I passed the fat trunks and dented bumpers of sedans that seemed iced in place, as if their owners were inside drinking and gaming away the time until spring thawed those tires loose again. An unmistakable waft of burning meat floated toward me, making me think of the stockyard east of town, the way thousands of animals were corralled into their own lot of tight pens, icicles of snot hanging from their muzzles, frozen mud locking their hooves in place. I was hoping to find Bill Hasper, Parkton’s lone taxi driver, for a ride back home.
Ahead was a modest commotion, centering on a column of smoke, and the black slush at my feet soon became littered with rib bones. I came across an old water tanker, which had been fashioned into a gigantic truck-sized grill, in the manner of those oil drums people cut lengthwise to turn into smokers. A man in a chef’s hat stood upon scaffolding over this thousand-gallon grill, scalding entire racks of ribs and briskets. He leaned to shuffle great mounds of meat over heat that rose a shimmery silver-black. The raised half-dome of the water tank read “You’ve Got a Friend in Beef!” and I was pretty sure that, if the dome slipped off the stick that kept it propped up, it would cut this man in half.
As I walked past one gritty vehicle after another, it was on Julie that my mind settled. Sure, she was stuck-up and aloof, and her hair was a fright, but I couldn’t stand the idea of her going out into the world thinking I was a buffoon of a man, a scientific huckleberry. In universities across America were departments that had had only one encounter with Hank Hannah, and they will forever remember him as the jerk at the shrimp bowl, the ape at the lectern. But I wasn’t the same man who once entertained a dean with a cocktail-napkin diagram of the sacred Mactaw fertility dance. I wasn’t the same person who wore Highlander aftershave and walked around with a copy of my own book in my back pocket. I simply couldn’t let Julie return to UNND with such a skewed portrait of a guy who had since caught sight of some of his problems and was really trying.
In the extremities of the lot was recreational-vehicle land. Here streams of RVs were parked in parallel lines, rather than rows. It was like walking down industrial alleys, colder somehow in these corridors of motor homes, and when the wind kicked, you could see lines of them rock like train cars. That’s where I caught sight of Farley Crow Weather, eating ribs from a Styrofoam container, admiring a Wind Reaper Mark V.
Farley nodded, mouth full, at the sight of me, and beckoned me over. I could tell he’d just had his flattop trimmed — fine bristles dusted his forehead and ears.
“Jeez,” he said, “where a guy couldn’t go in this rig.”
Together we studied the camper. It was a three-axle model, with outriggers and built-in tow bars. A satellite dish pointed toward the Arctic.
“You planning on a trip?” I asked.
Farley tossed a bone under its rear bumper, grabbed another rib.
“Never know,” he said. “A fellow thinks about it now and again.”
“It’s a pretty big outfit for one person,” I said.
“I suppose,” Farley said. “You think it could take the hills?”
We examined the vehicle’s size and length. We bent to inspect the rear differential, and when Farley pointed toward the exhaust pipe, whose mouth was nearly six inches wide, we nodded that an engine that big probably could.
“Out here for business or pleasure?” he asked.
“Oh, both,” I said. “You?”
Farley gave me a quick once-over, noting my wild hair, my jacket, the general animal hide of me. He eyed the raggedy gift-shop bag I held.
“Serving some writs,” he said. “Plus, I know a guy out here who cuts my hair.”
My scalp was really itchy. “Look,” I said, “I could use a ride.”
“Yeah, sure, I s’pose,” he said, pointing a bone in the direction of his own four-door American sedan. This was his way of saying, Anything, buddy, anything.
Farley’s back seat held two milk crates of legal briefs, both buckled down with safety belts; the passenger seat was a bin of soda cans and empty boxes of Vicks licorice cough drops. A police scanner on his dash flashed little red lights as it roamed all the emergency channels, looking for trouble. When I climbed in, Farley fired up the engine, then promptly powered down all four windows. He kept looking at me funny.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Farley said. Then, “You got a rash or something?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” Farley said, but as we turned onto the main road, he eyed me again.
I was scratching behind my ear. “What?”
Farley returned his attention to the road. Cold air flooded the cab, lifting a flurry of cough-drop wrappers as we picked up speed. Trudy’s GTO, crusted gray with road-swept snow, sat on the side of the road, but there was no sign of Gerry’s cruiser.
“Farley,” I said, “it’s good that I ran into you. I’ve got an important question.”
The police scanner stopped for some staticky talk, though we couldn’t make it out. Farley turned down the squelch, so the red light cycled and cycled in silence.
“Shoot,” he said.
I said, “Let’s say you have some friends, and these friends are probably doing something bad. You aren’t exactly helping, but you know it’s bad, and you haven’t turned them in, either. Are you in trouble?”
We passed the old skating rink, a gang of crows keening along its saddled roof, probably casino-bound to scavenge all those bones. Farley shook his head. “You know, Hank, I’m your lawyer. You can tell me things, and it’s confidential. That’s how it works.” Farley raised the windows, asked, “Would this have anything to do with an article I saw in the paper that someone killed a little girl’s pig over at Glacier Days?”
I didn’t say anything. I felt something sharp on my ear, like I’d been bitten. I slapped at it.
“Your school didn’t start giving Ph.D.s in hog butchering, did it?” Farley joked.
Beyond the tractor dealership was Parkton’s one sleazy motel, the Lolly gag, and there, in the parking lot, was my van. How many vans have custom-painted tire covers that read “King of Spades” above a playing-card anthropologist that held a shovel instead of a scepter? Of course, everyone in town would think it was me in there. I craned my neck as we drove past. Was my father really in one of those rooms getting laid? I’d need scientific notation to figure out the last time I got laid. I’d need an Aztec calendar to find that date.
I turned to Farley. “Do you think I’m washed up?”
Most friends would say, Hey, buddy, what’s eating at you?
But Farley meditated on the answer. “It depends,” he said, after a while.
I didn’t ask, On what? I let the clapboard farmhouses shoot on by.
Farley eventually said, “If you’re comparing yourself to the hotshot Hank who got his theory published and started living too high-hog to spend time with his friends — well, compared to that jerk, you’re doing pretty good. If you’re comparing yourself to the Hank I knew at Mactaw, the pimply kid who drove our sociology teacher crazy, who wrote articles in the Tomahawk about making the world a better place, who talked over lunch at Burger King about history and truth in a way that this reservation kid had never heard before… Compared to that guy? Well, you tell me.”
When we pulled up in front of University Village, Farley held my eye as I grabbed my bag and swung open the door. This meant that he wasn’t done with me, and, standing out in the snow, I leaned in the window, because sometimes Farley could say some pretty dang wise things when you least expected it.
His foot rested lightly enough on the brake pedal that the car wanted to pull away. He waited until I’d closed the door, then unwrapped a Vicks cough drop. “Try to avoid those store-bought flea powders,” he told me, popping it in his mouth. “Start by bathing in baking soda. If that doesn’t do the trick, you’ll have to use vinegar and tomato juice.”