112. Selva drove north on Tenth. . . .
Selva drove north on Tenth Street past the police station, where an ambulance with flashing lights had backed up to the front door. Two blocks east, on Twelfth, more blue-and-white flashes reflected off the facades. Apparently a fire was in progress in one of the downtown buildings. We entered the on-ramp for the branch of the Interstate that connects I-80 with Lincoln’s downtown, but instead of turning west onto the freeway, Selva continued out Highway 34 toward Seward. The clock on the Volvo’s dash said 1:15; one of the bright planets, most likely Jupiter, hung like a white grape against the blue-black sky. As we passed the turnoff to Branched Oak Reservoir, I turned to her. “There are lakes out here where people go skinny-dipping. Have you been?”
“No, Jonas,” she said. “Skinny-dipping is not my style.”
Already we were in farm country, with the glow of Lincoln spread on the horizon behind us. The farmhouses looked dark and lonely under their bluish lights. “The last time I went skinny-dipping was in Viet Nam,” I informed her. It was not a thoughtless association.
“I thought you spent your Air Force time in Texas.”
“That’s what I tell people. I’ve been getting tired of it, though.”
“That’s all right, Jonas,” she said. “Nobody believes you anyway.”
“Why do you wear those long-sleeved blouses?”
“It’s still cold,” she said. “I’m a cold-blooded person.”
We rolled beneath the three traffic lights of Seward, turning north onto Highway 15 at the middle one. The Lutheran college town lay comatose under its streetlights, the only movement, besides a lone police car, the changing time and temperature on the sign above the bank. Once we’d passed the golf course on the north edge of Seward and entered open country again, I looked back over my shoulder to the southeast. The lights of Lincoln put up a visible glow, but their influence had shrunk to a discreet fan on the horizon. “Are we going to stop at your parents’ house?” I asked.
“What, and scare my mother with you? She thinks Adrian is bad enough.”
The little Volvo hummed along at seventy, its ride more brisk than the American cars I knew. The leather seat felt seductive. I yawned.
“That seat tilts back,” Selva said. “I’m all right. Go to sleep if you want to.”
“Let me know if you get sleepy,” I said, pulling my hat down over my eyes.
“I’m not sleepy.”
I woke with a shout under the lights of a gas station in Columbus. I had imagined I was in the grubby little operating room of the quonset hospital in Ba Rang. Instead of Stuart, it was me on the stainless-steel table; an idiot surgeon was rummaging inside my chest, trying to find my heart. Selva left the filler hose and peered in the window. “Are you OK?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I found the lever to tip the seat upright and got out. “I need to piss, though.”
“What was it?”
“A dream.”
Inside the station I got a free highway map, and Selva showed me the turnoffs for Parade. Then I took the wheel while she dozed. I drove west of Columbus on Highway 30, then north through several silent little towns. Selva roused in about forty-five minutes and looked around her. “Almost there,” she said. “Slow down.”
With the lights of Parade a mile or two ahead of us, she had me turn off onto a country road. “Did you tell me that your parents farmed?” I asked her. “I don’t remember it.”
“That’s not all,” she said. “You’re going to be surprised.”
We zig-zagged on section-line roads until we came out onto another highway, where Selva had me turn southward, away from the lights of town. In less than a mile, we approached what looked to be a junkyard. As we got closer, I saw that what I’d taken to be wrecked cars were airplanes, mostly light civilian planes like Pipers and Beechcrafts but with a few dismantled World War Two planes mixed in. There was a hangar and a windsock at the end of an alfalfa field; the rest of the buildings were ordinary farm buildings, with agricultural machinery parked among them. A gabled two-story farmhouse with antique lightning-rods and a closed-in porch stood amid elms whose dying branches had grotesquely twined together. The layout was generous, but every outbuilding appeared to lean. “Don’t stop,” Selva said. “Go on by. You can turn at the next intersection and come back for another look.”
“This is your house? You grew up here?”
“Home sweet home.” She pronounced these words with a sharp bitterness that went beyond Midwestern self-deprecation. I drove until we were among bare fields again, then found an intersection and swung the Volvo around. “Go faster,” she said with a grimace. I accelerated; as we passed the farm a second time, I saw that the hangar was lettered with a sign: Andersen Sky Ranch. Agricultural Services. An elderly biplane was tied down beside the hangar.
“Your old man’s a crop duster?”
“He farms, mostly,” Selva said. “My brothers’ve taken over the flying business.”
“Do they live here, too?”
“Of course,” she said. “We’re one big happy all-American family.”
We passed the last of the junk planes and drove on into Parade. It wasn’t much, just a rural county seat with its two drugstores and five filling stations, nothing more for young people to do than in Palemon. I’d imagined Selva to be a banker’s or a lawyer’s child, a small-town princess pretty as her daddy’s cash. That now seemed far from the case; Andersen’s Sky Ranch looked as if some forgotten movie company had combined sets for Sky King and The Addams Family and then gone back to California without filming. I couldn’t help but wonder what Adrian thought of the place.
West of Parade, the country opened up even more, the regularly-spaced farmsteads giving way to mixed-corn-and-cattle operations, with patches of sandhills pasture separating the cornfields. I drove in silence, with Selva awake in the passenger seat separated by the gearshift console from my own. When I reached across, she took my wrist between thumb and forefinger as if she were picking up a dead squirrel and placed my hand firmly back on my side of the car.
The land became more hilly and lonelier, until we were driving through grassland whose pockets were undissected by the network of drainages found in tighter soil. The sandhills rose to the north and west; as we skirted them, the smaller towns thinned out to one in every twenty miles. Between them we passed few lights of any kind. The road was newly paved, thouugh narrow, and we rolled on smoothly until we came to another county seat, this one situated among the irrigated fields that border the Loup River. We followed the river for an hour and then turned north, taking a highway that cut through ranching country as straight as a line ruled onto a map. Crooked little two-track roads emerged through barbed-wire fences; wherever one of these trails coincided with a mailbox, I knew that an inhabited ranchhouse lay at the end of it. We passed twenty minutes and more without a sign of a town.
“These hills are like breasts,” Selva said at one point. “Jonas, do you know where you’re going?”
“Dad used to truck cattle from in here,” I said. “I’ve been down this road fifty times at least.”
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