A Firing Offense (21 page)

McGinnes was attempting to open his boxcar with his free hand and foot. I tried the door on my car.

“It’s locked,” he shouted.

“So’s this one,” I called back. “What now?”

He looked around the side of the car. “Swing in between the cars. There’s a small platform on either side of the link that you can stand on. And watch your feet.”

I followed his lead and moved gingerly off the ladder and onto a two-foot-wide iron footing, taking my hand off the rung only when I was certain I was secure. McGinnes now faced me across the link that connected our cars. The ground below was a blur that rushed away.

We rode the train for a couple of hours, through smallish towns and low-activity yards and back through woods and clearings. When we crossed a bridge over a wide creek, McGinnes pointed to the moon’s reflection on the still water. In one of the railroad yards a dog barked at us briefly. In another, an outline of a man waved slowly.

When we were again in the middle of a long stretch of woods, McGinnes suggested we get off the train. “It feels like we’re slowing down,” he said, and looked out from between the
cars and back at me. “What you want to do is, move back out to the outside ladder. When I tell you, jump off and away from the train. Lean back to counter your momentum, and when you hit, take long strides until you slow down.”

“I’ll watch you,” I said.

We moved out to the sides of our cars. The night air had grown cooler. McGinnes waited for a long while until the land gradually leveled out. Then he pushed away from the train, landed on his feet, and slowed to a jog.

I was concentrating on jumping away from the train—it seemed then to be the main objective—and threw myself way out, realizing as I did that my upper body was far ahead of my legs. My feet barely touched the gravel. I rolled until I was stopped by a log and some brush. When McGinnes helped me up, I was a little dazed but relieved.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, though my back already ached and I could feel a deep scrape below my knee as it rubbed against my jeans.

The caboose passed and with it the noise, leaving only the quiet of the woods. We watched the last of it enter a curve ahead and disappear into the night.

WE WALKED ON THE
tracks in the moonlight, keeping in the direction of the train. He looked at the stars and claimed we were heading northwest. I didn’t dispute it as it seemed irrelevant in any case. I was becoming tired and ornery.

“I don’t know how you talk me into this shit,” I said.

“Relax, will you?” McGinnes stopped me with his hand on my chest. “I bet you can’t even tell me what you did a week ago today. But when you’re drooling in your wheelchair in forty years, you’ll remember this night—the way the woods smell right now, the sound of the train. That rush you got when you were running across the clearing.
This
is happening, man,
this
is what’s important. Everything else is bullshit.”

We walked on. I related the course of events from the day Pence had called to the present, leaving out nothing. McGinnes was unusually attentive as he listened. At one point he began coughing furiously, then retched and spit up something bilious. I sat on the tracks and waited until he was ready to continue.

Sometime after midnight we reached a railroad yard and found an office with a washroom, where an elderly man let us get some water and clean up. Then we walked into an adjoining town, found its main road, and put our thumbs out.

An hour after that the driver of a jacked-up Malibu slowed and pulled over. McGinnes looked in the passenger window, pointed me to the back seat, and hopped in front.

A young serviceman was behind the wheel. He checked me out in the rearview, looking slightly apprehensive at the sight of my marked face.

“Where you guys headed?” he asked.

“Elizabeth City,” McGinnes said.

“Elizabeth City?” He laughed. “Hell, you’re in Virginia!”

McGinnes looked back at me and then at the kid. “Where in Virginia?”

“Franklin area,” the kid said. “What are you, lost?”

“We hopped a train,” McGinnes said proudly.

“No shit!” the kid said.

“Damn straight!” McGinnes said, turning his head slightly so I could see his wink. “What you got in this thing, a three-oh-seven?”

“Yeah,” he said sheepishly and added, “but it moves.”

“Good engine. You in the navy?” The kid nodded and McGinnes told him of a base he had once been fictitiously stationed on. We were driving out of town.

“What was it like? Hopping a train, I mean.”

“I’ll tell you what,” McGinnes said. “Let’s grab some cold beer, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

I hunched down in the seat and folded my arms. I closed
my eyes, confident that when I opened them next we would be parked in front of the Gates motel.

I woke early the next morning, hiked back into the woods, and found my knapsack in the clearing. Returning to the room, I woke McGinnes, showered, shaved, and gathered up our gear.

After checking out we stopped for coffee and juice, then got back on the highway and traveled east to 158, then south across a bridge over the intracoastal waterway, our windows down and the radio up.

Less than two hours later we crossed the bridge at Point Harbor and, announcing ourselves with a raucous whoop from McGinnes, rolled onto the Outer Banks.

S
O, JOHNNY,” I
said. “Who’s Virginia Dare?” We were driving down the beach road that bore her name. To our left were oceanfront cottages and houses on pilings.

“First child born in this country to English parents.”

“I’m impressed.”

“And I’m hungry. Let’s get some breakfast,” he said, and then, embarrassed, as if having knowledge of the state history was in some way a feminine trait, added, “Besides, I gotta’ lay some pipe.”

We switched over to the 158 bypass and pulled into the lot of a pancake house. It was warm as summer but there were few patrons. The town was in its off-season.

McGinnes ordered a pot of coffee, french toast topped with a fried egg, sausage, and practically everything else from the kitchen that would clog an artery. I had eggs over easy and scrapple.

When we finished, McGinnes grabbed a section of the
USA Today
he was “reading” and a book of matches and headed for the bathroom. I borrowed the phone directory and a blank sheet of paper from the cashier and wrote down the names and addresses of several restaurants.

