The Driftless Area Page 6

  “Hey. Are you in love?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, Pierre Hunter. Who with?”

  “Don’t tell anybody.”

  “Okay.”

  “Her name is Stella Rosmarin.”

  Carrie shook her head. “Why is that name familiar?”

  “If you’ve ever seen her you would remember.”

  “No. I know what it is. It’s a kind of rose. A Rosmarin rose.”

  * * *

  Pierre figured it must be a well-known mistake to intervene between a wife and a husband. There were people who did that for a job and they had many years of training, and even they probably only fucked things up half the time.

  But none of this was quite real. Roland and Carrie could only talk of their problems, and Pierre could only give advice, in a joking way.

  You learned this as a bartender—to humor people in their troubles rather than get all sincere about them. It might have been that the humoring was better anyway. It might let people think things were not so bad and therefore could be worked out. That’s what a lot of people came to a bar for anyway.

  Of course, what the counselor in beer school had said was that if you drink to make things seem not so bad then those same things will seem worse than ever in the middle of the night when the alcohol burns off.

  The counselor would not concede that alcohol had any function at all beyond blind destruction. He made liquor seem like a totally inexplicable historical development.

  Once in a class Pierre said what seemed obvious to him, that a few drinks enabled people to drop their inhibitions and talk. Even though, yes, there might be—there are—healthier ways to do that. But the counselor reacted as if Pierre had said that a few drinks enabled people to flap their arms and fly like birds.

  And everyone in the class sided with the counselor, as they did not want to be held back for another session.

  Anyway, the next time Pierre saw Roland—at the Family Lanes bowling alley in Rainville—he told him to quit hoarding the money.

  “This is a person who works for a living, in America where, for all its many faults, you do get your money,” said Pierre. “She doesn’t have five dollars for cigarettes.”

  “Oh, yeah, the cigarettes,” said Roland. “That makes sense as a point of speaking. But who is she smoking with? That’s the question.”

  “Why? Who is she smoking with?”

  “How about it’s that kid who works on the golf carts, which is why they don’t work, because he’s standing around breathing smoke on Carrie all the time.”

  “You’re just jealous,” said Pierre.

  “Of course I am,” said Roland. “You know how cute she is.”

  Pierre made his approach and laid down a green-marbled bowling ball that went on to pick up a seven-ten spare.

  “Well, anyway, you owe me eighteen bucks,” he said.

  The summer came on hot and still. Cars on gravel raised clouds of dust that could be seen for miles, and the sun seemed to develop a personal interest in anyone who moved beneath it.

  Boaters and swimmers flocked to Lens Lake and business picked up at the Jack of Diamonds, owing to its quiet and powerful air conditioning. The dark bar was a good place to be on hot nights, and the red leatherette chairs were gone, replaced by wooden ones from Italy.

  One night after work, Pierre went to see Stella. It was around two in the morning when he got there. The treetops framed a column of sky, into which the little house seemed poised to take off, and the moon cast soft blue light on the clapboards.

  Pierre shut the car off and walked across the thick and uncut grass. It was still hot, 80 degrees or more. He had no idea whether Stella would welcome him at this time of night. She had said to come back anytime but Pierre had a hard time trusting signs of attraction unless they were totally transparent.

  He had left himself an out by bringing her something.

  It was a model boat he had made. It seemed fairly idiotic, now that he was here and holding the boat in his hands. But at least if she did not want him to stay he could say he only meant to drop it off and be on his way.

  The house was dark except for two lights, one on the stove panel in the kitchen and one upstairs. And of course there was no car. Had she cleared out entirely, the place might look exactly this way.

  He knocked and after a moment heard a noise from the second floor. The screen window hinged at the top and Stella had pushed it open and was looking down.

  “Pierre?” she said.

  “Hi,” he said. “Is it too late?”

  “Come up,” she said. “The door’s unlocked.”

  He walked into the house, waited a moment, and climbed the stairs. She stood in the doorway with the light of the room behind her. She wore a little more than she had the last time he saw her but because it was underwear it was more exciting.

  Funny how that works, thought Pierre.

  “Here,” he said. “I made this for you.”

  She lifted the boat in her hands and closed one eye to look down the hull. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “It’s a replica of what they call the Gokstad ship,” said Pierre. “That’s all wood, by the way. Well, except the sail, of course, is cloth.”

  “This would be the Vikings?”

  “Yeah. They think it was a burial ship built around the year nine hundred.”

  “And you made this?” she said.

  “Yeah. You can have it if you want.”

  “Christ, I love it,” she said.

  They went into the bedroom, where she set the boat on the dresser. There were sixteen oars on either rail and they were angled downward to enable the model to stand on its own.

  “I’ll put it here where I can look at it and think of you putting it together.”

