There wasn’t much to look at for most of the drive.
Tom followed George Tyler Jr. almost twenty miles along the tar-patched stretch of highway leading east out of town. They finally turned south at a town called Sparks. Tom saw the sign, but he didn’t see the town.
Tyler took a county road through an open gate, bouncing over a handful of iron bars set parallel over a trench in the ground. Tom remembered his grandfather calling them autogates; they were designed to keep livestock from crossing. Ranchers installed them all over this area where fence lines paused for road.
The road turned to gravel, then bare dry sand, narrowing as it curled through pasture toward lower ground. Grazed scrub turned to taller grass.
Then trees. They entered a tunnel of elms and oaks and hackberries, all beginning to bud with new leaves. Within the next couple of miles, Tom saw paper birch growing next to tall fir and pine.
According to the brochure he’d taken from a wire rack in the front office of the motel, this leg of the Niobrara flowed twenty-eight miles through a state park and a federal wildlife refuge. Ecosystems jumbled in the river valley, from western to eastern forest and prairie between.
According to the brochure, if you liked getting away outdoors, the Scenic Niobrara River was for you. Wildlife abounded. Waterfalls cascaded. A child could navigate the diciest of the rapids between the put-in below Cornell Dam and his grandfather’s place at the end of the run.
The wildlife Tom had spotted from the car consisted of polled steers and a rabbit. A smashed turtle. A few birds. He hadn’t really been looking. Every mile or two now, they passed a weather-beaten shingle for one of the other outfitters along the bank.
Tyler took a cut off the main road, and they came to a pine rail arch. A big splintered sign welcomed them to Coleman’s Landing. An arrow labeled CAMPGROUND pointed toward a right fork; the arrow pointing left said ARRIVAL CENTER—CANOE/KAYAK/TUBE RENTAL * FIREWOOD * CONCESSIONS * GEAR & GIFTS.
Tom heard the river, and then he saw it, flat water tumbling over a ford of jagged bedrock and driftwood limbs. They followed a bend around a curtain of trees to a parking lot topped with crushed rock. Tom could smell the water when he got out of the car.
“I’ve never been here,” he said. “Pretty.”
“Water’s low,” Tyler said. “Awful drought, last few years. Folks were hoping for a big snow this winter. Didn’t get one.”
“Oh.”
“Not sure who belongs to that one.” Tyler indicated a third car parked in the lot: a rusted Subaru Brat with a camper shell and no hubcaps, IN TRANSIT tags instead of plates. The Sube sat near what appeared to be a mini school bus that had been painted silver, hitched to pull an aluminum trailer.
“Which one’s the truck?”
“Truck ain’t as nice as either of those.” Tyler nodded at the bus. “And that’s the only one belongs here. Take a load off if you want. I’ll go see what’s what.”
Tom didn’t feel like waiting around in the parking lot. He went with Tyler up a cedar chip path.
The main building sat back on a small rise overlooking the ford; it looked to Tom like a cross between a farmhouse and a ski lodge with a long covered deck added on. He saw a couple of sheds and what looked like a small bunkhouse farther back in the trees.
He also saw a row of canoes turned up on the ground outside one of the sheds, aluminum keels glinting in the sun. The shed’s sliding door had been rolled open; loud classic rock drifted from inside.
A guy in cutoffs emerged with a coil of rope in the crook of his elbow. He wore flip-flop sandals and a red bandana pirate-style on his head. He saw them coming and stopped what he was doing.
“Afternoon,” Tyler called.
The guy raised a hand. Up close, he aged a decade from Tom’s initial guess. His eyes looked pink, slightly shot.
“You work here, son?”
“Little as possible.” A grin. “What can I do for you guys?”
Tyler glanced at Tom. “Sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“I’m Duane.”
“Duane who again?”
“Foster. If you’re looking for the owner, he’s not here right now. I just got here myself.”
“Just got here from where?”
Foster narrowed his eyes. “Omaha. Is there a problem?”
Tom didn’t know why he felt like he should jump in. “I’m Tom Coleman.”
“Hi.”
“Your boss was my grandfather.”
“Was?”
“Heart attack,” Tyler said. “Three weeks ago. I’m sorry, son, I thought Park’s employees had been notified.”
Foster looked at the loop of rope on his arm. He looked out at the river. He looked at Tom.
“Damn,” he said.
Before dark, Tom left Foster at the bunkhouse smoking a joint in a hammock strung between two old elms.
His new truck was an old F-150 with creaky suspension, rust holes in the fenders, and a red paint job long faded pink by the sun. They’d found it parked at one of the campgrounds, weeds already growing up around the tires. The truck looked like hell but seemed to run fine. At least it started on the first try.
He found a narrow stretch of old buckled pavement and kept to it, winding into the Sandhills. In the valleys, big dunes rose up around the cab, scrub-covered hulks that blotted the view of all but the road ahead.
Tom climbed to a high point and parked in the bunchgrass alongside the road. He pulled his flask and climbed up the bumper, onto the warm hood. He leaned back against the windshield and looked at the darkening sky.
It felt like nothing but sky here. No buildings, hardly a tree—just a kingdom of grass in all directions, a world of sky meeting the low horizon all around.
He still remembered the feeling he’d had here as a kid. A vague terror somewhere in his blood.
He remembered a summer rainstorm that rolled in late one afternoon. He’d been out on the range fixing fences with his grandfather, miles from anything, when massive black thunderheads the size of continents seemed to rise out of the prairie and cover them over fast. He’d felt the dark sky lowering as if to crush them; he’d cowered reflexively, grinding his teeth and gripping his elbows as they’d waited out the pounding storm in the truck. Tom remembered his grandfather smoking Winstons and humming to himself as the thunder rumbled over them.
On clear days, blue sky towered like an ocean. Tom remembered that he used to avoid looking up; he remembered the irrational, overwhelming sense that he might float up, untethered and helpless, until he disappeared into the clouds.
Somehow, back amongst these strange rolling dunes, looking up into this sky for the first time since that summer as a boy, the idea of floating away didn’t seem so bad.
He thought about Melissa. She’d already been to the cemetery before he’d left town; he’d recognized the fresh clutch of white Gerber daisies she’d left on the grave. He wondered how she’d spent the rest of the day.
He’d finally called, from a filling station on the Iowa side of the Quad Cities, just because he couldn’t shake the feeling that he should. He’d left the number to his grandfather’s place on her machine, but he doubted she’d use it.
Tom wondered what he’d tell her if she did. Found a great job. The sky’s the limit.
Stars begin to flicker in the purple nothing above. His dad always said they were better out here. Tom tipped the flask and watched, knowing the truth.
They were the same here as anywhere. He was just in a different spot.
If she called, he guessed he’d tell her he’d moved.