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  Each time, though, he’d had enough to earn him a hangover the next day, enough to poke Swiss cheese holes in his memory of the end of the evening—getting home, unlocking the door, taking his clothes off, putting himself to bed. He’d done all those things, and he remembered them, sort of. But the recollection was patchy, shifting its shape when he tried to bring it into focus.

  But this last time his head was clear when he left Blue Dog. Nobody had asked him to leave. It was his idea, and he never even considered going home. There was another bar on the next block, one he’d passed dozens of times without once crossing the threshold. It looked a little low-rent, he’d always thought. A little shady.

  What the hell was its name? A woman’s name. Maggie, Maggie’s something or other.

  Time he paid them a visit. He remembered running that phrase through his mind.

  And what else did he remember?

  Precious little. Opening the door, and the smell hitting him in the face. The smell was of a couple of kinds of smoke, wrapped up in spilled beer and shirts worn too many times between washings. It was a long way from being a pleasant smell, was in fact distinctly unpleasant, and yet there was something comforting about it. Embracing him, drawing him in. You belong here, it seemed to assure him. Come right on in. You’re home.

  The bartender was a tall blonde with a hard face. She was wearing a pink blouse, entirely unbuttoned in front, showing a lacy black bra.

  Maggie’s Turn—that was the name of the place. Was she Maggie? Maybe, but probably not. Maggie had probably lost the joint in a crap game, or sold up and gone prospecting in the Yukon, or turning tricks in Ybor City. If there ever was a Maggie. Maybe the bar’s name was the title of a song, rock or country, it could be either one.

  He didn’t remember ordering a drink, but he must have, because he remembered her pouring it, remembered picking it up, remembered bringing it to his lips.

  And remembered absolutely nothing after that until he came suddenly awake, like a radio switched on at full volume. Wide awake, still in his clothes, still wearing his shoes, and possessed with the certain knowledge that something had gone terribly wrong.

  Except it looked as though nothing had. Nothing bad enough to make newspaper headlines, nothing to make William Jackson a wanted man.

  His shirt has been torn, with a couple of buttons gone. That could easily be the result of a bar fight, and not necessarily much of a fight at that. A little pushing and shoving, a hand making a fist around the bunched-up fabric of his shirt, tugging enough to rip the fabric and send a button flying.

  Scratches on his hands.

  He’d looked at them and imagined those hands around a woman’s throat. And her smaller hands, clawing at him, until the strength went out of them.

  Not a memory, nothing of the sort. Just his imagination, taking in the evidence, fabricating an explanation for it.

  But his hands showed scratches more often than not. He used them at work, he grabbed this and reached for that all day long, and he was ever picking up something too hot or scraping a hand against one thing or another. For all he knew, the scratches on his wrists and the backs of his hands had been there before he went into Kelsey’s, and thus long before he got to Maggie’s Turn. He could walk around with scratches on his hands without ever taking notice of them.

  Not until he woke up with jagged holes in his memory, and pure dread for what might have filled them.

  But a few scratches didn’t mean his skin was under somebody’s fingernails. And how could he have choked someone to death without raising enough of a stir to register on the Internet?

  Was there a way to clear his searches from the computer’s history? He was fairly certain there was, but he couldn’t figure it out, and decided it wasn’t important. He logged out, stood up.

  Time to get on with his life.

  That afternoon he filled out forms, showed his growing collection of ID, and applied for a Montana driver’s license. The clerk established that he’d had an out-of-state license and said if he could show it, he wouldn’t have to take a road test. He explained that it had expired, and long enough ago that he hadn’t even held on to it. He made an appointment for the road test.

  There’d be a written test as well, and they gave him a booklet so he could study for it. He glanced at the booklet and saw that he could have taken the test on the spot, and without reading the booklet. A sample question: True or false, in a three-lane highway the middle lane is used for parking.

  He’d made his appointment for three in the afternoon, a dead time at Kalamata. You needed to show up in a car for the road test, and somebody had to drive you there because you didn’t have a license yet. He didn’t want to ask Carlene to miss work, and Andy was out, as at least one of them had to be there to flip burgers.

  “You’ll take my Toyota,” Andy said. “Francie’ll run you there and bring you back. When we close tonight, you and me’ll take it out for a spin, give you a chance to get familiar with it. Every car’s got things in a different place, the lights and the wipers and all, and you don’t want to take a driving test with a car you never drove.”

  Andy sat beside him as he guided the car through the streets of Cross Creek, then here and there on state and county roads. “You won’t have trouble,” Andy assured him. “It’s like swimming, riding a bicycle. The memory gets into your muscles and you can’t forget. You could do it in your sleep.”

  “Some people do.”

  “Jesus, you think you’re kidding,” Andy said, and talked about a time when he’d fallen asleep at the wheel. “Drifted off the road, knocked down a road sign, and clipped a telephone pole. Pretty much coasted into it, and it was a good thing I wasn’t going fast, and an even better thing I pulled to the right instead of the left. It was a two-lane, runs north to Willard, and I could as easily have driven straight into oncoming traffic. So you never know, do you?”