  “It’s kind of stupid, but—”

  “No, it’s not,” said Stella. “You don’t have to feel that way. Pierre, listen to me. Whatever is bad, you didn’t cause it. You can feel good if you want to.”

  She raised her hands with fingers apart as if she had counted ten things. “Wouldn’t that be better? Isn’t that what you want?”

  He laced his fingers in hers. “I want you,” he said. “And there, I’ve said it.”

  Still holding Pierre’s hands, Stella drew her arms back, pulling the two of them together, and she pressed his hands to the small of her back.

  It was very graceful, how she did that. He could feel the ribbed cloth of her undershirt and the hem of it and the warm skin beneath.

  “You’re the one I’ve been waiting for,” she said.

  A woman had once told Pierre that men mistake sex for love, or maybe it was love for sex, he could not remember how it went, and maybe that only proved her point. But he thought there should be love in it, or created by it, and maybe this was why he hadn’t slept with too many people.

  Of course it wasn’t always what it could be. Sometimes there was a disappointing sense of a favor being granted, and reluctantly at that, a sense of calculation and separation, and this reduced the experience from ecstatic union to a hybrid of gymnastics and accounting, and all in all it could be kind of tense and gloomy.

  With Stella it was not like that. She was wild and lovely and drew no line between what she gave and what she took. She wanted and Pierre wanted what they were after equally, or sometimes one a little more, and sometimes the other, and the differences gave way to creativity rather than isolation.

  And what were they after? It was not only the good feeling of friction and slide, though that was much of it. Maybe there was a time before individual minds when sensation fell on the world and all knew it the same. It was something like that. To find that time and live it one night. To join together, as in the wedding vows. It was like the word that Pierre had spoken of that time he was drunk—which time, there were so many—the word that would say everything, and the word was the sound of breathing.

  They made love all through the night. It was hot in the room and then cooler
as the early morning drifted in the windows, until at last they shivered under the covers, played out and a little deranged. There was a light on, a standing lamp with an orange shade. The wiring was bad and it kept going on and off. Sometimes it would stay on for a while and then again it would strobe, and the light in its changeable modes seemed to urge them on. And they would sleep, but lightly, each with the awareness of the other held close.

  Once they woke and they were still together and she lay on him with her hands touching his face and her head beneath his chin.

  “So, what are you doing this summer?” she said, and he could feel the vibration of her voice in his chest.

  They laughed. She rose on her golden arms and looked at him.

  “You mean like a vacation?” he said.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “I usually go to California in August. A cousin of mine lives out there with her family. But I don’t know if I will this year.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, see, I hitchhike.”

  “But you have a car.”

  “It would never make it. It’s too far. And you can actually go faster without one, because you don’t have to stop. But I don’t know. I’m twenty-four now. Getting kind of old for it.”

  “Twenty-four is nothing.”

  “And besides, you’re here.”

  “You should do whatever you were going to do,” said Stella. “Don’t not go for me. And then you can come back and tell me the stories.”

  “I’ve wanted this since the day we met,” said Pierre. “Even on the day we met.”

  “You were so cold.”

  “I’ve forgotten.”

  “I remember everything.”

  “That’s quite a lot.”

  “Some things I’d just as soon forget.”

  “This helps, though, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, because it’s only us.”

  “And who are we again?”

  “A guy and a gal, lost together in this funky world.”

  “How pretty you say that.”

  “We should take it slow,” she said. “Really slow—like this—until it’s just unbearable. . . .”

  At around five o’clock the light began to seep into the room and the birds to sing in tentative phrases as if to find out who else was awake. Pierre got up and shut off the erratic lamp, and as he did so he got a shock that leaped all the way to his shoulder. He walked back to the bed, kneading his knuckles, and then they went to sleep and did not get up until the afternoon.

  “I heard you had one cart,” said Roland Miles. “Carrie seen you in the store.”

  “So?”

  “Well, you know what that means.”

  They were up on the stone tower in the state forest behind the Jack of Diamonds. Roland was patching the mortar between the stones where it had cracked to white ash and fallen out, and Pierre was leaning on the wall and looking out over the country.

  “Two people, one cart,” said Roland.

  “No, what does it mean?” said Pierre.

  “That you’re living together.”

  “What if we are?”

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “I took her to get some groceries.”

  “How kind of you. Carrie said you were in the hair care aisle and looking pretty goddamned cozy.”

  “She should’ve come over.”

  “Well, you know—you don’t want to interrupt people when they’re deciding which conditioner gives that allover shiny feeling.”

  “I like her.”

  “That’s good,” said Roland. “You should like someone. It’s the way people are. And she likes you?”

  “Seems that way.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Pierre. “There’s some deer down here.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Just walking around. Now they’re running.”

