The Stranger Game. Peter Gadol
I couldn’t figure out where Craig was headed. He seemed at once to be making discoveries and to be riding a downward slope into deeper despondency. When he left his house in the mornings, he brought snack bars and sandwiches, a change of shirt, a sweater. He followed one person or group of people and then the next, and when he lost the light and wanted to head home, sometimes he had to drive an hour, an hour and a half through traffic from a neighboring county. He wanted to see how far he could push this, how far from home he was willing to go, how lost he was willing to get. This went on for a month, and then one morning he prepared for a longer road trip.
Since I wasn’t sure where I was heading, into what climate, I packed a bag with both cargo shorts and a cardigan. I drove across the river into the eastern part of the city and tracked a food truck. I caromed off into a park in pursuit of some of the food truck customers and watched them picnic. From the park, I picked up a pack of motorcyclists heading east, and this took me some distance into drier terrain.
The road threaded through mustard-colored towns, past silos, past windmills. I stopped at a diner somewhere and watched four women chat over lunch. I followed one of them to a storefront dance studio. There was a locksmith finishing up a task there—I followed him out on another a call. And so on. Trees disappeared, there was only rough scrub, then little of that.
In the desert, one hundred and fifty miles from home, I ran out of daylight and stopped at a motel. I fell asleep in my clothes. The next morning, I followed motel guests after they checked out, a man and a woman about my age. They were portly in the same way, both wearing jeans, cowboy shirts, boots, and I decided they were a couple who over time had grown to look alike the way couples do; it was also possible they were siblings.
I stayed with them on the highway and exited when they did an hour later, each new desert town more baked than the last. I worried they had noticed me, and I dropped back, letting their car push forward until it was no bigger than a hawk hugging the horizon.
Without warning the car pulled off the road, sending up a cloud of dust, and wound down a dirt drive toward a ranch house. They parked next to two pickups, one of them up on blocks. Tempted though I was, I couldn’t very well drive down the dirt road, too, and I couldn’t stay parked up on the street. I wanted to know what the couple/siblings were up to—there had been something notably joyless about them when they’d left the motel without banter, grim-faced, probably not on holiday—and to figure them out, I’d have to take my chances and come back later under the cover of night to see if they were still here.
I drove around. I noticed a sign for an inn a few miles east but napped instead in my car. It started to get dark. I went back to the ranch house. The couple’s car was where they’d left it. I continued a quarter mile on, parked on the shoulder, and walked back. There were lights on in the house. The property wasn’t fenced, but I made sure not to get too close. I wasn’t at all prepared for the desert wind, which numbed my ears. When it was truly night, I could see better into the house, and I crouched down there a long, long while, and this was what I observed:
Three people, the man and woman I’d followed (siblings after all, I decided), both moving about a kitchen, plus a white-haired man seated at the table, the man small in his chair. Their father, from the look of it. The woman was setting the table, and she tied a bib around her father’s neck. The son was at the stove, spooning the contents of various pots into serving bowls. Steam rose from a bowl of spaghetti. Then the siblings sat on either side of the older man, and they held hands in grace. I heard a crescendo of laughter, and the son served food to the father, the daughter promptly cutting it up. The father couldn’t feed himself; his children took turns spooning him dinner. He slumped a bit in his chair, but the siblings were merry anyway, putting on a show, telling stories.
That was it, that was all I saw, adult siblings being tender with their frail father. Where was their mother? Had she died some time ago or did she live (had she lived) another life elsewhere? The father stayed out here far from town, from other houses, so who tended to him when his adult children were not around? Was this visit routine or was it a special occasion? I waited for a birthday cake, but there was no cake, only alps of ice cream. What was the history of this family? Had there been a period of estrangement? Had a mother’s final illness yielded a rapprochement? Had the siblings moved out of the desert the moment they could, or was it the father who’d fled the city? Maybe it was the siblings themselves who had been at odds, but their father‘s failing health had necessitated them setting aside their differences...
My lower back ached from hovering in one place for too long; the wind left me with a ringing in my ears; my hands were shaking. I drove slowly, following the signs to the nearby inn, and before I stepped inside I noticed a flyer taped up to a utility pole, and on the flyer an image of a small dog with pointy tufted ears. Across the top of the page, someone had written Perro perdido.
When I stepped inside the inn, I was delirious with hunger and melancholy, and to the woman who set down her book to greet me, I asked, Are there generally a lot of lost dogs in this town?
The woman thought about it. Not particularly, she said. Now and then, I suppose.
Are they ever found, the dogs that do go missing?
The woman shrugged. Some, she said. That’s the hope.
That is the hope, I said.
When I asked if there was a room available, the woman of course wanted to know for how long, but I didn’t have an answer. Then for some reason she asked if I was looking for work, because she was only filling in and they needed a new night manager. Was I qualified?
I wrote this essay over a series of slow nights at the front desk. I have turned my sabbatical into an extended leave, and although I suspect one day I might return to my city life, I am in no hurry. I no longer follow strangers, but I do interact with new guests at the inn every day, and when someone wants to find the old turquoise mine or a desert trail head, even if it’s the morning and the end of my shift, I usher the guests where they want to go. Along the way, I try to find out as much about them as I can, what brought them here, what they are escaping and/or to what they eventually will return. Where they are headed next.
Once upon a time I was an avid traveler and left the country twice a year. I used to keep a checklist of places I needed to see, the monuments, the landscapes. Now I am less interested in places than people. I can’t get enough of people.
I very much doubt that most of you reading my account have or will become as closed off as I did, as cold at night, as folded inward, but for those of you who do worry that you, too, might slide into similar despair, I suggest you study the nearest stranger from a safe distance and watch him or her a long while.
Forget about yourself. Don’t make an approach. This is your only chance. Look. Keep looking.
How can you draw a line connecting you and this stranger? How can you make that line indelible?
THE FIRST QUESTIONS THE INVESTIGATING DETECTIVE ASKED ME about the last time I’d seen Ezra were the obvious ones: Had he appeared restless or preoccupied? Was he evasive about anything? Did he seem manic? Or hopeless?
“Did Mr. Voight say anything cryptic?” Detective Martinez asked.
Not that I could recall. The last time I’d been with him was on a Sunday. I was dropping off a cast-iron skillet—
“A skillet?” the detective asked. “Why a skillet?”
There was one in my kitchen that was especially good for searing. I was eating out or ordering in all the time, whereas Ezra had been on a cooking jag. When I showed up he was already making mushroom risotto. I was instructed to pour myself a glass of wine, have a seat, and keep him company while he stirred in wine and broth.
“He seemed settled,” the detective said. “In a good place.”
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I wanted to see,” I said.
The risotto was loamy and rich, and we shared a bottle of the same wine he’d cooked with. Ezra was excited about an art book he’d purchased.