Death Will Have Your Eyes (7 page)

I ate breakfast
slowly and, afterwards, carried a second cup of coffee over to the counter and sat beside him. He was on his third or fourth, with milk and with sweetener from sky-blue packages. Where we were, you could see stacks of glasses in wire racks against the kitchen wall, a tottering tray of napkins rolled, burrito-like, around silverware, a badly encrusted waffle iron.

“Come here often?”

A lot younger than I would have thought—but aren't they all?—and good-looking in some indefinably continental way; functionally dressed in loose jeans, sweater, ski jacket, running shoes. I wasn't the only one who thought him good-looking. The waitress spent an inordinate amount of time seeing to his coffee.

“Capricorn,” he said. “And no, I don't want to dance.”

We sat there a while. Truckers came in, made calls over coffee and burgers and left. Travelers whose children could be seen looming into the windows of vans outside like sharks in aquariums materialized at the counter and voyaged back out with cartons of food in hand.

“So what do we do next?” I said. “You supposed to smother me with a jelly doughnut?”

“Thought maybe I'd just persuade you to order the chili. That ought to do it.”

“Or I could jot down my itinerary, we'd meet a couple of times a day for meals. Save you a lot of trouble. Easier for everybody, in the long run.”

“Hmmmm,” he said, and got more coffee from the waitress. Can't let a good customer take two sips without a refill. He nodded to her and smiled.

“We could even consider carpooling,” I said. “I can't remember if there's an energy crisis right now, but if not, one's bound to be along shortly.”

He shook his head, half an inch in either direction, once. “Don't think so. I've seen the way you drive.”

“There's that. But you do have to look at the big picture.”

He looked into his coffee instead and suggested a walk. I paid, waited as he spoke with the waitress, then we went out together into a chill, sunny morning. Sunlight on everything, just lying there, trying to get warm.

We walked down the main stretch a block or two, then onto a side street that barely managed to harbor six buildings and a building-size, overgrown parking lot before surrendering to the chaos of kudzu and what people hereabouts called
woods
. I'd had similar feelings once on a brief assignment in Midland-Odessa, Texas: this sense that three paces out from the city I'd step abruptly off the continental shelf, into quicksand and nothingness—as though aliens had carved the city from its environs and deposited it here.

“Do you remember a morning in the fall of '71, on Cyprus?” my companion said after a time.

A woman's face floated into my mind. The smell of lemon trees, kerosene.

“I do. But there's no way
you
could.”

He went on. “Because of your presence, because of what you did, or caused to happen, there—I don't know the details of this, and you yourself may or may not recall them—a woman selected to die instead was reunited with her children.”

Oh, yes: I remembered.

“Years later, far from those islands, in a far different life, in a different world, that woman again found love and remarried. Her husband was a Russian émigré, a childless widower who had long believed his life over, his family name never to be forwarded, his fortunes at an end.

“Dmitri was at first astonished, then grateful, to find love and family so late in his course. Gratitude did not come easy to him, you understand. He had clawed his way up from the rudest dock work. It was difficult for him to credit fortune, chance, destiny—to credit
anything
but his own determination and labor—for what happened in his life. And because that recognition, that gratitude, came with such difficulty, it was taken most seriously. Taken
to his heart,
as he himself might say. It became one of the central facts of his life.

“In time that gratitude extended itself to the person he knew to be responsible for his wife's survival. And so, declaring someday that person would be properly thanked, Dmitri turned his considerable resources towards discovering the man's identity.”

My companion paused, watching an Amish buggy make its plodding way along the road's shoulder.

“It was, as I'm sure you know, a for
mid
able task.”

Stressed on the second syllable, as the British do.

“I'd think so.” Hope so.

“One fraught with false trails, laden with dead ends, blinds, misdirections. And impossible to say, finally, whether it was dogged persistence, money—vast sums of it, pirate chests full of it—or simple luck that's carried me at last to this long-desired end.”

“This is the end, then? Here?”

“The Russian, Dmitri, died many years ago—as good a man as will ever see this world. His wife, the woman you knew as Cybelle, followed shortly after.

“In thanking you now, I discharge both my father's gratitude and the vow I made to him.

“Spaseba,”
he said, holding out his hand. “I am Michael. And now, I suppose, finally, I can get on with my life.”

Thinking of his obvious professionalism, I said:

“But surely this
is
your life.”

