The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(98)

He’d bought some school tablets and a small packet of ballpoint pens at the drugstore and at night he’d sit propped against the haybales and write letters to her by the light of the oil lamp. How to begin. Dearest Alicia. Once he wrote: My beloved wife. Then he balled the paper and got up and put it in the stove.

There were owls in the barn gable even before the snow was gone. He stood in the bay and played the light up into the loft. Two heartshaped faces peered down. Pale as applehalves in the light. They blinked and shifted their heads from side to side. Some wisps of straw fell.

He woke a few nights later and lay listening to the silence. He got up and lit the lamp and carried it into the front room and held it overhead. A bat was lofting itself silently through the rooms. He went to the front door and opened it and left it open to the cold and went back to bed and in the morning the bat was gone.

He went through the drawers of the press in the front room. A tiny teacup. A woman’s glove. I dont know what to tell you, he wrote. Much has changed and yet everything is the same. I am the same. I always will be. I’m writing because there are things that I think you would like to know. I am writing because there are things I dont want to forget. Everything is gone from my life except you. I dont even know what that means. There are times when I cant stop crying. I’m sorry. I’ll try again tomorrow. All my love. Your brother, Bobby.

He had gotten out of the habit of talking to her when he was in New Orleans because he’d find himself talking in restaurants or on the streets. Now he was talking to her again. Asking her opinion. Sometimes at night when he would try to tell her about his day he had the feeling that she already knew.

Then slowly it began to fade. He knew what the truth was. The truth was that he was losing her.

He remembered her in the winter twilight at the lake standing in the cold. Holding her elbows. Looking at him. Until finally she turned and walked back to the cabin.

He sat in his blankets with the lamp at his elbow. Sheddan said once that having read a few dozen books in common was more binding than blood. The books I gave you you devoured in hours. Remembering them almost to the word.

The weather is warmer. There is an owl behind the house. I can hear him at night. I dont know what to tell you. I’m going to stop now. All my love.

He got up and pulled on his boots and his coat and walked the road. A cold halflidded moon moving through the trees. Faint in the distance the boards of the bridge trundling under the wheels of a car. The lights moving along the ridge and then gone and the blowing cold and the snow blowing off the fields and then settling again. When she came to the door of her room in Chicago he knew that she hadnt been out in weeks. In later years that would be the day he would remember. When all her concerns seemed to be for him. He took her to dinner at the German restaurant in Old Town and her hand on his arm at the table drained everything away and it was only later that he understood that this was the day when she was telling him what he could not understand. That she had begun to say goodbye to him.

He woke and lit the lamp and leaned back in the haybales with the blankets wrapped about him. In the lamplight the water standing in the pail in the floor shirred up in thin rings and then went still again. Something on the road. Something deep in the earth. His face was wet and he realized he’d been crying in his sleep.

He swept the snow off of the truck with a broom and got the battery loose with a pair of pliers and hauled it into town in the little wagon and hauled it back. Seven hours on the road. Two days later he was gone.

He spent the night in an old railroad hotel in a small town in southern Idaho and he lay awake listening to the long shunt and clatter of the railcars and the clang and echo of them like news of ancient war. He stood at the window. It had begun to snow.

He drove south to Logan Utah and took Highway 80 across Wyoming. Green River. Black Springs. Cheyenne. He slept in the truck and drove on. Crossing the central plains. The big tandem trucks plying the highway in the blowing snow. Ogallala. North Platte. In the red dusk flights of cranes crossing the highway. Circling and descending onto the flats where they landed walking and folded their wings and stepped and stood.

He took the secondary roads north. A few cars passed and then none. A squat ricepaper moon rode the lightwires. On the road out of Norfolk he came upon a pair of lights shining down the roadside ditch. He slowed the truck. The lights were mounted one above the other and it took him a minute to figure out what they were.

He pulled over and parked. It was a car in the ditch on its side with the lights on and the engine running. White smoke drifted across the road. He switched off the truck engine and took his flashlight from the glovebox and got out and shut the door and crossed the road. He shone the light down into the windows but he couldnt see anything. He stood on the driveshaft and pulled himself up and looked down into the car. On the door below a man was curled up blinking in the light.

Western tapped at the glass. Are you all right? The man shifted slightly but he didnt answer. Western could see the man’s breath. Strands of dead grass and mud and gravel pressed against the underside of the windowglass. Western climbed onto the rear quarter panel and got hold of the door handle and tried to lift the door but it was locked. He aimed the light down into the car again. Turn off the engine, he called. The man put his elbows over his face. Western switched off the flashlight and sat there. A dog barked in the distance. The lights of a farmhouse beyond through the dark of the woods. He climbed down and walked around to the rear of the car and pulled off one boot and leaned against the bumper and held the leather sole of the boot flat against the chugging exhaust pipe. The motor stumbled and died and he pulled his boot back on and climbed out of the ditch and crossed the road and climbed into the truck. He thought that the man crouching in the car was not the driver and he started the engine and pulled out down the road thinking he might see the driver come up in the lights hiking along the road but he didnt.