“I just want to know one thing,” she said. “Why the fuck did I set you up with Jo if you were just going to ditch her? You lied to me. I am so fucking over the men of this country—well, this world, really, but you know what I mean.”
“I know. It was extra shitty of me. I’m sorry,” he said.
He sat down on her bed and stared out the dusty window. Across the street was a construction site, a large pit ringed by machines that looked to him like giant monsters, which he found momentarily distressing. “I’m just gonna call the police,” he said.
“Look, Sara’s unstable, self-destructive, uncontrollable. She’s run off again—not sure where this time. If she lives to see thirty, I’ll be surprised.”
“How do you know her?”
“She’s my cousin.”
“Then she has money to buy her own shit.”
“Hey, chill out. We don’t know if she stole the jacket. She was probably just cold,” she said. “Why are you being such a pussy about this jacket thing?”
“Why am I a pussy for wanting my jacket back?”
“A leather jacket.” She laughed. “You’ve been in fistfights and you have a black eye. People look at you and say, ‘Look, there goes a guy with a black eye and a leather jacket.’ We get it, you’re a visionary, a badass.”
“Actually, I fell into a cab door. But that’s an interesting theory.”
“What I can’t seem to figure out is if you’re the real deal or just full of shit.” She paused. “Girls steal clothes all the time. Honestly, what is the big deal?”
“I had things in my pockets. I had this arrowhead—”
He stopped midsentence and didn’t say anything else. Maybe forty-five seconds—an uncomfortably long pause—and listened to the traffic humming outside. “Look,” he said, “tell Sara my dad died last week and I have to leave town and I need my jacket.”
“Shit, I forgot about that. What happened?”
“They think he killed himself.”
He stopped looking out the window when he saw her staring at him and he thought she was maybe looking at his eye but then he realized she was watching him. She licked her thumb and wiped something off his cheek.
“You can’t even tell,” she said.
That night Jamie had a strange dream in which he was skinning a white-tailed deer somewhere around Fulton and Nassau. He pinned the deer with his forearm and pressed his knees against the body and then angled a blade across its throat, near the jaw, and severed the windpipe and neck bones and sliced completely through the spine and then cut out the rectum and ripped off the ears. There was a woodpile nearby and for some reason he was throwing the guts onto it, and when he stood he saw his father dead in the woodpile. He dropped the knife and he was no longer himself and he watched the rest of it from beyond.
He woke up and there was a cry caught in his throat, and in some indefinable way the dream made him feel closer to home than ever. He couldn’t get back to sleep so he opened his MacBook and compared prices of rental cars on Enterprise. He thought about his father. The police said there was no note. Only his truck, still running, on the side of the bridge.
In all things Jamie strove to be like his father. He’d never gone to school, lived in West Virginia his whole life. Claimed he’d only ever be happy in West Virginia and that no change of place could ever change who he was. All his friends could sit on their heels in their old age while he just kept on working, and he did so by preference. He’d been sensible and well meaning and always had a look of honesty about him. Tall, with good posture, a nice chin; a man who’d look you straight in the eye, friendly, but with a boyish air. There’d been something assured, Gregory Peck–ish about him. Jamie’s best memory of him was the day he’d found the arrowhead. It was a Saturday and they were walking through the woods. He was five or six years old. The old logging road they often walked went through thickets, across a creek bed, and wound around a hill until it reached a pasture. Jamie fell on his butt and noticed the arrowhead lying under a laurel bush. Almost two inches long, the arrowhead’s sides narrowed until they reached the tip, pencil thin, sharp. The right side was shaped with a precise curve.
“What’s that?” his father said.
“I don’t know,” Jamie said.
His father took the arrowhead. “Let’s see here,” he said. With great formality he began inspecting the arrowhead. They stood on the path for a long moment without talking and Jamie was surprised to see that his father was smiling, apparently pleased with Jamie’s discovery.
“What is it?” Jamie asked.
“It’s an old Indian arrowhead,” his father said. “They probably used it to kill a deer, then dropped it here. It’s kinda cool, if you think about it.”
“What is?”
“That somethin’ an Indian did hundreds of years ago can touch us today. That it was lost by some Indian and wound up here to point us somewhere. Think about it.”
Jamie took the arrowhead and pretended to inspect it. He climbed onto a small log that jutted out of the rocks. Standing up there, he was almost at eye level with his father. He’d spent his life thus far looking up at a mountain; it was the first time he’d considered how different that place might look from the mountaintop.
“Pretty proud of yourself, ain’t ya, knothead?” his father said. “Let me see that again for a second, will ya? I promise to give it right back.”
Jamie slowly handed the arrowhead to his father, who took it from him in the same manner in which he’d given it, and it even looked to him as if his father didn’t want to take it, which made Jamie feel like he truly would get it back.
His father put the arrowhead in the palm of his hand and held it out. “You see how it’s like the arrow on a compass?” he said. “It can point any way it wants to.”
Jamie jumped from the log. “Wonder what it’s pointin’ to then.”
His father lowered himself to one knee. “Maybe the search for whatever it’s pointin’ to is better than whatever it’s pointin’ to. Do you understand?”
Jamie nodded.
His father lightly swatted him on the bottom. “Let’s go on home then.”
It’d been a long time, nearly four years, since Jamie had managed to visit his father, and he barely called anymore, didn’t even write—because that was, he thought, something his father would never understand, that there would be no use searching, no use having an arrowhead to guide him, if there wasn’t something worth finding in the end.
At four in the morning, he left his apartment. The sun wasn’t up, but he smelled the pizza from 2 Bros Pizza and felt a little better. He walked to a coffee shop where he had a coffee among a handful of New Yorkers with their historic faces. He paid and then lit a cigarette and set out walking aimlessly. It’d snowed earlier and he looked for places where he was the first to walk and kicked at the snow and then
