Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming

Standing in the parking lot, Ryan asked Vanessa which window was by the staff lunchroom. She pointed out one nearby. She then went to the trunk of the car and removed a 4-gallon red plastic gas can. John skittishly approached Vanessa, who said, «Put out your hand.» John balked. «Oh, be a man about this, John.» He held out his hand and she poured a fine, granular substance onto it.

Vanessa said, «These tiny, almost invisible little bowling balls are clover seeds. And now we are going to use them to have fun with spelling.»

She began pouring the seeds out in a large flowing script, onto the putting green grass. John understood that she was writing something. «What are you writing?»

«She's writing out the words “Gary's banging Tina,” » said Ryan.

«Who's Tina?»

«The CEO's wife. They leave a sloppy trail behind them, too. And I wouldn't have dragged Tina into this except that she's the one who made sure that Gary got the credit for my ideas.»

«Clover seeds quickly penetrate the turf,» said Ryan. «And once they seed, their roots are like tentacles — the shoots show up a deep, dark green in about ten days.»

«Just a few days before Gary returns from Bermuda. What a coincidence,» said Vanessa. She finished her large, graceful lassoing of letters.

«The only way to get rid of the words is to remove the turf,» said Ryan. «Smart, eh?»

«Done.» She headed back to the car.

«That's it?»

«Chop-chop. Let's get a move on.»

A minute later they were on the freeway again. Vanessa was still driving. John was getting the jitters. He was having dark thoughts about what could have happened to Susan. Though his movies were violent and their characters often sick, John had never thought of them as being real . For the first time in his life he began visualizing the violence of his films entering his life and it made him feel queasy, and now he knew a bit of what the people who sent him letters chiding him for gore might be feeling.

Ryan said, «Vanessa and I are going to help you find Susan.»

«Leave it to the cops,» said Vanessa, «and she'll be luncheon meat before anybody finds her. Let me put out a dragnet tonight. Come over to my place tomorrow afternoon at five. I'll give you the results and throw in dinner.» She paused. «Are you okay, John?»

«Why?»

«You look like you've seen a ghost.»

«I'm fine. Vanessa,» he said, «I have a question for you.»

«Uh-huh?»

«Why are you helping me? I mean, you don't know me — you don't — »

«Oh, stop right there. My angle is Ryan. You helped him, and so I'm helping you.»

«And?» asked John.

«And that's all. Please, why don't you tell me the real reason you're so obsessed with finding Susan Colgate, huh? For all I know, she could be wearing a Girl Guide costume and decomposing underneath your front porch — and maybe all of this search stuff we're doing is a ruse designed to deflect attention away from you. »

John was dismissive: «Not the case.»

«Okay then, why look for Susan Colgate, John?»

«It's because …»

«Yes ? »

John squeezed and squeezed his brain with his fingers like a hard-to-open bottle of olives. «It's because she knows that people were meant to change. She knows it's inevitable. And she seems to recognize I'm at a point in my life where I can't transform anymore. I sound like a country-western song. Sorry.»

«Well, to me it looks like you're stalking her. It could seem kind of creepy to her.»

«I'm not stalking her, Vanessa. I'm trying to find her. Nobody's taking this disappearance seriously, except us.»

«Hey, what's in this for Susan?» Ryan asked. «Assuming we rescue her from being tied up on top of the railway tracks.»

John glared at him.

«Sorry.»

But Ryan's question got John to thinking. What did he bring to Susan's table? Was he just another fucked-up Hollywood guy for her to take care of? No, because — because what? John reached down deep into the hole of his mind, trying to grasp onto a nugget of reason. He thought of the desperately lonely woman reading the Architectural Digest, and he thought of the woman he'd met outside the Pottery Barn who'd fed him dinner, the secret nation of Eleanor Rigbys who existed just under the threshold of perception. That this secret nation existed was new to him. That he might help fix it was even newer. «We have a lot in common,» he blurted out.

«Huh?» Both Ryan and Vanessa had each gone on to new thoughts.

«Haven't you noticed that the couples who stick together the longest in life are the ones who shared some intense, freaky experience together? Jobs — school — a circle of friends?»

«Yeah?»

«Well, Susan and I did that, too.»

«But you have no idea where Susan went after the crash, John. I mean, you're talking about disappearance, right?»

«Ryan, that's what we learned about each other during our walk — that we both went to the same place. At the moment I don't know her specifics, but that'll happen once I find her.»

They fell silent. Vanessa was frozen at the wheel, as if driving through a snowstorm. They were in one of thousands of cars on a ten-lane freeway jammed with cars, even in the darkest part of the night, rivers of cars headed God knows where. Nobody spoke.

John slept all of the next day. That night, over a simple pasta primavera, Vanessa emptied out her net for John and Ryan to see her bounty. «Susan Amelia Colgate was born on March 4, 1970, in Corvallis, Oregon. Her mother, Marilyn, was married to a Duran Deschennes, but never actually got divorced.»

«She's a polyandrist,» said Ryan.

«A what ?» asked John.

«It's the opposite of bigamy. When a woman has two or more husbands at once.»

«This Duran Deschennes guy got killed in 1983 and the mother married Donald Alexander Colgate in 1977, so for seven years she was a polyandrist. But my hunch is that Don Colgate has no idea he was hubby number two. I bet we three, along with Marilyn herself, are the only people in on her secret.»

Vanessa continued. «Susan grew up in McMinnville, Oregon-in a trailer, at that. She was a frequent entrant, finalist and winner in literally hundreds of beauty pageants during her youth. Her biggest win was the 1985 Miss USA Teen pageant in Denver, but she surrendered her crown there onstage, to LuAnn Ramsay, now wife of Arizona's governor, I might add.»

«This stuff I already know,» said John. «Internet. Library. Magazines. Tell me something new.»

«In 1997 she was presumed dead in the Seneca plane crash, but she wasn't, and to this day nobody knows where she spent almost exactly one calendar year. Even I couldn't find anything there.»

«Such modesty.»

«Well, I did find something. »

«What?» John pounced.

«It may be nothing, but when I was patterning her phone data — »

«What phone data?»

«Oh, grow up. The era of privacy is over. As I was saying, I was patterning her phone data and found an anomaly. Her most-dialed phone number is to a guy named Randy Hexum. He lives out in the Valley. So I did a scan on him, and it turns out he's from Erie, Pennsylvania. His real name's Randy Montarelli and he lived thirty miles away from the police station where Susan turned herself in and claimed amnesia.»

«And?»

«They both arrived back in L.A. at the same time a year ago, and he went to work for Chris Thraice. Randy Montarelli-slash-Hexum also has almost no data attached to him since leaving Erie. It's damn hard to have a dead data file, but he's done it. It's bloody suspicious.»

«He's in the Valley?»