Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

“Maybe she is. She never mentioned it.”

“Some are like that.” He shrugged again. He picked up another smelt, then dropped it on the plate.

“This place smells like shit,” he said. “Come on, let’s go outside.”

He hitched up his pants and I followed him through the crowd to one of the exit doors, which let us out into an asphalt schoolyard. The door slammed behind us and we stood alone in the dusk, the eastern sky a flat, even lavender. Three crows hopped near an overflowing garbage can. One abruptly took flight and landed in a nearby tree, where he called to the others.

“So you like the stories, huh?” he asked.

“I do,” I said.

“I heard ’em all right here,” he said. “That’s where I’m from. Horton Bay. You know those three Ojibway in the Hemingway story? The ones who catch Nick Adams’s dad in a lie about whose timber washed up on his land?”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “I know the story,” I said.

“Those were my cousins and my great-grandfather,” Salteau said.

“The Indians?”

“Yeah, Ignatz. The Indians.”

It seems to me that to assert an identity as someone else’s fictional character is among the strangest forms self-abnegation can take. Ultimately, those who feel that their identities have been borrowed are flattered — insulted, maybe, but flattered. Hemingway’s Indians are depicted as thugs and half-wits; their calling out of Dr. Adams on the timber whose theft he is attempting to conceal has more to do with the unwillingness of one of them to work off a debt than with their misgivings about the ownership of the wood. I remembered what I’d said to Kat at Gagliardi’s, about how there were probably a thousand people in the region claiming a direct connection to Hemingway’s life and work: under other circumstances, I would have assumed that Salteau could see only his stake in a historic imagination.

This was different. While the coincidence wasn’t completely impossible (or so I tried to tell myself), I couldn’t help feeling that a creation of mine had taken physical form and appeared before me. I asked, “Have you been here your whole life?”

“I’ve moved around some. I was in the army. Drove a cab in Seattle. Wore a white collar, insurance business, for a while. You OK?”

I must have looked as if I’d seen a ghost. I nodded, but I wasn’t really OK.

“So why didn’t you bring that babe tonight?” he said.

“She’s not in town. She lives in Chicago.”

“Why are you here, if she’s there? Babe like that? You must be a nutcase.” He laughed.

“She had work,” I said. “She’s a reporter.”

“Ah, the media. You ain’t a reporter, though. You don’t ask enough questions.” He gestured at himself in mock surprise. “ I’m asking all the questions.”

“Well, she’s actually interested in you,” I said.

“Like for a story? Why’d she be interested in me? I never go to Chicago. I been to Chicago once. They don’t need Indians in Chicago. They need Indians right here.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

He hitched up his pants again and we began walking together toward the parking lot on the other side of the building.

“So,” Salteau said after a while. “You and this reporter you ain’t interested in boning. If you really want a story, come on out and talk to me.” We’d arrived at an old blue-and-white Ford pickup. He opened the passenger side door and took a notepad from the glove compartment. Leaning against the hood, he wrote out an Abbottsville address and then tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to me.

“Drop by,” he said. “I bet I could tell her some things she’ll want to hear.” He climbed into the cab and slid over to the driver’s side and started the engine. I watched as he backed out of his space, the beams of his headlights swinging through the cold still air of the parking lot, the sky beyond nearly night now, stars emerging one by one from the darkness like the remembered parts of a dream.

K ATreturned to Cherry City on Monday afternoon and called me. I asked her to have dinner with me at the Tanager, a “classy” restaurant up in Darning, the kind of place that has wall-to-wall carpeting, exposed beams, chandeliers, plush booths and banquettes, a view of the water through the spotless expanse of glass lining one side of the building, a richly satisfying menu of completely familiar American food, and a clientele who fill the parking lot with their Buick and Lincoln sedans. I was a little surprised when she agreed, but I’d told her that I had some news about Salteau.

We met at the restaurant. We were seated in a corner near the kitchen, possibly because I’d decided, in the absence of a commitment to anything else, to commit to my quasi-survivalist look. The rest of the room looked like it was filled with delegates to the 1984 Republican National Convention.

“Nice crowd,” said Kat.

“The food’s good,” I said.

“This is the sort of place that would make my husband shudder.”

The waiter brought our drinks, white wine for Kat and a double Laphroaig on the rocks for me. I’d already had one at the bar while I waited for her to arrive.

“To your husband,” I said, raising my glass. “Let him celebrate grilled marinated baby harbor seal with igneous cornmeal and conker spoonbread, heirloom cotton, roasted artisanal hen-of-the-woods, and squid-ink poblano chutney; let us eat bloody prime rib with ramekins of bouillon and horseradish sauce, a baked spud, and five limp green beans.”

“Enough,” she said.

“Just want to draw a clear distinction between him and me,” I said. “I’m not a food person. To me there’s something essentially infantile about fetishizing the act of putting strange and unfamiliar things in your mouth at every opportunity.” I swigged my scotch.

“I have a feeling you’re more like him than you’d like to think.”

“Oh, yeah?” I held up my half-empty glass. “He like to drink?”

“That one’s all yours.”

“Hey: Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Poe, Chandler, Joyce, Beckett, Lowry, Cheever, Carver, Yates. I can keep going.”

“Bravo. Now, backstroke.” She leaned back and mimed applause. “And here I thought it was just because you’re Irish.”

We ordered and ate. I ordered a bottle of red wine to go with the food and steadily refilled Kat’s glass throughout the meal. I ordered a second bottle. I got the impression that we were getting louder and louder, but I didn’t care. At one point I hooked my feet around the legs of Kat’s chair and pulled her closer and closer to the table, in shuddering, irregular stages, timed to interrupt her while she was speaking. Finally she just began to laugh, and threw her napkin at me. I smiled stupidly as I reached under the table and put my hand on her thigh and ran it up toward her crotch. She jumped, her knees hitting the underside of the table and rattling the dishes and cutlery, and then laughed. “You infant!” she exclaimed. This merited a sharp look of rebuke from a woman at a nearby table, who bottle-fed a placid newborn while keeping an eye on two well-behaved older toddlers who stood peering out the plate-glass window across the room. Her reaction made me slightly peevish. Sex is sex, lady, whether you choose life or no. Miracle bundles notwithstanding, somebody said some dirty words, somebody pulled hair, somebody came, somebody smelled their fingers afterward.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“We’re not in any shape to drive back to Cherry City.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, for about the fifth time that evening. “You watch.”

We left her car in the lot. I went through an exaggerated pantomime of opening the door of my truck for her, bowing, and helping her into the cab — once again I mentally compared my movements to those of a puppet or marionette — and then I got in and drove us down the Manitou peninsula, first along the winding roads that followed the shoreline, where I took it easy on the curves at first and then grew increasingly, recklessly confident, and then south down the relatively straight county route, where I floored the accelerator and hit ninety.