Timothy Johnston - The Current

He rubbed his open hand on his thigh to warm it and then placed it on her forearm. “It never has and it never will, sweetheart.”

“Oh, Daddy, don’t be morbid.”

“It’s just the truth.”

“That’s not what you said when Mom was sick.”

“That was different.”

“How was it different?”

“You were just a little girl then.”

“Maybe I needed to hear the truth.”

He kept his hand on her arm. “Maybe. But I couldn’t say it. Not then.”

She stared at the ceiling. “I missed her funeral.”

It took him a moment. Caroline Price. “Yes, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”

“I want to go down there. I want to see them. Her family.”

He nodded. “All right. When you’re stronger.”

“I don’t want to wait.”

“Well.” He squeezed her arm.

“Well what.”

“Well, they may want you to. Wait, I mean.”

She turned to look at him. To see his eyes.

“They don’t want to see me, you’re saying,” she said.

“I don’t know what they want, sweetheart. I can’t even imagine. But I think maybe those folks need a little time just to themselves.”

She stared at the ceiling again. She wiped at her eyes.

“They don’t think they want to see me,” she said, “but they do. I’m the one person they want to see.”

He stayed until she slept again, then stayed a while longer just watching her face, the faint tremblings of her eyelids, seeing her face from long ago, a little girl in her bed, night after night when he’d read her to sleep. And then he saw that hand, Radner’s greasy right hand pressed over her mouth, and his heart began to bang again. Finally he got up and crossed the room and drew four purple rubber gloves from the size L dispenser and tucked them into his jacket pocket and walked out of the room.

Sutter , she said once he was in the car again, on the road again. When she wanted to be sure she had his attention she called him Sutter.

“Please, woman,” he said aloud. “Just… for a little while here.”

WABASH HAD THE one loaner and Gordon could take that or he could wait for Wabash to get back with the wrecker, Goss advised him, and then Goss himself could drive him home—he couldn’t leave Marky alone at the garage—but if it was a bad heater core, as Goss would bet dollars to donuts it was, then Gordon would have to leave the van for a day at least, because to get to the heater core you had to remove the AC housing and to get that out you had to remove the blower and the filters and to take those out you had to pull the dashboard and to pull the dashboard you had to— Jesus Christ, gimme the loaner , Gordon had said, and he’d taken the key from Goss and left the van and all his tools and his supplies behind and he would have to cancel his appointments for the day and that was just as well anyway, way he felt.

The loaner was solid, clean, fast. A ten-year-old Crown Vic Interceptor that Wabash had picked up at the Minneapolis PD auction and painted all black, but even so when you were behind the wheel you had the feeling that everyone who saw you coming saw the black-and-white and they slowed way, way down or they hit the turn signal and turned off the road you were on, because a certain kind of man knew the shape of the Crown Vic whatever the paint job and did not like having that shape in his rearview one bit.

Gordon drove the car slowly through town, but when he hit Old Highway 20 he opened her up and let her run. Clear, cold winter day with no snow or ice on the road, the car soaking up the sun, heat pouring from its vents, and he did not ease off the gas until he hit the narrow bridges that crossed over the Upper Black Root as it snaked its way south toward the state line and its new name, the Lower Black Root… upper, lower, all the same river as far as the Indians were concerned, back in the way-back days before highways and bridges and Crown Vics.

Not Indians, Daddy: Native Americans .

Twelve years old and her eyes bright with knowledge. With education—with wonder at his lack of it.

Do you think the Sioux, or the Crow, or the Cheyenne changed the name of the river at the Iowa border? she wanted to know.

Sure , he said, teasing—such seriousness, such big eyes! Why not?

Daddy—do you think they had borders at all? A line that said ‘America’ on one side and ‘Canada’ on the other? No, they didn’t. It was all one land, all one river, all part of the big open everything. Until we came along. Lying to them, cheating them, killing them but keeping their names, Minnesota, Iowa, Dakota —ticking these off on pink, serious fingers— Mississippi, Miami…

We , she’d said. The bloody old work of her own granddad’s granddads: kill off the people, kill off their buffalo, kill off their songs and their stories but keep their names.

That young girl gone now too, lost to the river that was the same river whatever you called it and that emptied into a greater river that once had no name and that emptied into an ocean that once had no name, and that ocean evaporating into the sky and coming back down in water that ran over the land whatever you called it and found the creeks, and the creeks found the rivers once again… and so ran his thoughts, winding north through Sioux country in a machine that spewed from its backside the smoke of creatures that lived and died a million years before any man, Sioux or otherwise, took his first breath, until he reached the sign that warned him of a reduced speed limit and he slowed the Crown Vic and drove lawfully into the little town, and stopped at the one light and then sat there after it had gone green, no one behind him, no one anywhere that he could see, and after the light turned red he drove through it and no alarms sounded, no sirens wailed, and he drove on.

Fields buried in snow, windbreaks of black winter cottonwoods and then the old farmhouse rising out of the land just as he remembered it—twelve, thirteen years ago that would’ve been. Anyway it was before she moved out here and before her father passed, because she’d asked him to come out and talk to the old man, who seemed to think there was something wrong with the septic—he was smelling it all the time now, and no wonder because he hadn’t had the thing pumped in three years, and there was a broken pipe, and it was high summer and by the end of the day Gordon was so covered in filth and flies she’d turned the hose on him like a dog, the two of them laughing like they hadn’t laughed in a long time. Since before Roger died. Since before Meredith left.

Thin line of smoke rising now from the chimney and that could mean she was home or not home, but then he saw her green wagon in the drive and the sight of it did something funny to his guts, to his heart, and he almost drove on; she might recognize the Crown Vic as Wabash’s loaner but she would not put it together with him.

Unless the boy told her so, when she picked him up later in the day; unless the boy told her Mr. Burke had been at the garage that morning and had driven off with the Crown Vic, and then she’d know it was him who’d driven by, who’d slowed down but hadn’t turned in, and he said, “Just to hell with everything,” and braked and made the turn in time, fishtailing a little in the packed snow of the drive.

He parked behind the wagon and stepped from the Crown Vic and shut the door and looked for her to come to one of the windows so he wouldn’t have to stand on that porch waiting for her to answer the door. But she didn’t come to any window and he was making his way to the porch when he heard something off to his right, toward the back of the property, out of view, and he stopped where he was, ear-cocked, until he heard it again: a muted, earthy thunk. Like something pounding at slow intervals on the stony ground.