“That’s it. Summer Feelin’,” he said. “Hello there, Summer Feelin’. You’ve got a dog?”
“It’s Bill Quinn,” said Knute. It was dark and she knew there was a chance Hosea wouldn’t recognize him, but Hosea had a look on his face, a faraway look, and it didn’t seem right, for some reason, to lie to him.
“Is it?” he said. He shook his head and smiled. “They come,” he said, “and they go.”
“I’m trying to find Max,” said Knute. “Have you seen him?”
“No, I haven’t,” said Hosea. “Not recently. Why? Where’d he go?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly, that’s why I’m trying to find him.”
“You don’t think he’s left …” Hosea glanced at S.F., who was busy playing with Bill Quinn “… left Algren?”
“No,” said Knute, “I don’t think so. I’m going to check at his house. Jo hasn’t seen him, but you know … he might be there.”
Hosea looked like a ghost in the moonlight. His face was as white as the letters spelling Canada on his red shirt. “What if he’s gone?” he said. Knute looked back at Summer Feelin’. She didn’t want to get into this with her listening.
“I’m going to find him. I’m pretty sure he’s around.”
Hosea looked like he was about to cry. Why she was trying to reassure him that Max was around, when Max was her boyfriend, and the father of her child, who was sitting right there, was beyond her.
“Don’t worry, Hosea,” she said. “It’ll be okay. I’ll find him. He’s got a broken leg.” She started driving away slowly. “Okay, see ya, Hosea, see ya at work tomorrow. Don’t worry!” she yelled out the window, “I’ll find him!”
Hosea walked home and sat on his front steps for a while. He could see part of the white horse decal on the water tower, sort of shimmering in the black sky and he looked forward to seeing the whole thing against the filter-orange sky of early morning. “I hope you find him,” he said out loud, remembering S.F.’s smiling face in the back seat. It was a pure thought, a simple wish, with no strings attached. He truly did not care about his fifteen hundred at this point. He hoped on every star and flying horse in the universe that S.F. would find her dad. He thought of calling Lorna to tell her that everything was, once again, up in the air. Max was missing. He’d yelled at his buddy Tom, and made a fool of himself. Why would he want to tell Lorna that? he asked himself. He went inside and lay down on his bed and wept.
When Knute and S.F. got to Jo’s house, Jo came lumbering out to the driveway and said, “No, he’s not here, Knutie, I don’t know where he is.” It was really late by then, after midnight, and Knute told S.F. to lie down on the back seat with Bill Quinn, and try to go to sleep. She got out of the car and lit a cigarette and Jo said, “What happened, anyway? Why’d he take off?” So Knute leaned against the car and told her exactly what had happened, and she said, “Oh for Christ’s sake, Knutie, he loves you, it’s so fucking simple. Let it be! He hasn’t run away from you. It’s the goddamn guilt that’s killing him.”
“Oh,” said Knute, “he’s running away from the guilt of running away?”
“Yeah,” said Jo, “and all the work in front of him trying to rebuild your trust, which he wants, and S.F.’s, and all that very difficult shit. And believe me, it’s difficult. He hasn’t run away from you!”
“Okay,” Knute said. “Then where do I find him?”
“How the hell should I know?” said Jo. “Wouldn’t I have found him myself if I knew? The poor kid has a broken leg, after all, he can’t have gone far.”
“If he was walking,” said Knute.
“Right,” said Jo, “and I’m sure he was. His private helicopter is in the shop and it’s his chauffeur’s day off. Don’t be ridiculous, Knute. Even if he’d have tried hitchhiking to God knows where, do you honestly think anybody would pick up a guy in a cast and a skirt and a ballcap? No shirt, no suitcase? Trust me, he walked.”
Knute threw her cigarette down and ground it out with the heel of her boot.
“Listen,” said Jo, “why don’t we have a drink and then I’ll come looking with you?”
“Just bring it along, Jo. Let’s go.”
They decided to drive along the country roads around Algren, circling farther and farther out for a few miles, and then circling back in, going over the same ground again. It seemed as logical a plan as any. They’d been driving for a while when Knute decided to ask Jo about her habit of blasting down Main Street on her combine and sharing a drink with her dead husband over at the cemetery. “That combine thing, Jo, do you ever …?”
Jo looked at her and sighed. “I don’t do it anymore,” she said. Knute nodded and they kept driving. “You know,” said Jo, sitting in the front with Knute, and resting her arm on the windowsill, “when Max was nine I took him to Cooperstown.”
“Oh yeah?” said Knute. “What’s that?” She thought Jo had been too drunk and fat to get out of the house all those years. That’s how the story had gone, anyway. She wondered how much she really knew about her little town and the people living in it.
“Cooperstown,” she said. “Cooperstown, New York. The Baseball Hall of Fame is there.”
“Oh,” said Knute, “keep looking out your side.” S.F. and Bill Quinn were fast asleep in the back seat.
“Max was so excited,” continued Jo. “He’d say, oh, four days ’til we get there, and then, you know, two days, one day, six hours, three hours, like that. And, you know, we had driven for days and days and finally we got there, to Cooperstown, and Max didn’t want to go to the museum! We had gone all that way for him, you know, he loved baseball and this was a dream come true for him, the livin’ end, and then he balked. The little fucker, I thought then. What’s going on? So I said ‘Okay then, let’s have something to eat’ and he chose a restaurant a little way down the street from the hall of fame, so we could just sort of see the flagpost that was in front of it, but not the actual building. And then he just farted around in that damn café for an hour and a half, making up excuses not to go to the g.d. hall of fame! So, you know, we took a little trolley ride around the town, it’s a really pretty little place, just up this windy road from Woodstock, actually. Anyway, a fun little trolley ride packed with other tourists and some local people. And finally I thought, Okay, we have to go to that hall of fame now. We just have to. So I told Max, ‘Okay, we’re getting off this trolley at the next stop and we are going into that hall of fame. End of story. You know, the damn thing’s gonna close for the day before we get in.’ So we get off and we walk up to the front steps of the building and Max stops. He just stops and stands there staring at it. And I take his hand, you know, c’mon, c’mon. But he stands there and he starts to cry. Now I’m totally fed up, but, you know, a little concerned, and I say ‘Max sweetheart, what is the problem here?’ And he says, ‘If I go in now, it’ll soon all be over, like a dream. And I don’t want it to end.’”
Jo shook her head and laughed. “Crazy little fucker, eh?”
“Well,” asked Knute, “did you eventually go in?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “We did.”
“Was it … did it work out okay?”
“Yeah,” said Jo. “We went over every single square inch of that place. I followed Max around and he covered it all, we were there for hours and hours, they had to kick us out at closing time. He was in heaven, that’s for sure.”
“Did he cry when you had to go?” asked Knute.
“No,” said Jo. “No, I don’t think he did. He was perfectly content, as I recall.”
“I thought you never left the house when you were, uh, when Max was little.”
“That’s just another lie, Knutie,” said Jo. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”