1. The Road from Nowhere to Nothing
Later that day, after brooding awhile over what had happened, Neal told himself that he should have had some sort of warning. Like one of those dreams in which he was running through a crowded airport and suddenly turned back because he’d forgotten something, only to find himself lost in a strange, endless corridor. If not a dream, then maybe just some odd sighting in the early morning, something unexpected but not exactly out of the way—a horned owl swooping from shadow to shadow, or a single grimy cloud drifting in an otherwise splendid blue sky.
An important letter had been waiting for him while he was out of town, and if he had sensed that something was looming, he might have gone to the post office before doing anything else that morning. But there had been no hint, no sign, no omen. Nothing to let him know he was about to be kicked into another life.
After the end of the long summer session, he had spent his two-week vacation enjoying the sun and surf on Bald Head Island with Deirdre, and they had finally rolled into Raleigh at 1 a.m. He had risen around mid-morning, hastily gotten his books and miscellaneous papers together, cleaned his glasses with the kitchen towel, put on his tweed teaching jacket just before leaving his apartment, stopped by the McDonald’s drive-thru for coffee, and then made his way to campus, arriving at the door to his basem*nt office by about 10:30. He was running a little late, but his first class didn’t meet until 11:35, so he still had plenty of time to make copies of his syllabus, type up an introductory lesson plan, and take a few deep breaths before facing the new group of students.
Gripping his vinyl briefcase with his left hand, he cradled the coffee cup in the crook of his arm so, with his right hand, he could dig around in his pocket for his keys. To twist the key in the lock without letting his coffee spill, he had to tip back on his heels and then rock slowly forward as he pushed the door open. He pocketed the key and took a sip of his coffee before starting through the doorway, but he had taken only a single step forward when he stopped suddenly.
A heavy-set man with a high forehead and thinning hair was sitting in Neal’s cushioned chair, leaning over the top of Neal’s desk. Instead of the row of dog-eared Signet Classics that normally lined the wall at the back edge of the desk, Neal saw what appeared to be a full set of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary; instead of his pictures of sailboats on distant seas, torn off an old calendar, he saw framed prints of Blake illustrations: muscular nudes in painfully contorted poses. An open package of Hostess doughnuts sat on the top of the desk, next to a can of Diet co*ke. The strange man was hunched over a stack of paper torn from spirals, clearing his throat noisily from time to time, seemingly unaware that the door had been opened and someone was standing behind him.
Neal scanned the other two desks and found nothing unusual there. Hilda’s cat figurines sat serenely in their normal spots, frozen in the middle of a luxurious purr, or licking a gracefully uplifted paw. Deanna’s desk was heaped with poetry magazines, scattered among drip-streaked bottles of platinum nail polish and staplers of different sizes and shapes. The desktop computer sat in the far corner, the screen saver slowly scrolling the office motto: Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold . . . .
With everything else so normal, how could one thing be so hugely abnormal? Neal ducked out into the hall for a moment and checked the office number. With a single free finger, he traced the Braille at the end of the plate, as if he thought it might be hiding some unsuspected meaning.
Stepping back into the office, he was about to ask one rather obvious question, but the bulky man, suddenly swiveling around, spoke first.
“Do you have any idea what happened to possessives before gerunds? Should we send out a search party?” He gave Neal a kind of inquisitive look, but only for a moment. Grunting dismissively, he took a bite of a powdered doughnut, and turned back to his stack of papers.
“I think you’re sitting at my desk,” Neal said, as calmly as he knew how.
The man turned again and stared blankly at Neal. He picked up his co*ke with large, blunt, sugar-dusted fingers, took a drink, and kept staring.
“I’m sorry,” Neal said, sharply and nervously, “but this really is my desk.”
“I’m afraid it’s not your desk,” the man said flatly. “I hate to disappoint you, but you’re mistaken.” With that, he pivoted in the squeaky chair, which wobbled as it turned, and hunched over the desk again.
“What did you do with my things? My books … my clock, my coffee mug … my … other things?”
The man shrugged his round shoulders. “You’ll have to ask someone else,” he said, without turning around.
“Why should I have to ask anyone?” Neal could hear a touch of panic in his voice. “Everything should be right there. Because that’s my desk. It’s always been my desk.”
The man turned slightly and looked at Neal out of the corner of his eye. “I wish I could help you, but the truth is that there are only three people in this office.”
“Yes, and—”
“There’s the nice woman with the lisp, there’s the girl who wears nothing but black and mumbles to herself all the time, and there’s me. That’s three. I believe that makes you an odd man out.” The man cleared his throat, as if he were about to say something else, but instead he just bore down on another paper with his red pen.
Neal took a sip of his tepid coffee; finding it thoroughly distasteful, he set it on top of the filing cabinet next to Hilda’s desk.
“I’m going to the Head’s office to see if I can find out what happened. No one told me I’d been moved somewhere else. I should have some say over where I park myself. If I were you, I wouldn’t get too comfortable there.”
The man made no reply.
“All right then,” Neal said emphatically. “I’ll be back in just a moment.” He dropped his briefcase on the floor as if to punctuate his intention to return.
“Oh, if you’re going right now,” the man suddenly said, “would you mind carrying away some of that junk over there?”
Still hunched over the desk, the man jabbed his thumb toward the corner of the room now concealed by the door.
Neal moved the door aside, and found a heap of bulging Xerox boxes. He plunged his hands into one on the top of the stack and found a pile of old student papers. Picking up the topmost paper, he read the opening sentence: “In today’s society, there are many issues in which people often times agree and disagree with.” Somehow it sounded familiar, but then it could have been the first sentence of any number of freshman themes written in the last fifty years for any number of different professors. The student’s name was also both familiar and unidentifiable: James Davis. Who knew how many James Davises had passed in and out of the doors of composition classrooms in the seven years that Neal had spent teaching at North Carolina State University? He pulled out the next paper and read the name at the top: Clarissa Lowdermilk. Suddenly he could see the clear outlines of a face: a ponderous nose, a broad chin, pouting lips—a living replica of one of those forlorn heads on Easter Island. Yes, she was definitely one of his. He dug deeper and came to a layer of gradebooks with his name written on the front, in that embarrassing scrawl that only seemed to get worse as he got older.
A second box was filled with his paperbacks; underneath that was a box with framed pictures, binder clips, carelessly strewn file folders, a fuzzy sweater.
“And have you ever noticed,” the strange man said abruptly, “that not one of them knows the difference between conscious and conscience?” He didn’t appear to be speaking to Neal. After posing his question, he rested his head in his large, round hand and gazed at the taut thigh muscles of a Blake goddess.
But Neal was determined not to let the man forget about his presence in the room. He yanked one of the gradebooks out of the first box and shoved it in front of the man’s face.
“I told you! This is my office, too. You see my name there? Dr. Neal Pilchard. That’s me.”
The man turned and studied Neal intently, his rounded brows furrowed with parallel frowns. “Pilchard? It seems like I’ve heard that name recently.”
He reached for the next-to-last doughnut in the package and took a small, delicate bite.
“I know,” he finally said, wagging his index finger. “It was that chesty secretary with the bangs. She was looking for someone called Pilchard. But I think this person had a different first name … Calvin, maybe.”
“That’s me,” Neal said. “My name is Calvin McNeal Pilchard.”
“Were your parents Calvinists, by any chance?”
“You could say that, I guess. My father was a Baptist minister.”
“I see.” The man wriggled excitedly, as if he were pursuing a stimulating line of thought. “That might explain your peculiar sense of entitlement. ‘My desk … My office.’”
“What?”
“Irresistible grace and all that.” The man giggled. “Nothing too good for the Lord’s anointed, eh?”
Neal sighed, exasperated. “Did she say what she wanted?”
“It was something about a key. She wants your key, apparently.”
Neal stuck his hand in his pocket and wrapped his fingers around his key ring. “You mean, she wanted to exchange keys, the key to this office for the key to my new office.”
The man shrugged. “She didn’t say anything about a new key. She just said she wanted the one you had. That’s all.” Hunching over his papers again, he made a sound that seemed to emanate from deep in his pharynx, like the warning growl of a grizzly bear.
Neal stared at the boxes full of his things. He felt that there was no point in lugging them away. If he was being moved to a new office, or … if he wasn’t being moved to a new office … Either way, he would want to throw away about half of what was in the boxes rather than transporting it all.
First, though, he had to find out what was up. He had to speak to Dr. Duval, the Department Head, as soon as possible. If he wanted answers, he might as well go straight to the source.
He picked up his briefcase, tossed it onto the heap of boxes just before he left the office, and started walking down the hall toward the elevator, briskly, purposefully. Along the way, though, he began to wonder if he really wanted to know what was what. He was beginning to suspect, strongly, that he was not meant to be the recipient of any good news—not today, anyway. His stride slowed and his legs began to feel heavier. He had almost reached the elevator when he heard a voice calling out from the other end of the hall: “Calvin! Just a minute, now! Calvin!”
Neal knew it was the secretary with the blonde bangs; the cadence of command was unmistakable. He picked up his pace sharply, turned the corner, and dashing past the elevator, pushed his way through the heavy stairwell door, hurling himself up a flight of steps, three steps at a time, until he reached the first floor. He kicked open the door to the men’s bathroom, rushed inside, and pressed himself against the tile wall next to the sink. Trying to ignore the fecal stench and the sounds of bowel movements in progress, he listened as the stairwell door opened, and percussive, staccato shoe-taps made their way around the corner. He heard them pause, then make their way back, and pause again. He thought he could hear the secretary breathing on the other side of the wall. Neal waited until he heard her step around the corner again, and traced the sound of her shoes until he could no longer hear them. He opened the bathroom door slowly and made his way cautiously into the corridor; he peeked around the corner, and found the hall empty, except for students slouched on the benches next to the classroom doors.
He turned to go back to the stairwell, intending to make his way up to the Head’s office, but it dawned on him that the secretary would be probably be there ahead of him, sitting watchfully in the outer office, ready to pounce. He slumped against the wall, mulling over an alternative plan, when he heard the sound of Dr. Duval’s voice coming from a classroom down the hall. He checked his watch. The class would be over in about ten minutes.
Making his way down the hall, Neal followed the sound of Dr. Duval’s elegant baritone, until his words began to take on shape, meaning, and force. Neal placed himself where he could see the students in the classroom and be seen by them, but none of them looked his way—quite a tribute to the professor’s teaching skill. Even the football players slumping in the back of the room remained attentive. The boy with the pierced lip in the corner had his desk tilted back and peered from under hooded eyelids but kept his eyes fixed on the front of the classroom. The girl in the tank top fiddled with her bra strap, but her face had an entranced look. The young professional woman in the dress suit, typing away steadily on her laptop, threw continual, compulsive glances over the top of the screen.
Neal stepped a little to the side, just enough to see Dr. Duval himself in his seersucker suit, standing poised and dapper, like an ivory-handled umbrella, holding a battered textbook splayed open in one hand. He was a Black man of slightly more than medium height, but with a gallant posture that always made him seem as if he were the tallest man on campus. He had a thick head of ruffled pepper-and-salt hair, and a ghostly white beard. He regarded his students with Olympian serenity, with an expression both austere and sardonic, as if he could see the flywheels spinning in their transparent minds.
It was the first day of class, but already Dr. Duval was deep inside a well-scoured text. “So, Wordsworth would have us believe that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’” He let the sound of that last word hang in the air for a moment, until his irony had a chance to sink in. “Yet before he can finish his sentence he has already started to take it back. Notice that. What does he say after the carefully placed colon?” He paused, just long enough to give the few of them who actually had their textbooks a chance to lean over the page. “Now it seems that ‘it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ Can you really have it both ways? Can you experience an outpouring of emotion when the reason for the emotion is gone? Can something ‘recollected in tranquillity’ be properly called emotion at all? Or if it’s emotion, what’s the real source? Something remembered from a stroll in the country, like seeing a patch of daffodils next to a rippled pond, to use one example? Or is the source of the emotion nearer at hand, like the sense of satisfaction that comes from finding the perfect word to fit your metric scheme, as you sit with pen in hand, writing about a patch of daffodils in the solitude of your study?”
He snapped the book shut and grinned imperiously. Neal shook his head. It was all nothing more than callow showmanship, an ingenious display of semantic sleight of hand; nevertheless, he was numb with fascination, waiting eagerly to hear what Dr. Duval would say next.
Just then, though, he heard the stairwell door at the other end of the hall creak open and the very distinctive sound of heels on the hard floor, and he jumped back and slipped through a conveniently open door. He found himself in a shadowy office, illuminated only by a boudoir lamp on a telephone table, a glowing fish tank, and the computer screen. The woman sitting at the computer, her fingers poised over the keyboard, was someone that Neal recognized as either an assistant professor or associate professor of film studies.
“It’s strange,” she said, looking at Neal sideways, “but I don’t remember inviting you into my office. I guess it’s true that the memory is the first thing to go.”
Neal smiled awkwardly, keeping an eye on the busty secretary with bangs, who was making her way steadily down the hall.
“This is really kind of funny,” he said, keeping his voice low. “You’ll think it’s kind of humorous when I tell you why I had to sneak in here.” He even attempted a nervous laugh.
“I’m glad to hear that.” Swiveling in her chair, she crossed her legs and passed her hand through her hair, pulling abstractedly on a few errant strands. “I just turned fifty, and I really need something to laugh about. You wouldn’t believe it, would you? My birthday was just last weekend. Fifty years old. That’s why I can’t even remember your name, although you do look a little familiar.”
“You see …” He was suddenly aware that the secretary was looking right at him. “There’s a very simple explanation,” he said in a whisper.
“I look forward to hearing it,” the film studies professor said. “Although I can’t promise that I’ll remember it five minutes later.”
Neal could hear one of the fish in the tank nuzzling the gravel at the bottom. He could also hear Dr. Duval’s voice still sounding strong and emphatic from across the hall. “‘Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’!” The scorn in his voice was palpable. “I hope you don’t think Wordsworth believed that himself! No. He was much too good a poet. What Wordsworth knew very well is exactly what I intend to teach you in this course. That poetry is a compound of words, chosen not for what they reveal but for what they conceal. At its best, poetry is a desperate act of negotiation between what we are and what we choose to become in the eyes of the world. Every word is a—”
“You know,” the film studies professor said, preventing Neal from hearing the end of Dr. Duval’s sentence, “this could be interpreted as predatory behavior.”
“Honestly,” he murmured, “there’s a simple—”
“I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. Apparently my hearing is another casualty of age.”
The secretary with the blonde bangs had her arms folded and was standing straight across from the door of the office, whispering stridently: “Calvin!” Deeply annoyed, clutching his keys in a compulsive way, he wished she would at least call him Dr. Pilchard. “It’s really nothing important, nothing important at all,” he said to the assistant or associate film studies professor, without really thinking about what he meant.
“Well, while you’re here, maybe you could help me with something. Do you honestly think I should dye my hair? Wouldn’t that be kind of—”
But at that moment the class was dismissed, the students began pouring out the classroom, and Neal made a break for it, pushing his way into the midst of the swarming bodies. Before the secretary could get to him, he spotted his quarry coming out of the room with his fat textbook under his arm.
“Dr. Duval!”
Neal’s urgent greeting seemed to shake him out of a self-congratulatory trance. “Ah. Good morning, Neal.” He glanced down briefly, flipped the pages of his book as if searching for a conversational thread, then looked up and said, “Tell me, what do you think of Wordsworth?”
“Honestly, Wordsworth isn’t on my mind right now,” Neal said briskly. “What I need to know is—”
“I mean, don’t you think ‘Resolution and Independence’ is really rather disingenuous?”
Neal was stymied for a moment, unsure whether Dr. Duval actually wanted his opinion. “I’m not that familiar with it,” he said.
“Come on, now. Don’t you ever read poetry?”
“I’m more of an American literature guy.”
Dr. Duval made a tutting sound. “Pity.”
Turning away from Neal, he began cruising swiftly down the hall. As Neal tried to keep pace with him, he glanced back in irritation. “So is there something I can do for you?”
Neal stepped in front of him, forcing him to come to a stop just as they were about to reach the corridor to the outside door. “I want to know why I’m being asked to give up my office key.”
Dr. Duval co*cked his head a little and frowned. “Regrettably, we weren’t able to renew your contract.”
Neal shook his head. “No. I have a letter, with your signature, that says my contrast was renewed.”
“You should read more carefully, Neal. That letter stated that the offer was ‘contingent on circ*mstances not currently foreseeable, including but not limited to—’”
“I know that. But I should have been notified.”
“You were notified. By email and by letter.”
“Oh.” Neal felt weak. He slumped against the wall and stared momentarily at his shoes. “I guess I haven’t exactly been reading my email lately. I’ve been away at the beach. I was trying to get a real vacation, so I didn’t want to hear from students complaining about their final grades. My mail was stopped; I haven’t had a chance to pick it up at the post office.”
“So that would explain it.” Dr. Duval’s elusive smile creased his face in a dozen different ways. He moved around Neal and turned the corner, heading toward the foyer.
“But that doesn’t explain it! What were the circ*mstances? I think I have a right to know.”
Dr. Duval stopped, gave a muted grunt, and said, “Actually, you don’t.”
Three tall young men in baseball caps passed between the two of them in single file, each staring glumly at his phone. Neal reached around the last of them and took hold of Dr. Duval’s arm. “Don’t you have some sort of moral obligation? This hit me kind of sudden. You have to admit that.”
Dr. Duval looked quizzically at the hand that gripped his arm, and Neal let go.
“If you want to come with me to the coffee shop, I’ll try to explain a thing or two. I may not be able to make you happy, but at least you’ll be better informed.” With that, he pushed his way through the door, not bothering to hold it open for Neal.
Several students stooping under overloaded backpacks came through the door before Neal could make his way outside. Neal would have rushed across the street in pursuit of Dr. Duval, but a wall of traffic suddenly bore down on him. As soon as one lane was clear, a CAT bus came thundering along in the other lane, leaving a trail of blue vapor in its wake. When he finally crossed the street he could just barely glimpse Dr. Duval disappearing into the Tangerine Dream coffee shop, two blocks away. Feeling dispirited again, Neal leaned against a parking meter. The slack-jawed homeless woman in the Packers jersey stopped to stare at him with red-rimmed eyes, and he could almost feel her pity brushing the back of his neck. He shoved himself forward and walked doggedly up the street.
Coming through the door of the café, he was greeted by cool jazz and the satiny quiescence of dark-paneled walls. There was a bald man with overgrown gray fringes and a thick gray mustache sitting at his laptop at the corner table next to the window, wearing a T-shirt that said, WATCH OUT: IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL YOU’LL END UP IN MY NOVEL. The man looked up at him, gave him an evaluative glance, as if he were considering and rejecting Neal for a role in a minor scene, and then went back to his work. A peevish-looking man and an equally peevish-looking woman were carrying on a conversation in a low register, with many emphatic gestures, making it difficult for Neal to see past them, but he finally spotted Dr. Duval walking away from the counter with a glass mug of coffee and a plate of cake. Neal followed him to the dimmest corner of the café and watched as he seated himself at a wooden table. He opened his textbook and began reading seemingly at random, as he forked a piece of cake into his mouth.
Neal leaned over the table, to remind Dr. Duval that he had some claim on his attention.
Dr. Duval slowly looked up from his book. “So there you are. I thought you had given up on me. Please, have a seat.”
The rickety wooden chair was backed up against the wall, so Neal had a little trouble wedging himself into place. “Do you think we could scoot the table over just a little?”
Dr. Duval was sipping his coffee serenely, letting his lips linger over the rim of the cup. Ignoring Neal’s question, he took another bite of cake. “This carrot cake is extraordinary, Neal. Why don’t you go order yourself some? You’re looking a little pale, I’m afraid. You could use something for energy.”
“I’m all right,” Neal said, shifting his chair to give himself a little room to breathe.
“Are you sure? Maybe a glass of orange juice?”
“No, thanks. I was just hoping you could explain a few things.”
Dr. Duval nodded noncommittally. “Before this is all over I may end up doing you some good.”
In spite of himself, Neal perked a little when he heard this. “If you have any classes to fill, even if it’s just one or two sections, I can really teach just about anything. American lit, of course. But I can do British, if I have to, world lit, business
writing … I don’t mind teaching night classes.” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded painfully ingratiating.
“That’s not what I was getting at,” Dr. Duval said. He mashed his fork against the cake plate to pick up a few crumbs and then cleaned it with the tip of his tongue. “What I was referring to was advice. Sound advice. As well as simple, useful knowledge.”
“All I want to know is why I lost my job,” Neal said quietly.
Dr. Duval set the fork down on the plate and cleared his throat. As he appeared to be mulling something over, Neal leaned forward in anticipation, until Dr. Duval finally, bluntly said, “We don’t need you.”
Neal waited for a moment, expecting him to say more, but he just picked up the fork and continued eating.
“Aren’t you going to explain why you don’t need me?”
“I don’t know whether there’s any point in explaining. You see, the real trick is to make sure that you are needed. The burden is on you.”
Neal slumped back in his chair, speechless, with the first glimmerings of hatred stirring in his nerves. He watched as his former Department Head ate the last bites of cake, mashed up the last crumbs, and sipped his coffee, seemingly unaware that he was being observed.
Dr. Duval finally pushed his plate to the edge of the table and resumed speaking as if he had never stopped. “Basically, it had to do with asphalt.”
“Asphalt?”
“Yes. About one million cubic meters, to be exact. You know, I once spent an entire month unable to recall the word asphalt. Isn’t that strange? Of all the words in the English language to forget, why that one? I wanted to use it in a poem. But I couldn’t think of it to save my life. I finally got down on the street—risking my neck mind you—rubbed the pavement with my open palm, thinking it would jar something loose in my brain. All I got for my trouble was some oil on the knee of my slacks.”
Neal waited anxiously for him to continue but he was evidently lost in thought, drawing lines with his index finger on the table. “Turns out I had a vitamin deficiency of some kind,” he finally said. “B12, I think it was,”
“And this has something to do with me?”
“Asphalt has something to do with everyone, in one way or another. Why, it runs through every inch of our lives, doesn’t it? Widows would weep, orphans would starve, mild-mannered software engineers would slit their own throats if it weren’t for asphalt.” Dr. Duval frowned at his reflection in the coffee, evidently in no particular hurry to get to the point.
Neal was about to repeat his question, but Dr. Duval stopped him with a petulant wave of his hand. “I guess you’ve heard about the Road from Nowhere to Nothing.”
“The Road from Nothing to …?”
“Where have you been, Neal? The Land of Oz?”
“I was at Bald Head Island.”
“Don’t they sell newspapers on Bald Head Island?”
“Probably,” Neal said timidly, feeling suddenly as if he had been plopped down in the middle of an oral exam.
“Well, if you’d bothered to look at a newspaper or watch local news sometime in the past few weeks, you’d know that the Majority Leader of the State Senate has been trying to get the State to build a highway from a deserted fishing village on Currituck Sound, across the Great Dismal Swamp, to I-95, just north of a very large cow pasture. Nowhere to Nothing. Apparently one of his money men was hoping to raise the value of some family acreage, so he could unload it and buy a piece of a hedge fund. The Majority Leader figured he could bury the project in the community development bill that came up during the special session in July, when everyone was trying to wrap things up and get out of town. But someone leaked it to a political reporter. Editorial writers all over the state got ahold of it, and the subcommittee was knee deep in guano about two days before the end of the session. The only way to keep all the sponsors on board was to turn the thing into an omnibus road construction bill. The total cost of the appropriation was obscene. I won’t burden you with it. But let’s just say that some cuts had to be made in other parts of the budget.” Dr. Duval leaned forward slowly. “And that’s where you come in.”
“They balanced the budget by eliminating me,” he said, his voice strained by the throbs of bitterness that were beginning to take hold.
“That’s one way of putting it. Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. A very large number of budget reductions had to be rammed through a dozen state agencies before the University got its share. Naturally, the Forestry School and the College of Textiles have too many allies to get hit in any serious way. You won’t be surprised to learn that the College of Humanities took the biggest blow. English is only part of that, so the cuts didn’t exactly destroy us. We had already planned to eliminate the phone lines, so that took care of a lot of our share. We were able to cut a couple of clerical jobs that hadn’t been filled for a while, anyway. We gave up a printer and ordered a cheaper brand of paper. We were able to whittle it all away with little measures like that—all except for $3,649. That number seemed to just stick in our windpipe, you might say. Until my secretary pointed something out.” He reached over and tapped Neal firmly on the wrist. “$3,649 is exactly the difference between what we pay lecturers with doctorates and what we pay lecturers without doctorates for a full year of teaching. Now do you see how it comes back to you, Dr. Pilchard?”
He leaned even closer to Neal, making Neal uncomfortably aware of the deep creases in his nut-colored skin, descending from the bridge of his nose, skirting the lower edge of his cheekbones on either side of his face, disappearing into the soapy-looking depths of his beard.
“How about if I just ditch my Ph.D.?” Neal laughed with an effort.
Dr. Duval smiled faintly. “Not that simple. You’re a marked man.” After a thoughtful pause, he added, “But maybe you aren’t marked for life.”
Neal wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but just then Dr. Duval was greeted loudly by a bald, broad-shouldered man in a tweed jacket that looked like Neal’s in a plus size.
“Adrian! I’ve got a question for you. How many deans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
“I don’t know, Chuck. Tell me.”
The man bent over and muttered in Dr. Duval’s ear. Dr. Duval laughed hoarsely. “I always knew you were wicked, Chuck!”
He stood and put his arm around the other man’s shoulder, and the two of them carried on a conversation full of obscure names and acronyms. Neal took the opportunity to scoot the table forward; he was hoping to breathe a little more freely, but there was a knot in his chest that wouldn’t go away. He leaned over the table and rested his head in his hands, until he heard the conversation coming to an end with a final burst of laughter.
Dr. Duval settled back into his chair, picked up the textbook and began poring through it seemingly at random, licking the tip of his finger as he turned the pages. Looking up, he seemed surprised to find Neal still sitting across from him.
“Well, I have to say you’re persistent, Neal.”
“I don’t think you’ve explained everything, Dr. Duval.”
Dr. Duval pushed the table back toward Neal. “Oh? What mind-numbing detail have I left out?”
“I’m not the only lecturer with a Ph.D.” Neal’s sense of outrage had pushed its way to his temples and was now threatening to beat tears out of his eyes. “So why do I get the axe?”
“I believe student evaluations had something to do with it. You fell a little below the departmental average. Since you asked.”
“I don’t think that’s fair. Those are just numbers. They don’t tell the whole story.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Neal. You couldn’t be more wrong. Numbers tell no story at all.” Dr. Duval smiled and stroked his beard as he considered his words. “They tell no story, make no excuses, offer no bribes. They don’t whine, they don’t flatter, they don’t plead, they don’t boast, they don’t lie. Numbers have no sin. They simply are.”
Dr. Duval swirled the last of the coffee in the mug and then drained it. He stood, picked up his textbook, and tucked it under his arm. “Best wishes, Neal.”
As he watched Dr. Duval make his grand departure, Neal was strangely inert. He had been suffering pangs of frustration and resentment, but in the face of the Department Head’s steely logic, he was suddenly empty, as if he had lost his right to feel anything.
Dr. Duval had almost reached the door before Neal found the energy to speak, loudly: “You said you had some advice for me.”
Everyone in the café turned to look first at Neal, then at Dr. Duval, who seemed pleased to have an impromptu audience.
“Yes, Neal. I know this must seem like a calamity to you. But you should give yourself a chance to see it as a gift. As an act of Providence. Do you see what I mean?”
Neal shook his head, as he felt a tingling blush spread across his face.
“Let’s just say that everyone needs a good swift kick, now and then. Now do you see what I mean?”
Neal shook his head again.
“You will.”
With that, he turned and opened the door. But just before he stepped outside, he turned again, and fixed Neal with a fierce stare. Even at some distance, the lines along his cheekbones stood out starkly, raggedly, like the healed traces of deep scars. “And yes, if you’re wondering, I have been kicked—many times.”
2. An Angry Young Man
Neal was virtually unconscious as he made his way through the noon crowd in the café. He crossed the street and headed down the sidewalk toward the English Department building, with some vague idea that he would clean out his office. He stopped, though, and decided that he couldn’t face anyone he knew right now. He couldn’t speak to the other lecturers without wanting to spit at them for having a better grip on fortune’s slippery railing, and he couldn’t stand the prospect of passing any of the regular faculty members, watching them compose their faces in that artful way, courteous but nonetheless condescending. Of course, today they didn’t really need to bother. They could grunt with annoyance, if they felt like it. They could walk right past him as they would walk right past a janitor or the copier man or the eager little man with Harry Potter glasses, who bought desk copies and sold them to used book dealers. They could treat him like a gust of air, if they knew. But they wouldn’t know, not yet, so he’d have to endure the same old masquerade. He could do without it.
He turned on his heels and headed back the other way, with the idea of holing himself for the rest of the afternoon in the depths of the library. By 5:00 the faculty would mostly be cleared out. He took his phone out of his pocket and held it for a moment, as he considered calling Deirdre. He halfway wanted to assert that he had a life centered somewhere else, not bound up with whatever it was he had lost in the last couple of hours. He and Deirdre had just spent two weeks in close quarters; by now they occupied measurable space in each other’s lives. It was the sort of shared personhood that he remembered from his marriage to Lainie, right up to and even a little beyond the day that their divorce became final. Deirdre would have to know sooner rather than later, but as he held the phone he decided that he would wait a little longer before letting her in on the new, heavy fact of his life. He slipped the phone back into his pocket.
He crossed Founders Drive and then walked alongside the Life Sciences building, with its grime-streaked yellow brick façade. Rounding the corner of the building, he crossed another street to reach the wide-open Brickyard, where he merged with a multitude of students—students in polo shirts and khaki shorts, in denim miniskirts, in tight-fitting, strapless summer dresses, in throwback basketball jerseys, in faded plaid shirts with rolled sleeves; students gliding along in iPod Nirvana, students munching burritos wrapped in foil, students with grim faces, walking briskly through clusters of strangers as they glanced at their watches, students speaking expressively with their hands as they dawdled with their friends. Neal incidentally noted a few faces that seemed familiar, but as usual no names came to mind. He had noticed that after about three years of teaching, the face of every former student dropped into an unsorted mental file. Passing a student with a familiar face, he would often be given a warm smile; sometimes a conversation would spring up and he would grin pleasantly at the student for several minutes, without having the faintest notion of her name. Today, he dreaded any kind of encounter with a former student; if he were to hear anyone say, “Hey, Dr. Pilchard,” he knew the words would have a snide, ironic undertone, unintended but nonetheless hurtful. Veering toward the entrance to the library, he turned his face away from the crowd.
Neal went on inside, thinking that he would find a lonely spot amid the dust and shadows of the fifth floor stacks, where all sixteen volumes of Emerson’s journals were housed alongside Hawthorne’s complete works in two different standard editions. Nearby you could find several shelves full of Hemingway’s novels, including eight identical, unread copies of Islands in the Stream. For at least the next few hours, he was hoping to take one step to the side of his life.
Once the elevator had deposited him on the fifth floor, Neal set out in search of a certain copy of The Sun Also Rises which he had once underlined and annotated in pencil, after his own well-worn copy had finally begun shedding pages. He was trying to remember something funny that one of the characters said about Mencken—or was it Max Beerbohm? Neal recalled that it was supposed to be funny, but he had never quite seen the humor in it, and he wanted to get the exact words so he could figure out what was unfunny about it. As he sauntered along from shelf to shelf, his fingers idly brushing rows of spines, he sensed that he was walking along the edge of bottomless despair, and he started to feel a vise-like pressure in his chest. He looked at the books directly in front of him, wondering if there was any genuine relief they could give him, and he realized, with some surprise, that he had the tips of his fingers on a very old copy of Walden.
He pulled it off the shelf and began to flip through the brittle, mildewed pages. He recalled a certain passage about being lost in the woods, somewhere in one of the middle chapters, and he felt a sudden need to find it and savor something in it, although he wasn’t fully conscious of what it was he needed to know. He went back and forth from chapter to chapter, ignoring the slick, slightly blurry, black-and-white illustrations, stopping at various familiar, cherished spots, like the place where Thoreau defined time as “the stream I go a-fishing in,” or the place where Thoreau recounted his game of hide and seek on the pond with the crazy loon, or the place where Thoreau described the rivulets of melting of sand on the railroad bank, spreading like leaves and fingers, as God unmade and remade the world. As Neal passed from page to page, he would fleetingly remember what he was looking for, and why, but the thought would melt like morning vapor as soon as he tried to take hold of it, and though he kept making the effort, he doubted that he really wanted to catch it and end the quest. Flipping back once again to Chapter One, he paused at the long, breathtaking paragraph about doing business with “the Celestial Empire.” He allowed himself to be fascinated once more by the harrowing tightrope of infinitives that made up the biggest part of the paragraph—“to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent”—suspended in ether by the slenderest strands of syntax, a fragment made of fragments. He felt that this kind of well-wrought prose was a good place for his mind to rest. It seemed impervious to mockery, impervious to skepticism, impervious to Dr. Duval’s mean-spirited deconstruction.
He turned several pages, searching for a particular long, acerbic sentence about newspapers, when he found that someone had smeared snot across an entire paragraph. It wasn’t the first time Neal had found the dried remains of some sniffly undergraduate’s listless afternoon of required reading. But this time he was irate. He slammed the book shut and threw it all the way to the wall. Its pages ruffling in brief protest, it struck the door of a closed carrel and landed with a plop on the floor. Stunned by what he had just done, Neal watched numbly as the door to the carrel opened and a frosty professor in a Hawaiian shirt stepped out, looked down at the book and then at Neal, questioningly.
“It kind of slipped,” Neal said.
“Oh,” the professor replied. “I guess you better pick it up.”
He stood still for a moment, as if waiting for Neal to do the right thing. But Neal did nothing, so the professor shrugged, picked up the book, and disappeared with it into the carrel.
Neal checked his watch. The afternoon still stretched far ahead of him, but he was no longer in the mood to lose himself in the stacks. He wandered broodingly to the elevator, came out at the lobby, crossed to the East Wing and went up the stairs to the Media Center. He stood at the counter trying to make up his mind what to watch in the dead hours ahead of him, while the snippy Filipino woman behind the counter waited, tugging at the top button of her blouse. On the wall of the Media Center there were posters for movie classics like Citizen Kane, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Metropolis, and Schindler’s List. But Neal had no room in himself for searing insights into the human condition. One day, perhaps, he would care about the human condition again. But not now. He told himself to stop trying to make the right decision, and he simply asked for The Music Man. Nothing about the human condition there, he assured himself.
He sat down in front of a DVD player, clapped the headphones over his ears, slipped the disk into the machine, and made up his mind to be amused. Once Prof. Harold Hill jumped off the train at River City, and made his way to Main Street in his vaudeville suit, and hatched his plot to sell musical instruments and uniforms to a non-existent, never-to-exist boys’ marching band, and began making overtures to the snooty and impossibly lovely piano teacher, Neal found the pressures of the present moment giving way. As the movie spun its way along, though, other kinds of pressures were slowly, strangely brought to bear.
He began thinking of his father. He was well aware that The Music Man had been his father’s favorite movie. It seemed to have come on TV every Sunday afternoon of his childhood, and his father would choose the matinée over any football game or the final round of any golf tournament. But why that should matter to Neal right now was not clear to him, until he remembered one very particular Sunday afternoon, when he and his father had watched the movie together, after having gone to see a dying man in the dirtiest hospital Neal had ever seen. The memory was drenched in bland misery, and Neal guessed that one misery was simply calling up the ghost of another.
Neal recalled that the man was in the last stages of something terrible. He was the older brother of one of the longstanding members of Rev. Pilchard’s small congregation in Fort Worth. The devout sister had been urging Neal’s father to pay a pastoral visit, to make one last attempt to save her brother’s soul. Neal’s father had taken him along because he wanted Neal to see what suffering looked like—real suffering, in contrast to Neal’s adolescent self-pity. Rev. Pilchard spent the afternoon attempting to communicate with the motionless man in the hospital bed. He gave a small lecture on the Path of Salvation; he recited, All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and O Death, where is thy sting? He interrupted himself repeatedly to ask the man if he understood, and the man occasionally managed to force the word yes through limp, chapped lips. Meanwhile, the sister would lean over and stage-whisper into Rev. Pilchard’s ear: “Don’t forget to tell him about the lake of fire, preacher. He’ll listen if you tell him about the lake of fire. I know he’ll listen. Go on, preacher.” And all the time, a heart monitor was beeping out the seconds, and a pump of some kind burbled as it sucked fluid out of the man’s body. After nearly two hours, Neal’s father prayed in an earnest-sounding voice, while the sister murmured, “Yes, Jeeesus, oh yes, Jeeesus.”
On the way home from the hospital, Neal’s father stopped at a video rental store.
“You think they’d have The Music Man here?”
Neal shrugged.
“Well, let’s see.”
The fat young man at the counter asked if they needed VHS or Beta. Neal’s father looked blankly at the clerk. “V and H what?”
Neal sighed and said, “VHS.” He and the clerk rolled their eyes at each other.
Once they got home, Neal’s father popped the tape into the still-new VCR, threw his jacket and tie on the couch, and collapsed onto his recliner. Neal sat in a bean-bag chair to watch the movie for the hundredth time, while glancing in fascination at his father, who laughed almost continuously, under his breath, dabbing at the tears that trickled down the sides of his face. Maybe it occurred to Neal then, but probably not—he probably realized only much later that as his father laughed at the elaborate deceptions of Professor Harold Hill, at Professor Harold Hill’s inane glory, and later his farcical disgrace, in the midst of a torch-bearing, tar-and-feather-hungry mob, he was really laughing at the pretender that he feared he had become.
His father would often say that his soul “burned within him,” and though Neal could never understand what that meant, and seemed to understand it less and less as the years went by, he knew that something genuine was stirring his father each Sunday morning as he came out of his study, sweaty and flush-faced after two hours of prayer. But in the dreary hospital room that afternoon, his father was a stranger to himself, carrying out his duties faithfully, bearing the words and intonations that suited the role that he had assumed, but false to his calling in ways that he could never express—an impostor. Neal recalled many occasions when, standing behind the pulpit, his father had seemed on the verge of saying something true and unbearable, only to slip into safe repetitions of phrases that could barely be registered as sound, they seemed so inevitable. And as soon as the sermon had rung to a predictable close, and the organ had begun to intone the invitation hymn, his father’s face would break into a smile of blessedness, as if the music had rescued from him the empty pit of his own words. Somewhere along the way, Neal had come to realize that The Music Man was a metaphor for his father’s failures, a means of seeing himself clearly, and relieving himself of self-hatred through laughter.
Neal stopped the movie just before he reached the end. He went back to the counter and asked for two other DVDs, but as he began watching one of them he found that scenes from The Music Man were still spooling through his mind. Thoughts of his father were still running in and out of the remembered frames of the movie, but those thoughts seamlessly gave way to something else. He found himself reliving a dream he had had some years ago. In the dream he was teaching an American literature class—something he had never yet gotten to do. He was giving a lecture on The Scarlet Letter, peeling back layers of unsuspected meaning from sentence after sentence. The students were as still as mannequins, eyes as dull as shirt cardboard. He heard his speech coming slower and slower until, as he halted in the middle of a convoluted, meandering sentence, the classroom door opened and a lanky professor with a craggy face—an Abraham Lincoln look-alike but without the beard—walked in and announced that he had been listening to Neal’s lecture and could not allow him to continue. He opened up a textbook and began pointing out risqué passages, interpreting them with wit and verve. The students erupted in laughter again and again. Neal hunted through his own textbook, unable to find the passages that the professor was expounding. The usurper turned to him suddenly and said, with a scowl, “Of course, you can’t find them, my good man. You’ve got the wrong edition!” The students laughed with abandon, and the professor urged them on. “You see! There’s a reason why you were bored! It wasn’t your fault!” The students’ laughter turned vicious, shaking the room like aftershocks from an earthquake. Neal wanted to escape, but as in many other dreams he was unable to move, and he suddenly found himself encircled, pushed against the blackboard by the students’ heavy bodies, sweltering under the fog of their breath. He had woken in a sweat.
