On the Run (13 page)

“Sir, there’s one thing I want to get clear. I’m glad I came back. But it wasn’t really because I felt some special need to … find my roots.”

Paula interrupted. “I told him about the money after he said he’d come back with me.”

“I was pretty indifferent about coming back, sir. But there was one thing that swayed me. Paula didn’t know how this Fergasson located me. You see, it’s something I have to know. I understand he’s supposed to be very good, but if he could find me, somebody else could find me. I must have left some trail I don’t know about. I had to come back to find out how it was done.”

“Oh, that’s quite interesting, and quite clever. He had the Jacksonville background, and he picked up your trail in Atlanta long after you’d left there, of course. In Jacksonville you wrote the ads for the used car sales. You did the same in Atlanta. He got a lot of those old ads and he went through them and isolated tricks of phrasing and description, and sales gimmicks. He assumed you would still be in the same business, and in a metropolitan area, and be writing used car copy. He went through dozens of newspapers. He found that the ads placed by Trade-Way Motors in Houston had these same devices and turns of phrase. He went to Houston
and found that a Sid Wells had composed the ads. He got a look at you, and he knew that it was the same man in the Jacksonville photographs, thinner and more suntanned, without the glasses and with a different hair style. So he took your picture and came back here and reported.”

Sid sat with a stunned expression. Then he smiled in a wry and reluctant way and said, “The son of a gun! I never thought of it. But right now I can think of one thing I used first in Jacksonville, and then in Atlanta, and in Biloxi and in Houston. You build traffic at the lot by selling some horrible junkers instead of scrapping them. A one cent sale. You buy the plates. First come, first served. It’s an old gimmick. But I used to corn it up by saying they were guaranteed unconditionally for three miles or three hours, whichever came first. A lot of other things like that too. People see the same old ads. You have to say something a little different. And he thought of a thing like that!”

“It’s why he’s expensive.”

“He would never find me the same way again, sir.”

“I needed to find you once. Do you mind being here as yourself, my boy, as Sidney Martin Shanley?”

“It feels strange. But I think I like it, for a little while.”

“You please me, Sidney. I want the town to know that the old man’s grandsons have come back. The wire from George says he will arrive tomorrow.”

Sid felt a little tremor of alarm. “Does he expect to find me here?”

Tom Brower looked at him, and suddenly there was no focus or sharpness in those ancient eyes. His eyes and mouth were vague. “ ’Licia, don’t be scared of the automobile, honey. That loud noise scares horses, but it doesn’t scare big girls eleven years old.”

Paula went quickly to him and touched his forehead. “Tom?” she said urgently. “Tom?”

He looked up at her. “Who are …” The mists went slowly, like a mirror clearing after breath has clouded it. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he looked furious. “Damn wanderings,” he said. “Senility. Where did I go to, Paula?”

“Alicia was eleven, and afraid of a car.”

He smiled. “I was a little bit afraid of it too. An enormous Buick, and sitting in it was like sitting in a tree house. We motored all the way to Syracuse in it, a tremendous feat. Mud and dust and stones and punctures. We started at dawn and got there just before dark. Forty miles. My wife was so exhausted she wept. But what were we saying when I … lost touch?”

“I was wondering if George knows I’ll be here.”

“No mention was made of you.”

“Sir, is there any way we can find out if any stranger or strangers come here looking for me?”

“I think setting it up would in itself cause too much talk, my boy. The chance is remote. I have the feeling your luck is good. I think it was bad for a long time, and now it has turned good again. Do you?”

Paula turned and winked owlishly at Sid.

“I feel better than I have any right to feel,” Sid said.

“Now I want you to tell me about …”

“Later!” Paula said firmly. “He’ll be here. You can talk and talk. But not all at once.”

“This child is insolent and domineering, Sidney. They put R.N. after their names and become impossible. All right. I’ll sleep. One last little crumb of life left, and she wants me to spend it sleeping.”

Sid left them. She came out in a few moments. “I have to run down to the village for a few minutes, Sid dear. Walk me out to my car, and then you go and sit in the front room and listen for him. He might wake up, but I don’t think he will.”

