Louisa bobbed happily as she spoke. “Does he have a dog he takes into cafés? This is a small black dog with an oversize head. Do you remember a small mean dog?”
And: “Could he now—or did he ever—have an Afro? What about neck jewelry, chains? Do you have any recollection of a jingling of chains?”
Plus: “What about that guy with the broken arm … oh, forget it: that’s
my
father!”
She was having a wonderful time, talking with her mouth full and her eyes going everywhere. Outside, they had begun to drag the corpse of the sign back into the parking lot. When he was up and half over the curb, we heard the crash which signaled his back breaking, but the trucks pulled away, drawing him, still and broken off the road.
Will hadn’t said much during the dinner, except for his whispered “Order the pork,” when we first sat down. Later he excused himself and went to the men’s. Louisa and I finished eating and were loitering in the lobby, checking out the glass case full of fossils, when we realized Will had been gone a long time. I went and pushed into the men’s room, fully expecting to see Will giving some sore loser a lesson in lavatory manners. The attendant, who could have been Leonard’s brother, sat in the shoe-shine chair and watched me as I tried every stall.
“Have you seen an old guy with white hair in here?” I asked him.
“Naumph.”
Louisa was not in the lobby when I returned.
People are
disappearing
, I thought;
the same old stuff
. Then, through the fossil case, I saw her run by. In the parking lot, I caught up with her at the cowboy’s elbow. Her hands were up as if to fend off a blow.
“What’s going on?”
“I thought I saw him out here.” We scanned the lot. “Where the hell is he?”
It was a good question.
I ran down a couple of rows and she disappeared down another line of cars. I could feel it coming:
this is panic
, I thought,
my heart is taking over again
.
“There!” she screamed when I found her way out by the highway. “He got in that camper for christssake. There!” She pointed at a brown and white camper on a brown pickup truck. The truck had turned into traffic and was headed west, toward Wells.
I wish there had been another person with us that night; it would have been helpful to have someone who could remember everything; someone who could have held Louisa down in the back seat and prevented her from screaming the blame and hitting my ears with her fists.
She wanted to know what was going on. She wanted to know who Will was with. She wanted to know what we were going to do. She wanted to know why I had done this. Each of these questions was posed in an angry scream and punctuated with a slug in my ear or my arm. And they were not playful slugs. This was not the punching game.
But what stirred me most wasn’t the assault of questions or the battery of fists, but the fact that she would consider me qualified to answer
anything
.
We dropped out of Wendover, Nevada, and out onto the flinty plain, no purple mountain majesties, no amber waves of grain, just a million miles of broken glass glinting moon-ward. The moon, a blasted shell, rode the southern horizon like a mushroom cloud.
Ahead, we could see the distant taillights, each set spelling out Will’s name.
The Chevrolet, full of new oil, ran up to seventy-five, seventy-eight, faster than we’d ever gone before on those old balloon tires, and it began to shiver a little. At eighty-five the shiver had grown to a permanent vibrato; it was as if we were in a steady forward skid. I couldn’t let up.
This will be over. This will be over soon.
This will have never happened.
We passed four cars on that road, none of them brown, none of them trucks, none of them bearing campers. I tried to reason with Louisa. I tried to find out if she was sure it was Will. Could he be back in Wendover wondering where we were, waiting for Louisa to come out of the ladies’ room? Did she see any vehicles pull off the highway?
We pulled off the exit and fell onto the flat streets of Wells, where we cruised hastily, up and down the main street. No brown truck. As a matter of record, we couldn’t see anything very well. The casinos were dark and so were the gas stations, and then we realized the magnitude of our fix: lost, in the dark, unable even to get gas. Which by this time we needed.
Back at the truckstop, we found them pumping gas from a tanker truck into a long line of waiting vehicles. The line snaked around the huge truck garages in a double loop. We had less than a quarter tank and so I filed up behind the last car in the black and white truckstop panorama.
