Concert of Ghosts (16 page)

Alison stopped at a rural diner that sold chicken-fried steak and biscuits with gravy. An American flag hung outside the premises. The pole, blinding white in the sun, had recently been painted. The flag itself had the look of a garment laundered only ten minutes ago. Inside, where it was dark and cool and fragrant with fried onions, Tennant, suddenly ravenous, ordered two hamburgers and french fries and a Coke, roadhouse cuisine, greasy and magnificent. Alison nibbled on Tennant's french fries and drank ice water. She kept looking out the window. A spotty kid in oily coveralls stood by the pumps, arms folded, his expression as interesting as a donut. He turned once to look in her direction. His face remained impassive. He was eighteen, nineteen, but he seemed already old, as if pumping gas for passing tourists had wearied him beyond recovery.

“We need to get rid of the Cadillac,” Alison said. “First used-car place we find, I'll trade the thing for something less conspicuous. Something totally
dull
. Black or beige.”

“Wise move.”

Tennant finished his food, pushed the plate away, and went to the men's room, where the smell of urine and pine disinfectant was overpowering. He closed the door and walked to the urinal. As he unzipped, a man entered the room. He was plump, wore black glasses and a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, a riot of bananas and parrots and palm fronds, a bad dream in rayon. He had a baseball cap with the logo of the Kansas City Royals. He went to the washbasin and turned on a faucet, holding his thick hands under the flow of water. He looked at himself in the mirror, which was when Tennant glanced at him.

The abrupt sense of recognition unnerved Tennant, who stepped away from the urinal. He watched the fat man turn toward the towel roll and dry his hands methodically, one finger at a time. Tennant—dispensing with doubt, galvanized by anger, frustrated—moved quickly, forcing his arm against the man's neck, pushing the head forward into the wall. The baseball cap rolled away and the fat man grunted. His neck was soft and fleshy and yielded easily under the pressure of Tennant's arm.

“Jesus Christ—”

“We keep meeting in toilets,” Tennant said. “I don't like the intrusion on my privacy, fella.”

The man squirmed, trying to turn his face around. The black glasses slid down his nose and he looked squashed, preposterous.

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?”

Tennant, who hadn't performed an act of violence since some pointless battle in grade school, two punches and a bloodied nose, said, “You were in the diner outside Albany. You followed me inside the john. Remember?” And he pressed harder, appalled by the way he was enjoying this moment. “Remember?”

“Albany? I never even been to the place. Jesus Christ. Look. If you want money, I got about seventy bucks, my hip pocket, take it, take it for God's sake. Just don't hurt me.” The designer glasses fell and shattered on the hard floor, tiny specks of black.

“I don't want your goddamn money,” Tennant said. “I want you off my back.”

“Lookit, I never seen you in my life, go on, check my wallet, man, I sell insurance, I got my own agency in Williamsport, Walter Swin's my name, see for yourself,” and he struggled to get the wallet out of his back pocket. Tennant knocked the hand away and seized the wallet from the pocket himself. He released the man, who rubbed his sweaty neck.

“My glasses. Lookit my glasses. Goddamn Ray.Bans. Lookit. You're outta your mind.”

Tennant let the wallet dangle open. A plastic concertina of credit cards, a driver's license, membership in the Rotary Club, the Williamsport Chamber of Commerce, and a business card on which was written
WALTER SWIN, INSURANCE BROKER
. The wallet also revealed snapshots of an overweight blonde woman and two plump kids with flesh the color of white bread. He released the man completely and, still holding the wallet, stepped away. Under his feet the broken Ray.Bans crunched, a melancholy little sound. What had he done? What the hell had he done here? Confused, he saw his face in the mirror—scruffy, hardly recognizable even to himself. Harry Tennant, stranger. Violence was a new madness for him. He gazed again at the wallet; Walter Swin's self-contained world was so ordinary, so banal, and the man himself such a quivering bundle of apprehension, that Tennant didn't doubt the authenticity of the cards and photographs and memberships. He'd blundered into that bizarre world of plastic, that network of cards and documents upon which everyone's identity rested, that computerized, germfree universe in which you couldn't be the person you claimed to be unless you had evidence, credentials of yourself—as if constant reminders were needed because the country suffered from neurosis, an identity crisis too deep to understand. He remembered how Sajac had gone through Alison's purse, with the quick, greedy movements of a scared man. Had he behaved like that? Crazy, mindless, terrified into violence?
I am turning into Bear Sajac. A cruel metamorphosis
.

