toy cars. “Driving, yes, driving to Fargo,” and I said this last, slowly, thinking she might catch it. She grabbed my hand and decided it was time for us to leave. I held her for a minute and, given our sizes, she was no match. There was a story about the meteors coming up on the cable news that I wanted to see before we headed out, making sure the initial predictions had not been off the mark.
Again, you probably already know this from the final reports, and this part, they sort of got right. It was the night of the Leonid showers, those meteors that come on time every year, where you get a chance to see hundreds if you are of a mind to, are in one of the good areas of the country, and can stand the weather. I always made it a point to see them, if I could, no matter where I was, and I was usually willing to travel some distance on the night they were coming through, set an alarm clock, whatever, to see them.
“When Fred Howkowski made it out there to Hollywood,” I said when we’d been on the road for a bit, startling my passenger at first, “he actually got a lot of work as an extra, pretty quickly. You know, westerns were still pretty much in demand then. I think even John Wayne was still alive and making movies, but I’m not for sure. He’d call me collect whenever he was going to be in a movie. He’s the reason we’re heading where we are. Well, he’s the reason I’m headed where I am, Fred, not John Wayne. Keep trying to take care of one last thing.” Most times, his movies never got out to our rinky-dink movie house back home, which is surprising since we’re in ranch country. You would think the ranchers might like them, but maybe they see enough cowboys on the job that they don’t want them for entertainment, and in Big Antler, the less said about Indians, the better.
Nothing particularly bad ever happened, I suppose, at least as far as anyone’s still alive was concerned, but Indians and whites just don’t mix too much down there, hardly any Indians at all, I can remember, except Fred’s boy, who became mine when Fred gave him up to me. So, anyway, whenever Fred would call, I would get the Lubbock paper for a few weeks, and when his movie would come out, Liza Jean and I would take the boy into the city, get us something to eat at a nice place, and look for his daddy up on the screen. Sometimes we could see him, sometimes not, even when he told us where he was supposed to be.
“Well, he got word one time they were making a movie out of some book that was supposedly about Indians. He’s like you, just loved the movies. But like most of those movies and books from what I have seen and what I’ve heard about, they are usually about some white guy adopted by Indians who then grows up and out-Indians the Indians, does everything they can teach him to do but only better. This one was going to be no different but Fred was happy.” The girl continued staring out the rig’s passenger-side window, occasionally glancing at me to let me know she was hearing my voice.
“Liza Jean was growing annoyed at all the collect calls. Back then, calling state to state was something only the rich or famous could do and we were neither of those things. So I paid those bills out of my junk-business profits to keep the peace around the house. I’d taken to garage sales since I had gotten home, have a pretty good eye, and I’d buy stuff up enough to have one of my own or do it as an estate sale or sell to antique shops and you can turn a pretty decent profit if you pick only the stuff that has some staying power.” By her outfit, it looked like this girl was one of those who watched the fashion shows and made a point of getting new things when they came out. My clothes are a lot like the stuff I hunt for, old and reliable. That trendy stuff just never lasts.
Once people get bored with little under-stuffed bears, for example, you would be stuck with the samples you hoarded for at least another ten years when interest would somehow just spark up again out of nowhere. I stuck with other stuff that was pretty much guaranteed to grow and grow in scarcity, like real art deco, or art nouveau, no knockoffs, no reproductions. I didn’t touch anything made after 1953, unless it had some of that signature “fabulous fifties” look that was getting bigger all the time. So with that cushion, I didn’t mind paying for Fred’s calls keeping us connected, and since Liza Jean never helped me with the estate sales, she never got a say in what I did with my profits from them, either.
“He got the call from central casting, and with his looks and his list of movies, they even said he had a good shot at some lines. He had his SAG card, he said, whatever that was, and that meant he could do the lines if they offered them to him. He said the star was a young guy, making it big, and was always nice to the extras, letting them hang out in his honey wagon, signing autographs and whatnot. I bet you would like that. Probably be carrying that around in your rucksack there,” I said, tapping her little pink bag. At first she jumped and reached to grab it and then must have thought better, easing off and smiling at me more frequently, but only for a second or two before returning to her scan of the roadside.
“Fred kept saying he would get me an autograph that I could sell, and such, but he never did. That was the way of it with him.” Even the time I visited him, he kept pretending that he was looking for that autographed picture he got for me, but we both knew it only existed in his head. Finally I said something like, well, it will surface, once we get this stuff cleaned up some, figuring maybe we could get his dump into reasonable shape, if we gave it an honest try, though I don’t think it would have stayed that way for long after I had left. When he saw me off the next week, he said that he’d let me know about his speaking part, that he was supposed to hear back soon.
The road from Big Antler to Los Angeles is a long one indeed, and though the one from Bismarck to Fargo ain’t even remotely as bad, it’s still a haul, and I was getting drowsy. This young lady might have been from Asia, but she seemed to like the tapes I was playing, mostly old country standards, Hank Williams—the old one—Bob Wills, all those guys. After a while, even my old reliable music failed me and I’d found myself drifting. I started to tell her all this nonsense, in even more detail, a story I usually only tell myself on this trip every November, whenever the showers come. Through her fragments of English, it must have sounded like a hodgepodge, most of the time, a few familiar terms here and there. Maybe my voice temporarily chased away whatever ghosts had dragged her to this dreadful place.
“We met in the war, and though Liza Jean could never understand how that could make you stay connected to someone, I admit it’s more complicated than that. It never starts out complicated. If a familiar face is all you got, that is what you go with. Fred was the only one I recognized from basic.” I laughed a little and she tried to laugh, too. “I’m not for sure when we moved from being friendly to being friends, probably around the time I saved his ass, though.” She was gone again. Sometimes her eyes would follow something at the roadside and if I had ever offered to stop, she would have been out there in a second, wandering in the snow.
She probably didn’t need to hear this kind of stuff, anyway. I’ve been to the Trinity Site in New Mexico, where those first atomic tests were done, and of course have gone and found some of my buddies up on the wall in D.C., but I have always wondered what that Hiroshima museum must be like. I hear they have a watch there, a pocket watch or wristwatch, I am not for sure which, that survived the blast, but stopped ticking at that exact moment the bomb went off. Everyone should see that. I bet this lady has. Even if she hasn’t been to that museum itself, she’s seen it. It’s the same way you can see the name of someone you knew, who never came home from Vietnam, written neatly in that black surface, you can feel the depths of those etched names under your fingers, as you run them across, even if you have never been down to see it in person, to stand in front of the wall. That is the nature of the way we lose some things in our lives.
“We’re here,” I said.
“Fargo? Here?” the girl asked, gathering up her little backpack.
“Yeah, you just hang on, missy. I got to find somewhere reasonable for you to stay.” Fargo can be a bad scene, and that was all this girl needed, to let the wrong person see her. If she still wanted to continue her crazy search in the morning, that was her business, but for my part, I got her to safety and it was time for me to make my yearly trip to the designated wide-open skies. Fargo would have been okay for me any other night of the year but the light pollution would be too strong for my purposes that night. Coming into it, or really coming into any of the cities at night, was like flying into Phu Bai that first time. The firebases, and particularly the rear, just seemed to be begging for