Free The Driftless Area by Tom Drury

face.
    But in each case the ride had ended and he had gone on—he did not attend the crawdad bake (or fry, or however the crawdads would be prepared), or learn to interpret a racing form, or spend the night with the hash smoker.
    Sometimes he thought it would be better if he had done these things. Not that he could have done them all. Only the gambler had offered. But there may have been signals that Pierre in his transient nature had missed. To turn your life on a dime seemed to him the essence of American thought. But he had never been able to do so until now.
    He made Utah in two nights, and there he met a tragic sort of woman in a mountain town. She was thirty years old or so and drinking in the bar of the dark and worn down hotel where he had checked in for the night.
    She’d had some hard times. Something begins to fade from the eyes after too much of anything. She had thick dry reddish hair and white scars on either side of her face as if she had been attacked by a bear.
    In fact, she said, she’d done this with her own fingernails one time after going too many days on speed. Pierre did not know what to say to that, but she smiled and nodded, as if the pain had faded, leaving only a sort of impersonal amazement.

    They danced in the bar and then, wanting to see the town, Pierre walked her home, to the house where she said she lived with her grandmother. The house was close to the newly paved road that fell away from the town. The door was locked, and she knocked and called out, but nothing happened.
    “She does this if I come home late,” she said. “But there’s a ladder in the garage. Come on. You can help me carry it.”
    So they went in the garage and she turned on a light and looked around. There was a big yellow Cadillac but no ladder that they could find.
    She stood with her hands in her back pockets and looked all around the garage. “Clever,” she said. “She must have taken the ladder in the house. Good one, Grandma. That’s thinking ahead for you. This is kind of a game we play.”
    “Why don’t you come back to the hotel?” said Pierre. “You can sleep in my room.”
    “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t swing that way.”
    “You don’t have to swing any way,” said Pierre. “You can stay there, that’s all.”
    “Really? You would do that for me? You must be a religious kind of guy. ’Cause what I normally do if I can’t get in is sleep in the Cadillac.”
    “Well, you don’t want to do that.”
    “No, that’s for sure.”

    So they went back to the hotel and stayed the night, all on the straight and narrow, she in the bed and Pierre in a chair with a blanket.
    “And how are you doing over there?” she said.
    “Very well, thanks.”
    “You might be interested to know I’m off the crank now.”
    “That’s good.”
    “And here’s a promise I made to myself. That someday, when I find a pile of cash, I’ll take it to a plastic surgeon and I’ll say, ‘Make these scars go away.’ ”
    “They probably can.”
    “Oh, these days? It’s a snap, I bet. They probably do it all the time.”
    “The cash is the tricky part,” said Pierre.
    “I think it will happen, though. I can just see it.”
    “If you can see it, you can be it.”
    “Where’d you hear that?”
    “Beer school.”
    “So you’ve abused substances too,” she said.
    “Oh, many a time.”
    “Do you think it’s true?”
    “What?”
    “If you can see it, you can be it.”
    “No. What time is it?”
    “Two o’clock.”

    “For example, you can see a llama,” said Pierre. “But you couldn’t be one.”
    “That’s taking it pretty literal.”
    “I’m going to sleep now.”
    “You have passed your test,” she said.
    “I didn’t know I was taking one.”
    “You didn’t ask for anything or come jumping all over me. You were true to what you said, and you’re sleeping in some scuzzy chair. I admire that.”
    “You can’t spend the night in your grandmother’s car.”
    “Hey, I got news