He handed the wallet back. “Listen, I don't know what to say.”

“I oughta report you to the law. Guys like you shouldn't be running round. Guys like you should be locked up. Key thrown away.” Walter Swin was indignant now. He'd escaped an encounter with a lunatic in a public toilet and he was reasserting himself. Didn't he have rights, after all? What was the Republic coming to? A man couldn't wash his hands without being assaulted? What kinda situation was that?

“I'm sorry, that's all I can say.”

“Yeah. Right. Well. You may be sorry, guy. All well and good, yeah. But lookit my glasses, Christsake.”

“Here, here,” and Tennant took a bill from his pocket, a hundred, pressing it into Walter Swin's squab-like hand.

“That covers the glasses, I guess. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta mind …” Suitably bribed, the fat man ran out of indignation all at once. Tennant, finding it difficult to breathe, his chest aching anew from Sajac's blow, picked up the baseball cap and handed it back, then stepped out of the toilet. Alison wasn't at the table. The empty space troubled him briefly, but then he saw her through the window. She was leaning against the Cadillac, staring off into the distance. She was wearing pale-tinted shades and running a hand through her hair. In the glare of sunlight, which reflected ferociously from the red car, she looked frail, diminished. He felt a protective urge toward her, but even as he stepped through the door and tried to dismiss the embarrassing encounter in the toilet, he wondered how he could safeguard somebody else when it was troublingly clear he had a frequent problem protecting Harry Tennant—that inscrutable entity—from himself.

11

It was late in the afternoon when Alison traded the Cadillac at a car lot in Columbus, Ohio. She chose a late-model black Buick, marvelously nondescript, twelve thousand miles on the clock. The salesman, dressed in a chocolate polyester suit and white shoes, wore a St. Francis medal against his furry chest. His simian hands were covered with black hair and he had a gold front tooth, which he fingered constantly. The deal involved some basic haggling, which Alison might have strung out because the car she was trading in was, after all, something of a classic. In her urgency to make the trade and move on, she accepted a straight swap. A great Cadillac convertible for a boring Buick, what the hell, sign the title papers, let's hit the road.

The Buick was equipped with a computerized dashboard that constantly issued digital information; the assumption in Detroit, it seemed to Tennant, was that all drivers, because they were morons, needed elementary electronic signals that might be as easily read as TV graphics. This thought dissolved into images of great abandoned car factories, broken windows, unemployed men and women, the homeless; there was a sorrow at the core of the country, a collapse into despair and anger that spawned savagery, casual gunplay, whimsical tragedies. He thought of all the old promise that had existed so briefly in the Haight and how it had gone out like a shattered light bulb. Martin Luther King. Bobby Kennedy. Vietnam. Assassinations, coffins draped in flags, men like Noel Harker who considered the war their private killing ground.

He thought of poor fat Walter Swin in the men's room and was embarrassed by his own outburst of violence. For a moment he might gladly have broken some bones. What did that make him? Had he ever been violent before? Had he always been the hippie pacifist, the Haight dopehead dead set against his father's world, the guy who walked in peace marches stoned? He thought: I could have been anybody, anything, a serial killer, a rapist, a monk, and I wouldn't know. He was an unwritten book, blank chapters, a zero.

Alison said, “I just gave away a beautiful car for a goddamn Wurlitzer on wheels. I have to wonder if it was worth it.”

Tennant made a remark about the uncomplicated joy of anonymity. Change a car, you're harder to find. He put no great conviction into his words. Hope was a raft, and you clung to it any way you could. You went under, came up again, prayed for gentler waters.

Beyond Columbus, with twilight drifting lazily across the landscape, he took over the driving. Alison fell asleep in the passenger seat, her head inclined toward Tennant's shoulder. He liked the way she felt against him. Indiana lay ahead, then Illinois. After that was Iowa, the heartland, and Sammy Obe.