  When the time came, Andy tossed him the set of keys while Francie hung her apron on a peg. In the car she asked him was he nervous, and he said he wasn’t. “I would be,” she said. “You tell me something’s a test, right away I’m all nerves. You got a car picked out, Bill?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Andy’s been talking about getting a pickup. You wanted, he’d give you a good price on this one.”

  He said it was something to think about. He pulled up at the building where he’d applied for the license, took the written test, and waited while a woman checked his answers and congratulated him on a perfect score. “Well, I was up all night studying,” he said, and when she gave him a look, he asked if anybody ever failed it.

  “You’d be surprised,” she said.

  He returned to the car, and Francie drove him to the crossroads where they gave the road test. There were some folding chairs set up, and she sat and waited while a rail-thin man in a sort of generic khaki uniform had him drive here and there on back roads, going, backing up, making a three-point turn, and otherwise demonstrating that he knew the difference between an automobile and a sewing machine.

  “Oh, hell, that’s enough,” the man said. “Most everybody passes, the average kid’s done so much country driving by the time he gets here that he knows what to do. The ones from the Res, well, they don’t need Montana’s permission to drive on their own land, and when they want to be able to drive in the rest of the world, the only way they’ll flunk the test is if they show up half in the bag. Which, I have to say, they sometimes do. You’re okay, Mr. William M. Thompson. They call you Bill? Well, welcome to Montana’s rolling highways, Bill.”

  So just like that he had a car and a license. There was no reason he could think of not to buy the car from Andy, who told him he could have it at ten percent below the dealer buy price quoted in the Blue Book, and that he could pay for it in weekly deductions from his pay.

  He could have paid cash for it, he’d gone on adding to the stash in the money belt, but he decided to split the difference, paying Andy half and arranging to have his pay
docked for the rest.

  “You’ve been saving your money,” Andy said.

  “Well, what am I gonna spend it on?”

  “Not too much in Cross Creek. Of course, you want to take your lady out for a nice meal now and then. Presents for Christmas and her birthday, and God help you if you forget Valentine’s Day. Flowers or candy, and if you’re smart it’ll be flowers and candy.”

  Had he ever mentioned Carlene? Not that he could recall. Still, it was a pretty small town. It figured that everybody would know everything.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

  “And while you’re at it, thank God and the angels that you’ve only got one birthday to remember and one woman to send flowers to. Ah, don’t get me started. Saving your money, Bill, that’s a good thing. Time might come when you might want to make a little investment.”

  “Oh?”

  “Never mind. We’ll save that for another day.”

  That night he took Carlene to the Conestoga. She made more of a fuss over his car than it deserved, and he pointed out that it wasn’t exactly a Cadillac.

  “But it’s a car,” she said, “and it’s yours, and that’s exciting. When was the last time you owned a car?”

  Back in April, he thought. He’d driven into Galbraith in an aging Buick, put a few bucks into transmission work while he was there, replaced two of the tires. And left it behind when he carried his suitcase to the Trailways station, because if they were looking for William Jackson, the Buick would be something to key on.

  When had he last owned a car? Well, technically, he probably still owned that Buick. It was a good bet they weren’t looking for him, since he hadn’t left a body behind in Galbraith, but he certainly wasn’t going back for the car, and wondered idly who had it now. Wasn’t a bad car, really. Burned oil, but you had to expect that.

  What he said was, “Oh, it’s been a while.”

  He’d picked her up at the library, and stopped there so that she could get her car, then followed her back to her place. He wasn’t really in the mood and would have just as soon gone on home himself, but he didn’t think that would go down too well.

  And he wound up in the mood soon enough. “There’s something I read about,” she said, avoiding his eyes, and went on to do things that suggested a lengthy apprenticeship in a bordello in Port Said.

  He drove to Kalamata. There were four parking places behind the diner, and Andy, who walked to and from work, had kept the Toyota in one of them for as long as he’d owned it. “The spot goes with the car,” he’d said. “You got all the comforts of home with Mrs. Minnick, but what you don’t get is a place to park.”

  He left the car in his spot, walked home, then remembered he was just about due for another bottle of Old Crow. At two ounces a day, a pint was gone in eight days. Lately he’d begun buy fifths instead, and a fifth was twenty-six ounces and change, so it lasted him that much longer. But there was just one drink left in the bottle, and a little less than a full drink at that, so he kept on until he was standing at the bar of The Stockman.

  Without asking, the bartender reached for a fifth of Old Crow, then paused before slipping it into a paper sack. “Got a special on J. W. Dant,” he said. “Generally more expensive than Crow by a dollar a bottle, and somebody decided that this month it’s three dollars cheaper.”

  While he thought about it, the bartender set up a shot glass and filled it from a J. W. Dant bottle. “On the house,” he announced, “so you can make an informed decision.”

  He picked it up, drank it down. “Tastes the same as the Old Crow.”

  “What you don’t get,” he said, “is that slick-looking bird on the label.”

  He nodded, and the bartender put the Old Crow back on the shelf and slipped the Dant into the paper sack.

