What This River Keeps: A Novel

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR A few cars drove by him at this late and lonely hour, but Ollie couldn't figure out where in the hell they might be going. Not in this quiet little place, anyway. Not here in Logjam, where the Dairy Queen closed at nine, even on a Friday night, and every other business flipped its door sign over hours before then. Ofcourse, he'd been places that wouldjust be getting started at this hour: Knoxville, down in Tennessee, or Asheville, North Carolina, say. He'd practiced saying these names in his head, so he could casually drop them into conversations like a seasoned traveler. Not that he'd visited either ofthose cities at this time, now close to midnight. But he'd driven by them on their bypasses. And no one could refute him and say they weren't exactly as he described them. He'd grown used to interstate driving, and these cars and pickups passing him on these narrow streets moved like drips ofmolasses down the side ofa bucket. And what were they out for? They weren't driving to the corner allnight gas station for some emergency Aspirin or a rubber from the restroom vending machine, because the gas station closed at seven and you couldn't buy condoms in this town. Some punk-ass high school kid could drive fifteen miles in any direction and not find a condom for sale. He knew this because he'd tried. No one in this county wanted to sell condoms, but they must've been all right with seeing ten pregnant girls in every graduating class ofsixty kids. He smirked to himself. Damn, he hadn't seen it all, but he'd walked into gas stations at damn near three in the morning out there off the interstate. The streetlights burned dimly on their posts above the cracked and patched roads. He drove down the streets slowly, taking it all in, as if he'd never seen his hometown before. Traveling great distances gave a man a wise perspective, he noticed. He slowed as he reached the electric company office. They'd left a light on, and looking through the front window past the painted letters he saw what must've been her desk, empty. Where she'd been working all week, wondering about him. He hadn't driven by the office since he met her and it felt weird to look at the building now. It was a nondescript little place and there was no reason to look at it before. He drove the length of the main street and then turned down a side road when it T'd near the old feed mill. Some kid had spray painted "LSHS Football" on the side ofa deserted house next to the mill. Right on the house itself. Lower Shipley High School, where he himself had attended, some fourteen years ago. He'd played football for a couple ofyears, too, but ended up quitting because the coach wouldn't quit being an asshole. He tried to read the mailboxes lined up in front of the small wood houses, but not all of them were marked with names. And some of the houses and 240 What This River Keeps 241 converted apartments had no mailboxes, keeping a post office box instead. There were fewer streetlamps here, and his lone working headlight cast a weak beam. But he knew the son of a bitch lived down here somewhere, and he needed to find his house tonight, before he saw her again for the first time. He kept a tire wrench behind the seat, a steel X, and he'd planned for many, many miles the most effective way to use it. He'd decided it was the right thing to do. Yet the wrench had four ends to it, four different sizes ofsockets, and he couldn't decide how best to hold the tool to deliver a crippling blow. If there'd been a vast ocean somewhere beyond those mountains where he'd camped, he hadn't looked upon it. He hadn't smelled its salty air or sensed its wet, shifting sand under his pale feet. He hadn't felt its waves crashing against him, the undertow trying to pull his legs out to sea. He hadn't listened to its surf washing under a cacophony of crying gulls. And now that he was back home in Indiana he probably never would. He might send a postcard...