Night fell and the blackness of the highway was awesome. The lights of oncoming cars dazzled him. Every now and then his rearview mirror glared, and he imagined a spotlight being turned on the Buick, illuminating both himself and Alison. Once, overhead, he saw the solitary light of a helicopter crossing the highway; with the window rolled down he could hear blades thrash hot dark air. From above, from behind—where did you look?

He drove one-handed, letting the free hand rest on Alison's smooth neck, where a small pulse beat. The digital lights on the dash that informed you of gasoline usage and mileage and outside temperature created a red glow, imparting the strange impression you were traveling in a photographer's darkroom. When he could drive no farther and weariness had begun to distort his vision, he found a rest area and parked the car. There were about six other cars in the parking spaces. He got out and stamped his feet to recharge his circulation. He smoked a cigarette, his first in a long time, and gazed at the small stone structure in which toilets were located. A woman in a polka-dot dress came out, passed beneath a lamp, and walked to her car. Tennant watched her.

The woman—middle-aged, her dyed scarlet hair moussed stiff and slightly ridiculous—took keys from her purse, unlocked the door of her car, then paused. Momentarily she turned in Tennant's direction, as if afflicted by a fear of brigands and scoundrels in the lonely rest areas of America's freeways. Then she got inside her car and closed the door. Tennant saw her back out and drive off. You suspect everyone, he thought. It becomes habit, dreadful habit.

“Where are we?” Alison stepped from the Buick.

“Illinois. Indiana.” He shrugged. What did their precise location matter as long as their direction was generally the right one? The flat, unlit landscape made geographical distinctions vague. You moved, you kept moving, if you were going west you were doing fine.

Alison said, “Let me drive for a while. I feel okay. You rest.”

Rest. That appealed to him. He sat in the passenger seat, closed his eyes, felt a tide of fatigue wash over him, then retreat, then return. His shoulders ached from driving. He drifted for a few minutes, lulled into a thin sleep by the rhythm of the car.

He awoke—thinking of the room on Schrader and hippies painting in the sunlight. Scaffolding. The image panicked him.

He tried to relax, drummed his fingers on his knees, stretched his legs, switched on the radio. The music, riddled by static, was a song out of the past, “Good-day, Sunshine.” He changed the station, found country-western, a loathsome little ditty about a man tired of crying over a woman called Ruby. He switched off the radio, thinking self-pity should never be set to music.

“You're antsy,” Alison said.

Tennant looked at an enormous truck roaring in the opposite direction, blowing vast clouds of smoke from its stack. “I'm fine,” was all he said. Why had he begun to feel this bad?

She reached out and placed her fingers in the palm of his hand. “You're sweating.”

“It's hot in here.”

“The windows are down, Harry.”

“It's still hot.” His heartbeat was going fast. His pulse went at speed. He'd felt this way a few times on cocaine, slippage yielding to panic and then to a sense of your own doom. Coronary hour, an explosion in the old chambers. The downhill rush of the locomotive going out of control.

“Are you feeling sick?”

He shook his head. Sick, hell no, he was in fine shape, A1, first class, blue ribbon—except for the bothersome volcanic eruptions that every so often spewed lava and scattered ash inside his head. Help me, Alison, he thought. Get me out of this bummer.

“I'll pull over if you like.”

“I'm fine.”

“You don't have to shout. I'm only twelve inches away.”

“Was I shouting?”

“Yeah. You were shouting.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's okay.” She looked at him quickly. “You want to talk? Or do I get some guff about a dizzy spell?”

“I was thinking about something, that's all.”

“I'm listening.”

“A room on Schrader Street in the Haight. That's what I was trying to remember. It bugs me. I can't place it exactly.”

“Did you live there once?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you think you could find the place again?”

Tennant shrugged. He couldn't be sure. He looked at the road ahead. A house on Schrader. What was the big deal anyway? A room, a few details, hippies splashing color on walls. He shut his eyes. Squeeze the brain, the headbox, force something out, for God's sake. Sweat ran over his eyelids.