getting caught. These hot spots in the dark Dakota winter also drew all sorts of their own trouble, with the promises of alternatives, and this girl would not be able to make it on her own, I was sure.
I know, she had made it all the way from Japan to the Twin Cities and then on to Bismarck in the first place, so who was I, telling her she couldn’t make it? But like I said, Fargo is a tough place. The Mainline just off 94 was pretty decent, continental breakfast, you know, bad coffee and stale doughnuts, but it was something to eat, if you wanted it, and you could actually see the river from some of the rooms there. It would be fine for her, and besides, I really had to get a move on if I was going to make Detroit Lakes in the time I wanted. I don’t know why she didn’t just fly to Fargo in the first place, but she must have had her reasons for doing the things she was doing. Everyone does, whether you agree with them or not.
“You just head right in there, where it says office, o-f-f-i-c-e, see?” I said, pointing to the glowing sign above the lobby door, “and they’ll take care of you. Tell them, one night.” I held up my pointer finger again, this time, straight up, and tried to get her to do the same. I touched her hand and folded the other fingers under, into a fist, and then she got it.
“Come?” she asked. Actually, I only assumed she was asking, as about all of her brief sentences seemed to be questions. She might have been commanding, for all I know.
“Uh, no.” I shook my head and reached over, opening her door for her. “I got things to do tonight, and I gotta get a move on, if I’m gonna make it. Now you watch your step getting out. There’s a little platform for you there, watch. Don’t fall.” She just sat there, the cold wind blowing in and filling up my cab with the smells of Fargo, industry, greasy food, diesel, the works. I never drive with a coat on, so I reached back over her, shut the door, grabbed my jacket from behind me, and hopped out myself, climbing on up on the passenger’s side and reopening the door.
We were beginning to draw some attention from inside the lobby. The night manager even lifted his remote and I assumed turned down the volume on his little television set. I guess what we were doing was more interesting than the goings-on in a black-and-white Mayberry. I had a sense it might turn out to be a good thing, later, that the night manager saw her refusing to come down from my cab. Now, when I’m alone on the drive and need to take a leak, I do what most do and just use Ziplocs until I come to a convenient service area to dump the full bags. You get agile with the trick after years of practice but I was guessing that would be a bit impolite with my passenger. I also wanted that night manager to know my passenger was with me not only willingly, but defiantly, so he’d be able to say so with certainty if authorities started asking after the circumstances of that evening. I just had a sense I was already into something a lot deeper than I had planned to be. So I went in and asked if I could use their john and gave him the quick rundown, suggesting she might be back in a cab later on.
I didn’t have time for this kind of nonsense. I already had the key to the place I’d reserved for the next couple of nights, had them mail it to me when I paid in advance. It had been sitting in the upper compartment of my truck’s cab for almost a month. As soon as the astronomers had made their predictions, I had picked up the phone and made a couple calls. I got lucky on the second try. Though they tend to be booked up solid for summer by mid-March, there’s not a lot of winter demand for those little cabins around Detroit Lakes, and they were just the sort of thing I was looking for.
“Look, miss. I really need to get a move on. I’m running late. My load don’t need to be to the Twin Cities until tomorrow, but I have got to get going, and I won’t be making a stop back this way again. This here is the place you wanted to be. This is it.” The coat she wore wasn’t much, looked more like a spring jacket than anything else, maybe even silk, bright pink. She shivered as I stood in the door holding my hand out to her, all the time watching my dashboard clock too. I was about out of hand gestures other than the “come here” motion and to point to the ground.
“How save friend ass?” she said.
“What?” Her voice had been so quiet, the wind almost took all of it away, but I knew that she was speaking relatively coherent English. I had not imagined her fluency. She held her shoulders close, looking down into her lap. The map was gone, I guess, into her bag. I shut the door, shrugged my shoulders at the night manager through the big plate glass doors, and he shrugged his shoulders back and returned to Mayberry. I went around and climbed into my seat.
“His life. There was no donkey involved. It doesn’t matter. Really. In the end, I don’t guess I did a very good job of it anyway,” I said, looking out in the yellow-gray night of Fargo.
“Where . . . now . . . friend?” Yeah, I know it sounds like I’m mocking her, but I remember the few words she spoke to me, clearly. She did understand English pretty well, it seemed, but the way she spoke it was in these long, long pauses, and big chunks of clumsy language. Why she didn’t speak before, to me or to the troopers, I do not have an answer for.
“I have to go. Missy, I am guessing you have a pretty good idea of what I’m saying after all, and you’re welcome to come with me. I’m sure there’s plenty of room where I’m staying, and I promise, I will not lay a hand on you. I got other things on my mind tonight, anyways, but if you do not get out of this cab in the next minute, I am pulling out, and this will be the last you see of Fargo with me.”
“Where friend?”
“He’s dead. Been dead about thirty years now. As I said, I guess I didn’t do too good a job of saving him in the end, or his boy for that matter.” I put the rig in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. “The wife and I haven’t seen the boy in over fifteen years. And that is surely my fault.” I found US-10E out of town pretty easy and Fargo disappeared in my side mirrors, the blackness of the night taking over as we made our way out to Detroit Lakes and the cabin I had reserved three weeks before, when the Leonid predictions were made public.
The drive was going to take a little less than an hour, even with creeping my speed up some, and I was about sick of Bob Wills. The radio offered not a lot up there, though I eventually found a classic rock station playing the Stones so I left that. Sometimes you hear a line and there you are, back where you thought you had left, many years in the past. I was home by the time this song came out, but I knew what they meant. Sometimes it is just a shot away.
“Ha. We used to listen to these guys in the bunkers, and I bet there was no joking about the lyrics there. I can tell you, not too many people would have been singing along in the jungle. We were definitely always looking for shelter. Well, we got out of that and came home, but he didn’t just love the movies, like you. He didn’t just want to chase them, he wanted to be in them. That was where I lost him, when he headed off to Hollywood.
“The last time I heard from him was a letter he’d mailed with a key to his apartment. You cold? You want me to turn up the heat?” She nodded and by this time had stopped looking out the window. “Here, put this on,” I said, and that was the one and only time I shared the blanket Shirley Mounter had given to me, the last time I left her, after Fred Howkowski’s funeral. Nobody else but me and the boy even knew it was there, and I wasn’t talking, and these days, surely he was not talking, either. Maybe he’d even forgotten it after all these years. For me, though, every time I unlock the cab and climb on up, that blanket is the first thing I look for, to make sure it’s still with me. It is the one thing I have left to remind me of the happiest period of my sorry-ass life.
Handing it over off the cab bunk just then was the only time I had let anyone else use that blanket, ever, and even at that moment, I didn’t like the idea too much. But Shirley had given it to me that final time so I would have something to hang on to, and I thought that girl needed something to grab just that moment too. Probably, she looked at me instead of the window because we were no longer on the movie tour route for her, but I liked to think it was something else. I adjusted the heat and opened up my flannel. The T-shirt underneath was about fine for the temperature she liked but there was no way to get that flannel off while I was driving. You learn some talents for the road, but those that involve your safety belt and the steering wheel are too big a challenge even for a lifer like me.