26
There is a beam of light, shaped by an eye-sized hole in the battened window over the cot, a light with no purpose other than to push a burning coin of itself over the seams of the floorboards—irregular demarcations of an illogical timepiece. The beam is pink in the dawn and turns yellow-white on its sweep as the sun moves westward over the earth—as the earth spins eastward away from the sun—progressing from one corner of the room where a locked chest sits, to the opposite corner, the beam going ruddy, and then pink again, and then dying altogether at the lion’s foot of the stove, as if dispirited, as if defeated daily by the black iron thing.
Some days the beam never arrives at all and it’s as if the sun, and time with it, has stopped. Other days the beam flickers and withers midfloor, signaling the arrival of a storm front. And when it dies all at once, as if by a switch, she pins herself against the wall side of her cot and waits for the beam to come back and for the peeping eye that stopped it to move on again.
Currently the beam is midfloor. She could reach out and place her hand in it and feel it pool in her palm, a warm autumnal yellow, a weightless continuum to the outside world, free to come and go.
She doesn’t move, not in the least. Her heart down-beating from a race it believed it was in, a dream-race against nothing but her own shadow.
You should get up. You should get up. You should not lie here like this.
The coin of light rests in the center of her vision, severed in two by a crack in the timber. The longer she fails to get up the more it’s as if her real self has continued on in the dream, leaving behind this heavy, dark-minded thing, this shell. Why get up? Why move? Hopelessness falls like the shadow of a great bird; black thoughts rise like water. Then, suddenly, without deciding to do so, she sits. Is sitting up. A pair of hands in her lap. Hers. She can make the fingers move like so. My fingers. My legs. Mine.
27
They rode the storm eastward and by the time they reached the outskirts of Omaha it was dark and the ice had grown thick at the edges of the windshield where the wipers and heat fought it back, and when the Chevy’s tires strayed from the tracks in the whitened road, rails of slush crushed beneath them with a wet, explosive sound.
They came into more lanes and more traffic. A semi plowed by casting a filthy wave over the windshield, and through the wash of it they saw a pair of taillights ahead but in a strange place and at a strange tilt. A little farther on they saw the tire tracks cross suddenly before them, twining in helices before trailing away into the median, and then they saw the black SUV down there and the blue glow of the phone inside and the man’s lips moving calmly as if he were only continuing the conversation he’d been having before he spun off the highway.
“All that rig and there you sit in the median,” said Reed Lester.
“We could be next,” said the boy.
“I doubt that.”
“Four-wheel drive isn’t any good on ice and I haven’t got any weight in the back.”
“You want me to get on back there, boss?”
The boy looked over. “Would you mind?”
“Hell, no. Just pull over a second.”
“I thought you might just go on out your window.”
“I could. But if I fall, then where will you be?”
The boy watched the road. The red starbursts of taillights. The bleary lit signs of gas stations and motels drifting by.
“Maybe we ought to just pull over someplace and see what happens with this,” said his passenger.
“You said you were just going to the other side of town.”
“I am but it’s a big damn town and this traffic’s gonna get a whole lot worse, and I’m in no hurry. Are you?”
The boy stared out at the storm. “You know any place to go?”
They left the highway and drove along a business strip of car lots and liquor stores and many dark, derelict buildings. In the midst of it sat a small restaurant of boxcar shape with neon beer signs burning in its windows and a radiant sign in the shape of a palm tree declaring its name which was the Paradise Lounge.
“You like burgers?” Reed Lester asked.
“Sometimes.”
“This will be one of those times.”
Lester directed him to park in back and he did so, bringing the Chevy to rest in the cratered gravel lot among another dozen cars and trucks. They transferred the wet backpack from the truckbed to the cab and the boy locked the truck and followed Lester toward a red metallic door.
Inside was a noisome crowd which somehow gave the impression of having arrived out of the inclement night hours before, and all together. Faces turned to take stock of them and turned away again with no show of impression good or bad. The air smelled of seared beef and perfume and alcohol. Islandy music piping down from the ceiling and everywhere on the walls large, richly colored images of white sands and turquoise waters and brown-backed girls.
