Spencerville

he’d owned when he left Spencerville for the Army half a lifetime ago.
    As they drove, Keith said to Billy, “Baxter has three hunting dogs with him.”
    “Shit.”
    “Think about it.”
    “I will.” Billy asked, “Where are we going?”
    “Michigan. Northern part.”
    “Yeah? I do most of my hunting up that way. There’s some good maps in the glove compartment.”
    Keith found the maps and located Grey Lake at the northern end of the peninsula. It was nearly one P.M. , and they should be in Atlanta about seven and, with luck, be able to find Baxter’s lodge at Grey Lake within an hour.
    As they drove, Keith spotted two Spencerville police cars, saw another troop of mounted posse, and a Spencer County sheriff’s car. He slid down in the seat each time, and no one seemed to pay any attention to the old pickup truck. Billy was wearing a John Deere cap pulled low over his eyes, and Keith instructed him not to make eye contact with any cops, since they all knew him from his frequent nights in the drank tank.
    Keith asked him, “Do they know this truck?”
    “Nah… I never got a DUI or nothin’. I drink and walk. Hardly use the truck to get to town.”
    “Okay… if they want to pull us over, you do what they say. We can’t run the police in this thing.”
    Billy replied, “Fuck them. I’m not gonna lay down for those assholes anymore.”
    “They’ll shoot. I know this bunch.”
    “Fuck ’em. They’ll shoot you anyway. Hey, those assholes drive regular Fairlanes. When I get into the corn with this thing, there ain’t gonna be no fuzz on our tail.”
    “Okay. It’s your call.” Keith regarded Billy a moment. Apparently, there was more to the man than Keith had been able to determine when Billy was drunk. Billy was on a mission now, too, and though Billy Marlon and Keith Landry had traveled different roads since high school and Vietnam, they now found themselves on the same road and with the same thing in mind.
    In fact, Billy said, “I’m gonna get us to northern Michigan, Lieutenant—hey, you signed that note ‘Colonel.’ You a colonel now?”
    “Sometimes.”
    Marlon laughed. “Yeah? I’m a sergeant. I made three stripes before I got out. Ain’t that somethin’?”
    “You must have been a good soldier.”
    “I was… I was.”
    They drove a few more minutes, and Keith said to Marlon, “They might have roadblocks at the county line.”
    “Yeah, I know. But there’s got to be fifty, sixty farm roads that leave this county. They can’t put a roadblock at each of them.”
    “Right. Let’s pick one.”
    “I know the one. Town Road 18—mostly dirt and most of the time mud because of the bad drainage. Lots of cars get stuck, and Baxter’s bozos got to keep their Baxter Motors lease cars lookin’ good.” He laughed. “Assholes.”
    Marlon turned west onto a paved farm road, then a minute later turned right and headed north on a rutted gravel road, Town Road 18.
    Ten minutes later, the corn ended and they were in a low-lying area of marsh grass, a vestige of the ancient Black Swamp. The road became muddy, and the truck splattered through the black silty muck.
    Five minutes later, Billy said, “We’re out of Spencer County.”
    Keith hadn’t seen a sign, but he figured that Billy was familiar with the area. He took an Ohio map out of the glove compartment and said, “Let’s take back roads up to the Maumee, then maybe we’ll pick up Route 127 to Michigan.”
    “Yeah, that’s the way to go.”
    They continued on, heading west and north on a series of intersecting town and county roads, through the rich autumn farm country, the endless fields of corn and hay, the pastures and meadows. Now that he was leaving and perhaps never coming back, he made certain he noticed everything: the road signs, the family names on the barns and the mailboxes, the crops and the animals, the people, and the vehicles, and the houses, and the whole sense and feel of this land whose whole was indeed far greater than the sum of its parts…
And the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started and know the place for
the first time.
     
    *  *  *
     
    They drove another half hour without much said that didn’t pertain to the subject of land navigation and police.
    Keith regarded the map and saw that most of the bridges across the Maumee River were located in the bigger towns on the river, and he didn’t want to go through a town. He spotted a bridge near a tiny village called