My slog back up to the cabin proved worthy of a brief PBS documentary, complete with process shots of looming black hills closing in on the Jeep's tiny headlights and time-lapse photography of the hapless vehicle negotiating treacherous mudslides, but I made it. The whole time, I was thinking about settlers carving their way into this country for the first time, how hard, how damned near impossible, it had been. Even in my grandfather's time, most people were like birds that never strayed far from their birth tree; a trip of a hundred miles was a major undertaking.
As I came around the bend in the lake, I saw the shadowy figure sitting on my porch.
"You walked here?" I asked minutes later, metal popping behind me as the Jeep's engine cooled. My night, apparently, for conversations on porches.
"Waded is more like it."
"And it looks like you brought about half the mountain with you."
Eldon took off his shoes, stomped his feet hard against the porch floor, and we went inside. I motioned for the shoes and, when he handed them over, tossed them in the sink. Poured a shot for me from the bottle there on the counter, looked up at him. He nodded, so I got another glass. I heard a moan, starting low and rising in pitch, and glanced outside to see tree limbs on the move: Wind was building again.
"How are things at the camp?" I asked.
"Could have been worse. Minor injuries, some broken windows. About half the storage building got taken out by a tree. Lot of the stores, bulk flour and so on, are likely ruined."
"But everyone's okay."
"They're a tough bunch up there. Take more than a storm to throw them."
I hauled myself bodily out of my thoughts, how I'd got to know the group, what they'd already been through both individually and collectively, to ask: "Been waiting around long?"
"Not too long. Easy to lose track of time here. Few hours, I guess."
"Then you have to be hungry."
I pulled bread, sliced ham, pickles, mustard, and horseradish out of the refrigerator, put together a couple of sandwiches for us. Eldon had his down in about three bites. Then he grabbed the bottle off the counter and poured for us.
"I came here-"
"I know."
He looked at me, utterly calm and not unduly surprised, but wondering.
"No other reason you'd be here."
He nodded. "I can't go back, John. My mind tells me I should, I know that's the smart thing to do, the only real solution. But something inside me, something as strong as all that logic and good sense, screams No! at the very notion."
It struck me again, as it had so often in my time as a therapist and in years since, how few of us actually make choices in our lives, how few of us have choices to make. So much is mapped out: in our DNA, our class and temperaments, the way we're raised, the influence of those we meet. And so much of the rest is sheer chance-where the currents take us. However much we believe or feign to believe that we're free agents, however we dress it up with debates on nature, nurture, socialization or destiny, that's what it comes down to.
"Where will you go?" I asked.
"Hey, the invisible man, right? Dans la nuit tous les chats and all that."
"Or as Chandler said, 'Be missing.'"
"Exactly."
"It won't be easy."
"Not as easy as it used to be, for sure. Too many electronic fingers in too many pots now. But I've been half off the grid my whole life. This is just about pushing it a little further-a matter of degree."
"They won't stop looking."
"For the most part, they already have. The documents are out there-warrants, arrest record, and all that. They'll stay. But only as history, and just as immaterial."
"You'll be out there as well, Eldon. A ghost. Nothing you can hold on to."
"I know." He smiled. "I feel lighter already."
"You should at least talk to-"
"Isaiah, yes. I had the same thought. Get the advice of an expert on the cracks and crawlspaces of society."
"And?"
"We talked. I've been well advised. He's a remarkable person, John. They all are." I had fetched a couple of blankets from the closet and thrown them to him; he'd settled under them on the couch. "As, my friend, are you." He peered out, Kilroy-like. "There is no way I can ever say how much your friendship has meant to me."
"There's no way you'd ever need to."
When I got up the next morning, Eldon and bike were gone. The banjo case lay on the kitchen table. Eldon had scribbled a note on the back of a magazine I'd been intending to read for about a year now: She always said that instruments dont belong to people, we just borrow them for a while. I sat over coffee, thinking about when Eldon and I first met, about that time in the roadhouse out on State Road 41 when he'd refused to fight the drunk who'd smashed his guitar, about the music he and Val used to play together. About how much a man can lose and how much music he can make with what he has left.
I drove in to work to the accompaniment of a wide range of static on the radio, low bands to high, weather playing havoc with that the same as it was with everything else. Black and charcoal clouds hung just over the treetops. It was nine but in the half-light looked more like five, and as I scrabbled and slid along, gearing down, gearing up, momentarily I had the sensation of being underground.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The drive was followed by an ordinary day in which, beginning the moment my feet hit the town's asphalt a little past ten, I dealt with:
Jed Baxter, who wanted to know where the hell Eldon had gone to;
Mayor Sims, who came bearing go-cups of coffee then casually got around to asking if it might be possible for "the office" to do a background check on Miss Susan Craft up Elaine way;
Dolly Grunwald from the nursing home, brought in by one of her nurses, with the complaint that they were poisoning her out there; and Leland Luckett, who parked his shiny new Honda out front of City Hall with the butt of the buzzard who'd flown into the windshield pointed to the door of our office. He'd just been driving along when the thing flew straight at him, right into the windshield. Like a damn missile, he said. It was quite a sight. Thing was the size of a turkey, and stuck in there so firmly that it took the two of us to pull it loose. I'm still not sure what else Leland thought I could do for him. In exasperation I finally asked if he thought my arresting the damn bird, dead as it was, would be a deterrent.
Afterward I walked across the street to the diner for coffee and a slice of What-the-hell pie. Most places would just call it Pie of the Day, something like that, but Jay and wife Margie took notice of how many people said "Just a cup of coffee" only to add "What the hell-a piece of pie, too." Not surprisingly, since everyone had been watching out the front windows, most of the conversation was about Leland and his buzzard.
Margie came out from behind the counter to take my order and ask if I'd heard about Milly Bates. Everybody'd noticed how shaky she looked at Billy's funeral. Not just in pain or overwhelmed, Margie said; it was like you could see through her. Then this morning her folks'd gone over to check on her and she was gone. House wide open, no note, nothing.
"What about the car?" I asked.
"In the driveway. But it hadn't been running for weeks, someone said. The sheriff-" She stopped, realizing her blunder, embarrassed by it, but for me, not herself. "Lonnie, I mean-is checking on it. Coffee?"
"Coffee."
"And…?"
"Just coffee. To go."
I drove out that way with the coffee in the cup holder on my dash. At some point the lid slipped and coffee sloshed over the dash and floorboard, and I barely noticed. I was busily trying to put things together in my head, things that in all likelihood didn't even belong together, a confused young man's death, an old woman who'd lost everything, now Milly.
Lonnie's car stood by the house with the driver's door open and its owner nowhere to be seen. It was his wife's car really, but after giving up the job and Jeep he'd "taken to borrowing it," and after close to a year of that, Shirley had gone out without saying a word to him and bought a new one just like it. The door to the house was open, too. Inside, flies shot back and forth like tiny buzz bombs, and I followed them to the kitchen where a table full of food brought around by neighbors and friends-a roasted chicken, casseroles, slices of ham, dinner rolls, cakes-sat mostly untouched. The coffeemaker was still on, with a few inches of coffee that looked like an oil spill; I turned it off. On the refrigerator alongside were a shopping list, discount coupons, a magnetic doll surrounded by clothing and accessories, also magnetic, and an old Valentine's Day card.