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.
“What is it?” he said.
“Irish coffee.”
“Where’s the coffee?”
“Already in our stomachs.”
He kept one hand on the wheel as he sipped. It was Tennessee whiskey. The feeling he had then, with the empty road rolling ahead of them through the white fields and the warmth of the liquor easing through his veins — it cracked open the world. Near Julesburg he turned to look at her and found her gazing back at him, her lips not quite closed.
“That was your present,” she said.
“What was?”
She held up the cup.
He steered them off at the next exit and on a dirt road behind a farmer’s field left the engine running. She slid over on top of him, but when he tried to enter her she pushed him aside and rolled to the passenger seat. She dropped the backrest and pulled his hand between her legs. He moved over onto her, but she pushed him away. “Kiss me like you mean it,” she said. She rubbed her mouth against him. “Go slow.”
He did. Warm air blasted from the heaters. She placed her hand over his, pushed it down between her legs, and showed him. She began to sigh. She lifted his other hand onto her breasts. She spread her legs wide and guided down his head. She was whispering. She arched her back, shivered, and pulled him over on top of her.
On they drove. Just east of the Wyoming border they stopped to eat. At an insanely bright truck stop they shared an order of barley soup under the gaze of a sturdy middle-aged waitress who returned with a full plate of warm bread and set it down next to their bowl. What they couldn’t finish they slid into their pockets.
When they were done eating, he gave Cle the car keys and walked back to use the bathroom. He washed at the sink and in the chipped mirror examined his face. His features had never pleased him, and he looked no different now except for the unusually dark beginnings of a beard. His forehead was still too broad, his entire face far softer than he wished it.
Still, he’d changed again. He could sense it.
When he got back out to the car, the trunk was open and she was in the front seat with the burlap sack on her lap.
“My God,” she said. “What is this?”
“A chain.” He closed the trunk and went around to take his place at the wheel. “What does it look like?”
“My God, Milo. Where’d you get something like this?”
“I made it.”
“You made it?”
“Yes.”
“With your own hands?”
“Yes.”
“It must have taken years.”
“A couple of months.”
“And it’s all wood?”
“Yes.”
“Here,” she said, “let me see those hands.” She reached across the seat and took them. She rubbed the skin on his palms, touched each squarish yellow callus, ran her nails up between the indented joints that beneath her ministrations presented themselves to him as though for the first time; sitting there with her, he saw his fingers not just as straight, utile extensions of his will but as the varied isthmuses of form that they actually were, narrowing and widening, hiding and exhibiting their wrinkles. In the pearly light of the High Plains afternoon she brought them one at a time to her lips and kissed them. Then she lifted both his hands and for a long moment held them there against her cheeks.
At last she let them drop and he started the car and drove them on toward California.
Devil’s Fork
BACK IN BERKELEY, he took his usual seat at Evans Library and looked down at the stack of journals whose tables of contents had long ago become litanies of worry for him. In any week, there were at least a dozen publications that might arrive with someone else’s breakthrough on the Malosz.
He placed his arm over the cover of Acta Mathematica and for a few minutes tried to focus his mind. Finally he gave in and opened to the first page. Fortunately, there was nothing there to upset him, as there wasn’t in any of the rest of the pile. He set it all aside.
His habit then was to close his eyes. He had a particular gift for logical cartography and all his life had been able to leave his thoughts whenever he broke for the night and then return to them the next day at the exact location where he’d quit, as though his internal mappings — in his mind, he was currently unfolding three-dimensional knots and refolding them antichirally — were an illustrated book in which he’d simply turned down the corner of a page.
But this time something different occurred. A darting little flicker on the screen of his cognition. For several moments he couldn’t resummon the previous night’s picture. The blankness lasted almost no time at all.
He’d been getting too little sleep.
—
ONE NIGHT IN a deadening rain, Biettermann offered him a lift home from the mathematics building. Just the two of them this time in the rumbling old GTO, red taillights wobbling against the slick asphalt all the way up College Avenue. The car slid between lanes, moving headlong through traffic. Horns faded behind them.