Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

Then it happened: he was confused. For a moment, there seemed to be two thoughts entering his mind at once. It was a moment — half a moment — of misperception. She seemed to be very far away, her voice coming from some other room.

Then it cleared.

“All right,” he said. He took the cup and pulled out a chair for her. “Partners in crime, then. What do you think of that?”

“You’re not the type.”

“I’m not? What about this?” From the closet he pulled out a pint of whiskey that he’d bought that morning. He’d wrapped it as a Christmas gift for Borland; but now he tore apart the wrapping and fortified the coffee. He needed calm. “To something different,” he said. When she’d drunk it down, he poured a shot for himself.

—

AT CHRISTMAS, HE took the bus home to Cheboygan. The road leading up to the house was piled with snow, and all along the hill the rows of spruces hung low with their winter weight. In Berkeley, he’d boarded the bus in a T-shirt. Now he moved morosely through the old rooms in his flannels, looking out the windows while his mother sat at the reading table and his father tinkered outside. He read his coursework; he slept long hours in his bed; sometimes he went out to the woods, though he felt separated from them now. He would open the thin Pelado and Harkness text on characteristic classes that Hans Borland had lent him, then sit at the radiator flipping the pages in his lap, thinking of Cle.

Calling felt like weakness.

Only when he was asleep did he not pine for her. His nights were fitful, disturbed by dreams of plunging. Every morning shortly after dawn, regardless of whether it had snowed during the night, his father would put on his boots and go out to salt the walks. Then came the hollow wallop of the drifts falling to the hedges as the old man worked his way around the garage eaves with a broom. Milo would turn to the wall and try to sleep, thinking of the soft shelf of heat where he’d curled his legs behind Cle’s just a few nights before.

She’d gone home to see her family in Minnesota. No more than a narrow sliver of land separated them now, but something other than the map made it insurmountable. He’d called her on his first night home and she’d seemed distant, an intermittent stream of laughter emerging on the line from somewhere in the house. She had sisters. He waited for her to call back, but she didn’t. He gave in and tried again two nights later, but the sister who answered the phone hesitated for a moment, then told him she’d gone out. He vowed not to call again till the week was up.

He wondered what Earl Biettermann was doing over the break.

Time was interminable. He knew he ought to be working on the Malosz, but watching his mother with her novels and his father with his tools — he was starting another one of his projects — leadened him. It took a certain energy to lift his mind to the plane on which it could bring force to bear on a problem. Now this energy had deserted him.

One morning, a few days before the vacation ended, his father brought him outside to the garage. Laboriously, the old man bent down, turned the cross-shaped metal latch, and raised the creaking door. Inside, the family’s old powder-blue Valiant had been cleaned and polished.

“Yes?” said Milo.

“We’re getting a new one,” said his father. “Delivered tomorrow.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Plymouth. It’s yours.”

Milo didn’t know what to say. He walked around to the driver’s window and looked in at the familiar seats. A pair of keys on the dashboard, tied together with string. He stepped over and shook his father’s hand.

The old man said, “In this kind of weather, use thirty-weight oil. Forty in the summer if it’s hot.”

“I will. Thank you.”

“Your mother’s inside. It was her idea. She’ll want to know if you like it.”

“I do. I like it very much.”

That evening he called Cle again. This time her sister handed over the phone. He told her about the new car. She told him about her vacation. The Wells family owned a toboggan, and the sisters had taken it into the hills around Northfield, then cooked supper over a fire. They’d roasted a goose for Christmas and spent the rest of the days in Minneapolis, ice-skating on a lake and shopping.

There was a silence.

Finally she said, “Don’t you want to know whether I got you anything?”

“Do I?”

“Well, I might have.”

This knocked down the wall inside him. He told her he would drive across the Upper Peninsula and pick her up in the Valiant at her front door and bring her back to school.

“I already have my plane ticket, silly.”

“I’ll drive underneath the plane.”

She laughed.

“Really,” he said.

“That’s silly. I told you.”

“When do you leave?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Which flight?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“So I can make sure God protects it.”

“He doesn’t do individual flights.”

A silence. Then she said, “Actually, that was kind of sweet.”

Two days later at the American Airlines terminal in Minneapolis, he ran up the corridor waving a bright orange hunter’s hat. At the gate, the passengers were already lining up to board.

“Lord,” she said. “Am I dreaming?”

“No, I am.” He took her valise. “The car’s outside, Cle. Come on, I almost burned it out getting here. I’ll drive you all the way to your door.”

She looked around. “You’ll have to get rid of the hat, though.”

—

IT WAS A three-day trip that took them five. The roads were good, but snow stretched knee-high to the horizon. They stopped three times in the first hundred miles and tore at each other’s clothes — at the back of both rest stops between Minneapolis and Albert Lea, where she hung her Catholic-school sweater in the window and climbed past him into the backseat, and the third time on a picnic table beside a creek culvert that passed under the highway, his pants pulled down and her skirt pulled up, the whole thing hidden from the cars but not the trucks. Big rigs blared their horns as they passed. It was still broad daylight.

When they reached Albert Lea a lazy snow was filtering down. They turned west, then south onto 60 at Worthington, the clouds breaking up finally near Sioux City, where they came out onto the Missouri River under a clear sky at nightfall.

A huge barge lit from bow to stern was making its way up the dark waterway. “Our own private constellation,” he said.

“Floating toward us through the heavens.”

They got out of the car and stared. She cradled herself in the crook of his shoulder. They must have stood there for an hour in the windless night, silently watching as the lights moved up the river past them. Then the landscape turned black again. It might have been the happiest hour he’d ever spent.

Onward. It was twenty-five degrees out, and after a dinner of Ritz crackers and a can of Spam from a country gas station, they spent the night on a side road near Onawa, curled around each other in the backseat beneath their coats and a wool blanket that he’d found folded around a tin of chocolate bars in the trunk. In the morning she nudged him awake. She pointed through the gap she’d rubbed in the frost: a herd of elk was filing slowly past the car.

“It’s a sign,” she said. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For picking me up. You seem to have figured out what a girl wants.”

“I have?”

“Some of it, at least. I guess you’re actually not an idiot. Not a complete one, anyway.”

In the rising light they ate the chocolate bars and stepped a few yards from the car to drink from a shallow stream whose icy coat he broke with the heel of his boot. At midday, near Ogallala, she pulled a tiny bottle from her bag. She split its contents between the two Styrofoam coffee cups that had been rolling around on the floor since their gas-station stop the night before and offered one across the seat.