THIS IS A TERRIFIC READ, A GREAT NEW YORKER STORY!
A King Alone
By Rachel Kushner The New Yorker
He was on a low road next to the French Broad, which divided the town in half. He thought about how with small cities, like this one, that were split in two by a river, you added the word “West” or the word “East” to the half that was less desirable, the half that was not the commercial center.
He had been on this road before, twenty years earlier. The damp and teeming feel was familiar and unchanged. There was almost no development here, just tall trees and railroad tracks. His windows were down and the river felt close, as if its green water were breathing on his skin.
He arrived at the railroad crossing—he remembered this crossing—as the gates were descending. He waited. The sound of a train horn blasted into the car. As the train appeared and rumbled past—industrial, Norfolk Southern, tankers of chemicals connected one to the next like hot-dog links—a man hobbled up to the driver’s-side window.
Where had he come from? Who knew. People seemed to pop up on a roadside from out of nowhere.
The man’s mouth moved as though his lips were dancers.
George heard nothing at all. The train was moving past, tanker by tanker, and the sound of it drowned out every other.
The man kept talking.
His chin was stubbled in gray, his gut sloping forward like a stretched water balloon. He was on crutches, missing the bottom half of one leg. He held the crutches and also a full bottle of beer, as if this were no challenge.
The man and George were possibly the same age. People aged differently. George was sixty but felt undeterred in his habits and pursuits. He had both his legs, for starters.
George pointed to his ears and shook his head to indicate that he couldn’t hear the man’s words, and the man nodded and stopped moving his lips.
The two of them, George in his car, the man resting his armpits on the supports of his crutches, watched the train slide past like they were watching a movie.
When the caboose appeared, orangey-red—some things, not that many, do not change—the man spoke again.
“Can you take me to the other side of the river? Just up to River Bar—it’s close.”
George said that was fine. He had always picked people up. It was like they knew. They understood that they could just walk up to his car window at a stoplight. Crutch up to the window.
The man was impressively nimble getting in the car with the crutches and the missing half leg and his beer bottle, as though he’d been managing this way for some time.
The gates went up. As they set off, the man raised his bottle in a toast, the turbulence of the uneven train tracks sloshing beer onto the car seat. George did not care, had never cared about anything material and certainly not this Ford Crown Victoria, which looked like an undercover cop car.
“Did you know most people are dehydrated?” the man said. “Ninety per cent of Americans, is what I read. All these thirsty people. Not me.” He drained the beer bottle.
George did not ask the man what had happened to his leg. He sensed that he would hear about it without prompting.
A very long train was stopped on the tracks one afternoon, the man told George. He was walking. He had always walked to River Bar before the accident. He waited and waited for the train to move so he could cross. There was no engineer, no one in sight, and happy hour at River Bar was almost over—you get a shot and a beer for three dollars, he said. He had six bucks, and he could get a little credit from Smitty, the bartender who was working that night.
He figured he’d step over the linkage between train cars, do it quickly. Why stand there getting eaten alive by tiger mosquitoes when he could be inside, under a fan, drinking with his buddies? He’d got one of his legs up over the linkage when the train lurched forward and started rolling. It picked up speed, with him trapped under it.
He detailed to George what had happened next. There was a tourniquet fashioned from a shirt. A nephew of Smitty’s who worked in the emergency room. A sum he was awarded, eventually, thanks to a lawyer from Charlotte. An ex-wife who bled him of the money as if he had a hollow leg. And look, he said, I don’t have any leg.
He had told this story—the bar, the train, the shirt, the lawyer, the ex-wife, the hollow leg—probably eight hundred times.
River Bar was a shack painted sky blue, with a dark, open doorway. It looked like the kind of outbuilding where you’d expect to find old gas cans and a lawnmower. There were voices audible from inside. People relaxing and drinking in this tiny shed. The man thanked George for the ride and got out of the car and started crutching. At the entrance, he shouted, “Honey, I’m home!”
Honey, I’m home. It was like in that movie with Jack Nicholson, pretending he’s a cheerful nineteen-fifties-style husband when really he’s a monster and a murderer. But maybe that was a nineteen-fifties husband, George considered. That movie, “The Shining,” only pretended to be horror. It was really the horror of your typical family. Men yelling and blaming, and women on their eggshells, padding around.
He’d heard this line just a week earlier; it was as if there were a regional conspiracy of men yelling, “Honey, I’m home!” It had happened at a liquor store near the bass lake in north Florida where George had gone to fish. He was buying bait. At the counter was a display of Fireball, on military discount. The clerks were from India, and they were behind bulletproof glass, because the place had been held up repeatedly. This was on the Georgia border, near a huge state mental hospital. Some character walked in and grabbed a bottle of Fireball and yelled, “Honey, I’m home!” The two clerks did not look up at him.
Honey, I’m home, but what’s the use.
Honey, I’m home, but I can’t stay long.
George had been in a dry spell, lyrics-wise. He turned that one over, hoping something might come from it, as he meandered north.
