The Boy In The Black Eyeliner
On the screen there was a road at night through a windshield. Snow coming sideways across it in the headlights. Down in the corner there was a white stamp of numbers.
January 9. 2:07 a.m. Eleven degrees.
There was no picture of the boy. The camera pointed out the front of the car, so all you could see was what he saw. But you could hear the inside. A heater fan. A radio turned low. Somebody yawning.
Then a green sign slid by on the right, and Doug’s hand stopped halfway to the phone.
“That’s 92,” he said. “That’s the Petersen corner.”
“Yes, sir,” Evan said from the door.
A mailbox came up out of the dark. Ours. The big black one with the reflector tape that Doug put on after the snowplow took out the last one.
And past the mailbox, on the gravel shoulder, walking away from the camera with his arms hanging straight down, was a man in pale blue pajamas.
No coat. No hat. Barn boots, unbuckled, flapping.
I knew those pajamas. I had bought them at the Farm and Home in Winterset and wrapped them for his birthday.
Nobody at my table made a sound.
On the phone the car slowed. The blinker started ticking. You heard the boy say, to himself, “Oh, no. Oh, no, no. Okay.”
The car pulled off ahead of the man and stopped. A door opened. The wind was so loud in the microphone that it crackled. Then the boy walked into his own headlights, skinny in that long black coat, with both hands held out and open where the old man could see them.
“Sir? Sir, hi. It’s real cold. Can I give you a ride someplace?”
Pop’s voice came back thin over the wind. “I’ve got heifers due. I’ve got to get to the north place.”
“Yes, sir. That’s a long walk, though. I’m headed that way. Why don’t you ride with me and get warm first?”
I watched my father-in-law, on that little screen, look this strange child up and down. The collar. The black around the eyes.
“You a hired man?” Pop asked him.
“Something like that,” Evan said. “I’m the driver.”
And Pop took his arm.
The boy walked him to the passenger side with a hand under his elbow, going slow over the frozen gravel. He took off his own coat and put it around Pop before he shut the door.
Back inside the car you heard the heater turned up as far as it would go.
“There you go. Put your hands right on the vent. How many heifers?”
“Fourteen,” Pop said, and his voice was stronger already. “First-calf heifers. You can’t leave a first-calf heifer alone on a night like this. My dad lost two that way in ’51.”
“What happened in ’51?”
And Pop told him.
He told that boy about the blizzard of 1951 and his father’s team of Belgians and a lantern on a pole. He talked for six or seven minutes while the car sat on the shoulder with its flashers going, and the boy never once said there are no heifers. He never said you are confused. He said, “Is that right?” and “What did you do then?” and “I bet your dad was proud of you.”
I looked up from the phone.
Pop, the real one, at the end of my table with his napkin in his collar, was not looking at his plate anymore. He was looking straight at the boy by the door.
“That’s my driver,” he said.
Doug turned his head toward his father very slowly, like it weighed a great deal.