  “Any fawns?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “They’re probably near, they usually are. . . . I’m not saying you’re on the bottom of the barrel. I’m sure you would stand out to somebody, just given how many people there are, and the laws of probability.”

  “Yep,” said Pierre. “It’s a mystery.”

  “Well, don’t listen to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I can see that.”

  Pierre had learned something in college that he always remembered, and this was that everything that succeeds creates the conditions for its own demise.

  A professor with a prematurely bent posture and white beard had said this about an ancient kingdom that had disappeared, and Pierre thought it was true of many things.

  A simple example would be a fire, which burns the fuel that feeds it and goes out. Supposedly this would even happen to the sun. Or a hero, who rights some great wrong and finds that his services are no longer needed.

  It was the only philosophy that he had, although he was not sure it was philosophy. It meant that nothing sufficiently good or bad can last. The only things that might last are things that make no difference.

  Yet it was like Pierre to magnify simple questions into large abstractions about which nothing could be done. All he meant in thinking of this formula for dissolution was that if he and Stella moved in together, they would put an end to the living apart that made them want to live together in the first place.

  So he never raised the issue, and neither did Stella. They spent many nights at her hilltop house and one at his apartment in Shale before he left on his trip to California. These nights and mornings seemed so luminous and urgent as to exist separately from the rest of his life. It was as if they were beginning the world from nothing every time they met. Where had he been all this time? That was the question that went through his mind when he and Stella were together. And where was he now?

  FIVE

  PIERRE HAD never really got a bad ride. The worst that happened was that a driver would share an unexpectedly powerful strain of grass and play some song like “Tecumseh Valley” and Pierre would become sort of comatose. Much of the music was old, as were most of the drivers, who remembered a time when the roads were jammed with people thumbing rides.

  He made fantastic time. The hitchhiker may appear carefree and open to experience, but in Pierre’s case this was deceptive. He got ruthless on the road, greedy for miles. He did not have to be anywhere in a hurry, but he hurried anyway.

  He remembered some of the people who had given him rides—a quiet, serious man who went from track to track gambling on horses, another man with a rusted tub of crawdads in the backseat, a woman in a tan Karmann Ghia who laughed beautifully and lit up a metal hash pipe, winking like Santa’s sexy niece as the white smoke curled around her face.

  But in each case the ride had ended and he had gone on—he did not attend the crawdad bake (or fry, or however the crawdads would be prepared), or learn to interpret a racing form, or spend the night with the hash smoker.

  Sometimes he thought it would be better if he had done these things. Not that he could have done them all. Only the gambler had offered. But there may have been signals that Pierre in his transient nature had missed. To turn your life on a dime seemed to him the essence of American thought. But he had never been able to do so until now.

  He made Utah in two nights, and there he met a tragic sort of woman in a mountain town. She was thirty years old or so and drinking in the bar of the dark and worn down hotel where he had checked in for the night.

  She’d had some hard times. Something begins to fade from the eyes after too much of anything. She had thick dry reddish hair and white scars on either side of her face as if she had been attacked by a bear.

  In fact, she said, she’d done this with her own fingernails one time after going too many days on speed. Pierre did not know what to say to that, but she smiled and nodded, as if the pain had faded, leaving only a sort of impersonal amazement.

 
They danced in the bar and then, wanting to see the town, Pierre walked her home, to the house where she said she lived with her grandmother. The house was close to the newly paved road that fell away from the town. The door was locked, and she knocked and called out, but nothing happened.

  “She does this if I come home late,” she said. “But there’s a ladder in the garage. Come on. You can help me carry it.”

  So they went in the garage and she turned on a light and looked around. There was a big yellow Cadillac but no ladder that they could find.

  She stood with her hands in her back pockets and looked all around the garage. “Clever,” she said. “She must have taken the ladder in the house. Good one, Grandma. That’s thinking ahead for you. This is kind of a game we play.”

  “Why don’t you come back to the hotel?” said Pierre. “You can sleep in my room.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t swing that way.”

  “You don’t have to swing any way,” said Pierre. “You can stay there, that’s all.”

  “Really? You would do that for me? You must be a religious kind of guy. ’Cause what I normally do if I can’t get in is sleep in the Cadillac.”

  “Well, you don’t want to do that.”

  “No, that’s for sure.”

  So they went back to the hotel and stayed the night, all on the straight and narrow, she in the bed and Pierre in a chair with a blanket.

  “And how are you doing over there?” she said.

  “Very well, thanks.”

  “You might be interested to know I’m off the crank now.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And here’s a promise I made to myself. That someday, when I find a pile of cash, I’ll take it to a plastic surgeon and I’ll say, ‘Make these scars go away.’ ”

  “They probably can.”

  “Oh, these days? It’s a snap, I bet. They probably do it all the time.”

  “The cash is the tricky part,” said Pierre.

  “I think it will happen, though. I can just see it.”