For much of the afternoon he had been asking himself why he hadn’t been given a warning, and now he saw that he had been warned. Was it two years ago? Three? The truth had been facing him all along. His father wasn’t the only imposter in the family.
Neal made himself wait until the minute hand on his watch had finally inched its way to the top of the dial: 5:00.
The halls of the English Department building were mostly empty. When he reached his office and opened the door, he was relieved to find it vacant and dark. He flipped on the lights, sighed, and turned to the task of cleaning out his things. Always before, when he had purged leftover papers from his files, he had made a point of removing paper clips and tossing them into a small cardboard box on his desk; but now he decided there was no point in saving anything, and he sent each paper sailing into the wastebasket as soon as he had had a chance to glance at it, and confirm that it was something that would never conceivably be of any use to him. He gave similar quick glances at old textbooks and then heaved them in the trash, and when the basket was full, tossed the rest of the throwaways somewhere in the vicinity. He was debating whether to hurl a never-used poetry anthology onto the pile when he heard several dead-sounding knocks on the door.
“Yes?”
The door creaked open and a young man with wild, curly hair stepped into the room. The face was familiar, and Neal imagined for a moment that the young man was someone he had seen walking through the surf at Bald Head Island, before recognizing him as a student from the summer session.
“Dr. Pilchard?” The voice was cold and steely.
“Yes . . . uh.” Neal had already forgotten the student’s name.
“I’m Jim Davis.”
“Oh. Right.” Neal was hoping he hadn’t come for his paper, because by now it was buried at the bottom of the wastebasket.
“I just got off work, and I came down here to ask you why I got an F in your class.”
“Well. I …” At the moment, Neal had no earthly idea why young Davis had gotten an F. He hunted around a moment for the grade book and then glimpsed it across the room, wedged between the wastebasket and the coat rack. Under the pressure of the student’s tense silence, he went to pick it up and flipped through the book until he found the records for his summer class, and then he moved his finger across James Davis’s grades and attendance record.
“Your grades were O.K.,” Neal said, not looking up, “but you had too many absences. I do have an attendance policy, you know.”
The surface of the student’s face was unchanged, except for the tightening of his lower lip. “So. All I had to do was plant my butt a few more times …”
The student had said nothing in class for ten weeks; this knife-edged voice was new to Neal’s ears. He was continually amazed whenever he discovered that an innocent-looking face at the back of the class concealed a septic mind. You could never know what they were thinking. Why had Neal been compelled to discover this over and over again?
“It’s not a question of just sitting there,” Neal said, with forced calmness. “Class participation means—”
“I know what the f*ck it means,” the student said coldly. “It means I have to take this f*cking class another f*cking time! It means I have to come sit and listen to some f*cking sh*thead like you, tell me how to f*cking write the way he wants me to
f*cking—”
The student interrupted himself. “I don’t have any time to waste. I’ve got a kid coming along and I’m God damned if I’m going to … Who’s your boss? Who do you answer to?” His features were still as stiff as plaster, but spit was coming out with his exasperated words.
Neal was indignant until the marvelous thought occurred to him that he was no longer responsible. It wasn’t his problem! He was on the point of telling the student to go take a leap at the moon, when he thought of something better.
“Who do I answer to? His name is Harold Hill. Professor Harold Hill.”
“What is he? The department head?”
“No, not the department head.”
The student was clearly puzzled by the smile that was spreading across Neal’s face.
“Is he the dean?”
“No, no. He’s a music man.”
“Huh …?”
“He’s a music man. And he sells clarinets to the kids in the town, with the big trombones and the rat-a-tat drums …”
The student’s eyes narrowed, and he appeared on the point of saying something, but the words seemed to have gotten stuck in his throat.
“And the piccolo, the piccolo,” Neal continued merrily, “the uniforms, too, with the shiny gold braid on the coat and a big red stripe running ….”
There was a look of something like fear in the student’s eyes. “O.K. Well, if you won’t—”
“I don’t know how he does it.” Ignoring the student’s sputtery attempts to speak, Neal grinned at him without a trace of mercy. “But he lives like a king, and he dallies and he gathers, and he plucks and he shines …”
The student backpedaled until he bumped against the door. He fumbled for the knob, hurled the door wide, and ran down the hall.
Neal followed him out the door and called after him: “And when the man dances, certainly boys, what else?”
The student disappeared around the corner and could be heard crashing through the heavy stairwell door. Neal turned and found a couple of dazed graduate students staring at him in mild alarm.
Glad that he still had an audience, he bellowed: “The piper pays him! Yes, sir! Yesssir! Yessssssssssssssssir!”
3. Let’s Play a Game
Neal put everything he wanted to keep into one box and lifted it onto his shoulder. When he came out of the office, he headed for the stairwell, but then remembered that he still had the office key on his ring. So he set the box on the floor, dug the key ring out of his pocket, detached the key, and punted it to the end of the hall. Picking up the box again, he strolled on to the stairwell, whistling “Seventy-Six Trombones.”
Coming out in the milky light of a late summer evening, he felt far too restless to go back home. He stowed the box in the trunk of his car and walked four blocks down Hillsborough Street to the Sportsman’s Club. Determined not to lose the giddy feeling of freedom that had suddenly come over him as he had faced down the student in his office, he got fervently drunk.
The next morning he found himself stretched out on his couch, unable to remember how he had gotten home. The Xerox box with his books and pictures and things was sitting on the floor near the television. He pulled himself up, picked his glasses up from off the floor, set them somewhat crookedly in place, and walked to the sink, stiff as a two-by-four, wincing as tremors of dull pain shivered up and down the sides of his skull. He put his head under the faucet and poured cold water into his parched mouth. Before he had taken three steps away from the sink, he felt a little shudder in his stomach, and he quickly went back to the sink, leaned over, and heaved—but nothing came. He had probably lost it all already, a supposition confirmed by the faint taste of bile at the back of his tongue. He lingered at the sink for a moment, and then he set about making a pot of coffee.
Everything that had happened the day before, right up until he had downed his fifth shot of whiskey, was reasonably clear to him. He savored the memory of his triumphant departure from campus, but every other moment, with all of the shock and disgrace he had felt, had equal weight, and he anxiously braced himself, expecting a heavy load of shame to tumble down onto his hunched shoulders. But he found that he had no room in himself for self-pity or self-hatred right now, or anything else except headache and nausea. And that was a relief, he told himself. He drank his coffee in a state of perfect numbness.
Around mid-day, feeling washed-out and slightly disconnected from his body, but otherwise more or less normal, he began wishing for something to do. He recalled that he had never finished his half-purposeful search through Walden the day before, so he dug out his old paperback copy, sat on the arm of the couch, and hunted around for a much-underlined page. There it was, in the chapter about Thoreau’s forays to the village. Neal found that he had double-underlined this sentence: “It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.” Just below was a sentence which had been both underlined and starred, twice, in the margin:
In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, —do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.
Now he understood why he had been looking for that passage. After his conversation with Dr. Duval, he had felt as if he had gotten stuck in one of his airport dreams, and he needed to believe that being lost was actually a good thing. Now, holding in his hands the one book in which he had implicit faith, he did believe it. He knew his own “beacons and headlands” only too well. The uniform Freshman Writing Program syllabus, the sequence of assignments, the grading schedule, the schedule of mandatory student conferences, the required textbook, the standard lessons on topic sentences and in-text documentation, his mechanically regular mid-morning coffee breaks … If those were his landmarks, it was definitely good to be lost.
In the slow aftermath of the hangover, he viewed yesterday’s events with a cold, Jovian serenity; he saw them as the tragicomic pratfalls of an abandoned self, one of many. He had almost forgotten how freely he could re-imagine himself when he needed to. Long ago he had pictured himself as Professor Calvin M. Pilchard, the paleontologist, scraping shale under hammering waves of heat in the Gobi desert, moments away from unearthing a fully preserved skeleton of the much-rumored winged tyrannosaur. Some time later, possibly a week later, he had seen himself as Cal Pilchard, the iron-footed place-kicker for the Dallas Cowboys, lining up for a 68-yard field goal, in a stadium full of screaming Giants fans. It must have been several years later that he saw himself on stage in a foggy nightclub as Mack Pilchard, the stone-faced stand-up comedian. And maybe a year after that, or possibly the year before, after briefly thinking about pursuing his father’s line of work, he saw himself as some sort of lapsed fundamentalist holy man, sitting cross-legged in a rock garden, his arms crooked at right angles, making twin peace signs with his hands, a smile of universal love, pity, and understanding stretched across his face. He snickered at these discarded self-images but still consoled himself with the idea that he might be holding many other selves in reserve. He was large, he told himself; he contained multitudes.
Somewhere along the way, he had convinced himself that he could be remade in the image of Dr. Duval, a commanding presence in the classroom. Dr. Duval himself seemed to have snuffed out that particular illusion. But as he revisited the moment of the master professor’s departure from Tangerine Dream, Neal glimpsed yet another imaginable self: the bald novelist with the bushy mustache. Neal felt no affinity for that face, but he envied the eyes that roved restlessly from place to place, person to person, the eyes that looked up from the laptop speculatively and intently while Dr. Duval vanished into the roar of midday. These were eyes that made and unmade the world in a single moment. These were eyes that called shape and movement into being. Neal could now see with painful clarity how other people’s purposes had given both form and content to his life, and he realized how empowering it would be to turn the process inside out.
C. M. Pilchard, the novelist, had been a favorite persona at some point in time. As a high school junior he had been innocent enough to write an entire novel without considering symbolism or narrative geometry or any ironic shades of meaning. After reading A Farewell to Arms in AP American Literature, though, he was forced to admit that his novel was unreadable, and he had allowed it to be carted away to the county landfill, along with a pile of old magazines and coloring books. Neal never really regretted the loss of the novel, such as it was, but he regretted the self-consciousness that had overcome him every time he had tried to write fiction after that. It always seemed that Hemingway was looking over Neal’s shoulder, shaking his head, scratching his stubble, and grunting in disgust. Neal had tried returning to fiction writing at various times in his adult life, always with shorter and shorter projects in mind, but never until this moment did his life seem to depend on making it work.
Neal suddenly jumped up and went to get his laptop out of his briefcase. Setting it down on the table next to the sofa, he opened it up and then leaned back and cracked his knuckles as it woke out of sleep mode. He pulled up a blank screen without thinking about how he planned to fill it, but he wasn’t worried about writer’s block: he calculated that he had lived roughly sixteen years without writing anything of significance except his dissertation—and what, he asked himself, was the significance of that? —and he knew that there were any number of things that he could grind into pulp for storytelling purposes; it was just a matter of getting the first word down and then moving on from there.
His fingers fidgeted over the keyboard, as if they were ready to run ahead of his brain. But the screen remained unnervingly blank as one minute gave way to the next. He closed his eyes and listened to the liquid whir of the air conditioning. He decided to write the entire first sentence with his eyes closed, if he could decide what to put in it. Neal could hear the refrigerator purring; he could hear two women laughing just outside his bedroom window; he could hear a car door shut. He wanted images to come to him, the image of someone in motion, moved by need or interest or desire to cross a street or walk through an open door. He felt cramps in the back of his hands, so he raised them off the keyboard and rested his head against his knitted fingers.
He opened his eyes and found the white screen glaring at him. He needed conflict to set a story in motion, and the only conflict that occupied him at the moment was between him and the blank screen. Without letting another moment pass, he leaned forward and began to write—about a man beginning to write. Everything else would follow from that, he figured. Why couldn’t he begin here, at the present moment, and work backward from there? Maybe this would prove to be the end of the story, maybe the middle—why should he care right now? The main thing was to write and keep writing.
Neal still hadn’t finished the first sentence when he heard his phone ringing, a faint but insistent sound. He’d left it on his nightstand while undressing to take a shower a little earlier; now he jogged across the apartment to answer it.
“Took you long enough.” Deirdre’s tone of voice wasn’t quite as petulant as her words.
“The phone was in the other room.”
“What other room? Aren’t you at school?”
“No. . . . Not yet.” He winced as he found himself treading inadvertently toward dishonesty.
“Well, what are you doing?” Neal could tell that she wasn’t seriously interested. She was just killing time, probably averting her eyes from a stack of accordion files on her desk.
“I’m just …” He realized he couldn’t tell her what he was actually doing, not yet. It would lead to questions that he wasn’t yet prepared to answer. “Nothing much.”
“Don’t you have any classes today?”
“Not right this moment, no … It’s not like I have to sit at a desk all day.”
“I don’t sit at a desk all day, either.” Now she was beginning to sound petulant.
“I wasn’t necessarily talking about you. Everyone knows that corporate lawyers lead lives of non-stop adventure.”
“You can stop trying to be funny, Neal.” He could hear her swiveling in her chair. “Listen. I just wanted to remind you about tonight. Pick me up at 6:30.”
Tonight, he thought, his mind blank. Tonight …
“You forgot, didn’t you? Thank God I called. I must have told you about it a hundred times already. You know, the open house at the junior partner’s.”
“On a Tuesday night?”
“I’ve told you before, they always have these things during the week. Everyone has plans on Friday, and a lot of people go out of town on weekends.”
“What is it? Formal? Casual?”
“You can wear anything. But not that ratty tweed jacket.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
She sighed. “Trust me. It smells. You must have some students who don’t bathe or something.”
“I just had it dry-cleaned. Right before we left for Bald Head.”
“Don’t be stubborn, Neal. That’s not a charming trait. Anyway, it’s too hot for tweed. And please don’t wear that lime green polo shirt, whatever you do.”
He could see her right now in her gray suit, her legs crossed, her left knee poking out from under her skirt, the lower half of her stockinged left leg dangling, her foot beating time to inaudible music. Right then, suddenly aroused, he wanted nothing more than to bite her on the calf.
“How about if I just come naked?”
She laughed wickedly. “I dare you.” In the background, he could hear someone speaking to her in a tense voice. “Remember,” she said hurriedly. “I’ll be ready at 6:30. Don’t come any earlier.” She made her usual spit-fire kissing sounds and clicked off.
Neal had been pacing the bedroom during the conversation; now he leaned against the door jamb, still aroused. He wondered if he could sneak off to her office and nibble whatever flesh she could offer him, but the moment the idea occurred to him he remembered that he still had to tell her the news from yesterday. He was well aware that he had deliberately concealed it just now, and with that in mind he could feel his back muscles tensing, his arousal withering away.
He returned to the living room and sat down at his laptop again. Without giving it much thought, he added one more word and a period to the sentence he had begun. He thought he knew what to write next, but he felt a new headache coming on, and he decided that in his current washed-out condition, he was not in the best shape for inventing the rest of his life. It was not as if he was going to be busy for a while.
When Deirdre and Neal arrived at the open house, fashionably late, three overfurnished rooms were already cluttered with guests and another small crowd had spilled through the sliding doors out into the yard, where they lined the rim of the swimming pool and wove their way around the deck furniture. There were two distinct groups of guests, trial lawyers who were friends of the junior partner’s girlfriend, and a somewhat larger contingent from Deirdre’s firm. The trial lawyers were unnervingly friendly, locking eyes with Neal in a shameless, demanding way, as if they were confident that every stranger had an exploitable grievance. The corporate lawyers, on the other hand, had a way of looking pointedly to the side of Neal’s face, as if trying to peer discreetly at whatever lurked behind his left eyeball. Neal found this refreshingly respectful in comparison. He recognized a few of Deirdre’s colleagues, but had to be reintroduced even to them. Repeatedly he heard Deirdre present him as “an English professor,” and he passively participated in this lie every time it was repeated.
They meandered into the dining room where there was an ample buffet. Neal, unbearably hungry, filled a plate with wedges of camembert and gouda, some kind of sticky casserole, limp spears of asparagus, and a slab of pink salmon.
Deirdre was glaring at a mahogany china cabinet. She tapped the glass and said, to no one in particular, “This is so unnecessary.”
She turned to the buffet table, picked up a pastry shell with what appeared to be a kind of squishy quiche.
“Bar mitzvah leftovers,” she pronounced firmly. “Kyle must have paid for the food. I swear he’s the world’s biggest cheapskate.” She peered over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t touch that salmon if I were you.”
Neal had a piece of salmon on the end of his fork just then. He looked at it warily, sniffed it, then dropped the fork onto the plate and put a piece of cheese in his mouth instead.
Deirdre shook the collar of her blouse. “Aren’t you hot? Let’s go out for some air.”
They squeezed their way through the clusters of people in the back parlor, where someone was playing Rhapsody in Blue expertly on an unseen piano. There was a mostly younger crowd on the stone patio that surrounded the swimming pool. A couple of women in short skirts were sitting on the edge of the pool, dangling their legs in the water as magnolia leaves circulated on the rippled surface.
A young man in a white silk blazer was holding forth in a loud voice, to a couple of younger men huddled against his shoulders:
“That’s when I showed him the lab report with the notes scribbled on it. I leaned over and held it in his face. And I said, ‘This is your handwriting, isn’t it?’”
His listeners grinned. “That’s the first he knew about it, right?”
“Well, who knows what he knew? It was his handwriting, no doubt about that.”
“But I mean, he hadn’t seen it in, like, twenty years.”
“Twenty-three years. Unless their guys had pulled out the same piece of paper and grilled him about it.”
“They probably didn’t even know it was his handwriting.”
“Well, let me tell you,” the man in the blazer said, pouring out the remainder of a glass of beer on the other side of an oleander bush. “His face turned white as bird sh*t. I could swear it hit him blind.”
“What did he say?”
“He tried to play dumb, of course. Probably comes easy to middle managers.” His listeners laughed explosively. “First he made like he didn’t know. He knew he couldn’t get very far with that, though. We’ve got his signature on about a million pieces of paper. So then it’s like, ‘How do you know it says cracking?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, what do you think it says? And then he shrugs like how should he know? And then he says he needs to be excused for a moment.”
“And did someone follow him?”
“Of course. Do you think we’re a bunch of idiots?”
“He probably had to go empty his diaper.” More explosive laughter.
Deirdre poked Neal in the ribs. “Look over there, by the tree.”
In the corner of the backyard, under the overgrown magnolia, Neal saw a man with a deeply creased forehead anda crest of stiff white hair. His orange plastic-framed glasses and his jaunty smile might have given him a youthful look, if not for the liver spots that dotted the sides of his head. His arm encircled a much younger woman with a pale bird-like face framed by a wealth of stiff black curls. She was smoking a cigarette and squinting in the glare from the lowering sun, turning now and then to whisper something in the older man’s ear.
“That’s the senior partner,” Deirdre said in a soft, oddly reverent-sounding voice. “And his fiancée.”
Neal nodded. There was no point in making the obvious comments.
“I was there when they met,” Deidre said, with suppressed eagerness.
“You were where?”
“In the conference room. We were representing her company in a product liability suit. The senior partner just happened to wander into the room with our chief litigation specialist. They were talking about bass fishing, or something like that.”
Neal watched as the woman reached behind and squeezed the back of the senior partner’s neck, a little too firmly, to judge by the brief tightening of his jaw.
“You could see it happening right away. The way they looked at each other.”
“Just like that, huh?”
“He sat down at the head of the conference table. Of course, he had nothing to do with the case. He just wanted to keep his eyes on her. She was talking to her accountant, jotting down something on a legal pad, but she couldn’t help noticing that he was groping her with his eyes. I thought she was annoyed at first, but after the meeting got going she started directing all of her questions to him, even though he wasn’t supposed to be there. Two hours later I was walking down the hall past his office, and I heard his secretary ordering a dozen tulips. She sort of raised her eyebrows at me as I walked by.”
“How do you know that was—”
“A week later he had lunch with Kowalski, the divorce lawyer. I saw them coming out of the elevator together. You know, his wife got all three houses. He was in such a hurry he wouldn’t let Kowalski drag out the negotiations. Can you imagine being that much in love?”
It was a startlingly pointed question. Deirdre looked at him searchingly, her lips parted slightly. Just as Neal started to feel nervous, she looked past him and followed the senior partner and his fiancée with her eyes, as they turned to face each other and began speaking noiselessly, with the faintest trembling of their lips.
“I’ve got a great idea,” she whispered. “Come on.” She gripped his arm and ushered him back through the French doors, through the parlor, into the dining room, where they were nearly alone. She leaned close, laughter rising in her throat, and said, “I want you to pretend like you don’t know me. Go into that room”—she pointed to the doorway on the other end of the dining room—“and I’ll follow you in just a moment. Pretend like you’ve never seen me before. Go on.” She gave him a soft push forward.
He stepped into a spacious room with a suite of silk-upholstered furniture along one wall, and a row of shelves along the other. Guests were packed as tightly here as they were in the back parlor. The mingled voices rose and fell in pitch with a regularity that seemed a little uncanny. Neal had left his drink on a patio table, so he felt embarrassingly empty-handed as he waited for Deirdre to enter the room.
She came in without any sign of self-consciousness, as if she had just spent the past five minutes studiously forgetting her name. Neal watched her as she fingered various knick-knacks on the shelves. He had been annoyed by her suggestion at first, but now he felt a little gratitude at being invited to step outside himself. His pulse started to quicken as he studied her closely. He was impressed, once again, by the way she carried herself, her shoulders squared, her chin thrust forward assertively, whether in motion or repose. She was about an inch taller than Neal. She had a broad, plump face and ample hips. But her generous figure took nothing away from the tautness and quickness of her movements. She wore her brown hair long and straight, fastened at the neckline with a flat gold clip, and her ears were small and shapely. She was wearing a sleeveless electric blue blouse, and a black skirt that just grazed her bare, sun-baked knees.
He had been instructed to take possession of her all over again, and now he crossed the room, dodging the curious glances of strangers, with a dizzying sense of expectation.
As he approached her she was cradling a Hopi kachina doll in the palm of her hand. She looked up at him with a carefully affected air of surprise. He was unnerved when he met her eyes. He looked down at the hardwood floor, tapped his foot as if testing to see what type of wood it was made of, and then looked up again.
“Anyone you know?” he asked, poking the doll lightly and feeling immediately silly.
“I’m just curious. I saw it staring at me as soon as I came into the room. Am I in some kind of danger?”
Neal took it out of her hands and pretended to be examining it. “It’s hard to say. It definitely looks like the genuine article, though.”
“What do you think of those teeth?”
Neal put the doll back on the shelf. He felt tense and witless. “I wouldn’t be concerned. I think I read something about these things. They’re used in the bean dance, you know, or something like that.”
“But why would it be staring at me? I thought maybe you could tell me, since you were clearly staring at me, too. I really didn’t know I was supposed to be on public display.”
She seemed to be giving him an opening, and he stammered his way toward it. “Maybe it was fascinated with … your eyes.”
“What about my eyes?”
“Well, your eyes are sort of … mischievous.”
“Is that good or bad?”
In spite of her question, he could tell that he had struck just the right note. “Good. Very good. And your ears, they’re …”
She put a finger to his lips. “Careful, now. My boyfriend is in the next room. He could be peeking at us through the door.”
“What would he do if he saw us?”
“I’m not sure. He’s kind of quiet, but I get the feeling that he might … I don’t know what. He keeps his cards close, if you know what I mean. You can never tell.”
Neal suddenly imagined that he was overhearing something about himself.
“Does your boyfriend …?”
She shook her head and, gripping his collar, began to pull him along to the hallway that led to the other end of the house. Some guests were huddled in the middle of the hall, evidently exchanging obscene jokes. Deirdre smiled knowingly at them and hurried through the little group with Neal in tow.
They turned a corner, and she led him into an unoccupied room, dusty, airless, and dimly lit, furnished with a row of filing cabinets and a desk piled with old phone books. She took his head in her hands and gave him a zesty open-mouthed kiss; thrusting her right leg between his knees, she kicked off her shoe and hooked her foot around his ankle. He unbuttoned her blouse and kissed the tops of her breasts. She untucked his shirt and ran the palms of her hands up and down his back.
As he began lightly brushing her neck with his tongue, he could hear a humid sigh rising from somewhere deep inside her; instantly, he began fading back into his real self, sagging under the burden of passive dishonesty, and he felt his arousal slipping away.
“Oh my,” she said, “your back muscles are so stiff all the sudden. What’s wrong, my love?”
He lifted his head from her shoulder, faced her for just a moment, and then glanced at the sliver of light coming through the room’s drawn curtains.
“It’s nothing. I’m just …”
He looked at her again and found an expectant glimmer in her eyes.
“I’m just a little uptight lately.”
“Anything you want to tell me about?” She continued stroking his back, softly and slowly.
“It’s no big deal, really. Not the end of the world. I just lost my job.”
“Oh, you poor man.” She cupped his chin in her hand and ran the other hand through his hair. He realized that she was still play-acting and thought he was, too.
“No, Deirdre. I mean I really lost my job. Me, Neal.”
The excitement in her eyes vanished like a wisp of steam. She still held his head in her hands, and her grip tightened noticeably.
“When did that happen?”
“Yesterday. Or … I found out yesterday.”
She let go of him and took a half step back. “I don’t understand. What about your contract?”
“There never was a contract, not really, only an offer, and the offer was withdrawn.”
“Neal, that’s nonsense. You don’t know the first thing about contracts. I swear to God you’ve been had.”
She crossed her arms, and her mouth tightened into that fiercely meditative frown that Neal had gotten painfully used to. “I need to get someone on your case.”
“Deirdre, there’s no point in dragging one of your friends into this. The language of the offer was very clear. It said—”
“It doesn’t matter what it said. Words can be turned any number of different ways. Up, down, inside out. We’ve got an employment specialist who … Well, he normally works on the employer’s side, but I know he can help you. I saw him in the living room just a moment ago.”
Neal raised his arms, as if he intended to make some emphatic point, but then let them drop again. “Look, they’re not going to give me my job back, and there’s not that much money involved here. It would have been just a one-year contract for diddly.”
She punched him in the chest. “You can’t just give in. Your pride isn’t diddly, is it?”
“I don’t see what my pride has got to do with this. It’s a question of income. Even if I did go to court, the University would tie it up for months, and I’m going to need money soon.”
It was the first time he had put it to himself so bluntly. All the time he had spent that day trying to reimagine himself, he had conveniently forgotten that bills would be arriving, that food had to be paid for. Among other things, he still had to pay off the credit card bill for the trip to Bald Head Island.
“Can’t you find another teaching job? There must be about a hundred colleges in this area.”
“They’ve already hired for the fall, Deirdre.”
“What about online colleges? Have you made any calls?”
“Well, no.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and studied the tips of his shoes. “Not yet.”
“Have you gone through the classified ads yet? Have you logged onto Monster?”
He shook his head.
“Well, what have you been doing all day?”
“I’ve been … doing some thinking.”
She clapped her hands to her forehead. “My God, Neal! Why don’t you just wait until the icecaps melt? Then we’ll all drown and you won’t have anything to worry about.”
Just then she looked down and noticed that her blouse was still open. She turned around, buttoned up, and smoothed the hem of the blouse over the top of her skirt, then wedged her right foot back into her open-toed shoe.
“I never said you could undress me, Neal. What were you thinking? Someone could come in at any moment.” Her voice had suddenly turned prim and efficient.
She turned back to face him, her eyes as hard as blue marbles, her hands planted firmly on her hips. “What I don’t understand is why you’re always on one-year contracts. With your qualifications. At your age.”
“There aren’t that many tenure-track jobs. Unless I’m prepared to move. But it’s not just that. The truth is that I’m not really qualified.”
“Why not? You’ve got a Ph.D. What else do you need?”
“Publications. I need to publish articles, a book. I need to read papers at conferences. I’ve been so busy teaching for the last seven years that I haven’t really had time to do those things.”
“Well, do those things! Make time! Get a grown-up job for a change!” She was turning red with exasperation. “Come on. I’ve got to go back and circulate.”
Deirdre plunged into the crowds in the living room, the back parlor, out on the patio. She left Neal to his own devices, to strike up random conversations with other stragglers, about baseball cards or the last season of Breaking Bad or the latest computer viruses; at one point, as light from the fluorescent lamps on the patio began casting filmy shadows in the parlor, he found himself involved in a tortuous game of chess. He stayed within sight of Deirdre as she moved from person to person with impeccable timing. He could still feel the pressure of her fists against his chest just moments earlier; he still heard the passionate exasperation in her voice, and he found that his desire had reawakened. He carefully followed her movements as she darted from one conversation to the next. She hardly glanced at him. The more remote she seemed to him, though, the more he desired her. She had spent fourteen days with him on the beach, more naked than not, and no matter how far she drifted away from him that evening, he was achingly conscious of the newly browned body beneath her clothes.
She waited until half the guests had left before she approached and told him she was ready to leave. When they arrived at the front stoop of her townhouse, Neal used his own key to open the door. Shutting the door behind them, he leaned toward her and kissed her. She returned his kiss somewhat indifferently and began to walk away, but he gripped her hand and then, suddenly kneeling down, pressing his face against her belly, he reached under her skirt and caressed her thigh and the moist flesh behind her knee. She stroked the back of his neck in a kind of abstracted way, but soon she pushed away from him and brushed her skirt.
“I can’t tonight, Neal. I’ve got to get up early and get ready for court.”
“How early?”
“Just never mind it, Neal. I’ll call you sometime tomorrow.”
He stood up, and she gave him a quick final kiss.
“Good night,” she said, gently patting him on the shoulder. “And good luck, or whatever.”
4. Canned Life
Neal set the alarm on his phone and got up dutifully at 6:30 the next morning. He jogged for half an hour, took a quick, cold shower, and sat down with the classified ads as he breakfasted on coffee and a Nutri-Grain bar. He tore out a couple of employment notices, one under Information Services, the other under News/Journalism, before letting his attention roam among the ads for used motorboats and jet skis.
He had already decided that he would begin each day early, as if he had a regular job to go to. He would spend each morning making calls, he told himself, and writing letters, and going from place to place within a thirty-mile radius, seeking out interviews. He would try to save his afternoons for writing. He would make another effort to begin something—a novel, or a novella, or a short story, or a sonnet—that might become something important or lead to something important … as long as he had at least some time left over, he could start on something more than a mere job. However, he was gratingly aware that, in the very immediate future, he had to figure out how to pay for electricity and cable, how to feed himself, how to keep himself off the street.
His first efforts to find a mere job were frustrating. Most of the phone numbers given in the newspaper listings connected him to an employment agency, whose friendly representatives promised to find him the job of his dreams, for an upfront fee of $500. When he called a couple of the other numbers he was greeted dully and told that the position was no longer open. Setting the paper aside, he opened up his laptop, and scrolled through some online employment sites. That morning he ended up sending out his resume twenty-two times, sometimes for full-time contract editing jobs, sometimes for part-time work as a “community blogger” or an “education advocate.” He spent the middle part of the morning composing cover letters that fit the jobs he was pursuing and offered at least some degree of truth about the facts of his life.
After several hours in the world of virtual selfhood, he made himself a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich—comfort food. He started up his computer and opened up the file he had created yesterday, with the first sentence of his novel. He added a couple of commas, changed one word, deleted another, and then deleted the whole sentence. He stared at the blank white screen for a moment and then stood up and began walking back and forth across the room, to consider what exactly he was trying to do. For no apparent reason, he found himself conjuring up the saline smell of Deidre’s skin drying in the afternoon sun, after a quick dash through the surf, and he began to yearn somewhat hopelessly for contact with her body. He recalled the way he had offered himself to her the night before, wishing he could immediately recreate the moment, yet feeling shame for the abject way he had surrendered himself, as if he had acknowledged that she was the successful half of their shared personhood and had languidly wished to be dissolved into her yeasty, nubile, pink-nippled, supple-lipped, soft-bellied, sturdy-limbed, savory womanhood. His vulnerability had only made him less desirable to her. It was an impossible conundrum, as things stood right now. He could not expect her to fully reciprocate his desire until he had regained his dignity. At the very least he needed to find a job. But if he ever hoped to meet her on an equal plane, to offer himself as a partner rather than as a supplicant, then he needed to regain his professional standing. That was when it occurred to him that he might not want to abandon teaching altogether. If he had felt like an impostor up until now, maybe that had more to do with his lack of credentials and professional standing than with any real deficiency in himself. He did have his doctorate, and it could be that he was just a few publications away from being qualified for something more respectable than the life of a non-tenured hireling. If he could put some of his old seminar papers or parts of his dissertation into publishable shape, he might be able to find himself actually qualified for a decent job. He might never be a spellbinding lecturer, but how many professors really were? A tenured position would at least give him some sense of mastery, the right and the opportunity to finally profess the literature that he had spent a large part of his life absorbing into his mind, heart, and soul.
Neal kept his graduate school papers and the original copy of his dissertation, with all of the final edits suggested by his director, in a Rubbermaid tub which he had been storing in the back of his closet. Nothing was arranged in any particular way, so he simply hauled out two heaps of paper, flopped down on the bedroom floor, and began to leaf through the mass of papers, tossing most of them aside, after scanning the title or a couple of paragraphs, while settling down to read some that had always seemed somehow promising to him. The papers were between fifteen and twenty years old, and the scholarship was obviously out of date, as was much of the jargon, but he felt that many of the ideas might still hold up. The dissertation, in any case, was only five years old. He had finished it and revised it during his first two years of teaching. After finding a blank legal pad in the midst of his assorted papers, he began jotting notes about how to make something usable from what he had in hand.
Near the end of the afternoon, he glanced up at the clock on the desk, and he recalled that Deirdre had promised to call him. He felt a certain pride in what he resolved to do, and the practicality of what he had accomplished so far, and he wanted to give her an account of his day. He took his phone out of his pocket and dialed her number, but all he got was her voice mail. He assumed she was in a meeting, that she would call later. But by the time he had stripped for bed that night, after spending the evening rereading a book of Hemingway’s short stories to get some ideas for research, she still hadn’t called, and he considered trying again. He decided to wait until the next day, after he had gotten something more substantial done. He didn’t want to appear needy, either to her or to himself.
He kept to his planned routine the following morning, making a few calls, including one to a friend who still worked at Educational Measurements, a testing service where Neal had once miserably occupied a cubicle. He was hoping that some kind of temporary work might be available so he could at least pay his bills while he was arranging for something better. He spent the rest of the morning criss-crossing the metropolitan grid, making cold calls at a couple of publishing firms, following up on several of the more promising applications he had sent out.
At a medical software firm in Research Triangle Park, the receptionist ushered him into the office of a young woman, not more than 23 years old, with paper-smooth cheeks, coated with a layer of fake-tan foundation. She pulled up his resume, gave him a noncommittal smile and told him that the assistant manager would see him shortly. He waited on a couch in the large, sparsely furnished, nearly empty reception area for about an hour. His only companion was an olive-skinned man with a closely cropped beard, who spent his time reading a very small, red, cloth-bound book. A woman with spiked hair emerged from the corridor behind the reception desk, conferred with the receptionist, and disappeared again.
The receptionist looked across the room at Neal. “Calvin? I’m afraid the assistant manager—”
“Actually, you can call me Neal.”
“Uh huh. The assistant manager is going to be in a meeting. She won’t be able to see you this morning. We’ll let you know when we need you to come in.” She smiled and then turned to the other man. “Sahil, you can go on back now.” He rose, offered Neal a sincere, half-apologetic smile, and then disappeared down the silent corridor.
Breathing the clammy air of discouragement, he dialed Deidre’s number, waited until the voice mail message began, and then jammed his phone back in his pocket.
In the afternoon he went to the library to begin pulling together the books and articles he would need for his research. After five hours of roaming the stacks skimming articles and collecting books to take back to his apartment, he was embarrassed to discover that, now that he was no longer employed by the University, he was unable to check anything out. He would have to do all his work in the library. He slumped into a chair in the lobby and sulked for a moment, but made up his mind that he would do what he had to do. He took out his phone and tried Deirdre once again. And again he got her voice mail. This time he left her a message describing the plans he’d made and the work that he had been doing, until he was finally cut off. He waited for her call that evening, but again went to bed without hearing from her.
The next day he spent another morning in stubborn, pointless pursuit of a job, then hauled his laptop to the library, hoping to spend the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening taking notes, typing out new versions of old paragraphs and building new paragraphs on top of old paragraphs, but the aroma of Deirdre’s bath powder kept insinuating itself between the words as they tumbled onto the screen. He tried her number again. He was growing more and more certain that she was screening him out, letting voice mail pick up whenever she saw that the call was from him. He decided that the only way he would get a chance to speak to her would be to go to her townhouse after she got off work. He tried to concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing for another hour and finally headed down I-440 to her townhouse.
She wasn’t there yet, so he let himself in. He climbed the steps to her bedroom, where she kept her one land-line phone, and dialed her number.
“Hello?” she answered, a little hesitantly.
“Hey, what’s going on these days?”
“Neal? What the … What are you doing in my place?”
“What reason do I have to have? I’m going to move in here, once my lease is up. Maybe I just wanted to check out the master bedroom.”
A moment of uneasy silence passed before she said, “We never made any definite plans about that.”
“I thought we made some pretty definite plans.”
After another pause, she said, “We can talk about that.”
“Good. I’d like to talk about that.”
“Why don’t you go on home, Neal? I’ll call you.”
“You mean, just like you called me yesterday?”
“I’ve been really busy. There’s always a lot of catching up to do after a vacation.”
Neal sat down on Deirdre’s bed. Looking across the room, he noticed a pink slip hanging from the top hinge of the closet door. “Why don’t we discuss everything over dinner tonight?”
“I’m going to be here pretty late, Neal. There’s no point in waiting for me.”
“It’s O.K. I don’t mind. I’ll see you when you get home.” He hung up before she had a chance to say anything else.
Neal spent most of the evening in front of the television in Deirdre’s narrow living room. He was watching an attractive pair of crime-scene investigators examining blood stains when he heard the front door open and close. He heard Deirdre clatter across the hardwood foyer in her heels and watched listlessly as she came into the living room. She was wearing a navy pantsuit and lugging a fully loaded tote bag. With an exaggerated sigh of relief, she let the bag slide off her shoulder, onto the vacant end of the sofa that he was sitting on.
“How long have you been here, Neal?” Her voice had a kind of tense repose, as if she was gearing for conflict but would just as soon avoid it.
“I don’t really know. I forgot to look at my watch when I got here.”
She nodded obscurely. “You want something to eat?”
“No thanks.”
“Well, do you want a drink?”
“No.”
“Do you mind if I help myself?” Without waiting for a response she disappeared into the kitchen. She returned with two bottles of Meister Premium. “In case you change your mind.” She opened a bottle and took a drink, giving him an edgy, sidewise glance. She sat down in a high-backed chair and crossed her legs.
After a few uneasy moments had passed, she broke the silence. “Are you planning some long discussion about living arrangements? Because if you are, this is not a good time, Neal. I don’t know whether you noticed, but I came home with a sh*t load of work, and I’ve just about—”
“I just want to know why you’re not answering my calls.”
“I told you before I’ve been busy.”
“How long does it take to answer the phone?”
She set the beer bottle down. “Neal, you’re going to have to give me some breathing room.” A stolid look began to settle over her features.
“Since when?”
“I’ve been having some doubts about where we are.”
“You mean since I told you—”
“No. I don’t want you to think that it’s about you losing your job. I was already having doubts.”
“You mean even when we were at Bald Head Island?”
She nodded decisively. I had a lot of time to think when we were sitting there on the beach.”
“I thought you were reading Anna Karenina.”
“I couldn’t really get interested.”
Neal slumped down on the sofa, thrust his hands in his pockets, and acted like he was turning his attention to the TV screen, where an attractive white-coated coroner was slicing a seam into the flesh over a dead man’s sternum.
