Winter Loon(83)

It was not the good sleep I needed. Instead, I dreamed as I still often do of deep and dark places, of things held tight and shut doors. In my dream, I crushed some small animal with my bare foot, its bones popping under my toes. Jolene was in my dreams, too, but at a distance. I called to her, but when she turned, her face was my mother’s and her skin had turned blue. She told me she was cold, but it was my own chill that rescued me. It was barely daybreak when I woke up, stiff and shivering, thin blue blankets at my feet.

I stepped outside and stretched. Against the distant buttes, the sun was rising. Though the motel was close to the highway, there were no road sounds at all. Somewhere a prairie dog scolded. The vacancy sign was lit but the office seemed closed. Only one other car was in the motel lot. I felt like I was the only person anywhere. I pulled the collar of my jacket up and laid the map out on the hood of the car, tracing with my finger the miles I’d clocked. I was in the middle of the sage-and-sandstone Badlands, near the Montana line. I would cross the border, follow the highway, turn south with it, and follow the river coulee down through Billings and across the state. I punctuated my route with a tap on the town of Burden Falls. I had nothing to go by once I got there except a name and a postmark. He could be there. He could be gone. I let my eyes drift back to Minnesota, to Loma, where I hoped a more distant future would continue to wait for me.





CHAPTER 24

I TURNED ON the radio, but the best signals came from Christian stations, with screaming preachers telling me what a sinner I was, what a failure. Day two on my own and already I felt hollowed out, my pumpkin innards scraped into a paper bag. I thought about calling Jolene, to let her know where I was and that I was fine, but who wants to know the details of loneliness, the way it sticks to the inside of your mouth, runs through you, a spit through a pig? Better to wait until there was something to report. I pulled out the pouch tucked into the layers of my shirts and held it tight in my hand as I steered my way onto the westward highway.

I passed town after town until finally the interstate downshifted into a two-lane highway winding through one-stoplight towns, past cutoffs to the foothills and the mountains that cropped up out of the empty prairie. Winter hay lay like rolling pins in fields dotted with cattle. Beyond the fields, thickets of cottonwoods and evergreens followed the highway’s path, their roots sapping water from a hidden riverbank. The sky was blue and vast.

I kept driving, past a meatpacking house, a motorcycle and snowmobile shop, a concrete and gravel plant on the side of the hill. A dented guardrail skirted a bend in the road. White crosses lined the curve where the road turned into the river span. I crossed a silver trestle bridge over a rocky river into Burden Falls.



THE SMALL TOWN WAS LAID out in a neat grid with the highway running north and south and the river roughly following the same path around a center that included a grocery store at the east end of Main Street and a school at the west. I checked into an L-shaped motel next to a brick creamery. The room was rustic, more Western and homey than highway motels. The headboard was a wagon wheel and the pictures hanging on the walls were all of cowboys and Indians waging war. I stared at a woman adorned in fur and hides sitting next to a teepee. I remember thinking Jolene would hate it, Mona, too, for that matter. The way the animal skin fell off the brown shoulder, the feathers and vegetables and baskets scattered around her as if that’s all Indian women ever did, lounge around waiting for a warrior to come home. She would only wait so long for me.

I didn’t know where to begin, how to look for someone who didn’t want to be found. I could hang around a coffee shop or bar. I knew he’d been at the post office but not whether he’d return. I could watch for the familiar pickup, the Minnesota plates. The loneliness struck me, and I understood why my dad took Elizabeth on those long trips. And I longed for my mother. The motel room smelled like her—not the lemon perfume but the rootlessness. It smelled like packing up.

There was no phone book in the room, so I went back down to the front desk, thinking I’d start my search there. I thumbed to the Bs, tracing down the column. No Ballot. The woman at the desk was flat chested and boy thin with a shock of frizzy hair the color of processed cheese. She watched me with buggy blue eyes while I searched. I slammed the book shut, stared out the office window.

“Didn’t find who you’re looking for?”

I shook my head. “You know anyone by the name of Moss Ballot?”

“What kind of name is Moss? That’s not much of a name.”

“So, no?”

She shrugged and shivered her body, crumpling up her whole face like even the name repulsed her.

I had another thought and went back to the phone book, back to the Bs. I let my finger rest on a color, no address, and spun the directory around. “Do you know these people?” I asked, pointing to the name.

“Blue. Arthur and Geneva.” Her voice was twitchy, like each sentence came out after a shock from a cattle prod. “Can’t say as I do. But I’m pretty new here myself.” She let out a laugh like machine-gun fire. “I got to make more friends, I guess. What’s your name?”

Deflated, I pushed the directory back to her without answering. “Anyplace around here I can get a good dinner cheap?”

“There’s an A&W out on the highway. Or the Cozy Cup up the road here on the right.”

“Thanks for your help.”