Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“I never heard Frank make a racist comment.”

“After the people were murdered in that church in Charleston, I said to myself, That’s what’s going to destroy us after all.”

“No,” said Claire. “That is what will make it so that no one in the world will care if this country is destroyed.”

“A golden age, though,” said Janet. “In comparison with what’s to come. Golden ages are always in the past.”

Just then, Claire had a small memory, maybe from the nineties? She was sitting in her window seat, waiting for takeoff at O’Hare. They must have been at the edge of the runway, and for some reason, she saw something she had never seen before — planes approaching in the twilight, their headlights on, appearing in the distance, tipping slightly upward, then floating downward. As soon as one landed, another appeared, so silently, so rhythmically, so cooperatively. And then darkness fell, and a few stars glimmered, and a three-quarter moon. She didn’t relate this memory to Janet, but she did think right then that all golden ages were discovered within. No one would ever know that her father, Carl, the endless Iowa horizon, a pan of shortbread emerging from the oven, and her grandchildren laughing in the next room had indeed made her life a golden age. She glanced over at Janet, who gave a little snore. Dreaming, Claire hoped.

—

GUTHRIE SOMETIMES TALKED to Perky, now known as LTC John Perkins Langdon (he had added the “John” himself because as “Perky” he had been incessantly harassed during training and he didn’t like “Franklin”). LTC John Langdon talked like an army training manual — clipped, ruthless, impatient. As far as Guthrie was concerned, Perky’s way of dealing with his own PTSD was to embrace it. He had seen action not only in Afghanistan, but in Yemen, during the crisis, and in Greece, when the EU called in American forces to put down the uprising. When Perky was in the States, he was stationed at Fort Hood. He complained a lot about the heat and said there were rumors going around that Fort Hood was no longer sustainable — they might reopen Fort Ord, out in California, just for the weather. The way he talked now was always sharp, irritated, military, never “perky.” What John would do when they retired him, Guthrie could not imagine.

One day, at the noodle shop in Iowa City, Guthrie overheard some people talking, talking about Seattle, about Pike Place Market, Bain-bridge Island, and, most important, how far Seattle was from everyplace else in the world—“almost like Perth,” said one of the girls. Of course, this was not true. You could see on any map that Seattle was close to several cities: Portland, the nightmare that was Vancouver. But he got up from his lunch, disposed of his bowl and his utensils, and placed his tray on the stand, and that afternoon he left. He took all of his cash out of the bank ($846), packed a single suitcase, filled his car with gas. He stopped at the mall, gave his letter of immediate resignation to the supervisor of the skating rink, picked up his skates, and bought four new decks of cards, just to pass the time. He headed west on 80, not intending to see the farm, but at 63 he turned north after all. Late in the afternoon, he drove past it, then looped around the section. The big house was still there, but the old Maze, the windbreaks, and the barns were gone. Even the Osage-orange hedge was gone. Equipment was parked beside the hill. The hill still sported a small jungle of weeds, trees, wildflowers. Possibly that had been his dad’s favorite place on the farm, but possibly not. He drove on, through Sioux City up to Sioux Falls, where he stopped and spent the night in his car. It was then that he decided not to head straight to Seattle, but to see a few things. He thought twice about this when he woke up just after dawn and all that was visible was dust (he could taste it, too, even though the windows and the vents in the car were closed). He sat up sweaty from the heat, and looked at his watch. Only 7:00 a.m. He put up his seat back, blew his nose (dust) a few times, and made himself wake up. He could turn around. But he knew perfectly well that Iowa City was death for him. No one saw that but Guthrie. Even so…and, anyway, he had resigned from his job. These days, that was like committing suicide.

