Hannibal was a strange choice for Amy, however, as I don’t remember us having a particularly good or bad time there, just a time. I remember us ambling around almost a full year ago, pointing at things and reading placards and saying, “That’s interesting,” while the other one agreed, “That is.” I’d been there since then without Amy (my nostalgic streak uncrushable) and had a glorious day, a wide-grin, right-with-the-world day. But with Amy, it had been still, rote. A bit embarrassing. I remember at one point starting a goofy story about a childhood field trip here, and I saw her eyes go blank, and I got secretly furious, spent ten minutes just winding myself up—because at this point of our marriage, I was so used to being angry with her, it felt almost enjoyable, like gnawing on a cuticle: You know you should stop, that it doesn’t really feel as good as you think, but you can’t quit grinding away. On the surface, of course, she saw nothing. We just kept walking, and reading placards, and pointing.
It was a fairly awful reminder, the dearth of good memories we had since our move, that my wife was forced to pick Hannibal for her treasure hunt.
I reached Hannibal in twenty minutes, drove past the glorious Gilded Age courthouse that now held only a chicken-wing place in its basement, and headed past a series of shuttered businesses—ruined community banks and defunct movie houses—toward the river. I parked in a lot right on the Mississippi, smack in front of the Mark Twain riverboat. Parking was free. (I never failed to thrill to the novelty, the generosity of free parking.) Banners of the white-maned man hung listlessly from lamp poles, posters curled up in the heat. It was a blow-dryer-hot day, but even so, Hannibal seemed disturbingly quiet. As I walked along the few blocks of souvenir stores—quilts and antiques and taffy—I saw more for-sale signs. Becky Thatcher’s house was closed for renovations, to be paid for with money that had yet to be raised. For ten bucks, you could graffiti your name on Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence, but there were few takers.
I sat in the doorstep of a vacant storefront. It occurred to me that I had brought Amy to the end of everything. We were literally experiencing the end of a way of life, a phrase I’d applied only to New Guinea tribesmen and Appalachian glassblowers. The recession had ended the mall. Computers had ended the Blue Book plant. Carthage had gone bust; its sister city Hannibal was losing ground to brighter, louder, cartoonier tourist spots. My beloved Mississippi River was being eaten in reverse by Asian carp flip-flopping their way up toward Lake Michigan. Amazing Amy was done. It was the end of my career, the end of hers, the end of my father, the end of my mom. The end of our marriage. The end of Amy.
The ghost wheeze of the steamboat horn blew out from the river. I had sweated through the back of my shirt. I made myself stand up. I made myself buy my tour ticket. I walked the route Amy and I had taken, my wife still beside me in my mind. It was hot that day too. You are BRILLIANT. In my imagination, she strolled next to me, and this time she smiled. My stomach went oily.
I mind-walked my wife around the main tourist drag. A gray-haired couple paused to peer into the Huckleberry Finn house but didn’t bother to walk in. At the end of the block, a man dressed as Twain—white hair, white suit—got out of a Ford Focus, stretched, looked down the lonely street, and ducked into a pizza joint. And then there we were, at the clapboard building that had been the courtroom of Samuel Clemens’s dad. The sign out front read: J. M. Clemens, Justice of the Peace.
Let’s sneak a kiss … pretend we just got hitched.
You’re making these so nice and easy, Amy. As if you actually want me to find them, to feel good about myself. Keep this up and I’ll break my record.
No one was inside. I got down on my knees on the dusty floorboards and peered under the first bench. If Amy left a clue in a public place, she always taped it to the underside of things, in between the wadded gum and the dust, and she was always vindicated, because no one likes to look at the underside of things. There was nothing under the first bench, but there was a flap of paper hanging down from the bench behind. I climbed over and tugged down the Amy-blue envelope, a piece of tape winging off it.
Hi Darling Husband,
You found it! Brilliant man. It may help that I decided to not make this year’s treasure hunt an excruciating forced march through my arcane personal memories.
I took a cue from your beloved Mark Twain:
“What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries? Mere killing would be too light.”
I finally get it, what you’ve said year after year, that this treasure hunt should be a time to celebrate us, not a test about whether you remember every thing I think or say throughout the year. You’d think that would be something a grown woman would realize on her own, but … I guess that’s what husbands are for. To point out what we can’t see for ourselves, even if it takes five years.