  He paid for the bottle, reached for his change, then stopped himself. He ordered another shot of the Dant, and stood there looking at it for a long moment before he picked it up and drank it down. Then he ordered another.

  And that, he decided, was enough. He’d had enough to feel it, and he did feel it, and it wasn’t a bad feeling. But it was as good as he needed to feel, and as much as he needed to drink, and he walked home carefully, used his key carefully, climbed the stairs carefully.

  He put the bottle away, and now he had two bottles in the drawer, and that wouldn’t do. There was less than a full drink in the Old Crow bottle, and it occurred to him that he probably ought to finish it now, so that he could get rid of the empty bottle in the morning.

  Decided it could wait. Decided the dresser’s bottom drawer, which no one but he himself ever opened, could hold two whiskey bottles for another day or two, and was better equipped to do so than he was to hold another slug of bourbon.

  But there was something else to tend to before he got into bed.

  He fetched his money belt, went through the bills and found his North Dakota driver’s license. It was in the name of William M. Jackson, and it bore a photograph of him. He pulled out his new Montana license and compared the two pictures, and decided that they looked more like each other than either of them looked like him.

  He’d retained the North Dakota license in case he ever needed it for an emergency. If he’d had to drive, it was at least a valid license, with a couple of years to go before it would expire.

  You couldn’t tear it up, it was some sort of laminate of plastic and cardboard, and while it would probably burn, it might raise a stink in the process. He spent twenty minutes using his Swiss Army knife’s scissors to cut the thing into tiny fragments. The license resisted cutting, and it was hard to get leverage on the little scissors, and by the time the job was done to his satisfaction, he felt as sober as he’d been when he first walked into The Stockman.

  In the bathroom, before he readied himself for bed, he flushed away the innumerable shreds of his old license. In bed, during the few minutes he waited for sleep to come, he thought that he had everything a man could need. He had a job and a place to live, he had a girlfriend who was good company in and out of bed, he had a car and a place to park it and Montana’s official permission to drive it wherever he wished.

  Everything a man could need.

  He woke up with a headache and a dry mouth. But his memory was crystal-clear. He wondered at some of what he recalled. Why had a quick stop to pick up a bottle of whiskey turned into three drinks in quick succession?

  No answer to that, but no harm, either. Two glasses of water got rid of his thirst, and as many aspirin did the same for his headache.

  Checked himself in the mirror, saw the same face he always saw. No better, no worse.

  Off to greet the day.

  A week later he worked the breakfast shift by himself, and Andy came in at lunchtime. When the noon rush faded, Andy said, “You know something, Bill, you got me thinking.”

  “Oh?”

  “About pie. About pecan pie, specifically.”

  “There’s a piece or two left, if you want one.”

  “How you got me started,” Andy said, “is rhubarb pie and vanilla ice cream. Every time I sell a piece of pie, I ask, ‘How about a scoop of vanilla ice cream with that?’ And with rhubarb the answer is usually yes, and with the other pies it’s sometimes yes and sometimes no. It’s yes enough of the time to make it worth asking, but it’s not the same as with the rhubarb.”

  “Well, there’s a natural affinity, I guess.”

  “Affinity. I guess there is, and that’s where I’m going with this. I’m thinking I’ll start carrying a new flavor of ice cream, and can you guess what it is? Butter pecan.”

  “For the pecan pie.”

  “You don’t think that rings the bell for affinity?”

  “I’m just trying to figure how they’d taste together,” he said. “Not bad, would be my guess, but what bothers me is the sound.”

  “The sound?”

  “Pecan and butter pecan,” he said.

  Andy considered, nodded. “Like an echo.”

&
nbsp; “Well, sort of. Like a double dose of the same flavor, but there’s no question you’re on to something. Rhubarb and vanilla, pecan and what?” He’d known right away, but took his time coming up with it. “Oh,” he said, “I bet that would work.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s just an idea, but I’m thinking rum raisin.”

  “‘One pecan pie coming up, and how about a scoop of rum raisin with that?’ Oh, I like that. I can just about taste it. You ever try it yourself?”

  “I haven’t got much of a sweet tooth, Andy.”

  “No come to think of it, I don’t recall ever seeing you eating pie or ice cream. But you’re a genius at knowing what goes with what. You know what else I like about it? They’re already feeling pretty daring ordering a rich dessert, and now they get to top it off with something that sounds like drinking. You happen to know if there’s any actual rum in rum raisin?”

  “It’s probably just rum flavoring, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Well, I don’t think you need a liquor license to sell it. It’s just that there’ll be some of them who’ll have to know. There’s these four women come in every Wednesday after they work on their quilts over at the First Methodist. You know the ones I mean?”

  He nodded. “Always take a booth.”

  “And generally the same booth every time, and when I remember I save it for ’em. ‘Now, one of you young ladies better have vanilla, and be the designated driver.’”

  “You’ve got your lines all worked out.”

  “What I’ll do, I’ll call in an order right now before I forget. Rum raisin ice cream. Have to wonder how the Mormons feel about it, and I guess we’ll find out, won’t we? Oh, we’re gonna have some fun, Bill. And you know what else? We’re gonna sell us some ice cream.”