The Driftless Area Read online

  “Oh, it’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you someday.”

  “How do you get around without a car?”

  “I don’t, very much,” she said. “I have a bicycle.”

  “Not much good this time of year.”

  “No, that’s true. They deliver my groceries, and the mailman comes, and the meterman, though he doesn’t come that often, compared to the mailman.”

  “It sounds kind of lonely.”

  “It is, but I haven’t minded so much. I guess you could say I’ve been waiting.”

  “For what?”

  She bent her head to blow steam from the tea as she held the cup in both hands.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You, maybe. To pull you out of the lake.”

  The dryer completed its cycle, and Pierre got dressed, said goodbye to Stella, and left the house. Her driveway wound down through the trees to the Lake Road, where he turned south and headed for the Jack of Diamonds. It was dark. His clothes were dry, and though his boots had seemed dry enough in the kitchen of Stella’s house, they were wet and cold now, and he stamped his feet on the pavement to keep them warm.

  I’ll have to go back and see her again, he thought.

  FOUR

  THE JACK of Diamonds was a low building of dark dovetailed timbers and square yellow windows set against the bank of the forest. Pierre went around to the side, through the kitchen, and down to the basement, where he had a locker with dry socks and sneakers. He put them on and went upstairs.

  Chris Garner and Larry Rudd were sitting at the bar. They came in three or four times a week to drink beer and talk of obscure subjects and everyday items, such as rotary weed trimmers or garbage disposals, that were more dangerous than commonly understood. They were in their fifties and had been teammates on a basketball team that almost went to the state tournament many years ago. Now Rudd owned two vacuum cleaner stores and Garner sold shoes.

  Pierre rearranged the liquor bottles as they talked. He grouped them by color, which other bartenders found unprofessional, because blue gins would end up next to blue vodkas, for example, but so be it.

  “Oh, we watched it,” said Rudd. “The wife and me, in the comfort of our home. Watched the whole movie. But if that’s supposed to be sexy, I don’t know, I must be missing something.”

  “Because of the masks,” said Garner.

  “Yeah. You couldn’t tell who anybody was.”

  “But that’s the idea, though, isn’t it. The anonymity.

  That it would tend to make it more exciting.”

  “Not knowing what somebody looks like?” said Rudd. “What exciting about that?”

  “Well, it depends on the mask, I guess. If it was like the Lone Ranger wore you would have a pretty good idea of the overall appearance.”

  “Nah, these were over their whole faces. They were supposed to be—I don’t know what. Cats. Spirits of the past. Birds. I believe there were birds. Lords and ladies.”

  “Frightening things,” suggested Garner. “At, like, a ball or something.”

  “Well, again, that may have been the intention. But to me it was very implausible.”

  “Maybe it’s different for young people,” said Garner. “Pierre, get in on this.”

  “What’s the question?” said Pierre.

  “Would you sleep with some woman if you didn’t know who it was because she was wearing a mask?”

  “That’s what you’re asking.”

  “Rudd seen a movie about that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you might.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Pierre, you dog.”

  “You guys about ready?”

  Pierre drew two beers, poured off the foam, topped the glasses up, and set them on the bar.

  “A face is kind of a mask anyway, when you think about it,” he said.

  Rudd took a drink and set the glass down. “You should never ask Pierre anything.”

  “You don’t make your face,” said Pierre. “It’s given to you. You might think it represents your true self, but why would it? Half the time you make an expression and think, Oh, this is my whatever expression, and nobody even knows what you’re thinking.”

  “That’s true,” said Garner. “I have no idea what my face looks like to the outside world.”

  “That’s just as well,” said Rudd. “So anyway, we get done watching this sex movie with all the masks, and I go out to the kitchen, and there’s some water standing in the sink. So what do I do? I run the garbage disposal, right, as that’s the only way to get rid of the water. And this is my problem with them: that you can’t just pull some simple plug but you have to fire up the equivalent of an outboard motor to get the fucking water out of the sink—when what should come shooting out but this huge shard of blue glass. I was lucky it didn’t kill me.”

  Pierre gave last call at the end of the night, and everyone but Chris Garner went home. The shoe salesman lived alone and was often the last to leave. He sat at a table near the bar with a Rusty Nail he’d been working on for some time. Pierre carted kegs up to the walk in cooler and then went behind the bar, where he stood counting money and putting it in the cash box.

  “Do you believe in fate, Chris?” he said.

  “Fate.”

  “Yeah. That things happen for a reason.”

  “Sometimes. Like if your car won’t start, and you left the lights on, that’s probably why.”

  “That’s not fate.”

  “I didn’t say it was.”

  “Fate is more like you leaving your lights on in order that the car won’t start.”

  “Who would do that?”

  “Nobody, on purpose. But if you were meant to.”

  “Then no. I would have to say I don’t believe it. You must, however, or you wouldn’t raise the question.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You should ask Rudd. He would know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Or if he didn’t, he would make something up.”

