It got on to late afternoon. Sunlight drifted in between buildings, and shadows overreached the streets. Everything was normal, and then everything got scary.
I was just poking along, looking in store windows, checking the show at the movie house, when, ahead of me, Jesse walked toward a Golden Hawk. He was maybe a block and a half away, but it was Jesse, sure as God made sunshine. It was a Golden Hawk. There was no way of mistaking that car. Hawks were high-priced sets of wheels, and Studebaker never sold that many.
I yelled and ran. Jesse waited beside the car, looking sort of puzzled. When I pulled up beside him, he grinned.
“It’s happening again,” he said, and his voice sounded amused, but not mean. Sunlight made his face reddish, but shadow put his legs and feet in darkness. “You believe me to be a gentleman named Jesse Still.” Behind him, shadows of buildings told that night was on its way. Sunset happens quick on the prairies.
And I said, “Jesse, what in the hell are you doing in Sheridan?”
And he said, “Young man, you are not looking at Jesse Still.” He said it quiet and polite, and he thought he had a point. His voice was smooth and cultured, so he sure didn’t sound like Jesse. His hair hung combed out, and he wore clothes that never came from a dry goods. His jeans were soft looking and expensive. His boots were tooled. They kind of glowed in the dusk. The Golden Hawk didn’t have a dust speck on it, and the interior had never carried a tool, or a car part, or a sack of feed. It just sparkled. I almost believed him, and then I didn’t.
“You’re fooling with me.”
“On the contrary,” he said, real soft. “Jesse Still is fooling with me, although he doesn’t mean to. We’ve never met.” He didn’t exactly look nervous, but he looked impatient. He climbed in the Stude and started the engine. It purred like racing tune. “This is a large and awfully complex world,” he said, “and Mr. Still will probably tell you the same. I’ve been told we look like brothers.”
I wanted to say more, but he waved real friendly and pulled away. The flat and racy back end of the Hawk reflected one slash of sunlight, then rolled into shadow. If I’d had a hot car, I’d have gone out hunting him. It wouldn’t have done a lick of good, but doing something would be better than doing nothing.
I stood sort of shaking and amazed. Life had just changed somehow, and it wasn’t going to change back. There wasn’t a thing in the world to do, so I went to get some supper.
The Dog had signed in at the café:
Road Dog
The Bobbsey Twins Attend The Motor Races
And—I sat chewing roast beef and mashed potatoes.
And—I saw how the guy in the Hawk might be lying, and that Jesse was a twin.
And—I finally saw what a chancy, dicey world this was, because without meaning to, exactly, and without even knowing it was happening, I had just run up against The Road Dog.
It was a night of dreams. Dreams wouldn’t let me go. The dancing ghost tried to tell me Jesse was triplets. The ghosts among the crosses begged rides into nowhere, rides down the long tunnel of night that ran past lands of dreams, but never turned off to those lands. It all came back: the crazy summer, the running, running, running behind the howl of engines. The Road Dog drawled with Jesse’s voice, and then The Dog spoke cultured. The girl at the five-and-dime held out a gentle hand, then pulled it back. I dreamed of a hundred roadside joints, bars, cafés, old-fashioned filling stations with grease pits. I dreamed of winter wind, and the dark, dark days of winter; and of nights when you hunch in your room because it’s a chore too big to bundle up and go outside.
I woke to an early dawn and slurped coffee at the bakery, which kept open because they had to make morning doughnuts. The land lay all around me, but it had nothing to say. I counted my money and figured miles.
I climbed in the DeSoto, thinking I had never got around to giving it a name. The road unreeled toward the west. It ended in Seattle, where I sold my car. Everybody said there was going to be a war, and I wasn’t doing anything anyway. I joined the Navy.
III.
What with him burying cars and raising hell, Jesse never wrote to me in summer. He was surely faithful in winter, though. He wrote long letters printed in a clumsy hand. He tried to cheer me up, and so did Matt Simons.
The Navy sent me to boot camp and diesel school, then to a motor pool in San Diego. I worked there three and a half years, sometimes even working on ships if the ships weren’t going anywhere. A sunny land and smiling ladies lay all about, but the ladies mostly fell in love by ten at night and got over it by dawn. Women in the bars were younger and prettier than back home. There was enough clap to go around.
“The business is growing like jimsonweed,” Jesse wrote toward Christmas of ’62. “I buried fourteen cars this summer, and one of them was a Kraut.” He wrote a whole page about his morals. It didn’t seem right to stick a crap crate in the ground beside real cars. At the same time, it was bad business not to. He opened a special corner of the cemetery, and pretended it was exclusive for foreign iron.
“And Mike Tarbush got to drinking,” he wrote. “I’m sad to say we planted Judith.”
Mike never had a minute’s trouble with that Merc. Judith behaved like a perfect lady until Mike turned upside down. He backed across a parking lot at night, rather hasty, and drove backward up the guy wire of a power pole. It was the only rollover wreck in history that happened at twenty miles an hour.
“Mike can’t stop discussing it,” Jesse wrote. “He’s never caught The Dog, neither, but he ain’t stopped trying. He wheeled in here in a beefed-up ’57 Olds called Sally. It goes like stink and looks like a Hereford.”
Home seemed far away, though it couldn’t have been more than thirty-six hours by road for a man willing to hang over the wheel. I wanted to take a leave and drive home, but knew it better not happen. Once I got there, I’d likely stay.
“George Pierson at the feed store says he’s going to file a paternity suit against Potato,” Jesse wrote. “The pups are cute, and there’s a family resemblance.”
It came to me then why I was homesick. I surely missed the land, but even more I missed the people. Back home, folks were important enough that you knew their names. When somebody got messed up or killed, you felt sorry. In California, nobody knew nobody. They just swept up broken glass and moved right along. I should have meshed right in. I had made my rating and was pushing a rich man’s car, a ’57 hemi Chrysler, but never felt it fit.
“Don’t pay it any mind,” Jesse wrote when I told about meeting Road Dog. “I’ve heard about a guy who looks the same as me. Sometimes stuff like that happens.”
And that was all he ever did say.
Nineteen sixty-three ended happy and hopeful. Matt Simons wrote a letter. Sam Winder bought a big Christmas card, and everybody signed it with little messages. Even my old boss at the filling station signed, “Merry Xmas, Jed—Keep It Between The Fence Posts.” My boss didn’t hold it against me that I left. In Montana a guy is supposed to be free to find out what he’s all about.
Christmas of ’63 saw Jesse pleased as a bee in clover. A lady named Sarah moved in with him. She waitressed at the café, and Jesse’s letter ran pretty short. He’d put twenty-three cars under that year, and bought more acreage. He ordered a genuine marble gravestone for Miss Molly. “Sue Ellen is a real darling,” Jesse wrote about the Linc. “That marker like to weighed a ton. We just about bent a back axle bringing it from the railroad.”
From Christmas of ’63 to January of ’64 was just a few days, but they marked an awful downturn for Jesse. His letter was more real to me than all the diesels in San Diego.