Peace Like a River

  “That shyster.”

  “Probably to the public toilet.”

  “Stinker.”

  “We’ll wake up Dad,” Swede decided, “and get out of town. When Andreeson gets back, we’ll be gone!”

  “You think we should? Won’t we get in trouble?”

  “Did we do anything wrong?”

  “No.” But it felt like we had—or were about to.

  She snared my arm. “Should we tell Dad about him, do you think?”

  I nodded, ready to run do so. How often did we get to deliver Dad actual news?

  But she shook her head. “He might want to wait around and talk to Andreeson.”

  “So? We’re innocent. Like you said.”

  “I know, but Andreeson might do—something unfair. He might make us go back home.”

  I didn’t think he could do that, even if he did work for the federal government. Swede said feds often broke their own rules, a sentiment gleaned from Mr. DeCuellar and one she maintains to this day.

  “You think old Andreeson can tell Dad what to do?” I said. Let her answer an uncomfortable question for once.

  “I’m afraid of it,” she admitted.

  In the end, though, all our stratagems came to naught because Dad woke with a record headache to suggest, in a distressed whisper, that we stay parked till morning. Instantly I recollected August’s apprehensions about Dad’s health, but he swallowed two aspirin and promised to be better by supper, provided it was chicken and dumplings.

  “He’s really sick,” Swede told me, outside his shut bedroom.

  But I clung to Dad’s promise. “What’s in dumplings?”

  “Baking powder, flour, milk.” But she wore a pout at this turn of events, and I couldn’t blame her—she’d been picturing us slipping out while Andreeson sat on the toilet.

  We made the dumplings with a Swanson chicken (“One Whole Chicken in a Can”) and Dad as sworn emerged to eat, declaring full recovery. He didn’t look much better, but then it was hard to see him; rather than use the Airstream’s lamps, Dad claimed to prefer the ambient dimness thrown off by the streetlights of Linton. It was more romantic, he said—obviously cover for his light-pained eyes—but we went right along. Are you familiar with canned chicken? Romantic lighting doesn’t hurt.

  Someone banged on the door.

  “Yes,” Dad called. It was so dark I couldn’t see his expression.

  “Mr. Land, it’s Martin Andreeson.”

  Dad was silent a moment. Ever since, I’ve thought he believed, just for a second, that it was Davy out there, come to reconcile. He stood, struck a match, lit a mantle in the kitchen. “Come in.”

  Andreeson was hatless and smiling in a fresh haircut and tan knee-length topcoat. In the gaslight he glowed like hale skin. He looked younger than when we last saw him, which alongside Dad seemed monstrously unfair. He said, “Lovely weather. I enjoy the Dakotas. Don’t get out here as often as I’d like.”

  Dad stood with his hands on the back of a kitchen chair, his face all pouched with headache. I couldn’t help but remember the pronouncement he’d made to Andreeson that previous time: “You and I will not speak again.” What power had flowed from him in that sentence, how prophetic and incontestable he had sounded! Dad seemed to be thinking similarly, for he gave me a wry so-much-for-pronouncements look and said, “Do you have news for us, Mr. Andreeson?”

  “Why, no, I don’t.”

  “Then your purpose here is abstruse,” Dad said politely.

  “I’m glad to explain. You departed suddenly in the middle of January. Your rent is paid through April, though you no longer draw a salary and you have no savings. Half of Roofing thinks your mind soured. They think you’re out here eating locusts.”

  Dad chuckled. “How about the other half?”

  “They believe you heard from your boy and are gone to meet him.”

  “Which theory appeals to you?”

  “I’m trying to think what else could bring you here—now.” He meant to the Great Plains in midwinter; it actually wasn’t a bad question.

  “We’re looking for him,” Dad said.

  Andreeson appeared to be waiting for explication, finally prompting, “Did he contact you?”

  “No.”

  “Did he contact August and Birdie?” Notice he didn’t even say Shultz; Andreeson’s familiarity with our whereabouts, finances, and friends was a type of worry I’d never encountered before.

  “Yes, he did,” Dad said.

  “August told me differently,” Andreeson said. “Very loyal, though it does leave him open to accessory charges. What directions did your boy leave him?”

  “None.”

  Andreeson looked at Dad as though he were a slow child. “Mr. Land, it’s my responsibility to find your son. At the moment it’s my only responsibility. I believe we are close to him right now. If you know more than you’re saying, you could save his life by coming out with it.”

  “I’ve been honest with you, Mr. Andreeson.”

  “You could also save August and Birdie some grief down the line. It’s a shame they lied to me.”

  Dad said, “You yourself have lied twice since stepping in here.”

  That set Andreeson back a step, and he didn’t contest it either. I was still wondering which two statements were false when he nodded, set his hand on the door, and said, “Mr. Land, you and I don’t have to be enemies.”

  “Mr. Andreeson,” Dad replied, “it appears that we do.”

  So departed our putrid fed, in a gust of chinook from the door, and a few moments later in popped Swede in her overcoat—we hadn’t even noticed she was gone.