As I set the gear back into first and turned the key off, Louisa screamed: “There!” She pointed to the vehicle slipping away from the head of the line, full of gas, across the spotlight: a brown pickup truck carrying a brown and white camper.
“Oh, shit!”
I backed softly into the grille of some big white car newly in line and we listened to his greeting as we pulled away.
“We’ve seen worse!” I hollered back to him.
Meanwhile, Louisa had traced the brown truck’s every move with her hand up near the windshield. Across the highway he had turned right, north, and we followed. After turning we slowed cautiously to check the side roads, but Louisa’s hand was still front and center, so I followed that.
“He’s in there,” she said. And then the first gentle thing she’d said for hours: “Why’s he in there?” At this point, it was a rhetorical question.
North
, I thought.
I remember north
.
Imperceptibly we slipped from the darkness of the town of Wells, Nevada, into the darkness of the unfruited plain. The taillights ahead of us made strong time against our own slow acceleration, through the shimmy which this time did not cease, even in the upper register.
It was only a few moments later, on my mental clock, that we closed to within about a half mile of the camper; Louisa’s hand was still up on the dash when I felt the parachute stutter and open, and our speed collapsed into a limp glide. We were out of gas.
“No!” Louisa yelled. “Not now! No.” And since the fact was irrefutable and yelling seemed as effective as anything else I might do, I too said
NO
and I added
NO NO NO
.
Now time became very real, tangible as a stone. One hour and ten minutes lined up. Finally, an Indian cruising slowly up the shoulder stopped behind us and gave us five gallons of gas from his spare tank, asking us as we paid him if we had seen his lost ponies. We hadn’t seen any ponies.
Though Louisa was all set to resume our chase with the speed and tenor it had previously known, I drove back onto the highway headed north with more reserve at sixty-five miles an hour. I did not know if I was resigned to things or not, because I did not know what the
things
were. Resigned. Look it over; it’s quite a word. It comes around when you realize that something you don’t understand and that is absolutely not in your favor can and will happen. It might not be your world, after all.
At this steady pace we drove well past midnight, coming finally to the darkened hamlet of Jackpot, Nevada, a site where the road widens to accommodate three casinos and a motel and seventy mobile homes, all dark as the other side of the moon, the power cut off.
Louisa confirmed my vision of our endeavors with a tired: “This sucks.” She, like myself, was sapped by our trip, and she slumped in the seat.
With no plan, and no words spoken, we dipped slowly through the parking area, our heads searching the ranks of cars left and right. We must have looked like burglars.
This time, I saw the camper. Parked blatantly in a row of cars imported from the Orient, it stood out like a lump, and when we drove over there it was the same brown and white we’d seen all night.
Louisa was out and against the back of the camper before I could finish parking, and I saw the door swing open carelessly as she plunged in. When I joined her, I found her sitting on an ice chest, her fists in her eyes.
“He’s not here,” she said. “He’s not in here.”
**************
Inside Cactus Pete’s, four lanterns glowed. They hung above the gaming tables across the wide room where people gathered as if to witness autopsies. All the slots were black, dead. The bent, little faces of the citizens around the tables looked spent, like doctors at dawn, sad and accomplished in their rolled-up sleeves.
We searched the room, creeping along the dark aisles of slot machines. Nothing. No one. I found three nickels.
Everyone was in the coffee shop, where we too deposited ourselves in the slick Naugahyde and ordered coffee.
“No coffee. It’s cold.”
“Cold coffee,” I told the woman. “Two cold coffees.”
Louisa’s face looked swollen and garish in the candlelight, and as the light seeped up from the west, I saw the old blue bruises of fatigue under her eyes. We didn’t talk. We listened to a couple in the booth behind us whisper in German. The man was being very logical about something, and I was so tired that the words became things to me, little metrical blocks by which I measured the coming light.
Jackpot, Nevada. I drank cold coffee with non-dairy whitener and thought about Will. We have driven out of our way at great speed in the great night while he is waiting for us back in Wendover, sitting on the curb, wondering why Louisa and I chose tonight to elope. I could see the vision perfectly. His arms around his knees, he sat like a lost cowboy on the walk in front of Rowena’s fossil display. He thought: They were nice kids. Confused, but nice kids. They left me behind, but that is what happens.
