Page 58 of Goode Vibrations

Say we open up—say I do, she does. We share our pasts and have the whole talk about everything, the thing we’d both been avoiding. Then what?

She comes with me on all my travels? That’s not her life. And mine isn’t in Alaska, that’s for fucking certain. So, then what?

Fuck if I knew.

I just knew I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t go find her, and at least try.

Tookclose to two hours to get back to the motel. Well past noon by then. The day clerk was a woman, grandmother age and friendly.

“Oh, the lovely young dear in room twelve?” she mused, upon me asking. “She left hours ago, I’m afraid. Just after my shift started. On foot, bless her heart. Headed for the junction, I think. There’s a gas station there at the corner, you might ask Darnell if he saw her.”

Darnell was a black man with a shaved head and a neat goatee and wire-frame glasses. “Yeah, I saw her,” he said, glancing up at me as he counted out the cash in the till drawer. “White girl with li’l bitty booty shorts, an’ a big ol’ backpack. Came in…oh, three, almost four hours ago. She bought…let’s see.” He glanced away, thinking. “Beef jerky, and filled one of those plastic hiking bottles with water from the drinkin’ fountain over there. What else she buy? Oh, I know…candy—M&Ms, Skittles, and…some of them gummy fish in the yellow and blue bags. Swedish fish.”

“Which way did she go after she left here?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

I felt her path, felt the pull northward.

Darnell gestured at the northward spur. “Thataway.” He eyed me, then. “Let a keeper get away, did you?”

I laughed at his insight. “Yeah, mate, I sure did.”

He patted a handful of cash into a neat stack. “Well, good luck to you, son. Hope you find her.”

“Me, too.”

Northward, then. Slow, watching the shoulders. Watching side roads, dirt roads, tracks that led off into nothing.

Afternoon sun faded into orange, and the hours found me having made the trip from the junction where US-61 crossed the river east before breaking off into US-151 and US-61, going east and north and west and north, respectively, all the way to Sparta, where WI-27 met I-90. Almost two and a half hours, 117 miles. It seemed impossible that she’d have made it that far, but if she’d found a ride anything was possible. Finding her was impossible.

Had we exchanged numbers? I went through my phone, and discovered we hadn’t.

What if she’d found a ride and was now miles beyond Sparta? I’d been going slow, watching for her on foot, assuming she’d have stuck to this northward route. But what if she’d found an alternative route? Found somewhere to take photos and I just passed her? I couldn’t explore every sidetrack and dirt road between Dubuque and Sparta.

Fuck.

I’d let her get away.

I couldn’t let her stay gone. Couldn’t.

So, I refueled and went back the way I’d come. Another two hours plus back to where I’d started—no sign of her. Tried another sequence of spurs north and west—WI-35 following the Mississippi River until it rejoined the 27.

Woods, fields, farms.

Dirt roads and silos. Semis and pickups, blink-and-you-miss-them towns. Afternoon turned into evening, exploring offshoots, pausing in gas stations to ask if anyone had seen the most beautiful girl in the world recently, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a green shirt.

Evening into night. Where was I? I’d lost track of myself. North of Sparta? Way off the beaten track, full night. Nowhere.

Resignation rattled in me. I pulled into a truck stop outside Black River Falls—an oasis of light in the midnight darkness, piers of pumps crowded with idling semis, passengers cars on the other side with roof racks piled high, drivers and passengers stretching and yawning and all of us caught in the weird midnight friendliness of strangers crossing paths in this little island in a sea of nowhere nothingness.

There was a diner, windows facing the lorry side of the truck stop. I got coffee and a cheeseburger, sat alone at the window and ate slowly. Listlessly.

Watched the huge trucks pull in, refuel, and leave.

Finished, I sipped a fifth cup of coffee and wondered what I’d do next.

A semi roared to a stop at a pump. Driver’s door opened, as did the passenger’s door.

Out of the driver’s side descended a round middle-aged man in baggy jean shorts and a dirty white wife-beater, wearing battered sneakers and an out-of-place cowboy hat.