The Night We Buried Road Dog

IV.

A little spark of flame dwelt at the stack of the dozer, and distant mountains lay whitecapped and prophesied winter. Mike filled the graves quick. Matt got rakes and a shovel. I helped him mound the graves with only moonlight to go on, while Mike went to the trailer. He made coffee.

“Drink up and git,” Mike told us when he poured the coffee. “Jesse’s got some friends who need to visit, and it will be morning pretty quick.”

“Let them,” Matt said. “We’re no hindrance.”

“You’re a smart man,” Mike told Matt, “but your smartness makes you dumb. You started to hinder the night you stopped driving beyond your headlights.” Mike didn’t know how to say it kind, so he said it rough. His red mustache and bald head made him look like a pirate in a picture.

“You’re saying that I’m getting old.” Matt has known Mike long enough not to take offense.

“Me, too,” Mike said, “but not that old. When you get old, you stop seeing them. Then you want to stop seeing them. You get afraid for your hide.”

“You stop imagining?”

“Shitfire,” Mike said, “you stop seeing. Imagination is something you use when you don’t have eyes.” He pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and was chewing it before he ever got it lit. “Ghosts have lost it all. Maybe they’re the ones the Lord didn’t love well enough. If you see them, but ain’t one, maybe you’re important.”

Matt mulled that, and so did I. We’ve both wailed a lot of road for some sort of reason.

“They’re kind of rough,” Matt said about ghosts. “They hitch rides, but don’t want ’em. I’ve stopped for them and got laughed at. They fool themselves, or maybe they don’t.”

“It’s a young man’s game,” Matt said.

“It’s a game guys got to play. Jesse played the whole deck. He was who he was, whenever he was it. That’s the key. That’s the reason you slug cops when you gotta. It looks like Jesse died old, but he lived young longer than most. That’s the real mystery. How does a fella keep going?”

“Before we leave,” I said, “how long did you know that Jesse was The Dog?”

“Maybe a year and a half. About the time he started running crazy.”

“And never said a word?”

Mike looked at me like something you’d wipe off your boot. “Learn to ride your own fence,” he told me. “It was Jesse’s business.” Then he felt sorry for being rough. “Besides,” he said, “we were having fun. I expect that’s all over now.”

Matt followed me to the Chrysler. We left the cemetery, feeling tired and mournful. I shoved the car onto Highway 2, heading toward Matt’s place.

“Wring it out once for old times?”

“Putter along,” Matt said. “I just entered the putter stage of life, and may as well practice doing it.”

In my mirrors a stream of headlights showed, then vanished one by one as cars turned into the graveyard. The moon had left the sky. Over toward South Dakota was a suggestion of first faint morning light. Mounded graves lay at my elbow, and so did Canada. On my left the road south ran fine and fast as a man can go. Mist rose from the roadside ditches, and maybe there was movement in the mist, maybe not.

There’s little more to tell. Through fall and winter and spring and summer, I drove to Sheridan. The Mormon turned out to be a pretty good man, for a Mormon. I kept at it, and drove through another autumn and another winter. Linda got convinced. We got married in the spring, and I expected trouble. Married people are supposed to fight, but nothing like that ever happened. We just worked hard, got our own place in a few years, and Linda birthed two girls. That disappointed the Mormon, but was a relief to me.

And in those seasons of driving, when the roads were good for twenty miles an hour in the snow, or eighty under sun, the road stood empty except for a couple times. Miss Molly showed up once early on to say a bridge was out. She might have showed up another time. Squinchy little taillights winked one night when it was late and I was highballing. Some guy jackknifed a Freightliner, and his trailer lay across the road.

But I saw no other ghosts. I’d like to say that I saw the twins, John and Jesse, standing by the road, giving the high sign or dancing, but it never happened.

I did think of Jesse, though, and thought of one more thing. If Matt was right, then I saw how Jesse had to die before I got home. He had to, because I believed in Road Dog. My belief would have been just enough to bring John forward, and that would have been fatal, too. If either one of them became too strong, they both of them lost. So Jesse had to do it.

The graveyard sank beneath the weather. Mike tended it for a while, but lost interest. Weather swept the mounds flat. Weed-covered markers tumbled to decay and dust, so that only one marble headstone stands solid beside Highway 2. The marker doesn’t bend before the winter winds, nor does the little stone that me and Mike and Matt put there. It lays flat against the ground. You have to know where to look:

And now even the great good cars are dead, or most of them. What with gas prices and wars and rumors of wars, the cars these days are all suspensions. They’ll corner like a cat, but don’t have the scratch of a cat; and maybe that’s a good thing. The state posts fewer crosses.

Still, there are some howlers left out there, and some guys are still howling. I lie in bed of nights and listen to the scorch of engines along Highway 2. I hear them claw the darkness, stretching lonesome at the sky, scatting across the eternal land; younger guys running as young guys must; chasing each other, or chasing the land of dreams, or chasing into ghostland while hoping it ain’t true—guys running into darkness chasing each other, or chasing something—chasing road.