Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (6 page)

“This bus is lost,” someone said. “Where's he think he's going?”

Liz realized they were journeying on narrow roads through bottomland, not on the four-lane. Thick fog breathed at the windows. She touched Peyton's arm. “We're lost,” she whispered. “We're in the Twilight Zone.”

“Looks like we might drive right into the river,” Peyton said after a bit. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

“I don't care if we go to Timbuktu,” Liz said. “Where is Timbuktu, anyway?”

“No idea.”

“It must be somewhere.” Liz tapped the man in front of her on the shoulder. He had a short beard like Peyton used to have. “Do you know where Timbuktu is?”

“Over yonder somewhere,” he said, pointing with his elbow. “Over the big pond.”

“Wouldn't that be something?” Liz said to the man. “To be hijacked to Timbuktu and nobody knows where it is or how to get there—including the hijacker!” She laughed. “It'll take us a month to get there.”

Laughter traveled through the bus. Liz's remarks got passed around, and a couple of passengers began goading the driver to go to Timbuktu.

“This
is
Timbuktu, I believe,” someone called out to the driver. “You've hauled us all the way to Timbuktu.”

“The old geezers look scared,” Peyton said to Liz.

They seemed to be driving over water, but they couldn't see a bridge.

“Hey, don't he have a map?” someone asked.

“We're crossing the Big Muddy,” Peyton said.

The invisible bridge was long, and the river a void. The bus hushed.

“Sorry, folks, I dropped the reins back there,” the driver eventually admitted over his microphone. He turned on the overhead lights. “Don't worry, we'll get you home. Just hold your horses and I'll figure out what road this is. And it won't go to Timbuktu.”

There was a burst of laughter and a little applause.

“I don't believe such a place exists,” said the church woman. “It's just a notion, like Never-Never Land.”

“Like heaven?” Liz said.

“No. Not at all like heaven. Heaven is a real place. It has gold streets and pearly gates.”

“And singing,” said Peyton.

“Everybody sings there, whether they can carry a tune or not,” said the church woman with a smile. “Law', I hate to sing. I purely dread heaven.”

“Do you dread heaven, Liz?” asked Peyton as the lights dimmed again.

“No. Heaven's the least of my worries.”

The bus quieted. Most of the passengers seemed to nod off. After awhile, Peyton slipped his hand under the fleece throw on Liz's lap. His hand rested between her thighs like a sleeping cat. It lay there, its dark heat firing her. Then, under the blanket, his hand began undulating slowly up her leg, inside her shorts. She sat up straight, wide awake, and stared out at the fog. She inched her legs apart. And before long he was finger-fucking her hard, then smoothly, expertly. She felt the peacefulness of giving in, the delicious limbo of temptation, where everything at stake seemed make-believe. For the time being, she was waiting for the spinning images of her life to line up in a perfect row.

Thunder Snow

Boogie tried to talk Darlene into staying home that weekend—heavy snow was predicted—but she wouldn't listen. She had volunteered to drive up to Cincinnati to retrieve her cousin Fentress's thyroid medicine and then carry it to her all the way down in Bell County.

“I don't want you going down there into those mountains if it gets bad.”

“I'll be on four-lanes most of the way,” she said. “If I can't get through to Pineville, I'll just stop at Aunt Gladys's house. Don't worry, Boogie. I'll watch out. You worry too much.”

Boogie did worry about Darlene. Their separation during the Gulf War had been traumatic for him, causing him to become overly protective. He had been terrified that she would return from Saudi Arabia in a body bag. For a woman to come home from a war that way was an intolerable notion. But she shrugged off both the terror and the glamour of the war—a lot of sand and bad food and heavy work loading vehicles, she said. “Somebody had to kick Saddam's butt,” she said when she got home. For a time, she marched around the house like a stranger. He noticed how the permanent in her hair had grown out.

The sky was clear when Darlene headed for Cincinnati on Sunday morning. She would visit her mother, collect the medicine Fentress had accidentally left there, then head for Pineville on Monday. On Sunday evening rain began falling. It turned to sleet. Later, during the night, Boogie could sense the silence of snow over the house and yard. In the morning he lay still in bed for a few moments. He heard no traffic, no planes, no dogs or birds. He got up and pulled the drapes apart. The snow was coming down in thick blobs fat as cotton balls. Already it had covered the barbecue grill on the porch, and the bushes out back appeared to be a row of snow soldiers.

He telephoned Darlene's mother.

“She left two hours ago,” Loretta said. “She thought she could beat it, but it commenced to snowing about an hour ago.”

“It's snowing here,” Boogie said. “She'll be driving right into it.”

“I imagine she'll head home and not try to go down to Fentress's till tomorrow,” Loretta said. She coughed loudly. “Lord, I'm strangled. Darlene had to go to the all-night place and bring me some cough syrup.”

Loretta worked at a dry cleaner's, and in the winter the fumes made her throat raw.

Boogie said, “If Darlene comes back, or calls, tell her to stop somewhere and not try to drive in the snow. Tell her I said so.”

