Black leather jacket and motorcycle boots.
Brando Dean Bogart all rolled into one.
When she pulled up alongside me and stared at me with those dark dark shades, I found myself losing control. Some force pressed my foot to the gas pedal, brought out my best Robert Ryan grin, made me resolve to give the mystery lady the run of her life.
We raced.
I could smell wind and river and hot car oil.
I could see an empty black slab of road and bouncing headlight patterns and diamondlike eyes of cats and raccoons hiding in the grass on the piney side of the strip.
I could hear wind and motor rev and dual exhausts and rush and roar of speed speed speed.
We wouldn’t make a decent can of dog food if we crashed now. She looked straight ahead.
Both hands on the wheel. Roaring into the night.
Pulling ahead. Eighth of a car length.
Quarter of a car length. She was going to leave me behind.
I was standing on the sonofabitch. I was yelling at the sonofabitch. I was foaming and frothing at the sonofabitch. Faster faster.
Crazy was what I was.
I regained some of my momentum. My hood pulled even with her rear fender. Then my hood was even with her passenger door.
I raised my ass from my seat, pushing myself against the wheel, hoping that this position would somehow add to the velocity.
I pulled up to her front fender.
Wind taste. My Lucky butt so tiny it was burning my lips. I spat it out, the flame exploding into a million minor meteorites, burning my cheek and hair. Not that I cared. I just kept pushing, willing.
For the first time, she looked over at me. And then she somehow put even more power into her car.
And then I saw her. Not the mystery woman but the woman running down the piney hill to the blacktop.
She came up out of the small gully, looking crazed. She was waving her arms. Her face was smudgy with dirt and what appeared to be blood.
Her blouse had been ripped so you could see her white bra and the blood smeared on her shoulder and chest. Her jeans were ripped out at the knees.
She looked like an animal who has just survived a cruel ordeal.
The funny thing was, I didn’t recognize her at first. I had to cut back my speed so I wouldn’t run over her if she suddenly lunged onto the blacktop. That took most of my attention. The black Ford raced on ahead me, a shadow among shadows, vanishing.
My Ford bucked, swerved, screeched, whined, and bucked some more before I could fight it to a stop on the wrong side of the road. By now, the woman’s image had finally registered. Mary! It was Mary!
I jumped out of the car and ran back to where she’d been.
But she wasn’t there any longer.
I was alone on the blacktop. Prairie moon. Bay of coyote. Distant odor of skunk. Alone.
I ran up and down the shoulder, frantically calling her name. My legs wanted me to sit down. Bringing the ragtop from 100 mph to zero so quickly hadn’t been good for me or the car.
I ran way past where she’d been. No sign of her.
I looked up at the pines. Had she gone back into the forest? This particular patch went on for miles. Finding her, if she had set her mind on hiding, would be impossible.
Something moved on the edge of my vision, something to the right. But when I turned to look all I saw, about three hundred feet away, was a large culvert. I could hear water trickling from it. There’d been a lot of rain recently.
She peeked out again. That’s what I’d seen moments ago. She might have been a frightened deer, scared of the nearby human, uncertain of his motives.
She saw me. Our eyes met for a second.
She still looked wild, bestial. And then she retreated back inside the culvert. I imagined her racing through the culvert and out the other side to the riverbank.
I had to grab her quickly.
I hurried down the gully, through the knee-high grasses, to the culvert itself. The interior smell was terrible. Rancid water, weeds, animal feces.
She crouched in the center. I could barely see her.
“I want to help you, Mary. Please don’t run away.”
It really. was like talking to a frightened animal.
I was afraid she’d bolt at any moment.
“Please, Mary.”
I started into the culvert on hands and knees.
I could feel the sodden waste soak my trousers and coat my palms. I moved inch by inch.
She starting moving too. Every time I moved, she moved. Back.
“Mary. You need help.”
Our game continued. I’d move forward; she’d move backward. The stench kept getting worse.
She made her move without any warning whatsoever. She had room to turn around, and turn around she did. And immediately started scrambling from the culvert.
She was gone before I could get moving. When I crawled out to the riverbank, I saw her stumbling away far downstream. After the darkness of the culvert, the stars seemed especially low and bright and numerous. Dark water gently lapped the bank.
I ran after her. She helped me by looking over her shoulder every few yards and by stumbling several times.
The river’s edge was sand and hard mud. On a warm night like this, you’d usually find a fisherman or two. The rutted mud explained her stumbling. I stumbled a few times myself.
And then I closed on her. By this time, we were both out of breath and had slowed down measurably. I came dragging up behind her and took her shoulder and pulled her to a stop.
She screamed.
I pulled her to me and clamped my hand over her mouth.
She started kicking me in the shins. It hurt like hell.
“Mary, what’s wrong with you?” I said. “It’s me, McCain. McCain, Mary.”
Then I saw something awful. Something impossible. Those eyes of hers. There was no recognition in them.
Exhausted, she’d quit kicking me. Quit wrestling inside my grasp. I let go of her, took my hand from her mouth.
“Mary,” I said, “don’t you know who I am?”
She looked at me with the frank, uncomprehending gaze of a child. In a very quiet voice, no melodrama whatsoever, she said, “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
Part III
Sixteen
“You’re saying she has amnesia?” Miriam Travers said.
Dr. Watkins pawed at his jowly face.
He still wore a black rinse on his once-gray hair and still filled his showerhead with aftershave lotion.
He stank of it the way frontier docs, according to legend, had stunk of John Barleycorn. His wife had died two years ago. He was sixty-four and had just started dating. There were a lot of gentle jokes about his love life.
“Now that’s one of those five-dollar words I hate to use,” he said, fiddling with his stethoscope. The only hospital in Black River Falls was a sixteen-bed affair. If you were very bad off, you went to Cedar Rapids; worse than that, you went to Iowa City. He peered down at Mary, asleep in her hospital bed. She’d been cleaned up but you could still see bruises. “She’s had some kind of terrible shock. So right now she’s not remembering too good.”
“But she didn’t even recognize me!”
Miriam said. She’d held back tears for quite a while now. It was 2ccjj A.M. and she was spent. She had a very sick husband at home and a daughter whose state had yet to be determined.
I slid my arm around her. She leaned against it, frail and weary.
“Again, Miriam, we don’t know what happened. But obviously something pretty bad did. Amnesia, as they like to call it on television, comes in all kinds of forms. It rarely lasts very long. I expect in a day or two she’ll be saying hello to you when you walk into the room.”
“But where has she been? What happened to her?”
Miriam said.
Those were the questions of the evening. I’d brought her straight to the hospital. She’d slept most of the way. Not once had she shown any recognition of me. A couple of times, I wondered if she was still alive.