“When I met you,” Deirdre was saying, in an unnaturally calm voice, “there were a number of things about you that really appealed to me, especially after some of my past experiences with men.” When Neal turned to face her again, she had her hands in her lap, fingers laced tightly. “You were patient; you didn’t insist on having your way; you never acted like you had to have the last word; you were considerate; you had a quiet, dry sense of humor. I really thought you were the perfect gentleman.” Neal couldn’t help noticing how her use of past tense became a little more emphatic with each statement. “But lately I’ve begun to think that what it all means is … that you’re just not sure of yourself.” Her eyes narrowed slightly as she lobbed the last few words at him.
He was reluctant to respond, but he didn’t want his silence to simply confirm what she had just said. “If you’ll recall,” he said with painful deliberation, “just a few days ago you accused me of being stubborn.”
“You were just being passive aggressive. And besides, you gave in. Just like the other night when we came back here, and I cut you off.”
“Well, what did you want me to do?”
“See? You’re asking me what you were supposed to do. That’s exactly what I’ve been talking about.”
Her bad faith was staggering. He was momentarily speechless. As he looked at her, sheathed in the serge pantsuit, which traced the contours of her ample frame but gave no hint of her warm fullness, he was startled to realize how far he had come from that very recent moment in her bedroom, when he had shivered with desire at the sight of her slip.
She waited briefly, to let him decide whether he had anything more to say, and then continued: “I really like you, Neal. I honestly do. But I feel I need someone different in my life. I feel like I need to be . . . threatened.” For a moment, she seemed to have surprised herself. “I don’t really mean threatened, exactly.” Her eyes looked crossed, while her body remained perfectly still. “Maybe I do mean that. Maybe that’s exactly what I mean. Never mind. I hate trying to talk about my feelings. It always sounds so fake.”
“Well, that’s something we can agree on,” Neal said, getting up to leave.
“Don’t go away angry, Neal,” Deirdre said, with no apparent conviction.
Neal turned toward the foyer, but before he took a single step he turned back again. “I think I will have some of what you’re having.”
Deirdre shrugged, opened the other bottle, and handed it to him. As he was sipping the beer he glimpsed a watch lying on the glass coffee table. He had noticed it before, and he had even recognized it as a man’s watch, but for some reason he hadn’t asked himself what a man’s watch was doing on Deirdre’s coffee table. He set the bottle down on the table and picked up the watch, with its heavy gold wristband and its complicated rings of numbers.
“Doesn’t look like your watch,” he noted dryly.
Her expression didn’t change. “I guess someone left it here. Someone who likes to know what time it is.”
“A friend?” The watch smelled of some peppery cologne.
“Sometimes I meet with colleagues after hours. It’s more relaxing here than in the office.”
“You’d think whoever it was would be missing it.”
“Throw it here, Neal. I’ll put it in my tote bag and take it into the office on Monday.”
He tossed it carelessly across the room. She had to jump out of her chair to catch it.
“Good save,” he said, as he headed for the door.
He had almost reached it when he heard her calling his name and his heart perversely started to thump. “I need your key,” she said flatly.
On the way home he stopped at a grocery store, because he felt that by now he ought to be hungry. He wandered idly through the aisles, consulting a sketchy mental shopping list. He dropped a loaf of bread into the cart, a few cans of tuna, a slightly unripe bunch of bananas, a box of scouring pads, a package of light bulbs, and a can of shaving cream. He was indifferently conscious of whatever was directly in front of him—brand names, the color schemes and shapes of lettering on packages, the variety of sizes of the different items that fell into view as he made his way steadily down each aisle. He knew that what had just happened in Deirdre’s townhouse would catch up to him before long, but he decided that there was no hurry about that.
As he was waiting in the check-out line, he scanned the magazines and tabloids with a kind of painful attention, until his eyes came to rest on one particular headline:
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD GIRL GIVES BIRTH TO GERBILS.
The woman in line just in front of him said, “Isn’t that awful?”
Neal grinned, pleased that he was still able to offer an honest response to another human being. “Well, at least they’re mammals.”
The woman shot him a look of mild outrage, turning her head just enough for him to see the Bluetooth mounted on her left ear.
“I told her she should have called his bluff,” she said, continuing her conversation without the slightest pause. “It doesn’t take that long to recover from a hernia operation.”
Neal’s head began to spin, and he felt as if he were taking leave of his hands and feet, while they remained numbly in place like the limbs of a wax effigy. Only when he was exiting the store, holding his purchases in three plastic bags, did he feel that was coming back to himself, his eyes wincing in the glare of car lights. He hauled himself and his grocery bags into his car and, on his way through the parking lot, he stopped for a woman who had two children clinging to her skirt as she spoke animatedly into a phone. He saw an intense-looking young man stumbling along in front of the strip mall shops, squinting into his phone. A man in a passing Mercedes, his phone wedged between his neck and his shoulder, nodded in silent agreement with an invisible confidant. A minivan came along just behind the Mercedes; the woman at the wheel jabbed at her phone with her thumb, steering with her left hand while squeezing a cigarette between her fingers. Everywhere Neal looked, people seemed to be connected to a world of fascinating happenings, brought to them by magic moonbeams from some warm, inviting there, far away from the impenetrably empty concreteness of here. Neal slowed his car to a crawl and then turned left, into a row of spaces, and parked.
He reached for his own phone and studied the screen. He still had Lainie in his Contacts, and he scrolled to her number, wishing he had the courage to use it. But she had told him not to call anymore. Her therapist had advised her that continuing a relationship with an ex-husband, even if it had turned into something safely platonic, was keeping her in “emotional suspense.” She had told him this with a slight catch in her voice, which had given Neal a kind of churlish satisfaction for quite some time, as he allowed his resentment to smolder slowly until nothing was left but ashes of regret and a kind of inert, hopeless guilt.
He knew that in some way he was at fault, just as she was at fault, the two of them separately, because there was no way that they could share their portions of blame, since each of them was at fault for such very different reasons. He could recall the separate faults that made up the timeline of their marriage—her habit of withdrawing into unbreakable silence at the slightest offenses; his habit of stealing glances at other women and imagining that his marriage would be perfect if only his wife had a certain woman’s cheekbones, or another woman’s legs, or another woman’s shoulders; her habit of hinting, in subtle and unsubtle ways, that he was a fool to quit a secure, decent-paying desk job to throw himself back into his doctoral studies, with no clear prospect of employment; his habit of staying late at his library carrel, discussing his frustrations with a fellow graduate student, an empathetic young redhead, when he was supposedly meeting with his study group. He could remember the separate causes and effects but could no longer recall where they belonged in relation to each other—which were the causes, which were the effects, and which effects were the causes of still other effects.
What he knew for certain is that she had cheated on him. He would never have known about it if she hadn’t told him, so he had to give her credit for being honest and responsible. Furthermore, she insisted on joining a marriage counseling group at a Methodist church. After attending two meetings with her, he refused to go anymore. He reminded her that he had agreed to get married in a church only after she promised she would not make him go to church after they were married because, as he told her emphatically, he had had all the religion he could stand when he was growing up. She accused him of not taking their marriage seriously, and he laughed in her face. After that, she wouldn’t speak to him for a week, and suddenly, to his bewilderment, he found himself in the wrong, lividly resenting the way she had managed to transfer her guilt to him.
So they separated by mutual consent and began waiting out the year before they could make their divorce final. In spite of all the frustration they had created for each other, Neal found that he had trouble sleeping without having his legs entwined with her legs, his arm tucked under her breasts. They had always slept together naked, and the feel of her skin against his skin had been the one certainty of their relationship, through all of the silences, innuendoes, and betrayals. So even after he’d moved into a duplex within walking distance of campus, he continued visiting her several times a month at the apartment that Lainie and he had shared for so many years, sleeping with her on the mattress that was still perfectly conformed to his body. Why she agreed to this arrangement was never entirely clear to him. Maybe she craved his body exactly as he craved hers; maybe she felt she still owed him some compensation for her infidelity. Whatever the reason, the arrangement continued intermittently as they waited for the final papers to go through, and even after that for several months, until one morning when she got up to get ready for work and Neal, peeking out from under the sheet, watched her getting dressed. She had put on her panties and her bra and had taken a blouse off of a hanger, but before she put it on she paused in front of the dresser mirror and passed her hand over her slightly rounded belly. While fondling her during the night, he had simply guessed that she was gaining a little weight, but she was caressing the small bulge with odd tenderness. Almost as soon as the truth hit him, he found her glancing back at him.
“You’re not pregnant, are you?” he asked, with a tremor in his voice.
She continued to look at him for a moment, as he shrank further down into the sheets. “Don’t worry. It’s not yours.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s just that I haven’t exactly been a good girl lately. Don’t worry about it.”
She finished dressing and left him alone in the apartment.
He didn’t see her again for a while. Shortly after the baby was born, she called to let him know that she was engaged and that she wanted him to meet her fiancé. He made excuses and promised to call her sometime soon, but never did, and he heard through a mutual friend that Lainie and her fiancé had broken up. It was only then that he felt free to call her. He developed a habit of phoning her once a week, mid-morning, when he knew that she had gone for her cigarette break and would welcome a little aimless conversation. Both of them felt comfortable with each other now that the highly charged expectations of marriage were behind them. They even went to movies occasionally, whenever Lainie could find a reliable babysitter. Every time he came to pick her up, she would be waiting on her front stoop, smoking. Each time he expected, with some apprehension, that she would invite him inside to meet her son, but she never did. Occasionally Neal would still feel the remembered pressure of Lainie’s long slender body, but he avoided any further effort to bridge the physical distance between them. Even though she had never remarried, there was something about the invisible presence of her son that made Neal felt she was spoken for, and that he had no right to intrude. He was happy with the arrangement that had finally developed; it might have continued forever if her cold-blooded therapist hadn’t decided to intervene.
Neal had spoken to her only one time since that last phone conversation. He was in a used bookstore on Hillsborough Street, thumbing through some vinyl records, when the little bell on the door tinkled and he idly looked up and saw her coming through the door, followed by a boy with shaggy brown hair, who was playing a hand-held video game. She might have ignored him, but their eyes happened to meet as soon as she pushed her way through the door, and a greeting was unavoidable. She approached him with a queasy smile, and they asked each other a few innocuous questions.
Turning to her son, she said, “This is Neal, my … friend. You know, the man I’ve told you about.”
The boy nodded but didn’t look up from his game.
“Couldn’t you just say hello?” Her smile was becoming a little labored.
“Hello.”
“What have I told you about looking at people when you speak to them?”
“Mom, please. I’m in a battle right now.”
She plucked the game player out his hand and dropped it into her purse. The boy glared at Neal and said, “Hello.”
Neal’s first impression of the child’s face was startling. He saw squared-off jaws and flared nostrils that reminded him instantly of his own father, especially as he had looked in certain black-and-white pictures in the front of one of the family picture
albums. In a moment, though, the impression melted away and all Neal could see were Lainie’s large eyes, her dimpled forehead, her tapered chin.
5. The View from the Twenty-Third Floor
When his phone started ringing, Neal was already half awake. Daylight had been filtering through the bedroom curtains for at least a couple of hours, as his mind slipped in and out of a muddy, dream-ridden stupor. Sitting up, he peered blurrily around the room for his phone before realizing, with regret, that he had left it in his pants pocket and that he would actually have to get out of bed to answer it.
Ten days had passed since he had been officially dumped by Deirdre, a full two weeks since he had learned that he was no longer employed. Neal had stopped making any effort to get up early, or to exercise, or to scan the Internet and the newspaper for new job openings. He no longer thought about trying to resuscitate his academic career. A few days after his last conversation with Deirdre he had decided to stop making compromises with destiny. If he was fated to be a writer, he had to start writing. However, he decided that before he snapped open his laptop again, he needed to know exactly where to begin.
It had already occurred to him that he had more than enough experience to write an academic satire, a well-established genre with a ready-made audience. So he’d wandered around his large, relatively empty apartment for a couple of hours, trying to imagine an English Department faculty meeting, professors and assistant professors arranged around a conference table. He pictured the barrel-shaped, shaggy-bearded medievalist, freshly arrived from the Forest of Mirkwood; he pictured the well-known, oft-quoted pop culture specialist, with his soul patch and his feather-trimmed fedora; he pictured the melon-faced Victorian bibliographer, with her blunt-cut hair and fish-hook earrings; he could see the film studies professor whose office he had invaded, and the distinguished professor from his impostor dream, and of course Dr. Duval sitting at the head of the table, looking both menacing and serene. He envisioned them all in fine-grained detail, but when he tried to make them speak, they were utterly mute. What would they be talking about? Neal had never been one of them, even though he had worked for seven years on the periphery of this privileged circle; he couldn’t see them from within, so he had no way of knowing what moved them or what mattered to them. And, besides, he found that he was bored with them after all, so how could he hope to make his readers care?
At that point he had suddenly stood still, halfway down the carpeted hallway, with his eyes closed and his hands pressed against the top of his skull. Once he’d emptied his mind, he let it fill up again on its own, and this time he pictured a room full of students and began feeling his way toward the story that lay crouching behind at least one pair of eyes. From somewhere, from some mixture of memory and transient reverie, he could see the eyes of a young woman, wide with the liveliness and lucidity of innocence, but slightly averted, reflecting a preoccupied mind. Instead of trying to summon the outlines of her face, he tried to complete the picture of her surroundings, hoping to find something—another face, perhaps, with its own suggestive shadows—that would put her story into motion. But his mind kept circling back to those same eyes and what they might be concealing. Nothing else came to him, but he was convinced that there was something there, and he told himself that he couldn’t give up without giving up everything. He decided to wait and let the idea come to him.
So he’d spent another few days listlessly attuned to anything that might turn his mind in the right direction. He watched local TV news as long as he could stand it. He took slows walks at midday past the neighborhood middle school. He cycled his way through his favorite Nirvana and Radiohead CDs. He spent hours with the newspaper in hand, absorbing all of the details of several murder investigations. He scanned the obituary pages, preoccupied by the photographs of the dead, none of whom could possibly have known, at the time their pictures were snapped, that these pictures would become the faces of ghosts—alive to themselves, dead to the world. After briefly taking note of how many obituaries were for people close to his age, he would drift over to the features page and work the crossword puzzle and the jumble. When he reached this point, he would begin wondering whether he was really accomplishing anything at all, and a kind of malaise spread from his temples to his feet, a pained awareness that his father, looking down from some balcony in the clouds, would mutter the word sloth, and probably cite a few choice proverbs before turning away in sorrow. Neal knew these proverbs very well because his father had made him memorize them:
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise . . .
How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? When wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?
He wanted to argue with these dusty echoes; he wanted to explain that it wasn’t sloth that had taken hold of him, that he was still reeling from several hard blows to the head, that he was simply lying low until he could be sure that he was safe from another swing of the hammer. But in the end, he could honestly tell himself, and any spectral being who cared to listen, that he would be working again in a matter of days. One by one, the electric bill, and the cable bill, and the credit card bill came to rest on his coffee table. He could circulate around them; he could use them as improvised coasters, leaving them tattooed with brown coffee rings; he could send silent curses toward them; he could wish them away. But he would have to reckon with them; and once the bill for the rent arrived, he knew he would have to act. He would have to scrape out what was left in his checking account and then find a job, or two jobs—stocking shelves at Target, pouring coffee at Tangerine Dream, buffing floors at Harris Teeter. Unless something better came up in the meantime.
The faint hope of something better gave Neal just enough motivation to heave himself out of bed and reach into his pants pocket for his phone. Although he didn’t recognize the number on the screen, he imagined for a weak moment that he might hear Deirdre’s voice, so his own voice was somewhat faint and quavery when he said hello.
It wasn’t Deirdre. It was Cliff, his former colleague from the testing service. “Dude. You don’t sound so good.”
“You woke me up.”
“A thousand pardons. Seriously, you sound strange. Like you’re living at the bottom of some deep, dark hole.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m in a hole, exactly. More like a cave. I’m hibernating.” Neal let himself drop back down on his bed.
“Must be nice.”
“Right. So what exactly are you calling about?” From past experience, Neal knew that you had to make Cliff get to the point, or you could be running in circles with him for hours.
“No need to be snippy, dude. I’m doing you a favor.”
“Don’t think I’m not grateful. Dude.”
“You remember you called me a couple of weeks ago about whether we had any openings.”
“And . . . ?” Neal’s heart was already beginning to shrivel at the thought of going back to work in one of those dreary cubicles.
“And we don’t have any. In fact, there’s been some layoffs. I think I’m safe for the time being, but the atmosphere around here is kind of toxic, if you know what I mean.”
“So you called to tell me that you had nothing to tell me.”
“Not exactly. I do have something for you, if you need a quick buck. It’s really a great chance for easy money.”
“Look, Cliff. If this is another one of your stupid Craig’s List scams—”
“No, this is for real. Solid money … It’s this guy who knows my father. I heard about it through Dad. He’s looking for someone to drive a car to Chicago.”
“That’s all?”
“Pretty much. From what I can tell.”
“How much will he pay?”
“Don’t know. But the dude is rich. He’s some kind of venture capitalist, or something. Apparently he made his first million by selling off about a hundred acres of family land. His cousins were chicken growers, and they went bankrupt trying to compete with Golden Farms, the huge meat conglomerate. So he borrowed some money, bought up all their land for the price of sawdust, supposedly to keep it all in the family, and then he turned around and sold it all to Golden Farms—acreage, chicken barns, hens, biddies, roosters, and sh*t. He’s cold, man. And he’s worth half a billion. I swear he’ll make it worthwhile.”
“What’s the deal with the car?”
“Don’t know.”
“How come you’re not doing it?”
“I wish like hell I could. But I’d probably have to take a couple days off from work. And besides we’ve got company right now. Marlene’s parents. I can’t just disappear, much as I’d like to … So are you interested?”
Neal had been ready, just moments earlier, to tell him thanks but no thanks. But when Cliff actually put the question to him, he realized that he couldn’t just swat away some fairly easy cash—not now, not when he wasn’t exactly making good use of his time, anyway.
Cliff promised to get his father to set things up. Two hours later, he called back to let Neal know where to go and when.
Neal shaved off five days’ growth of beard. Then he dug through his closet for a fairly presentable two-piece suit. He had to dust off the sleeves a little, but once he had it on, he found that it still fit him well. He figured that, for the moment, he could pass for a man with serious intentions. And, in fact, he did have some serious intentions. He had decided that he could use whatever money he earned from the errand to buy himself a little time—a couple of weeks, possibly a whole month. At some point, obviously, he would have to succumb to the grit and rigor of real work, but before that happened he wanted to make some headway into his novel. He wanted to give his work some momentum so it could keep rolling along the margins of his days, and as he knotted his tie and grinned into the bathroom mirror, he told himself that a quick infusion of cash was all he needed to make that possible.
The address that Cliff had given him was for an office suite in the newest, tallest building in downtown Raleigh. When Neal stepped out on the twenty-third floor, he heard the whining of a dozen power drills and nearly choked on drywall dust. He double-checked a post-it note with the office number and headed uncertainly down an uncarpeted hallway, surrounded by rows of aluminum studs framing dark unfinished offices. The office he was looking for was in the only finished part of the floor. He stopped in front of the door and read the nameplate:
CAPITAL FUNDS GROUP
Garvin S. McCurdy, Pres.
The door was a slab of mahogany, a formidable barrier, seemingly designed to keep power and guile hermetically sealed. Neal straightened his tie before trying the doorknob.
He found himself stepping into a surprisingly cramped reception room with little more than a desk and what appeared to be a second-hand couch.
The receptionist, turned slightly away from the door, was on the telephone, the receiver clamped between her shoulder and her neck; with a compact in one hand and a pair of tweezers in the other, she was plucking her eyebrows as she kept up her end of a torpid conversation.
Sitting stiffly on the couch, Neal saw the reflection of one of her heavily shadowed eyes angling off the surface of the tiny mirror. She snapped her compact shut and turned to scrutinize him.
“Wait, sweetie,” she said. “I’ve got to put you on hold for just a moment.” She tapped a button on the phone with a long, curved fingernail and turned her severe attention to Neal. “Yes?”
“I’m here to see Mr. McCurdy.”
“Mr. McCurdy doesn’t have any appointments this afternoon.”
Neal cleared his throat. “Maybe you could ask him if he’s expecting me. Is he here?”
“Of course he’s here,” she said, scrunching her nose irritably.
She jabbed another button on the phone with her fingernail and began speaking in a kind of staccato murmur. She listened for a moment, nodded faintly, and then waved Neal toward a frosted-glass door.
When Neal opened the door, he was surprised again—this time at the spaciousness of the office. He found himself about thirty feet away from the rambling, L-shaped desk where Garvin McCurdy was sitting transfixed before a computer screen. The space in between was largely empty, an expanse of gray carpet that gave off an odor of ant repellant. In a far corner of the office there was a potted fig tree, and in another corner there was something that looked like a pewter spittoon, but otherwise the room seemed to cry out for something to fill it up. Behind the desk there was an enormous window that brought the dizzying emptiness of the sky into the room.
There were three chairs in front of the desk. Neal deliberated for a moment before sitting down, especially since McCurdy hadn’t actually invited him to sit down, or even looked at him yet; finally he chose the smallest and plainest chair, setting himself down on the edge of the seat, gripping his knees tightly.
McCurdy continued to stare at the computer screen, making quick movements with the mouse. He had a remarkably vertical face, with a jaw that sloped precipitously before curving sharply into a knobby chin. His forehead stretched up high and flat, meeting his hairline at a perfect right angle, while his narrow nose dropped down in a nearly straight line from the bridge to the crimped nostrils. He had a full head of feathery white-streaked hair, falling like water into a slight curl at the neckline; his eyebrows were thick and billowy, ash-colored with spikes of white, like the rest of his hair.
He held up his left hand, as if to forestall Neal from speaking, before Neal had any chance or inclination to say anything; then he took a phone out of a pocket in his suit coat and made a few swipes and taps on the screen.
“Hey, what’s the deal with Synersys?” He spoke rapidly, with a tone that was hard and coarse like the blade of an iron file, yet the vowels came out with a kind of loopy twang that lingered in the air. “That stock wasn’t supposed to drop until Thursday. I just dumped my whole load an hour ago. I don’t like the way this looks. I don’t need the SEC sticking their thumbs up my ass again … Well I need better information than that. Tell Harker that I’m putting him on notice right now.” He dropped the phone back into his jacket.
It was only then that he finally looked directly at Neal. McCurdy’s eyes were ringed with creases, but there was something violently alert about them.
“So you’re here about the car.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been told that you’re between jobs right now.”
Neal simply nodded.
“You were an English professor, huh?”
“You could say that. I was a lecturer, but it amounts to the same thing.” There was a slight tremor of pride in Neal’s voice that seemed absurd but also felt natural and even necessary under the circ*mstances.
McCurdy leaned back a little without breaking eye contact. “So I guess you’ve read a lot of big books, huh? I guess you’ve read Paradise Lost, for example?” His expression was strangely accommodating, as if he were in the habit of deferring judgment until he had learned everything he wanted to know.
“Most of it, I guess.”
“And I’ll bet you’ve read Hamlet, too.”
“Sure.”
“All right. Tell me this. What does all that ‘To be or not to be’ stuff mean?” McCurdy’s eyes, with their pale surfaces, were open wide, his eyebrows furled back like the wings of a moth.
Neal started to believe that he was being subjected to a subtle test of character or agility, and he self-consciously groped for words. “It’s just a way of saying … It’s kind of like he’s—”
McCurdy suddenly slapped his hands on his desk and then aimed his index finger at Neal. “O.K., here’s what I really want to know. If everyone already speaks English anyway, how come you’re still teaching English in college? What’s the point?”
Neal wanted to say, “Well, I’m done with that,” but he hated to admit that he’d been drummed out of his chosen profession. He knew he needed to come up with an answer, but he had no idea where to begin.
At that moment the telephone on the desk buzzed. McCurdy gave Neal the “hold that thought” gesture again, then picked up the receiver and mashed a button.
He listened for just a moment and then said, “I don’t have anything to say to
him … What are you supposed to tell him? Just tell him the truth. He’s not worth lying to … Yeah, just tell him that we checked out his damn product and it’s nothing but a flimsy plastic throwaway …Those little organizers or whatever they are … Tell him the buttons are all jiggly and too tiny for normal human fingers. You try to pull up a calendar of stock offerings and you get the weekly weather forecast for Bangkok … Right. Tell him that. And tell him that I had my guy go down to his factory on the edge of the jungle and see the corroded siding and the leaky roof firsthand. There was only one paved road from there to the docks and it was flooded half the year. Tell him that. Tell him that the customs officers down there are fat, pimply orangutans who won’t even look at you until they get their bribes. One bribe at the door. Three bribes at security. Two bribes at the pier. Tell him that. Give him a mouth full of the truth and make him so sick that he never calls back again. Got it?”
With that, he let the receiver drop neatly into its cradle and faced Neal, his eyes wide again. Neal had spent the past few minutes feeling his head spin as he tried to figure out whether McCurdy really wanted an answer to his question, but the man finally changed the subject himself.
“I’ve got a conference call coming through in a few minutes,” he said, waving his watch in front of his face in a kind of symbolic gesture. “So let’s get right to it. O.K.?”
“Fine with me.” Neal sat up a little straighter and self-consciously tugged at his jacket sleeves.
“I believe you know that this job involves the delivery of a very expensive piece of machinery. I’d give this job to one of my employees, but I don’t pay them to deliver cars. That’s why I’m willing to hire someone off the street. No offense.”
Neal grinned weakly. “None taken.”
“What’s that?”
“I mean, I’m not offended,” Neal said, a little too loudly.
McCurdy gave him a blank look and shrugged. “Well, whatever. I just have to know if I can trust you. So tell me, how do I know that I can trust you?”
Neal immediately wished he could go back and answer the question about “To be or not to be” instead. McCurdy had that open, earnest expression on his face again, as if he was skeptical but fully prepared to be convinced. Neal could have faced open hostility with more composure; it was that seemingly sincere air of expectation that unnerved him.
“Well, you can always do a background check.” Neal hoped that his tone would carry a touch of irony.
“I’ve already done that,” McCurdy replied, humorlessly.
“No felonies, I hope.”
Again, the weak humor fell flat. McCurdy’s expression was unchanged. “I wouldn’t have let you inside my office if anything had turned up. But I still don’t know if I can trust you.”
Neal was ready to give up right then, but as soon as that thought occurred to him, he also realized that he really had nothing to lose, so he said the next thing that entered his head: “I’m a Baptist preacher’s son.”
“So?” McCurdy said this softly but with withering flatness.
“Well, I don’t know … I guess that says something. I mean, when you grow up in that kind of home, believing that almost anything you do could send you to Hell … I guess you never completely outgrow it. It sort of keeps you in line.”
“So you’ve got religion.”
“No. I didn’t mean it that way. In fact, I’m not very religious at all. In fact, I’m practically an atheist.” Except for a slight lowering of his eyebrows, McCurdy’s expression was still as neutral as pine paneling. “It’s just that once you’ve got that idea, the idea of Hell, it never really leaves you, and you never stop looking behind your back, so to speak.”
McCurdy finally shook his head. “I don’t buy it. The biggest hellraiser I ever knew was a preacher’s kid.”
“Right. I know all about that sort of thing.” Neal was beginning to warm up to the subject. “But don’t you see? The preacher’s kid is always trying to prove something. He’s trying to prove that he doesn’t care, when all that means is that he does, in spite of himself. And the more he has to prove, the more trouble he has to get himself into.”
McCurdy finally leaned forward, his arms propped along the edge of the desk. “But you’re still not giving me any reason—”
“No. Listen.” Neal had also leaned forward. “What I mean is that he’s trying to prove something to someone. So he’ll keep getting into trouble as long as that someone is still around, but after that someone is gone, there’s no reason anymore.”
McCurdy nodded, then he leaned back with an indeterminate air of decision. “So your old man is dead.”
Neal felt momentarily dazed. “Yes. That’s right,” he said slowly. As he said this, he imagined that the room was tilted in the direction of the enormous window, just enough to send himself and McCurdy and McCurdy’s desk tumbling into the boundless blue ether.
McCurdy gazed at Neal reflectively, running the back of his hand along the length of his elongated cheek.
“Sounds like you believe what you’re saying,” he finally observed. “All I can do is go with my instincts, anyway.” Something that had the look of a smile flitted across McCurdy’s lips, but just as Neal began to feel confident that he could read the expression on his face, it gave way to an empty gaze. Abruptly, McCurdy asked, “What kind of trouble did you get into?”
Neal tried to brush away the question with a faint, forced laugh, but McCurdy seemed to expect an answer, so Neal attempted an honest one. “Any kind of trouble you could find inside the pages of a book.”
“That’s nothing.”
“Well, you should ask a Baptist minister whether that’s nothing. Baptists do a great deal of worrying about what’s inside the pages of books. Some Baptists do, anyway. Especially books they’ve never read.”
McCurdy nodded, conceding the point. “O.K. I guess there’s something to that. I’ve known a few Baptists in my day.” He dropped his gaze for a moment and spread his fingers restlessly across the top of his desk. “Still. I kind of wish my son Tucker had gotten into some of that kind of trouble.”
Looking up at Neal again, with a kind of renewed challenge in his glance, he said, “You ought to be glad you don’t have any kids.”
“How do you …?” Neal interrupted himself, not entirely sure what question he meant to ask.
“You don’t, do you?”
Neal couldn’t trust himself to answer that question. He felt sure that something in his voice would betray his unpardonable uncertainty. It was safer for him to just shake his head.
“If you ever do …” McCurdy was apparently on the point of reconsidering what he was about to say, and the irritation of this uncertainty gave a sudden color to his face. “If you ever do have kids, you better not turn your back on them. That’s all I have to say.” But it was clearly not all he had to say because he barely skipped a beat before he continued: “This kid, this Tucker, is what it’s all about. Why you’re sitting here right now. He’s in some kind of trouble. He sent me an email saying he needed money, fast. He wants me to wire it to a bank somewhere in Chicago. He said it has to do with some bad investments, but I can just guess what that means. He told me he wants it to be just business, strictly business, but that’s a lot of …” McCurdy clenched his right fist so tightly his fingers trembled. “Well, what do you think? When a kid asks his old man for money, do you call that business?”
“Not usually.”
“Damn f*ckin’ right.” McCurdy’s face turned utterly white, as if he had shocked himself with his own profanity. “Sorry.”
Neal shrugged.
“I guess it’s all my fault.” McCurdy placed his hands behind his head and leaned back, fixing his eyes on the ceiling. “Partly his mother’s fault, I guess, but mostly mine. His mother was my first wife, and I guess I drove her away because of something I did, or didn’t do. I don’t remember any of it, but her lawyer could fill you in on all the facts. So if that was my fault, then I guess the way Tucker turned out was my fault, too. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?”
“Well …” Neal felt sure he had something to say to this, but when he started to speak he lost it, whatever it was.
“His mother drank too much. Not me. That’s never been my problem. But I suppose it’s my fault for letting her raise the kid. She did raise the kid, sort of. But I can’t put all the blame on her. I should have done more. I thought it was enough for me to bring in the money, so he’d have a nice house to live in, and so he could go to the best school in the county, and so he could have tennis lessons, and a set of straight teeth. I thought I was helping him by giving him an example of what you could accomplish through hard work. And crap like that. But I should have done more. I don’t know what. I wish someone would tell me what. But I should have done more.”
McCurdy leaned forward again, opened the middle drawer of his desk, and rooted around among what sounded like a haphazard assortment of papers, obsolete floppy disks, and small, indistinguishable metal objects. “You don’t happen to a have a cigarette, do you?”
“No.”
“Good. That was the right answer.” He picked up the telephone handset, mashed one of the buttons, and spoke sharply: “Ruby, go down to the first floor and get me a packet of B.C. powder.”
For a moment, he seemed to be waiting for Neal to say something, and then he rediscovered his train of thought. “It’s like that kid was just there. Somewhere in the room, in the yard. He’d be playing out these battles between cowboys and spacemen on the living room floor. Or he’d be shuffling his football cards and laying them out on the kitchen table. Or he’d be bouncing a tennis ball against the side of the house and making crowd noises from the back of his throat. And I’d just come along and say, ‘Hey there, Tucka-hoo.’ Couldn’t get a word out of him. I figured if he ever had anything to say to me, he’d just up and say it. I just let him go on and play and tried not to bother him. I didn’t think that was so bad. He seemed to be an O.K. kid. But then it was like I—”
The phone inside his jacket started ringing, and he reached for it again. “What now?” He listened grudgingly, punctuating his silence with surly grunts. “No. The answer was ‘no’ yesterday and it’s ‘no’ today … That doesn’t change anything. The answer is ‘no’ … Spell it with capital letters if you want to. The answer is ‘no’ … No … No … He can walk across broken glass on his knees if he wants to. The answer is still ‘no’ … He can eat five pounds of rusty nails. I’ll personally come and watch. I’ll bring popcorn. The answer is still ‘no’ … No.” He dropped the phone back into his pocket.
McCurdy blinked for a moment, like someone who had just walked out of a dark foyer into sunlight. “It was like that for years,” he said. “And then one day I came home and found him sitting stretched out on the couch. His mother had already left me, just me and him for several years by then, and I saw him sitting there on the couch, stretched out like he had nothing in the world to do, and there was this weird glassy look in his eyes, and he said, ‘Hey there, Dadda-hoo.’ Just like that. And that’s when I decided I had to get him out of the house, for good.”
Gradually, as he was speaking, McCurdy’s eyes shied away from Neal, and seemed to focus warily on something just over Neal’s head. “I pulled my stake out of a couple of overvalued microchip factories, gave him fifty grand and told him it was the first installment of his inheritance. It seemed like a fair transaction. His freedom, my peace of mind. Just like they say: win win. I told him not to ask for any more money, not as long as I was still drawing breath. And I didn’t hear from him for a while. Occasionally the police would call me to make some polite inquiries about his whereabouts. One time I got a visit from a CIA man. Apparently Tucker got himself arrested in Bulgaria. He told me later that he was involved in smuggling Bibles, but I just laughed at that. Still, he never asked me for help until now. So I’m thinking he’s in some kind of serious trouble.”
McCurdy suddenly sat straight and faced Neal directly again. “Now, you probably think I’m rich. You’ve been told that I have money spilling out of my ears, right?”
Neal made another half-hearted attempt at laughter. “I’ve heard something like that.”
“Well, the truth is that I’m poor as mud. All of my money is twisted around somebody else’s land, somebody else’s patent, somebody else’s pension fund. I don’t have it to just throw around. No one understands that. Tucker doesn’t understand that.” He made an abrupt sweeping gesture across the top of his desk, but then instantly, firmly settled himself again. “Fortunately, though, I happen to have a fairly valuable solid asset. The car. It’s pure luck that I happen to have it on my hands right now.”
McCurdy glanced uneasily above Neal’s head again, and then settled back in his chair, and actually smiled. “The car is a beauty. In the world of cars, it’s—”
Neal heard the door of the office open and the scritch-scritch of pantyhose friction, the unmistakable sound of a woman approaching. It was McCurdy’s receptionist, who stepped in front of Neal and leaned over to set a glass of water on the desk. As she opened up a packet of powder and stirred it into the water with her finger, her bottom inched toward Neal’s face, giving him a clear, unwanted view of her panty lines. Turning, she cast an affronted glance at Neal and tugged on her tight skirt before stalking out of the office.
McCurdy drained the glass of water and then pushed it carelessly aside.
“I was saying … In the world of cars, this one is platinum.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a Boccaccio.”
“Italian, huh?”
“What? No, it’s as American as Miracle Whip. Is it possible you’ve never heard of Quentin Boccaccio and his one-man battle against the American automobile industry?”
Neal shook his head uneasily.
“Man, you ought to take your head out of your books once in a while. Boccaccio is a legend. An American hero.” He ran his hand under his collar, now suddenly restless with enthusiasm. “He was an engineer. Worked for Ford, GM, did consulting for Chrysler. He despised them, one and all. He hated the way they groveled to the consumer, the way they sniveled and whined to the government. He despised their market research, their focus groups, the mob mentality. So he decided to design the perfect car, and build it—never mind the cost. It’s the classic American story.”
Neal nodded. “The individual against the system. Man versus the Machine.”
“Right. And this is America. Where the Machine wins every time.”
Neal smiled ruefully. “Count on it.”
“Boccaccio built about two thousand of these cars. Never could recoup his investment. The government charged him with tax evasion, wire fraud. He cleaned the last dollar out of a Swiss bank account and bribed his way out of the country. No one knows what happened to him after that, although there are rumors that he moves from island to island in a stolen yacht, maybe in the Indian Ocean, maybe in the South China Sea.”
“Quite a story.”
“Yes. And those two thousand cars he built have become more valuable from one year to the next. Supposedly, they’re the best-built cars in history, but I don’t believe that. Oh, sure. They’re great cars. But it’s got more to do with some idea … of escape, I guess.”
Oddly, as soon as he heard McCurdy utter the word escape, Neal got a clear picture of the car—a vision of rolling, burnished steel, a wedge-shaped hood coming to a tapered tip, like a running shoe, gleams of reflected sunlight in the rear-view mirror, an image in fine detail, down to the pebbles lodged in the tire treads.
“Anyway, one of those cars ended up in my hands. Let’s just say it was the fallout from a bad partnership. One of my New York associates who wasn’t particularly honest or particularly smart. The car wasn’t quite worth what he owed me, but he pointed out that it was an investment. So I took the car, called it even, scratched his number from my Rolodex. If I hadn’t known for sure that this thing would appreciate in value, I never would have made the deal. But there was a little more to it than that.”
McCurdy paused and smiled broadly, knowingly at Neal. “I didn’t know what it looked like before I saw it, but when he pulled into the parking garage with that thing, it was like I’d been seeing it all my life. I saw myself flying along the road in that car, rolling with the road but not touching the ground. I have to take trips to New York about every two months, for face-to-face meetings, for signings, to personally stick a knife into someone’s eye, and so on. And I thought what would it be like to take to the road once in a while? I’ve got to tell you I hate the smell of airplanes. Never mind all of the other crap. Just the smell is enough for me. So I guess I got caught up in this idea of escape, like I was saying.” He gestured to Neal in a friendly way. “You can understand that, can’t you? This wouldn’t mean anything to a woman, but we’re men. We’re wired the same way.”
Neal felt a surge of gratitude, or something like it, for being suddenly included in McCurdy’s circle of fellowship.
“So instead of catching my flight at Kennedy, I drove back to North Carolina in my Boccaccio. And I learned a few things about hairpin curves in West Virginia. Like to scare me to friggin’ death. And so I cruised onto I-95 and ran into fifty miles of gridlock. Let me tell you something right now: the State of Delaware is a national disgrace. So when I got home I drove that car in my garage and left it there. What’s the point of getting it out again? Didn’t bother to change the license plate. It’s just a drag on me now, with the taxes and insurance.”
McCurdy put his hands behind his head and leaned back. It seemed to be a way of signifying that he had come to the end of something.
“So,” he said. “I’ve got something to give the boy that I don’t want anyway. It’ll get him out of his trouble, I think. And it’s a one-off deal. Giving him money, even if I had it to give, which I don’t, would lead him to think there was more to come. But he’s not going to think I’ve got more cars to give him.” He paused, to let Neal ponder his impeccable logic. Finally he said, “I’ve just got to get it there.”
“So you think you can trust me to do it?”
McCurdy frowned and gave him the once-over one more time. “Yeah. I guess so. Everyone’s a risk, anyway, when you come down to it.” McCurdy leaned forward and started drumming his fingers on his desk. “I’ll pay your expenses, of course. I’ll throw in some money for a night of lodging; I’ll give you a gas card with enough to get you there; money for meals; a bus ticket to get you home. Over and above that, I thought $600 would be a fair wage.”
After some quick mental math, Neal let out a mild groan.
“What? What’s that? Not enough? For one simple drive-away?”