“No. I'm an engineer, a shipbuilder, actually. Not that I've had much chance to practice that profession.”

We had come back around to the truck stop.

“For all his efforts and dedication, the old Russian was never able to discover your identity. In fact he learned almost nothing. What else was there for me, then, but to become, myself, what we knew you to be? If you wish to find wolves,
become
a wolf.

“This is what I did. I trained and had myself sent out as a field agent and before long in that clandestine, circumspect world I began encountering certain…stories, I suppose you would say. You may or may not know: a kind of myth, a hollowness, exists in the place you once occupied. As in Voznesensky's poem for Robert Lowell:

“You were ensconced, shrouded, in that space. But then it began to seem as though the space might be no longer vacant, the hollowness filling. Rumbles of far-off thunder made their way to me. Rumors, unexplained occurrences, movements on the horizon. All of which led me inexorably to this assignment. To you. And thereby to the end of one career.”

We stood near a huge plate-glass door plastered over with travel stickers. Our breath pedaled out into the chill morning air. A middle-aged couple on a Gold Wing pulled up at the curb and sat with engine idling, studying separate maps, he in half-moon reading glasses, she holding the map out away from her, squinting.

“I had assumed it was
my
career that was supposed to end,” I said. “And my life.”

“So, apparently, had others.” Michael looked into the café. The waitress looked back at him from behind the counter. They both smiled.

“I must tell you: I am not at all certain that I recognize the game pieces in use here, or that I know their proper moves. And the board itself seems a most peculiar, oddly shaped one. I hope that you will take particular caution, my friend.”

He held out his hand and we shook.

“How very strange to call you that: friend. You have been central to my life for much of it. Yet I've not met you until this day. And now will have no reason to see you again.”

“Unless you come simply
as
a friend.”

I stood for a moment watching through a tiny map of Texas on the door as he reentered the café and sat at the counter. A cup of coffee was put before him. The waitress, apparently, was on break; she came and sat beside him.

For the remainder
of that day and much of the next—presumably until someone got around to discovering Michael's apostasy—I was a solo act. Sailing free and alone on the interstate and through adjunct towns, at peace with myself and surroundings.

Then about three in the afternoon, roughly alongside a stretch of fiberglass hot tubs turned on edge like huge jigsaw pieces and another service-road store selling “chainsaw art” (totemlike figures of bears and other wildlife liberated waist- or haunch-up from tree trunks), with acquisition of a sporty little white job and a moose-like Pontiac—countertenor, bass—I became a trio.

They took the Datsun out an hour or so later.

There wasn't a lot I could do. We'd cat-and-moused for thirty miles or more on the straightaway before nosing into a cluster of tight, contradictory curves. The Pontiac had lugged up hard on my outside then, holding me in the curves and crowding close against me while the sports car, a Fiat, nipped and nibbled at the inside like a good cow dog.

It was all timed perfectly, almost balletic. And when finally I did leave the road—more or less electively, as it happened, taking what I decided might well be my last chance—for a moment, just before the rear wheels lost purchase, I thought I'd done it, thought I might actually have pulled it off.

The Datsun hit the far bank and paused, listing for an interminable moment during which several Latin American nations changed their names, political ideology and rulers at least once, then, very rapidly, gaining speed all the while, began rolling.

After six it all seemed academic and I quit counting.

So I started rolling, myself: out of the tight ball I'd tucked myself into and out of the car in a single ongoing motion. Then let momentum carry me onto my feet and sprinted between billboards for steak houses, motels and wrecker services into nearby trees.

I was on a limb high overhead when they finally talked themselves into coming in after me. I could see their cars pulled into a gap-toothed V back at roadside. There were only the two drivers, one a middle-aged, crewcut man in crisp white shirt, tie and windbreaker, the other in Yuppie Lumberjack and baseball cap. The older one had a shotgun. The younger one probably thought his red shirt was weapon enough.

I stayed up there a long while, letting them wear themselves down and lose what edge they had.

Then the kid stepped around a tree into my elbow and went down. His head lay propped against roots. Blood poured from his nose and pooled at his collar, soaking into the shirt, darkening it to maroon. He snored.

The older one was considerably more trouble, and for a time I was afraid I'd moved on him too hard. But eventually light seeped back into the dull gray eyes he leveled at me.

I nodded to him.