A giant insect flew into the car and got trapped in an air vent on his dashboard. He pulled over to direct the insect out, but mangled it by accident while trying to remove it from the vent with the edge of his insurance card. It left a mess suited for one of those cleanup companies, the ones that come in after a flood or a suicide or a chemical spill. Not that he’d ever called one.
The guy who sidles in with a woman as she’s exiting a long and brutal marriage. As she’s ending a short and volatile affair. Whatever it was—something complicated—the Cleanup Man came after. He’s not the one. I ain’t the one. That was a Lynyrd Skynyrd song. The Cleanup Man is the guy she cries to; he’s an innocent. He’s not to blame. George took a few notes in his little black leather-bound notebook, which he kept on the seat of the car for when he had a sudden idea.
He turned up a leafy incline, where he expected to see a diner on the right, a place he’d gone to with his daughter, Jenny, twenty years ago, when he was in this town to visit her. He could go there again. Jenny did not live here anymore, but she’d loved that diner. And when he got to Nashville, where he was going in order to see her, he could tell her that he’d gone back there.
The diner was on a rise above the river, as he’d remembered. But it was almost completely covered in kudzu, which looked to be pulling down the nearby electric lines. The place was wrecked and abandoned.
Its name had been Greek Diner. At least that was what Jenny had called it.
“That can’t be the name,” George had said. She’d pointed to the sign.
“It’s like ‘Chinese buffet,’ ” he’d said. “Or ‘Thai food.’ It’s not called that. That’s just what it offers.” But the place had lost the sign indicating what its name was long ago, and people called it Greek Diner.
The woman who ran Greek Diner had decorated the place with her own folk art—postcards and calendar pages collaged with bird appliqués, Disney characters, and Bible verses, and coated with a hard shiny lacquer.
The woman had had a mysterious accent—Greek, maybe. She wore stage-ready makeup and a big brown wig with height, structure, and large-bore curls, as if she were Loretta Lynn. She seemed lacquered like her folk art, existing in a different reality from the one that Jenny and George occupied, and not just because she was shit-faced drunk, slurring and stumbling between the vinyl booths at Greek Diner. There was a genuine mystery to her.
“Isn’t she gorgeous,” Jenny had said.
George and Jenny, they liked the same kinds of things. Jenny had meant, isn’t she wild, and he had agreed that she was.
Back then, Jenny had been living in an unfurnished little house next to a creek in West Asheville. There were people along that creek who were off the grid, using generators and rain cisterns. They weren’t hippies. They were country people, suspicious of the government. Several times that week, while George was staying with Jenny, he had woken up to the sound of arguments. People threatening to blow each other’s heads off.
He remembered Jenny’s neighbor, a character named Junior Brown, who had no idea he shared a name with a musician in Austin, where George lived now, and for whom George had written a couple of songs.
Junior Brown painted cars for a living, and the fumes had ravaged him. He talked a lot about Mr. Smith and Miss Wesson, the two accomplices that others might have to meet if they didn’t stay in line. Junior Brown liked Jenny, and said that if anyone messed with her they’d have to talk to Mr. Smith and Miss Wesson.
People with guns could be pretty corny about them. George himself did not own guns. He’d had a shotgun when he lived in the Hill Country outside Austin, for shooting rabbits that got into his vegetable patch, but that was it. No handguns. Nothing for so-called security. He thought of a possible song lyric: “No gun in my pocket, I’m just happy to see you.” Or “I’m just happy to see you.” Suggesting the other part, not stating it.
Jenny had been employed then as a waiter at a place downtown by the courthouse in Asheville. Jenny said “waiter,” not “waitress”; she was a tomboy. She wore engineer boots, Carhartt work pants, and wifebeaters, had slicked-back, chin-length hair—basically the same clothes and hair as George. She had no car. She walked into town to earn her pay. She was a songwriter like George, but not yet successful. She was a kid then, twenty-one or twenty-two years old. She’d eventually bought a car, an orange Maverick that constantly broke down. Her joke to George was “catfish at a caviar price.” Because the used-car lot on Patton Avenue where she’d bought her Maverick had the reverse on its rippling banner: “caviar at a catfish price.” Jenny had learned to work on the car. She was like George in that way. In so many ways. She acquired tools and figured things out.
George had come to visit only that one time. That week, they’d walked up the hill bordering the creek to the gas station for coffee each morning; they’d dabbled in variability by trying different flavored creamers. They’d brought home a carton of milk and a package of Oreos for breakfast. Dipped the cookies in the milk. Health food was for other people. Jenny had inherited his trim physique and his good looks, his bad-food habits almost as an ethic: a way to keep things simple, by knowing how to enjoy what was readily available at any gas-station convenience mart in America.
The neighbor Junior Brown had told George that Jenny had a lot of good-looking friends. “I mean fine young ladies. Ouch. Hurts me to look at them. They come and go. It’s busy over there.” George understood that Junior Brown was suggesting that Jenny had girlfriends. That she impressed him as a peer, as an honorary man. Which she was to George as well, except that she was also his daughter, and she didn’t share her private life with him. He never asked her about it. They talked about their work, about music.
