English was not an option with this girl, so I tried any kind of sign language I could conjure up. I’d thought I’d gotten somewhat handy with it in the war. I could only remember a few real phrases now, “didi-maow,” “boo-coo,” some others, and generally mispronounced them so bad that the locals there had no idea what I was saying. I was reduced to hand signals: “let your fingers do the walking”; “how much for this”; “do you have anything to drink”; “anything to smoke”; rubbing my hands together and blowing on them for cold—my toolbox of sign language was pretty limited. Eventually this lady recognized one of my attempts. I held an invisible cup of coffee, then pointed to the building. Finally she let me put my arm around her shoulder and we went inside. The light skeleton beneath her jacket felt on the verge of breaking apart so I lifted, floating my arm an inch above her real body. She mostly just warmed her hands with the cup of hot chocolate I bought her. My cell phone was not getting any reception inside, but I didn’t dare leave her where I couldn’t see her, so I called the state troopers from a pay phone.
“Uh, hello, hi, my name is Tommy Jack McMorsey, and I drive for Martin Romero shippers, out of Lubbock, Texas,” I started.
“Yes sir, how may I help you?” the dispatch said, her voice flat, thinking this was just another call from a holy roller driver, complaining about the lizards. I hate those guys. They’re not getting any—by their own choice, I might add—but they don’t want anyone else getting any either. They’re always filing formal complaints, particularly about those ladies falling in the fourth category. Those really aggressive ones tap on your passenger-side passing-mirror window and show you a little skin before they try the door to see if you’ll unlock it.
“Well, you see, I’m calling from Oasis, on eastbound I-94, just out of Bismarck, and—”
“Yes, sir, I know where you’re calling from, how may I help you?”
“Well there’s this young lady here, and she—”
“Has she asked for money in exchange for services, sir?”
“Uh, well, no, she has her own money,” I said. “Look, could you just send someone out here? I think she needs help, and I am pretty sure I’m not the one she needs it from.” I gave her my tag numbers and told her I had to go, that the young lady had just wandered out the front doors and I wanted to keep an eye on her.
The odor of landfill is its own special rot, and I could smell it before I caught up to her. The only thing it reminds me of is that industrial sauerkraut they used to keep in the stainless steel flip-top buckets at the drive-in movie concession stand. The condiments were nastier than the roller-dogs, those orange hot dogs that spun and spun inside the glass case. It is truly the only smell that landfills remind me of. That, or maybe the lingering odd smell in the air after someone sneezes and you are unlucky enough to be nearby.
This girl didn’t seem to mind it, though. The nasty steam crept out of those white PVC pipes releasing gases from all that waste dissolving into who knows what below us. She pointed to these pipes and she would walk around them, shake her head, point to the presumed tree on her sheet of notebook paper, and head on off to the next pipe. I followed her to every damned one of them, trying to figure out what she was looking for, holding my coffee up to my nose and hoping for the best. This is the way the troopers found us when they eventually got there.
“Mr. McMorsey? Tommy Jack McMorsey?” the first trooper called, from the lot. Even in the gray, his holster hand was plain to see. It was near dark by that time, and for a minute I was not for sure who was calling my name. The girl’s belief was so strong that I examined the damned exhaust pipes with her, for some discriminating features, believing I could see differences in them, and I had no idea what she was even looking for as she touched their lips, rubbed their sides, studied the perimeter around them, decided against them, and moved on. I’m not saying I was deluded enough to think we were going to find that Fargo ransom and be set for life, but there was something about her belief that somehow the act of looking was enough to keep her going for at least one minute more. And sometimes, what more can we ask for, right?
I’ve seen that look a lot in my life. Out on the reservation Fred Howkowski came from, it was on practically every other face I looked at. He had that look most of the time I knew him, first along the firebases and out on patrols in the war and then home, when he’d headed out to Hollywood trying to join those movies he loved so much.
“Yes, that’s me. I’m the one who called.”
“This the woman you reported?” the trooper asked as he came closer. He looked tired and wanting to get out of the cold and only in seeing his face did I realize how cold I was, how my bones ached. The time we had been out there at the fill had got by me.
“Well, I wasn’t exactly reporting her, more concerned is all,” I said. He stepped up between us and spoke to the girl. Her eyes opened wide when she saw the North Dakota emblems on his uniform, and she showed him the map right off, I guess not afraid he was going to take it from her.
“We’ll handle it from here,” he said, taking away the fact that she was a person, just like that. She was another situation, another incident. They took a statement from me, how I’d found her and such, but then they strongly suggested I go back about my business and I know what a suggestion from someone in authority means. They took her away and couldn’t get much out of her either, I guess. They said they were going to look around town for someone who could speak her language. I have been around Bismarck and I have not seen too many a Chinese restaurant even, let alone one of those sushi bars like they have for the yuppies in Dallas. They dismissed me pretty clearly. Though I waited outside for a while, an eighteen-wheel rig is not an easy thing to hide and they came out, asking me to move along.
I headed back to the Oasis and sat in a window booth. It wasn’t all that long before she reappeared and sat back down with me. You don’t see a lot of people paying a cab to get to the stops. Even the lizards catch rides in some other way, either hitching on the entrance ramps or even walking to some of the stops, but the Oasis is pretty far out from where anyone might live. This is where the official story gets all lost, even though I was about as clear as I could be when they asked me questions. According to the troopers, they couldn’t get her to change her mind in looking for the ransom, or get her to understand it was just a movie, that no money existed. She kept insisting, as I understand it, that the movie opens saying it is a true story, and she was sticking to that.
All her papers checked out, passport, visa, whatever, and they must have gone through her purse to see she had enough money to at least survive a reasonable amount of time in the country, and they did try to do her a favor, I have to give them that. They took her to the bus station and showed her how to buy a ticket to Fargo. Even as messed up as she was, she knew certain things to be true. Among them is that a Greyhound is not going to stop along the highway from Bismarck to Fargo so you can go treasure hunting, no matter how much you might ring that emergency bell. And if they did, they sure as hell wouldn’t idle there long so you could dig around in the snow.
A cab couldn’t have been too hard to find. There’s usually a bunch of them around the bus station, taking home people who do not have loved ones to come and pick them up from wherever they’ve been wandering. She came right in and tried to get me to go back out with her to the landfill, but I’d had enough of her nonsense. I have had to be out on a cold night, waiting for the tire guy if I’ve gotten a blowout somewhere along the way. As a general rule, if you’re not out there when he gets to your truck, he just moves on along to the next rig with a blowout. There’s never any shortage of us around. So you stand and wait and flag him down and once he starts to working, he keeps asking you something or another, dragging your ass back out into the cold. He figures if he’s got to be out there on your account, you’re going to be out there keeping him company. Since I had no official business with this young woman on the fill hill, I wasn’t stepping through those doors until it was time for me to get my ass back on the road.
“I’m heading on, going, driving,” I said, eventually. Again, with the hand signals, I wished I had a little toy rig on the table, so I could move it from the salt shaker to the sugar canister, something like