  Terry Benton, owner of the Jack of Diamonds, came in at half past midnight. His story was one of those you read about from time to time. He had made a lot of money designing computer networks in Oregon and retired nine years ago at the age of forty four to return to the Midwest and start a supper club. His idea had been to re-create an earlier Jack of Diamonds, which had been in Eden Center and which he remembered from his childhood.

  “Any trouble tonight?” he said.

  “Nope,” said Pierre.

  “How’d we do?”

  “Better than last Sunday.”

  “Last Sunday wasn’t bad.”

  “Yeah, so . . . better than that.”

  Terry laid his camel hair coat along the bar, sat down, and turned toward the room. He had a deceptive build—wide of frame but not very deep, as if he had been flattened by a cartoon steamroller. “Do you like the chairs?”

  “I guess so,” said Pierre. “What about them?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure about the red vinyl anymore.”

  “What would you get, wood?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Can’t hardly go wrong with wood,” said Pierre.

  “The red might be too busy.”

  “I fell in the lake today.”

  “Did you?”

  “I was skating.”

  “You wouldn’t catch me on that lake.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because you fall in. What’s wrong with Garner?”

  Pierre shrugged and raised his eyebrows.

  Terry walked out among the tables, swinging his arms and clapping his hands. “Let’s be going home, Chris.”

  “All right, all right,” said Garner. He stood and put on his overcoat. He adjusted the lapels and shook his head and walked with Terry to the door.

  “You could use some new shoes,” he said. “Why don’t you stop in one of these times?”

  “Maybe I will. But tell me somet
hing. What’s your opinion of the chairs?”

  “They seem fine to me, Terry.”

  Terry had a lot invested in the place. He’d outfitted the kitchen with Ramhold-Bailer appliances, hired the chef Keith Lyon away from the Chanticleer in Austin, Minnesota, and commissioned an artist to paint murals on the walls. In the style of Grant Wood, the murals portrayed the surrounding countryside as a nearsighted dream in which everything was smoother and greener and more discrete than in life. The bar itself was cherrywood and stable as stone.

  Terry had wanted the restaurant to be suave, for that is how he remembered the original, but he also wanted it to be popular, and he seemed flexible as to how this might be achieved.

  You could see this in his reaction to the incident of the sink and the sign. Late one night about a year before, a man who had been shut off from drinking anymore went into the men’s room and tore the sink off the wall. He was banned for life but that was not the end of it. A couple of days later a homemade sign appeared in the ditch along the Lake Road leading to the Jack of Diamonds. It was black paint on white plywood, and what it said was:

  TWO MILES TO THE

  STINKING GREASE PIT

  Well, there was no question who had put up the sign. It was obviously the man who had wrecked the sink and flooded the men’s room. And at their weekly meeting most of the employees agreed that the thing to do was to pull up the sign and throw it away.

  But Terry said, “Let’s think about this.”

  He said, “We are not afraid of this accusation. It is laughable. The Jack happens to have Keith Lyon, probably the best chef in the Driftless Area.”

  Terry was always trying to get people to call the Jack of Diamonds “the Jack,” as he thought it sounded hipper and more inviting.

  “And don’t say anything, Keith, because you know I’m right. That lamb thing you make, whatever it is, on the open fire, and they wrote it up in the magazine—”

  Keith sat at the bar drinking white wine. He could be brutal when things went wrong in the kitchen but was kind of quiet and bemused otherwise. “Lamb à la Primitive,” he said.

  “Right. So I ask you. Grease pit? Are you kidding me? And might it not be the cooler thing if we did not respond? If we did not deign to respond.”

  “I think it’s an insult,” said the waitress, Charlotte Blonde.

  Despite her name Charlotte was a brunette. She had begun waiting tables to pay tuition at the community college in Desmond City but she got pregnant by a teaching assistant and tuition went up, and now she had a infant daughter and a full-time job.

  “And it could add to our cult status,” Terry Benton said. “What sort of place would ignore such a sign as if it didn’t exist? A cool place, I would think. A place that is very confident of its own value.”

  “As to the sign, I don’t care one way or the other,” said Keith Lyon. “I’m not sure we have cult status, but the sign is not an issue to me, because that’s not how I get here anyway.”

  “Well, okay,” said Terry. “If we don’t have cult status, this might give us one.”

  And that is why the plywood sign painted with the bitterness of the banned customer still stands on the Lens Lake Road in Shale. It has been changed, though. Now it says:

  TWO MILES TO THE

  JACK OF DIAMONDS

  The judge presiding over the charges against Pierre seemed young and lost in the robe of justice. It was black and slick like a poncho in the rain, and he kept pushing the sleeves up so they would not interfere with his hands.

  He was one of those judges who make it a point to know as little as possible about the cases before them. He would state the facts all wrong and rely on the lawyers to set him straight and in general seemed to resent having to deal with so many instances of societal breakdown.

  But he was a judge, Pierre thought, and must have aspired to become one, so what had he been expecting? Naturally, the people in court had problems. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in court.

