a silo, any kind of man-made structure that might lead me out of the wilderness.

A jackrabbit appeared. He was about two feet in length and gray, with those distinctive long ears pointed straight up from his head. The ears twitched while he watched me, a contemptuous expression on his otherwise placid face. I stamped my foot and said, “Hasenpfeffer,” which is the name of a German stew made with marinated rabbit. Either he was an uneducated rabbit or he didn’t fear the implied threat. After a moment he hopped away, moving in no particular hurry.

I bet he knows where he’s going
.

I figure there are three modes in life. There’s action mode, during which the present and the immediate future are all that concern me. It’s the mode I slide into when I’m working, doing all those favors for people, setting up arsonists like Church. In action mode, there is little room for reflection; everything moves with extreme speed; vision narrows to only those people and things within reach. It’s an intense living in the moment. Time stands still. True, immediately afterward, time becomes a living thing again. It sweeps forward at its own deliberate pace. One can anticipate the future and all the responsibilities that it entails—to family, to friends, to oneself—and be weighed down by them. It is like coming down from an immense high. Still, I liked it.

Then there is intellectual mode, where most activities take place inside the head. This is where I spend most of my time—reading, listening to music, going to ball games, enjoying a few beverages with the boys, whipping up gourmet meals for my friends, attempting (badly) to emulate Tiger Woods on a golf course, studying the habits of the ducks that live on the pond in my backyard, working out, taking martial arts training, practicing with my guns, solving puzzles like where the Imposter came from and where he went. It’s simply the exploration of life, of keeping yourself open to its countless surprises. I liked this, too.

Then there is where I was now—plodding mode. I was simply moving forward, step by step, hour by hour, into an unknown future, trying to maintain a straight line and hoping for the best. There was no cheering, no cursing, no real thought. I was merely putting one foot in front of the other and trusting, hoping, that eventually I would get somewhere worth going. I think this is how most people go about their day-to-day lives. It is what Oliver Wendell Holmes meant when he wrote, “Alas for those that never sing but die with all their music in them.”

“Hell with it,” I said aloud. “I have never lived like that; I’ll be damned if I’m going to die like that.”

To prove it, I started singing, mostly tunes from the American Songbook, until it became too exhausting to walk and sing at the same time.

Hours passed. My legs became sore, especially my ankles. You’d think a guy who’s played hockey thirty weeks out of the year since he was five years old would have stronger ankles, but there you are. My feet were beginning to ache as well, and I was sure I was developing blisters; my sneakers were not designed for this kind of travel.

I halted and tried to calculate my progress. It was impossible. A backward glance showed me nothing. The prairie was like the ocean. There was no end to it, no edge lined with mountains or coastal waters or lush forests. Near seemed the same as far out there.

I reminded myself that a man in fairly decent shape walking briskly should cover as much as five miles an hour. Only that’s over a flat surface, and despite what you might have heard, the Great Plains are not flat; at least they aren’t as flat as a football field or a baseball diamond. There were plenty of low, rolling hills to contend with. Plus, the damn vegetation. Along with the wheatgrass—see, I remembered what it was called—there were other prairie grasses to grab my shoes, pull at my legs, and slow my pace. There was a brown-colored grass that was several inches higher than the wheatgrass that reminded me of knitting needles. Another grass grew in dense mounds eighteen to twenty-four inches high with slender blue-green stems that sometimes turned a radiant mahogany red. Then there were a few grasses that I actually recognized—sunflowers and golden rods.

Okay, you’re not walking briskly, but you are walking steadily, I told myself, even though every step caused my ribs to throb with pain. Call it four miles an hour.

C’mon
.

Three and a half, then. Make it—I studied my watch some more—twenty-six and a quarter miles since I started. That’s pretty damn good.

Except that you haven’t eaten anything in twenty-two hours, or drunk anything since the cups of coffee you had last night at the Perkins County Courthouse. Except that you’re slowing down—admit it, you’re slowing down a lot. Except that you have no idea how much farther you need to go
.

Shuddup.

Remember all that distilled water you poured into the ditch yesterday? What a waste
.

Shuddup.

Once I got it into my head, I couldn’t shake the thought away—the threat of dehydration. Fluids, in the form of sweat, were going out, yet nothing was coming in. What’s more, my sweat—which was supposed to cool my body—was being dried before it could fulfill its mission by the hard northwest wind that simply would not stop blowing. It was like standing in front of a huge fan for nine and a half hours. The symptoms became too pronounced to ignore—dizziness, headache, stomach pain, nausea, and an unpleasant taste in my mouth. True, these were also the symptoms of chloral hydrate working itself out of my system. Still … Add to it the unrelenting sun. If it wasn’t a hundred degrees, it was close to it. I had turned up the collar of my polo shirt, yet it did little to protect my neck. I could feel my skin burning there, as well as on my arms and on the right side of my face.

If dehydration doesn’t kill you, sunstroke will
.

Whine, whine, whine, whine, whine …

I was following my shadow now, the setting sun at my back, the shadow stretching so far in front of me that I could barely see where it ended. Then it disappeared, swallowed by a night that seemed to fall as swiftly as a hammer on an anvil. With it came a wave of cool air that engulfed me and settled around me as if I had just walked into a refrigerator. I had never felt air go from hot to cold so quickly.