He walked back to the barn with her. Her little English Ford was parked just inside the big doors, heading out. Behind it, in the shadows, was a high square black Chrysler, up on blocks. Davie was clipping the grass at the edge of the drive.

When they went into the barn, he pulled her over to one side, behind the shelter of the edge of the door and kissed her very thoroughly. There was a warm and lingering smell of dusty hay, of animals long gone. She said, when he released her, “You do respond well to your cues.”

“A girl says come with me to the barn, it isn’t too complicated.”

“I’ll be gone about fifteen or twenty minutes. When I get back, you can have a nap.”

“Is this some compulsion, to put everybody to sleep?”

“You only let me do about one third of the driving. And you have had a few unexpected demands upon you, you know. Let’s keep you all fed and rested.”

He faked a yawn. “Now that you bring it up.”

She laughed and got into her little sand-colored car and went chugging out and up the drive. He watched her out of sight and went back into the house. He looked in at the parchment silence of the old man, and then sat in the living room. He smelled wax and polish and dust. He looked at the worn places in the rug. The high old furniture was in solemn geometry, in silent rural conversation. He heard the slow snick of Davie Wintergreen’s shears, and the sleepy chirr of insects in the summer afternoon.

No sound or smell of summer night came into the small suite in an old hotel in Syracuse where George Shanley lay sleeping. There was a clatter and roar of the two air-conditioning units that made the two rooms seem as if they were on some strange laboring conveyance that trundled on through the night.

He had taken a direct jet flight to Idlewild and had flown from there back to Syracuse on Mohawk Airlines. At the Syracuse Airport he had picked up the rental car he had arranged for, a big convertible. It had turned out to be a yellow one. He was not displeased. He had arrived just at dusk.

Before leaving, once he knew his schedule, he had asked Sad Frank Lesca to give him the right name in Syracuse. Frank had looked it up and phoned a man named Casey Stoker. When he was in the hotel, he phoned Stoker’s number. Stoker didn’t want to be friendly. He sounded bored. Lesca had told him it wasn’t a business trip. Stoker sent him to a place called Hill Haven, told him to ask for Sam. He left the rental car and took a cab. It was a four dollar fare. Sam was bored too. These people seemed indifferent to the west coast operation. When he tried to talk about his places, Sam yawned in his face. But the action was good. The tab was on the house, at least for drinks and dinner. Good drinks. Fine steaks. The girl arrived before he had finished his second drink. He’d told Sam something not too young, slim and dark and small, maybe, with a little class, but not so much class she couldn’t laugh a little. And for all night.

She went by initials. T.C. Everybody called her TeeCee. She had a cute little face and a big pile of dark hair,
and a hard narrow little dancer’s body. She had a small scar on the bridge of her nose, and gold way back in her mouth when she laughed. She got the money part out of the way real quick, so that it was snapped away into the purse, over and done with so they could forget it. My God, she went through that steak like Sonny Liston. She was a happy kid. She told her troubles and turned them into jokes. She’d been a dancer, gone out to the coast, married a stunt man. After being paid to fall off horses and buildings, he’d fallen off a curb for free, dead drunk, cracking his spine. No insurance. No compensation. They had a three year old kid named Joy. After trying everything else, she’d finally started hustling, got hooked up with a pretty good call circuit. Good protection. The spine was damaged so high up, the husband’s health was shaky. And brooding about how she was making a living didn’t help him much. When Joy was five, the stunt man died of pneumonia. She quit the business and came back to Syracuse. Joy was nine now. A cute kid. They lived with her mother. TeeCee worked days as a receptionist. She hadn’t expected to go back to hustling. But, you know, you get bored. And she ran into an old friend. And then she got lined up with Sam. Really sort of part time. A couple of tricks a week. No slobs and no drunks and no creep routines. Sort of dates.

After the steaks they went back to where the games were. Sam cleared him. He bought a hundred of chips and split with TeeCee. She liked craps. It was easy to see which way they were swinging the game, and he coached her to go with it until she started getting a little too fat, and then he cashed her out with two hundred clear. They were giving him a cold eye, so he put his fifty on the come line and let them take it. He took his fifty back from TeeCee, and without being asked, she cut the two hundred down the middle. He liked that. It showed a nice instinct.