The house in West Asheville that Jenny was renting had an old lawn jockey out front that Jenny could have sold to the antique mall downtown for good money. Instead, she’d wanted to “take it out of circulation”—her expression, as if it were money—because it was a racist curio and she didn’t think people should be collecting them. George had helped her knock it from its anchored perch in a block of cement.
They had carried the lawn jockey to George’s car by the head and the feet, like it was a corpse. It was solid concrete and weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds. Part of its face had flaked away. It stayed in the trunk of George’s car, putting an extra load on his rear shocks and springs, until he found someone who wanted it, a blues musician in Mississippi.
The last time he’d visited Jenny in Nashville—the only time—he’d been coming from the west and had stopped in Memphis to see Graceland. Moving through the rooms, he’d listened to an audio guide, in which Priscilla Presley spoke of Elvis as her beloved dead husband, even though they’d divorced long before he died. The mansion grounds featured a “meditation garden,” where Elvis and his parents were buried. Beyond the meditation garden was a horse corral. While trying to experience the meditative effects of the fountain, George was distracted by the corral: one of the horses had an enormous erection. “Elvis loved horses, as everyone knows,” Priscilla was saying, “and there is still one horse remaining at Graceland that he purchased and brought here and lovingly rode: Ebony’s Double, a Tennessee walking horse that—”
It was the horse with the erection.
As he left Memphis, it was raining heavily. The roadways were flooded with water and debris. Wind was uprooting huge trees. It was too dangerous to keep going. He’d pulled off in a tiny town near the Kentucky border, one bar, one motel. The motel had been full.
He went to the bar. He met a woman there who had a tough sexiness and made a good drinking partner. He told her the motel was full, and she said he could sleep at her place, an apartment down the street above a furniture store. He was due at Jenny’s, but it was raining, and he was following the script of chance, as he often did.
He and the woman had not even kissed—he didn’t know if they were going to, he never made assumptions about women, and this sometimes got him in trouble—when she asked him to burn her with her cigarette, which she held out to him.
He told her there’d been a misunderstanding.
He slept in his car that night, the wind angrily rocking it on its springs.
Later, he regretted having been abrupt with the woman; she had tried to backpedal the request. He’d left anyway.
I ain’t the one.
That was five years ago. That same night, in that little bar, he’d danced with a much older woman. She was seventy, she told him, to provoke his shock and his compliments. From the neck down, in the very tight pants and high heels she had on, she had the body of a twenty-year-old.
George remembered the song they danced to. It was “Love (Between a Boy and Girl) Can Be So Wonderful,” by the Temprees. The Temprees’ lead singer had a falsetto that was like velvety crushed ice. The voice was so beautiful that tears had run down George’s face as he danced with this old woman in her tight pants and high heels.
He didn’t know who had written the song. But the song wasn’t the thing. It was how the Temprees sang it. A good songwriter, and George had certainly thought about the craft of it, was like a good screenwriter. You had to leave enough room for the real genius to come in and do the work: the singer of the song, the director of the film. You were just setting up furniture. Setting up pins. Creating possibility. That’s all. The magic of song lyrics had to do with their simplicity. There had to be space for the singer. And space for the two people on a dance floor in a one-bar town.
Jenny was now more successful as a songwriter than George was. That was fine with him. He was proud of her. For himself, he never wanted anything out of reach. He never forced things. He went where doors opened, where he was invited, and that was it.
Except that he had not been invited to visit her in Nashville, had not let her know that he was coming. She had stopped returning George’s calls after that last visit, five years ago. She did not answer his letters, or his e-mails. He tried not to take this personally. She was living in the present. Doing whatever she was doing. He was like that, too.
He figured he’d just show up and everything would be fine. It might not be fine, but he hoped it would be. She could take him to whatever was the equivalent of Greek Diner in her world these days (and he could report that Greek Diner was nothing but a memory, a collapsed building with a wig of kudzu fitted over it). He could get to work helping her with some project, refinishing furniture or replacing ball joints. Putting lawn jockeys in trunks. That was how they visited. That was how they were.
Heading north from Asheville on secondary roads, George spotted someone on the side of the road up ahead, a guy with his backpack on the ground next to him.
Someone hiking the Appalachian Trail, George assumed. They always needed a lift into town to buy provisions.
George pulled over.
The kid scrambled up eagerly and hitched his backpack over one shoulder, thanking George profusely.
That was probably part of why he gave people rides. How grateful they were in a world where almost no one would stop to help a stranger. Today, he also wanted to replace his memory of the old guy who had sacrificed his leg to happy hour, and what was more wholesome than a backpacker?
The backpacker was in his twenties, with a scraggly beard and tattoos on his legs, his skin browned from exposure, not leisure. He told George that he was from Alabama and had been in the military. Now he worked part of the year restoring power after hurricanes and major storms, to save up for hiking season.
