Slide - Kyle Beachy [71]
I left the maze of booths and attractions and moved into the crowded lawn beneath the Arch, stepping lightly around the feet and fingers of those already settled. I found a small plot of grass and dropped to the ground, untied shoes, piled my socks to my right, and lay down flat on my back.
Everything about the fair was growing louder, the mayhem of communal glee. I closed my eyes and imagined the lawn packed with men and women and blankets and coolers and those collapsible canvas chairs everyone was buying. I foresaw the arrival of vendors selling thin glow-in-the-dark tube lights that would make it home wrapped around children's necks and wrists. Money would be exchanged. There would be mosquitoes like all get out, clouds of vile mosquitoes, and nobody here would care a bit.
I saw Stuart and Marianne moving across the lawn, not forty feet from me. I dialed his number quickly and saw them stop. Stuart pulled out his phone, looked at it, and put the phone away. I watched them take several steps across the lawn, then I lay back down.
seven
dennis rested thick and bitter on his stool and told me to load as many bottles as I could into the van. I stood waiting for an invoice.
“Hell are you doing?”
“Rule one of delivery you said. No paper, no water. You were adamant. You gestured and deployed intonation to punctuate your point.”
“This ain't business today. This is a gift, kid, compliments of Debbie Dinkles. Here's your paper. Directions so you don't get lost, have to call big Dennis come save your hide.”
I loaded as many bottles as would fit inside, then reversed down the ramp. I was to go west—deep into rural backwater Missouri until I reached something called Irenia Winery. My only delivery of the day, off the books, no official delivery at all. I followed directions onto Highway 40 and traveled beyond the Spirit of St. Louis airport and baseball fields, beyond the stores and dealerships and everything else until I reached Route 94, where I was to turn left and follow as it snaked south. I passed a police station and shooting range, then came upon a tight set of curves flanked by bosky walls of the most brilliant natural green. And here the road stayed for a bit beneath a canopy of overarching leaves that allowed sunlight through in disco-ball rays, splattering the blacktop roadway.
Signs said I was approaching the town of Defiance. Four or five short white houses with porches on either side of the road, a yard packed with rusted tractor parts, two roadside bars along one mellow left-hand curve, two empty parking lots, and then no more Defiance.
Back into the trees for a while, around blind curves, strict no-passing zones. I slowed to a near crawl, taking it in. By now I'd given myself over to the delivery, whatever its length. Today I would be subsumed by this one task. Tomorrow would be different. I followed a long, gradual descent around an arching right-hand turn, and here the foliage parted, opening into a scene of great countryside, fields stretching to a river and beyond, where they stopped at a sheer gray wall of bluffs. And it felt that up until this point, the whole summer so far, I could have been anywhere, any of a hundred middling American cities pocketed by wealth and poverty and sex and violence, faith and despair, contrived success and palpable failure. But with these fields and this river, those legendary bluffs of song and portrait, I knew where I was. Missouri, her naked body hidden away for anyone who knew enough to want her.
Southwest, fields and bluffs on left, hills and wineries on right. How long had these places been out here? I passed the Sugar Hill Winery, Stone Creek Winery, Augusta Winery. Several others marked by signs with arrows and promises of live music or scenic gazebos. I held Dennis's directions