Jesse killed himself, timing his tiredness and starvation just right, but I was willing to let it go, and Matt was, too.
“We’ll go along with you,” Matt said. “But they’ll sell this place for taxes. Somebody will start digging sometime.”
“Not for years and years. It’s deeded to me, Jesse fixed up papers. They’re on the kitchen table.” Mike turned toward the trailer. “We’re going to do this right, and there’s not much time.”
We found a blanket and a quilt in the trailer. Mike opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out snapshots. Some looked pretty new, and some were faded: a man and woman in old-fashioned clothes, a picture of two young boys in Sunday suits, pictures of cars and road signs, and pictures of two women who were maybe Sue Ellen and Sarah. Mike piled them like a deck of cards, snapped a rubber band around them, and checked the trailer. He picked up a pair of pale yellow sunglasses that some racers use for night driving. “You guys see anything else?”
“His dogs,” Matt said. “He had pictures of his dogs.”
We found them, under a pillow, and it didn’t pay to think why they were there. Then we went to the Linc and wrapped Jesse real careful in the blanket. We spread the quilt over him, and laid his stuff on the floor beside the accelerator. Then Mike remembered something. He half unwrapped Jesse, went through his pockets, then wrapped him back up. He took Jesse’s keys and left them hanging in the ignition.
The three of us stood beside the Linc, and Matt cleared his throat.
“It’s my place to say it,” Mike told him. “This was my best friend.” Mike took off his cap. Moonlight lay thin on his bald head.
“A lot of preachers will be glad this man is gone, and that’s one good thing you can say for him. He drove nice people crazy. This man was a hellion, pure and simple; but what folks don’t understand is, hellions have their place. They put everything on the line over nothing very much. Most guys worry so much about dying, they never do any living. Jesse was so alive with living, he never gave dying any thought. This man would roll ninety just to get to a bar before it closed.” Mike kind of choked up and stopped to listen. From the graveyard came the echoes, of engines, and from Highway 2 rose the thrum of a straight-eight crankshaft whipping in its bed. Dim light covered the graveyard, like a hundred sets of parking lights and not the moon.
“This man kept adventure alive, when, everyplace else, it’s dying. There was nothing ever smug or safe about this man. If he had fears, he laughed. This man never hit a woman or crossed a friend. He did tie the can on Betty Lou one night, but can’t be blamed. It was really The Dog who did that one. Jesse never had a problem until he climbed into that Studebaker.”
So Mike had known all along. At least Mike knew something.
“I could always run even with Jesse,” Mike said, “but I never could beat The Dog. The Dog could clear any track. And in a damn Studebaker.”
“But a very swift Studebaker,” Matt muttered, like a Holy Roller answering the preacher.
“Bored and stroked and rowdy,” Mike said, “and you can say the same for Jesse. Let that be the final word. Amen.”
IV.
A little spark of flame dwelt at the stack of the dozer, and distant mountains lay whitecapped and prophesied winter. Mike filled the graves quick. Matt got rakes and a shovel. I helped him mound the graves with only moonlight to go on, while Mike went to the trailer. He made coffee.
“Drink up and git,” Mike told us when he poured the coffee. “Jesse’s got some friends who need to visit, and it will be morning pretty quick.”
“Let them,” Matt said. “We’re no hindrance.”
“You’re a smart man,” Mike told Matt, “but your smartness makes you dumb. You started to hinder the night you stopped driving beyond your headlights.” Mike didn’t know how to say it kind, so he said it rough. His red mustache and bald head made him look like a pirate in a picture.
“You’re saying that I’m getting old.” Matt has known Mike long enough not to take offense.
“Me, too,” Mike said, “but not that old. When you get old, you stop seeing them. Then you want to stop seeing them. You get afraid for your hide.”
“You stop imagining?”
“Shitfire,” Mike said, “you stop seeing. Imagination is something you use when you don’t have eyes.” He pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and was chewing it before he ever got it lit. “Ghosts have lost it all. Maybe they’re the ones the Lord didn’t love well enough. If you see them, but ain’t one, maybe you’re important.”
Matt mulled that, and so did I. We’ve both wailed a lot of road for some sort of reason.
“They’re kind of rough,” Matt said about ghosts. “They hitch rides, but don’t want ’em. I’ve stopped for them and got laughed at. They fool themselves, or maybe they don’t.”
“It’s a young man’s game,” Matt said.
“It’s a game guys got to play. Jesse played the whole deck. He was who he was, whenever he was it. That’s the key. That’s the reason you slug cops when you gotta. It looks like Jesse died old, but he lived young longer than most. That’s the real mystery. How does a fella keep going?”
“Before we leave,” I said, “how long did you know that Jesse was The Dog?”
“Maybe a year and a half. About the time he started running crazy.”
“And never said a word?”
Mike looked at me like something you’d wipe off your boot. “Learn to ride your own fence,” he told me. “It was Jesse’s business.” Then he felt sorry for being rough. “Besides,” he said, “we were having fun. I expect that’s all over now.”
Matt followed me to the Chrysler. We left the cemetery, feeling tired and mournful. I shoved the car onto Highway 2, heading toward Matt’s place.
“Wring it out once for old times?”
“Putter along,” Matt said. “I just entered the putter stage of life, and may as well practice doing it.”
In my mirrors a stream of headlights showed, then vanished one by one as cars turned into the graveyard. The moon had left the sky. Over toward South Dakota was a suggestion of first faint morning light. Mounded graves lay at my elbow, and so did Canada. On my left the road south ran fine and fast as a man can go. Mist rose from the roadside ditches, and maybe there was movement in the mist, maybe not.
There’s little more to tell. Through fall and winter and spring and summer, I drove to Sheridan. The Mormon turned out to be a pretty good man, for a Mormon. I kept at it, and drove through another autumn and another winter. Linda got convinced. We got married in the spring, and I expected trouble. Married people are supposed to fight, but nothing like that ever happened. We just worked hard, got our own place in a few years, and Linda birthed two girls. That disappointed the Mormon, but was a relief to me.
And in those seasons of driving, when the roads were good for twenty miles an hour in the snow, or eighty under sun, the road stood empty except for a couple times. Miss Molly showed up once early on to say a bridge was out. She might have showed up another time. Squinchy little taillights winked one night when it was late and I was highballing. Some guy jackknifed a Freightliner, and his trailer lay across the road.
But I saw no other ghosts. I’d like to say that I saw the twins, John and Jesse, standing by the road, giving the high sign or dancing, but it never happened.
I did think of Jesse, though, and thought of one more thing. If Matt was right, then I saw how Jesse had to die before I got home. He had to, because I believed in Road Dog. My belief would have been just enough to bring John forward, and that would have been fatal, too. If either one of them became too strong, they both of them lost. So Jesse had to do it.