"I’m the guy up there in the bucket. A lot of people can’t do the heights. Doesn’t bother me.”
He’d already completed the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide. When he finished the Appalachian Trail, he’d be a Triple Crown.
George asked him how his hike was going.
The kid acted as though this question were mysteriously insightful, but there was no more obvious question to ask.
“It’s just such a trip you’d ask me that,” he said. “Because at the moment I’m facing some serious challenges with my feet. My heels are splitting open. I have to get some kind of medicine up here at a pharmacy.”
He told George that sometimes he hated hiking. That he never looked around him and felt the wonder of nature, because there wasn’t time for that at the pace he needed to keep in order to hit his daily mileage goals. He was often completing a summit at 8 a.m. that regular hikers would structure their whole day around. And after that summit he might have two or even three more ahead of him before dark. And sometimes he kept hiking after dark, until he could see almost nothing. He slept in his clothes, on the side of the trail.
George asked if he ever hiked with other people.
“Nobody out there can keep up with me,” he said. “I’m solo.”
George wished him the best of luck, hoped his feet healed.
He dropped the kid at a grocery store in the nearest town, then went to a diner down the street. There were three solitary young men spread out along the counter eating their lunch. They each looked identical to George’s passenger—tanned, with scraggly beards, tattoos arrayed on their legs at random angles like luggage stickers, their dusty backpacks behind them, against a wall.
On his way out of that town, George passed a fenced-in lot that was filled with old restaurant signs, one leaning against the next, like soldiers sleeping standing up. He slowed, curious. They were all from the same franchise—Shoney’s. There were scores of them. Where the lights would have been screwed into each sign in a series of holes, like a pegboard, were rust-caked circles.
The magic of a thing you’d normally see only from a distance disappears when you see it up close. But a new magic takes its place.
He’d travelled through Illinois with Jenny one winter, and the snow had been piled up so high that when they stopped to get gas at a Union 76 the trademark orange ball was low and huge above a berm that a plow had made. It had looked like some foreign moon barely floating above the snowbank. Jenny was seven or eight then. He was taking her for a short visit to see his parents. They had scrambled onto the snowbank, and he had held her up to touch the big orange ball.
She probably would claim not to remember that now. Her story of her childhood didn’t highlight such moments.
He’d once given a ride to a photographer—he later figured out that the guy was famous—who took pictures of stuff like the old restaurant signs. The forlorn and forgotten. The casually striking.
George had picked that guy up in eastern Arkansas. It wasn’t clear why he was hitchhiking. He wore beautiful clothes and orated like a gentleman with fine manners and proper schooling. He had shown George a brochure of a museum show—his own, he said—featuring a photograph of a woman in a coat with a fur collar. She was in profile and it was hard to see her face, but George understood that she was beautiful. Beautiful and long-suffering.
“The point is not her,” the photographer said, as if reading George’s mind. “The point is these stations of depth in the signs behind her, one, two, three: from Esso to Old Crow to Bourbon Supreme. Get it? And then the car, a detail, a part of something whole and unseen.”
In the foreground was a blue wedge of a trunk lid. George knew from the elongated chromed tail-light, the way the housing of the light was part of the tail fin, that the car was a Cadillac, probably an Eldorado. There was no need to point this out. He and this man, his passenger, were of the same generation. They were men from a world furnished with the same stuff—cars and attitudes and Old Crow. Long-suffering women.
The woman in the image was the man’s wife, George assumed. Just from how the picture was composed and the way he’d said “her.” The point is not her.
George had been married three times. He and his first wife, Jenny’s mom, had planned to inhabit the world together, a small world shaped by small-town ideas. He was nineteen and goosed up on youth, and he thought that marriage was like having a girlfriend but without having to sneak around, without having to fuck quickly in the back seat of cars or in cornfields. (They’d grown up together in southern Illinois, outside Carbondale.)
Sure, it was stupid. But that was how he’d seen things at the time. They had moved to Chicago and got an apartment, and he’d taught rudimentary math and reading to women in a Job Corps program. The women were there by court mandate. They painted their fingernails in class. They went into an uproar when he said that California was a state like any other and not a foreign country. The women were unwilling to learn. Most of them had what their social workers would label “innumeracy.” They ran circles around George, getting him to sign various forms for their court appearances and their parole officers. He quit before too long, but the truth was he took a lot from those women, in terms of how they talked. What they talked about. They bent language like glassmakers, folding and molding it to custom uses. That was when he started taking notes, writing song lyrics, with the encouragement of Jenny’s mother, who believed in him.
He wrote a bunch of songs and sold two. He went to Nashville to meet with music publishers. He got a little work, but, more important, he got an idea of what kind of person he wanted to be. George was staying in a bare-bones weekly-rate place. He went to clubs every night, caught glimpses of songwriting legends like Ray Price and Harlan Howard. It was 1974 and the director Robert Altman was in town, making the movie “Nashville.” George and some younger musicians and songwriters more or less lived off the food they stole from the craft tables of Altman’s film set. Jenny was six months old. He did not return home to her and her mother.