“It’s just that I guess I was hoping that … I could earn enough to pay my expenses for a month.”
McCurdy’s eyebrows lowered, putting his eyes in shadow, without dimming the sudden meanness of his expression. “So I’m supposed to pay your expenses for a month?”
“I just …Well, you asked me. I guess I just had certain plans and …”
McCurdy abruptly pushed his chair back, stood up, braced himself against the desk as he teetered for an instant, and then gestured rudely to Neal. “Get up and come here.” He walked to the window and gestured again. “Come on, I want to show you something.”
Neal obeyed, more from curiosity than fear.
“Look down there.”
Below the window Neal could see the intersection of two busy streets. The cars looked as small as safety pins. The people waiting at the light, crossing the street, milling on the sidewalk, were barely distinguishable as men, as women, Black, white, young, old, professionals, vagrants.
“Look closely. Do you see that man crossing the street right now, with his briefcase? You see that?”
“More or less.”
“There is a man there, where I’m talking about. He just reached the other side of the street. You do see him, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, how old do you think he is? Thirty? Forty? Sixty?”
“Hard to tell.”
“You think maybe he’s in debt? Maybe he put his life savings in some tech stock that his friends told him was the next big thing, the next Google, and now the stock has tanked? And his wife wants to leave him because she doesn’t want to be married to a failure?”
“How would I know?”
“Or maybe he’s a huge success. Maybe he’s got a fantastic career as an energy broker, but he’s just learned that he has cancer. His doctor told him he may have five years, maybe six months. He’s facing six weeks of radiation, which may only make him sicker.”
McCurdy turned to look at Neal. “Now I want you to tell me whether I’m responsible for him. Am I expected to pay his expenses for a month?”
Neal was startled at the lack of sarcasm in McCurdy’s voice.
“Well, am I?”
He honestly expected an answer, but Neal was too dazed to speak.
“Well, am I?”
“No.”
“Damn right. And what about that woman standing there at the corner? Why isn’t she crossing the street? What is she waiting for? You think she’s afraid to go home because her live-in boyfriend might beat her? You think she has three children to support? You think she has untreated epilepsy? Neuroses? Bipolar depression? Who’s supposed to pay her expenses for a month?”
Again, he waited for an answer. But Neal just shrugged.
“Am I supposed to sell my share in Wells Fargo to the man who tried to force me into a buyout last month? So I can pay her expenses, and the expenses of the guy who just gave her the once-over and then looked away?”
Neal remained silent.
“I’m asking! What do you and everyone else expect of me?”
McCurdy grasped the lapel of Neal’s jacket and thrust him toward the window. “Look. How many people do you think there are down there? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand? Every single one of those people has got expenses. Because I’ve got a positive credit balance, money in a manner of speaking—does that mean I owe them their monthly expenses?”
Neal gazed at the street as if searching earnestly for an answer to McCurdy’s question. When he finally turned away from the window, he found McCurdy had turned back around and was leaning over his desk, propped on his extended fingertips, gazing at the computer screen.
“Close the door slowly on your way out,” he said, dryly.
Neal nodded and began to walk toward the door. Just as he reached it, though, he looked up and noticed a granite gargoyle mounted above the transom. It was a hunched figure, with greasy-looking, furled wings, coiled in a kind of fetal crouch, but with narrow eyes that seemed ready to dart from their sockets, and a grin that held suggestions of both malice and hunger.
“Tell me something,” he heard McCurdy say, in a voice that sounded as if it were hurtling hopelessly over the edge of a gorge. “When you think about Hell, do you ever picture something like that?”
Neal turned and saw that McCurdy appeared to have aged ten years.
“Not exactly,” Neal said.
“Well, consider yourself lucky.”
Neal opened his mouth to speak, but then shook his head and reached for the doorknob. He heard McCurdy speaking behind him again, this time in a voice that was spent and slightly hoarse: “Do you think a grand would be enough?”
Turning, forcing a limp smile, Neal nodded. “Sure. That would do.”
“O.K. You’ll need to be at my place tomorrow morning at nine. Stop by Ruby’s desk on the way out, and she’ll tell you exactly where to go. And don’t forget to close the door slowly. That damn powder hasn’t started working yet.”
6. The Rip Current
As Neal had expected, the Mapquest directions led to a gated subdivision. He pulled up to the security hut and explained his business to the guard, who looked like he could be Ruby’s older brother. The guard made a phone call, turning his back to Neal as he directed a few concise questions into the handset, and then without turning back, jabbed his thumb at the gate, which was already opening at his command.
Neal drove down one long single-lane street, with houses situated on picturesque vistas, separated by acres of what appeared to be virgin woods. Turning one corner, then another, climbing one hill, descending the other side, swerving aside for a small family of white-tailed deer, he reached McCurdy’s surprisingly modest house, cloistered in the shade of grandfatherly oaks. Neal parked at the curb and walked the length of the curving driveway. The house looked older and older as he approached it. Neal could only assume that this was the original house in the locale, and the neighborhood had grown around it with the usual impertinence of rural suburbs.
When he reached the stoop he regarded himself critically. He had put on blue jeans that morning because he didn’t think he’d have to make an impression on anyone, but at the last minute he had decided to grab his teaching jacket: he didn’t know exactly what situations he might be thrown into; when traveling across several state lines, he imagined he should expect the unexpected. Also, he would be traveling into unknown weather, and the tweed could give him more warmth than he needed now. Now he brushed the sleeves of his jacket before finally ringing the bell.
A mockingbird somewhere above his head mimicked the ring of the bell; a crisp breeze ruffled the leaves over his head. Otherwise Neal’s presence was greeted with silence for several minutes. He placed his finger on the doorbell, but before he could decide whether to press the button again, the door was opened by a large man in an apron. At first glance, Neal imagined that the man was glaring at him across an invisible hedge of social distance, but immediately Neal could see that it was only the man’s small eyes, peering over prominent cheeks, that had created that impression. He wore an absurd goatee that softened any possible air of hauteur, and two large earrings glistened in the sunlight that peeped through the oak leaves. His eyes, with all their wary arrogance, were red and moist, as if he had just spent an hour weeping over the morning newspaper.
“Forgive me,” he said in a deep, gentle voice. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting. I was in the kitchen chopping onions. I’m making a thing with onions, mushrooms, sausage, and breadcrumbs. Don’t ask me what it’s called. I’d shake your hand but then your hands would smell like onions.” He held up his very large right hand. “My hands are now members of the onion family.”
He dipped his head briefly as a substitute greeting, as he wiped his hands on his apron. “You must be Pilchard. Tell me, is that your first name or your last name?”
Neal started to laugh, but suppressed it when he saw that this question was not meant as a joke.
“Uh … Just call me Neal.”
“Ahoy! How about if I just call you Ishmael instead?” He laughed with unfeigned relish. “You are an English professor, aren’t you?”
“Used to be.”
“I thought you’d be taller. Anyway, the tweed looks good on you. Very professorial.” He chuckled at himself for enunciating this last word so crisply. “Never mind the hubbub. I know you’re here on important business, Mr. Neal.”
“Just Neal.”
“My, my. What humility.” The man bowed elegantly. “I’ll bring the car out. Just step over to the driveway.”
Neal wandered along the flagstones toward the recessed garage. He listened to the mockingbird reiterating the bell tones until the automatic garage door began to growl and lift, and the Boccaccio rolled out onto the white pavement.
Neal vaguely remembered the way he had pictured the car the day before, and of course he had gotten it all wrong. But now that he could see it for himself he was knew that this was exactly how he should have imagined it. The car was as red as a plum on the first day of ripeness—firm, glistening, and sweet. From the taillights to the headlights its horizontal profile was almost perfectly straight, tracing the flight of an imaginary bullet, dipping forward just slightly as if in grudging obedience to the laws of gravity. A sharp crease ran the full length of the car on each side, along the edges of the trunk and the hood, the bottom rims of the windows—a javelin line that seemed capable of piercing concrete and stone, not to mention human flesh. The compressed frame and low-hung roof gave the car a kind of skulking look, like a large cat crouching in tall grass, still but never truly motionless, always tensely anticipating the flash of the next moment. The grill, with its gleaming rows of chain links, was mounted above a chrome bumper that jutted menacingly, like the clenched bottom lip of that same sprawling, crouching beast.
McCurdy’s housekeeper climbed out of the car and left it running.
“Hear that engine? Listen.”
Neal could hardly hear anything but he could almost feel something deep, silky and warm radiating from the car.
“You could swear it’s alive, couldn’t you?” The housekeeper caressed the top of the car as he said this. “Go ahead and get in.”
Neal gripped the frame of the door and ladled himself into the wraparound seat, tossing his hastily-packed briefcase onto the floor below the passenger seat. He leaned forward and felt the seat moving with him, in a way that was startlingly conscious.
“How about that, huh?” The housekeeper’s voice was almost giddy. “This is a car that thinks along with you. It knows what you want to do almost before you know. If you’ve never driven a car like this before, you’re in for a life-changing experience.”
Neal laughed reflexively at that, but the man simply leaned in closer, unable to hide his excitement.
The interior sides of the doors had dark walnut surfaces, as did the dashboard, the steering wheel and the transmission cover. The knob of the gearshift showed a pattern resembling a squat fork with three handles and five tines, adding up to seven forward speeds, something Neal had never seen before.
“The seventh gear is your overdrive,” the housekeeper said, leaning in close. “It’s for cruising once you reach your top speed, in sixth.”
“What is the top speed?”
“Well, it can reach 165 without jiggling a bolt, but don’t ask me how I know.” The housekeeper grinned broadly, clapping Neal on the shoulder.
When Neal flinched, the man retreated a little and waved his hand self-consciously. “Sorry. Forgot about the onions.” He reached under his apron and brought out a zippered pouch. “Here are a few things that you’ll need.” He zipped it open and displayed the contents. “Cash for lodging and food. A gas card with a $250 limit. Directions to Tucker’s last-known address, in Annandale, west of Chicago. He’s still living there, we think. We’ve got a man in the area who checks about once a month.”
The housekeeper pulled a sealed, unmarked envelope from the pouch. “This is important. In fact, it may be the most important part of your job. It’s a letter to Tucker about his inheritance. This must be delivered personally.”
Neal reached for it for no real reason; the man simply dropped the envelope back in the pouch and zipped it up.
“In addition to the money for expenses, you’ll find ten brand new hundred-dollar bills in here. The full grand. You’ll get another thousand once the letter has been delivered to Tucker.”
“Another thousand?”
The man grinned and nodded. “Mr. McCurdy figured you were worth it. But listen. This letter has to be delivered in person. I can’t emphasize that enough. You won’t get the money unless Tucker calls and says that he’s read it.”
With that he finally handed Neal the pouch. Neal started to toss it into the passenger’s seat, but thought better of that, and slipped it into his jacket instead.
The housekeeper nodded approvingly. “Guard that letter with your life. And don’t forget, you’ve got the title in there. Make sure you leave that with Tucker.”
“So is that it?”
The job suddenly seemed much more daunting, but Neal was restless and eager to be on his way—and tired of the housekeeper’s heavy presence.
“Yeah. Bon voyage, Ishmael.”
The housekeeper gave the roof of the car a final caress before stepping back, allowing Neal to shut the door and seal himself into the car’s cool interior. He gripped the handles of the wheel with mounting anticipation and fear and placed his hand on the knob of the gear stick. But the housekeeper began tapping on the window urgently. Neal ran his hand along the smooth inner surface of the door until he found a switch marked by a fingerprint groove, and lowered the window.
“I meant to tell you. You can’t trust that gas gauge. I’ve taken this pony out for many a ride, and I’ve stopped to fill up when the gauge showed a quarter of a tank, and danged if I didn’t have to buy a whole tank. Well, I guess even the Trojan horse was missing a few widgets.”
He nodded in farewell, but before Neal could raise the window again, he leaned in and said, “Listen. Whatever you do, try to understand Tucker. I’ve known that boy since he was eight, and I’m telling you that there’s some good in him … somewhere.” He nodded once again, this time in solemn, dubious agreement with himself. Neal murmured a parting word and then closed the window again, and felt relief at finally being alone.
He drove slowly through the subdivision, paused at the gate to nod coolly at the guard, picked up a little speed in the light traffic on the state highway, swerving a few times in his lane until he accustomed himself to the steady handling the car required.
To reach the interstate, Neal had to pass through several blocks of strip malls and office buildings. Waiting at a red light, he watched the faces of the drivers turning left in front of him; drivers hunched over steering wheels had always seemed strangely isolated to him, but now he could see them taking note of the car he was driving, co*cking their heads in curiosity, wonder, or sheer envy, as if for just a moment Neal had entered into a significant relation to each passing individual—a relationship that encompassed the Boccaccio, the nameless longings and fantasies of the passing driver, and the driver’s own sense of distance and possibly unacknowledged fears, and even encompassed Neal himself. It was weirdly disorienting to be identified with the car, and Neal was eager for the light to turn green so he could make his way onto the interstate.
Merging with the I-40 traffic was momentarily terrifying; he prudently downshifted as he drove up the ramp and into a tight space in the right lane, but once he had passed a few large trucks with little trouble, he shifted into fourth again and then, with increasing assurance, into fifth. He began to settle himself into the familiar stillness of perpetual motion on the unending open road. Except that, even in his stillness, he was deeply unsettled because he had no real sense of his destination. He knew more or less where he was going, but he couldn’t imagine the place and—more to the point—couldn’t imagine himself being there. And he couldn’t imagine what would happen after that, either in the near or distant future.
This unsettling sense of openness reminded him of something that had occurred at Bald Head Island a few weeks earlier. He’d made a promise to himself to swim purely for exercise at least once a day. One morning he’d gone perhaps fifty yards from the shore, when he felt himself being tugged out to sea. In a panic, he chopped fast and hard against the current, but it was pointless; he felt himself being driven toward the clear horizon. He stopped fighting the current and tried evading it, treading water parallel to the beach, but all the time he could feel himself drifting further out to sea. He shouted for help, but no one was within earshot. Each glance at the horizon terrified him, so he ducked under and began stroking doggedly with eyes closed and arms outstretched, angling slightly away from the run of the current. Finally he felt the pull slackening, and he surfaced, facing the shore and the daunting stretch of water that separated him from the beach. Ducking under again, he stroked and kicked with all of his remaining energy until he found himself in a breaker; he rode it, paddling with the wave until he could feel sand between his toes, then staggered the rest of the way onto the beach. He stumbled across the dry sand, kicking shells and plastic six-pack rings out of his way, finally dropping down next to Deirdre under their umbrella. She looked up for a moment and then asked him to hand her the Coppertone.
The moment of panic was what he remembered most from that experience, and something like it took hold of him now: the feeling was less insistent, but it carried a similar kind of dread. He felt as if the same horizon loomed ahead of him—“the vastness and strangeness of Nature,” in Thoreau’s familiar words. But now it seemed as if the beckoning shore had disappeared.
7. The Car Thief
By 10:30 Neal had traveled about fifty miles. The traffic on I-40 had thinned out a little, so he was able to keep a small, comfortable distance between the Boccaccio and the legion of less hallowed vehicles. An hour into his trip, he was beginning to grow gratefully bored as he contemplated the miles and miles of interstate driving ahead of him; if he had had the option of remaining in fifth gear until he reached Chicago he would have taken it. After another hour on the road, though, the boredom began to sit heavily on his inert shoulders. He switched on the radio and heard nothing but static; he tried the dial and heard snatches of angry voices but had trouble zeroing in on individual stations, so he could never tell where the anger was coming from, or where it was going, and he finally switched off the radio in irritation. The car was retrofitted with a CD player, and Neal had brought along some CDs. He had left them in his vinyl briefcase in the back seat, though, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to listen to any of them, anyway. He hadn’t bought any new titles in years, and hadn’t kept up with recent music well enough to know which ones to buy even if he had taken the trouble, so he was left with a music collection that had been burned so deeply into the channels of his brain that he could play every track in his head without the aid of technology. He nosed his way through noon traffic near Winston-Salem, with a white-knuckled grip on the wheel until he was finally out of the vicinity. On the other side of Statesville he thought about getting something to eat but he had grown too comfortable with his fifth-gear groove to shake himself out of it yet. Finally, with the mountains in view and the sun beginning to droop in front of his eyes, he took an exit that led directly to a truck stop with an adjacent Waffle House.
A slender trail of contraband cigarette smoke greeted him when he pushed his way through the door. To avoid the smoke, he slid into a booth next to a glary window. Nervous about leaving the car for the first time, he looked for it in the parking lot, but his view was blocked by a full-size pickup.
As he tried to catch the eye of the waitress, he heard a loud, grating voice coming from the booth in the corner: “Well, we’re here. We’re here. We’re not going anywhere else, so you’re going to have to find something you can stand to eat.”
He peered over the two empty booths in front of him and spotted a family of four. The two teenagers were facing him, a boy with a mop of ragged hair and a girl with a pimply forehead, both with icy white complexions, impertinent blue eyes, noses that were equally pointed and upturned. The father’s voice had the sharpness and thinness of someone on the verge of tears: “I’ve had enough of that from both of you. Now we’re just going to sit here and have lunch, if that’s O.K.”
Neal got up and went to the counter. Shaking off his irritation at the ribbons of smoke that came from that direction, he looked for a place where he would have a clear view of the Boccaccio. He was almost nauseated by his sense of responsibility for the car. He had been quite hungry when he entered the Waffle House, but when the waitress handed him a laminated one-sheet menu he scanned with indifference the eggs and waffles on one side, the sandwiches and steak on the other side.
“Coffee?”
He looked up and found the waitress training tired eyes on him.
“Sure.”
She set a cup down and filled it up. “What do you want?”
Neal ran a finger up and down both sides of the menu, still too preoccupied to think seriously about eating. Compulsively, he glanced at the Boccaccio sitting handsomely in the sun. “I don’t know yet,” he said.
She nodded wearily and stuffed her pad and pencil back into her apron.
“How about some coffee here?” To his left, a man with gray, greasy, disheveled hair pointed at his cup with his cigarette.
“I just topped you off, Billy,” she said.
“That coffee’s done sat on the burner since this morning. I want fresh coffee, like you give him.” He gestured toward Neal with his cigarette.
“Oh, I poured him up some special coffee because he’s so handsome. He’s my pretty boyfriend. Don’t you know that?” She winked at Neal and her eyes took on a bright expression for a fraction of an instant before she walked away.
Neal blushed, looked down at the menu and then out the window again, reassuring himself that the car was still in its place, serene and gleaming like a slab of wet marble in the afternoon sun. From across the restaurant he could hear the father’s voice again: “I’ve told you not to use that word. Your mother and I didn’t raise you to talk that way.” Other voices from that same corner of the restaurant mingled with the father’s voice; Neal couldn’t make out the words, but he heard tones of wounded dignity.
“I’ll tell you what I’d do.” Billy was suddenly speaking to him. “When them words come out of a sassy little mouth like that, you get you some of this.” He grabbed a bottle of Tabasco sauce and waved it in Neal’s face. “Right in the mouth. See if that don’t fix it.”
Neal pretended to be concentrating intently on the menu, but Billy seemed convinced that he had caught hold of a captive listener. “You want to know why kids is so bad these days?” He leaned toward Neal. “It’s them liberals that took over the schools. Say anything, do anything so long as it’s ugly. See, it’s—”
He was interrupted by a large, flush-faced man: “Hey, Billy. Would you stub out that cigarette, for God’s sake? Don’t you know they done passed a law against it? My eyes are bloodshot from all that smoke.”
“Well, maybe you need to see an eye doctor, Skinner.” Billy took a long drag on his cigarette and, smiling, let the smoke out in one large cloud. “And for your information, I’ll follow all them liberal laws if I feel like it.”
“Hey, Mason.” Skinner man called to the man sitting to the right of Neal, a Black man in a blue work shirt with his name stitched on an oval patch, who was busy finishing off a plate of scrambled eggs and steak. “He’ll listen to you. Tell him to stub that cigarette out. He’ll kill all of us with that smoke.”
Mason stopped eating and looked up, slowly looking back and forth from Billy to the other man. “He ain’t botherin’ me none,” he finally said. “Let him alone, Skinner.”
Billy smiled, triumphant. “I got my place. You got yours.” He put the Tabasco bottle between himself and Skinner. “There’s the boundary. I’ll do what I want on my side, see? That’s the American way.”
Skinner grunted and turned his back to Billy, who leaned toward Neal again and picked up where he had left off. “See, it’s whatcha call an agenda.” He lowered his voice. “What it is … you scratch a public school teacher, and what do you get? A communist. That’s what it all comes down to. Them school teachers, the school board, all of them. First they let in colored …” He glanced carefully at Mason, who apparently hadn’t heard. “Then they tell them all to do what they want to do … cuss, screw each other, smoke dope, the whole business. They’re trying to make everything fall apart so’s they can take over. It’s an agenda.” He poked Neal’s menu to underscore his point.
“But the worst of all,” Billy said, raising his voice again, “is them college professors. They—”
The waitress broke in: “Billy, will you shut up for a change? I need to take boyfriend’s order.” She turned to Neal with a stiff smile: “Made up your mind yet, sweetie?”
Neal had his finger on a photograph of a cheeseburger. He was about to place his order, but suddenly changed his mind, turned the menu over, and stared hard at a stack of pancakes topped with melting butter.
“Give me another moment,” he said. The waitress shrugged and walked away. Neal glanced out the window again, once again reassured that the Boccaccio was serenely in its place. In his mind he was already out on the road again, cradled by the soft leather seats and the spine-massaging purr of the engine.
“That’s a beauty of a car, ain’t it?” Billy was leaning closer than ever, dangling his cigarette just inches away from Neal’s glasses.
Neal nodded uncomfortably.
“That’s Mr. Holcomb’s car. Eugene P. Holcomb. Richest man in western North Carolina.”
Neal tried to turn a little in his stool and use the menu as a shield over the left side of his face.
“You know Mr. Holcomb?” Billy asked.
“Can’t say that I do.”
“I’ve done worked for Mr. Holcomb fifteen years. Odd jobs. His house has got twenty-five bathrooms, you know. I’ve fixed many a leaky faucet in that house. Yes sir. Ever Easter Mr. Holcomb hires me to trim the hedges and edge the driveways and hide Easter eggs. You should see the way that lawn sparkles on Easter morning. To see all those kids in their little suits and their Easter dresses running all over the lawn, peeping like crickets, chasing the guinea hens. There ain’t nothin’ else like it in this county.”
Neal decided he would have a chicken sandwich to go. He looked around for the waitress, but she was taking orders at one of the booths, scratching her bottom with her pencil.
“That’s a fine car, let me tell you. I’ve waxed that car many a time. I’ve changed the oil, the fan belt. I know that car inside out. Only one of its kind in the state of North Carolina. You have any idea how much a car like that costs?”
Neal shook his head.
“You can build a house for what that car costs. But it ain’t nothing to Mr. Holcomb. Yes, sir. All he’s got to do is snap his fingers.”
“Billy.” Mason spoke abruptly, in a deep, gruff, but awkwardly gentle voice. “You know Mr. Holcomb been dead ten years.”
“A lot you know, Mason. I seen him right here, just two minutes ago. I just spoke to him.”
“Billy, if Mr. Holcomb was alive, you know he wouldn’t step foot in no Waffle House.”
“I can’t help it if you’re deaf and blind, Mason, but he was here just this second. He asked me for a cigarette. Mrs. Holcomb won’t let him keep no cigarettes in the house.”
Mason shook his head slowly. “Well, where is he now?”
“He must’ve went to the men’s room.”
“He been in that men’s room a long time. Ten years by my count.”
“Hush, Mason. Don’t let Mr. Holcomb come back and hear you talking that nonsense.”
“He ain’t coming back, Billy. Not from where he’s gone.”
“I said hush it. Ain’t that his car sittin’ right out there in the parkin’ lot? No one in this county has a car like that. No one in North Carolina.”
“Actually,” Neal said carefully, “it’s my car. I mean … I’m driving it.”
Billy suddenly slapped the counter, shaking the Tabasco bottle and several coffee cups. “Well, that does it. I seen you staring at Mr. Holcomb’s car since you sat down here, boy. I knowed what you was up to since the moment I saw you. You’re aiming to steal that car.”
Neal shook his head nervously. “I swear. I’m driving that car. See?” He held up the keys.
“Stole!” Billy grabbed at the keys, and Neal just had time to whisk them away. “I don’t know how you got Mr. Holcomb’s keys, but he’s gonna know about it or I’m—.”
“Billy.” Mason’s voice was slow and firm.“You got to stop that. You got to shut up now, or them boys from the hospital will be back to get you, and they’ll take you back to live with Cora Jean.”
“Mason! If I’ve told you once … I don’t ever want to hear that woman’s name, that—”
Billy interrupted himself. He reached over Neal and tried to jab his cigarette in Mason’s face.
Neal slipped out of his seat just as Mason was taking hold of Billy’s wrist. Once he reached the door of the restaurant, he had to push his way through the family of four—still sniping and whining at each other.
Halfway to the car, he glimpsed Billy bursting out the door, flinging his cigarette over his shoulder, waving his arms as if he were fighting his way through a flock of crows, shouting, “Thief! Thief! He’s takin’ Mr. Holcomb’s car!”
Neal quickened his pace without actually breaking into a sprint. Still holding the keys in his right hand, he unlocked the car, opened the door, jumped in and slammed the door shut—all before taking his next breath. Billy veered around to the back of the car, and before Neal was able to put the car in reverse, he slapped his hands down on the trunk lid and began pounding the back of the car.
Stiff with panic, Neal fumbled for the horn, but as he sounded it again and again he felt ridiculous. He considered backing up slowly to force Billy away, but before he had to decide, he saw Mason coming around the corner of the Waffle House, dragging his right leg behind him. With a grimace, Mason took hold of Billy’s arms and pulled him away from the car, just enough to let Neal back out.
As Neal moved across the pitted parking lot, though, he could see that Billy had somehow broken away. He pursued Neal on into the road, shouting loudly and incomprehensibly, his harried voice sounding just like the bursts of random anger Neal had heard on the radio.
Neal took another exit just east of Asheville and stopped at a convenience store for some gas. He ordered a hamburger and co*ke at a Burger King drive-thru, then stopped in the parking lot to eat and try to figure out where to go next. Taking the road atlas out of his briefcase, he studied a map of the eastern states and could quickly see that the shortest route to Chicago was north from Winston-Salem, through Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky by way of several different highways to Cincinnati, then from there to I-65 via the I-465 loop at Indianapolis. But Winston-Salem was already 140 miles behind him. He saw that he could also travel through Cincinnati by merging onto I-75 before he reached Knoxville. But he decided he could probably travel faster if he stayed on I-40; he could meet I-65 at Nashville, zoom straight up the north-bound corridor until he could hook onto I-90 and then make his way west into the sprawling groves and cul-de-sacs of Greater Chicago. And as he sat there licking the mayonnaise off his fingers, it occurred to him that he could try spending the night with a friend from graduate school who was now pursuing tenure at Vanderbilt; that way he could save the price of a motel room and add a little profit for himself. He dialed 411 and got a number, but the line was busy when he called.
Back on the road, he skirted Asheville and then climbed toward the Great Smoky Mountains, shifting down to third gear as he wound his way past walls of rock and through tunnels lit in midnight neon, feeling barely any strain in the lower gear but a deeper, more tactile thrum from the feral engine.
Once he had crossed into Tennessee and finally crested the mountains, he faced a harsh sun that glared at him from the back windshields of the cars just ahead. Again and again he glanced away at the countryside that spread out west of Knoxville. Unlike the wall of towering pines that bordered the road across North Carolina, the line of broad-leaved trees on the Nashville route frequently opened up to reveal large swaths of open land, cut by rivers, bounded by barbed-wire fences, broken up by ponds that glimmered in the angling sun, and rotting barns with rust-reddened roofs. Neal could never look very long into these byway fields before turning his attention back to the relentless highway lines, but the occasional glimpse of a human being—on horseback, or standing next to a mailbox at the end of a dirt driveway—made him wonder fleetingly if he was headed in the wrong direction. The spaces spreading out on either side of him, and the side roads that vanished in the distance, and the streams leading away into shadowy depths of trees—all of this suggested so many byways of life, more substantial than anything he could imagine waiting for him along the interstate. His swift progress left him at once wistful and depressed, wondering whether anything that passed through his rearview mirror could ever be part of his life, or whether it was all simply destined to slide into the mute, faceless depths of memory, to join the countless things that were once real to him but would never be real again.
At twilight he reached Nashville and its corridors of slanting stone. Stopping along the shoulder of the interstate, he tried his friend’s number and was greeted by a suspicious “Hallo” in a female voice that sounded vaguely Middle-eastern. He asked for his buddy, and the woman said she would check, and then after what seemed like a full five minutes, said “Hallo” stridently again, before informing Neal that his friend was not at home.
“When do you expect him?”
“Later,” she said dully.
“How much later?”
“Later,” she repeated in the same tone of voice but a little louder.
Back on the interstate, weaving through three lanes of west-bound traffic, he searched for a motel sign, kept looking after he had exited onto Briley Parkway in the direction of I-65, and finally spotted a Days Inn uphill on the left.
The lobby was empty when he walked in, his briefcase swinging casually by his side, but the lone desk clerk was in no hurry to greet him. Hunched over a flat computer screen, he mouse-clicked repeatedly with brisk, irritable flicks of his wrist, frowned, clucked his tongue, before apparently deciding that he had made Neal wait long enough.
“Yes sir?” He had a large round head and a neatly cropped mustache, which stretched into a straight bristly line, like a ruminating woolly worm, when he smiled.
“You have a room?”
“Yes,” the clerk said, his voice brimming with self-satisfied irony. “I believe I can truthfully say we have a room.” He mouse-clicked a few more times and seemed to chuckle at a private joke. “Yes. Yes. I believe I have just what you need. May I have a card, please?”
“I plan to pay cash.” Neal drew the zipper pouch out of his jacket pocket and picked out several twenties.
“My, my. What crisp dollar bills. Mm.” The clerk held them up to his nose. “It even smells like real money. For sure.” His smile broadened, turning merry and vaguely malicious. “But I’ll still need a card, you know. In case there are any … extra charges, for example.”
Neal handed the clerk a near-worthless Visa and waited while the clerk swiped it somewhere under the counter.
“Second floor,” he said, handing Neal a room card and abruptly dropping his smile. “Pull your car around to the right.”
Once Neal reached the room and pushed open the door, he walked just far enough inside to toss his briefcase on one of the twin beds, and only then took stock of his surroundings. The room was made up a few pieces of nondescript furniture, an oversized television, a small mirror, a watercolor of some elongated pears or possibly some yellow yams, and just enough unencumbered floor space to permit sidewise movements from one end to the other. The bedspreads, the carpet, the upholstery of the threadbare love seat, the wallpaper—all were color-coordinated. Four separate shades of beige. Neal walked to the window, fiddled with the tangled cords and after a little effort, managed to draw the curtains open. He looked out on the lights of cars winding their way down the street in the gathering darkness; across the street, a BP logo glowed hugely, its light reflected on grease-spotted asphalt. On the other side of the gas station he could see more asphalt stretching away into the near distance, and the spectral lights of strip mall stores situated between a Subway and a Cracker Barrel. Neal shrugged faintly. What else had he expected to see? At least, he told himself, he knew where he could find something to eat, although he wasn’t especially hungry just then.
An hour later, coming back from his spare supper, he found that the room was no less drearily non-descript than before. He wondered what to do with his time before he was ready for bed. He picked up the remote control and aimed it toward the television, but almost immediately he put it down again, a little unnerved by the desk clerk’s reference to “extra charges.” It occurred to him that he should have brought some books with him, for the bus ride back from Chicago. He opened his briefcase hoping to find something, dug through his extra socks and boxer shorts, his nearly used-up spool of dental floss, his trusty bottle of vertigo pills. He found a pair of prescription sunglasses that he knew he would probably need the next day, and he set them on the dresser. But, as he had suspected, there were no books.
At loose ends, he wandered over to the window and looked down into the parking lot, straining to see the Boccaccio parked a few spaces away. He felt eerily possessive of the car, much as he had in the Waffle House earlier in the day, and began to wonder if he should just sleep in it since he would probably obsess about it anyway until daylight. Instead he closed the curtain. He tried to occupy himself with his thoughts, but the only thing that came to him in the stillness and silence of the room was the memory of Billy and his lunatic frenzy and his own frenzy as he leaned on the horn, as if he had leaped voluntarily into the bottomless abyss of Billy’s madness. His imagination began unspooling any number of possible bad endings to the whole fiasco. For want of anything better to do, he finally decided to risk turning on the TV; he spent the better part of two hours circling through the channels, unable to decide whether to watch a listless baseball game, a replay of Senate hearings on mortgage-backed securities, or back-to-back episodes of The Rockford Files.
By about 11:30, bleary-eyed and thoroughly bored, he flipped off the TV, switched off the lamps, stripped down to his shorts and slid between the sheets of one of the twin beds. Lying perfectly still, he gazed at the barely visible fruit-like thing in the painting for a full twenty minutes before remembering to close his eyes. But as he started to fall asleep he heard loud door-slamming sounds from the parking lot below and immediately thought of the car again. He felt his heart starting to pound, and any thought of sleep was whisked away. He became attuned to other sounds both near and far—the hissing of tires on the street, the purring of a cooling unit just outside the motel, the crunch of ice being dispensed from the machine down the hall. Lying flat, still, and helplessly alert, he began to pick up the thread of a conversation in the room next to his, leaking through the paper-thin wall. He could distinguish a male voice and female voice, swatting certain emphatic words back and forth, such as chafe, thrust, circumcise, and Vaseline.
With his body curled under the scratchy sheets, he felt, as he often did these days, the phantom pressure of Deirdre’s body—the remembered texture of her silk nightgown, her warm thighs with their wisps of hair in the damp places, her heavy breasts pressing through the fabric. Her largeness was always a pleasure to him, as he knew that whatever part of her he could feel pressed against his groin and belly was matched by the flesh that stretched beyond his grasp, to be held and kissed and enjoyed at his leisure. But there was no pleasure left for him in the memory of her body, no arousal, not even a sense of longing any more—only a tangible sense of absence. And once even that had dissipated into the stifling air around him, he was left with an even profounder emptiness—severed completely from the scattered evidences of life that came to him through his unwillingly attentive ears. The couple in the room next to him had ended their conversation, apparently, but muffled squeals seemed to leak through the wall, with mingled tones of laughter and pleading.
Suddenly he wanted to pray. This always struck him as an absurd idea, yet it came to him surprisingly often. He assumed it was just an ingrained habit, left over from a time when he had actually believed he could relieve despair by making desperate petitions to the unknowable. Knowing this, however, did not keep him from wanting to pray, and he would have prayed now if he had been able to find any meaningful words to use. That was where the desire to pray was always balked. What words could he use? Earlier in his life he had allowed himself to say too many rote prayers. Because he had not had the courage to tell his father straightforwardly that he didn’t believe in his God, or any other God that he had ever heard of, he had closed his eyes and knotted his fingers and said grace in words that he had long rehearsed. He could still hear the echoes of those many empty phrases uttered with his eyes closed, accompanied by his father’s gentle grunts of approval, his sister’s sniffles, his mother’s impatient sighs, and the oddly soapy smell of string beans steaming in the middle of the table. Because he had allowed those prayers to be a kind of shell, protecting him from confessing honest unbelief, he had difficulty investing any imaginable words of prayer with any substance. Many years later, he made it a point of honor not to pray with Lainie, during that time when their marriage was unraveling and she was nagging him to go to church with her. He felt that this refusal represented some progress in the development of his character. He had come to value honesty the way an elderly bachelor treasures his mother’s ashes. And yet he wondered about that. His refusal to pray with her probably had as much to do with emotional stinginess as it did with honesty. He hadn’t been very honest that morning when he had watched Lainie studying her swollen belly before the bedroom mirror, and he had asked her in that quavering, cowering voice, “You’re not pregnant, are you?” And where exactly, he asked himself, had his treasured honesty been when he met her time and time again afterward without asking any honest questions about that boy with the squared-off jaws and flared nostrils? How many times had he avoided seeing the child until he was accidentally confronted with that blank, unassuming face that posed a thousand questions for him? Neal was numbly aware that, by deliberate choice and deliberate lack of choice, he had succeeded in creating distance between himself and those who wanted his love. And he now felt the measure of that distance in the most depressing way possible in this dark motel room in this strange, impersonal, murmuring city far away from home.
Every succeeding thought was pushing him further and further away from sleep; he could feel his pulse throbbing in his ear and bumping against the walls of his heart. Exasperated, he got up, reached for the remote and turned on the TV. The blue light and measured, steady voice of a play-by-play announcer had an instantly narcotic effect. Women in black evening gowns were competing in a billiards tournament. Neal was struck by the look of fierce purpose on their faces, and he paid close attention to the deep cleavage that opened up every time they leaned over their cue sticks. But he soon lost interest and let himself sink back into the sheets. The sound of clicking billiard balls drowned out the distracting sounds around him while lulling him into sleep.
8. Shades
He woke to the staccato sounds of a sports announcer’s voice. Sunlight forced its way through the curtains—not the mellow, tentative light of the early hours, but the impatient, insistent light of mid-morning. Neal reached for his glasses and then picked up his watch from the bedside table: 9:34. He was gripped with a sudden panic that, with the TV on for nearly ten full hours, he might have picked up some of those dreaded “extra charges,” but reassured himself that it had been on ESPN the whole time, one of those standard cable channels that he had already paid for, along with the bed, the bathroom, the artwork, and the wallpaper. Right now, the network was running highlights of the baseball game he had watched intermittently the night before. As he stared at the TV screen and one quick replay gave way to another and the announcer narrated with breathless urgency, he was amazed at how exciting and action-filled the game appeared to have been, compared to the lifeless way it seemed to be progressing the night before. Gazing in fascination at home runs exploding away into the stands, and base runners tearing up the dirt underneath the quick swipe of fielders’ gloves, he quickly shook off the tatters of sleep and suddenly felt that the world was far more alive than it had seemed to be the day before.
Eager to get on his way, he made a rapid run through the shower, dug a new shirt out of his briefcase, retrieved his pants from the love seat where he had slung them, and dressed quickly.
Spotting the sunglasses on the dresser, he put them on and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, glaring back through a layer of smoke-gray tint. The impression was a little startling. He was familiar with a certain image of himself that he trusted all friends and even strangers to carry away, and this wasn’t it. These were designer glasses that Deirdre had picked out for him: she said that the straight shanks and the shape of the lenses reminded her of some sunglasses that Robert De Niro had worn in Taxi Driver. Neal decided as soon as he took them home that they were reflections of Deirdre’s taste, based on some notion of how she wanted to remake him, and he had pointedly left them home when the two of them went off to Bald Head Island. How they had ended up in the briefcase when he had packed for this trip he didn’t know. He took them off quickly but then put them on again and began trying to imagine the kind of person that seemed to lurk behind them. There was a kind of blankness there that troubled him and partly intrigued him, and in the end he left them on, and decided to let the beholder beware.
Seeing himself in these pricey-looking shades, though, made him realize how pale and shabby his teaching jacket and his laundry-blanched jeans must look. He decided that while he was in Nashville he should try to find a thrift shop where he could buy some clothes that would upgrade his image, some left-behind glamour garments that had once belonged, say, to an aspiring but luckless country-and-western crooner. After his run-in with Billy the day before, he felt that he needed to look like he belonged in the Boccaccio. At the very least, it was time for him to ditch the tweed jacket. Deirdre was right. It reeked of undergraduate smells—gym class, cheap cologne, and white-cheese popcorn.
Shutting the door of his room, briefcase in hand, he glanced at the door to the right, where the two chatty lovers might still be asleep for all he knew. Taking a couple of steps to the side, he hammered the door with his fist, yelled “Check-out time!” at the top of his voice, and darted around the corner of the hall. He waited there just long enough to see the door slowly open and glimpse a pair of heavy-lidded eyes peering around the edge.
