Headlights(70)

Have they tried the wolf of no name.

Have they tried—

“What are you doing?” Hannah says. I open my eyes, and she’s standing beside the booth, watching me. Her eyes zeroed in on my face.

“I’m just … thinking,” I say. I blink. She’s not holding the sweatshirt over her nose anymore. She’s not wearing it, in fact. Her arms, throat, chest bare. Her skin. I swallow. She watches me another moment, glances over to the bar, then sits.

She smells faintly of that something spicy again, in addition to the ponderosa smell she seems to carry with her. She slips what looks like a small medication tube into the hoodie’s pocket in her lap. In her tank top, her tattoo is visible. A hyperrealistic mountain on her arm, tattooed over a thick jagged scar. Her skin is smooth and tan, all of it—

I clear my throat. Pull my eyes away. Make myself.

The song changes, another John Denver. “I Guess He’d Rather Be in Colorado.” I take a sip of water and try not to throw up.

“What’s your deal with John Denver?” Hannah asks, watching me. What is that expression on her face? Confusion, curiosity. Something more, maybe.

I clear my throat again. “What do you mean?”

“I mean”—she tucks her hair behind her ear—“it’s been on the radio nonstop, your car radio that mysteriously doesn’t turn off. It played in the motel. I heard it again when I touched the papers you’d held. Why?”

I take a breath, try to speak. It doesn’t come. After a second, I try again. “You really heard ‘Annie’s Song’ playing there?” I ask.

She nods, watching me.

And I don’t know why I say it. Maybe because I need to see her reaction. To watch her eyes and know if this is somehow her doing. If she would put me through this.

“I used to live in that room,” I say. “When I was a kid. And I used to listen to John Denver, all the time. There was a movie about him, and we had his autobiography.” I swallow, make myself say it. “My mom used to read it to me. And the movie … it was playing when— I think that someone was trying to get to me by playing that music in the room.”

“Trying to get to you … by playing the music for me.”

I shrug. I’ve got nothing better for her. I’ve got nothing better for anyone else.

She takes it all in, and I don’t get a lie from her. Or I mean I don’t get a feeling. Not that the feelings are real. But I think the way she’s watching me now, the way she takes me in, I think that was the first time she heard about me living there. Unless I’m a total idiot. Unless I’m falling for an act, hook, line and sinker. Which …

I look away, glance back. She’s watching me, still. She swallows too, looks away, her chest rising and falling.

The server sets our food down. Hannah leans back further, a sick look crossing her face at my burger.

Right. Vegetarian.

She covers her nose again with the sleeve of the hoodie in her lap. “So,” she says, not touching her food. “Was he your hero? John Denver?”

“No,” I say after a minute. “He was a … complicated guy. His dad didn’t support him early in life, and it seems maybe a lot of his life was trying to make something of himself despite and because of that. And John as an adult was gone a lot, cheated on his wife, Annie, for years. At one point, when he was away, Annie had to make a decision about trees on their property in Aspen that someone told her needed to be cut down, and she did it. The story’s a little different each way. In the movie, he gets back from tour and sees the trees are gone, and he takes a chainsaw to their four-poster bed. It comes out of nowhere, this just total rage. He was big on humanitarian missions, helping the environment. He loved nature, loved their property. He was never remotely violent before that moment, was just this sort of dweeby but cool cowboy hippie out saving the world with his music and charity.”

“What happened in the book version?”

I take a bite, chew, and swallow. “When Annie finally wanted a separation after he’d been gone for so long, and he’d moved out, she started hosting dinner parties and having their Aspen friends over without him. So he showed up at the house one day with a chainsaw. He says in the book that he could see she was afraid he was going to hurt her with it. He just … says that. No apologies. And then he pushes past her into the house and cleaves the dining table in half, the one she’d hosted at without him. He goes into their bedroom and cuts the posts off the four-poster bed. Then he drops the chainsaw and grabs her, puts his hands around her throat. And in that moment, in the narration, he says, ‘I almost lost it.’ Like everything that happened up to that moment was just … He almost lost it.”

“Oh. So it makes sense you’re obsessed with him.”

I laugh. I can’t help it. I take another bite. Something about the woman in front of me. Something about everything falling apart. I swallow, glance at her again.

I say after a second, “It’s—I mean, I loved the music, when I was young. But it was the fact that he could be so … complicated, I guess. Nothing ever made me feel as safe as a kid as his songs did. I’m not excusing his behavior—you can’t—but people I knew, as a kid, things I’d seen. Something about knowing that even people who might not be all the way good could give a lot of good to the world anyway … it made me feel hope. And he was funny.” I point to the speakers. “Like this song. About a guy in New York who dreams of Colorado and the West, everything here so beautiful. Then at the end of the song, the most brutal savage line. Up in his office, a quiet cough is all he has to show he lives in New York City. John Denver loved this land, Colorado. He loved this place more than anyone. He made Colorado, to me, less dark, less terrifying. Like … a place worth being.”