He saw Jenny sporadically, took her on a trip here or there, when she was old enough that she didn’t need much minding. As a teen-ager, she stopped talking to him. She didn’t give a reason. After her mother died, of cancer, she was more open to his company. Her mother had been “Mom.” He was “George.” If he had to describe the relationship, he would say it was more like two friends.
That photographer he’d picked up in eastern Arkansas had asked him to pull over every now and then, which was how George absorbed that the man had a taste for the Atlantis-like quality of certain roadside scenes, of what had been and was no longer. A closed gas station. A boarded-up snack bar. A cinder-block building with faded script: “Watermelons, red meat, yellow meat.”
“You don’t see the yellow-meat watermelons much anymore,” the photographer said. “And no one calls it meat.”
He told George that he built stereo equipment as a hobby. The photography was not a hobby, he said. George said he wrote songs as his not-hobby. They talked about music a bit, and the man started describing technical aspects of tube amplifiers, which George could not follow. When the man saw that George was lost, he backed up, changed register.
“I met this guy who did everything single,” he told George. “I mean, he had one speaker connected to his stereo. He only listened to mono records. Rode a B.S.A. Gold Star, single cylinder. Lived alone. Everything was ‘one’!”
“You might say I’m like that also,” George said. “I mean the ‘one’ part.”
“You know what Pascal said.”
“I don’t,” George replied. He never had any hangups about his education, never felt that knowledge would make him look better or that he should pretend to have more of it than he did.
“A king alone, without distractions, is a man of misery.”
“So it’s fine to be alone,” George said, summarizing what he took from this aphorism. “So long as you have your distractions.”
The man said that sounded about right.
When he’d arrived at Jenny’s place in Nashville, five years earlier, after the awkward confrontation at the woman’s apartment and sleeping in his car, he’d been a day late. He explained that he’d been delayed because of the storm. He himself never cared if people were late, even several days late. He worked with musicians. They lived on their own time. He figured Jenny was the same. He told her about the old woman in her tight pants at the bar, because it was a funny story. And about the young woman who’d kicked him out when he said he didn’t want to burn her with a cigarette, because it was a strange story. (She hadn’t kicked him out so bluntly—it was more like she’d ruined the hospitality—but he was simplifying for Jenny.)
He thought Jenny would enjoy his reports from the road. But Jenny said she didn’t want to hear about it. “I don’t need this,” she said. “It’s bullshit. I try to let you into my life. Which is something you haven’t earned. And I’m sitting here waiting for you all night while you’re apparently at some dive bar dancing with strangers.”
“I’ve done a lot worse things with strangers than dance,” George said, and smiled, hoping he could get her to lighten up. He and Jenny, they were cut from the same cloth. The two of them were ramblers and chroniclers. People who tried to condense things—complicated and painful things—into verse and chorus. Something like that. But Jenny did not laugh.
Instead, she went to the kitchen and took a hammer from a drawer. She walked outside and swung it into George’s windshield, which fractured where she’d hit it, in a large radiating web on the passenger side. She certainly knew how to use a hammer.
“That won’t even hurt you,” she said. “Because you don’t give a shit. About anything.”
He knew to stay quiet. She went back in. He followed. They sat down and she started talking. She told him that for years she’d wondered when he would decide to get to know her, but that moment had never arrived. She started talking about her childhood. Her mother had worked full time as a secretary at a wholesale farm-equipment supplier to support them. This was in Carbondale, where her mother had returned after Chicago, when Jenny was still a baby. At sixteen, Jenny got a weekend job with the local utility. She rode in a van with a crew. She was the only girl. She was already a tomboy by that point. One afternoon, the crew decided to make her into a proper girl, to show her that she was one.
When she started going into the specifics of what had happened, George discovered that he could not listen. Could not hear it. He stood up. Of course leaving wasn’t the right thing to do. But he had to.
“See? See?” she screamed after him. “I knew it. You have your stories, and I have mine. I don’t want to hear your stories, just like you don’t want to hear mine.”
He left her apartment and drove that stupid car with its partially fractured windshield all the way to Austin. That was their last interaction. Back at home, he could have taped the windshield, to be cheap, and to preserve the damage as a kind of stubborn penance, but he eventually had it replaced.
George meandered from western North Carolina into Tennessee. He picked up no more strangers after the amputee and the young hiker. He ate barbecue alone.
He thought about calling Jenny to let her know that he was coming. But if he did she might say, Don’t come.
He arrived in Nashville at 10 p.m. He knocked on the door of Jenny’s house. He heard a baby crying. He felt confused. Was this the right place? He was sure that it was. His memories of this street, the dead grass and the little walkway leading to a brick triplex, Jenny’s the only door that faced the front, and of what had happened between him and Jenny were vivid, although he had tried to forget them.
