Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

“Nothing,” I said. “Just curious.”

I took this as a sign to head back to the casino, the blown grit pelting my bare legs. I could see Angus, unmistakable in his white coveralls, standing on the naked brown land behind the building talking to Gerald, who kept gesturing toward the south. Angus was nodding, his hands on his hips, and when he saw me he grinned. Gerald, on the other hand, turned around and looked significantly less happy to see me.

“Hello,” I said. “What’s going on back here?”

“Just finishing up,” Angus said. His coveralls were spotless.

“I don’t know a lot about plumbing,” I said, “but you’re not even dirty.”

“Easy jobs today,” Gerald said. For the first time, he smiled, and his whole face changed; behind his thick glasses, his brown eyes looked suddenly warm. “A few leaky faucets is all.”

“Even so,” I said.

“I’m like a tightrope walker,” Angus said, “ and the coveralls are my net. I have them just in case, but I never fall.”

“Hah. He’s a kidder, this guy,” Gerald said to me. “I’ve seen him plenty grimy, don’t you worry.”

“So did you win us a million dollars?”

“I lost everything,” I said. “I had to sell the van.”

“Glad to hear it,” Angus said. He put one arm around my shoulder and extended the other to Gerald, who shook it. “We’ll be off.”

We walked back through the casino, Angus carrying a toolbox this time, waving to all and sundry. Most people ignored him but a few, including the woman who’d given up her slot machine for me, glanced up and smiled. She had returned to the same machine, and there was a bucket full of quarters in her lap, probably all the money I’d put into it. She saw me looking at the bucket and winked.

As we got into the van, I was still trying to figure out what Angus had been doing there. “How long have you known Gerald, anyway?” I said.

He shrugged. “Nobody really knows Gerald Lobachevski,” he said. “I just work for him every once in a while.”

“What kind of name is Lobachevski, anyway?”

Angus started the van. “His father was some Russian anthropologist — pretty famous, supposedly. Came to New Mexico to do research at a pueblo and had a little romance. He wound up leaving again before Gerald was born. I don’t think Gerald ever even met the man, but he likes having the name. He likes to be different from everybody else.”

I was going to ask more questions, but became distracted when I realized that instead of turning back toward town, Angus was driving north.

“Aren’t we going back?” I said.

“Now why would we do that?” he said, and winked. Then he turned up the music, which was no longer Sinatra but something classical I didn’t recognize.

“Because we’re in the middle of nowhere?”

“I wish that were true,” he said. “But it’s not.”

The landscape changed from brown to red, with green pine trees unfurling their branches. We were in the mountains now, and I rolled down the windows to let in the cool air. There were no houses, no towns, no nothing. It looked like nowhere to me.

He turned onto a dirt road and the van shuddered in its ruts. I looked at his freckled profile. He was leaning his head on his left hand, his elbow propped against the window, and looked calmer than I’d ever seen him.

He parked deep in the woods, the trees thick and tall, and what sunlight reached the ground beneath them was filtered thin. Angus got out, came around to my side, and opened the door. For some reason he was carrying his box of tools and for a second, looming there in his absurdly clean outfit, he looked like an undeniable threat.

“Aren’t you getting out?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you going to molest me or something?”

“Excuse me,” Angus said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I believe you’ve already molested me. More than once. Could you get out now, please?”

“It’s just that I associate being alone in the woods with, like, horror movies.”

“That’s both sad and ridiculous,” he said.

I climbed out and followed him through the woods into a small clearing, where he set the toolbox down. My sandals were full of pine needles and dirt. Birds were chatting away in the trees. There was something weird about the place, and it took me a second to realize what it was. “It’s cool up here,” I said. “Much, much cooler.”

“I thought you’d like that.” He unzipped his coveralls and took them off, revealing the usual ripped shorts and tattered T-shirt. He folded the coveralls lengthwise and laid them on the ground. “Have a seat,” he said. The coveralls were still warm.

He sat down by the toolbox and opened it up. “I asked Gerald to go to the store for us while you were gambling his money away,” he said. He pulled out and laid on the ground a succession of items: a cluster of grapes, a block of cheese, sliced sandwich bread, a tomato, a can of tuna fish, a whole pineapple, a rotisserie chicken, a bottle of wine with a screw-off cap. It was a big box.

I started to laugh.

“Best I could do,” Angus said. He took his Leatherman out of his pocket and started cutting up the pineapple on the lid of the box. The spiny skin fell to the ground in spirals. The sky was a flat, clean blue, and the sun was making everything glisten. He kissed me and held my hand, his own hands sticky with pineapple. I lay down on the coveralls and wrapped my fingers around the belt loops of his cutoff shorts. He smelled like water and ammonia and pineapple.

“I don’t know why we’re here,” I said.

“You really are out of touch with nature,” he said. “Not to mention the concept of hanging out.”

“No, I mean, I feel like I’m probably not your usual kind of person. I picture you with an earth-mother type who doesn’t shave her legs and hews her own wood. I couldn’t survive a day by myself in the outdoors. I don’t even know what hewing means, come to think of it.”

He looked at me, then touched my face, and his expression almost made me laugh; but then I was past it, on the other side of laughing.

“I don’t know anybody like you,” he said.

I almost choked in exasperation. New York, I wanted to say, was full of people exactly like me. With Michael, for example, I’d always known I was a type, part of a crop, one in a long line of art-history girls with the same education and wisecracks and shoes. If he could see me now, on my back in the woods with a plumber and a pineapple, he’d raise an eyebrow and smirk. In my mind I told him to go to hell, and returned my attention to the moment at hand. “I’m not an unusual person” is what I finally said. “You, on the other hand, are definitely an unusual person.”

Angus put his sticky hand on my bare ankle. “You smell good.”

“Sure, compared to the other people you know,” I said.

He kissed me, and I kissed him back. I didn’t know how long we spent there, and didn’t care. After lunch we took a nap, then went for a walk. When we got back to the van it was dusk.

I fell asleep in the van heading back to Albuquerque. When I woke up, my mouth was dry and cottony from hanging open the whole time, and I smacked my lips together, dazed. Angus was driving with one hand on the wheel and his hat pulled down over his eyes. We drove past eighteen-wheelers barreling along the interstate, past hordes of motorcycles and people hauling boats back from whatever excuse for a lake they’d managed to find around here.

Angus bought gas when we hit town, peeling some bills off a wad of cash in the glove compartment, and when he got back in the van he asked where I wanted to go.

I looked at the money; it was a ball the size of a grapefruit, seemingly composed of large bills. “I know we can’t keep staying in motels,” I said, “but the thought of going back to that apartment with everybody else doesn’t really appeal to me.”