Back in the lot I removed my sweatshirt and tossed it in the backseat. We drove to a variety store on the highway, where McGinnes bought sandwiches, beer, and ice for the cooler. While he did that, I pumped gas into my Dodge, then paid a young attendant who had a back wider than a kitchen table. He sang “Tennessee Stud” while I gave him the money and kept singing it as he walked back into the garage where he was working.

We returned to the Virginia Dare Trail and drove south out of Kitty Hawk, through Kill Devil Hills, past the Wright Brothers Memorial and into Nags Head. All of these towns were pleasant and indistinguishable from one another. Near the huge dune of Jockeys Ridge we stopped at a motor court named the Arizona and checked in.

We changed into shorts and walked across the road to the beach. We put our gear down in front of a white cottage on stilts that had boarded windows. The tide was receding and the swells were high at four feet and breaking far from the shore.

When I broke a sweat, I jogged to the shoreline and dove in the ocean. The water was pleasantly cold and clean. I swam parallel to the shore for roughly a quarter mile, then breaststroked back and rode in a few waves.

McGinnes handed me a cold beer as I toweled off. I drank it sitting upright on the blanket. McGinnes pulled another beer from the cooler and announced that he was going for a walk. I watched him go north, stopping to talk to an old man wearing long pants, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap.

When I finished my beer, I pulled another from the ice and walked up the wooden steps and onto the porch of the white cottage. The window frames were peeling and the rusted storm
door was permanently weathered half-open. Wooden Adirondack chairs painted a bright green sat in front of the boarded bay window on the splintering deck. I turned one of them to face the ocean, sat in it, and put my feet up on the railing.

The constant crash of the waves was punctuated by the cries of a flock of gulls that sat on the gravelly beach. A young father was surf fishing a hundred yards down the beach, his tackle box, white bucket, and cooler by his side. His blond little boy looked for shells but stayed close by.

I pushed the hair back off my forehead and finished my beer. The area around my nose and under my eyes no longer ached, confirming my grandfather’s claim that saltwater was a cure for every ailment. I crossed my arms and settled into the chair, then drifted to sleep.

McGinnes woke me with a shake. I was sitting half in shade now. I looked at my arms and their deep brown color, quickly regained from my vacation on Assateague three weeks earlier.

“Let’s go, man,” McGinnes said. “You’re starting to look like a Puerto Rican.” I poked his red chest with my index finger and brought up a splotch of white.

We returned to the room. I showered and changed into a denim shirt, jeans, and running shoes. McGinnes put on his Hawaiian shirt and went into the bathroom, toothbrush in hand. He began to cough and shut the door.

I sat on the bed and ate one of the sandwiches as I looked over my list. McGinnes came out of the bathroom and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You all right?” I asked.

He smiled unconvincingly and chin-nodded the list in my hand. “What’s up?”

“Restaurants that Kim Lazarus may have worked in. They should be open by now.”

“Let me check out a couple,” he said quickly.

“Based on what her father told me, I figure there’s only three possibilities, unless the place she used to work in is out of
business now.” I ripped the bottom of the page off and handed it to him. “This place has a popular happy hour, judging from the ads, and it’s Mexican. Skip the restaurant and check out the bar. I have a feeling they may be trying to off the drugs, and a bar with employees that use would be a perfect spot. If you get a bite, try and find out if they’re still in town.”

“No problem,” he said.

“I’ll drop you off and check out these other places. Then I’ll swing back and pick you up after I’ve done that. You need bread?”

He put his hand out and I handed him some of my bankroll. He folded it and stashed it in his pocket, then pointed a thumb into his own chest. “Don’t worry about dad,” he said. “This kinda shit is like cuttin’ butter.”

I LET MCGINNES OFF
in the parking lot of the Casa Grande, which was in a large, old oceanfront hotel in Kitty Hawk.

“I’ll see you in the Big House,” he said, and shifted his shoulders in a Cagneyesque manner. I watched him in my rearview as I drove away, feeling an odd sympathy for him as he strolled across the lot in his Hawaiian shirt and polyester slacks.

The first place I hit was in a strip center next to a cluster of movie theaters on the divided highway. It had been advertised as a restaurant but was little more than a carryout serving tacos and burritos.

The kid who was behind the counter when I walked in was busy playing air guitar to the Metallica that was coming from his box. I asked about Kim Lazarus and got a dull-eyed look and a negative response.

My next stop was a free-standing restaurant in Nags Head that was done in a stucco and adobe motif, one of those Tex-Mex chains that American families love specifically for their blandness. It was their dinner rush, and when I saw the waitresses’ uniforms—green and gold dresses with some type of
elaborate headgear more appropriate on a trotting horse—I had the feeling that Kim Lazarus had never worked here.

The woman behind the register, thin and sharp-featured, seemed to be the only one around not doing anything. I walked up to her and smiled.

“Hi.”

“Hello,” she said. “The hostess will seat you.” She made a jerky, pigeon-like movement with her head.

“I’m not looking for a table. My cousin works here. I’m on vacation, thought I’d say hi.”

“Everyone’s kinda busy, sir. But what’s her name? I’ll see if I can get her attention.”

“Kimmy,” I said. “Kim Lazarus.”

“There’s no one here by that name,” she said.

“I thought for sure she said this place,” I whined. “Did she used to work here?”

“Honey, I’ve been on this station since we opened two years ago. No Kim ever worked here.” She jerked her head again.

“Are there any other places like this?” I asked. “I guess I got confused.”

“Casa Grande in Kitty Hawk. Or maybe she worked at Carlos Joe’s. But they closed down last year. Had some trouble.”

“What happened?” I asked, winking conspiratorially. Then I jerked my head like hers, for punctuation. “Taxes?”

She leaned in and whispered, “Owners got in drug trouble.”