A woman answered, holding a newborn. A man stood behind her. They showed no reaction when he said Jenny’s name.
“We’ve been here three years,” they said, “and we don’t know your friend.”
George said, “It’s my daughter,” and they looked at him and he felt their judgment.
He went to a bar where people were drunk and rowdy and he remained separate and alien. He slept at a motel and the next morning drove around Nashville with a sense of vertigo. As if his daughter were lost out there. But she was not lost. She was a forty-year-old woman and she was living her life. She could be anywhere.
He went to a few studios in Music Row where people might know his daughter. No one had heard from her. Some of these people knew him, at least vaguely, knew his work as a songwriter. George began to get the feeling that Jenny had instructed them not to tell him anything.
He left Nashville. He drove along the border with Kentucky, travelling west. It was the same route he’d taken when he’d stopped in that one-bar town to shelter from the storm, but in the opposite direction. He went back to that town. Retracing his steps was a habit of his, a way to navigate his life.
This time, there was vacancy in the only motel. He paid for a room. It was late afternoon. He walked down the street to the bar and ordered a beer. As he ordered, he wanted to ask the bartender about the young woman he’d met there. He remembered her name—Merle—because it was unusual. But he hesitated, thinking the bartender might know about Merle’s tastes. She’d probably asked every guy in the bar to burn her with cigarettes. But then he went ahead.
“Does Merle still come in here?”
“You don’t know?” the bartender asked, as he opened George’s beer bottle.
“No.”
The bartender said that Merle was dead. She’d had an argument with a boyfriend and he’d shot her. That man was in prison now.
There were others at the bar. The older woman with the young body, she was among them. She was seventy-five now. She walked up to George and asked him to dance, but he was still absorbing the news about Merle.
He wasn’t in the mood to dance, he told her. She looked at him with pity.
“Do you remember me?” George asked her, suddenly feeling that this mattered.
“Why would I remember you?” the old woman said with disdain.
“Because I danced with you last time. I was in this bar five years ago.”
“Five years ago! Honey, I’m here almost every night. Five years ago! I can’t even tell you who I danced with yesterday.” She laughed, pleased with herself, and motored off to dance alone, her drink in her hand, swivelling her knees back and forth to the rhythm of the song that had just come on. She was wearing white pedal pushers and had the tanned legs of a college tennis champion.
The bartender came out from behind the bar and boogied with the old woman. He danced until his regulars started yelling at him to get back behind the bar.
George left.
It would be dark in a couple of hours. If he started now, he could make it to Memphis. He had already paid for the room in the little motel, but it was sixty dollars and it didn’t matter. He needed to keep moving.
He drove in a southwesterly direction. The dogwoods were in extravagant bloom. Great clotted white-branched specimens that glowed in the dusk, all along the Cumberland River.
He was in countryside that seemed to have more cemeteries than it did towns. More people dead than living. But wasn’t it like that everywhere, more dead than living? He pictured the face of the waitress from Greek Diner, her thick makeup. In his mental image of her, her eyes were closed as if she were lying in a casket.
As dusk transitioned to dark, the temperature dropped thirty degrees.
He put on AM radio to get a weather report. It turned out that he was driving into a freak storm.
Rain speckled his windshield. It surged, falling like a curtain over the road. He thought of the kid on his hike. He’d be under a rain poncho, pushing past wet branches and stepping in mud, going and going.
The rain lightened, and then turned to gravelly pellets of ice. It began to patter his windshield like the taps of someone trying to get his attention.
It was hailing, and as he slowed a little he spotted a person on the side of the road. Walking, in pants and a T-shirt, no jacket, with towering beech trees behind him. It was dark and thirty-one degrees on a remote highway, hail popping from the ground. As George passed, the man sent up an arm, waving at him to stop.
George didn’t want to step on the brakes. The road was freezing and he knew he could slide. Instead, he let off the gas and slowed. By the time he came to a stop, he was several hundred yards up the road. The guy ran toward his car, soaking wet.
He was youngish, tall, and very thin. He was shivering as he approached the car, a baseball cap pulled down over his ears. George lowered the passenger-side window. “I’m going west,” he offered, thinking he’d be noncommittal.
“That’s good,” the man said in a frail voice, his body trembling with cold.
It wasn’t until they were back on the road, slush collecting in long sloppy piles along the wiper blades, that George sneaked a look at his passenger. He appeared undernourished in his baggy clothes and baseball cap, hunched in the seat. His upper arms were the same diameter as his wrists. He stared straight ahead, perfectly still, as if he needed to concentrate on the road in order to keep George’s car moving along it.
“I’ll turn the heat up,” George said.
The man didn’t respond.
George wasn’t the type to push for conversation. Although he would have liked a little talk. To get his mind off Jenny, and the way the couple with the baby had looked at him as they absorbed that he didn’t know where his daughter was.