After breezing through checkout, where a different clerk greeted him with cheery good will, he set out on I-65 to the 265 loop and exited on West End Avenue, in the direction of Music Square West. He cruised past a series of gaudy granite buildings with sprawling windows that took the sunlight and gave it back with a cold platinum luster. At the old flat-roofed Studio B, hunkered sleepily in the midst of the corporate monoliths, a tour line was stretched along the sidewalk—men in khaki shorts and golf shirts, with stomachs tipping over their belts; women in denim miniskirts, their faces framed by globes of hair in a variety of colors that seemed lurid as he glimpsed them through his shades. He rounded the corner of the block, drove past another row of corporate headquarters, and then turned right and headed further downtown, passing a couple of handsome brick churches along the way. He crisscrossed through a zone of one-way streets thick with hotels and storefronts, and decided he was probably moving in the right direction as he began spotting used guitar stores, and Elvis memorabilia stores, and Loretta Lynn wig salons. The street crowd was a mixture of business-suited men striding fast, glancing at their watches, and more tourists like the ones he had seen outside Studio B, moving at an empty-time pace. Neal sensed that at least some of them were glaring at the Boccaccio, as if they expected to spot a certified superstar in the back seat.
Neal drove nervously along, anxious to move through the slow-changing lights. As he was turning the corner from one dense street to another, he caught a glimpse of a man in a jacket with a steely, silvery sheen, walking along in a halting way, glancing behind him one moment, seeming to peer over the tops of buildings the next moment. If Neal hadn’t been on the lookout for clothes, he probably wouldn’t have given the man another thought. But somehow the look of that jacket seemed right for his purposes, and there was something about the man that suggested he was not unacquainted with dusty second-hand, or third-hand, shops. Neal drove a couple of blocks, until he could make another right turn, and slowly circled his way back up to where he had just been. He spotted the man leaning against a storefront, staring at his fingernails, in a kind of wary isolation from everything around him. The jacket had the burnished look of a Japanese steak knife, or the barrel of a Colt revolver, and it might have given the wearer a hard-boiled luster, if it hadn’t been for the unshaven face, the poorly matched plaid slacks, and his limp, defeated-looking posture.
Pulling into a No Parking space, he pushed open the car door, stepped briskly to the curb, and gestured to the man. “Hey, I want to ask you something!”
The man looked startled. He straightened himself and made a back-off gesture with the flat of his right hand.
“I just have a question,” Neal protested.
The man shook his head and began walking away. Neal followed from a respectful distance, and the man picked up his pace, hurrying around the corner of a hotel façade. Neal quickened his stride as well, as a reflex as much as anything else, until suddenly the man turned, faced him fiercely, and yelled, “f*ck off, man!”
Neal stopped, spread his hands in a gesture of innocent bemusem*nt, and said, quietly, “You don’t have to get crazy. I just wanted to ask you—”
“I said f*ck off, if you know what’s good for you.” The man put his right hand into his jacket, as if he were reaching for something.
Though Neal didn’t find the gesture very convincing, he was ready to walk away right then, mindful that he was illegally parked at the moment. But he didn’t want to give up so easily. For the moment he chose to stand his ground.
“Everything’s cool,” he said mildly. “I swear I just wanted to ask you about that jacket you’re wearing. Where’d you get it?”
The man pulled at the hem of the jacket and studied it for a moment, as if he had just become aware of it himself.
“I don’t know,” he said absent-mindedly. “I just grabbed it out of the closet,”
The man was wearing a striped purple shirt underneath the jacket, as if he had literally picked his clothes at random from a wicker laundry hamper.
“I was just trying to find out where you bought it,” Neal said.
“Bought it? You don’t understand, man. I had to jump off the damn balcony. Lucky I didn’t crack my spine.”
Neal sensed that he had just been given the answer to a question he hadn’t asked. The man apparently recognized Neal’s look of confusion.
“I’m telling you, that chick lied to me! She said her and her boyfriend were separated. I could see the place was full of men’s things, you know. But she swore that he left her two weeks ago. See, that’s always been my problem. My whole life. I’m just too trusting!” The man’s features took on an ashen expression. His three-day stubble was tipped with gray, and his lips, twisted into a look of grief, were a livid purple, as if his mouth had been clamped by a pair of tongs.
“You got a dollar you could spare?” he asked, stepping closer to Neal. “I could use a cup of coffee, and right now I don’t have a dime. Not one skinny dime.”
Neal began to think it was time to slip away. “Well, I’m really sorry about—” “You know, I left my wallet in her place,” the man said, moving a few steps closer. “I had the better part of forty dollars in small bills. Gone, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I guess my clothes ended up under the bed or some damn place. When I heard the front door open I had to grab what I could find. You think I’m trying to look like some rodeo clown?” He huffed indignantly. “All I could find was my shoes.” He lifted the right leg of his trousers and showed Neal an Italian leather loafter, with a sharply pointed toe, covering an otherwise bare foot. “Didn’t have time to grab any socks. I’m telling you, it was neck-and-neck there for a few minutes.”
Neal began to move away, but the stranger took hold of his arm.
“This has been one bad year, man.” His voice shifted into a different key, a tone of voice that had an odd mixture of supplication and bluntness in it. “I’ve been on a little bit of losing streak lately. I’ve been a little behind on rent. I’m usually able to use a little sweet persuasion on landladies … You know how it is with them old lonely ladies. Hungry for a little tender loving care.”
He apparently hoped for some kind of response from his listener, but Neal was too preoccupied with the man’s grip on his arm. “This one, though, she’s some kind of Holy Roller. Every time I get within five feet of her she starts spitting Bible verses at me.” He said this with a shudder. “And then wouldn’t you know it … My car was repossessed about a month ago. I thought I had a good deal going with the little lady I was telling you about, but you know how that turned out. I was over that balcony in a New York minute, son. Three stories down and not a broken bone. My first stroke of luck all year. Those damn cedar bushes saved my life.”
“I hope things take a turn for the better,” Neal said with a forced smile. “I’m afraid I’ve gotta—”
“Hey, you know I just thought of something.” The man tightened his grip on Neal’s arm. “You seemed to like this jacket pretty much. How’d you like to buy it off me?”
“It’s not your jacket, is it?”
“Balls! I’m not the most godly man in the world, but I don’t steal things.” He let go of Neal’s arm so he could make forensic gestures with both arms. “Me and that chick had a financial arrangement. She owes me. I never take cash in advance—too much pride for that … As far as I’m concerned, this jacket is fair payment. She can work it out with her boyfriend. Never mind the fact that they’ve got my wallet!”
A flash of outrage passed across his face, but he quickly pulled himself back to the immediate situation. “What’ll you give me for the jacket?”
Neal was uneasy. “I don’t really have much money to spare. Besides, I don’t even know if it fits.”
“Hah!” The man started wriggling out of the jacket. “There’s an easy way to find out.” He held it out in front of him and spread it like a bullfighter’s cape. Neal lifted his sunglasses to get a better look and was charmed by it all over again. The fabric had a complicated weave and its burnished gleam spoke of cold, impermeable assurance.
Without giving it another thought, he slipped off his tweed jacket, handed it to the stranger, and tried on the other one.
The man whistled. “Whoa, there. Looks custom-made for you, man. Hey, turn this way.” Neal pivoted to the left. “Scary, man. You wouldn’t believe what that does for you.”
This clumsy flattery irritated Neal, but he chose to believe at least half of what the man said. No, it wasn’t even close to custom-made. The sleeves hung a little long, and it was loose in the shoulders, but if he arched his back in just the right way, everything seemed to slide into place. The fabric was incredibly pliant and light, much better for summer weather than what he’d been wearing.
“How much would you want?” he asked.
The man tilted his head slightly, frowned, and finally said, “I’m thinking a hundred and fifty, or thereabouts.” As he was saying this he reached around, took hold of the collar of the jacket with both hands, and deftly slipped Neal out of it, handing him back his own jacket.
“Any interest in a trade?”
The man shook his head. “Tweed makes me itch. Beside, I need some quick cash. Got to buy me a bus ticket to Memphis, first of all. I’ve had all of Nashville I can take. There’s a lady in Memphis who still owes me for services rendered. Should be good for a few months’ room and board.”
“You need a ride to Memphis?”
“Going that way?”
“I could go that way.”
“O.K. I see the makings of a deal. That your car over there? The one that’s about to get ticketed?”
Neal glanced around the corner of the hotel and saw a woman in uniform punching in keys on a device attached to her belt. He hurried over and waved his keys in the air. “Just stopped for a second to spit out some gum!” Smiling, he opened the car door and hopped into the seat. Unsmiling, she jammed the ticket under a windshield wiper as he began to pull away.
He gestured for the stranger to follow him around the block, then pulled over and waited for him to catch up. The man heaved himself into the passenger seat and directed Neal to a side street several blocks away. They pulled up in front of a brick apartment building with a grimy stucco façade, reposing in the shelter of a few spindly trees.
“Go around to the alley,” the man growled.
Neal took it slow over the gravel, fearful of pitting the sides of the car, and came to a slow stop alongside the back of the building.
“Keep the motor running,” the man told Neal as he was opening the door. Neal watched as he scampered up the brick backside of the building, using gaps in the mortar as toe holds, until he reached the bottom rung of the fire escape; he climbed up to the third-floor landing, leaned with his back against the door, kicked it open with a sharp thrust of his heel, and disappeared into the building. In a moment he came out again with a bulging laundry bag slung over his shoulder, descended the steps in a series of careless leaps, and threw himself back into the car. “Roll, man! I can’t wait to see the last of this stinking town!”
Neal spent the better part of half an hour navigating his way to I-40, with no help from his passenger, who was too busy bemoaning the many ways he had been mistreated, betrayed, short-changed, and disrespected in Nashville. As Neal merged onto the interstate, the complaints continued and multiplied, the man’s tone of voice vacillating between anger and grief, and every shade of emotion in between. Neal learned about the various forms of dishonesty practiced by women in Chattanooga and Miami, Toledo and Grand Rapids, Las Cruces and Provo. He heard the man make extravagant accusations against his brothers, and his high school gym teacher, and a couple of fat-necked police detectives, and certain city bus drivers who refused to accept Canadian dollars. Neal sped up from 70 to 75 mph, surging up to 85 when the coast was clear, weaving around long caravans of tractor trailers, eager to get to Memphis and unload his human cargo. The man continued his chorus of grievances, nearly uninterrupted, for at least 100 miles, his complaints gradually giving way to a series of disconnected pronouncements about human depravity and cosmic injustice, followed by a string of questions about Neal’s own private affairs, and at one point Neal felt sure he was being propositioned.
“Where the f*ck did you get that idea?” Neal felt like pushing the man out of the car with no further ado.
“Just asking, that’s all. No need to get all worked up.”
A tense silence ensued, but a couple of miles later the man picked up where he had left off and continued with barely a pause for breath until they reached the Memphis exits.
After several mistaken turns, they ended up in a neighborhood full of large old homes with wraparound porches and peeling paint, elegant in a wan, fragile way.
“I’ll take it from here,” the stranger said as he opened the door and snatched his laundry bag from the back seat. “Thanks for the ride.”
Neal reached over and grabbed the back of the jacket before the man could climb out. “I believe we made a deal.”
“Oh, did we? I’m kind of fuzzy on the details.”
Neal gripped harder and pulled.
“Well, now that you mention it …” The man slid out of the jacket and left it in the passenger seat.
He shut the door and headed toward the other side of the street, peering dubiously at the clouds that were gliding across the sky, but he suddenly turned back and opened the car door again before Neal had a chance to drive away. “Hey, how about we make another little deal? What would you give for these shoes?” He lifted his left foot to give Neal a closer look at the black loafer. “What’s your size?”
“Eight and a half.”
“Perfect! Here!” He took off the shoe and tossed it to Neal.
Neal got out of the car to try it on. It actually was a perfect fit. And it was suddenly clear to him that his sneakers wouldn’t look right with the jacket.
“They’re yours for fifty dollars,” the man said.
“For a pair of used shoes?”
“Look,” the man said, holding up the other shoe. “This is genuine Italian calfskin. Not a scuff on either one of them.”
Neal waited a moment, sensing he had the advantage.
“Thirty-five, plus the sneakers in trade,” the man offered.
“Deal.”
Neal took I-240 and headed east so he could loop around to Highway 51 and make his way toward Kentucky and the Illinois state line. Before merging onto the highway, he exited into the suburbs north of Memphis so he could get something to eat; then he went into a nearby Target and bought a pair of gray Dockers to go with his newly acquired jacket, along with some black socks. He changed in the restroom, looked at himself critically in the mirror, realized his plaid shirt looked out of place, and went back to the men’s wear aisle for a solid-colored shirt and finally picked up a package of black T-shirts. Back in the restroom he put one on. He liked the way it set everything else off. He folded the other two T-shirts and slid them into his back pockets, then he stuffed his old clothes in a plastic bag and on his way out, on impulse, stuffed the bag into a trash bin.
Once he was outside the store, he paused for a moment, unsure that he belonged in his new clothes. He fiddled nervously with his shades and let a look of calculated indifference settle over his face. As he approached the Boccaccio, shimmering like a dream in the steamy heat of the afternoon, he noticed a couple of young women with shopping bags walking across the parking lot. One of them stopped for a moment, set her bags down on the asphalt, and pulled off one of her shoes. She shook it, apparently dislodging a pebble, and as she stood on one foot to put the shoe back on, she caught a glimpse of Neal gazing at her across the way. She turned away, brushed her skirt self-consciously, and then, picking up her bags, looked back pointedly at Neal. He met her glance steadily and coolly. She studied him for a moment with a slightly dazed look in her eyes, finally turning to catch up with her companion. Whistling softly, Neal got in the car and drove away with an obscure sense of triumph.
9. Do You Think He’s Dead?
Passing through a sizeable town somewhere in Kentucky, Neal pulled into the drive-thru lane at a McDonald’s to get some coffee. His plan was to cut through the western tip of the state, merge onto I-57 just north of Cairo, Illinois, pick up speed once he hit the interstate and keep driving hard until he reached the suburb where Tucker McCurdy was living. He could ask to spend the night there, or if he had no better option, he could spend the night in a bus station and make his way home before dawn the next day. He knew, though, that he would need some sort of stimulant if he had any chance of making it through the next five or six hours of driving, and he hoped that a medium cup of coffee would be enough.
Driving north, he had been surrounded by open farmland—long green rows of crops alternating with long brown rows of furrows. The sky was broad and flat-looking, flecked with wispy clouds, like an immense drop cloth of faded blue canvas smeared with white paint from edge to edge. Ribbons of woodland separated one farm from another, but between the sparse clusters of trees Neal could see, on either side of the highway, fields in patchwork patterns meeting a vague white horizon, as if the square, interlocking sheets of earth were being washed away in a solvent of pure bleach. The size of the sky and the remoteness of the horizon both seemed overwhelming, and as miles melted away the world still seemed to be a single unvarying stretch of endless distances. The dust-laden atmosphere, leaking through the car windows, was saturated with the narcotic smell of harvested sorghum. Two hours after leaving Memphis, Neal was having difficulty keeping his eyes open. Doing calculations of his current credits and debits, including what he had spent in food, gas, and lodging in the last twenty-four hours, was no help; compiling a list of major and minor characters from David Copperfield, in alphabetical order by first name, was no help; mentally tracing the coastline of Africa, starting with Morocco and moving south was no help, as he lost his way somewhere between Guinea-Bissau and Ghana. His eyelids had drooped shut again and again, and he was just about ready to start pounding the side of his head with his fist when he spotted the McDonald’s billboard.
As he sidled up to the drive-thru speaker he kept the car at a careful distance, fearful of scraping the door, and when he got to the window, he found it difficult to reach over far enough. He had to pull up a little more, free himself from the seat belt, and duck through the window to hand over his money and take the cup of coffee. Closing the window again, he looked for a cup holder between the seats and was a little surprised not to find one, although on reflection cup holders did seem a little too pedestrian for a car like the Boccaccio. This was not a vehicle that had been designed with harried, overcaffeinated commuters in mind.
So he held the cup between his knees to take the cap off, and then took it in his right hand as he steered with his left. He came out on a street shaded by sweet-gum trees, and hesitated for a moment whether to turn left or right. When he had first pulled in he must have been in a mental fog, he thought. He decided to drive down the street a few blocks to get his bearings. He passed a courthouse that could have doubled as a Presbyterian church and arrived at a vacant park that covered one block, and at that point decided that he had gone the wrong way, so he turned left when he reached the corner of the park and circled around it.
He passed the McDonald’s and stopped at a traffic light, sipping his coffee methodically, in carefully measured doses.
A Corvette with dashing, wave-like curves pulled up next to him, its engine throbbing and growling so loudly that Neal could feel the vibrations in the tips of his fingers. The car looked as if it had recently been through fire and flood; several layers of paint appeared to have been seared or scrubbed away, leaving alternating patches of dull silver, washed-out lavender, and white.
The tinted driver’s-side window lowered, and a hand emerged with a burning cigarette, which was promptly dropped down to the pavement between the cars, out of sight. Neal glanced at the light—still red—and then anxiously at the long thin wire of smoke rising from the cigarette. The hand still projected out the window of the other car, the fingers now furled and splayed into the shape of a pistol, the forefinger wagging forward down the street.
Neal decided to pretend that the gesture wasn’t meant for him. When the light changed, he wedged the coffee cup between his knees again, shifted up, and pressed the gas pedal slowly and deliberately, his eyes fixed straight in front of him as he began hunting for the highway entrance ramp. The other car slipped into the rear of the Boccaccio and made a stealthy approach until it nearly grazed the back bumper. The Corvette’s high beams flashed. Neal picked up speed to put a comfortable distance between the Boccaccio and the other car. When the other driver matched his speed, he shifted into fourth gear, quickly leaving the chain drugstore and used-car lot on the edge of town behind him. He could see the highway underpass far ahead of him, and was on the verge of shifting into the right lane, when the Corvette suddenly shifted up and pulled even, blocking Neal from merging over. Neal accelerated, cutting his eyes down for a moment to see the needle climb past 75, while the scruffed-up challenger seemed to strain to keep up. Feeling smugly assured of the power under his control, he slipped the car into fifth gear, nudged the needle over 80, and then started his shift toward the entrance ramp. The other car cut jerked ahead suddenly and cut him off just as he reached the lane stripes, and the two cars raced side-by-side through the underpass.
After they had passed a small cluster of gas stations and diners, Neal could see where the road began to narrow down to two lanes. All he had to do was slow down, let the Corvette take the single west-bound lane, and then pull over and circle back to the north-bound ramp. But that surge of power a moment before had put a flutter of anticipation in his gut, and he decided to make the other driver—that unseen presence behind the smoky blue tint—fully aware of what he was up against. Neal tipped the gear shift over and down into fourth, with a heightened sense of that effortless fluid glide; he pressed his foot firmly on the gas, accelerated until he was ready to shift up again, then the flutter in his gut lifted up into his chest as the car slanted forward, shooting smoothly into place just ahead of the Corvette’s scoured front end.
Neal’s nemesis faded back briefly, as the two cars followed a slight curve in the road, past a grain elevator and an abandoned trailer, but Neal could see the other car jerking forward again, slowly encroaching until it had come within half a length, and then, after several east-bound vehicles had passed, the car shifted lanes and pulled forward alongside the Boccaccio until it had reached the handle of the driver’s side door. An east-bound tractor trailer was approaching, and Neal experienced a moment of utter clarity, when he realized that he had nothing to gain from pressing his advantage, but the moment passed and he could feel himself sliding into a kind of weightless state of pure impulse, and leaning down on the clutch, he drove the shift lever one notch down and locked into sixth gear, watching in numb fascination as the needle tipped past 120.
He saw the Corvette slide in behind him as the truck barreled along the other way, creating air ripples that shook both cars. Neal wanted to lower the window so he could shake his fist at the other driver, but in the next moment he realized that he was fast approaching a rust-rimmed pick-up moving ahead of him in the west-bound lane. Neal was forced to let his speed slip back, and the other car once again pulled even in the other lane. The hand of the other driver appeared over the top of his car and gestured with a curled forefinger at the road ahead and to the left of the pick-up. Neal recognized this as either a challenge or a taunt, and either way he was determined to meet it. In the next moment he had a clear vision of the Boccaccio, with Neal Pilchard at the wheel, gliding across the short stretch of asphalt between the Corvette and the pick-up and putting the wedge-shaped piece of flayed scrap metal decisively in the rear as the clearly superior car pushed to 140 and beyond.
But the vision eluded him, and as the Corvette passed the pick-up, Neal swung his wheel sharply to avoid back-ending the truck. The Boccaccio veered off the highway and made a half-circle turn across the clayey shoulder as Neal furiously applied the brakes, trying to swerve back to the road at the same time. The car stopped abruptly when, aptly enough, it hit a SPEED LIMIT sign, and Neal hurtled out of his seat, the cup between his knees spurting coffee like seawater from a humpback’s spout.
When Neal began hearing voices, he thought that the radio had been switched on, but he couldn’t remember doing it himself. It was an odd kind of radio program, if it was one—two dull, muttering voices, male and female, with the same kind of flat intonation, speaking from what seemed like a considerable distance.
“You don’t think he’s dead, do you?”
“Unh … No. See, he just moved his foot.”
“You know how nerves can make a body sort of—”
“What? You mean like some headless chicken?”
“Well, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but—”
“See? He shifted his weight. He’s starting to come around.”
“Oh my! Is that blood?”
“What? Oh, I see. All over his pants leg. No, it doesn’t look like blood to me. Maybe he … Well, I don’t know. He’s moving some more.”
“Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?”
“Well, we could, I guess. But we’d have to wait for it, you know. And stick around and probably give a report to the State Police. No telling how long that would take. Of course, if we have to, we have to.”
“How much farther to Paducah?”
“Let’s see. Mayfield’s about twenty miles from this little burg. We’ll have another twenty, thirty miles to go after that. Should make it comfortably in an hour. So, I guess …”
“Look. He’s sitting up. I think he’s O.K.”
A tall, pot-bellied man in a maroon sport coat and an equally tall lanky woman in a pink dress with large white polka dots were standing close to the car, blinking their eyes intently through the windshield.
The woman fixed her hawkish eyes on Neal, and screamed, “ARE … YOU … ALL …. RIGHT?”
Neal nodded, even though he wasn’t sure exactly how he was entitled to answer the question.
Both the man and the woman smiled grandly, but neither of them made any effort to open the nearest door.
Neal lifted himself back into the driver’s seat, turned his head from side to side carefully, searched his face and the back of his head with his fingers to see if he could find gaping wounds. There was a bulge just above his forehead, soft and painful when he pressed it lightly; but he considered himself quite lucky, until he realized that everything he could see around him was wobbling slightly.
“DO YOU THINK YOU’LL BE O.K.?” The man was leaning down, with his head against the windshield, as if trying to peer into the pupils of Neal’s eyes.
Neal nodded vigorously this time, even as the world continued to tremble around him. “I’m fine!” he shouted, with as much conviction as he could muster.
An SUV pulled up onto the shoulder on the other side of the road, coming to a stop just in front of the Lexus that the well-dressed couple must have been driving.
As the tall woman kept a close watch on Neal, the man went across the road and exchanged a few words with the newcomer—a younger-looking man with a thick neck and close-shaved hair. Together they walked back across the road to the Boccaccio.
Neal wished he could lie down and close his eyes, but he was determined not to have another person standing over him, so he heaved himself out of the seat and came out of the car on the passenger side before just as the two men were approaching.
The younger man had a red, pock-marked face, and he revealed unusually sharp teeth when he smiled. Neal stared at the man, puzzled by his smile but relieved that the world had stopped shaking.
“Can I make a call for you?” The man had his phone in hand, his thumb poised to dial. “You have Triple-A, by any chance?”
“Triple-A?” Neal knew that this stood for something, but he couldn’t think of what it might be.
“You know, roadside service. Towing.”
Neal saw that the man was looking at the front end of the car, so he turned to see for himself. The SPEED LIMIT sign had buckled under the impact of the collision, twisting so that the placard had come down across the hood of the Boccaccio, slicing through the metal in a slant across the middle. One of the headlights was shattered, and the bumper was crumpled at the point of impact. As Neal studied the damage, it seemed as if his mind had split in half, just like the hood of the car. One part took it all in with fascination, as if he had always in some way wanted to see the results of a high-speed collision with a road sign and was ready to take note of every last detail. At another level his mind sheared away in a completely different direction, sending dark premonitions that were incalculable and nearly incomprehensible.
“I don’t suppose it’s totaled,” the pock-marked man was saying, with a toothy smile. “You might could just drive away. But you probably have to answer a few questions first.”
“What’s on your pants leg?” the tall woman asked in a tense voice.
Neal had to pause a moment to consider the meaning of “pants leg” before he looked down and found that he was wet from his knee to the hem of the pants. He pinched the wet fabric and then smelled his finger. “Coffee,” he announced.
“Oh, that’s all,” the woman said with obvious relief.
Neal suddenly remembered stopping at the McDonald’s, and then he recalled the scoured-looking car, and the pick-up truck that forced him to swerve. He nodded to himself, reluctantly conceding that all this had actually happened.
A pick-up truck pulled up along the shoulder, and Neal at first thought that this might be the one that caused his wreck, but he could see that it was too new-looking. A young man in a baseball cap jumped out.
“Anyone called the State Police yet?” he called out.
Everyone turned to look at him.
“We were just about to,” the tall man said.
The newcomer shrugged, leaned back against his truck, popped a stick of gum in his mouth, and seemed to be settling in to watch the proceedings.
Neal walked around the car and could feel something sink deep in the pit of his stomach. More of his memory was now slowly coming back to him, and he began to wonder how much trouble he was facing.
Before he had any time to consider it, another truck pulled up—a tow truck, with a large, cross-shaped iron hitch mounted on the back, a rectangular rack of yellow lights flashing over the top of the cab, and newly painted lettering across the door: KRIKE’S AUTO RESCUE. The door creaked open slowly, and out climbed a rangy, broad-shouldered man with glasses, wearing cargo pants, a flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and military boots.
The man slammed the door of his truck and stood a moment, taking in the scene in front of him, with eyes that seemed to jump forward from behind thick lenses. He was thirtyish, with thinning hair stretched over a tan scalp, a heavy brow cut into three layers by deep horizontal lines, and a strangely delicate-looking jaw.
“You can all go on now,” he said firmly, barely raising his voice. “The authorities have been notified.”
Everyone within earshot stood still, as if momentarily bemused by the note of command in the man’s voice.
“Everything’s under control here,” the man said with a little more emphasis. “Don’t we need to … testify, or something?” the tall, pot-bellied man asked with obvious dread.
“Did you see anything?”
“We came up after it happened,” the woman said with a nervous flutter. “We’re on our way to a wedding in Paducah.”
“Well if you never saw it happen, you don’t need to stick around for anything. Go on. The authorities will be arriving soon.”
Seemingly startled by this second reference to the “authorities,” the pot-bellied man and his wife made their way quickly back to their car. The pock-marked man grinned and grunted, kicking a little gravel with the toe of his boot, and then ambled back to his SUV. The young man in the baseball cap remained in place for a moment, enduring the hostile gaze of the tow-truck driver just long enough to prove that he couldn’t be intimidated, before he finally spat out his gum and climbed back into the cab of his truck. Once the scene was clear, the tow-truck driver strolled over to the Boccaccio and gave it a stern appraisal.
“You called the cops?” Neal asked, his voice faltering.
The man shook his head. “You don’t want them to come around here. What you need is to get out fast as you can.” He pointed back down the highway at the skid marks where Neal had swerved and traced the path leading from the black marks to the furrows that cut along the shoulder of the road. “They don’t have much use for drag racing around here.”
“Drag racing?” Neal said with a note of shock, which sounded hollow even to his own ears.
The tow-truck driver just grunted. You can’t make skids like that unless you’re doing at least 100.” He pinned Neal with his alarmingly large eyes. “You don’t feel like spending the night in the county jail, do you?”
Neal smiled weakly. “I don’t really think …”
The tow truck driver didn’t wait for Neal to finish his apparently pointless sentence. He took hold of the sign post and tried to bend it back enough to separate the placard from the hood of the car; unsuccessful at first, he gave the sign post several swift kicks, until it finally yielded, and then gave it one more hard kick, driven by nothing more than casual spite. Turning to the car, he spread his fingers and drew them tenderly along the sharply defined edge of the hood.
“I’ve heard of these things,” he said, not to anyone in particular. “I never thought I’d see one.” He turned to Neal. “Rear wheel or front wheel?”
“What do you … um …”
“This is your car, isn’t it?”
Neal nodded obscurely.
The man shrugged and climbed into the Boccaccio. Neal heard a faint metallic screech and could see the car’s wheels straightening as the car backed up about an inch. Then the man re-emerged. “Rear wheel,” he announced. “What I thought. That’ll make things easier.”
He walked back to his truck, got in with a spring-trap slam of the door, drove across the road and onto the shoulder, and then backed up to the trunk of the Boccaccio. With a monotonous whine, the cross-shaped hitch on the back of the truck stretched up and then down, slowly, and then forward again until the crossbar was even with the backs of the tires, and the tip of the hitch was directly under the back axle. As soon as the whine of the hitch arm ceased, Neal heard a deep-pitched groan coming from underneath the car and then a pair of brackets, one on each side of the hitch, snapped forward and locked in place, creating a kind of cradle for each of the tires. Neal watched the limber movements of the mechanism, heard the creak and clicking of the metal joints, smelled the acrid machine oil, as if it were all happening miles away from where he stood, as if his mind were a thing apart from the red dust, the sliced metal, the exertions of man and machine, the ever-present threat of the law. In some remote way, he was aware of the knots in his stomach and noted them with cool detachment.
The tow truck driver emerged from the cab and studied the work that he’d done so far.
“By the way, my name’s Krike,” he said. “Just like it says on the truck. Lyle Krike, if you want to know. But almost everyone calls me Krike. Even my mother.” He held out his hand and Neal studied it for a moment before extending his own.
Krike hopped back into the cab of the truck, and the towing arm slowly rose, lifting the back end of the car about three feet before coming to a stop, giving the tires a playful bounce.
When Krike came out of the truck again, he went from one side of the car to other, yanking on the metal brackets to make sure they were firmly in place.
“I don’t believe you’ve told me your name,” he said casually, turning to face Neal but still half-engrossed in his work.
“My name,” Neal said numbly.
“It’s common courtesy, isn’t it?”
“My name,” Neal said again. Momentarily, he couldn’t think of it, so he said the first name that popped into his head: “Harold Hill.”
“Good to meet you,” Krike said flatly.
“Professor Harold Hill,” Neal said without thinking about it, still stunned by his inability to remember his own name.
Krike was beginning to climb into the truck again, but he stopped and looked at Neal curiously. “Professor of what?”
“Oh.” Neal laughed nervously. “That’s just a nickname. Because of the glasses.” He jiggled the shades. “They’re prescription, you know.”
Krike nodded. He jiggled his glasses and grinned. “So are mine.”
Neal was beginning to feel light-headed as his mind made circular leaps from one disconnected fact to another, from memory to forgetfulness back to memory again.
“Come on and get in, Harold,” Krike said. “I swear the truck’s not as filthy as it looks.”
For a moment Neal thought that Krike was speaking to someone else, but when the engine started up he jumped, realizing that he would have to get in the truck or stay behind in the dusty heat, with the skid marks and the ruined sign. Climbing into the passenger’s side of the cab, Neal noticed a rifle nestled in a gun rack across the inside of the back windshield, and for a moment he imagined that its barrel pointed straight at his face. He flinched before hopping onto the seat.
Krike had observed Neal’s brief alarm. “I do a lot of repo jobs,” he explained. “You never know what’s gonna happen.”
10. Asphalt Records
The truck stopped in front of a modest brick house with small windows, shaded by corrugated, weather-streaked awnings. An overgrown oak tree loomed over the thin patches of grass that made up the lawn.
“We’ll have to lay low for a little while, until I can get Bix to open his shop. Come on.”
“I think I’ll just stay in the truck if it’s OK.”
“Look, Harold. I’m trying to help you out here, if you hadn’t noticed. You don’t want anyone to come around and put two and two together, if you know what I mean. You and the car. Until it’s fixed. Don’t you get that?”
Neal climbed reluctantly out of the truck. As they crossed the yard, a small dog in the bare, rutted yard next door roused itself, ran to the end of its chain, and barked, showing a set of gummy teeth. Neal was too shocked to react. Krike, on the other hand, gave the dog a dismissive glance and then hissed. The dog froze for a moment before slowly turning tail and sinking down on its haunches.
“Come on,” Krike said. “The chain’ll hold.”
Neal followed him into the house. The television was on in the cramped living room, but the room was vacant. The house was full of dank odors—thick, oleaginous meat smells, bitter smells of boiling greens, and something that seemed familiar, but was harder to identify, permeating everything else.
“Hey, Shel!” Krike shouted as soon as he had closed the front door. He waited for a response and then walked across the room’s vinyl floor toward a doorless passage. “Shel! Hey, where in the bejesus are you?”
A woman in a sleeveless, loose-fitting dress emerged from a dark hall.
“I told you supper wasn’t until seven,” she said the moment she entered the room.
“Never mind that. We’ve got company, Shel.”
She halted abruptly and stood staring at Neal with a look of blank dismay, as if he had placed himself deliberately in her path. The woman appeared younger, though not much younger, than Krike. She had a bland, undeveloped-looking face and rusty blonde hair, gathered back into a prim ponytail. Her broad, freckle-dusted cheeks and firm chin made an agreeable impression, but Neal decided she would be much prettier if her eyes were farther apart or if her lips had more color or if her gums were less apt to show when she was speaking.
She acted as if she were about to speak but held her tongue and glanced instead at Krike.
“This is Mr. Harold Hill, Shel. From . . . where’d you say you were from, Harold?”
“Well, I …” Neal was trying to remember what, if anything, he might have already said.
“I noticed the license plate,” Krike said abruptly. “I bet you’re from New York City. Sharp-looking guy like you.”
Neal smiled broadly. He chose to hold the smile for a fraction of a second and let Krike put his own construction on it.
“Well, how about that, Shel?” Neal couldn’t help noticing that Krike’s flat voice was somewhat at odds with his words. “This man is from all the way to New York City. What are you doing way out here in the backyard of nowhere?”
“It’s … mostly business.” Neal spoke carefully. “A little bit of business, a little bit of pleasure.”
“A little too much pleasure,” Krike said, smiling grimly. “If drag racing is your idea of pleasure.”
“Who’s been drag racing?” The young woman spoke with an unexpected, slightly unsettling urgency.
“It seems that Mr. Harold Hill has had a bit of an accident.”
“I don’t guess anyone was hurt,” she said, giving Neal a coolly curious look, biting her lower lip as soon as the words were out of her mouth.
“No need to …” As Neal began to speak, a sharp spasm suddenly gripped the back of his neck. He gave a forced laugh before attempting to finish what he was saying. “Really, it’s nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Hey, Shel.” Krike spoke without looking at the young woman. “Why don’t you get this man a beer? You drink beer, don’t you, Harold?”
“I don’t really need—”
“Sure you do. You’ve been in a tragic accident, Harold. You’re lucky you’re not dead right this minute. You need something to recharge your heart. Shel, go get him a beer.”
The woman glared at Krike for a moment but then disappeared into the kitchen.
“You’re probably used to Stella Artois, or something like that, aren’t you? I hope Meister Lite is O.K. That’s practically all they sell around here.”
The two of them could hear a clatter of cookware in the few otherwise silent moments before the woman returned. Reaching awkwardly from a careful distance, she handed Neal an open, water-beaded beer can.
“I’m obliged.” Neal couldn’t help smiling again.
“Oh, by the way, Harold,” Krike said. “This is my wife.”
“My name is Sheila,” the young woman said, frowning at her husband. “Sheila f*cking Krike.”
Krike seemed to be rolling his eyes, although it was hard to tell because they were so strangely refracted by his thick lenses. “Have a seat, Harold,” he said. “No telling when Bix’ll call. We might be here awhile.”
Neal dropped onto the oversized sofa that dominated the room. Sheila acted as if she were about to seat herself at the other end of the sofa, but instead took a couple of steps across the room and sat in a creaky rocking chair, folding the hem of her dress under her knees.
Krike gave Neal a skewed, slightly skeptical look. “You were about to tell us what kind of business you’re in, weren’t you Harold?”
Neal was too preoccupied to respond right away. His eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the living room, dimmed further by his shades, and he was getting his bearings. The sofa and the television fully occupied the center of the room, but to his left, in one corner, there was a small desk with a clunky, outdated PC, a fat spiral notebook, a single-cup coffee maker, and a can of WD-40. In another corner there was a magazine rack stuffed with yarn and grease-stained cookbooks, all of them featuring the same ever-smiling celebrity. In still another corner Neal could see what appeared to be an elaborate model of a large city, constructed of Lego pieces in the shapes of skyscrapers, bridges, a factory with square smokestacks, and a couple of square fat structures that might have been opera houses or museums—with segments from a plastic racetrack running between and around the buildings.
By the time Neal took notice of Krike’s question, he had almost forgotten what it was. “You were asking . . . . ”
“What do you do, Harold?”
Neal was amused and absurdly gratified by the impression he was making, and he wanted to keep that impression intact, if he could. He hesitated another moment, but then he found the answer to the question slipping into place. “I’m a music man,” he said.
“A music man … What does that mean?”
“It just means that I own . . . a small record company.” He looked at each of them in turn and if he had seen merely the trace of a smile curling up the edges of their mouths, he would have erupted in laughter. But Krike was grimacing, as if his teeth were grinding a rusty nail, while Sheila fixed her eyes on him distantly, sitting stiffly in the rocking chair, her fingers gripping the edges of the seat.
“Of course,” Neal said, speaking slowly, “it’s just an investment, you know. I’ve made my money in hedge funds, but I sold out a few months ago.” He was conscious of the way his voice came back to him from the walls of the room, mixing with the subdued murmur coming from the television. “I thought it was time to try something new. Business was getting a little … stale.” He nodded solemnly after he had plucked the word from the air. “Definitely stale.”
“I’m still trying to figure out what a music man’s doing out here.” Krike had propped his right hand on the television and was leaning on it, somewhat daringly, as it sat on a rolling cabinet and could have lurched out from under him at any moment. “How come you’re not back in New York City making music?”
“Well, you can’t just sit around in a studio all the time, you know. That’s not where the music really happens. You have to go looking for it.”
“Where?”
“Well, Memphis, for example. I was in Memphis earlier today.” Neal felt a little odd saying something that was actually true; for the moment, he was more comfortable fictionalizing himself. “I can’t wait for the music to come to me. I have to go where it’s being made. On the street, if you know what I mean. The street is where you find it. In fact, if you want to know what it’s all about …” He paused a moment as he tried to wrap his tongue around just the right word. “It’s all about asphalt.”
“What?”
Neal felt panicky, as if his mind were about to split into a thousand fragments. “Asphalt Records,” he said with a barely suppressed sigh of relief. “That’s the name of my company. It’s about finding the music wherever it’s being made. In Memphis or New Orleans … Or East St. Louis. Anywhere you find the street, you can find the music.”
Krike scoffed. “East St. Louis is a sh*t heap.”
“Well … That’s an example. It’s just one of—”
Krike plucked a ringing phone from his pocket and spat out a terse greeting. He listened for a moment, his eyes roving vaguely. “O.K., well I’ve got some business for you. I’m really looking out for you, boy. This is going to bring in some moooolah.” He flashed Neal an evil wink. “Just wait till you see it, buddy boy … O.K.”
He stuffed the phone back in his pocket. “Come on, Harold. Showtime. Gotta get that car of yours under cover.” Krike reached for his truck keys and tossed them in the air a few times as he headed for the door; he glanced out the window and then suddenly stopped short. “Hey, Shel. Take a look at this thing.”