Loretta said, “Well, I don't know what she's aiming to do. Fentress don't have to have her medicine till Thursday.” She stopped to cough. “I told Darlene I didn't think Fentress ought to keep on taking something that's radioactive. They're probably doing some kind of experiment on her.”

“It's not radioactive,” Boogie said.

“I know you and Darlene keep saying that, but I believe it is. Darlene's real good to traipse up here and fetch it for her, though.”

“She likes to drive,” Boogie said. “That's what it is.”

“She said she'd carry me down to Pine Mountain for Easter, but I told her she needn't.”

Boogie shoveled out the driveway, angry at himself for not driving Darlene to Cincinnati. But he had been on the weekend shift. Surely she wouldn't try to drive to Pineville in the snow, he thought. She had been born in the Kentucky mountains but had grown up in Cincinnati, where her parents had moved after her father lost his job in the mines. Darlene said they had worn a path back home to Pine Mountain, they went back to visit so often.

At work, half of the machines were down. Boogie's team was short two workers, and they had to rejigger the controls of the main machine, which directed the manufacture of some small plastic computer-casing parts. Boogie filled out the paperwork and checked on the timing of his number-three stamper. Some wheels were spinning in front of him. He reset a dial. He felt like a pilot in a cockpit. He often imagined he was flying. He could see himself in a Strike Eagle, swooping and plunging like a mighty bird.

“I had to walk half a mile to feed our neighbor's cows,” said Beverly Cox, from her computer station. “I thought my toes were frostbit.”

“Why didn't your husband go feed the cows instead of you?” Boogie asked. He would have done that for Darlene. He would have insisted.

“Cows ain't his thing,” Beverly said. “If it don't eat regular unleaded, he don't want it. He don't even want a dog.”

One of the managers stepped out of a connecting tunnel. “Traffic's backed up on I-75 south,” he said, gleeful with his news. “The trucks can't get over Jellico Mountain. The governor's talking about closing down the interstates.”

At break, Boogie went to the pay phone, but a dozen people were in line and nobody was getting through. The circuits were busy.

“I don't see how folks up north put up with weather like this,” said a wide-bodied guy Boogie knew as Big George.

“Snow—they can have it, I hate it,” said Beverly as she ripped open a candy bar.

“Darlene loves it,” Boogie said. “I bet she's having a big time out there while I sit around and worry.”

“Darlene needs a car phone,” said Beverly.

“That's what I want for Christmas,” said Big George.

“They cost a fortune,” Boogie said.

“What's a fortune if it saves your life?” Beverly sent her candy wrapper flying. “I told Ken if he didn't get me one he might find me in a ditch in pieces.”

“Darlene always thinks she can do anything,” Boogie said, wincing. “She'll drive and drive till she gets stuck. I know
her.
”

“Oh, she'll probably stop somewhere and call,” Beverly said in a sympathetic tone that made Boogie feel even worse.

At six o'clock, soon after Boogie got home, his National Guard unit called him out for the snow emergency. The weather service said this was the worst winter storm in over fifteen years. Garbed in layers, he struggled into the blowing snow. As he drove to the armory, he passed several ditched cars, and he skidded a couple of times himself. The trees had been coated with ice yesterday, and now the snow hung on in great clumps, bending the boughs low. He wondered where the birds were. The radio said it was going down to zero; already the wind-chill factor was five below.

He hadn't heard from her. He'd found only one message on his answering machine, from Darlene's brother Jack. “Boogie, how's the storm treating you? Are you O.K.? Got enough supplies? Did Darlene get back from Cincinnati? I hope she didn't head down to Pineville with Fentress's medicine.”

Snow made hats on garbage cans. Boogie saw a doghouse blown full of snow. He thought for a moment about Alexander, how he used to love to play in the snow. They had had to put him to sleep last winter. Freezing to death would be like being put to sleep. They said freezing in the snow was like drifting away under a soft blanket. You felt like you were settling in for a long winter's nap. Once your mind froze, you couldn't keep on fighting, he thought with a shudder.

Her funeral wouldn't be here, he thought, or even in Cincinnati. It would be in Bell County, with all her kinfolks. He always planned her funeral when he was worried that she'd had a wreck. Sometimes he worried so much that he got pissed when she showed up safely. When she left for Saudi Arabia, he had said, “You better come back. I don't want to have to listen to all your kinfolks wailing and weeping at your funeral.” And she said, “They'll just cry long enough to get it out of their system and then they'll try to sue the government and then they'll forget all about me.” She had grinned so big when she said that.

Gusts of snow blew in front of the car as he felt his way toward Man o' War Boulevard. He was creeping past a horse farm. The snow-covered fields made him think of the desert. Black fences rimmed with snow created a grid against the blank, vanished ground. He saw five snow-blanketed horses huddled under a clump of trees. He wondered if they were Arabian horses. He was surprised they weren't lolling on feather beds in their climate-controlled barns. Racehorses got better care than some people, he thought. Gazing at the broad plain of horse pastures, he thought about Darlene's people shut up in those close, tight little mountains. Darlene had said it used to snow at her grandparents' place on Pine Mountain more than it ever snowed in Lexington. The closeness of the mountains held the cold air longer and drew more snow in, she said. Darlene was always saying, “I wish it would come a sixteen-footer.”