A semitruck went past, noisy and slow, in the opposite direction, its headlights scouring the car’s interior. In the harsh, bleached light, the passenger reached up and snatched off his baseball cap. A tumble of dark hair flopped over the man’s thin shoulders and down his back. He shook his hair out—it went all the way to his waist—and turned toward George.
George realized that this person in his car was not a man. It was a woman. She grinned at George in a way he could not interpret, and he felt suddenly afraid.
The hail finally let up. He made mention of this to his hitchhiker. Now that he understood she was a woman alone in an area that was only dark woods, he wanted her to talk. To confirm that she was O.K.
“This is crazy weather for May,” he said.
She didn’t respond.
“I’m going to Memphis,” he said. “I can let you out there. That all right?”
She nodded enthusiastically, like a mime accentuating emotion to compensate for her muteness.
“You kind of appeared out of nowhere,” he said.
Her mouth quaked into that same smile from before, almost maniacal.
“Nowhere,” she said, as if impressed by the word, and she started to laugh, an eruption of giggles.
George stared ahead. He reminded himself how frail she looked. There was nothing to be afraid of, he told himself.
“Have you eaten?” he asked. “We could stop and get something.”
“I can’t remember,” she said. “No, I had a hamburger. But I don’t know when that was. It could have been a week ago.” She giggled in a machinelike way that had no joy in it.
He said they could stop if they found something up ahead.
He hadn’t eaten, either. And it would be a break from having to be alone with her in his car.
Thirty minutes later, there was a restaurant on the side of the road. A country place with a few customers, brightly lit. George pulled over.
Seated across from her, he could see that she had smears of dirt or soot on her face, which she partly hid behind her long, straight brown hair. She had deep scratches on her arms. He did not like the way the scratches looked, and he let himself wish he could get rid of her.
He asked where she’d come from, and she said, “I’ve been in a few places. Some different places.”
He tried to press her.
“I was walking,” she said. “Then you pulled over.”
“Where are you trying to go?” he asked.
“You can take me to Memphis,” she said. “That’s where you said you’re going.”
“But where will you go from there?”
“That depends,” she said.
“Where’s home for you?” George didn’t like that this was becoming an interrogation, he the interrogator.
She looked at the table, folding her bony hands one over the other, her fingernails lined with dirt.
“I’m in between places right now,” she said. “I’m going to see some friends of mine. People who know me.”
The waitress came. George ordered spaghetti and meatballs and a beer. He needed the beer.
The woman glanced at the menu with a worried look. She seemed unable to parse it.
“Spaghetti and beer,” she said.
“You want the same as him, hon?”
She nodded adamantly in her mime style.
She ate like an animal. George tried not to stare. She picked up each meatball like it was an apple, and took quick bites, then set it back on the plate. She picked it up again and bared her teeth and bit at it as if she were punishing it. Death by a thousand bites.
She sipped at the beer, made a face of displeasure, and then she dumped salt into it from a shaker on the table, which agitated the beer, sent it foaming up in its glass. She picked up the foaming beer and guzzled, leaving a white mustache above her mouth. She stared at George, with beer and spaghetti sauce on her face.
They were back in the car. It had stopped sleeting. After two hours of driving, they arrived in Memphis. It was late, almost midnight.
“Where should I let you off?” he asked.
“Anywhere is fine,” she replied.
He took the business loop off the freeway and pulled up to an intersection to let her out.
“I’ll drop you here,” he said.
She got out. He said goodbye and wished her luck.
“Thanks,” she said, and walked off, her gait stiff and hurried, a half run. It was how she’d moved when he’d pulled over for her, when he’d thought she was a man.
He was planning to stay in a motel he knew, the Admiral Benbow, which was on the main drag, but it was apparently no longer. Closed down, its sign dark. There was a series of large chain hotels all in a row farther on. He chose one. Got a room, closed the curtains, locked the door.
The next morning, he woke to the sound of vacuuming in the room next to his. It was late. He had slept a long time. He made coffee in the little carafe in his room and let himself rouse slowly, flipping channels on the television.
Walking toward his car, he saw that the woman was there, waiting for him. A wave of panic went through him. He tried to calm it.
She must have searched every hotel lot on this boulevard.
She stood. “I’m ready,” she said.
He was caught off guard. He didn’t have a lie prepared.
“I’m going to visit some friends,” he said.
“O.K.,” she said. But she continued to stand there, next to his car, looking down, her skeleton arms folded over her chest.
He felt something in him give.
“They live in Arkansas,” he said.
This gave him some out, he felt. He was going all the way to Austin, but he could get rid of her sometime today in Arkansas, wherever he claimed he was going.
They set off. Again, she said almost nothing. The woman impulsively pressed Play on his car stereo. “Born to Be Wild” came on. It was his cassette of Steppenwolf. The woman reached and turned up the volume. They rode with “Born to Be Wild” blaring into the car. It was like at Graceland, with that horse: God, playing a joke. Born to be wild. He had a woman in his car he could not shake. He didn’t know if she was mentally unstable or shell-shocked or had some other problem.