After a moment he said: “Correct me if I'm wrong. But I suppose if I move—if I can, that is—you'll shoot me.”

“With what?”

I was sitting, knees up, against a tree. I spread my hands.

“Okay if I sit up? Again: if I can.”

I nodded.

He came up slowly, hands flat against legs, breathing deeply, forcing the pain back. Put it in the pantry, use it later.

“Adrian?” he said.

“Asleep.”

“Temporarily, or otherwise?”

“Give him half an hour.”

He looked off towards the highway, blinked up at the sun through the canopy of leaves. A squirrel was fussing up there somewhere.

“Right, then.”

He lifted his left hand and probed at its wrist, experimentally, dispassionately, with the fingers of the other.

“Third time now I've broken the sucker. So…”

He looked at me again. Eyes depthless.

“So?” I said.

“So what's the deal?”

“How about we play History? I'm the big bad Russians and you're Julius Rosenberg. Tell me some secrets.”

“Yeah, well, I know how that one ended.”

“This one doesn't have to.”

There was a sudden exodus of birds from trees around us. Moments later, half a block long, a truck heaved into view on the service road, cab black and gleaming, bright cars lashed to scaffolding behind, distinct as paints in a paintbox.

“Cigarettes in my shirt,” he said. “All right if I get them?”

“Sure.”

He lit one and sat smoking, watching the truck swing back onto the interstate. I thought of camels lumbering among dunes half a world away. Of Erector Sets, carnival rides, the Eiffel Tower. My sculpture.

“Can't help you much. There's this man—an agent, I guess you'd have to call him. No pun intended. Everything comes through him. Someone needs a job done, he gets in touch, and the man sets terms, strikes the bargain. I call in later, a couple of times a day when I'm not already working, otherwise it might be two or three before I get a chance, and he tells me go here or there. Be in Dallas at five, Akron tomorrow morning, this is what you have to do there. Tickets are always waiting for me. Motel rooms. Cash. Everything about it ultraclean, professional. Smooth. So I can't give you a name. That's why it's all set up the way it is.”

He shook his head. “The rest is silence,” he said.

But it wasn't.

Adrian's breathing signaled trouble. We both heard the laboring heaves, listened and caught the gasp, realized at the same moment that his breathing had stopped.

And suddenly were there, together, at the tree.

Grabbing ankles, I pulled the boy down flat and thumped at his chest, twice, hard, with a fist. Then quickly measured three fingers up from the xiphoid, locked fingers and began rocking, elbows stiff.

“One thousand, two thousand…”

His companion pinched nostrils shut and blew his own breath into Adrian's mouth.

“Three thousand, four thousand, five…”

Breath.

“One thousand, two…”

Breath.

“One thousand…”

Breath.

Nothing.

After ten or twelve minutes, on
change,
we traded places. I watched him there above the boy rock back and forth on his one good hand, counting; and every fifth compression I blew my own breath forcibly into Adrian's still mouth. It remained still. Our sweat fell onto him.

We shifted places, shifted again.

Until finally, exhausted, we gave up. Adrian's pupils had been dilated for some time.

“What the hell happened?” my co-rescuer said.

“No way to know,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Yeah. Well.” He lit a cigarette and fell back against the roots, breathing hard, looking up at sky. “It's all pretty frail, what holds us here.”

“You got kids?” he said after a while.

I shook my head.

“Wife?”

No.

“Not many of us do. Boy there's the closest I was ever gonna come. Twenty-one years old. Would of been twenty-two next month. You even remember what it was like, being that young?”

Not really.

“Me either.”

He struggled to his feet and to the Pontiac, fished a bottle of Stoly out of the glove compartment and brought it back.

“Join me?” he said.

We passed the bottle back and forth a few times.

“I don't get out much,” he said. “You know how it is, working all the time, never knowing where you might wake up tomorrow morning. Then I
do
get out, and I look at all these people with their suits and their station wagons and the next thirty years of their life stamped out like it's on the back of a coin, and I have to wonder what makes them go on.

“Has to be family, I figure. And I guess Adrian there was pretty much
my
last chance for family.”

I handed the bottle across.

He took a small, careful sip and passed it back to me.

I finished it off. Held the bottle close to me. Birds sang again. We sat there a while without talking.

“Come on,” he said. “Help me get the boy into the car and I'll give you a lift to the next town. Get on with our lives, as they say.”

As if we had them: lives.