she had already been through it once and said it wasn’t all that bad. It would barely even be a ripple in the coffee cups down at the gas station, where most news gets spread in a town as small as Big Antler.
Yes, I know it sounds like I was planning to continue finding comfort on the road even as I was getting my funeral suit dry-cleaned for my wedding day, but I wasn’t really. I was even good for a while, and we had a pretty decent life together, but after a couple years, the old itch came back, right around the time Liza Jean was thinking we were not kids anymore, and gradually had worked us into a once-a-week kind of schedule, late on a Saturday night. By then, other aspects of my life had changed, too. I was definitely not going to New York anymore, among other things.
Maybe you’re thinking my falling-star wish is for something steady, or an amazing woman, a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, to come tapping on the door to my rig just once, and keep me company in the sleeper cab, but it isn’t. I wish for the same thing any time I see a shooting star, but I might as well be wishing for something that unlikely as to be chasing the things I am chasing.
ACT ONE:
Lights
CHAPTER ONE:
Fall Out
THIS IS A TRUE STORY.
The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.
At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.
Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
—statement from opening credits, Fargo
Tommy Jack McMorsey
The first thing you should know is that the papers got it all wrong. Well, some of it’s, you know, public record and there is no disputing that she ain’t ever coming back this way again. But it’s the way things happened. That’s what I’m talking about. Yes, I know they asked to interview me, but if words you’ve spoken have ever wound up in a newspaper at any time, or if you’ve found yourself on film or videotape that they’ve cut and rearranged, you already know what I am saying here about the inexact relationship between language and the ways we truly experience the world.
Even some of the basic things, the papers didn’t get right. I don’t know, maybe they thought it would be weirder or more interesting if she took a cab from Bismarck out to Fargo, or was it a bus to Fargo and a cab to Detroit Lakes? Wasn’t it weird enough that she flew into the Twin Cities and by winding up in Bismarck, she totally overshot where she was going by hundreds of miles? I don’t know, can’t ever remember the way they tell it, because I know the truth. I was the one who found her in the first place, both times, and maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut the second time. None of these new problems would have started for me, and I’d be living out my life the same way I have for the last twenty years or so, but I had to do it, make my yearly wish, hoping one falling star would come through.
I could tell right away when I pulled into the Oasis that she wasn’t your average lot lizard. I know that’s not too flattering a name to call a lady who will do all kinds of nice things for you just to share some time breathing the same air you do, but I didn’t make it up. That name is not one I generally use. It’s just one of the many things you learn on the lonely roads of this country. The lizards like to call themselves truckers’ wives. They like the way you maybe can’t tell if that label means being connected to just one trucker or maybe to an undisclosed number. There are men who wander the lots too, looking for the same thing those women are, but drivers use the standard names for those guys and as often as not, give them a taste of fist instead of the body part they’re interested in. I just tell those men no thank you. Who am I to be critical about what you want to do with another person, so long as no one gets hurt?
But as I was saying, this woman was not like those other women, though. They have a particular look about them. Hers was not that different, mind you, but different enough so’s you’d notice. She was not the type of woman who would share the back of your sleeper cab in trade for conversation, a meal, and a ride to the next place. For most of those others, the “next place” was only a minor matter. They didn’t care all that much about where it might be, and they were grateful if you helped them find their next ride after you. If you let them, they’d spin through your CB dial, like some kind of lottery-drawing emcee, risking nineteen if the others come up dry.
There’s a lot of good old boys out there. You get to know a man’s disposition on the road sometimes watching the way he eats his biscuits and gravy of a morning. The ones who eat with a smile, give you a nod from the next counter stool, flirt with the waitress, those are the boys you might ask about the weather or any Staties taking pictures from the median.
But there’s other fellas, too. You can see them at the stops just as often. They blame the cook and waitress if they don’t like the food, but they keep eating on it, grinding that food into nothing—chicken-fried vengeance. If they treat a piece of meat like that, I am afraid to think of how they might receive people. When they’re sitting at the next stool, I let the sky tell me directly what it might deliver and I watch the road myself for unmarked cars.
If a lady riding with me asks for help finding her next ride, I offer the radio. I let her run through the channels to find her own next rides into the routes. Chickenshit, but I do not want to be a party to sad young women looking for company and meeting the business end of a claw hammer or a tire thumper.
That’s blunt, but you can ask the wife. I have a certain way with words, Liza Jean says, and her tone lets you know she means the opposite of a compliment. Some over-the-road haulers ask these ladies if they’re riding with someone and then ask to speak to me, like I’m some kind of background check, but that’s not the way it is with me. A lady might fit nicely resting up against my belly in the night, and she might not steal anything when I’m looking elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean she’s not nuts. The only thing that had made me eligible for her talents was eighteen wheels and a full tank. That’s not too discriminating. I’m no troll, mind you, not half-bad, even—but no real prize, either. A man’s looks don’t matter to most of them.
But this lady was different, right off. I wouldn’t have done anything with her, anyway. There’s two kinds I pass right on by, those who are Asian, and those who look like Shirley Mounter. Some things in your past should just never be awakened. You don’t know if you’ll ever get them back to sleep again. Even if she hadn’t fallen into one of my categories, I still would have not considered her. It was something beyond looks.
Most lizards, when they get to a truck stop like the Oasis, they go to one of three places. There is the kind who sits at the restaurant, not bad looking, revealing leg and cleavage under those bright fluorescents. She is eating something light if she’s alone, a salad or whatnot. The second kind is a little older, a little heavier, or a little skinnier, always a little too something, and these ladies hang around the bar, where the lighting is lower and the men are drunker. The third type is much more random. You could never predict what they would look like. These are the ones the truck-stop owners like the least, because they almost never buy anything if they can get away with it. The owners pretend these women are invisible. Running the ladies off would be bad for business.
These always come in, order a water, and not that bottled water, just the tap water they give you in the little round juice glasses. They ask where the ladies’ room is, knowing the ladies’ room and gents’ are generally down the hall that leads to the “truckers only” area, with the lounge and courtesy showers. The showers are never a courtesy for everyone and you have to show your license and some rig ID before they give you a key to a shower stall. It’s not a bad deal,