Winter Loon(82)

“I know.”

She walked me out in her slippers and watched as I threw my bag onto the seat next to the tomato box. I smoothed her mussed-up hair and took her face in my hands. She tucked her elbows in, entwined her fingers, and thumped my chest once, like she was jump-starting my stopped heart. Tears were streaming down her face into my hands. I wiped them away with my thumb.

“Don’t go,” she said, crying fully now.

I pulled her into me, hoping her tears would soak my shirt and that it would never dry.

“I have to. But I’m coming back, Jolene. I am.” I could hear my own desperation as I tried to convince myself as much as her that I wasn’t leaving for good. “It’s not forever.”

“I’m scared.”

Somehow kissing her, embracing her, wasn’t enough. I dropped to my knees and held her hands in mine.

She bent to me, sheltering my body with hers. “Maybe it’s silly,” she said, dropping my hands to reach into the pocket of her thick sweater. “But keep this with you. Keep me with you.” She looped a leather string over my head and tucked a pouch into the collar of my shirt. She fingered a section of hair into her hand, showing me the blunt end, freshly shorn, then drew a matching pouch from her pocket, the drawstrings open.

From the tomato box, I pulled out Ruby’s knife. With my left hand, I grabbed a tuft of my own hair and with my right, cut it for Jolene, dropped it into the pouch she held open. She handed it to me and bowed her head.

“I will see you again.” She clutched the pouch around her neck with one hand and pressed her hand against my chest and the pouch she’d placed there with the other, sealing me to her.



I GASSED UP, BOUGHT A road map, beef jerky, red licorice, and a big bottle of Mountain Dew, and headed west. Mona left a crumbling old cooler full of meat pies and sandwiches in the back seat, enough to last me a week, though if all went as planned it would take me maybe two days to get where I was going.

With each mile I traveled, I felt the past slipping away from me and catching up at the same time, a leapfrogging memory game stuck in reverse. The radio crackled in and out, until finally I gave up and switched it off. With only my thoughts for company, I rewound and rewound, skipping over what made me happy, dwelling instead on the low points, turning snapshots into entire scenes, real or imagined, always settling down on one question. Would I find him? And in that question was buried another. What might have been? I crossed into North Dakota, leaving Minnesota and Jolene in my rearview. The landscape flattened even more, and the sky opened up with miles and miles of nothing, not even a fence post, in between the horizons. The road disappeared into clouds piping up in the distance. I pressed the gas until the car shuddered. I imagined myself getting smaller with distance, disappearing into nothing. I wallowed in the emptiness of the vast prairie, gray and grim. Long-haul truckers whipped past, stirring up a thin layer of dust and dry snow. I felt my mother in the car with me and thought it strange that I was driving, not her. I put my hand on the tomato box from time to time, whether to keep the lid on or to draw some truth out, I don’t know.

Somewhere after Bismarck, after crossing the big Missouri, a ground blizzard picked up, blowing early winter snow across the highway until the stripes whited out. I slowed to a crawl, not seeing a single car coming the other direction for long stretches of time. I considered pulling off but was afraid I’d get sideswiped or rear-ended by another lone traveler thinking no one else was on the road. Out of the whiteness behind me, high headlights flashed and an armored whirl of green pulled up next to me, then in front of me—one army truck, then another. A hand out, a wave to follow, then both trucks pulled in front of me. More headlights came up behind and I was in the cradle of a convoy, safer than I was before. When the wind died down, somewhere outside Medora, the full convoy went around me, another arm, a final wave. My eyes glazed over in the twilight, tired from fighting the disappearing highway. I didn’t see the mule deer until she stepped out. I hit the brakes and skidded into a shallow ditch. She stood there, her head turned to me, neck and ears craned. We watched each other, that deer and me. Troy had shot one weeks before. It hung in their garage, black nose almost to the floor, its accusing eyes fixed. But this deer was alive and she seemed to have no opinion of me at all. She seemed not to know me. And I had not killed her. I had not killed her. She turned her head and trotted off into a break of trees. I drove as long as I could, holding my thoughts like a forked twig over that deer, trying to divine some meaning out of the guardian soldiers and a near miss. Though I was exhausted, I felt new and possible, like the future might be mine for the shaping.

The first motel I found after crossing the Little Missouri River was the same kind of long white single-decker place I’d stayed in so many times before. I paid the man at the desk an extra five dollars to stop asking me how old I was and what I was doing on my own. I knew without stepping foot in the room what it would look like. One double bed covered in a worn cloth, two pillows, a metal-framed chair tucked into a chipped veneer desk, bad art, stained brown carpet, half a roll of toilet paper with the end folded into a triangle to let me know that the maid had been in the bathroom, though she probably hadn’t really cleaned it much. There would be a phone book but no map, pen but no paper, a Bible but no God. The difference was neither one of my parents would be there. I was truly on my own. Duffel bag over my shoulder, I turned the knob and walked in, alone but unafraid.