They found two stools at the bar and sat in the electric glow of tiki torches and ordered two beers from the bartender, a large yellow-haired man in a Hawaiian shirt who, in a practiced glance, saw two men weary from the road and the weather, and turned to draw their beers. Placing the pints before them he said, “You gents going to eat here or wait for a table?”
Lester looked to the boy and the boy shrugged and Lester said they’d eat there if the bartender didn’t mind.
“I don’t mind if you don’t mind.”
“Why would we mind?”
“I know I’m pretty, but most dudes come in here would rather be served by Barb or Patti.”
They rotated on their stools and took in the waitresses, one blonde, one redheaded, both in Hawaiian shirts and both older than either of them by ten years or more.
“We’ll keep an eye out for a table,” said Lester, and the man made an approving face and took a pencil from behind his ear. “So,” he said. “What do you want on those burgers?”
THEY DRANK THEIR BEERS and watched without comment the college wrestling match under way on a TV above the bar, two muscular near-naked men twining like pythons, until the channel switched unaccountably to a basketball game. In the backbar mirror the boy saw himself and Lester sitting side by side and it seemed an odd, implausible thing to see. When the bartender brought their burgers, fat and tottering on nests of fries, they both set into them gratefully, though the boy was not hungry.
The bartender indicated their glasses but only Reed Lester was ready for another.
“I don’t much follow college sports,” he said to the boy around a mouthful of beef. “You?”
“Not much.”
“What do they call them in Wisconsin, is it Buckeyes?”
“Badgers,” he said. The word flaring red on the white field of memory—her running shorts on the mountain, in the woods.
“Know what they call them here?”
He didn’t, and Reed Lester leaned and said cagily: “Cornhuskers. You believe that? Who can say that word without thinking cornholers?”
They finished the burgers and worked the fries. The bartender came to check on their glasses and rapped a knuckle on the bar. “Nothing personal against you gents, but there’s a booth opening up over there if you want it.”
They looked and Lester said, “What do you say?”
The boy glanced out the near window. The sleet was still coming down hard. Endless needles shooting through the red haze of the neon beer sign.
“I don’t mind sitting a while, but I won’t drink any more.”
“You sit and I’ll drink.”
They carried their glasses to the booth and the redhead, Patti, took their order and went away.
“How old you think she is?” said Lester.
“I don’t know. Thirty.”
“I think more like thirty-five. Still, she might be about as good as it’s gonna get in the old Paradise tonight.” As he said it the front door swung open and two young women blew in hunched and clutching each other and gathering control of their skating bootheels and laughing. “Holy fuck my hair,” one said, and they laughed again and cast their made-up eyes around the room.
Reed Lester raised an eyebrow at the boy.
The girls spied the two empty stools at the bar and hurried over and seated themselves with considerable tugging on short skirts and shifting of bottoms and tossing of hair.
“Bombed,” the boy said.
“They might not mind being bombed in a booth,” said Lester. He looked at the girls and his grin died away. “Shit.”
Two men had come across the floor to bookend the girls. Or not men but large boys in red and white football jerseys, baseball caps set backward on their skulls. Each bent toward the near girl, stiff-arming the bar in reverse images of capture. The name on the bigger boy’s jersey was Valentine. At a table across the room two other boys also sat watching, and after a minute the girls turned to look at the table, and then leaned and consulted into each other’s hair, and then they laughed and rose together from their stools and with more skirt tugging preceded the boys across the room. The smaller of the jerseyed boys snatched two chairs from an adjacent table without asking and all sat down and introductions began.
“Cornholers,” Reed Lester said.
The waitress returned to set their drinks before them and moved on again. The boy didn’t want to be there, but he wanted to be sober and so he drank his Coke while Lester drank his Jack and Coke.
“I used to watch such geniuses as these watching Mia at the bars,” said Lester.
The boy looked at him.
“My girlfriend—the Cuban? I’d see them huddling up and calling the play. Sure enough, some cornholing genius would come on over and start talking her up, like I wasn’t even there. She’d look at me like she didn’t know what the hell was going on, like what was she supposed to do, she’d just been sitting there. And she had just been sitting there, is the thing, boss. That’s all she ever did and still they came.” He swallowed half his drink and sat pondering the remains. “Well,” he said. “That’s all she did whenever I was around. But I wasn’t always around. And then, after a while, neither was she.”
“Where was she?”