look at it now and then and be reminded of the place it came from.
A light appeared and reappeared in the darkness behind him, gradually growing larger in the rearview. Loyal heard the whistle blow for a crossing, somewhere behind him, he thought, but when he steered around the long corner before the bridge, the train was there, its light sweeping along the rails, the iron shuddering past a few feet from him.
The worst was the time Dub had come back honed down to his bones, the scabs on his face like black islands and his left arm amputated except for a stub like a seal’s flipper. Mink and Jewell, all stiff in their best clothes driving down to get him, first time Mink had ever been out of the state. Dub called it that, ‘my flipper,’ trying to make a joke but sounding loony and sick. ‘Could of been worse,’ he said, tipping a crazy wink at Loyal. He’d only gone off once since then, no farther than Providence, Rhode Island, and hitching on the road, not riding the rods. There was a kind of school in Rhode Island he said, a place to learn tricks of getting things done with half your parts missing. They could fix you up with artificial arms and hands and legs made out of pulleys and aluminum. A new kind of plastic fingers that worked so good you could play the one-man band with them. But when he came back he was the same. Didn’t want to talk about it. Some VA place for servicemen, farmers had to get along the best they could. It was just a question anyway of how far you got before you were crippled up one way or another. A lot of people didn’t make it past the time they were kids. Look at Mink, pitchfork tines through his thigh when he was five years old, two car wrecks, the tractor rollover, the time the brood sow got him down and half tore off his ear, but he was still there, gimping around, strong as a log chain, getting the work done. Tuf Nut. The old son of a bitch.
Miles into New York state he pulled the car into a field behind a row of chokecherry trees. The broken seat back could come in handy, he thought, pulling out the brace and letting it flop down into a kind of narrow bed. But as he twisted near deep his chest seized up again, a blunt stake slammed into a place under his larynx, and with it a choking breathlessness. He sat up, dozing and waking in starts, the rest of the night.
No station came in clearly on the radio, not even the jabber of French and accordions, riding along the edges of the Adirondack conifer forests, spruce and miles of skeletal larch like grey woods static, sometimes a tangle of deer legs and phosphorescent eyes in the road ahead of him, far enough ahead that he had time to tap the brakes while he laid on the horn and watched them go, worrying about the brake lines, the worn drums. He passed houses not much bigger than toolsheds, threads of smoke floating out of the cobblestone chimneys, passed boarded-up log cabins, signposts saying ‘Crow’s Nest,’ ‘Camp Idle-Our’, ‘The Retreat,’ ‘Skeeter Gulch,’ ‘Dun Roamin.’ Bridges, water racing away, the gravel road punched with potholes, all the roads nothing more than notches through the tight-packed trees, roads that took their curves and twists from the St. Lawrence River thirty miles to the north. The strangeness of the country, its emptiness, steadied his breathing. There was nothing here of him, no weight of event or duty or family. Somber land, wet as the inside of a bucket in the rain. The gas gauge needle tipped down and he kept his eye out for a gas pump. The farther away he got the better it seemed he could breathe.
Late in the morning he pulled up to a tourist trap, BIG PINETREE, lying in wait in the trees beyond a long bend. He was half sick with hunger. Four or five old cars and trucks, standing so long their tires had gone flat. A row of sheds covered with signs: ‘Little Indian Moccasins,’ ‘Peanut Bride,’ ‘Balsom Pilows,’ ‘Lether Work,’ ‘Groceries,’ ‘Sovenirs,’ ‘Tire Change Wihle U Wait,’ ‘Lunchroom,’ ‘Botomless Cup of Coffee 5c,’ ‘Rest Room,’ ‘Gifts & Noveltys,’ ‘Auto Repears,’ ‘Worm & Bait,’ ‘Torist Cabin.’ There was a half-closed look to the place but the light was on in the pump’s round head, the glow shining through the red-painted Tydol Flying A gasoline. The parking lot as rough as a cob, full of mud sinks and washboard ripples. There was a garage bay with a hinge-sprung door that left a scraped semicircle in the gravel. Somebody had dumped a load of cordwood near the main building.
He went in. A wood lunch counter with a few stools home upholstered in red oilcloth, three booths varnished the color of orange peel. He could smell cigarette smoke. The radio was going, somewhere. ‘What a dart you placed in my heart the day that we parted.’ Beyond the counter were islands and aides of moccasins, pincushions, colored feather dusters with handles carved in the shape of a spruce tree, canvas water bags to sling over the car fender, felt pennants, wooden plaques burned with jokes and mottos, green bumper stickers stamped This Car Has Been to the Adirondacks, and on the wall the stuffed heads and mounted bodies of bass and pike, eight-pound trout with square tails, bear, moose and deer, a porcupine bigger than any of the bobcats arched on their birch half-logs, a king snake lumpily crawling over the door lintel and everywhere fly-specked photographs of men wearing knee-high hunting boots holding up carcasses and bodies.
‘Help you,’ said an irritable woman’s voice. She sat in one of the booths, comfortable in a space designed for three people, a fat girl with blond hair parted on the side and pinned back with a black grosgrain bow. She wore a man’s grey sweater over a housedress printed with seahorses. In front of her was a chicken salad sandwich cut square across the middle with strips of bacon hanging out the ends, and a pot of coffee beside a souvenir mug, a magazine folded open. He could see letters spelling out “The Telegram Came While I Was Two-Timing Joe.’
‘Like to get cup of coffee, sandwich, you got any more like that,’ pointing with his thumb.
‘I s’pose we can manage it.’ She heaved to her feet and he saw the wrinkled dungaree legs under the dress, the oily work boots.
‘Are you the Big Pinetree?’
‘Close enough. Big enough. Mrs. Big Pinetree. Piney’s in the Pacific and I’m here keepin’ the bears out of the lunchroom and fixin’ cars much as I can without no parts or no tires. Want it toasted?’
‘Guess so.’
She pulled the uncovered bowl of chicken salad out of a big Servel, the door around the handle discolored with garage grease, slapped three pieces of bacon on the grill and laid three slices of white bread to toast. She pressed down on the bacon with a spatula, forcing the oil out. She opened the Servel again, grasped a head of lettuce like a bowling ball, tore off an inch of leaves and dropped them on the cutting board. She turned the bacon, turned the slices of bread, pressed them with the spatula. She got the pot of coffee from the booth and poured it in a white mug marked ‘Souvenir of Big Pinetree in the Adirondacks.’ She slid the spatula under a slice of bread, toasted dark with a narrow rim of black around the crust, slid it onto a plate, plastered it with Silvernip mayonnaise, put half the lettuce on it, whacked a scoop of chicken salad dead center, then picked up the second dice of toast, laid it in place like a mason dropping a brick in line, hit it with the mayonnaise, the rest of the lettuce and the hot bacon. When the last dice of toast was on she looked up at Loyal, holding the knife.
‘Kitty-corner or straight?’
‘Straight.’
She dipped her head in a single nod, laid the knife dead center, horizontal with the edge of the toast, raised the heel of the blade and cut it clean. She pulled a two-inch cream bottle out of the Servel and thumped it all on the counter in front of him.
‘There you go. I don’t trust guys like it cut kitty-comer. City style. Fifty-five.’ He dug out the change, then sat eating, trying not to cram and wolf. She went back to her magazine and he heard her strike a match, heard the rounded exhalation of her breath, smelled the smoke. She was big, but she wasn’t bad.
‘This is a hell of a good sandwich,’ he said. ‘Any chance of another cup of coffee?’
‘Help yourself,’ she said, rattling the pot on the booth