They had vodka stingers out at the bar and taxied back to his hotel. She was a good hard worker, but something about her kept cooling him off. When it was finished off, he turned another light on and rolled her over and looked at what had kept taking his mind off it, a whole spidery mess of narrow little white scars and old welts that striped her narrow back and her hard little
butt. It made his stomach feel funny. She started snuffling even before he could ask her about it.

“It was my hus-hus-husband,” she said. “He was in that wheel chair I bought him and he was s-still real strong in the arms. And I’d come back from a t-trick and he’d cry and say terrible stinking things to me and say he was going to kill himself. And the only thing I could do that would help him, I’d strip and bite down on a towel or something and get braced good, and he’d whip me bloody. Sometimes I’d pass out. We tried not to make too much noise and wake the kid. Afterwards, he’d put stuff on my back, and I’d help him into bed, and he’d hold me and we’d both cry on account of what had become of us. You see, angel, it was the only thing in the world I could do for him. It was the only way he could feel like a man, the poor son of a bitch. It should have killed him quick when he fell onto that curb, not slow like it did. I can’t wear low backs on anything.”

“You poor kid,” he said. “You poor kid.” He turned the light off and held her close and patted her until she was able to have a nice cry.

When she was over it, she said, “Well, he used to knock me around some before he got hurt. You want we should sleep a little now?”

So together they slept in the cold rackety breath of the compressors, his arm across a body as narrow as Liz’s had once been, his face nuzzled into the back of the lean striated shoulder, her dark hair spilled, the light of the far lamp golden across them, lost to each other on the far side of their dreams. And should he awaken, she would come back from her sleep to meet her obligation, making for him a sinewy diligence, manufacturing her obligatory cries of acclaim, falsifying her pleasure, while she wondered if her mother would remember to call the man to fix the dishwasher first thing in the morning, wondered if Joy was getting enough out of her dancing class this year, wondered if the blue blouse would be all right for the office if she turned the collar.

In the second floor bedroom on the southwest corner of the old Brower house, in all the sweetness of the country night, in the soft center hollow of the old bed, the lovers lay entwined, murmurous and enchanted, their
hearts slowed for so long that the nostalgia of their caresses was beginning to turn upon a promised edge of new urgency. The electronic heart thumped, reminding them of mortality, making love more sweet.

She caught his hand and kissed the palm of it, placed it carefully back where it had been and said, “Like those people in the geometry problems, the ones that live on the surface of the paper, and all they can go is sideways. We’re that way about time. There’s only now.”

“Two tenses. Now and soon.”

“Don’t talk about any other kind of time. We have a comparative tense though, don’t we?” She nuzzled his throat. “Better. We don’t have good, better, best. We just have better, better, better. We’re very limited people, Sid.”

“Caught in a rut.”

“You mean in rut. No. That was coarse and vulgar and wicked. I’m no lady.”

“Don’t you swoon? Ladies swoon.”

“You keep doing that, boyo, and you’ll see a swoon, believe me. Sid?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Should I … should I try to be a little more passive?”

“Nobody tries to be anything. We just are. No fakes in the group.”

Suddenly she was tense and still. “Listen!” she whispered. “Listen to Tom.”

He held his breath to sharpen his hearing.

“Can you hear how it’s different?” she asked.

“The heart is the same, but the breathing isn’t as regular.”

“That means he’s awake. I better go down and see if he needs anything.” She left him. He saw her as a pale blur, moving. He heard the creak of a floor board and the slither of fabric as she put her robe on. “Don’t move,” she whispered. “Take a nap. Rest yourself.”

He heard the door open and close. In a minute or two the speaker made a rusty braying sound that made him jump. He turned it down, and it picked up Tom’s voice perfectly. “… materialize like a damned witch.”

“All you have to do is think of me and here I am.” Her voice was fainter, but he could hear her clearly.

“I was thinking of you, my dear.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“No. You can sit close and hold my hand and listen to me.”