  “I had to run to the gas station,” she said breathlessly. There was a Phillips 66 we were using. Hanging her coat neatly in the closet she set about the kitchen in a brisk way, brewing coffee for Dad, laying things shipshape, and finally slipping into the saddle, where she dashed off the following:

  The blizzard shipped in from the west like a grin

  On a darkened, malevolent face,

  And the posse that sought Mr. Sundown was caught

  In an awfully dangerous place.

  For their horses were sore and their chances were poor

  Of locating warmth or repose,

  When the sweet sudden sight of miraculous light

  Shone dim in the dark and the snows, my lads,

  A light through the dark and the snows.

  And the lady who answered their knock at the door

  Had answered another, an hour before.

  The above was possibly four minutes’ work for Swede, who remember was no typist. So fully did she own these lines, so resonant were her strokes upon the keys, that Dad said, “My goodness, Swede, don’t you know Moby Dick has already been written?” But no response. I guess she was just too elevated to hear him.

  She bid them to stay, in her courteous way,

  And insisted they sit by the fire,

  And she poured them all brandy and sang them a song

  And they slept as though lulled by a choir.

  The sheriff next morning was first to awake

  And he called all his men to the chase,

  For a dream had suggested their quarry sought rest

  In the hay in the barn on the place, lads—

  He’d slept in the barn on the place.

  But when they crept into the building to spy,

  Gone horses, gone lady, gone outlaw, goodbye!

  Dad’s headache was gone in the morning—in fact, he suggested pancakes after Swede routed us from bed. The routing itself should’ve alerted me to something; Swede was rarely awake before Dad, whose early minutes with King James were not negotiable.

  “Can’t we get going?” Swede begged. It was close to wheedling, a bad sound at that time of day. “Let’s just have cornflakes.”

  Dad felt none of her urgency. No mistake, Andreeson had tossed a wet washcloth on the trip. In fact, Dad was inclined to laze around Linton awhile. After all, he’d be
en honest with the fed—we weren’t on Davy’s schedule or anyone else’s. Maybe the thing to do was snuggle down and wait on the Lord. “Anyhow, Andreeson hates North Dakota,” Dad said. “I knew it right off. Won’t he get disgusted if we just plop down for a month?”

  “But Davy—” Swede began.

  “Davy’s in the palm of God’s hand, like all of us are. A few days’ wait may be the best thing for everybody.”

  Normally this would’ve been how the discussion ended, for Dad said, “Now, what about those pancakes?”

  “I don’t feel very good,” Swede said.

  Dad leaned at her. “Why, you are pale. It’s early yet; why don’t you go back to bed?”

  Swede climbed back in her bunk. Dad turned the gas low so the trailer was dim and warm and restful. I dozed myself, hearing only the occasional turn of a page as Dad read.

  Then Swede said, quietly, “Dad?”

  “Mm.”

  There was a pause which brought me alert.

  “I have been praying, and I believe it is the will of God that we get going.”

  Dad sat back and stretched, rose up without reply and closed his Bible. “Well, Reuben,” he said, “get out the cornflakes. At the very least it’s the will of Swede. Let’s go.”

  It was on this day we began to imagine ourselves truly far from home. By sunup we’d bumped into the great Missouri River and struck north along its banks. Dad had informed us that when we crossed the Missouri at Mandan we would leave Central Time and enter Mountain Time, a concept he ought’ve cleared up, as it put all sorts of snowcapped expectations in our heads. Meantime it was a good drive yet to Mandan in the trailer, which was freezing. What’s over as quick as a January thaw? Swede retreated to the back of the trailer to stare at the highway falling eastward behind us. “Come on, if you’re cold,” she said. That end was Dad’s bedroom. She was sitting on his bed Indian-style, under a hump of quilts.

  “We did it, huh?” I said. Slipped away from Andreeson, is what I meant, leaving town in the dark that way.

  “Yup.”

  I poked her, under the blankets. “Think how he felt this morning, coming down to the park and us gone—think how he feels right now!”

  “Pretty mad, you think?” Swede smiled, but there wasn’t any winning in it, which was irritating; it seemed to me we hadn’t won many rounds lately, and here was Swede refusing to enjoy a clear victory. In fact she had hollow half-moons under her eyes, like some bad old woman. She watched the empty road distrustfully.

  “Maybe he doesn’t know it yet,” I ran on. “Probably he’s down at the cafe, eating hardboiled eggs. He’s having another cup of coffee, reading the newspaper—”

  “Hating it that he’s in North Dakota,” Swede added, drawn in, I figured, by my skillful use of detail.

  “Yes, hating it like everything, dumb North Dakotans all over the place, and in about ten minutes he’ll finish up and drive down to the city park, and we’re gone! What do you think he’ll do?”

  But Swede’s enthusiasm was momentary, for she replied, “Well, who knows. I guess what he won’t do is trot back to Minneapolis all beat and sorry. And you know what? He found us without much trouble; I suppose he can find us again.”

