Freedom [260]
After making his escape from Carol, and deducing from Blake’s cool good-bye that he hadn’t been forgiven for being a liberal, he drove up to Grand Rapids, stopped for some groceries, and reached Nameless Lake by late afternoon. There was, ominously, a for sale sign on the adjoining Lundner property, but his house had weathered 2004 as middling-well as it had weathered so many other years. The spare key was still hanging on the underside of the old rustic birch bench, and he found it not too intolerable to be in the rooms where his wife and his best friend had betrayed him; enough other memories flooded him vividly enough to hold their own. He raked and swept until nightfall, happy to have some real work to do for a change, and then, before he went to bed, he called Lalitha.
“It’s insane here,” she said. “It’s a good thing I came and good that you didn’t, because I think you’d be upset. It’s like Fort Apache or something. Our people practically need security to protect them from the fans who’ve shown up early. All those jerks in Seattle seem to have come straight here. We’ve got a little camp by the well, with one Porta Potti, but there’s already about three hundred other people laying siege to it. They’re all over the property, they’re drinking from the same creek they’re shitting right next to, and they’re antagonizing the locals. There’s graffiti all along the road leading up there. I have to send out interns in the morning to apologize to the people whose property’s been defaced, and offer to do some repainting. I went around trying to tell people to chill out, but everybody’s stoned and spread out over ten acres, and there’s no leadership, it’s totally amorphous. Then it got dark and started to rain, and I had to come back down to town and find a motel.”
“I can fly out tomorrow,” Walter said.
“No, come with the van. We need to be able to camp on-site. Right now you’d only get angry. I can deal with it without getting so angry, and things should be better by the time you get here.”
“Well, drive carefully out there, OK?”
“I will,” she said. “I love you, Walter.”
“I love you, too.”
The woman he loved loved him. He knew this for certain, but it was all he knew for certain, then or ever; the other vital facts remained unknown. Whether she did, in fact, drive carefully. Whether she was or wasn’t rushing on the rain-slick county highway back up to the goat farm the next morning, whether she was or wasn’t rounding the blind mountain curves dangerously fast. Whether a coal truck had come flying around one of these curves and done what a coal truck did somewhere in West Virginia every week. Or whether somebody in a high-clearance 4x4, maybe somebody whose barn had been defaced with the words free space or cancer on THE PLANET, saw a dark-skinned young woman driving a compact Korean-made rental car and veered into her lane or tailgated her or passed her too narrowly or even deliberately forced her off the shoulderless road.
Whatever did happen exactly, around 7:45 a.m., five miles south of the farm, her car went down a long and very steep embankment and crushed itself against a hickory tree. The police report would not even offer the faintly consoling assurance of an instant killing. But the trauma was severe, her pelvis was broken and a femoral artery severed, and she had certainly died before Walter, at 7:30 in Minnesota, returned the house key to its nail beneath the bench and headed over to Aitkin County to look for his brother.
He knew, from long experience with his father, that alcoholics were best conversed with in the morning. All Brent had been able to tell him about Mitch’s latest ex, Stacy, was that she worked at a bank in Aitkin, the county seat, and so he hurried from one to another of Aitkin’s banks and found Stacy in the third of them. She was pretty in a strapping farm-girl way, looked thirty-five, and spoke like a teenager. Although she’d never met Walter, she seemed ready to assign him significant responsibility for Mitch’s abandonment of their