strange things pass.”
—Seamus Heaney
***
Build me a house near to the sea,
Build me a house that looks something like me.
Build me a house close to the water,
Build me a house that safeguards my daughter.
—Ava
To my wife Catherine; to my children Sara and Dillon
(and his wife Gro Jeanett); and to my grandchildren
Sienna, Beckett and Emrik.
And in memory of my brother Jimmy, 1951-2023.
PART ONE
The Dakotas
Fame is fleeting,
Life is short.
You take your beating
And you depart.
—Ava
This Earth, That Sky
The two Travelers—both women; one older, one young—together in a pickup with a camper shell where they sometimes slept.
They drove the rural and snow-spackled Dakotas toward the horizon on a wintry afternoon across flat farmland blanketed in snow under the threat of more weather. “Nana, those are mountains.”
“Serena, those are clouds.” Nana held tight to the wheel. She knew the tires on the truck were bald. When wind flared, old snow stippled the highway, obscuring it. Sometimes she felt the truck skid. Late afternoon shimmered, alive with breaking flocks of birds heading south.
“Nana, they’re mountains.”
“They look like mountains, don’t they?”
She wouldn’t argue, even in jest. A large flock of dark birds wheeled above them, fighting for purchase against harsh wind, finally admitting defeat and flying with the wind, unable to go south. A fly buzzed against the windshield until she opened her window and shooed it out.
“Shoo fly, shoo fly,” Serena said, laughing.
A darkness was coming. It felt to Nana like vertigo, and she wondered if what she saw was shadows made by congealing jelly in the aging vitreous of her eyes. She shook her head to clear her vision. “Without clouds, the land in these parts would feel naked.”
Serena narrowed her eyes to concentrate. “They don’t just look like mountains; they are mountains.” She had the open face of a young, bronzed angel, or what Nana imagined an angel would be if such things could light upon the uninhabitable parts of the Earth. At ten she had baby fat, despite their hit-and-miss diet, and fleshy fingers the color of hard-packed earth. She enjoyed making things, whether with thread or felt or colored pencil, and playing games of all kinds: board games with cards or dice and any other game found at a flea market or in one of the abandoned moldy aisles in the new ghost towns as the Dakotas emptied out. People died, moved on. There was nothing there anymore for anybody looking for a life. The ones who remained, who had connections, whether tribal or ancestral, sometimes stayed in place, locked and loaded. The others lived in the cities or close to the interstate highways, where Police still patrolled, at least during the day, when they kept a kind of order, the ones who could be trusted.
The two were on the run.
Nana sometimes found herself hobnobbing in the little shops in the inhabited towns that still speckled the land. She was social. She needed conversation. There wasn’t much of that anymore. Her husband, Martin Gonzalez, had been shot dead by somebody they thought was a friend. It felt like medieval times. It was hard to know whom to trust. Shops in many towns were closed or had very limited hours. “OUT OF BUSINESS.” How many times had they seen that sign hung from a doorway or painted on a window? “WHAT’S LEFT IS YOURS,” one said. That shop had been cleaned out long before they arrived.
They had stayed the previous night in an abandoned bed-and-breakfast called the Out-of-the-Way B&B, with Victorian lace doilies and a collection of bone china teacups on every available surface, all dusty and half broken, each with a gaily painted wooden troll inside. A single gleaming toaster on the breakfast buffet table actually worked, a piece of crumbled toast still in it. Dust covered everything. Nothing had been plundered, only broken. There was a frozen loaf of bread in the kitchen freezer.
Nana had dreamed that night of a man who took her ticket from her, the ticket that could get them into a room where nobody died. He held it before her but refused to punch it. “I paid for it,” she argued. He stared stone-faced, like unyielding gneiss in a field, hate burning in his eyes as he put the ticket in his pocket and turned away.
The electricity still hummed in the house. It was a mystery. We could stay here a time, she thought, if it wasn’t close to the highway. Not out-of-the-way enough.
“Nana,” Serena said when the toast, frozen no more, popped up so fiercely that it sprung to the table and almost fell to the filthy floor, “that toast is ready, and it’s not going to butter itself.” There was no butter. She and Serena could kill whole weeks like that, traveling through towns where people once lived and thrived, stopping here and there, burning the days. Nana had a wad of money from the house she once owned and kept it in a compartment under the seat. She felt a catch in her throat. “The whole world given away for twenty-four pieces of silver,” she muttered. The bitterness was like habanero, burning the tongue.
She knew they had to find a place to settle, a community to take them in, or try their luck in Fargo, where she and her daughter, with Martin, had once lived, and hope for the best. Traveling was a way to kill time. It was also a way to get killed. Stay in one place, everybody said. On the road, without a convoy, you’re meat. And Nana had grown old for such a life. “They’re mountains, Nana. I can see snow.”
But she felt alive, safe on the road. Maybe it was disease after all the mayhem, a claustrophobia she couldn’t quit without moving, but Serena deserved better.
In the car Nana reached and squeezed the young girl’s arm. “We don’t have mountains in this part of the world. The horizon is almost flat.”
Alert, Serena turned toward her. “What’s horizon?”
“It’s where earth and sky appear to meet.”
