NEITHER OF THEM said anything to me as I finished.
It was him; the penmanship and formatting were unmistakable. The part that didn’t make sense with the story of his life—or at least the version that I was told—was the date. April 29, 1970, was five years before his novel was published. According to my family, he was building railroads in California, never leaving the state, not writing cowboy fiction in a bar in Utah.
But if he’d stopped into the bar in 2010, he’d done it on the forty-year anniversary of the writing of this story, to the day.
Confusion like hot air burned my face, woozy and light. I thought of my father—he must have known something about this. If my grandfather had been running around the country, surely those were the kind of stories he would have told his son. How had no one ever told me?
The worst part was that it all did sound almost familiar. The story, the storytelling, the cardinal, the gold—tiny pieces of it showed up in fragmented images I had in my head of time with my grandfather before his disease worsened and I gave up on understanding him. They were all there, pieces of moments I almost remembered, but had let myself forget.
But it wasn’t there for no reason; I hadn’t found this place for no reason. The clue, I realized, must be hidden somewhere inside of it. That’s why he’d led me to this bar. The forty-year-old story would tell me where to go. The penthouses of New York and the grasslands of Virginia didn’t make sense—he wouldn’t have had time to travel there and back to Ohio, and besides, it’s not where the characters would have gone. If he was the narrator of the story, he’d be making a “hideaway at Melbourne,” or . . .
A word from the first clue struck me: safety in mecca.
When I looked up from the story, Little Ray was walking across the bar with a burger and fries. “Kind of a depressing ending, huh?” He set them in front of me. “I always thought it was a bit dramatic, but shit, writers’ll be writers.”
I nodded to the burger, distracted. “I’m vegetarian.”
“Not in Green River, you’re not.” He pushed it over to me, and I smelled it in my stomach, empty but for three days of old nuts and Snickers bars. Hating myself, I ate.
“So how is ol’ Arty?” Ray asked. “Still so full of shit he can taste it?”
“He’s dead.” Hamburger spilled out the sides of my mouth.
Ray hung his head. Even Pete shuffled at the information. I saw Ray open his mouth to protest, but thought better of it, and instead smiled into a glass of whiskey he’d set in front of himself. He pushed one in my direction. “Peaceful sleep’s not the end of night,” he said, tilting it toward me. “By morning we’ll dance with the angels of light.”
The words rang in my ears, warm and familiar as I drank. “Who said that?”
Ray smiled as he hit the bottom of his glass. “Just now? I did.”
Ray’s silent memorial lasted another two minutes. He poured another drink. He drank it. He opened his mouth to speak. Again, he gave up, and turned his back to me.
Mara had moved to a table in the corner, surrounded by three older men, and somehow still looked comfortable. It was reckless, but she didn’t look nervous. She looked almost like she was having fun.
I waited until Ray drifted back across the bar before turning to face Pete. “Pete, I don’t wanna bother you—”
“Y’already are.”
I composed myself, trying to pick off the most gnawing curiosities drumming inside of my skull. “Do you know what my grandfather was doing here?”
“What’s anybody doing anywhere? Trying to get somewhere else.”
I slid the story toward him. “Do you know what he means by ‘Mecca’?”
Pete cleared what sounded like years of phlegm from his throat. “Mecca of the Midwest is Denver.”
My heart leapt. Denver. He’d make his way to a hideout in Denver. It fit my grandfather’s progress perfectly. The story was a clue, and that was the solution. My trip didn’t have to end tonight.
I fought to keep my pulse down. “What about my grandma?” I asked. “When did you meet her?”
“’S a lot of questions.”
I shifted in my seat. With his eyes closed, it was impossible to tell if he was angry or just making an observation.
“No,” he said. “Never met no grandma. Guess I didn’t know it was like that.”
“What about Orlo Kopek? Did you ever meet him?”
“Yes.” Pete sighed. “I did.”
My fingers started tingling with excitement. “Do you know where he is now?”
“I do.”
“Where is he now?”
“Elgin Cemetery, out on Hastings.”
The roller coaster inside my chest swung around into an enormous dip. There it was again, the sorrow of realizing that someone I didn’t know, someone I needed, had passed on. But sorrow morphed to curiosity, and I asked, “When did he die?”
Pete grunted again. “September 15, 1974.”
A familiar beanie head bobbed over the bar. I saw Ray speaking to her, and Mara’s full-scale charm offensive in response. Naturally, she drew every eye along the bar, hanging up over it, balancing on her elbows. Ray glanced nervously back toward me and they both caught me staring.
“I have to go,” Mara mouthed, gesturing to her wrist where a watch might have been, then outside. I glanced down at my cell phone: it was 3:55. The train left in five minutes. “Come say good-bye?”
I nodded and stepped back from the bar.
“Hold on.” Ray stopped me. “One thing I’m confused about. If Arty died five years ago . . . what’re you looking for?”
He asked loud enough that several tables at the bar noticed, looking up at me. I rolled the question around my head, the door standing behind me, the story sitting in front of me. “I’m just trying to understand.”
Ray seemed satisfied by the answer. “Well, thank God,” he muttered. “What’s it they say? Mystery’s only a mystery if someone’s still tryin’ to solve it?”
“That’s right,” I whispered, and with one glance back up at Ray, I snatched the string-bound pages off the table and took off for the door.
If someone behind me shouted about me stealing their Arthur Louis Pullman story, they did it after I was already out onto Green River Street, sprinting toward the train. Mara started after me, letting off an excited cry. “What did you get!” she shrieked, her footsteps directly behind mine on the abandoned street. “Why are you going back to the train?” I didn’t answer, and we sprinted back to the platform.