I could go no farther, so I sat on the prairie. Hunger clawed at my stomach, yet that did not concern me nearly as much as the parchedness of my throat or the dryness of my tongue as I ran it across my chapped lips.

There were so many times when I should have died and I didn’t
.

“Hey,” I told myself. “Don’t talk like that. If you think you’re going to die, you’ll find a way to make it happen. Instead, do you know what you’re going to do? First thing in the morning, you’re going to walk a little ways until you find a road. Then you’re going to hike down that road until you find a farmhouse or hitch a ride with a local. Then you’re going to find a phone, make a few calls, go home, get cleaned up, and then you’re going to take Nina to Paris.”

I settled against the hard ground; the earth was warm against my back. I cupped my hands behind my head and stared up at the night sky. I watched as it slowly turned from a sorrowful blackness into an extravaganza of light. I recognized the North Star immediately, as well as the Big Dipper. That was it. I didn’t know the constellations; I wished I did. Orion, Andromeda, Hercules, Pegasus, Cassiopeia—I knew the names, but not where to find them. An astonishing woman named Renée, who was far too good for the likes of me—just ask her family—had attempted to introduce them to me. Alas, something always seemed to distract us from our stargazing. Oh, well.

Staring up at the starry, starry sky, I had a revelation.

“You gotta believe,” I said aloud. “You just gotta believe.”

It wasn’t a particularly profound thought, I know. Yet it worked for the ’69 Mets. It worked for my ’87 Twins. It worked for the ’07 New York Giants. It would sure as hell work for me.

My eyes closed reluctantly. I slowly fell deeper and deeper through the layers of sleep, sliding effortlessly from dozing to the half-awake confusion that followed to sleep that resembled a coma …

It was a slumber so deep, so profound, that I needed to crawl out of it in stages, reconstructing the events of yesterday, the boredom, the pain, the hunger and thirst, the never-ending walking across the never-ending prairie. The light increased very slightly, flitting across my closed eyelids, then sprang upon me like the opening of a window shade in a dark room.

I was curled into the fetal position and shivering. The cool nighttime temperatures had created dew that covered everything. Why it didn’t wake me I couldn’t say; my clothes were drenched. I uncoiled my body and slowly, painfully stood. It was day in the east, yet still night in the west, and the sky in between varied by degrees from purple to violet to the purest aquamarine. The colors of the dew-soaked grass and shrubs also impressed me—a mosaic of silver, green, blue, red, yellow, and gold. The wind continued to blow, and the air was full of scents I had not encountered before.

I stretched, and the effort reminded me that my ribs were probably broken, that my legs and feet were tender, that my stomach was empty. I stripped off my wet shirt and sucked the moisture out of the material. Afterward, I bent to grab tufts of grass, squeezing the dew off of them and licking the water off of my hands. It took about ten minutes to quench my thirst. When I was ready, I used the sun and my watch to realign myself and started walking east. My shoes and the cuffs of my jeans became even more soaked as I hiked through the wet grass, making travel more difficult than before. There wasn’t a single tree—not one. Nor could I discern any visible roads, fences, or power lines. Yet my spirits remained high.

You wake up, live through the day, go to sleep; then you do it all over again. There’s a kind of victory in that, I told myself.

I had an exquisite view of the eastern half of the sky, clear and perfect, stretching to the horizon with nothing, nothing at all, to interrupt it. The perpetual wind blowing from the west and north pushed my back, urging me along, even as it turned the landscape into a waving sea of grass and drove cumulus and cirrus clouds across the sky, the shadows of the clouds sliding along beneath them. There was a dragonfly and, later, a squadron of Monarch butterflies. I also saw plenty of animals that had eluded me the day before—badgers, gophers, prairie dogs, more jackrabbits.

“Don’t mind me,” I told them. “I’m just passing through.”

No one could possibly mistake it for Eden, yet the Great Plains had a kind of austere beauty, at least in the morning. I began to like it, although I did so against my better judgment. For the first time, I could appreciate why immigrants might travel across continents and oceans to get there. It was a country with both a glorious and appalling past. It was here that intrepid pioneers, lured by a Homestead Act that promised free land to anyone who would live on it and improve it, withstood loneliness, drought, blizzards, dust storms, and unyielding soil to help forge a nation. It was also here that men, who measured civilization by the color of their skin and advanced weaponry, pushed Native Americans off their ancestral homes and herded them onto reservations. It was a land of outlaws and legendary lawmen, of boomtowns and busts, of builders and destroyers and dreamers. It was also a land with a precarious present and dubious future.

I had no idea what would happen to the Great Plains.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t care.

All I wanted to do was get off them.

That was becoming increasingly unlikely.

It was against my own intellectual inclination to linger in the past—the dark land, a poet once called it. Yet, without a clear destination, I was becoming more pessimistic with every thirsty step. I found myself thinking less about what was in front of me and more about what was behind. Normally my memories were happy ones. Oh, the stories I could tell. Now they were filled with grieving—the death of my father and before that the death of my mother, who had become little more than an image to me, an impression of beauty and strength that could very well be more a manifestation of my imagination than actual memory. Regrets, too, things I had done that I wish I hadn’t, things I had said that I wish I could take back, which were actually fewer in number than those things that I had left undone and unsaid that now made me sad.