  The lawyers responded to the young judge’s habitual confusion with deference bordering on sarcasm, laying it on with phrases like “should it please the Court” and “if Your Honor might be directed to the document at his perusal,” until you would think that nothing productive ever got done here at all, or, if it did, it was because it had been worked out in advance, as in Pierre’s case.

  “I have what I take to be a plea agreement,” said the judge. “But I will tell you right now that I am neither bound—nor, for that matter, inclined—to accept it.”

  Pierre’s lawyer leaned toward him, bringing along a fog of cologne like the gift shop of a failing hospital. The reflection of the neon lights curved in his large glasses. “Don’t worry. He’s got to say that. It’s just for the people in the cheap seats.”

  “Being inebriated, the defendant broke up a party,” said the judge. “He does not dispute this. He does not express remorse. This is a hostile act disguised as carelessness, and this court doesn’t go for that kind of thing. Moreover, if Accelerated Rehabilitation is for exceptional cases—and we agree that it is, so I guess it must be—then—”

  “Your Honor, if I might interject,” said Pierre’s lawyer. “My client did not break up a party. The party, to the best of my knowledge—uh, continued for several hours. And he has plenty of remorse. If he has not expressed it to this point, it is due to the simple fact that no one has asked him or offered a forum in which he might do so.”

  The judge seized the papers on his desk, looking at one, tossing it aside, looking at another, squinting and scowling. “Where’s the bill of particulars?”

  “Now, he went into a party.”

  Still shuffling papers, the judge said, as if to himself, “He went into a party. Well, I hate to tell you, but that is not illegal.”

  “He walked into a house where a party was under way,” said the prosecutor. “By virtue of leaving their door unlocked, as one well might while hosting a party, the law-abiding owners of the house became subject to an unwanted incursion which the defendant refused to forego except in his own sweet time.”

  “Is this true, Pierre?”

  “More or less,” said Pierre, “but I did leave.”

  “Was there no violence? What am I thinking of? Was there another case like this one?”

  “Let me read to you,” the prosecutor continued. “I quote here the police report. ‘Asked for why he would not go, subject states he needs a little time and demands they let him do his coin trick or he will not leave.’ ”

  “‘For why he would not go. . . .’” said the judge.

  “Your Honor, if I might footnote that,” said Pierre’s attorney.

  “No, I don’t think you might,” said the judge. “A coin trick? Is that really why we’re here? Am I given to understand we are talking about a coin trick?”

  “It’s in the affidavit,” said the prosecutor. “But I would argue that what he actually did in the house is not pertinent. Only a card trick, perhaps that’s so. But does this mean that anyone who breaks into a house will be armored against prosecution provided he insists on performing some—”

  “Well now, wait, is it a card trick or a coin trick?” said the judge.

  “I’m sorry, you’re right; it is a coin trick.”

  “And would the defendant like to demonstrate this trick for the court?”

  “No, Your Honor,” said Pierre.

  “And, you know, that’s probably wise.”

  The judge found the paper he was looking for, flattened it with the edge of his hand, and signed it.

  “I will take the plea,” he said. “You know I don’t want to, yet by my signature I so order.”

  Accelerated Rehabilitation had a scientific sound, as if Pierre would rehabilitate faster and faster in an elliptical path until evaporating in a blue flash of pure mental health.

  Instead, he entered a counseling class that met once a week in a red Queen Anne house in Desmond City for ten weeks that spring and summer. The counselor had a bla
ck and gray ponytail and a gold earring, and he wore pale blue or yellow shirts with voluminous short sleeves, and in general his look seemed calculated to disarm them with its mix of influences.

  Pierre found the class slow and insincere. The room where they met had faded green wallpaper with an oppressive pattern of vines, and the box of tissues for the presumed crying could only be considered grotesque. Yet he had no one at all to blame for his being there except himself, and he could not say he didn’t learn anything.

  One night the class went to an auditorium at the hospital to hear a panel discussion among relatives of people killed in drunk-driving accidents. They spoke of the accidents and how they were told—a phone call, a knock on the door—and of the things left behind that they could not bear to see, and he heard sometimes in their voices a desolation beyond questioning. He thought of the long emptiness of nights that had brought them here to speak reasonably to people who were in essence standing in for the killers. And he did not know how they could do it.

  Another time everyone in the class had to select a shrine to a highway fatality and write an essay about it. There are a number of these makeshift markers on the narrow roads of the Driftless Area. It is hard to give them their due while driving through the normal day. You notice them for a while; then they fade into the scenery as the weather washes their brightness away.

  Thus one morning in May, Pierre parked his car up north of Midlothian where a young woman who had attended his high school had died in a crash.

  A car driven by a man from Lansville had crossed the center line and sideswiped her car, sending it into a tree. This was three years ago, when she was nineteen years old, and now she would always be that age.

  There was a cross decorated with beads, and beneath it people had left perfume bottles and flowers and smooth polished stones. Pierre sat down in the grass with a pad of yellow paper and a pencil. He looked down the road. A string of blackbirds dipped and peeled off in sequence to the east with the red blaze on their wings. It was so quiet he could almost hear the girl’s soft and rounded voice from school. But her words were not clear and he had to make them up: