She stopped talking for a moment, and my silent admiration of this woman loaded the American countryside and flooded the cities.
“I’m . . . I’m not sure exactly where I’m supposed to go in Los Angeles. I lost the letter. It’s a funeral home that gets paid by the city to keep the . . . bodies until someone comes.”
“Okay,” she said, all business now, “here’s what we’ll do. I’ll make the necessary calls, and if you phone me tomorrow, I’ll give you all the information.”
“That would be wonderful, Norma.”
Almost at once she said, “I dreamed we made love.”
She stopped talking, and I saw Bethany watching from across the double-lane highway. She had her look of attention, as if something very important had happened or would happen soon. She was still, but it was not the stillness of a pose.
After I’d stood a long time by the cold phone bank, Norma said, “Sorry. That’s dumb.”
I couldn’t release myself from Bethany’s stare. Looking at my sister, I said into the phone, “That’s not dumb, Norma.”
And in another moment, I said like a stupe, “We . . . the best way to be strong . . . is to rely on people.”
“And . . . to trust them,” she whispered.
The dry cold of Arizona took Bethany, and the stars twinkled down upon a fool.
“Call tomorrow, and I’ll have the information.”
More silence and stars.
“Bye, Smithy.”
“Bye.”
60
Count had slept for most of the ride to his house. He stretched out on the backseat of Pop’s wagon and sawed logs. When we pulled into the driveway, he woke up immediately with a terrible headache.
It was late, and the night was wet and foggy. A true Rhode Island May had spread out from the Narragansett Bay and rolled in from the ocean. Aunt Paula switched on the light the instant we had turned into the drive, and she stood on the front steps, watching me and my pop coax Uncle Count out of the car and toward the house. Aunt Paula didn’t say anything right then. It wasn’t that she was angry as much as worried. Count had gone down hard with his heart for as long as I could remember, and Paula had always borne the brunt of his “dance with the Big Man,” as Count referred to death.
The overload of cold beer and hot breasts had swelled my uncle to bursting. He held his head, and his bulging gray eyes pressed against their sockets.
“Looks like a migraine,” said Paula, leading the way into their bedroom. We struggled on either side of my epic uncle. We could have steadied a mountain. We could have supported the Empire State Building. We sat him on one side of the double bed. I remember being astonished that another human being could share that space with the Count, but Aunt Paula was not just another human being. She was powerful and brilliant in the way a pilot fish is, or a kitten maybe. I realize that sounds stupid. She fit, is what it is.
“There’s some ice already in the ice bag. It’s in the big freezer in the garage.”
I left Pop and Paula pulling off the moaning Count’s pants and went through the kitchen into the connected garage. I had always thought it was the height of modern living to have your garage attached to your house. You had access. Our garage was a typical one-car structure that didn’t seem functional. Especially in the winter. Now here was a foggy, damp, dark Rhode Island night, and all I had to do was flip the switch.
I walked around Paula’s Dodge Dart that Count liked to keep warm in the garage and over to the large white freezer. I opened it and scanned the top for the ice bag. Count and Paula had frozen dinners of every variety set neatly box to box on top. I began to rummage for the blue-and-silver ice bag. There was a large bag of turkey parts, and Paula had Scotch-taped a white piece of paper to it and written “Good for Soup.” There was a paper bag of small, round things wrapped in aluminum foil, and on the bag Paula had written “Fresh Tomatoes. Good.”
It was inevitable that the ice bag would be at the bottom of the freezer. I needed it, so it had to be in the very most inconvenient spot possible. Below the stacks of frozen juices, I saw the top of the ice bag. The silver screw top with the word THERMOS in black letters. I gave it a pull, but it seemed stuck to something. Probably a leak, condensation from when it was last put in, something.
“Great,” I said, sourly and out loud. Already I had begun sharing my moods with nothing and no one.
I pulled again and felt the slightest give. Finally I yanked hard, and the rubber ice bag with the silver screw top loosened and rose heavily in my hand, and Wiggy rose, too, his icy mouth clamped desperately to the rubber bag under the hard frozen foods.
61
Twenty-four miles out of Williams, riding my bike in the truck night of Route 40, I pulled into Ash Fork. The dry cold had stiffened me up, and I could think of nothing except my warm sleeping bag spread out on the cot and Chris across the space of a whisper. My thinking made the cold worse. My feet numbed, and my ears ached even with the wool cap pulled tightly down over them. I was also feeling more stupid than usual, that phone conversation with Norma playing over in my head.
“Lips!” I shouted out loud. “Eyes!”
I shouted for no reason other than trying to shout out a bad feeling I had. A certain kind of lonely feeling. A feeling that embarrassed me.
I glided then into Ash Fork on the run. Chris, Norma, Little Bill, Carl, and Bethany glided, too, this time in the stars, twinkling on and off between me and God. I felt light-headed. I felt as if I could fall asleep balanced on my bike.
Passing several old gas stations and a small grouping of stores, all closed, I circled the rotary road until I spotted the blinking lights of Randy’s 24-Hour Restaurant. I leaned my bike against the curbing and tried the door. Locked. All the lights were on, and I looked in. One old woman in a blue uniform and a white apron was laying out the silverware. Slowly. Table to table. I knocked on the glass. When she looked up to me, I smiled and waved through my chilly miserableness, and she came to the door.
“We’re closed. Open in half an hour.” She looked like Mrs. Santa Claus, and when she said she was closed, it was with a warmth and understanding you’d expect from Mrs. Claus, but I was cold and had lost understanding maybe seven or eight miles ago. I needed coffee. I needed a warm seat.
“But the sign says”—I pointed—“Randy’s 24-Hour Restaurant.”
“That’s true, honey, but the sign’s wrong. It’s Randy’s 23-Hour Restaurant. I close between three and four in the morning so I can put a grand shine on everything.”
She raised her watch hand up in a sweeping motion and announced the time. “It’s three forty-five . . . forty-six now.”
“Okay,” I said.
Mrs. Claus closed the door and returned to her grandly shining silverware. I stood looking after her for a moment and then walked back to my bike. My legs were stiffening up, and my shoulders throbbed. It was unsettling to have begun aching again similar to that first bike week. I squatted and touched my toes, but the ache remained in an almost dizzying spray of needles and pins. I put my hands onto the main frame of the bike and pathetically laid my head on the leather seat. I closed my burning eyes. Bethany was singing a solo, in our church’s choir. Her chin was softer than I imagined, and I couldn’t recognize the song. It was a strange—I could call it light— dream, because it happened before I slept, but it was actually much clearer than a daydream. My daydreams have a soft edge, and the characters are in a kind of prearranged situation. People first and then the situation. I’m more or less in the daydream driver’s seat. In a full dream, I’m not in command of events, but the events and people are specific, and they absolutely wouldn’t sing a song I wasn’t sure of, any more than they’d speak in a foreign language. Light dreams are problem dreams. There are no rules. With my head on the seat, my sister delicately sang, her head raised. She might have been calling birds—I’m not sure—but off to her side, in the empty soprano section, something moved, and it had the hands of a rake. It had the long fingers o
f the bamboo pieces of rake, and arms that could stretch around altars for what it wanted. And what it wanted, in the row, was my beautiful sister, her hand raised, her eyes somewhere off, looking into a mirror that wasn’t there. I saw her clear, and the rake hands and fingers. I screamed, but the only words that came were “louder” and “Chevrolet.” And then a great light turned on, and it made my head ache, and my eyes, already burning, burned in flames. And it became dark again. And then the great light again, and . . . I opened my eyes. The light that was on and off continued. The light was no longer a part of my dream but a part of the restaurant’s parking lot. I turned to it. Pulled into a far corner was an enormous freight truck, its lights on, then off, its engine growling. The great lights blinked on and off again. This time they remained off. I stood and faced the truck. Slowly, I pointed to myself.
“Me?” I asked softly, stupidly.
The lights blinked again, and I walked toward them. I circled to the driver’s side of the cab and stopped as a deep, easy voice said, “There’s some minutes left. Come around the passenger side. Heat’s on.”
I walked around the front of the truck and climbed high into the cab. Coffee and cigarettes drifted through the air. Warm. I smiled at the driver.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Cold out there.”
He handed me his coffee cup and poured the remaining coffee from his battered thermos into it.
“Warm you up nicely,” he said.
It was a smooth, like I said, deep, honey sort of voice, and it fit him. A dark brown man, maybe sixty, with tufts of white hair underneath a round cap of brown-and-gold plaid. A neatly trimmed mustache played in his smile above heavy lips. Tired black eyes were set in a part of his face that seemed very young, almost as if the eyes and skin and bones around the eyes were new, some recent addition maybe.
“Good coffee,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Philip Wolsey,” he said, offering his hand.
“Smithson Ide,” I said. It was a bitter coffee, and I smiled over the taste of it. Mom would fill my pop’s thermos every morning with a harsh and acidy blend. “That was real coffee,” Pop said. Philip Wolsey had a thermos of the real thing, too. Wonderful aromas went with it. Toast. Bacon. This coffee was a feast of a memory. I smiled again, and my stomach growled.
“Good?”
“Oh, yes, sir. I need this.”
“Real coffee. Call me Philip.”
“My pop’s coffee was exactly like this.”
“What I do, you see, is instruct the counter worker to reboil my coffee before they fill the thermos. Trick is, you have to stop at the real places. No fast food.”
I passed the cup back to Philip, who took a sip and handed it back.
“Finish it. Randy makes fine coffee. Five minutes.”
Three more trucks pulled into the lot. A town police car. A small electrician’s van. No one got out.
“Now, if I’m out of line, you must say so, but old Mr. Curiosity has got me. That’s your bicycle?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Philip,” he said.
“Philip, yes. Mine.”
“And you are coming from somewhere. I know it.”
“I’m coming from Rhode Island, Philip. I’m coming from East Providence, Rhode Island.” I finished the last mouthful of coffee and passed the tin cup back to him. He shook it out the window and screwed it back onto the thermos. Whatever cloud cover there had been had miraculously blown off, seemingly in minutes, and the greatest starry sky of all time lit the space around Randy’s diner.
Philip checked his watch, and a big grin spread across his wide face. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one.”
Immediately the entrance lights popped on, and the old woman in the blue dress opened the door. The three truckers got out, and two policemen, and two men from the electrical van.
“Come on, young man. Breakfast is on Mr. Philip Wolsey of the Ames, Iowa, Wolseys.”
I followed him into the warm restaurant and sat in a booth by the window.
“We’ll order at the counter. Randy won’t wait on tables between midnight and five. I haven’t been through this particular route in maybe seven years, but I can’t imagine it’s any different.”
We got up and ordered bacon and eggs and pancakes instead of toast. Orange juice and coffee, which we carried to our booth.
We sipped our coffee and our juice.
“Rhode Island. Nineteen sixty-three. I carted a freightload of semolina wheat, some exotic strain of wheat, from a Mr. Tamernack to Boston’s Italian section. Brought back gourmet handmade fettuccini. Passed Providence on Route 95. Then passed it coming out. That’s quite a distance.”
“Pretty far.” My eyes were still burning, and I still felt cold. I shivered a little. Philip reached across the table and put the back of his hand on my forehead. He left it there for about thirty seconds.
“Temperature. You’re sick.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Excuse me.”
Philip walked out to his truck. Our breakfast was ready, and I picked it up at the counter and brought it to the table. Philip returned and put two aspirin in front of me.
“Oh, I’ve got some in my saddlebags,” I said.
“These are extra-strength. If you take them with food, they shouldn’t upset your stomach.”
I took them, and we ate. I could only finish about half of the food, although I was very hungry. I sat back and sipped my juice.
“So what you’re saying is that you have ridden that bicycle from Rhode Island to Ash Fork, Arizona.”
I hadn’t been saying anything, but Philip was buying my breakfast.
“I changed bikes in Providence, Indiana. I had a Raleigh, and out there now is a Moto.”
“Why?”
I thought for a second and stared at the juice in my hand.
“I think I’m on a quest. My friend Norma says I’m on a quest. I know it’s strange. I used to be fat.”
I don’t have any idea why I said that last thing, except that, being sick, I was thinking differently.
“Don’t look fat now,” Philip said. “A quest. Don Quixote in America. But there’s more.”
Philip took both of our cups up to the counter, and Randy refilled them. He carried them back.
“There are people I’ve met,” he said confidentially, “who swear that Randy never leaves. People who say they’ve never seen other help in here.”
I looked over at the blue-and-white woman.
“Is that possible?” I said.
“All things, all things are possible. What do you think your bike ride says? People would say, ‘Is that possible?’ Of course you know it is, now.”
“I guess.”
“What’s the quest?”
“That’s the thing. Norma says it’s that, but I don’t know.”
“Well,” he said seriously, holding his coffee in both hands, “a quest could be someone seeking something, or pursuing something, or even an investigation of sorts. A personal investigation.”
The black and twinkling sky had gotten red over a huge, distant bluff that I could see out the window. I told Philip what I knew. Bethany, Bill, Norma. I skipped a lot, I remembered a lot. When I finished, he said, “It’s all of it, then, young man. I’m very fond of the way your Norma thinks. I’m going to Needles, in California, on Route 40, where I’ll unload half of my freight. Dog food. Dry. Hundred-pound bags. Then I’ll cut up to Vegas and deliver the rest. I’m going to highly recommend that we put that bike of yours in the truck and you hitch with me into Needles—if that’s not cheating.”
“That’s not cheating,” I said.
62
He came out hard, a white frosting over his black and brown and white beagle colors. I couldn’t pry the thermos ice bag out of his mouth. Almost instantly his coat went damp, then soggy. I laid him on the Count’s workbench. I never noticed how long Wiggy had been. He was always in some frenzy to eat, to be pe
tted, to be played with. I rubbed him lightly from his ears to his tail.
“Wiggy,” I said.
I walked back to Paula’s kitchen and washed my hands in scalding water. Then I took one of her dish towels and emptied a tray of ice from her kitchen refrigerator into it.
“I couldn’t find the ice bag, Aunt Paula. I did this.”
“This will do,” she said.
My pop was standing vigil, and Paula began applying the ice pack.
“I kind of left the frozen stuff all over the place. I’m just gonna put it back.”
I don’t lie very well. I don’t lie very much. This was a good lie, I think, and I walked back to the garage. I bundled Wiggy up in a car blanket, grabbed a gardening shovel off the garage wall, and ran out through the backyard and around front. I crossed the street under a lamp, praying no one would see me. Shovel. Wiggy. Me. There was a vacant lot across the street, and behind that a small stream had created what could be called a little gulch. I used to play there when Paula and Count had baby-sat for me. The floor of the gulch was covered by generations of leaves, and the ground was spongy. I laid Wiggy down and began to dig. I worked frantically, and the labor made it seem less terrible. I pulled at rocks, I chopped roots. When the hole was deep enough that I had to be on my knees to work, I pulled Wiggy over by the blanket and set him down in the hole, wrapped in red plaid forever.
I haven’t thought about God for a long time. I would say twenty-five years. People who think about God probably have a circle of friends and wonder and share things about God. Things like, is there one? I have thought about God recently. In the fields, in my tent, I think of God and me and the rest of it, but back then the last thing on my mind was God. Still, after I had filled in his hole and patted it down and even redistributed a layer of the oak and maple and birch leaves over that silly dog, I got onto my knees and said, “Dear God, please do something to make Wiggy happy. He was a nice dog, and now Count’s sick.” I kept my eyes tight for a moment, then ran like a madman back to my uncle’s garage.