Boone remembered the first time he'd ever seen the Mississippi River; he was riding a Greyhound bus from Lexington to Phoenix, on his way to a new job and a new life – foraging ahead to prepare a place in the way he imagined the early western settlers did. He went first and would send for Maude when it was time. The bus crossed the river into Dubuque Iowa; it had been early morning, and the fog was rising up off the water and engulfing everything the way the fog engulfs everything in stylized Gothic movies. The hangover was more or less gone, but his head hurt from sleeping on the bus and from not having any aspirin and from not sleeping very well at all. He had opened his eyes long enough to see the river around the middle of the suspension bridge. He'd always wanted to see the river – ever since he read Huck Finn when he was a kid; he didn't quite know what to expect, but for some reason, seeing it from a suspension bridge crossing from Illinois into Iowa was not what his imagination had planned for him. And it didn't look like he expected it too, either.
He had made reference to his two days before when he and Maude crossed over on their way to visit friends of hers in Waterloo. I've been here before, he had said. Maude was driving and looked over at him with her nose all wrinkled and her eyes saying she didn't believe him. He'd come to realize she didn't believe half the stories he told and a fair amount of what he said; but that was what she asked for, marrying a writer. That was the way he figured it, anyway. Boone had given up trying to convince her that he couldn't make up the silly shit he said, that it wasn't how things worked. How is that possible, she had asked. I was, he had answered. On the bus to Phoenix. It was even this time of day. Early morning. The fog's the same. She shook her head. That's strange, was all she said.
But now it was the return trip and he was driving. Boone didn't mind driving; but he missed the freedom he used to feel when he first learned to drive. He was sure he had lost the urge to drive around the time when he spent so much time in a car. It was right after he divorced his Rhea's mother, and the only place he had to live back with his mother. She hadn't cared, but something about the arrangement bruised his already battered (from the divorce) ego. So he started living in his car. Visiting friends, sleeping on their couches. Sometimes he slept in the car when he was parked somewhere safe. If he was out of money and out of friends, he sometimes stayed in libraries. On weekend he saw Rhea, he stayed with his mother, and during holidays. But that was about the time when a car changed from an implement of freedom to one more weight around his neck. Just one more thing to have to think about when he was tired of thinking at all. That was what he had decided, anyway. He didn't mind driving the return trip to Mt. Arliss, though. It was only a three hour trip, and he knew if traffic worked in their favor and there weren't any cops out, he could make it in around two or two and half hours.
Even two hours was seeming like forever, though, because Maude wasn't speaking to him. She was staring out at the road and chain smoking.
Both of them were exhausted because they had been up late, arguing. Boone was still unclear as to what the argument was actually about. Whenever Maude dug into him – which was admittedly not very often in spite what he probably deserved – it was with a laundry list of offenses that he had committed. His most recent offense was always the first one – the one that had started the deluge anger, anxiety, fear, and frustration. But she never stuck with that one. Rather than talk about one thing at a time, Maude's approach was to bombard him with his sins until he was incapable of responding. Then she would stop talking and go to sleep – which was the final insult, since nothing was ever resolved. And with nothing resolved, Boone was in for a long night of not sleeping and going back in his memory trying to find the thing that tied all the seemingly random events together.
The sin that had unleashed the torrent this time wasn't even a new one. It started after he woke up hungover.
“You know that you lie when you drink, right?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Last night,” Maude explained. “When we were over at Andy and Audrey’s. You... well, it wasn't lying, exactly. Exaggerating.”
“I exaggerate? About what?”
“Oh,” she sighed, sitting on the bed. “It's not even anything worth remembering. But be aware.”
Boone didn't answer. He wasn't sure what it was he had been so disingenuous about. The four of them were sitting around the kitchen table. He and Andy were drinking beer and shots of Jameson. The three of them talked a lot about theater – which always left Boone out, since he only really cared about theater when it was something Maude was doing. He had just been trying to get into the conversation. Later Boone found out that not only was he liar, but a belittling, interrupting asshole... so much of an asshole that Audrey had inquired, when Boone didn't accompany them on a shopping trip but stayed in the motel room to nurse his hangover, whether he was still “grumpy.”
The coup de grace came that night, though, when they were hanging out and Boone said hardly anything at all. He hadn't felt right all day, and while he would have preferred to have a few drinks to delay the hangover, Maude didn't want him to drink. She was on another one of her mini-quests to save him from himself – or to save herself from what she saw as a repetitive pattern of unhealthy behavior. Or something like that. Boone suspected that she felt bad because she hadn't noticed his booze intake all summer when she was working 12 hours a day at the theater. Boone had thought he was doing pretty well; he was maintaining, getting things done – most of the time – and he was always there to focus on her when she was home, to make the time matter. But now that her schedule was more or less normal, she was noticing all of his little faults and petty sins and, in the way she tended to, inflate them to mammoth proportion.
But she didn't stop there. “And what are you going to DO?”
“About?”
“About you! What are you going to do for work?”
“I have a job.”
“You hate it!”
“It frustrates me.”
“You want to quit.”
“I didn't. I haven't. I probably won't.”
“I'm TIRED of being poor,” she said, crying. “I'm tired of worrying about whether you're going to tell another boss to go to hell.”
“I haven't. And he's not my boss, really. I'm freelance.”
“You're acting like the world's out to get you! You always think the world is out to get you!”
“It is.”
The argument went on like that for a few more hours before she fell into silence, got into bed, and turned the television onto some unbearable reality show or another. Then after about a half hour she turned out the light and turned off the show and went to sleep without saying another word to him. He laid awake in bed for another couple of hours, trying to figure out how find the balance between what she expected and what he knew he was capable of.
They were cordial in the morning. She woke up and took a shower. Boone went to the lobby and got them both a cup of coffee and a few donuts. Then he took a shower, they packed, checked out, and started the trip home.
By the time they reached Dubuque, it was nearly ll. Boone much preferred the city covered in fog. Maude looked over at the clock. “We're making pretty good time.”
“Yeah.”
She put her hand on the back of his neck and started playing with his hair. “You feeling okay?” she asked. “Are you still able to drive?”
“Yeah. I'm fine.”
“You look tired.”
“I am.”
She sighed. “I love you, you know.”
“I love you, too.”
She looked at the clock again. “We should be home in another hour or so.”
“Yeah. A little more than an hour, I think.”
She removed her hand from his neck, rubbed his right leg, and leaned over on his shoulder. He liked having her there.