I wonder what you see in your mind’s eye when I ask you to remember the house in Nevada where Jeremy Heldt used to live. Wood? Brick? Vinyl siding? High windows? A fireplace? Try to remember whether Steve Heldt had a garage to park his car in: Did he? How many cars did it have room for? What kind of cars? Was there a door leading into the house from the garage, as at the Sample house in Crescent, or did the outbuilding stand free, with a little grassy alley between its outer wall and the house’s west-facing side? Did the street out front have a sidewalk, or was it one of those more recent developments, a neighborhood planned to keep the riff-raff out: no public thoroughfare, streetlights kept on all night, awkward traffic islands at the four-way stops? If you’re able to imagine Steve Heldt grown older now, answering the door, do you hear an accent—something homey, something quasi-Southern?
No. There is no identifiable accent here unless you’ve cultivated a very careful ear. This is an easy place to live, milder in feel than Nebraska to the west, negligibly warmer in the winter than Minnesota to the north, of less imagined consequence to the world than Illinois to the east or Missouri to the south. The reason you have a hard time seeing the house is that it was built not to stand out. It went up in 1951, and is brick with small four-square windows made of Pella glass, and there is no garage, because most people back then had only one car, and they parked it in the driveway.
“What can I do for you?” said Steve to the young man now standing on his doorstep, a boy who reminded him of his son in scruffier days, in times gone by; maybe all young men remind aging fathers of how their sons once were, years ago.
“I was looking for Jeremy,” James said, trying to sound natural.
Steve cocked his head and considered his visitor: the shaggy hair, the flash of silver in the left earlobe underneath the curling locks; the too-smart gray summer blazer, linen or seersucker, stuff nobody wears around here. “Probably have to wait until Thanksgiving,” he offered after a moment, smiling. “Who should I say stopped by?”
“Is he all right?” James asked, bluntly, the way people talk where he grew up, and that was when the temperature of the air on the front porch seemed to drop, the two considering each other, spanning a gulf neither could accurately describe.
I wish I could have been there to see it: moments like this were like oxygen for me once. But I had to move on. There’s no going back. I lost all my equipment in the move.
Steve Heldt’s face froze. “As far as I know,” he says, and then: “What’s this about? I hope there’s nothing wrong,” gesturing to the unknown visitor with his free hand and holding the front door open with the other, come in, come in, tell me nothing’s wrong tolling steadily in the privacy of his heart, the younger man fishing now inside the inner pocket of his coat, retrieving from it a thick eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet folded lengthwise, printer stock his mother has on hand for when she plays around with her digital camera in Collins: this printed page bearing the image of a young man in a chair, eyes avoiding the lens, colors badly corrected and gaudy but visibly Jeremy Heldt, young Jeremy as he’d appeared to his friends and family and coworkers over a decade ago.
*
James took the Lincoln Highway west from Nevada instead of heading directly back to his parents’ place. He wanted to clear his head, and he felt starved for time to himself. Back at St. John’s, he’d been sharing a dorm room with a computer science major; it was a zero-pressure environment. The discord of finding himself alone in a house with his whole family inside it had been a shock he’d struggled to conceal. Up near the mountains in New Mexico, he sometimes yearned either for their company or for the promise of it, but Collins, however novel, made for close quarters.
Entering Ames, he didn’t feel much of a difference—there was a big city park with a wide stream running through it on one side of the highway, and a few auto shops dotting the other—but then the buildings began to form clusters. It wasn’t Albuquerque, the place he and his friends liked to spend weekends they later wouldn’t remember, but it had an excitement to it all the same. Ames! Who knew anything about Ames, Iowa? But here it was: florists and fast food and four-way intersections where it’d actually make a difference if you ran the red light.
The little downtown was trying to shed some of its quaintness; there was a big abstract steel sculpture on one corner, but across the street stood a statue of an anthropomorphic bird, its cartoon-gloved index finger pointing at the sky: We’re Number One. The surface of the statue was composed of rectangular shards of reflective glass; its glint was blinding. Down in Las Cruces, New Mexico State had a mascot, a mustachioed cowboy pointing a revolver at an unseen aggressor. You saw him everywhere. His name was Pistol Pete, and his aspect was unambiguous. The mirror-shard bird was harder to read.
But the window of the health food store made him homesick for Santa Fe specifically. He could see the blue corn chips and the expensive bottled water from the street. He was a senior now; maybe he’d take a six-pack back to the farmhouse. Have a beer with Dad. Why not?
Inside Wheatsfield Grocery he felt less uprooted than he’d felt since landing in Des Moines. This could have been anywhere: the same Odwalla juices, the same Kettle chips. A hot bar with sautéed kale and grilled pineapple chicken. The guy with the beard at the checkout had a huge scar running from his elbow to his wrist instead of the tattoos he might have had in Santa Fe, but he was still a guy with a beard.