The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(96)

He bathed in a creek that ran beneath the road. An old concrete bridge. The rebar showing through the rails. He stood naked and shivering on a gravelbar downstream and toweled himself off. The water was cold and clear in the pool below the bridge. Good smallmouth water. He slept that night again in the truck and woke in a milky light where the glass was sifted over with a thin skift of snow. He sat with his sockfeet in the sleepingbag and started the engine and turned on the wipers. Gray daylight and a distant circling of birds rising up out of the river basin a mile away. The thin cranking of their calls. A lone truck was coming up the highway. Droning on the grade. He leaned and opened the glovebox and took out a package of crackers and tore it open with his teeth and sat eating the crackers and waiting for the engine to warm.

He crossed the Platte River at Scottsbluff and parked the truck along the edge of a broad gravel flat and walked out and stood looking at the river. The low hills a deep violet in the twilight and the Platte like a frayed silver rope where it ran downcountry over the braided flats, threading the sandbars in the deep burgundy dusk. He sat in the gravel and carved with his pocketknife a small wooden boat from a piece of driftwood and sent it away downriver into the darkness.

He rolled across Montana in the low winter sun. Fields of turned earth. Tall grain elevators. Pheasants crossed the road with their heads bowed like wrongdoers. On the dead straights of the highway in the evening he could see the lights of trucks miles away. The dark of distant mountains. Nothing on the radio but static.

He slept in a motel just across the Idaho State line. A varnished wooden bed and wool blankets. It was cold in the room and he turned on the gas heater in the wall. He went into the bathroom and switched on the light. Green tile from the 1940s. A floral print in a dimestore frame hanging on the wall over the toilet.

When he woke it was 4:02 by the red clock on the night-table. He lay listening. The periodic lights from off the highway moving along the slats of the blinds and over the pine board walls. Then slowly drawing back again. He got up and pulled the blanket from the bed and wrapped it around his shoulders and walked out into the parkinglot in his socks. Immense spread of stars overhead in the cold. In a few minutes he was shivering and he realized he was going to need warmer clothes. He turned and went back in.



* * *





He spent the winter in an old farmhouse in Idaho that belonged to a friend of his father’s. A two story frame house with a woodstove in the kitchen and neither electricity nor water. He walked through the empty upstairs rooms. A scattering of yellowed newsprint, some broken glass. Lace curtains at the windows that had all but gone to vapor.

He had some blankets and he found more in a chest and he piled them all up in the kitchen. In a few days he would drive into town and buy an insulated winter coat and a pair of gumboots. He drove the truck up to the barn and loaded it with haybales and brought them down to the house and hauled them in to line the walls of the kitchen, windows and all. Before the winter was out he would drag more bales up the stairs and cover the floor of the bedroom above the kitchen with them.

There was a bed in one of the downstairs rooms and he pulled the mattress off and dragged it into the kitchen and he set an old Eagle oil lamp on the linoleum floor and filled it with kerosene from a can of it he’d found in the mudroom and he lit the lamp and set the glass chimney back and turned down the wick and sat.

In the mudroom there were jars of fruit and tomatoes and okra but he’d no idea how long they’d been there. Some iron harrowteeth in a wooden box. The bones of a mouse in the floor of a stainless steel milkcan. He found an axe in the woodshed but he’d no way to sharpen it and when he came back from town again he had a chainsaw and two boxes of paperback books. Victorian novels that he hadnt read and wouldnt but also a good collection of poetry and a Shakespeare and a Homer and a Bible. He got a fire going in the stove and carried a bucket down to the creek where it crossed under the road in a culvert below the house and he came back and made coffee and put some beans to soak. He fed more wood into the stove and pretty soon the kitchen was almost warm.

When he woke in the morning mice were watching him. Deermice with enormous liquid eyes. When he looked out the glass of the kitchen door it was snowing.

Sometimes at night he’d be wakened by something moving in the rooms overhead. A few times he went up the narrow wooden stairway wrapped in a blanket and swept the rooms with the beam of his flashlight but there was nothing there. Tracks in the dust of the floor. Possibly raccoons. In the morning he fitted pieces of cardboard into the sash where glass was missing. A few nights later he heard them again and he went up and stood in the darkened room listening. The window flooded with moonlight. The black winter tree limbs stenciled over the floor. Then he heard something moving in the room downstairs. He thought he heard a door close. He went down quickly but there was nothing there and he went back to his nest in the hay by the stove and he learned to live with whatever things there were in the house and they with him.

In late winter an unexpected thaw. He walked the slushfilled roads in his boots. His diet was largely beans and rice and dried fruit and his clothes were falling off of him. He stood on the old wooden bridge below the house and watched the waters where they ferried darkly past the shelves of ice. There were cutthroat trout in the river but he’d lost all heart to kill things. One day he saw a mink loping humpbacked along a stretch of gravel. He whistled at it and it stopped and looked back at him and then continued on.