Concert of Ghosts Page 12

  “And I thought I was asking a simple question.”

  “Okay. Let’s see. I had this mad passion one time for a guy called Stern. Charlie Stern. Class valedictorian in high school. Editor of the school paper. President of the student union. Mr. Big. We had some fumbling behind the bleachers. I thought my heart was going to shoot right out of my throat that night.”

  “What happened?”

  Alison smiled. “Sad really. There I was all set to give up my suffocating virginity when poor Charlie Stern ejaculated in his pants. He avoided me after that. Embarrassed, I guess. Then, when I was in college, I had a fling with my professor, a married man by God. Swore he’d leave his wife and all that bullshit. It came to nothing in the end. I was that semester’s affair. He had a notorious habit of bedding his female students. I was one more conquest. Another notch. At least he gave me an A.”

  He had the feeling she hadn’t answered his question, but had circled it instead, as if the subject of love was one on which she wouldn’t be drawn. Secrets, he thought. Things she doesn’t want to say. He was reminded of how she resisted his question about her parents in Buffalo. Okay. There were sides to her he didn’t know. Live with the fact. You don’t get to know another person in a matter of days. It takes time, a lifetime.

  “What about you, Harry? You been in love?”

  The question stung him because he had no answer. He stared at the ceiling. Had his life been loveless? There had been girls in the Haight, there were always girls in the Haight because sex was what everybody did—casual, carefree, going through the motions of the deceptive new liberty. You fucked indiscriminately because it was one way of saying, Look, all the old values are dead. But love? He felt the panic of a man trying to check his own pulse and failing to find it. I’d remember love, he thought. Wouldn’t I? I’d remember love. Something that intense.

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked,” Alison said. She kissed him lightly on the forehead—he smelled soap on her skin, shampoo in her hair—then she rose and went back to her own bed, where she sat with her legs crossed and hands clasped. She arranged the slip as demurely as she could. If there was to be anything between them, it had been put on hold.

  The underwater diver on TV had surfaced, ripping his mask off. He held something aloft in one hand, a trophy seized from the deep, a gigantic shell, the former habitat of some poor evicted gastropod. The man’s life seemed very uncomplicated to Tennant. He finned his way down through clear tropical water and came back with a shell and that made him enthusiastic and happy. I must learn to dive. I must learn the simplicity of shells. I would be a contented man.

  Alison clicked her thumb and middle finger together. “Obe might be the key,” she said. “We’ve got to see him. We’ve got to know if he arranged that particular group for a specific purpose.”

  “What makes you think Obe can tell us anything?” he asked. “You said he’d lost it.”

  “His wife said he’d lost it, Harry. I didn’t see for myself.”

  “And you want proof?”

  “I’m addicted to proof.”

  “You said he was in Iowa. You know where exactly?”

  “I know where his wife is.”

  “And we just go and ask for directions to Sammy? Where’s the asylum? What’s Sammy’s room number?”

  “Sure.”

  “If she refuses?”

  “I’m a firm believer in not crossing bridges before I come to them.”

  Tennant reached out and switched off the bedside lamp. He’d never been in Iowa. But one place was as good or bad as any right now.

  “As soon as it’s light,” she said. “We’re out of here.”

  He slept in a superficial way, drifting in and out of awareness. He enjoyed the proximity of Alison, the idea that she lay only a few feet away. He dreamed of Chinatown, the fronts of tourist shops, gaudy silks, screens, paper lanterns. Somebody was beckoning to him, a figure in a shop doorway. He couldn’t see a face, only an outstretched hand. At some point the sky over Chinatown was filled with screaming gulls flying across the sun.

  The sound of a car in the parking lot woke him and the dream dissolved and he lay silent and tense, expecting to hear someone at the door. But nothing happened. Before daylight he woke again, this time with an erection, although he couldn’t remember a dream that might have inspired it.

  He looked at the curtains, which had begun to glow. On the other bed, Alison turned restlessly, asleep still but apparently troubled by specters of her own.

  The parking lot of the motel lay beneath a skein of pale pink sunlight. The few other cars parked neatly in their slots shone in a dull way. So far as Tennant could tell they were unoccupied. He scanned them quickly as he got inside the Cadillac. It was going to be one of those glorious clear blue days of late summer, wonderful visibility; it was the kind of day in which his awareness of vulnerability could only be increased by the clarity of the landscape. He and Alison would drive back roads, of course, but even so Tennant knew he wasn’t going to be able to subdue his tension. Where could you hide in this great blue-sky continent? The sun was already huge by the time Alison had driven twenty miles, and the pink had yielded to a fiery orange that appeared to make trees and meadows blaze; a ferocious sun of unbroken scrutiny.

  He took a road map from the glove compartment. Pennsylvania was a vast wedge of land that ended in one direction on the shores of Lake Erie, and in another on the Ohio state line. Youngstown, East Palestine, East Liverpool. In the center lay the Appalachians, dotted by villages, small settlements, towns that seemingly had no reason to exist other than as places on a map. St. Augustin. Glasgow. Cassandra. What did people do in a place called Cassandra? Feel sorry for themselves?

  He and Alison shared driving, speaking only rarely to each other. Tennant concentrated on the fields and woodlands that breezed past. He rolled down his window, catching the sharply delicious smell of fresh-cut grass. He tried to imagine he was complete, that he had total recall of his past. The mysterious dead were figments who had existed only in an old insignificant photograph. I am not Harry Tennant, he thought. Harry Tennant is also dead. I am somebody else, a nameless fugitive. But then he’d glance back too often, searching the road for any sign of a car tracking the Cadillac, and the illusion, already so fragile, would dissolve. Where were they, he wondered, the pursuers, the followers? Why weren’t they evident? Did they have some improbable power that enabled them to merge with the landscape? These questions worried him. Unanswered, they seemed to give flight another, darker, dimension: What if nobody was tracking them? What if everything were a complicated construct of the mind?

  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 roll
ed 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.