Sheila leaned forward in the chair, then she jumped up and crossed the room quickly. “Oh, baby! What is that? A DeLorean?”
“Better. It’s a Boccaccio.”
“Whoa. I thought those things were illegal.”
“No. But you can do some illegal things with them. Right, Harold?” Krike gave Neal a sideways glance. “Come on.”
“Don’t make him rush off.” There was a new note of gaiety in Sheila’s voice. “You go take the car. Let him stay and finish his beer.”
Neal looked curiously at the wet can propped on his knee, as if he had forgotten all about it. He had sunk wearily into himself ever since Krike had winked at him, reminding him of the afternoon’s calamity, and the costs that would come with it. He looked dully from Krike to Sheila, waiting for them to come to a decision.
Krike stood still, twirling his key ring around his index finger. “Yeah, sure. Finish your beer, Harold. Don’t let it get warm. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Neal took a sip, as if meekly obeying Krike’s command.
Krike opened the front door and was about to slam it shut when he turned toward Neal and said, “Gimme a number, Harold.”
“A number?”
“A phone number,” Krike said. “Bix’s got to have a way to call you, so he can give you the bad news.”
“Oh. I …” Neal shook his head once and then pulled the number out of the blankness of his mind. He recited it quickly.
“Got it,” Krike said as he stepped out the door.
Sheila closed the door behind her husband, leaned against it, and smiled obscurely at Neal.
Pointing to the beer can, which Neal had propped on his knee again, she said, “You want somewhere to set that down, don’t you? I keep meaning to buy a coffee table or something, but I can’t find anything that looks just right. You know. Something that fits the décor.” She gave a slightly forced laugh.
“I’m fine,” Neal said. He sipped the beer again, partly to show that he was happy to be holding it, partly to dull the sense of unease that was stealing through him.
Sheila suddenly lurched away from the door, walked over to the television, and switched it off. “You weren’t watching, were you?”
Neal shook his head, but for the moment she wasn’t actually looking at him. Instead she was casting her eyes from one corner of the room to another. “You know I do the best I can. At least the house is clean. Sort of.” She glanced with some irritation at the model city. “I see you’re looking at Krikeville,” she said.
Neal hadn’t been looking in that direction—not at the moment, anyway—but there was no point in correcting her.
“Lyle’s got some sort of dumb idea of being a city planner some day. He keeps saying when he saves enough money he’ll start taking night classes at Western Kentucky. Look at this.” She reached under the sofa, pulled out several large textbooks, and blew off some invisible dust motes. The books had titles like Introduction to Architecture and Urban Management Issues. Neal thought for a moment that she was going to heave them into his lap but instead she dropped them on the floor to the side of the sofa, where they landed flatly with the sound of a gunshot. “He says he’s reading ahead so when he enrolls in school and sits in the lectures, everything will just fall into place.”
“Not a bad plan.”
Sheila shook her head firmly. “Lyle won’t ever save any money. He doesn’t know how to run his stupid towing business. I should know, because I’m the one who has to keep the books. He keeps selling his trucks at a loss and buying new ones. Every time he dings one of the doors, it’s time for a new truck.” As she spoke she was inspecting Neal closely; her hands gripped the folds of her dress, twisting the fabric. “Not to mention all the useless gadgets he thinks he has to buy.” She darted over to the magazine rack and pulled a well-thumbed catalogue out from behind the cookbooks. “Look,” she said. “A screwdriver with a radium handle. Lyle bought that.” She flipped a few pages. “Clip-on night vision goggles. Lyle’s got that one circled and starred.” She leaned over until the catalogue page nearly touched Neal’s nose, and then she abruptly tossed the catalogue back in the rack.
Still standing near the side of the sofa, Sheila continued to size him up with her eyes as thick silence began to enfold the two of them. Several times she seemed to be on the point of saying something but instead she gently bit the tip of her tongue and pursed her lips.
“What’s that on your pants?” she suddenly asked. “There below the knee.”
“Just some coffee. I’m sure it’ll come out.”
“It doesn’t always come out. Let me see what I can do.” She disappeared into the kitchen and came out with a wet dish towel. “I put a little dish soap on it.” Kneeling, she rubbed Neal’s knee vigorously with one end of the towel and wiped it with the other end; then she stood and examined her work. “Can’t tell until it dries.”
Sheila dangled the towel absent-mindedly until she suddenly noticed the knot at the edge of his hairline. She leaned in and gently inspected it with her fingers. “How’d you do that, Harold?”
Neal felt another sharp spasm in the back of his neck. “I had a close encounter with a windshield. Or at least that’s what I think it was.”
“Weren’t you wearing a seat belt?”
“Oh. Seat belts.” He made himself laugh. “They’re for …” He was a little surprised that he couldn’t finish the thought, because for a moment he had felt so certain of what to say. Since he couldn’t pull a witticism out of a hat, he just forced another laugh, and she laughed along with him.
“Race drivers wear seat belts, Harold. What are you? Some kind of outlaw?”
“That’s it!You’ve blown my cover.”
They laughed together again, more naturally this time. But another tense silence shortly ensued. Sheila wrapped the towel around her hands and stared at them, and then she peered at Neal again, a little more tentatively this time.
“What kind of music do you make, Harold?”
Neal was beginning to realize how hard it was to make up a new self. There were always more questions that had to be answered, more lies that had to be invented. He was beginning to wish he had never started the whole thing.
“Well, I guess … a little bit of everything.”
“You mean like zydeco and stuff?”
“Well, no. Not exactly.” Neal had heard of zydeco, but he had no idea what it was.
“Like grunge rock?”
“Sort of.”
“Like hip-hop?”
“More like that. Whatever’s out there … Whatever’s alive, you know.”
“What about blues?”
“Sure. Asphalt Records is all about the blues.”
Her face suddenly brightened. “Hey, I’ve got something you’ll love, Harold.” Turning quickly, her dress swirling, she flung the towel on top of the television and, reaching underneath it, opened up a cabinet in the rolling cart that the television sat on. She took out a boom box and, after digging around a moment in the back of the cabinet, picked out a CD. She pushed the television aside, plugged in the CD player and inserted the disk.
Sharp, stinging guitar chords filled the room, followed by a deep, thunderous bass line that seemed to settle underneath the flooring. Sheila swung her hips and made rhythmic fist jabs at the air around her, closing her eyes, nodding, smiling, twisting from one side to the other. Awakening from a brief trance, she opened her eyes and gazed curiously at Neal, who was sitting stiffly on the sofa.
She stopped dancing and looked at him blankly. “Do you always listen to music like that, Harold?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re dead from the neck down.”
“Well, no, not …”
The true answer, of course, was yes. Neal had never danced in his life. If he had been in the mood to tell the truth, at least part of it, he could have explained that he had developed his music-listening habits in his best friend’s basem*nt, reclining in a ratty love seat, pretending to be stoned, staring at the logo on a bottle of bleach that sat on the shelf above the washing machine. He still associated acid rock with the smell of detergent. You don’t dance to The Dark Side of the Moon, he could have said. You don’t dance to Brain Salad Surgery. But if he were really going to be truthful, he would have to say that he could never dance because Baptists don’t do it. And he couldn’t change the way he was raised. He could get away with some things, of course. He could use curse words freely. He could spend the night with a woman without necessarily making any plans to see her after breakfast the next day. He could nod enthusiastically at various inarguable claims about the non-existence of God. But he couldn’t dance any more than he could peel his own skin off. Oddly, no one had ever told him why dancing was an abomination. No one had explained why the divinely inspired Book of Ecclesiastes could proclaim that there was “a time to dance,” and yet the Baptist soul police still looked upon dancing as a second cousin of idolatry and a step-brother of blasphemy. It almost seemed that the prohibition was enforced so deeply inside of him, connected at some spinal level to all of his nerve endings, precisely because it had never been explained.
“Come on, Harold!” Reaching over, she took him by the hand, and tugged on him until he stood up. She took the beer can out of his other hand, drank out of it, tipping her head back, and then set it down on the television stand. She started dancing again and Neal tried to imitate her, but he could do little more than some shrugging and twitching.
Sheila stopped dancing and shook her head. “What’s the matter, Harold? Can’t you dance? What kind of music man are you?”
“I’m guess I’m still a little shook up from the accident.”
“Well, we need to get you a little un-shook.” She crossed over to the CD player and hit the stop button. She ejected the disk, tossed it aside, and reached into the cabinet for another disk.
This time, gentle, trembling piano music came out of the player. Chopin, Neal guessed.
Sheila beckoned to him soberly, and he stepped forward with caution. She grasped his right hand firmly and took a stately step toward him.
“Just do what I do,” she said softly. She waited for just a moment, and then stepped back, then to the side, in pace with the music—stopping suddenly, though. “Hey, you can take your shades off, Harold. Here.” She reached over, removed his sunglasses, and hooked them onto the front of his shirt. “There.”
Neal could see her face pretty clearly but everything else in the room was a blur. He smiled awkwardly as she began her movements again, picking up the rhythm with no hesitation. Neal felt exposed without his glasses; not seeing the room clearly, he was afraid a blur might turn into something solid and throw him off his feet. As Sheila guided him across the floor, he placed one foot over the other carefully, glancing nervously at her feet to make sure he didn’t step on them, and he seemed at first to be keeping up fairly well, but he was unprepared for a sudden shift in the tempo and Sheila’s quick shift in direction, and he felt himself tipping as one shoe scraped against the other. He jumped back to regain his balance.
Sheila studied him for a moment with a maddeningly elusive gaze. “You’re thinking about it too much, Harold,” she said. “Go with your instincts. You can trust me.”
She walked across to the boom box and stopped it.
“Don’t look at my feet. Don’t look at your feet. Just move with me.” She pushed the television further out of the way, then she dragged the rocking chair up against the desk. “There. Enough room for a dance lesson. My aunt used to run a ballet school in Louisville. I got to take lessons at a discount for five years.” As if to provide proof, she executed a quick pirouette. Then she bent down and started up the player again. She wagged her finger at him. “Just stay with me; you’ll get the feel of it,” she said, as she crossed the room, stepping in time with the opening notes.
She took his hands again and with barely a flicker of hesitation she began moving in time again. “Look at my eyes, Harold.”
He obeyed her, following her lead as they moved around the room within the confines of the furniture. The slow tempo helped Neal to settle comfortably into the simple pattern of her movements; nimbly matching her steps, he learned to swing his legs in half-circles as they moved from side to side. When she leaned back, he realized, without thinking, that he needed to lean back in the same way, to keep the two of them balanced, and when she whirled around he pivoted with one foot while crossing over with the other one, stopping sharply with a sudden slight pause in the music.
As the pace of the music quickened, she swung him briskly with her arms extended long and taut; trying with some effort to keep up, he briefly began to feel flustered, but the tempo shifted down again, and she drew him toward her until he was pushing against her breasts, which felt surprisingly heavy. A flicker of lust passed through him, but she stepped away, releasing his left hand, and then she led him in a dizzying arc that filled all the space between the sofa and the wall. She drew him toward her again, until she was clasping both his hands, and she turned with him in two tight circles.
She came to a stop and waited for a moment, leaning back on her heels, before picking up the music again. As they moved with slackened pace for a few measures, her eyes took on a kind of absent, moonlit look. The tempo quickened once again as the piece seemed to be coming to a close. She released his left hand, and this time circled around him; as he watched her move, he felt as if his head were moving faster than his feet could shift, and then in the next moment, the room seemed to moving in a circle, pivoting over the top of his skull. He pitched to the side, carrying her with him, and they both came crashing down on the Lego sculpture in the corner of the room.
They erupted in laughter, in spite of the jabs from the sharp-edged plastic pieces they were sitting on. Neal had managed to avoid landing on top of Sheila, but his right hand had incidentally ended up on her thigh, which felt warm and springy through the thin layer of fabric. He removed his hand with a little reluctance before standing up slowly and stiffly. Sheila remained on the floor, still in convulsions as Neal reached down, offering to help lift her up. She took his hand and began to rise but almost instantly lay back down amid the plastic fragments, her hands over her eyes, wiping away tears of laughter.
Neither of them heard the door open. They both suddenly saw Krike standing in the threshold as if he had been there all along. Neal put his shades back on and tried to meet Krike’s gaze without flinching. Sheila sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees.
“That was fast,” she said calmly.
“Looks like someone’s been having a little party,” Krike said. “Music and everything.”
Sheila stood and went over to the boom box, which was now playing a somber piece by Brahms. She pulled the cord out of the wall, picked it up, and stowed it back under the television.
“I just thought a little music would be relaxing is all,” she said, speaking in a clipped voice.
“You got some way of relaxing, I’ll say.”
“Oh that.” Sheila waved her hand at the Lego pieces. “It was about time to clean that up anyway.”
Krike crossed the room. He reached down and picked up the remains of the parking garage, holding it gingerly for a moment before he finally broke it apart and dropped the pieces into the pile in the corner.
“So you and Harold have been doing housework. That’s a good idea. Put our houseguest to work. Make him earn his beer.”
Neal backed away slowly, until he had cornered himself against the rocking chair and had nowhere to go when Krike turned to face him.
“Well, Harold. I guess we need to get you to a motel.” Krike’s face wore a neutral look, but there was a noticeable tension in his cheeks and a kind of mournful flush around the edges of his eyes. “You might be with us for a few days, from the look of things. Bix says Boccaccio parts are a living devil to find.”
“He doesn’t have to go right now,” Sheila insisted. “He can at least stay and have supper with us.”
Krike shook his head. “Mr. Harold Hill of New York City doesn’t want any of your chicken stew.”
“Well, it’s not like I don’t try to do better than that.” All of the color was drained from Sheila’s face. Every trace of pleasure had disappeared, gone into hiding behind her eyes. “I try to get you to eat something decent now and then but you’ve got such a sensitive stomach. Mama’s boy.”
“Never mind that. We gotta get Harold situated right now. Come on.” He turned and made a brusque gesture toward the still-open door. “And don’t worry about the bill right now. We’ll settle up soon enough. I still got your number.”
11. A Streetcar Named Sheila
The next morning, Neal opened up the zipper pouch to see if he had an insurance card for the Boccaccio. Finding one, he dialed the 800 number for claims. A woman with a bright, fresh Wisconsin accent offered him whatever help he needed and waited patiently for him to lay his problem at her feet. Neal described the nature of the accident in truthful but minimal detail, leaving out the presence of the other car, for example, and the exact speed at which they had been traveling—because, after all, he couldn’t be absolutely sure how fast he had been going. Which is what he told her.
“I see,” she said encouragingly. Much to his relief, she apparently had not lost any confidence in him. After the slightest pause, she said, “Everything will be fine. Just fax us a copy of the accident report as soon as possible, and we’ll have you fixed up by the end of the day.”
“When you say ‘accident report,’ ” Neal replied carefully, “you mean, I guess …”
“The report that the police officer filled out at the scene,” the woman put in cheerfully.
“Oh, O.K. That accident report.”
“Right. That’s the one.” Her sunny contralto turned a few degrees cooler. “You’ll find the fax number on the card. You can just send that any old time now.”
“I’ll do that. I’ll definitely do that. I see the fax number. There it is.” He laughed abruptly. “I’ll just get that accident report off right away.”
“O.K.,” she said, with a farewell lilt in her voice. For one mad moment, Neal thought about trying to seduce her, but there was a definite door-slam quality to that lilt and he dropped the idea.
“I’ll get right on it,” he said, even though she had just cut him off.
He set his phone down on the nightstand and lay back on the disheveled bed. The previous evening, Krike had dropped him off at the town’s only motel, a cluster of single-story, cracker-box buildings with periwinkle roofs and rows of lavender doors. His room lacked even the shabby pretensions of the Days Inn in Nashville. There wasn’t even a chair in the room, just a bed, a TV, a clothes rod with fixed hangers, and a bathroom with a shower the size of a phone booth.
Neal had woken up with stiffness that ran like a steel pole from the middle of his buttocks to the base of his skull. Now, as he thought his way through his dilemma, he writhed in search of small comfort, his head clamped against the cool pillow.
He toyed with the idea of forging an accident report, possibly with Krike’s assistance. He assumed Krike knew exactly what they looked like and conceivably had helpful connections in law enforcement. But after the previous evening, Neal couldn’t be sure how much help Krike would be willing to give him, even for a friendly bonus. Neal distinctly recalled that his hand was on Sheila’s thigh at some point, but he didn’t know for sure whether it was before or after Krike opened the door.
He knew that if he couldn’t make an insurance claim he faced some discouraging options. He could try using his Visa but doubted that he had enough credit left to afford a new bumper, let alone anything else. The money that was left in the zipper pouch probably wouldn’t be enough. And then how would he pay for the trip back home? He could make wishful promises to the mechanic, possibly leave him something of value—the jacket? the sunglasses? the shoes?—and get the money from Tucker McCurdy once the car was sold.
Or whatever. Neal felt relatively sure that he wouldn’t end up in jail, or dead, and he had no job or reputation to lose, so he told himself that could endure the whole experience and possibly learn a lesson from it, or even gain some material for a short story that might fetch $100.
He decided that he was in the hands of fate, or God, or some special kind of lesser deity with grease under its fingernails, and he gave himself temporary permission not to think anything more remote than the fact that he was hungry. He walked across the street to a Rite Aid, where he bought a plastic bottle of iced tea, a package of Combos, and a novel that, according to the blurb on the shiny embossed cover, had been on the paperback bestseller list for thirteen straight weeks.
He walked down the street to the bowling alley where he had eaten supper the day before and sat at a table in the now-closed lounge, close to the tinted glass partition that separated the lounge from the lanes. He opened the book and started reading by the light of a neon clock advertising Meister Extra Dry. The plot of the novel was some sort of hard-boiled mystery wrapped in Gothic wisteria vines. Neal had already lost the thread of the plot by the time he had gotten to page 97; however, he wasn’t reading for the narrative but for the ebb and flow of the sentences, the little flourishes of alliteration and assonance, the blunt, sardonic sound of the dialogue, the careful, varied sequence of tag verbs—said, replied, retorted, sneered, quizzed, averred, opined, sputtered, fumed, bleated, blurted … The sound of pins tumbling and shoes squeaking and balls ejecting from the return with a wheeze and a clap of hard plastic—all of it kept him alert as his eyes roved the pages, hunting clues for how to write a novel that could find a snug place on drugstore shelves. He would look up now and then to find some of the bowlers gazing at him blankly through the wall-size pane of tinted glass, and then with blissful indifference to everything around him, he would return to the book, melting back into the mildly engaging prose, looking for ways to insert his own ideas between the lines.
As he faded into the dream space where memory and imagination merge with one another, he gave his full attention to that haunted face that had first come to him over a week ago, and he found that it was already changing shape. All along he had been thinking that he would have to draw on what he remembered from seven years of teaching, but he wondered about the distance he would have to cross to make his way, even imaginatively, into the lives of students. Life was larger than what he had known of it for the past seven years, and he was already finding new, unanticipated byways into the heart of things. Working his way back to his idea, he found that Sheila’s eyes had replaced those of the dimly remembered young woman. He now recalled clearly that Sheila’s irises were a weathered, chalky shade of blue. She had told him to follow her eyes when they danced, yet he hadn’t retained a clear image of her in the motions of their dance, perhaps because, without his glasses, he was a little too preoccupied with the dim outlines of the room as he made his way carefully along the edges of the furniture. What he recalled now was something that he had observed either before or immediately after the dance, a certain cool expression that had come over her as she studied him, biting her lower lip as if secretly contemplating something drastic and possibly dangerous.
There was something there, he thought, a premise he could work from. If he could give himself those four or five weeks to get started … If the right amount of money could beget the right amount of time …
He shut the book, feeling suddenly restive and anxious. He peered through the glass, scanning the lanes absent-mindedly, when he suddenly caught sight of his own reflection peering back at him. He was unnerved by the strangeness of the image facing him and was tempted to look behind him, sensing that the lounge contained too much space to hold only one occupant.
Neal opened the book again at random and gazed at the pages without actually reading any words. A new way of solving his money problem had just occurred to him. His sister Audrey could loan him nearly any amount of money, out of family obligation, if for no other reason. She and her husband, whose name he couldn’t quite remember, had started their own mail-order company, selling novelty pajamas and T-shirts. They were doing quite well, according to what she had told him a year or so ago when he had last talked to her. Her husband was still pulling down six figures as a tax attorney, so money was not exactly a pressing issue in their household. He would have to get her number from directory assistance, but since she worked at home he could probably reach her right away. He reached into his pants pocket for his phone and began dialing 411, then suddenly slapped it down on the plastic surface of the table.
He knew that if he called her to beg for money he would be giving her a ripe opportunity to remind him of all the family obligations he had bypassed in the past twenty years. She would find indirect ways to do it, but she wouldn’t miss her chance. She never did. If she said something about the sorority her oldest daughter was pledging, for instance, it wouldn’t be an incidental detail. The point would be that they were still waiting for a high school graduation gift from Uncle Calvin. If she mentioned a trip to Nevada to visit her husband’s mother, who spent her time playing slots and polishing her collection of shoes, she would be helpfully reminding him that he had never sent them so much as a card when her father-in-law died. His sister had a talent for that sort of thing. He would get the money he needed, he figured, but would pay for it in the short run, and the long run.
On his way out of the bowling alley, he noticed a large woman two lanes over, leaning over the ball rack, surrounded by a little crew of unhappy children, tugging at the hem of her tight-fitting blouse. She looked up as he passed and began glaring at him with strange intensity, as if her eyes were thumbtacks sticking their tips into his face. It must be the jacket, he thought, looking at his reflection in the glass doors just before hie made his exit.
Neal wandered up one street and down another. He thought about trying to find Bix’s shop and get a preliminary estimate, so he would have some idea of how large a stone he would have to swallow. But he didn’t see how that would help, so kept wandering. There was nothing he could do about his situation now, and that was the world’s best excuse for doing nothing at all. He had some vague intention of finding a library. Not that he had any great desire to read anything just then, but he felt that it would be a fairly peaceful place to hide out. Instead, he found himself in front of a movie theatre at the edge of town, and took note of the 3:30 matinee. It was 1:30 now. He walked back into town, to the park that he had driven by on the day before; he sat on a bench under a lazy-looking tree, observing the movements of squirrels and sparrows, listening to the metallic buzz of the harvest flies, looking at his watch from time to time. He felt a little conspicuous, even with the screen of trees around him.
After the matinee, he went back to the bowling alley to try to retrieve the book he had left there. The lounge was full of people now, all them young or recently young, all of them white. The men wore sport coats and shirts that were half open down the front; the women wore miniskirts and several layers of makeup, and some had taken the trouble to put on dark pantyhose. There was a great deal of jewelry flashing in the neon lights and a miasma of competing fragrances. The book seemed to have disappeared. Neal received a number of welcoming glances from both women and men, who seemed to recognize him as one of their own kind. He merely shook his head, though, and made his way out again, strolling on, from block to block, until he reached the intersection leading to the street where Krike lived. He stopped for a moment and listened to the sounds of doors slamming and dogs yapping and the puttering of a distant lawn mower; he let his gaze drift a little, scanning the street until he spotted the wrecker parked along the curb. Shrugging resignedly, he walked back the way he had come until he found a Dairy Queen, where he had a cheeseburger.
Back at the motel by 8:30, he spent the evening propped uncomfortably on the bed, in his underwear, watching some cartoons with off-color dialogue. He drifted off to sleep a few times. Finally he switched off the TV and got under the covers and was almost asleep when his phone rang.
“Harold. It’s me, Sheila. You don’t mind me calling, do you?”
“No … not much.” He had a sudden, vivid recollection of Sheila’s body, poised and tense, pulling him in a circle in over the living room floor.
“Good. I just can’t sleep right now and I was thinking. We hardly got a chance to talk yesterday.”
“We didn’t, did we?” In fact, Neal remembered nothing that either of them had said, but he did recall a number of uncomfortable silences.
“There was something I meant to ask you.” He could hear the rustling of bed sheets.
“You’re not in bed, are you?”
“Sure.”
“Where’s Krike, then?”
“He’s here,” she said casually. “You want to hear him snore?”
“Uh. I think I’ll—”
From what he could tell, she had already set the phone down on a pillow. Neal heard heavy, uneven breathing, with a slightly phlegmy intake.
“How’s that for music? You said you were going wherever you could find it.”
“You’re not afraid of waking him up?”
“He’s gone, Harold. He doesn’t sleep very much, but when he does he’s like a dead man.”
Neal was beginning to feel aroused, his desire quickened by a twinge of fear; pillow talk in the presence of a husband, even a snoring husband, was a perilous venture. It occurred to him that it might be prudent to just leave the scene altogether. He could take a bus to the Chicago suburbs, after all, let Tucker McCurdy know where he could pick up his father’s gift, and then, probably, make a fast escape by way of Amtrak.
The silence that followed Sheila’s last few words only deepened his anxiety. He heard tires crunching over gravel in the parking lot just beyond the room’s hollow door, and an electric guitar riff spilled into the momentary gap between the opening and the closing of a car door.
“What I wanted to know is …” Sheila finally said. “Well, you’re in the record business, right?”
He nodded to himself, glad that she had reminded him.
“So you must know some other people in the entertainment business. Maybe some people in the theater. In New York City.”
Neal hesitated for a just a moment before committing himself but decided that he would probably never see her again, so what difference did it make? “Sure. It’s all the same industry. We go to the same restaurants, use the same dry cleaners and so on.”
“That’s what I was thinking. So what I was wondering is, if you knew anyone that … Well, I guess I should have told you only there wasn’t enough time, but what I really want to be is an actress. You know, Broadway.”
Neal began feeling uneasy again. He finally identified an odor that had been teasing him for the past couple of hours—some sort of cinnamon musk embedded in something, possibly in the carpet or in the bed covering.
“I tried out for a dance company one time,” she continued. “They were doing Sleeping Beauty, and the choreographer was holding auditions for a few small parts. It was a world-famous Russian someone. I could tell you his name if I had a minute to think about it. It started with U, I think.”
Neal could feel his muscles tightening as he listened. He turned his shoulders from side to side to try to get the kink out of them. “So how did it go?”
“It didn’t really work out. But the choreographer did say I that I’ve got stage presence.” She pronounced the words very deliberately, almost as if she were speaking a foreign language. “He said I should take acting lessons. I think if I ever got a chance … You know, I’ve been practicing.”
She paused for a moment and seemed to be clenching the mouthpiece of the phone with her fist.
“Lyle,” she said in a soft deadpan. “Turning over in his sleep. Dead again.”
After another short pause she raised her voice again. “He brought home a book of plays from the used book store in Paducah. By accident, he said. I’ve learned a few parts. Listen to this. I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman’s charm is fifty percent illusion”—without raising her voice, she was able to put genuine intensity into it, along with a slight growl—“but when a thing is important I tell the truth, and this is the truth: I haven’t cheated my sister or you or anyone else as long as I have lived.” She stopped a moment, as if waiting for applause. “That’s from A Streetcar Named Desire.”
“Yes. I recognized it.” It was clear to Neal that she had seen the movie at least a dozen times. The cadence was Vivien Leigh through and through, but the timbre of her voice was something else—brash and bombastic but almost convincing.
“You think I have talent?”
“Of course,” he said promptly, certain that he was being sincere on some level.
“I know talent isn’t enough. I’m not some daydreamer, you know. It takes some luck, some gumption, maybe a little meanness. I don’t know.” She exhaled long and slow, and there was a slight hoarseness in her voice when she continued. “I’ll never know anything about myself if I don’t take a chance, though. I just thought you might … Well, I’m just not staying in this place forever.”
“It is kind of a scary word, isn’t it? Forever, I mean.” Neal’s mind was drifting a little as he peered at the darkness between the curtains.
There was another silence on her end, an ominous silence, given the forceful way she had been speaking.
Finally she said, “I don’t know how much more I can put up with, Harold.” Her voice dropped a little more. “When he got home this morning, he pitched a fit because I’d been smoking. He hates for me to smoke in the house. It irritates his sinuses or something. He’s such a pansy.” She gave a sigh of disgust. “He went all around the house with a can of Lysol, like he was trying to chase out every little particle of smoke. Then he went through all the drawers in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the bedroom, looking for my cigarettes. I must be some sort of … what do they call those people?”
“What people?”
“Who like to hurt themselves? sad*sts?”
“I believe you’re thinking of masoch*sts.”
“Is that it? I thought masoch*sts were the ones who like to set fires.”
“No, that would be …” Neal couldn’t actually think of the word at the moment.
“Well I’m one of those … whatever. I let him whack me every day I’m alive.”
Neal’s heart began to beat a little faster. “You mean he actually hits you?”
“Not in that sense. Worse, if you know what I mean.”
Neal was lying flat on the bed, and in the dimness of the darkened room, he could see something moving across the ceiling.
“It’s not your problem, Harold,” Sheila said. “I don’t mean to dump it on you.” Her voice had dropped still lower, and Neal sensed that he was sliding away from her. His arousal had left him completely, and he was starting to feel almost queasy.
“I don’t mean to keep you awake.”
Neal felt himself sinking down between the coils of the worn-out mattress.
“A little sleep would be good for both us,” he said.
“If only I could sleep.”
“Don’t try to sleep. Then maybe you will. Good night.”
He turned off his phone, slung it on the bedside table, and stared at the ceiling. But the thing had moved away or flown away, and he was left staring at nothing.
Neal got a cup of coffee at the bowling alley in the morning and took his briefcase with him to the laundromat down the street so he could wash his underwear, his socks and a couple of the black T-shirts he’d been wearing. As he sat staring glumly at the other patrons and shuffling his feet back and forth over the grimy linoleum floor, he noticed the cinnamon smell drifting up from his jacket, and he wondered whether he’d picked it up from the motel room, or whether he’d possibly carried it with him from the lounge at the bowling alley or whether, in fact, it had been in the jacket all along, gradually released by his body heat. His speculations were interrupted by the ringing of his phone.
“Hello?” He was fearing, and halfway hoping, that it was Sheila.
“Hey, jack. I done got your car fixed.”
“Are you Bix?”
“That’s what they call me,” he said impatiently. “When you gonna get over here? I got to make some space in my garage.”
“I’m at the Duds ’n Suds. Is your shop far from here?”
“Not that far. But whyn’t you just sit tight, and I’ll see if Krike can tote you over here.”
About twenty minutes later, Krike’s tow truck pulled up next to the laundromat, and Krike sat picking his teeth as he waited for Neal to finish drying his clothes and make his way out the door.
Krike said nothing when Neal climbed into the truck and remained silent as he drove about five blocks to the garage. Once they had stopped at the garage, Neal asked about the bill, and Krike handed him a yellow sheet with the handwritten figure of $187.09. The charges were listed simply as towing & rel. exp. He opened the zipper pouch and fished out the cash.
“You can keep the change,” he said.
“I was planning to,” Krike said, finally breaking his silence.
Neal decided it would be wise to scoot away quickly, but he still couldn’t resist pursuing the insurance question.
“I was wondering,” he said carefully. “You ever forged an accident report?”
Krike gave him a kind of troubled look. “You’re lucky to get out of this place in one piece, Harold. If you want my advice, I’d say just take your good fortune and go f*ck off.” He took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. There was something tender and almost wistful-looking about his naked eyes. “What’s this gonna cost you, anyway? It might be something to a working slob like me, but you? A big shot? Just take your lumps and go.” When he put his glasses back on, his magnified pupils jumped forward with startling suddenness.
“Sure,” Neal said as he nervously pushed the door open. “Thanks for the advice.”
“It’s free,” Krike said. “Which is more than you can say for anything else in this world.”
Just before he slipped out of the cab, Neal caught another glimpse of Krike’s rifle, still resting innocently in its wrought-iron cradle; superstitiously, he ducked under the imaginary line of fire as he lurched away from the truck.
Sighing, he began to walk toward the garage; he had just about made up his mind that he would try to give Bix a post-dated check.
Neal found Bix leaning over the engine of a station wagon on the blacktop in front of the garage. He was a Black man in droopy green coveralls, anywhere from 45 to 75 years old, slender, tall but stooped, and mostly bald across the top, with bushy, slightly graying fringes on either side. His face had the look of plastic that had melted under intense heat and then hardened again in the cool of the night.
“So you the cat that belongs to the Boccaccio.” He had a thin, scratchy voice with a slightly unsteady pitch.
Unsure of what he wanted to admit to, Neal simply nodded.
“That’s quite a car you got there.” Bix whistled and then clucked his tongue. “Come on here and take a look-see.”
Bix led Neal inside the garage, over a clean-swept, gleaming floor of polished concrete, through an aroma of canned grease and caustic hand soap. He gestured grandly at the refurbished Boccaccio.
“When Krike brought that sucker in,” he said, “I thought there was no way. No sir. Whole hood was gonna have to be replaced and where you gonna get that? Figured I could do something with the bumper. But the hood was split straight through. Plus that custom headlight was shattered. Where you caught a break, though, was the engine. Not a scratch. See for y’self.”
Bix reached inside the car and popped the latch. He yanked the hood open.
“See there? You could a drove it off right away. Once you was out of the state you wouldn’t have to worry about that sign.” He gave Neal a crooked smile. “Krike probably knew that, but he won’t gonna let a job get away. No sir.”
He shut the hood and then drew his fingers lightly, lovingly across it. “How you like that paint job there?”
“You painted it?” Neal could see that the color of the car, still the hue of a cold plum, was now a little closer to purple than to red.
“Had to.”
“I guess that’s extra.”
“Well they don’t paint themselves, you know.”
Neal cleared his throat and hunched his shoulders. “I guess I need to—”
“You ain’t asked how I got it done so fast. Look.” He gestured to the car with his arms spread. “Like new, ain’t it?”
Neal guessed that he was about to be charged more for a rush job, and he was ready to protest that he hadn’t asked for it.
“It’s like this.” Bix had a lively look in his eyes. “I got an old buddy in Mayfield with a junk yard. I called him up just on the hunch. And wouldn’t you know, there was a car just like this one got rear-ended up on Route 45 not two months ago. Smashed worse than yours. Totaled. But it was a rear-end collision, and the front end was like it come from the factory. Perfect. You know the beauty is that they was all made alike. Just one design. There’s only one Boccaccio, so everything from that car was made to fit yours. You hear what I’m sayin’? You a lucky man, jack. If I was you I’d head straight east till I got to Atlantic City. They’s a black jack table with your name on it.”
This was the second time in the last twenty minutes that Neal had been called lucky. But he was still waiting to hear how much he owed.
“I got my buddy to deliver the parts before lunchtime yest’day, and then had the afternoon to get her together, and that was that.” Bix grinned, showing a row of gold teeth.
Finally Neal worked up the nerve to ask. “So how much is it going to be?”
Still smiling, Bix shook his head slowly. “Not a blessed cent.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s on the house, jack.”
“You’re not charging anything?”
“No.” Bix’s smile disappeared without a trace. “All I needs is a little favor.”
There was something so earnest, suddenly, about Bix’s tone of voice that Neal felt a quick tightening in his chest.
“Krike called you a music man. You in the record business. That right?”
“Yeah. That’s right.” It was all Neal could say under the circ*mstances.
“Well, listen here. I got something you can help me with.”
Neal braced himself. He halfway expected to hear Bix give an on-the-spot audition, crooning some doleful mudflat ballad. “O.K.,” he said warily. “What is it?”
“I got this nephew,” Bix said, grimacing, his voice suddenly haggard-sounding. “His mama unloaded him on me three, four years ago. She was gettin’ herself dried out, and she didn’t have nowhere else to put him.” He spread out his hands, palms outward, as if to show that they were empty. “What was I gonna do? She’s my baby sister. So I took in the boy, I sent him to school till he dropped out, I put clothes on his back. I tried to put him to work in the shop, but all he’d do is drop wrenches down into the engine coils. Smoked his junk in the bathroom till my customers started thinkin’ what in the hell is goin’ on? I told him he might’s well stay home. So then he just start eatin’ me out of my house. Kept waitin’ for his mama to take him back, but she got hooked up with a preacher man, and he don’t want no kids around.”
Bix leaned against the car, closed his eyes and gave them a brisk rub. Then he waved his right arm in some vaguely significant way. “So then the boy starts makin’ music. Like he got nothin’ else to do with hisself. Rap music, or whatever they call it now. He got some kind of devil in him, is all I can say.” He paused and let out a long, low whistle. “But I tell you right now, what gets me is them friends of his. First of all, I see ’em settin’ on my sofa and laid out on the floor every blessed day. All day. They sleep in my house. They use my toilet. They clean out the Frigidaire. They smoke up the place.” Once again, he threw out his arms in exasperation. “And some of them guys is scary. Especially the white boys. Now I ain’t got nothin’ against white people. Most white people ain’t any worse than anyone else. But I swear you got to admit it now, some white people is just creepy. Ain’t got no color in they faces, no color in they eyebrows, heads just as round and bald as a light bulb. Ain’t got a friendly word to say to no one. And the noise … oh holy Jesus … that noise they make.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “They playing they music in the backyard and it’s all a thumpa thumpa, thumpa thumpa, just like that. It’s like they never gonna stop. Just thumpa thumpa, thumpa thumpa.” He drummed the beat on the hood of the car.
He gave Neal a searching look now. “So I’m tellin’ you, Mr. Music Man. There’s a favor you can do for me.” Suddenly he turned and disappeared in the small office that adjoined the garage. He came back out carrying a CD with his finger through the center hole.
“I found one of these under a sofa cushion. Got some of they music on it. All I’m askin’ is for you to listen to it. See if there’s anything you can do with it.” Bix looked curiously at the disk. “It sounds like something you could get someone to listen to. I can’t listen to it, but it don’t sound no worse than the junk they put out on the radio. It’s just all thumpa thumpa.”
He held it out to Neal, who took it, grasping it by the edges with the tips of his fingers.
“All I’m sayin’ now is for you to give it a fair shot. If them boys could hook up with a record company, I could get ’em outta my house. And it’s about damn time.”
Neal regarded the disk skeptically before slipping it in the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ll listen to it. I promise.”
“You bet you will. This practically a three-thousand-dollar deal I’m givin’ you, you know. I knew you won’t gonna pay for this with no insurance. Not after that mess you got yourself into. Playin’ around a little. I don’t blame you any. You ain’t old yet. But you tote this up, now. The hood, the headlight, the paint job. I shined up that bumper. Look-a there.” He reached down and ran his hand along the smooth chrome. “Changed the oil while I was at it. Add it all up and you got you a bill for over twenty-eight hundred. All for one little favor.”
Neal cleared his throat and said again, “I promise.”
“You bet. Hey, take them shades off for a minute.”
Neal removed the sunglasses and saw Bix leaning toward him, his face outlined against an out-of-focus background.
“You believe in God, don’t you?”
“Well, not if you mean—”
“Come on. Sure you do. You got the eyes of a God-believer if I ever seen any. You been down to the altar, sure enough.”
“I was just a kid,” Neal said, his voice breaking slightly.
“Once you got it, you got it. I see them eyes in the back of your head.” Bix extended his hand with his fingers forked. “Right back there behind your brain. That’s where they’re at.” Bix reached forward and touched Neal’s forehead with his fingers. Neal flinched, as if afraid that Bix’s fingers would go straight through his skull.
“You see,” Bix said. “It’s the eyes of God planted there. They never go away. And they’ll see what you do, see whether you keep your promise. And you done promised. I heard you twice already. Say it again.”
Neal swallowed, a little reluctant to speak. But once again the circ*mstances seemed to pull it out of him. “I promise.” Trying to be as honest as he could, he added, “If I don’t have any use for it, I’ll see if I can pass it along to someone who’d be interested.”
“O.K. then.” Bix withdrew his hand. “I heard you three times. We got ourselves a deal.” He reached into a pocket in his coveralls and brought out the keys to the car. Giving them a playful shake, he handed them to Neal and grinned. “Drive her away, jack.”
Neal stopped by the motel to check out, and on his way out of town he stopped at the same light where the scoured Corvette had accosted him two days earlier. This time he was relieved to be alone at the intersection, at least for the moment. But as he waited for what seemed a very long time at the light, he saw the large woman from the bowling alley crossing the street in front of him. She was dressed in a tank top and a polka-dot skirt, and there were no children in sight this time. After she crossed the street, she looked in one direction, then the other, and seeing no one around, she turned her back to Neal, lifted the back of her skirt with one hand, while with the other she yanked her panties down just enough to give Neal a good look at her bountiful, snow-white bottom. The light turned green and Neal zoomed ahead. Once he was back on the highway, cruising at 70 miles per hour past tatters of woodland and stripped fields, he began to wonder if he’d just seen a mirage.
12. The Wise Guy
He reached the Ohio River in less than an hour, passed Cairo, thinking momentarily of Huck and Jim drifting through the fog, and then as if by the power of suggestion, he glimpsed the wide Mississippi stretching to the western end of the horizon; he drove on toward clouds that were even darker than the slate hue of the river. The storm broke as he traveled north on I-57, before he reached Marion. Rain beat deafeningly on the roof of the car for at least thirty miles; the wipers could barely keep pace with the streams that washed across the windshield. The rear lights of the cars just ahead of him appeared like faintly blushing faces in a mammoth steam bath. The rain slacked off just enough for him to hear the whoosh of the tires through the run-off.
He persevered as the storm waxed and waned, through heavy gusts that rocked the car and occasional cracks of lightning. He had stowed away Bix’s CD in the glove compartment. When the rain slacked off he thought about slipping it into the player. He had promised to listen to it, and intended to keep that promise, since it wouldn’t cost him anything except a certain amount of time, which he would have to kill somehow anyway. But he wasn’t ready to plunge into the obscure depths of dread that had been suggested by the backstory to the CD. Time enough to make the nephew’s acquaintance, he thought.
About forty miles south of Champaign, the storm had cleared off enough for him to find an exit and go have a late lunch. Afterward, he consulted the road atlas and found that he would need to exit onto Highway 102 near Kankakee and then take Highway 53. Once he reached Joliet, the sky was opening up into a sea-like canopy of blue, as towers of clouds with white tops and bruise-colored bottoms drifted off to the east, leaving the prospect of a mellow evening straight ahead.
The address on the slip of paper that McCurdy’s housekeeper had given him led him into a maze of smooth, clean streets, winding around split-level homes with sprawling lawns shaded by ornamental pear trees and Russian olives.
Neal pulled up next to a home that was neither larger nor smaller than any of the others and double-checked the address. There were two cars in the open garage, so it seemed clear that someone was at home. Once Neal had opened the door he could smell charcoal in the air, although he couldn’t be sure where it was coming from. Shutting the door of the car carefully, to avoid upsetting the strange calm around him, he headed for the walkway leading to the door, but he had barely stepped on the curb when a woman in a pink T-shirt and a flower-print miniskirt approached him, coming around from the back of the house. She stopped twenty feet away, turned slightly to the side, as if she were about to walk away again, but finally came forward, to the edge of the sidewalk. She was wide through the hips but slender from the waist up, with a narrow, sharp-edged face, which seemed poised to signal alarm at any given moment.
She said nothing right away, but her eyes quizzed Neal sharply.
“I’m looking for Tucker McCurdy,” he said.
She hesitated before speaking, and before she had had a chance to say anything, a large, bullet-headed man came up behind her, wearing a spattered apron and carrying a meat fork.
“This your car?”
“Well …” Now that Neal was at the end of the job, he felt that he needed to play it straight. “I drove it here, if that’s what you mean.”
The man approached the car with a look of wonder; he ran his hand along its sharp horizontal edge.
“Man alive. What are the odds of seeing one of these on some ordinary Friday? It is a Boccaccio, right?”
Neal nodded.
The man turned to the woman. “You realize there ain’t but fifty of these in existence? One for every state in the union. What are the odds, huh?” He placed his hand down flat on the hood. “You realize there’s twelve honkin’ cylinders under there? You got any idea what kind of power this thing has? Like about 800 horsepower. Right?” The man gestured with his fork. “Hey, buddy. Level with me, now. You’ve done at least 150 in this thing. Am I right?”
Neal shook his head faintly.
“Don’t give me that. You can’t hide it, no way. It’s like a girl that’s lost her cherry, it’s all over her face. Am I right?”
The woman frowned. “Jarrod. That’s enough.” Then she turned to Neal with a look of decision on her face. “What were you saying?”
“I was informed that Tucker McCurdy lives here.”
She shook her head firmly. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”
Neal could hear Jarrod letting out a kind of snort and flashing a crooked grin. The woman turned and looked at him sharply. “Don’t you have to turn the steaks or something?” He shrugged and then shuffled along toward the backyard.
“Are you Molly Abernathy?” Neal asked.
“It doesn’t matter who I am,” she said firmly. “I don’t know the man you’re asking about.” Then after another slight hesitation, she added, “I’m sorry.” And then she turned away; trailing after Jarrod, she walked across the glistening lawn, toward a wrought-iron gate that opened into the backyard.
“I was really hoping you could help me,” Neal called after her. He slipped his sunglasses off and put on his regular glasses. “It looks like Tucker might be in some trouble.”
Molly stopped but did not look back. “What kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
She began approaching again, giving him a searching, resentful look. “Did his father send you?”
“Yes, he did.”
“I’ve heard that man is a real bastard.”
Neal shuffled his feet. “I wouldn’t know that. I’ve only spoken to him once.”
“Well, who are you, anyway?”
On the point of giving his name, Neal suddenly held back. “I was hired to deliver this car to Tucker. A gift … kind of.”
“What makes you think he’s in trouble?”
“Just something his father said. I don’t really know any of the details. I don’t think his father does, either.”
Molly sighed, and her eyes took on a kind of abstracted look. “I’m not sure I can do anything for you,” she said. “I haven’t seen Tucker for a while.”
“He used to live here, didn’t he?”
“I’m not sure how much I can trust you,” she said in a softer voice. “How do you know Tucker?”
“I don’t. I told you, I’m just here to deliver the car.”
“I know what you said. Look, I’m not trying to be mean or anything, but I’ve got to be a little … careful, when it comes to Tucker.”
Neal was bothered by the evident strain in her voice. “You’re not afraid of him are you?”
“Damn right she is.” Jarrod had come up from behind.
“That’s not true, Jarrod. Tucker isn’t anyone to be scared of. Tucker’s a lamb.”
“Hah!” Jarrod had his hands on his hips, the fork gripped in his fist and pointed out straight, as if he were shooting from the hip like some Dodge City bandit. “He’s either a crackhead or just plain mental.”
“Shut up, Jarrod.”
“Well why the f*ck did you tell him to go away?”
“I never did. You’ve got it wrong, Jarrod. Why don’t you be quiet until you know what you’re talking about?”
Indignant, Jarrod jabbed the fork in Neal’s general direction. “Well, why don’t you tell Mr. Speed Demon about the way he used to wake you up screaming?”
“You don’t need to make such a case about it, Jarrod.”
“And how he’d get under the bed and cling to the box springs and wouldn’t come out until you promised to push the dresser up against the door.”
Molly closed her eyes firmly and shook her head. “It only happened once or twice. Tucker explained that he had nightmares about something that happened when he was in Europe. Every time I asked about it he would just start muttering to himself.”
“What about the way he used to count the forks in the kitchen drawer? Not the knives, mind you—the forks. He did that every night. I know, you told me about that.”
Molly was tugging on the hem of her skirt, staring indifferently at the pattern. “Yes, yes. He did that. He said if he didn’t do it he couldn’t sleep.”
“Well, what was that all about? And what about that missing hundred-dollar bill?”
“That was nothing. He was just behind a little on one of his credit cards. If he’d asked me for a loan I would have given it to him.”
“So did he pay you back?”
“Jarrod, please. The steaks must be burning by now. Go turn them over again.”
The charcoal smell did seem to be getting thicker. Jarrod turned and moved grudgingly away.
“Tucker was … complicated,” Molly said, once Jarrod was out of earshot. “He wasn’t really very easy to live with. But I could tell there was some kind of hurt inside him. I don’t know whether it was how he grew up or something that happened along the way. I probably let him stay too long.”
“Why did he finally leave?”
“I meant what I said before. I never asked him to. But I was getting worried. We were getting a lot of hang-up calls. Tucker never answered the phone himself, which was always a little weird.” She paused; her eyes looked glazed. “And someone showed up one day. He was sort of like you; in fact, until you took those shades off you looked a whole lot like him, but he had this really grainy-looking face. I’ll never forget it. He asked for Tucker very politely at first, but when I said he wasn’t home he pushed his way inside. Thank God, Tucker really wasn’t home.”
“Did you call the police?”
“I waited and asked Tucker if I should, and he said no. He left before it got dark, and I haven’t seen him since then.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
She shook her head firmly. “No. I have no idea.”
Neal co*cked his head a little, giving her an involuntarily skeptical look.
“I mean that,” she said. “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t even know if he’s still in the state. Or still in the country.”
“I have reason to think that he’s in the Chicago area.”
Molly nodded vaguely. “O.K. Whatever. But I don’t have any idea. It’s a big city.”
“Well, is there any chance you might hear from him?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I was just thinking. Could I leave the car with you and maybe you could—”
“Absolutely f*cking not.” Jarrod had come up from behind again.
“I’m afraid I have to agree with Jarrod on this,” Molly said. “After what I told you about, I think I’ve got to cut my ties with Tucker. I’ve got a teenage son. I just can’t take any more chances.”
Neal was suddenly very perturbed. “So what I can do with the car?”
“I tell you what,” Jarrod said abruptly. “You drive it back to Old Man McCurdy and tell him to wedge it up his posterior.”
“Jarrod, you’re not being very helpful.” Molly looked thoughtful for a moment. “Look, I do know someone who might have some information for you. And it just so happens he’s coming over tonight. We’re having a little party, and our guests should be arriving any minute now. You can stay around if you want to. I think we have at least one extra steak.”
Jarrod was about to say something, but she clapped her hand firmly over his mouth. He waved his fork in mute protest; then he shrugged and headed back to the backyard gate, with Molly and then Neal following close behind.
The grill was smoking away at one end of a spacious patio. At the other end was a buffet table, with a paper tablecloth waving gently in a light breeze, a cooler loaded with ice, and a round glass table holding bottles of red wine with a variety of labels. Not long after Neal and his hosts had reached the backyard, a couple of women in sundresses passed through the sliding back door of the house. With a certain cautious instinct, Neal moved away from the new guests, toward Jarrod at the grill.
Jarrod glanced up with a slightly peevish look, and then reached down with his fork into a Styrofoam ice box for a raw steak.
“How do you like it?” he asked Neal.
“Cooked,” Neal said.
“Looks like it’s gonna be medium rare. Hope that’s O.K.”
“It’s fine. I’m not that hungry.”
Jarrod glanced at Molly and the two women, who were sipping wine and giving Neal a careful once-over.
“You know,” Jarrod said, leaning toward Neal and speaking in a confidential murmur, “This McCurdy is a rat. Never mind all the crazy stuff. He’s just a rat through and through when you get right down to it. Here’s the thing about Molly.” He glanced at her again for just a moment. “It’s like any woman. They’re always looking for someone they can mother. You know, it’s their nurturing instinct, or whatever. She convinced herself that this McCurdy character was worth saving. That there was some precious heart underneath all the mess and she just had to give him enough love and care and she could bring out the good in him. Pure sh*tto.”
Jarrod caught Molly’s eye and smiled stiffly. “If you want to know what I think.” Jarrod lowered his voice a little more, but he gestured emphatically with his fork. “I think if you want to find Tucker McCurdy, you’ll have to drag Lake Michigan. He’ll be the one with the concrete loafers—not like those beauties you’ve got on.”
“You think he’s in that kind of trouble?”
“Well.” Jarrod stabbed a steak at the back of the grill and turned it, watching the flames lick the charring edges. “Let’s just say … Tucker McCurdy tried to be a little too smart for his own good. If you know what I mean.”
Molly gestured to Jarrod in an unobtrusive but emphatic way.
“Here …, ” Jarrod said, handing Neal the fork. “Hey, what’s your name, anyway?”
Neal considered his answer for a just a moment. “Cal,” he finally said.
“Watch the steaks for me, Cal. I’ll be right back.”
Molly drew Jarrod away from the guests and spoke to him earnestly for a moment. he guests sipped their wine and peered at Neal over the rims of their goblets. Neal smiled at them, glancing quickly at their knobby ankles and painted toenails. When Jarrod returned to the grill, Neal handed over the fork and then retired to a corner of the patio, sat on a plastic lawn chair, and put his shades back on. He watched from a comfortable distance as two couples arrived and then another unaccompanied woman. Molly stopped by and invited him to help himself to a drink, and he declined. A little later he declined a steak with the same mild cordiality. He told himself that he should go ahead and ask Molly to point out the man with the possible knowledge of Tucker’s whereabouts, but once he had given himself the role of the conspicuously inconspicuous stranger, he found it difficult to pull himself out of it. He hoped that if his sullen presence was enough of an eyesore, Molly would take the initiative to try to get rid of him. But she hardly gave him a glance after half an hour had passed, and against his wishes, the guests, in their own ways, seemed to be trying to make him a part of the occasion. One after another they approached him and made fleeting conversation, each of them seeming to search for some key that would unlock the mystery of his presence, each of them assuming after a few fruitless queries that he was there as the friend of someone who had been unaccountably delayed or had simply forgotten about the party. Neal kept all of his answers terse and elliptical, creating a fuzzy, no-last-name identity for “Cal.” He smiled vaguely, blinking indifferently behind his tinted lenses, sinking deeper into passivity as darkness crept across the patio.
Three of the guests had finally left, when the other remaining couple gathered up the bottle of Pinot Noir and the potato salad they had brought with them and offered parting words to Molly and Jarrod. Molly turned toward Neal and nodded, and he began following the couple. Just before he reached the sliding doors, Molly took him by the shoulder and acted as if she were about to speak, but refrained, shaking her head and smiling vaguely. Neal went on through the sliding door, through the house, darkened except for a single lamp in the living room and an overhead light in the foyer. The man that Molly had indicated was the thin and hollow-chested one, with transplanted, shoe-black hair, who had been sneaking avaricious glances at Neal all evening but, unlike the other guests, hadn’t bothered to say anything to him. After opening and shutting the car door for his companion, the man turned to Neal and simply said, “Follow me.”
Neal trailed him for about ten miles, from one suburb into another, until he finally pulled up at a high-rise apartment complex situated amid darkened office buildings. He accompanied his date inside and made Neal wait for a fairly long time, long enough for the man to peel the woman’s clothes off, strip off his own clothes, engage in efficient foreplay, slip a condom on, make love, get dressed, drink a night cap, smoke a cigarette, promise to call in the morning, take another sip from his drink, and leave with a parting kiss.
When he finally reappeared, he hustled over to the Boccaccio and said, “Follow me just a little further.” He drove several blocks and pulled into an alley behind a supermarket, where he got out of his car and climbed into the Boccaccio.
“You got something to write on?” he asked.
Neal took the slip of paper with Molly’s address out of his pocket and gave it to the man, who took out a fountain pen out of his jacket and scribbled something. When he was finished he dropped his pen back into his jacket and crumpled the piece of paper in his fist.
“I guess this information would be worth something to Voortman, wouldn’t it?”
“Voortman? Who’s Voortman?”
“Don’t play stupid. I know who you are.”
“How’s that?”
“I’ve seen you at the Polaris Club. I’ve seen you back where they keep the hot towels, where all the deals go down.”
“I really don’t—”
“Just drop the act. What I want to know is how much it’s worth.”
Neal looked at him blankly.
“I know Voortman wants this, and I’m not just going to hand it over. What’s it worth?”
Neal considered whether he should correct the mistake or let it ride.
“I said don’t play stupid.” It was dark in the car but Neal could just see the curl of the man’s lips in the remote glow from a streetlight. “You guys carry cash all the time. You run a cash enterprise. I can see the bulge in your jacket, and I can tell it’s not a piece. It’s got to be cash. Come on. What’s it worth?”
Neal’s confusion was giving way to anger. He could see enough of the man’s face to read the smugness and venality written in every feature; the very idea of yielding to that cheap bravado was sickening.
He lunged across the space between the seats and grabbed the man’s clenched fist, shoving it up against the man’s face as he pushed him fiercely against the passenger side door.
“I’m going to do you a favor,” he said, in a voice that carried all the rage he was feeling at the moment. “I’m going to forget that I ever saw your stupid face.”
Neal could see the man’s face drooping and could feel the muscles in his arm going slack. He pried the man’s fingers apart, took the slip of paper, and jammed it in his pants pocket.
“Get out before I kick you out,” Neal said.
The man fumbled for the door latch, and tumbled out of the car backwards, losing his footing when he was out the door. Neal watched him scramble up, scurry back to his car, and drive away, his tires spitting gravel. Once he was alone in the unnatural silence of the alley, Neal shut the door and leaned back, trembling.
He lay for over an hour that night in still another strange room, watching traffic light reflections filtering through the blinds, counting out what was left of the cash he had started with, trying to massage the stiffness out of his lower back, and teasing out some long-remembered lyrics:
. . . Double-belled euphoniums and big bassoons,
Each bassoon, having its big, fat say . . . .
Mostly, though, he was replaying the scene in the car. He realized that he must have been wrong earlier in the day, when he imagined he was leaving behind the persona that he had created in Krike’s living room. It was truer to say that, in recreating himself as Harold Hill, he had been reaching toward something, some capacity for willfulness that had sprung out of the recent disasters of his life—as a reaction against despair or as some lunge for survival—and he was now trying to take full possession of it. He had caught sight of it during his race with the scoured Corvette; he had stalked it and sensed its presence in Krike’s house and had brushed against it as he was dancing with Sheila; and that night, as he hurled himself toward the man clutching the paper wad, he had embraced it for just a little more than a single moment. He knew now that he was in pursuit of a new, unabashed selfhood, and that he was gaining on it from one day to the next.
13. Rendezvous with Voortman
Neal had a GPS on his phone, but he hated the condescendingly servile voice that gave directions. So in the morning he bought a map of Chicago at a convenience store, along with a sticky bun, a cup of coffee, and a yellow Sharpie. Leaning over a stack of motor oil cans, he ate his breakfast and drew a line from the suburb where he had spent the night, up I-88 to the Eisenhower Expressway, east to South Pulaski, then across to the approximate location of the address scribbled on the wrinkled paper scrap. He drove along the freeway in tight but fluid traffic, thankful that at least he wasn’t having to make his way through a weekday rush hour. He had to face the glare from a thinly veiled sun, though, until he found his exit and made his way into the heart of the city.
Neal wound up in a neighborhood of two-story homes and three-story tenements, all constructed of pretty much the same kind of muddy red brick; with their angled facades and the terra cotta tracing around the windows, the row of buildings much have looked elegant at one time.The street was lined with crooked shade trees, and down the length of the block the sidewalks were separated from the lawns by chain link fences sheltering patches of weeds.
He easily found a place to park along the street, between an olive-green Impala and a white minivan. Getting out, he could hear the sound of a softball game in progress—many, many blocks away. However, he was struck by the absence of any children in the immediate surroundings, in spite of the fact that it was a Saturday morning. Not a single person of any age was in sight at the moment.
The building he was looking for was at the corner of the block—a tenement with a covered stoop. When he reached the door he found a row of buzzers with apartment numbers listed but no names. The man hadn’t given him an apartment number, so he was momentarily stumped. All he could do was to try each buzzer in turn.
There was no immediate response when he pressed the top one, but finally someone with a groggy voice answered.
“Do you happen to know where I could find Tucker McCurdy?” Neal spoke shyly, unsure whether he was speaking to a man or a woman.
There was a long pause before the occupant said, “What? Is that you, Maurice?”
“No, I’m just—”
“What?”
Neal was just about to raise his voice, but the intercom went dead.
He braced himself and tried another one. No response at all. He buzzed again. Still no response. He tried the next one down.
A man with a deep voice answered, “Yo.”
“Is Tucker McCurdy anywhere around?”
“Who that?”
“He’s a … I’ve got a message for—”
“No, I mean who you?”
“I’m just … sort of a go-between. He wouldn’t know my name.”
“Oh. Who exactly you going between, anyway?”
Neal sighed. “I just need to know where to find him.”
“I don’t know where to find him. I been in here for a week with a migraine headache. What’d you say your name was again?”
“Never mind.”
He tried the last one. No response.
Neal went down the steps, stuck his hands in his pockets, and stared hopelessly at the sky. He felt like cursing, but in the silence and apparent emptiness of the street he felt oddly exposed, and he chose to hold his tongue. He decided the best thing he could do, for the time being, was to sit in the car and wait. No one had told him what Tucker looked like; no one had given him a picture. But he figured that if someone about his age approached the building, key in hand, that would probably be his man.
Heading back to the car, he found that the street wasn’t completely vacant, after all. A large man in a light blue windbreaker was standing over the Boccaccio, examining it, running his fingers along the grill. When he saw Neal approaching he turned and smiled. He had a wide, pleasant face, a kind of U-shaped face with a broad, dimpled chin.
“This your car?”
Neal nodded vaguely.
“She’s a beauty, ain’t she?” The man caressed the side of the car and beamed. “This here is one of a kind.”
Neal gave him a noncommittal smile and tried to move around him to reach the driver’s side door, but the man turned and faced Neal, looming over him by about half a foot.
“Hey, man. Whyn’t you pop the hood? Lemme get a look at the engine.”
Neal stepped around the man. “It’s just an engine,” he said coolly as he reached for the door. He got in but the man held the door as Neal tried to shut it.
“You don’t need to get your shorts in a wad, man. All’s I want is to take a look. I just wanna see how they stack the pistons. This is got a ten-cylinder engine, don’t it?”
“Twelve,” Neal answered flatly. He pulled on the door, and the man let go.
Neal pointedly looked away. As he gazed at the stoop of the tenement, he could feel the knot on his head throbbing a little; his right eye started twitching. He hoped that the man would lose interest and leave him alone, but instead he walked around the back of the car, stopping now and then to lean in or press his hand against the metal. Neal watched him through the rear-view mirror, and then, glancing through the windshield, he noticed that someone’s arm was propped on the open driver’s side window of the white minivan up the street. Just then the curious stranger appeared on the passenger side of the Boccaccio and began rapping on the window. Neal tried to ignore him, but the man only rapped harder, so Neal grudgingly lowered the window.
The man poked his head into the car. “Hey look-a that.” He pressed his fingers on the dashboard. “That’s real wood, there, ain’t it? Holy injun. And what about that? Seven friggin’ gears.”
Neal drummed on the steering wheel nervously and finally said, “Hey, do you
mind …?”
“Oh, sure. Sorry to bother.” He pulled his head back out and Neal shut the window.
Neal gave his full attention to the front steps of the tenement again, afraid he might have missed something during his little exchange with the man in the windbreaker. He puzzled a little over the jacket the man was wearing; it was a little warm for that, he thought; he wondered fleetingly if the bulky garment had any significance, but he was startled out of his reflections by more rapping, this time on the driver’s side window. The man was leaning over again, still smiling broadly—clearly not someone who took offense easily. Neal wanted to give him the finger, but took the man’s size into account and simply drummed the steering wheel and looked straight ahead. When the man made it clear he wasn’t going anywhere, Neal opened the window.
“I bet this baby really drinks up the gas.”
“You could say that.”
“I’ll bet. Hey, I bet this thing takes turns like a dream, don’t she? That’s why they build them wide and low like this. There’s this road up in Michigan that—”
“You know,” Neal said abruptly. “I’d love to talk cars all morning, but …”
“Yeah, yeah. I talk too much, I know. That’s what my brother always says. Look at him over there.”
Neal could see the hand reaching out of the minivan, making a brusque beckoning gesture.
“See? He thinks I’m jabbering too much. But I swear. This is a hell of a job. Sittin’ all day long like this. They tell us to just run here, run there, and then just sit for an hour, two hours. It’s a crappy way to make a livin’, I’ll tell you.”
Neal could see the van door opening and a face peering out, glowering.
“My brother,” the man said to Neal. “He’s been at me for thirty-seven years. When we was in the crib together he used to crack my skull. No kiddin’.”
Neal tried to keep focused on the front of the building, but he was beginning to feel tense and even slightly nauseated. He decided to pull away for a while, ask around a little in the neighborhood, maybe get lucky. He started closing the window, but the man grabbed the edge of it before it was closed.
“Hey, I was thinkin’ maybe you could let me drive her around the block once.”
Neal shook his head.
“I swear I’ll be careful. I just wanna get a feel for what she can do. I wanna see if the turning radius is as sweet as what they say.”
Neal shook his head firmly and inched the window up some more.
“Some other time,” he said. He started the car and began moving away; in the rearview mirror he could see the man standing by the curb, watching dolefully as the Boccaccio moved down the block.
Neal turned left at the intersection, drove one block, passing a vacant lot full of weeds, littered with plastic grocery bags and bits of Styrofoam; going straight through the next intersection, he passed under railroad tracks, and looking to the right at the traffic light, spotted a row of businesses. He headed that way and parked near a shop with an authentic, shined-up barber pole.
Inside the shop he found a barber shaving the head of a customer with one hand while holding a cigar with the other hand. The shop was only half-lit, and there was no one around except the one barber and the one customer. The two of them were watching a television that was suspended from the ceiling; the flickering screen showed grainy surveillance footage of a man and a stylishly dressed woman coming out of a nightclub, with a graphic at the bottom reading A LITTLE ACTION ON THE SIDE? The voiceover sounded muttery and snide.
“Excuse me,” Neal said. “Do either of you know someone named Tucker McCurdy?”
The barber took a drag on the cigar and turned his head slightly in the direction of the doorway, where Neal was standing. He opened his mouth mutely, puckered his lips a little, took another drag on his cigar, turned back to his customer to scrape last flecks of lather off his scalp, turned back toward Neal and shrugged. “Check down the street,” he said, taking a towel and giving a one-handed massage to the top of the customer’s head. “At the Blue Tiger. Everybody ends up over there sooner or later.”
Neal offered his thanks to the barber’s back and stepped outside, looking up and down the street at the signs of the shops. Walking a block and a half down the street, stepping over low spots in the pavement ringed with dried mud, he passed a couple of pedestrians whose eyes were carefully averted from Neal’s. He kept on down the street until he spotted the logo of the Blue Tiger on a storefront window—a royal-blue cat with a tail that curled through the loops in the letter B, and, on closer inspection, eyes that consisted of eight-balls. Through the window Neal could see rows of pool tables. Instinct told him to exchange his glasses for the prescription shades before he stepped through the door.
He had braced himself for the smell of cigarette smoke, but the most prominent fragrance was some kind of cheap floor wax. It seemed that the click-clop sounds of balls that resonated through the building were all immediately absorbed by the walls, as if they were made of some highly porous sheet rock. The place was doing a brisk business on this Saturday morning; nearly every table was occupied, and all of the players had a look of self-absorbed concentration, suggesting that money for the monthly cable bill might be at stake.
Neal cleared his throat and made himself step forward.
“Has anyone here seen Tucker McCurdy?”
Not everyone looked in his direction, but he could see that he was being brazenly sized up by the employee in the corner of the room, leaning on the counter with a magazine spread out in front of him, guarding the cooler stocked with canned drinks. A player at a table to Neal’s left was lining up his shot, sliding the cue though his fingers; he halted before committing himself and stepped back from the table, cutting his eyes toward Neal in casual annoyance. “Look downstairs,” he said, before leaning over his shot again.
Neal walked across the gum-spotted floor, spotting the passage to the stairwell and, after taking a moment to reconsider, headed down the dark passage. He heard strained voices as he descended.
“Come on. Those cards aren’t going to get any prettier. Call, raise, or fold.”
“I don’t see any stopwatch.”
“Three, two, one …”
“I’m out, I’m out. Screw you.”
“Call.”
“O.K. Let’s see ’em.”
“Jacks and sevens. Choke on that.”
“Choke on this. A rack of evens beats two pairs.”
“Since when?”
“Since 5:32 this morning.”
“I must have been in the head.”
“Well, hold your bladder next time. Hey what in the … what’s that smell?”
Automatically, Neal sniffed his jacket. He hadn’t emerged from the stairwell yet.
“What’s it like?”
“It’s like … watermelon!”
“It’s my chewing gum. Want some?”
“Spit it out. I’m gonna lose my breakfast.”
Neal pushed open a blank metal door and stepped into a room that was suffused in yellowish-green light.
Five card players looked up as he stepped forward. They were sitting around a conference table strewn with beer cans, candy wrappers, and empty bottles of orange juice. A sealed but half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey sat somewhere near the middle, next to a pile of plastic chips. There was nothing distinctive about the players except for their general air of agitation and the fact that they were white, unlike the pool players upstairs.
Neal’s throat was dry as he began to speak and nothing came out. He swallowed thickly and tried again. “Anyone here seen Tucker McCurdy?”
“Not lately,” one of the players said. “He’s not welcome here anymore,”
“Any idea where I can find him?”
“No. But if you do find him, let me know. I need to kick his face a few times.”
“After I crack his knee caps,” someone put in.
“Only after I stick an ice pick through the top of his skull.”
The first man said, “He owes every one of us money. So if you happen to—”
“Actually,” Neal said abruptly, “I wonder if one of you could tell me what he looks like.”
All five stared at him with narrowed eyes.
“Hey, I think I’ve seen you before,” the first man said. “Aren’t you Voortman’s guy?”
Neal shook his head.
“I swear to God. You look just like him.”
“I’m not from around here,” Neal said, finding it oddly difficult to keep his voice steady. “I was sent here to find Tucker McCurdy.”
“Well, join the freakin’ club.”
“If you could maybe tell me something about—”
“You want to know what he looks like? O.K. Picture the most pasty-faced guy you can remember from high school. Now make him about six foot two. Tall enough to make the basketball team but with absolutely no natural grace. A bench warmer.”
“Yeah. And give him hairy eyebrows.”
“And these little eyes that look like rolled boogers.”
“And he’s got kind of an up-and-down head. You’ll see what I mean if you ever find him.”
The first man tapped his cards on the table impatiently. “I’ll tell you what, though. If you ever find him, you should just shake his hand and then kick him in the balls. You’ll be ahead of the game that way. See, our mistake was believing this shtick he’s got, of how his old man’s rich and just about to die. He’s always good for a few bucks, right? We’ve all learned our lesson.”
“His father is rich,” Neal said. “I can vouch for that.”
“Lucky him.”
“But I don’t know about him being sick. I just spoke to him the one time, and he seemed O.K … Sort of.”
“Well, he’s got a serious condition,” the first man said. “He’s sick with Huntington’s disease.”
“I heard it was Parkinson’s disease.”
“I heard it was some Latin thing that’s got like ten syllables.”
“Congestive heart failure is what he told me.”
“All I know,” the first man said, “is that if you’re looking for that son of bitch you’d better get a move on. Before someone else gets to him first.”
Neal was more than ready to get out of the stifling room, with its freakish lighting and its atmosphere of perspiration, mildew and accumulated farts.
“Thanks, anyway,” he said.
“If I was you I’d write it off,” the first man said. “It’s probably too late, anyway. Things were bound to catch up with that sniveling sh*t.” He offered a smile of grim satisfaction. “Can I deal you in the next hand? I swear this is an honest game. We like to change the rules now and then, but it’s all on the up.”
“Not my game,” Neal said hurriedly.
“Well, say hi to Voortman for us.” He winked at Neal and then leaned forward to scoop up the chips.
It wasn’t the same kind of wink that Krike had given him three days earlier, but once again Neal felt that he was wrongly sized up. He would have issued some kind of firm denial if he’d thought it would do any good, but he simply pushed his way back through the door, walking into a darkness that seemed thicker and deeper now.
Driving back under the railroad tracks, Neal decided he should go up to the tenement’s stoop again and try the buzzers; he hoped he could remember which of them had given no response the first time. When he pulled around the corner of the street, though, he suspected he had come to the end of his search. Along the sidewalk across from where the minivan was parked, he saw the man in the blue windbreaker, and an equally large man in an identical blue windbreaker—his brother, Neal assumed. Between them was a man in sweat pants and a faded T-shirt—a dough-faced man, with some features that immediately made Neal think of Garvin McCurdy. He had his hands clamped behind his back by the large man that Neal had already spoken to. The three men were about fifteen feet away from the minivan, moving awkwardly with stuttering forward motion as the man in the middle let his feet drag and made feeble efforts to wrench his arms free.
Neal slowed the car long enough to see what was happening, then rolled up into the space that remained between the slow-dancing trio and the white minivan.
The three of them stopped for a moment, gaping at the Boccaccio with a collective look of surprise, before the men in windbreakers began to tug the other man in a sideways lurch, intending to move around the car. Neal turned the car’s wheels a little to the right, to show them that he meant to block their way. The brother of Neal’s acquaintance began cursing as Neal lowered the driver-side window.
“I’m looking for Tucker McCurdy,” he said.
The brother’s face was blood red along the forehead, white down the sides of his nose and along his lips. “What the f—”
“Are you Tucker McCurdy?” Neal asked the man in the middle.
“No!” he screamed. “I’m not! I am not Tucker McCurdy! I don’t even know Tucker McCurdy!”
“Shut your windpipe!” The man holding his arms jerked him back, momentarily lifting him off his feet.
Looking at the two men with windbreakers closely, Neal decided that if they were twins, they must be fraternal, not identical. Where the first man’s face was broad and his chin agreeably dimpled, the second had features that looked pinched and unfriendly.
“Look, they mistook me for someone else,” the man in the middle said, appealing to Neal. “They think I’m some guy named McCurdy, but I’m not. I swear I’m not.”
The friendly-faced man cuffed him. “Just shut up. It don’t matter what your name is now. Soon it’s gonna be Splatface.”
“Pleeeeease,” the man in the middle cried, his eyes fixed on Neal.
“You gotta move, chump,” the pinch-faced man said. “We got business to take care of here.”
Neal rolled forward a little more. He was conscious of the fact that the men were wearing heavy windbreakers for a reason, but he could see that their hands were engaged; he was also somewhat giddily and even spitefully aware of the power he wielded behind of the wheel of a twelve-cylinder automobile.
“I’ve come to find Tucker McCurdy and take him with me … to see Voortman.” So far, that name had carried some sort of force, and Neal, in the pressure of the moment, thought it might be a useful card to play.
“Voortman?” The mean-looking twin grew suddenly stiff. “I thought you looked familiar, just now.” He turned to his brother. “Hey, f*ckhead. This the guy you was jabbering with? How come you didn’t tell me he was from Voortman?”
“I didn’t know him from nowhere. Who’s he supposed to be?”
“You know. He’s the guy.”
“What guy?”
“From the Wahoo Club. The one who keeps the key to the wine cellar. You know.”
“Oh, that guy. I know who you’re talking about. But he didn’t have them shades on before.”
“Open your eyes for a change!” The pinch-faced man reached around and slapped the back of his brother’s head. “You need to look around you instead of always blowing like a horse’s behind.”
For the moment—and it was strange how tightly he was locked in the moment, as if nothing had happened for the past week—Neal was more impatient than afraid. His mind zeroed in on how he could get the presumed Tucker McCurdy into the car.
“I was told to get Tucker McCurdy and bring him to Voortman,” he said in a blood-drained voice. “You are Tucker McCurdy,” he said, staring straight at the man in the middle, “aren’t you?”
The man said nothing as the two brothers tightened their grip, forcing him to bend his knees slightly; he stared, as if trying to find the right answer in Neal’s eyes.
“This is the famous Tucker McCurdy,” said the mean-looking twin. “We have some business with this gentleman.”
“Voortman’s instructions were very clear,” Neal said in a carefully measured way, sensing a return of the rage that had flashed through him the night before. “Bring Tucker McCurdy. In the flesh. No ifs or anything.”
The face of the pinch-faced twin was slowly turning several degrees paler. “Look. We got nothin’ against Voortman. All right? It’s just that we got—”
“I told you what Voortman said. He was very clear about—”
“We got our own orders. This is just some business of … This is got nothin’ to do with Voortman, O.K.?”
“I can’t f*ck around, guys.”
The man in the twins’ grip looked as if he were about to slump onto the pavement from nervous exhaustion. He was no longer pulling and tugging; the look on his face was a tortured parody of a smile.
“You can tell Voortman he can have him. And best wishes and all. But we got our business first. It won’t take long. And we aren’t planning to kill him, exactly.”
“Not on purpose, anyway,” the friendly-looking brother put in.
Neal shook his head, in preparation for whatever it was he meant to say next, and he would know what it was as soon as he said it. “You can’t change the rules, guys,” he insisted, imagining for a split second that he was rebuking the card players in the basem*nt of the Blue Tiger. “You can’t change the rules.”
“What rules?”
“The rule is that Voortman gets the first piece. You see what I’m saying? Everybody gets a piece. That’s only fair. But Voortman get his piece first! As in numero uno. As in el primero!” From somewhere in the back of his mind he could see that he was beginning to overdo it, but he could hardly stop himself.
“Look man, it’s not like—”
“What did I just say?” Neal hurled his voice with a strange and exhilarating urgency. “The first piece! You guys can have the rest.”
“But like—”
“You don’t want any trouble with Voortman.” As Neal spoke, he let the car roll forward a little more. “Ask Mr. McCurdy there if it’s fun to mess with Voortman.”
The two brothers looked at Tucker involuntarily, and then the one who seemed to be in charge frowned at Neal and started to say something but checked himself. He glared at Tucker, who by now had nearly wilted down the pavement. He wrenched Tucker’s arm up, while his brother pushed from behind, until Tucker was standing again, holding himself up in a kind of rubber-kneed wobble. The mean-looking twin pushed up on Tucker’s chin with his fist and acted as if he were about to spit in his face, but instead he told his brother to let him go, and then he pushed him forward and followed that hard shove with a kick in the back. Tucker went sprawling down to the pavement and would have slammed his knees on the asphalt if he hadn’t reached his hands out just in time.
“Have him back in an hour,” the pinch-faced brother said to Neal.
Neal refrained from saying anything until Tucker had made his way gropingly toward the passenger-side door and climbed into the car. “Sure thing,” he said, without looking at anyone in particular. He drove away in a slow, deliberate way, picking up speed only after turning right at the intersection. Without giving any serious thought to what he was doing, he made his way through a succession of unassuming neighborhoods until he found the sign that pointed to the freeway entrance ramp.
His passenger sat humped over, knees cramped at a sharp angle, hands on the dashboard, whimpering and choking. Neal ignored all of this as he concentrated on making his way out of the urban grid. Once they were out on the freeway, rolling along at a smoother clip, the pathetic sounds were harder to tune out, and they were beginning to seem somewhat forced.
Neal finally had had enough. “Will you please stop that?”
The sobbing did stop for a moment, but soon afterward Tucker began to moan like a man who has been strung on a pole and left to die. It finally dawned on Neal that his passenger had apparently believed him when he said he’d been sent by Voortman.
“Look. You can stop all that. I’m not from Voortman. I’ve never seen Voortman. I’d never even heard of Voortman until yesterday.”
Without changing his posture in any way, Tucker was suddenly still and completely silent for a full minute. Finally he sat up and turned to Neal with a look of giddy exhaustion.
“What? You’re serious?”
Neal was irked by the implication that he was ever not serious, and he felt like pulling over, pushing Tucker out of the car, and driving off to Canada. But he managed to hold back whatever resentment he felt at the moment. “I’m serious,” he said plainly.
“Well, who are you? Who sent you?”
Neal ignored the first question. “Your father sent me.”
“How do you know my father?”
“I don’t exactly know your father, but I met him, and he sent me to find you.”
“Why?”