He drank some water and pulled out of the parking lot. South Dakota was strangely different from Iowa, even this close to the border. Already in May, the former farm fields were brown, the parking lots had no cars parked in them, and the abandoned buildings they surrounded had lost their names. It was spooky. He pulled onto I-90. By eight, the dust had settled, and he could turn on the AC, which might be, literally, a lifesaver. He remembered from school that the Ogallala Aquifer had never stretched this far north — it was mostly in Kansas and Nebraska. There must have been some aquifer up this way, but he couldn’t remember the name of it. It was gone now. The landscape was moonlike, except for the quality of the road (excellent) and the remnants of former towns that he passed along the way. The Missouri River at Chamberlain was almost dry — the bridge soared above it, and the former bed of the river was a dusty stretch of dirt with a thin, shiny greenish line running through it; there had been so little snow out west that it hadn’t flooded in five years. His dad had always been strangely anxious about floods.

He was to the Badlands by lunch; he stopped and had a hot dog and a Coke at a bar in Wall, then drove south into maybe the strangest landscape he had ever seen. His car thermometer said ninety-eight outside, eighty inside. He took off his shirt and shoes, and drove barefoot. The Badlands came upon you gradually, but then there they were: you were driving along the edge of steep cliffs that fell away from the plains, rather than rising above them. The land was so dry that it looked rather like rock. Things got more and more desolate; after a while, he was among the cliffs, and then past them. A house here and there — abandoned ranches, no doubt. The switchbacks meant that he had to drive slowly, so it was dusk when he stopped, parked by the side of the road, and rustled up a box of crackers and another thermos of water. He thought it was perfect, in its way, that he would spend the night here, in the bleakest spot he had ever been in, bleaker than Iraq. Iraq was dry and forbidding, but you knew from ninth-grade history that every square foot of Mesopotamia had been walked over and thought about for thousands of years. Here, that did not seem to be so. Even though Native Americans had lived here, they seemed entirely vanished now, as if, Guthrie thought, the world had ended. But it was cooler than Sioux Falls. He slept fine, and was in a better mood in the morning. He detoured over to Rapid City and ate three fried eggs, an order of bacon, and a slice of cantaloupe. His car was saving him a lot of money. It got fifty miles to the gallon and was comfortable enough to sleep in — that was a hundred dollars a night in hotel costs.

He knew three guys who had disappeared into the North Dakota oil fields — Jake Sharp, in 2012, Randy Case in 2014, and, the most desperate, Lundy Mitchell last year, when he lost his job at the Iowa City Veterans Administration, and left his wife and three kids on South Lucas Street. He sent back most of his paycheck from Williston, where he, too, lived in his car. But the oil business wasn’t what it had been five years ago. According to Tracy Mitchell — who had never wanted Lundy to go, but what else was there to do, especially since their four-year-old was battling liver cancer and needed a transplant — the best fields ran out in about a month.

The weather cooled off a little as he drove north, but as soon as he crossed I-94, he felt the anxiety coming on. Even though he was alert about his triggers, he at first didn’t understand that it was the huge tankers rumbling by, shaking the road and buffeting his old car, that were giving him headaches and making his palms sweat. And the sunlight was blinding — or it seemed blinding to Guthrie — another trigger, because whenever he remembered Iraq he remembered squinting into the desert, barely able to make out where the danger was coming from. Finally, he saw a rest stop and pulled over. It was a nice rest stop, with aspen trees and a bit of a lawn, obviously built in the last few years, but the former oil fields encroached upon it — four dead derricks within a quarter-mile of the lookout, and another one in the distance. There was some sort of old holding pool nearby, and where there might once have been prairie grasses (and even wildflowers, at this time of year), there was now just dusty, gravelly earth. He imagined George Armstrong Custer sitting here on his horse, thinking he had been transported to Mars. On the highway, beyond the little break of trees, brakes squealed and two horns blared, a whining car horn and a deep, aggressive tanker horn. There was no sound of a crash (Guthrie didn’t turn around), but Guthrie’s heart was pounding anyway, as if the gunfire and explosions would commence momentarily. He went into the men’s john — rather luxurious — and sat there in the coolness for a long time, going through his exercises. Maybe, he thought, what worked in peaceful Iowa City would not necessarily work in oil country. He went back to his car, rolled down the windows, and stayed there for a while, practicing his card tricks. By one o’clock, he felt calmer, and also hungry — hunger was always a worthy distraction. He pulled out of the rest stop.