  And that was all that was said for some time because it was cold, boy, and we seemed to gain little heat from each other, held in our own thoughts as we were, two blankety lumps watching the barren highway zip to nothing. It was a cheerless, frost-flattened world, this west edge of Central Time. The ditches that had flowed dark with runoff had refrozen in the wind. You never like it to happen, for something as hopeful and sudden as a January thaw to come to an end, but end it does, and then you want to have some quilts around.

  Remember the fuel economy of the 1955 Plymouth wagon? Thirsty power under the best conditions, when pulling great weight our car became a carping slave demanding refreshment. Yes, gas was cheap, as I am constantly reminded, and yes, the Plymouth had an ample tank; still, service stations were not the frequent, well-lit, prosperous concerns they are today, and Dad had bought and filled two red five-gallon cans that might extend our range another hundred miles—generally enough to reach a gas pump, even on the Great Plains. These we cached with a case of forty-weight in a closet midships of the Airstream; shortly after leaving Roofing we’d stopped for a fill, my job being to get out the cans and have the attendant attend to them once he’d satisfied the wagon. It’s funny—I’d recognize that attendant were he to appear today, for he had one ear grown all thick and proportionless beside his head, a condition described as cauliflower ear, though this looked more like a good strong burdock leaf. He looked confused when Dad handed him a ten-dollar bill, as though thrown by the need to make change, and he admired the trailer aloud several times, admired it as though we were wealthy travelers and people beyond his reach. In return I was fascinated by the looks of his ear, the way it splayed off his skull like a bark fungus; and I recall how little meaning I gave it later when Dad told me such flagrancies were the common bane of boxers in the bare-knuckle days who routinely took ferocious hits. How comforting, those extra cans. In no way was I expecting to run out of gas; to me it only meant we were serious in this business. We would travel as far as necessary, staying gone through seasons, years if we had to, until we got what we’d come for—whatever exactly that was. Thanks to Swede I was no longer sure. But sometime in the middle of the morning, just as I was bequeathing her all my stuff should I freeze to death, Dad pulled into a Sinclair station in the midst of nowhere, and Swede and I hopped numbly down.

  “Nobody here,” Dad said. It was a little white gas station with a green stripe painted all round. Emptiest spot you ever saw. All morning the wind had risen, and the Sinclair sign with its green brontosaurus rocked and groaned on high. “I’d like to gas up,” he mused, “but I guess we can get to Mandan—we can easily get that far. Besides, we have the reserves.”

  But we didn’t gas up in Mandan. We crossed the Missouri, entering Mountain Time (“The mountains must be a few miles away still,” Swede remarked), but the city of Mandan held no gas for us. First service station we came to Dad slowed way down, then changed his mind and slid by.

  “Why didn’t we stop?” I asked.

  “Nineteen nine a gallon,” Dad replied, his eyes on the rear-view. “I believe we can do better.” An explanation I bought—why wouldn’t I?—though Swede whispered there’d been a state car parked at that very station, a trooper in sunglasses inside it, watching traffic.

  We cruised along into Mandan, a good-sized town on the Missouri River named for the Indian tribe Lewis and Clark wintered with. Those Mandans knew something about games, Swede told me—that’s what they did with Lewis and Clark, feasted and gave presents and played games till the ice broke up.

  Dad passed another gas station. “There was one,” I told him; I thought he hadn’t seen it.

  “Mm, yes, there it was,” he said.

  “Can we get something to eat when we stop?” I inquired.

  He didn’t answer and, moreover, didn’t slow when we approached yet another station, by now well into town. Seeing he was about to miss this one too I opened my mouth to advise him, only to have Swede grip my coat sleeve. I yanked away; she looked scared and savage. But looking past her as we went by the station I saw a trooper in his parka and ranger hat, leaning against his car in the wind.

  I’ll admit the sight thrilled me. Not that I believed the trooper was looking for us, which seemed a stretch, in the dark as we were about Davy, but Swede plainly believed he was, and Dad—well, Dad wasn’t stopping.

  Swede signed me to keep my mouth shut.

  We were all so quiet, in fact, that Mandan in my memory is a silent movie: people on the sidewalk shrugging in the hard wind and hard white useless sun, disappointingly few men in cowboy hats and those dressed wrongly in flapping bankers’ topcoats, a cafe with breakfast menus posted in the window and a couple of dogs waiting at the door, an actual living long-haired Indian stepping from a barb
ershop, and every thing and person getting knocked around by the bossy wind except the troopers, who on that day were sitting in their state cars at every gas station in Mandan, North Dakota, looking dispassionately out their windows. And so still were these men, and so unmoved in their faces, and so flatout many were they, dispersed like hunters across a field, that I knew they were indeed looking for us, and for Davy through us. At once I took a fierce chill. A sob rippled up my throat and I couldn’t do a thing about it. It sure is one thing to say you’re at war with this whole world and stick your chest out believing it, but when the world shows up with its crushing numbers and its predatory knowledge, it is another thing completely. I shut my eyes and rocked.