“Because he thought you were in some kind of trouble. I guess he was right.”
Tucker closed his eyes and slumped back limply in the seat, seeming to notice the softness of the leather now for the first time, and also experiencing perhaps the first wave of real relief. But barely a moment passed before he was frowning with irritation. “I asked him to send money, not a person.”
Again, Neal felt offended—mostly because he had just undergone a certain amount of risk on Tucker’s behalf. The image of the twins’ bulging jackets kept recurring.
“Well this person was sent to bring you this car. Happy birthday, or whatever.”
“My birthday was three months ago.”
“Then Merry Christmas five months early.”
“What does … so you’re saying he’s giving me this car?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Whoa.” Tucker opened his eyes and spread his arms over the sides of the seat. “Jesus in Heaven! What the … Hey, wait a minute.” Tucker suddenly turned toward Neal, tensed. “You’re not just having fun with me. You’re not some sick goon, just messing with my head, huh? Look at me!”
“I’m trying to drive, you freak!” As if to stress the point, Neal dodged around a plodding Winnebago. “What are you talking about, anyway?”
“It’s a classic torture technique. Don’t ever try to tell me I don’t know about torture. I’ve been through it all, buddy.”
“Just settle down,” Neal said through his teeth.
“Every day, buddy! Every day, when I was in Bulgaria, in the detention camp. They used to tell me I was going home, that they were trading me for some double agent that the CIA had snared. They were doing everything they knew how to crush me. Crush me.” Neal could see little flecks of saliva leaping from Tucker’s mouth across the sunlight that glared through the window.
“Settle down,” Neal said again, quietly.
Tucker slumped down in the seat again, sinking into the leather, clenching and unclenching his fists, repeating something in an inaudible voice. Neal glanced over several times and saw Tucker’s lips continue to move in an almost convulsive way.
Neal found this even more distracting that the various kinds of noise that had come out of Tucker’s mouth.
“What were those guys all about, anyway?” Neal asked, hoping to nudge Tucker into some halfway normal frame of mind.
Tucker acted as if he were alone in the car, being whisked along by an invisible chauffeur.
“Come on, what was—”
“If you have to know,” Tucker said suddenly, “it was preseason football. O.K.? Preseason football, damn it! It ought to be against the law.”
Neal glanced at Tucker, expecting him to continue. He had the same vertical profile as his father, the same kind of high, flat forehead and prominent chin; Tucker’s nose darted forward at the tip, though, and his features were generally sharper. His small eyes crouched under the heavy rims of their deep sockets, making them seem even smaller than they actually were.
“Look,” Tucker finally said, “If you’re going to play a football game, with uniforms and fans and cheerleaders and everything, you should at least be expected to win, or try to win. Don’t you think so?”
“Sure,” Neal replied after a slight hesitation.
“Losing on purpose is supposed to be against the law or something. Right?”
Tucker waited for a response, so Neal nodded and murmured, “Right.”
“O.K. So how come it’s all right for an NFL team to draft an All-America tailback in the first round, put him in for exactly five snaps, and take him out again, and replace him for the rest of the game with the arthritic ten-year pro that they picked up on waivers from the worst team in the league? Why is that O.K.? Why is it O.K. to play your taxi squad defense against the starting offense from the other team—for two possessions? I want someone to explain that to me someday. I’m telling you it’s a crime! It’s a disgrace to humanity!”
Tucker suddenly dropped into a silence so deep that walls of sound-proof glass couldn’t have made it any more complete.
“So,” Neal finally said, “I’m thinking you lost some money.”
Tucker’s eyes were firmly closed. “What can I say? It was a rivalry game. I was expecting both teams to show some pride.”
Neal maneuvered past a caravan of sixteen-wheelers and slipped a little spitefully past a couple of preppy-looking men in a BMW convertible.
“So who exactly is this Voortman, anyway?”
Tucker opened his eyes narrowly and gave Neal a stern, reproachful look. “I’d advise you not to use that name too freely.”
“It saved your life, didn’t it?”
“It’s not a name that you should just throw around.”
“Well, who is he, anyway? That’s all I want to know.”
“Look, you’re much better off not—”
Tucker suddenly leaned forward, staring intently at the view of the skyline through the windshield. The morning haze had melted away by now, and the sun, though still on the upswing, was high enough to drop crowns of bright light on the tops of the tallest buildings. “What the … Are we going east?”
“Yes.”
“Why are we going east?”
Neal wasn’t exactly sure. He had taken the east-bound ramp from pure instinct, possibly because he had some vague idea of returning to North Carolina, but he might have had no reason at all.
“You can’t get out of Chicago this way!” Tucker bellowed. “You’ll run right into the freakin’ lake! Turn around!”
Neal shrugged and began signaling and looking for the nearest exit.
“No!” Tucker screamed. “Not like that! Don’t exit!”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to stop at any lights. These people have stooges on every corner. Just go around the loop and head for I-80. West. And step on it when you get past Tinley Park!”
14. Ought to Give Iowa a Try
Tucker lapsed into eerie silence for the next fifty miles, sunk in a tense, resigned posture as he gazed through the windshield. Once or twice, Neal noticed his passenger plucking one of his eyelashes and blowing it softly off the tip of his finger. Caught in the act, Tucker shifted his eyes self-consciously but otherwise he appeared to be immured in some mute conversation with himself.
“Exactly how far do you want to go?” Neal asked, somewhat unnerved by an increasing sense of solitude.
Tucker seemed entranced, and it wasn’t at all clear that Neal would get an answer to his question.
“Illinois is simply not safe,” he finally said. “Not safe at all. Don’t stop until you get to Iowa.”
“That’ll be another hour and a half,” Neal pointed out. “We might have to stop for gas before then. This car chugs it, you know.”
“If you must,” Tucker said sullenly. “But keep the engine running.”
“So what is it? Does this Voortman own the state of Illinois or something?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Actually, I do want to know. I’m sort of in the middle of this. I’d like to know what it’s all about.”
Without appearing to acknowledge what Neal had just said, Tucker sat up and placed his hand absent-mindedly on the gearshift.
“Let go of that,” Neal snapped.
“It’s my car, remember?”
“Right, right. You want to drive? You want to just drop me off at the nearest bus station?”
“No. This is a good arrangement.”
“O.K. Well, if you want to keep this arrangement for a while, I want to know some things.”
Tucker sighed and leaned back, letting the subtle mechanism ease his head and shoulders down. “For the record,” he said in a subdued voice, “Voortman is a certain kind of businessman. With a wide-ranging financial empire. He has friends in every corner of this state and several other states east of the Mississippi. I don’t know how much detail I can go into without putting your life at risk, but it goes without saying that any global business entity depends on the cooperation of numerous local officials. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just say that there are wheels within wheels.”
“He runs a cash enterprise. Am I right?”
“Yes. Among other things. I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but you’re right about that.”
“So are you one of the wheels inside the wheels?”
“Well obviously, any cash enterprise is bound to be somewhat labor intensive.”
“I guess so.”
“It goes without saying,” Tucker insisted, waving his right hand irritably. “For a certain amount of time, I was employed by Voortman’s organization as a courier.”
“That’s a pretty way of putting it.”
“Yes.” Tucker set his jaw and looked pointedly away from Neal. “Well, I don’t mind saying that I was a trusted associate. I didn’t deal directly with the man, you know, but I took my orders from the man’s man.”
“You were certainly in high demand, for some reason. Or so I gathered.”
Tucker nodded vaguely. His features suddenly looked drawn; his eyes took on a filmy, abstracted look. He cleared his throat twice before speaking. “Well, you know in any cash enterprise, a few dollars are bound to disappear. Here and there. Let’s just say I was a target of suspicion.”
“Let’s just say you might have stolen a few dollars.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.” Tucker sounded genuinely indignant. “From my point of view, there were some back payments in there, money that had been owed to me and never paid. You see?”
“My God. Dishonest criminals. What is this world coming to?”
Tucker slumped in his seat again and stared at his fingertips. “Your sarcasm is pathetic, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
They were both silent for a couple of miles, as they made their way through acres and acres of ripe corn, under a sky that was rimmed with clouds at the margins but clear and pale overhead. However, Neal expected that his passenger would eventually say a little more in his own defense and he wasn’t disappointed.
“You have to understand that I never meant to keep it, even though I was owed that money. I was treating it as a loan. I fully expected to replace that cash in a matter of days.”
“Except it looks like you didn’t.”
“I would have in a couple more days. But I hit a run of bad luck.”
“Pre-season football?”
“No this was around the time of the British Open. I swear, I will never forgive Tiger Woods.”
“You know, you ought to steer clear of sports. Money sports, anyway. Maybe you should take up volleyball.”
Tucker ignored this suggestion. “They always used to let me keep a little walking-around money. A couple thousand, say. Just to grease the wheels of commerce. So I figured I was in the clear for at least a week, but the man’s man sent his man around to have a few words with me.”
“Was that the guy who went to see Molly?”
“Yeah. I thought you were him, at first.”
Neal felt a mischievous smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “And now you’re sure that I’m not him.”
Tucker froze, clenched his knees tightly, and gave Neal a lingering sidewise look. “Don’t f*ck with me, man.”
“I was kidding, O.K.? Get over yourself.”
Tucker glowered at Neal, just long enough to give him a mild case of the creeps, then abruptly faced the other way, staring silently at the passing countryside for the next dozen miles.
When the gas gauge showed an eighth of a tank, Neal remembered the housekeeper’s warning about the faulty needle, and he took the nearest exit, pulling up at a busy truck stop.
As soon as he killed the engine, he heard Tucker begin to protest: “I told you
to—”
“Shut up,” Neal said irritably. “Do you really want to blow up the car after you just got it? Just hide under the seat if you’re so damn scared.”
Tucker hunched his shoulders and frowned, but said nothing. Neal got out to pump the gas, and then went inside the station to buy a package of pretzels and a root beer. Coming out again, passing through the haze of dust and truck exhaust, he found Tucker standing with his hands against the roof of the car, his head down between his arms.
Neal approached him carefully, regarding him with a blend of compassion, apprehension, and sincere dislike. “You O.K.?”
Tucker nodded without raising his head.
“You want anything?”
Looking up, Tucker glared distastefully at Neal’s open bag of pretzels. “Not that,” he said.
“Maybe we ought to stop somewhere and eat. You’ll probably feel better after you get some food on your stomach.”
Gazing over the top of the car, Tucker blinked rapidly, as if he were getting his first glimpse of daylight after seven weeks in a mine shaft. “Where are we, anyway?”
“I don’t know. This was Exit 27. Let me see.” He reached into the back seat to get his road atlas and opened it up on the hood of the car. “We’re about thirty miles from Moline,” he announced.
“Next stop, Iowa,” Tucker said, his voice sounding a little forced now. “Let me see that.”
Neal handed him the atlas, and he flipped a couple of pages until he had the state of Iowa stretched out in front of him like a fat, slumbering sow. He ran his finger up and down the right-hand page, shaking his head in frustration. “Hey, where the hell is it?”
“What are you looking for?”
“There’s supposed to be someplace called Mt. Pleasant, not too far from the Illinois border.”
Neal took the atlas and scanned the map until he had his finger on the right spot. “Here,” he said. He fumbled in his pocket for the Sharpie he had bought that morning, and he drew a line on the map, across and down. “Due south of Iowa City. I-80 to I-380, which turns into U.S. 218, it looks like.”
“How long will it take?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not too long. Why are we going there?”
“I’ve got a friend there. A very dear friend.”
“And you didn’t know the way?”
“Haven’t met him yet.” Tucker was suddenly animated. “Hey, can I borrow your phone?”
Neal hesitated for a moment but, without giving it much thought, he reached into his pocket and handed it over. Tucker took it, offered up a shadow of a smile, and then disappeared quickly around the back of the station. Neal slumped against the side of the car, closed his eyes, and had nearly fallen asleep when he heard Tucker coming back to the car, his shoes frantically slapping the asphalt.
The two of them climbed back into the Boccaccio, and Neal started to turn the key, but before he could start the car, Tucker reached over and grabbed him by the wrist.
“First things,” he said, in a suddenly brisk, business-like voice.
“What?”
“I need to borrow some money,” Tucker said. “You see, I left my cash in my apartment. I never carried my wallet with me in that neighborhood. I was hoping you could loan me a few dollars.” He smiled with just a glint of boyish charm.
“A loan, huh? Another loan? I’m not so sure about your credit history.”
Tucker laughed in a weirdly deliberate way. “I guess I deserved that. But it’s different now. I have the car. Collateral, right? I’m good for it. All I need is maybe fifty dollars, maybe a hundred … maybe two hundred.”
“Are you sure that’s enough?”
“I think two hundred will do it,” Tucker replied quickly, ignoring the irony. “I mean … if you have it.”
Neal took the key out of ignition and cupped the key ring in his right hand. In purposeful silence, he gave Tucker a close, critical look, observing the strain reflected in his features as he struggled to force an agreeable-looking demeanor over the deep-set worry lines that cut down between his eyebrows and bracketed the corners of his mouth.
“As long as we’re putting first things first here,” Neal finally said, “let’s talk about my immediate future. Becoming your chauffeur wasn’t part of the deal I made with your father.”
“Sure, sure. I’ve got plans. You’ll be paid for your services, absolutely.”
“You mean in addition to paying back the loan?”
“Right.”
“And exactly what services did you have in mind?”
“Just keep on driving. You’re good at that.” He laughed drily. “I’ve got some ideas about how to sell the car. Trust me on that. And I need a driver in the meantime. We’ll have to cross through a dozen counties, and there are outstanding warrants on me in most of them. It’s not a good idea for me to be driving in daylight.”
Neal leaned back and gave Tucker another appraising look. “I’ll say this for you. You’ve lived an interesting life.”
“Beats the alternative.” Once again, a kind of winsome expression momentarily brightened Tucker’s face.
“And so you have some idea of what my services are worth?”
“I was thinking of maybe a percentage of the sale.”
Neal’s eyebrows lifted. If anything Tucker said could be believed—and so far he was deeply uncertain of that—then it was just possible he could come out of this whole experience way ahead.
“What kind of percentage are we talking about?”
The frown lines stretched across Tucker’s face again. “I hadn’t pinned down the exact numbers yet, but I was mulling over the possibility of maybe three, maybe four percent.”
Neal reflexively closed his fingers over the keys. Doing a little quick mental arithmetic, starting with the assumption that the car would sell for something in the low six figures, he calculated that he might come away with less than an extra five thousand dollars under those terms, and he was already setting his sights on a bigger payoff. He shook his head.
“What?” Tucker was struggling to make his voice carry a certain casual firmness. “You think maybe five percent would be reasonable? Honestly?”
“I think I deserve a finder’s fee,” Neal said bluntly. “For finding you. A finder’s fee is ten percent.” If he could end up with a five-figure payoff, it would buy him at least three months of leisure to get his novel off the ground. He saw the way opening up ahead of him, the path smooth, clear, and straight, sunshine and clear skies for as far as the eye could see.
“Whoa, now. I think you’re putting an awfully high price—”
“Don’t you think I deserve something for putting my neck out? For saving your life?”
“Come on. Those guys weren’t going to kill me.”
“Oh, I see. Well, what’s all the fuss then? Let’s just go right back there.”
Neal put the key in the ignition again and started the car. He shifted into reverse and backed in a half-circle around the pumps; heading out onto the road, he dodged a pothole, skirted a church bus loaded with gawking children, and surged past the west-bound ramp, while ignoring Tucker’s frantic protests. He veered toward the east-bound ramp and would have merged onto the interstate, but Tucker grabbed the wheel, pulling the car back into the right-hand lane. Neal allowed the car to slide onto the shoulder and cut the engine.
Tucker’s face was stiff with outrage. “What the f*ck kind of a—”
“Oh,” Neal said, leaning back. “So you’re not exactly sorry that I pulled your ass into this car. I’m still thinking ten percent would be a fair reward.”
After he had time to catch his breath, Tucker nodded faintly. “I think seven would be fair.”
“Nine,” Neal offered.
Tucker continued nodding for no apparent reason, and said nothing.
“Nine,” Neal insisted.
“O.K. Nine.”
“And just so we’re clear about this,” Neal said. “We’re talking about nine percent over and above whatever money I happen to loan you, plus twenty percent interest on the loan. I’ll bet that’s a better deal than you would have gotten from your friends in the blue jackets.”
Tucker stared at Neal grimly. “You’ve got a poker up your butt, you know that?”
“And look here,” Neal said, waving off Tucker’s last remark. He drew the zipper pouch out of his jacket pocket, unzipped it, and slipped out a piece of textured paper, stamped with a notary’s seal. “You see this? This is the title to the vehicle. Without this, you’re not going to get a dime for this car. I’m holding onto this for the time being, and I’m not letting go of it until I see a check in front of me with my name on it, for my part of the sale, plus whatever else is coming to me.”
Neal slipped the title back into the pouch and then took out two hundred-dollar bills. This was the cash he had set aside for a bus ticket back to Raleigh, so he hadn’t planned on keeping it anyway. Tucker reached for the bills with deliberately suppressed eagerness.
“Oh, by the way,” Neal suddenly said. “While we’re at it …” He took the sealed letter out of the pouch. “I was supposed to give you this. It was part of the job your father hired me to do. You’re supposed to read this and call him to let him know you read it before I get the rest of my fee.”
“Keep it,” Tucker told him. “Just put it back where you had it and hold onto it for me. I can’t stand to read anything right now.”
“Why don’t you keep it?”
“I gotta get my sh*t together first. I’m not ready to see what that bastard has to say to me.”
Neal decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea to entrust it to Tucker. There would be time for it later, and Neal felt that he had all the leverage he needed to make sure the job got done.
In less than half an hour they crossed the Mississippi River near Rock Island. Neal could see a white, three-fingered sand bar breaking the flow of the river to the south, while a narrow island, rimmed with flourishing trees, stretched away to the north. He followed the interstate due west for another sixty miles. The ragged leavings of truck tires littered the side of the road, sometimes almost indistinguishable from the flattened strips of road kill that the buzzards had left behind. South of Iowa City, Neal merged onto a four-lane highway, which narrowed down to a two-lane road after another twenty miles. On the right side of the road, rolling green ridges rose toward a near horizon, covered with patches of cheery-looking ragweed that blew in a slight breeze. On the left side, the bottom lands extended flat and wide, with rows of ripening crops, the spaces between them flashing along like spokes on a bicycle wheel. As they made their way through Iowa, Tucker occupied himself by running his fingers along the dashboard, manually examining every switch, every vent, every compartment, somewhat tentatively, as if he expected a jumping jack or mechanical cuckoo to pop out at the slightest touch. From time to time he would offer up anecdotes with neither a beginning nor an end, giving out names and places that meant nothing to Neal, stitched together with words that appeared to have common meanings but seemed to have taken on sinister connotations in Tucker’s vocabulary.
Before they reached the outer limits of Mt. Pleasant, Tucker instructed Neal to exit off onto a farm road running east and then to pull off onto a rutted, bleached road to the south, leading to a gravel strip that passed under a grove of locusts. Finally they pulled up in front of an isolated trailer surrounded by a well-trimmed patch of crabgrass. A white van was parked at the edge of the yard, and the grassy area was strewn with plastic toys—a slide, a big-wheel trike, a toy oven.
Even before Neal brought the car to a stop, four dogs raced out from behind the trailer, each of them large and sinewy, well-suited for guarding a respectable junkyard. The dogs surrounded the car and barked wildly, their eyes popping, their teeth glistening, ready to bite their way through the car windows, as soon as they were given the order. Unlike the creature that greeted Neal next door to Krike’s house, there were no chains holding back them back. Neal and Tucker waited with as much nonchalance as they could summon up, until the door to the trailer opened and a man poked his head out. Suddenly the dogs went quiet, turning their heads back in the direction of the door. The man stepped out, descended a set of aluminum steps, and jerked his head to the side; taking the signal, the dogs trotted away from the car and spread themselves along the front the trailer, sitting on their haunches, their snouts pointed toward the car and its passengers, their eyes still wide and wary.
The man was red-faced and blocky-looking, with an egg-shaped torso and a flat head topped with a brushy crew-cut; his brow was wrinkled in a way that appeared both inquisitive and oddly sympathetic.
Tucker told Neal to lower his window and then he leaned over and shouted, “I’m the one who called! You know …” He paused and whispered to Neal, “When was it?”
“A little over two hours ago,” Neal guessed.
“Two hours ago!” Tucker called out the window.
The man nodded.
“Your dear friend,” Neal commented flatly.
“Come on out,” the man said. When Tucker appeared to hesitate, he added, “The dogs know who’s in charge. Don’t let ’em bother you.”
Tucker climbed out of the car, crossed the yard quickly but carefully, like a mime strolling along the rim of an imaginary wall, and then disappeared with the man into the trailer.
Neal felt a sudden impulse to follow Tucker through the door of the trailer, to keep an eye on whatever transactions were about to occur, but he waited too long before acting and so he was forced to remain in the car, exchanging guarded glances with the dogs.
He left the window open on account of the afternoon heat, but soon the dogs’ thick, gamey odor began drifting toward him. He started the car and let the air conditioning circulate, then closed the window to cool things down. The dogs stood on all fours when they first heard the engine purr, but they remained in place, poised, tense, and still, until they were apparently satisfied that nothing important was happening, and they dropped back down on their haunches and let their tongues wag.
The trailer sat at the end of a dirt driveway studded with pebbles and scarred by deep grooves, apparently carved by runoff from recent summer showers. With nothing better to do for the time being, Neal mentally retraced the route they had taken since leaving Chicago, city streets leading to an interstate ramp, leading to highways, pitted gravel, and this stretch of dirt. And before that, Neal had made his way into unanticipated trouble by way of a sprawling freeway and other highways before that, day after day, with a detour onto the alleys and streets of a Kentucky town and through a garage by means of a wrecker, and at the beginning of it all, private, gated streets and public avenues leading to an interstate at the other end—every piece of the way connected to every other piece, all of it leading here, to where the asphalt had come to an end. He could go back further if he wanted to, to the point where he climbed out of his own car and into the Boccaccio, and before that to when he left his apartment on a late-summer Tuesday morning and strolled across the parking lot, and before that to when he first parked his car at the apartment complex, moving across Raleigh from a dilapidated duplex, and before that when he had moved out of the house he shared with Lainie to arrive at the duplex, and before that when he had traveled across several state lines to take his first graduate school courses … And all of the roads were somehow connected to each other.
In spite of his immediate surroundings, he felt an uncanny composure about where the roads were taking him. He couldn’t say for sure whether he was moving away from something or toward something, and he was in the dark about Tucker’s plans; yet now the journey seemed to have an unfolding purpose. He may have first sensed it after making his way out of the ugly scene in Chicago, or he may have only begun to feel it once he had established his terms with Tucker, just before crossing the Mississippi, but regardless of when it had all come over him, he was now convinced that he possessed his own personal horizon. This was quite a different state of mind than he had started out with, merging onto I-40 several days earlier. The journey still had an open end, but now there was no reason to fear what lay ahead because, regardless of where he was headed in the short term, he felt sure he would decide his final destination.
He was in such a satisfied state of mind that he was able to wait patiently, glancing at the door of the trailer from time to time, marveling at the placid alertness of the ever-watchful dogs, studying the flickering shadows cast by the trees that fronted the trailer, but otherwise allowing himself to slowly exult in his new, incomprehensible sense of capability.
His patience was just beginning to wear off when Tucker came out the door of the trailer. Neal glanced at his watch and found that he had been waiting for nearly an hour. He watched with some wry amusem*nt as Tucker made his way gingerly past the dogs, who rose to their feet again and probably would have leaped forward if their master hadn’t poked his head out in the nick of time.
Tucker climbed into the car and shut the door quickly. He patted his pants pocket somewhat nervously but then smiled broadly at Neal, revealing a set of dimples. “I don’t know about you but I’m starving,” he said.
Neal studied him curiously before saying anything, a little surprised at the apparent genuineness of Tucker’s smile, but then admitted he was hungry too, and once they were back on the highway, nearing Mt. Pleasant, they found a Denny’s not far off the road.
15. Librarian of My Dreams
The restaurant was nearly empty, but the thin, stooped hostess still had a harried look, as if inaudible voices were calling her from a dozen different directions. After seating Neal and Tucker at a corner booth, and shoving menus in front of them, she suddenly noticed that one of the buttons on her blouse had come undone, but she scurried away before giving herself a chance to attend to it.
Tucker opened up his menu and immediately began scanning it, but Neal sat with hands folded on top of his.
When Tucker glanced over, he smiled, again in a very natural way, and asked, “What’s up?”
“Nothing big,” Neal said. “I was just wondering if you could tell me what that last stop was all about.”
Tucker shrugged. “Just a little business. I think I’m up for some steak and eggs. How about you?”
Neal was starving, but he still refrained from opening the menu; drumming his fingers on the acrylic table-top he kept his eyes squarely on Tucker’s face, now brimming with an impish look of innocence.
“As long we’re going to be keeping company for a while,” Neal said, “I want to make sure you’re not doing anything to get both of us in trouble.”
“Don’t worry, O.K.? The guy is a supplier of a perfectly legal … substance. He just has a way of supplying it that allows his customers to bypass a certain amount of red tape.”
Neal nodded noncommittally, determined to keep his new-found composure intact. “Someone I met yesterday was under the impression that you were—”
“Well, whoever it was was wrong about that,” Tucker said abruptly, yet with a surprising lack of rancor. “I’ll have you know that I’m a graduate of five separate twelve-step programs. The substance I was referring to is just a little something to help me get by. That’s all.”
Neal set his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Five twelve-step programs? Did that include Gamblers Anonymous?”
“Sure.”
Neal leaned back and laughed.
“O.K., O.K.,” Tucker said, still without any evident irritation. “You can giggle all you want. The fact is that those bets were not compulsive; they were very calculated, more like investments.”
“Investments?
“To raise cash for very specific purposes.”
“I think I’m beginning the get the picture,” Neal said, the mirth suddenly drained from his voice. “Let’s see … You stole money from a crime boss so you could buy some kind of black-market medication. Then you gambled to try to make up the deficit in your accounts. Then you gambled some more to make up for your losses. And then you lost big. And then you emailed your father for money.”
Tucker shifted in his seat a little, but still showed no sign of irritation. “I could quibble with your wording,” he said, “but that’s basically the gist of it. More or less.” And then he grinned with a touch of shyness. “Like you said, I’ve lived an interesting life.”
They were interrupted by the waitress, who was short and stocky and, like the hostess, inexplicably preoccupied.
After they ordered their food, Neal leaned forward again and raised his index finger. “I don’t know what all you’ve been into, but I just want to remind you of something.” He patted the side of his jacket where the zipper pouch was tucked away. “You’re not touching this until I see some money.”
“You know,” Tucker said tentatively. “From a purely legal point of view, I think—”
“Oh, that is rich, coming from you.”
Tucker was markedly subdued for a while. The two of them glanced around the restaurant idly, stealing awkward, careful looks at each other. After the waitress had brought them their coffee, Tucker opened up two packets of sweetener and stirred the powder into his drink with his finger.
“Now that I have the car,” he said finally, “I can take care of everything. I can pay off Voortman, the bookies, everyone will be happy. Not my dad, but maybe everyone else.”
“Well, the car really isn’t worth anything until you find a buyer,” Neal pointed out.
“Oh, I’m all over that, man,” he said quickly, snapping his fingers. “I’ve had time to mull it over and I think I have the buyer.”
“Does he live anywhere close to here?”
“Not exactly. He’s—”
The sound of a ringing phone interrupted him. Neal recognized his own ring tone, but when he reached inside his pants pocket, the phone wasn’t there. Tucker took it out of his own pocket and answered it. Neal reached for it impatiently, and after a moment Tucker clapped his hand over face of the phone and said, “It’s for someone named Harold Hill. Anyone you know?”
Neal was befuddled for a moment, but he finally gave a dismissive wave and mouthed, “Just take a message.”
Tucker smiled broadly and brought the phone to his mouth. “I’m afraid Mr. Hill is indisposed for the moment. Would you like to leave a message? … Perhaps you could call back at a more convenient time … I think practically anytime but now.” Tucker nodded a couple of times, listening patiently with playful malice, then said, “All right, then, thank you for your suggestion.” He ended the call.
“Give it here,” Neal said. He pocketed the phone and then looked up to see Tucker still smirking.
“So,” he said. “Is that your name? Harold Hill?”
“That’s what they call me in Kentucky.”
“You get around a little bit, don’t you? What do they call you in Iowa?”
“I’ve never actually been to Iowa before.”
“Oh no, I don’t believe that, Professor. I believe you’re quite well known in River City!” Tucker was practically jumping in his seat. “You’re Harold Hill, aren’t you?”
Neal was annoyed, but he reminded himself that, after all, it didn’t matter what Tucker knew or didn’t know about him. He could be either as candid or as coy as he wanted to be. “I see you’re familiar with The Music Man.”
“Are you kidding? I used to have wet dreams about Shirley Jones. Man, she was some kind of woman. Don’t you remember the fire in her eyes?”
Neal nodded with an indifference that was only partly genuine.
“Hey, Professor. While you’re here you could do a little research. Find out if there’s any trouble here. With a capital T.”
Tucker rested his fist on his chin and seemed about to say something more but stopped, as if he were searching for some elusive word. He looked mysteriously intent for a moment and then suddenly smiled. “Hey, you remember the end of the movie?”
“You mean when Marion the Librarian saves the Professor from the mob?”
“No, after that. When the boys turn into an actual band, with shining instruments and uniforms and everything. I really believe in that kind of thing, don’t you?”
“It’s just a movie.”
“But don’t you believe something like that can happen?”
“What? Uniforms appearing out of thin air?”
“Not exactly, but something like that. I mean everything turning around. In a moment.”
Neal shook his head firmly. “You’re talking about magic. I’ve lived thirty-nine years now, almost forty, and if there’s any magic in this world, I’ve missed it. In this world, you’re on your own. You’re better off that way.”
“I’m not really talking about magic.” Tucker sounded a little put out. “I just mean … After a while, you can’t just keep suffering. Things have to turn around at some point.”
“Maybe,” Neal said. “But if you’re waiting for snappy drum rolls and cheering crowds you’ll be waiting a hell of a long time. No one can afford to wait that long.”
Just then the waitress showed up with a tray full of food. Neal and Tucker both suddenly remembered how hungry they were, and they began eating in silence. Neal cut his way into something that the menu had called “country fried steak,” coated in heavy breading and an oily layer of white gravy. The meat inside was soft, mealy, and bland, but Neal was too hungry to care and he began eating eagerly. Looking up from time to time, he saw Tucker slicing off large, blood-dripping pieces of his rib-eye, or wiping egg yolk off his plate with a slab of hash browns. They were both too busy for conversation. Once they pushed their plates away, they looked up at each other uneasily, as if they had become strangers all over again.
“So …,” Tucker said after finishing his coffee and pushing the cup next to the plate. “I’m still trying to pin a name on you. That is, if you’re not Harold Hill on this side of the river.”
“Call me Cal, if you feel like it.”
“Silent Cal, huh? No word about who you are, where you come from. I can’t help thinking you’re on the lam. You seem kind of like a high school principal making off with the PTA donations.”
“Not even close.”
“I bet you’re in some kind of trouble,” Tucker persisted. “What about that knot on your forehead? There’s a story behind that thing, isn’t there?”
“Why don’t we drop this subject for now? A while back, you were going to tell me about our buyer.”
“Oh, sure.” He seemed about to continue, but instead he pointed to Neal’s fork and said, “You gonna be needing that?”
When Neal shook his head, Tucker picked up the fork, and his own fork, wrapped them up in his napkin, and gripped them tightly in his right hand. Neal glanced at the little parcel Tucker had made, recalling something he had learned during his stopover in the Chicago suburbs.
“So,” Tucker went on without a flicker of self-consciousness, “I was thinking about my stepfather. Karl Meister. To be more exact, Karl Friedrich Meister, IV.”
“Does he live in America?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s totally an American.”
“Does he have some money to spend?”
“God, yes. He’s even richer than my dad. When Mom traded, she traded up the income ladder, believe it or not.”
“Does he have some connection with Meister beer?”
“Man, he is Meister beer! He’s the principal heir to the fortune. Marrying Karl Meister was like Mom’s ultimate fantasy. It brought together her two life-long obsessions: money and booze.”
“Wasn’t there a Meister that ran for Senate a couple of years ago?”
“That’s him. He was actually ahead in the polls until he had to start making public appearances. Those TV ads that kicked off his campaign were gorgeous. Unfortunately, there was a YouTube video that went around that showed him putting on hand sanitizer after he went through a receiving line. Bad PR.”
“As I recall, he spent quite a bit of money on that campaign.”
“Yeah, but it was like a handful of sand from the Mojave. He’s got plenty more.”
“What makes you think he’s in the market for a Boccaccio? Does he collect cars?”
“He collects everything. You name it. Paintings. Sculptures. Worm-eaten scrolls. Clay pots as old as God. Yellowy stamps with pictures of bearded nutcrackers. He’s obsessed with having things, anything that will hold value. Scared of all his wealth disappearing in some kind of computer meltdown. That Y2K thing freaked him to death. Then the World Trade Center gave his head another twist, and ever since then he’s been trying to turn his money into things. Like he wants to keep his hands on it.”
“Would a car really hold value, though?”
“I’ll bet this one would.” Tucker glanced out the nearest window, searching for the Boccaccio in the parking lot. “I’ve heard about them. There aren’t that many. Scarce commodities that occupy a specific market niche tend to increase in price. It’s the law of supply and demand.” He hammered on the table with the two forks. “Anyway, I’ll bet I can convince him it’s a good investment.He’s got boy geniuses running around him all the time filling his head with their ass-cracked ideas. Someone as paranoid as he is can be persuaded easily, just by playing the right notes in the right key. And I can be very persuasive when I feel like it. Watch this.”
The waitress approached the booth and refreshed their coffee, giving them each a slight scowl.
Tucker gave her a friendly look and said, “Hey, are you wearing silk stockings by any chance?”
She glanced down at her stubby legs, and then back at Tucker. “I bought ’em at the grocery store. I don’t know what they’re made of.”
“Would you mind if I just feel the fabric for a moment? You see, I work with synthetic fibers and various kinds of polymers used in fabric design, mostly for military purposes. Do you mind?”
She gave Tucker a dull, skeptical look, but after letting the coffee swish around in the carafe for a moment, she said, “What the hell. Go ahead.”
He reached down and pulled at the fabric stretching over her right knee; he let it snap and then made a point of smoothing it down, incidentally brushing the hem of her skirt with his knuckles.
“It’s quite an advanced polyester-dacron blend,” he observed. “I knew that they were managing to create some new efficiencies in textile processing, but …”
Tucker’s words were spilling out a little faster than his mind could move, but the waitress didn’t seem to care. “I have to wear these mocha-colored hose,” she said. “That’s what they tell us to get. I like more of an apricot color myself. Fits my skin tone better. They can’t tell me what kind of underwear to buy, though. I go to a lingerie shop. Look.” She turned to let Tucker get a good look at her in full-length profile.
“Hey, are you guys brothers or something?” she asked.
Tucker grinned insipidly. “Why? Do we look alike to you?”
“No. You don’t look anything alike. But my kids don’t look alike either, even though they got the same father. Me and my sister don’t look alike. She got all the looks and I got the figure.” Still holding the coffee pot in her right hand, she used her left hand to push her hair behind her ears. “It’s just that you guys seem kind of stuck together, like you have to be sitting with each but don’t want to.”
“Well now that you mention it,” Tucker said in a slightly lowered voice. “We’re here on some business. I can’t go into details. It’s all purely on a need-to-know basis.”
“You’re funny,” she said. “Did anyone ever tell you that you got girlie lips?”
Tucker tried to seem amused. “Not in so many words.” He ran the tip of his tongue along his lips and peered down at the forks he was still holding.
The waitress tugged on her hose and began complaining about having to work double shifts on weekends, about how hard it was to find babysitters, about having to drag the father of her children to court every month. “At least I didn’t marry the dickhe*d,” she said, and then she complained that she was getting athlete’s foot because her manager wouldn’t let her wear open-toed shoes. Her voice was flat and loud, and most of her short vowels sounded like a Sunbeam blender on the grind setting.
The hostess finally caught the waitress’s eye. “Don’t you guys want some lemon pie?” she asked, suddenly all business. “No?” She pulled the check out of a skirt pocket, dropped it onto the table, and walked away with a little swivel in her stride.
Tucker waited until she was out of sight, and then said, “You see? You just leave it to me. I can get my stepfather to fall in line.”
“Hm.” Neal was genuinely amazed at Tucker’s capacity for self-deception, but he decided that there was no point in worrying, yet. He began drumming restlessly on the table, eager to get on with the whole business. “So where does this stepfather of yours live?”
“Denver.”
Neal gave a short, sharp whistle. “Miles to go before we sleep. Who’s going to pay for the gas?”
“Don’t you have a credit card?”
“For what it’s worth.”
“I’ve got a few dollars left,” Tucker offered, with obvious reluctance.
“I guess we’ll make it.” Neal pointed to the check. “Maybe you can at least get that,” he said as he slid out of the booth.
Back on the road again, Neal retraced the way to I-80 and headed west. Somehow he also found his way back to that calm, quiet composure that he had enjoyed while sitting at the end of the dirt drive near Mt. Pleasant. A white haze gathered overhead, possibly foretelling rain. He was perfectly satisfied with the blankness around him and within him.
After another two hours, though, he was beginning to find Tucker’s antics distracting. The radio was on, tuned to a public station, and Tucker was providing commentary for an interview between a State Department official and a skeptical reporter. The public official had a habit of using the phrase if you will, and every time Tucker heard it he shouted back, “Well, what if I won’t, huh? Did you ever think of that? What if I won’t?” He punctuated his retorts with emphatic gestures, fingers co*cked and elbows swinging.
By the time they had bypassed Des Moines and were heading toward Omaha, Neal had had enough of both Tucker and the radio and was starting to feel that this would be a very long trip.
“Hey, why don’t you turn off the radio for a minute?” he suggested.
“Oh man, I can tell you’re going to be a fun traveling companion.”
“Look, if you need to amuse yourself, reach into the glove compartment. You’ll find a CD in there.”
Tucker pulled out the unlabeled disk that Bix had given to Neal, and looked at it dubiously.
“What is it?”
“Just something. Put it in and let’s listen to it.”
The first track started with a smooth, steady bass line, followed by a simple, repetitive dreambeat. Neal and Tucker both nodded agreeably. The guitar riff was about a half-step off the beat, though, and the voice was shrill and unsteady.
Tucker guffawed contemptuously. “What the …” He popped the CD back out of the player, opened the passenger-side window, and in one fluid motion, hurled the disk out of the car. Through the rearview mirror, Neal could see the disk sailing out behind the car like a Frisbee catching a breeze.
“I never said you could do that!” Neal shouted in a momentary panic.
“Hey, I was doing us both a big favor,” Tucker replied, yawning.
Neal shifted over from the left lane all the way to the shoulder and stopped the car. He threw open the door and ran back down the highway to where he could see the disk lying, squarely in the middle of the right lane. He headed down the road and would have veered onto the asphalt but a tractor trailer bore down on him at that moment, and he jumped back. After the truck had gone by, blowing a tuba-pitched horn blast and staggering him with the gust it stirred as it passed, he ventured onto the highway and picked up the disk, now crimped where the truck’s tires had passed over it.
Standing in the middle of the road, gazing into the sun, which was boring a hole through the vastness of white that now filled the sky, he stared pointlessly at Bix’s ruined CD. He told himself, and convinced himself, that it really didn’t matter, in spite of the solemn promises he had given. Those promises had been made the day before, by a fictional self, and since then he had become a new man. He was in full possession of himself now. The best possible proof was that he could leave his day-old commitments so guiltlessly behind him and head on into the sun and the blankness.