“Sixteen Tons.” Song he remembered from the oldies station. The radio now was listing cancellations. Self-help groups, church groups, schools, a basketball game. The snow glistened and gleamed in the night. His car seemed to be crunching and swaying through heavy sand. “Did you miss it here?” he had asked her when she came back from the war. “Did you think about me?”

“We were too busy to think,” she said. “It was another world.”

Now the radio was saying the weather was worse than the storm of 'seventy-eight. The wind-chill was going down to minus fifteen. A truck in front of him was weaving. Boogie took his foot off the gas. The truck ahead straightened out.

When he met Darlene, he had just moved to Lexington from the flat western end of the state and was living in a rooming house until he could get his bearings. By the time he did, he and Darlene were talking about how many children they wanted. After five years, they were still childless, and they were not sure why she couldn't get pregnant. Sometimes it seemed that she held herself separate from him so that there was an essential part of her he could never reach. He wished they could act like kids again together. He wanted to boogie in the snow with her.

Boogie got his nickname when he was just a toddler, dancing to his mother's old fifties records. Everybody found his little dance amusing. He was petted, an only boy in a houseful of girls. His nickname had always embarrassed him, but Darlene loved it. Not long ago, they saw Little Richard on TV entertaining the President at some Washington thing. Little Richard, in a black suit with sequined sleeves and gold buttons and braid, was screaming out the gospel like he'd just invented it. Darlene said, “How can President Bill just set there like a knot on a log and not get up and boogie?”

At the airport, Boogie followed a trail to the armory, where he was flagged in. Several small airplanes on the tarmac resembled seabirds, snowbound and frozen to the beach. Two large aircraft—a DC-9 and one of those windowless horse-transport planes—stirred his desire to fly. He should have been a pilot, he thought. But that hadn't occurred to him when he dropped out of college.

He stopped at a gate and rolled down his window.

“Hey, we're going out in the Humvees!” a heavy man in an orange deer-hunting suit said to him. “Why, you're Boogie Jones. I knew your wife at Fort Campbell.” The guy laughed apologetically. “I didn't mean that the way it sounded.” A drop of clear liquid was poised on the end of his nose. “I'm liable to get myself in trouble,” he said with a muffled guffaw.

“Point the way,” Boogie said.

“It's going down below zero tonight,” the man in the orange suit said. “That wind-chill factor is what makes it so cold. It's going to be twenty below wind-chill.”

He directed Boogie to a plowed-out parking area. Boogie skidded into the spot a little too fast, jumping the brakes too hard. It made him angry to think of guys like that out on maneuvers with Darlene. Or in some godforsaken desert half the world away. Boogie had parked too close to a van and couldn't get his door open, so he had to start the engine again and back up. He knew the kind of stuff that went on in wartime, but when Darlene was over there he had tried not to think about it. Instead, he had followed the maps on television, the movements of the Humvees through the shifting, whispering sands. Line from some poem? He followed the air war, then the tanks. She wouldn't have been in a plane or a tank. She would have been in a tent or a barracks. He knew perfectly well the unspoken reality of war: It was a sexual high; so far away from home, in the face of death, anything was O.K. In fact, when she was gone, he sort of got to know Dottie Henderson next door. Her brother was over in Saudi flying Warthogs. Dottie had CNN on all the time and taped the other news programs. She had three TVs and three VCRs. Whenever a Warthog went down, Boogie went over and waited with her to find out whose plane it was. She gave him food she was always apologizing for. But she was far too old for him, and she had old-fashioned women's interests, such as theme luncheons. Her garden luncheon featured dirt cakes—chocolate cakes baked in flowerpots and decorated with Gummi Worms.

Boogie's partner for this evening was Glenn Forrest, an insurance salesman. “These Hummers are little tanks in jeep clothing,” Glenn said, patting the low top of the vehicle almost affectionately. Boogie grunted.

Behind the wheel of the Humvee, Boogie set forth on his night mission. It was his turn in the combat zone, he thought. In the war, her unit was called up and his wasn't, and now, in the snow,
he
was on duty. But again they were apart.

In a Humvee, he could practically fly through the drifts. He wheeled around the airport, crunching through a foot and a half of virgin snow, then headed out to one of the subdivisions to pick up a surgeon who had to get to the university hospital. The doctor said he had surgery scheduled in the morning. “It won't happen,” he said as he got in the back seat. He was carrying a gym bag and wearing jeans and a Wildcats jacket.

“What kind of surgery?” Glenn asked the doctor.

“Just a splenectomy. It'll probably be rescheduled.”

“My wife had her appendix out,” Glenn said. “She almost died because they waited so long to go in. They thought she had food poisoning.”

Boogie said, “My wife and I went to the clinic there last summer.” He hesitated, wondering whether to ask this doctor's opinion. Then he blurted out all about the fertility tests he and Darlene had taken.