CHAPTER 7: Waverly 3
"You're good. I knew you were good, but, hell, you're good," Clint commended when we returned to the car. I was beaming ear-to-ear. My newly pilfered arrow rested on the back seat in all its glory. It had a carbon fiber shaft, expensive to anyone interested in buying arrows, and the traditional purple fletches I'd come to associate with Clint himself. I knew it wouldn't cost me a penny but I didn't like owing people anything in life. I picked a finger tab too, a glove style one that I didn't use myself, but I knew my nephew might. Jim tried to convince me out of it in favor of something lesser priced, but he'd been a good man letting me go up and shoot my heart out. I paid him all the same.
It was at that particular juncture I realized my credit card was missing. Clint knew full well I'd lose my life if it wasn't so intimately woven in my body. We spent the next hour searching the car, the sidewalk, the little overhang to the Cedar River waterfall, and then we went back and searched the archery range. We didn't find it there, though we did give Jim a laugh over the whole situation.
I drove us back to the parking lot behind the Lutheran church and, there, found my credit card laying vacant in the street along with the key card to my hotel room. Clint couldn't even laugh. Mostly, because he wasn't at all surprised. I'd once taken a trip through a mountain pass and accidentally taken a picture with a bear that I didn't realize was behind me. Losing a credit card in the street, asking and receiving a free arrow, then finding my credit card still lying untouched in the street was on par with the majority of my life.
With my fantasy of being a Waverly archer fulfilled, I headed on to the part of our journey that Clint was least enticed by. On the opposite side of Cedar River, the roads became thin, winding, and long. Small dirt offshoots sprouted in every direction from the riverview road and fed deep into the backwoods and hills of Waverly. It was there, in those trailers along the river shores that Clint Barton was born and raised. It was there, his childhood turmoil's formed.
The joviality of our adventure thus far slowly disintegrated into a cloud of swirling dark emotion. I could taste it in the air. Clint's shoulder's tensed whether he wanted them to or not. He sat back and tried, slowly, to feed calm back into his nerves.
Cedar Lane NE had been a road paved by the occasional traffic which traveled down its way. Or, at least that was how Clint remembered it. Even before we reached the lane, he began to sit more forward and take in the sights around him with a keener interest.
"It's really changed," he whispered. "The houses are all new. They weren't like this before. This was all open land or trees and brush piles. No one came back here."
"The city seems nice," I said.
He nodded absently, glancing out his window. "It's not the same anymore. It's weird how that works. There, down there, across from—is that a dock? That's where the road is."
I followed his direction and we slowed to a stop in the middle of the lane. What had once been dirt paths was now a paved thoroughfare. Not a large one, but big enough to fit two lanes of travel and accommodate the shoreline directly left of us. Clint rolled down his passenger window and stared out at the houses.
"It isn't here," he said.
"What isn't?"
He turned back to me. "My house. It's gone. The house I mean. I used to live right where that white house is now. The chain link fence over there, and the yellow house, was Mr. Rivendell's. But the house isn't there anymore. It's gone. I've never seen that brown house before. It's new too."
We sat for a time, looking at the row of three houses and watching the water run along the new docks across the roadway. It took a while for Clint to absorb it all. The place he hated, the home he feared, with the memories that kept him buried in the past had somehow released a hold on him. The house was gone. Waverly had moved on from it.
From where we sat, staring across the river Clint could see the tops of the church steeple on the Lutheran home. He shook his head.
"It seems so close. As a kid it felt like an entire world away and it's just right there. I can't believe it."
"Are you ok?" I asked gently.
"Yeah . . . it's weird . . but yeah. I kind of want to be mad that they took my house away but I wanted to burn it down. I actually feel better about all this." He looked over at me. "Let's go to the last place on the list."
:(:):(:):
"Take it slow. There's a lot of drop offs over here and the last thing I need is you in a ditch the same place my parents died." Clint said, his arm spanning the distance between us. His hand squeezed my shoulder protectively. I did as he instructed and eased my foot onto the brake.