Over the course of the day, he tried a few more times to have normal interactions with her. When they stopped to get gas, she went into the women’s room around the back of the gas station, and he contemplated starting the car and taking off before she returned. He could not bring himself to do it. She appeared from behind the gas station.
“I thought you were going to leave,” she said.
That was the thing about crazy people. Everything goes out of whack except their ability to read other people’s minds.
They crossed Arkansas, and George couldn’t drum up the nerve to tell her that this was it. The fictitious friends came and went. They were in Texas now, headed toward Dallas.
“This is where I’m going,” he said. “I can drop you off, O.K.?”
She nodded her mime’s nod. As if, Yes. Dallas. Sure.
“Do you have money?” he asked her.
“I don’t need money,” she said. “I mean, I had some. I’ll have some again. I find it when I need it.”
He reached into his wallet and pulled out forty dollars, which was what he had.
“Here, take this.”
She looked at it on the seat.
“Please take it,” he said.
She picked up the bills.
They were now on one of those hideous eight-lane boulevards with car dealerships and chain restaurants. He pulled over near a gas station and a McDonald’s.
“Good luck with everything,” he said.
“O.K.,” she said. She thrust her hand out for him to shake. He paused, because he hadn’t expected it, and she retracted her hand and got out.
She walked away, with the same stiff brisk gait, the baseball cap, her hair down, in her baggy T-shirt and loose pants. She turned toward the McDonald’s and went rushing through its entrance as if it were the gateway of a predetermined journey she was on.
He saw that the forty dollars he had tried to give her was on the passenger-side floor.
He picked up the bills and got out. Went into the McDonald’s, thinking he’d give her the money.
He didn’t see her inside. He walked up to the counter.
“Did you see a woman with long hair come in here just now, tall and thin, with a baseball cap?” he asked the cashier.
“I think I saw who you mean,” the cashier said. “She left.”
“But I didn’t see her come out.”
“She went out the other door,” the cashier said. “Customers aren’t supposed to use that. It’s an emergency exit.”
He walked back outside and circled the McDonald’s on foot. He didn’t see the woman. He watched cars blow past on this ugly boulevard. A man in an overcoat carefully picked trash from the garbage can outside the McDonald’s. Why were these hobo types always in overcoats? S.U.V.s idled at the drive-through window. A man in a parked car lowered his window and offered his leftovers to the man sorting trash. The man rushed over, coattails flapping, to receive the offering. “God bless!” he said.
Night was coming on. The boulevard didn’t have sidewalks. It wasn’t for people on foot. George realized that he could not guess what age the woman was. Maybe thirty. Maybe older.
He asked the man in the overcoat if he’d seen a woman with long hair wandering around.
“She got out of your car,” the man said.
“That’s right,” George said.
“I think she went that way.” He pointed up the boulevard.
“Are you sure?” George asked, aware that he might sound desperate.
At a huge intersection, up where the man had pointed, was an AutoZone. George went in and asked about the woman, if anyone had seen her. The other businesses here were closed for the night. The clerk said he hadn’t seen anyone who fit that description.
It was dark now, the high sodium lamps on the boulevard glowing orange, blotting out the sky, and making the nimbus from their artificial light feel like a world, but a mean and impersonal one. A truck missing its muffler went tearing past. George walked back to his car.
Maybe she’ll be there, he thought. Like at the motel in Memphis. Waiting, like a dog. Some cats are like that, too. He’d once had a cat, a petite black thing that looked like a kitten though it was grown, that would follow him all around, even two blocks down to his coffee shop in Austin, wait outside as he ordered, and saunter home at some distance, but never too much distance, then flop down on his stoop.
The woman was not at his car.
He went into the McDonald’s a second time.
“Did she come back in here?” he asked the cashier.
“Who?”
“The woman I was asking about earlier. With the long hair.”
“Oh. No. I don’t think so.”
He was suddenly envious of that cashier, who wasn’t looking for someone. Who was just doing her job, without having to manage a feeling of loss or doubt.
He got into his car and turned onto the boulevard, driving slowly, keeping his eyes on the parking lots of the businesses he passed. He went about a mile, then turned around to check the other side of the boulevard.
He was circling the lot of a Dollar General when he thought he saw her. He pulled over, feeling a rush of adrenaline. But the figure who looked like her, tall and thin, was a woman with two children. They got into their car and drove off.
People were parking in order to shop at Dollar General. Getting out of their cars and walking toward the entrance. Others were leaving Dollar General, putting grocery bags in hatchbacks and driving away. He caught snippets of conversations. People doing normal things, being family members, making purchases. He was feeling the same envy he’d had for the cashier at McDonald’s. These people didn’t know what he was dealing with.
He tried to think of where to look next. He pulled out of the lot.
He drove in the right lane with his blinker on, going slow, in case he spotted her. People honked at him. He didn’t care. Go around me, he thought at them. He continued on, driving five miles an hour, alert to every person on foot, ready to stop. ♦
