Friday, January 27, 2012

The Departure

    The last three weeks they had gotten no sales. In the countryside, tractors tilled the earth; to the west of town, a chemical plant poured fumes into the air and pumped waste deep underground. At night its lights glowed like an alien insect of glinting metal and light. Years before it had fouled the water, until everyone in town had to pump in their water from miles away.

    David Westron sat on his bed in the hotel room, his home away from home, staring out the window to the emptied parking lot just outside. The morning was still cool, but within a few hours waves of heat would rise off the asphalt, and the air would shimmer and bake the grass at the edges of the lot. Hunter Thomas sat in a chair nearby, writing something in his journal. The silence stretched between them. Both were spent, both had little to say after three weeks of knocking on doors, finding no one home, or worse, condescending smiles and nods that ended in sage predictions of "times being tough." Those left in the town who had not fallen to the plague were convinced that they were immune, that they would beat it, even though six in ten in the town had already succumbed. Or worse, a farmer or businessman would nod in sad resignation, knowing it was just a matter of time until the disease came knocking on their door, too.

The bed creaked beneath David. The springs were uneven and pushed into his back and sides during the night, and the blankets were rough and had a strong chemical smell. He had grown used to it over the last couple years on the road, sleeping in hard beds in strange towns across central Illinois.

At first it had been new and exciting, a sense of adventure as he and Hunter moved from town to town, arriving on a Monday morning, hanging four shirts and three pairs of pants each on hangers, tucking away pajamas and books and toothbrushes and shaving kits into dresser drawers and bathroom corners, and then driving out into the country, or into whatever town they were staying in, knocking on doors, selling their wares. By Thursday they would reverse the process, pulling out the clothes from dressers, the shaving kits, the dirty pants where mud and paw prints and rain had splattered them, and where sweat and rain and coffee had stained the shirts, stuffing them into suitcases that they would place back in the trunks of their cars, to go back to their other life, sometimes having met success, other times coming home empty handed.

It was now nearly two years since the beginning. The July heat had shimmered off the golden fields baking in the sun, the rain and thunder had rolled across the plains more times than they could count, drenching them as they slogged across a muddy field to another farmhouse, or waited for the rain to pass on a quiet country road. The snow had come, and the ice and the freezing cold, and the dark nights, and the wandering aimlessly beside icy rivers to gas stations where they could warm themselves with a cup of coffee.

But then they had their dreams to keep them warm. Someday this would all be worth it. The houses with the large fields and long driveways would be theirs. They would escape the dark nights and cold days of winter by taking trips to Cancun, the Caribbean, or to their vacation homes in Europe. One more sale, and then another, it was just the beginning of building their dreams and opening a life they had never known and leaving behind the bondage and fear they had known.

There were the beautiful moments as well: the clean smell of the world after a spring rain, the beauty of a giant buck standing in the middle of the woods, challenging anyone it saw before it stamped and blew and sprang nimbly off the road into the deep forest, the surprising moments of hospitality and kindness and friendship in the homes of strangers.

Hunter closed his journal, and turned toward David, casting a brief smile before it fell away into grim melancholy. "Well, anything to talk about?"

"No," David said, "guess not."

Hunter leaned forward and rose from his chair, grabbing a clipboard, business kit, and notes. "Well, that's it then," he said. "Good hunting."

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