We had turned back on Cedar Lane and entered 2nd Avenue again, taking it all the way to the where it merged into Bremer Road. There, I could hear Clint's heart beat beginning to quicken in his chest. I'd read about my notes on the area. Steve had driven Clint here. They passed a cemetery first, and continued straight to where the road curved sharply. It was there that a summer storm made the roads slick in rain and flooded the drainage ditches. An old oak sprouted at the corner. It was that oak tree I determined to find. So keen was my focus, I nearly missed the cleared-out land that emerged surprisingly fast on our right.
"The cemetery," I whispered, focusing on the headstones.
Clint looked over at me. "You're surprised?"
I nodded, slowing the car to a stop on a small patch of dirt beside the entrance. I sat looking at it for a time.
"I wrote about it," I said, "I just—I didn't remember it being real. I thought it wasn't real. I thought I made the cemetery up."
"I told you, you were good. Look at life out here imitating you. Fancy that," Clint said.
"Is not," I said, shaking my head. "I just really didn't think it would be here."
I panned across to the road beyond the cemetery, checking the winding path on the map between Clint and me. The suicide bend was coming up fast. I wanted time to look at it. Really take it in. I waited for a while to let even the distant cars pass me by and, once it was clear, we started down the path. I drove slowly. Following first the small bend and the dropping speed once more as the sharper, dangerous curve took over. There were no signs. No warnings. No yellow marked caution posts and… more distressingly… no tree.
"Where is it?" Clint asked the air, maneuvering up and down as if it might be hiding beneath some scrub brush. We could see a sharp drop off on either side of the roadway, without a guard rail protecting it. Down the gully were drain pipes, ditches, and fields of old, iced over snow. The curve in the road came and went faster than we expected. I turned around, and followed it back the other way.
"Pull over," Clint said suddenly.
I found a driveway and pointed into it, then flashed the hazard lights. I looked up at him.
"This was the direction they were going when they died," he said.
I opened my mouth, then closed it again, and glanced out at the winding road.
"Steve, Tony, and the rest of us, we came in the other way. Like we did just now. We didn't turn around. We didn't have to go this way."
"We don't have to go back," I told him. "We can turn around here. Leave."
"The tree's gone."
"I know."
"They must have taken it down. Been threatening to for years. They took out the drain where it used to be. The one where my mother died. They took everything out." He sat still for a time, thinking. He took another steadying breath and offered a single nod. "Ok. Let's go."
I put the car in gear, cut the hazard lights, and checked to make sure no one was coming for a while. With the area clear, we drove ahead and made a long, slow, pass to the bend in the road where the tree roots still clung and the road turned deadly. On we went, just ahead of the second turn where another dirt pull-over sat. I turned into it and put the car in park.
"What are you doing?" Clint asked.
I reached into the back seat and grabbed the arrow off the cushion. I climbed out of the car and walked over to the bend in the roadway. There, I planted the arrow. I looked back at him.
"It isn't perfect," I said. "It's one, and not three. And it's not in the right place. But I think it's a good memorial anyway."
:(:):(:):
I sat in the center of the bed, covered head to toe in my new Waverly Walmart purchases. From the Iowa Hawkeyes cotton-knit tee shirt to the gaudy yellow Hawkeyes pants, I looked like a walking poster board for the local collegiate team. Clint thought I was hilarious. Partly . . . or mostly . . . because if asked what sport the Iowa Hawkeyes played, I wouldn't be able to answer. I simply didn't know.
The carbon fiber arrow and the purple fletches sat on the end of the bed. Clint refused to let me leave it behind, a fact I am grateful for now. He hasn't formulated how to get it smuggled onto the plane, though checked luggage seems the most reasonable method. In the checkout-line at the superstore he bought himself an Infinity gauntlet complete with Soul Gems and a special, hidden gem, he must dino-dig out of a giant ball of dirt using only a toy chisel and a miniature Mjolnir. The hotel floor is covered in sand.
Rinon laid on the bed beside me. Gazing at the page as I continue to type and consider the daylong trip through Clint Barton's past and Waverly's future. It is never easy to return home, especially when that home changes so much. I think, this time, Clint may have a very different sort of adventure if he ever is forced to return to that small town which, now, is bustling wo much more than days past. He might visit Jim, and the yellow dog who minds the archery shop or he might get dragged over the rapids of Cedar River during a frosting winter.
Either way, the only one truly safe from what inspiration might come next is no one at all.
I hope you enjoyed this part!