“Let’s go back,” I said to Louisa. In the near dark, she looked waxen, ninety, not wayward in the least.
She didn’t respond. Behind me the Germans, having reasoned their way around the earth by laying extremely long words end to end like sections of a bridge, finally stopped talking. They stood to leave and the woman spoke in flat English: “Okay, I’ll get the check.”
Outside, the darkness drained down, showing us the first edges of the two-story motel complex attached to the casino. The brick units rose like an underwater city poking through the surface of the Sea. The light grew to the consistency of dirty water through which we could see the forty doors and windows in a perfect perspective drawing.
Sometime after five, the power in the casino surged on, and in less than a minute the coffee shop was thick with keno runners and the room resounded with the noise of coinage ringing in the slot machines. We heard one short siren and bell that indicated some lucky soul, for risking a nickel, had won a dollar and fifty cents.
The graduating light of day brought up the stunning vista through our greasy window. The concrete steps rising to the second floor of the motel cut a distinct sawtooth in the gray light. The closed umbrellas around the swimming pool began to take color: blue stripes and red stripes. And in the paling vision was the form of a man in a deck chair, still as a silhouette, focusing in our eyes.
“Holy shit!” Louisa pushed herself out of the booth and ran from the room. I paid the check, and followed her out the side door.
He was sitting alone in the immense yard on a chaise longe, staring at the swimming pool. The stone-struck light was so clear it was deceptive and it took me a second to call, “Will!”
He didn’t respond. That’s the sentence:
he did not respond
. I involuntarily ducked, sure I had the wrong person. But we went to him, Louisa first, and Will turned up to us with a surprised look on his old face and the surprised look never really went away again.
“Will.” Louisa kneeled by him. “Where have you been?”
I watched his face, his mouth open as he considered the question. He didn’t know who she was.
“Here,” he said, waving his right hand toward the pool. There was a small red thermos cup on his first finger. It wasn’t our cup. He focused again on the turquoise water in the pool.
I turned away, and as I did, I saw, between the units of the two-story motel, a group of six or seven ponies, small as rabbits, moving way out there on the desert shelf.
Will sat on the chaise, holding the cup in his lap in both hands. I didn’t know whose cup it was, and I watched Louisa pry it from his grip. It was not our cup, Jackpot, Nevada 89825.
****************
On the long journey back to Wendover, Louisa tried to reach Will. She told him the whole story: Blue Mesa, the diving lesson, Salt Lake and George, Rowena and Wendover. She located the fossil in one of his pockets and showed it to him, forcing it into his hands. She touched him, her hands on his face.
Listening to her, I learned what we had been doing. It was an awesome recapitulation; at least someone had a hold on the past.
When we climbed the last hill in Nevada, headed east and back into Wendover, Will finally spoke: “I believe you,” he said. His voice was not any different. “I do remember … bridges. The sound of crossing a bridge, the guardrail. The guardrail by the window.” The speech ended. He looked at her flatly. “I just don’t remember.”
I worry about this story. That I haven’t remembered everything, but it’s all right: I didn’t know everything in the first place. I do know that it takes time for deeds to find their reluctant way into words, and that time allows a new acquaintance with old wounds.
We rerouted down through Wells and headed toward Utah, and I thought:
This isn’t it
.
We’re not supposed to be doing this. We’re not supposed to be going back
.
I remember sitting in that old familiar car in the parking lot of the State-Line Casino in Wendover and watching Louisa take Will out to the fallen cowboy sign. They walked away from the car and Louisa took Will’s hand like a parent with a child. Occasionally I could hear her pleading with him to remember. She pointed to the bluff above the town where we had stood. Once.
And I remember my final argument with Louisa. That woman. We circled the car while Will sat in the backseat, and we yelled at each other. All around us, Wendover was cleaning up.