Night Passage (2 page)

“And you do?” Carson said.

His face felt stiff as he spoke and his arms and hands felt weak.

“We do, Tom. Emphasis on the ‘We.’ ”

Carson was silent, staring at Hathaway. The mention of Jo Jo had made him feel loose and fragmented inside. Hathaway took a thick stationery-sized manila envelope from his middle drawer.

“You aren’t much of a policeman, Tom, and it was just a sad accident that you learned things. But you did, and you were right to come first to me. I’ve been able to save you so far from the consequences of your knowledge.”

“What if I went to the FBI with this?”

“This is what I’m trying to forestall,” Hathaway said. “Other people, people like Jo Jo, would prevail. And your family …” Hathaway shrugged and held the shrug for a moment, and sighed as if to himself, before he continued.

“But we both know, Tom, you are not made of that kind of stuff. The better choice for you, and I’m sure you recognize this, is to take our rather generous severance package. We’ve found you a house, and we’ve contributed some cash to help you in relocation costs. The details are in here.”

“What if I promise not to say a word about anything, Hasty. Why can’t I just stay here. You’d have a chief of police that won’t give you any trouble.”

Hathaway shook his head slowly as Carson spoke. He smiled sadly.

“I mean, you know, the next chief,” Carson said, “might be harder to deal with.”

Hathaway continued his sad smile and slow head shake.

“I am trying to help you, Tom,” Hathaway said. “I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself.”

“I’m no troublemaker,” Carson said. “How can you be sure you won’t just get a troublemaker?”

“We have already chosen your successor,” Hathaway said. “He should be just right.”

He held the envelope out toward Tom Carson and, after a moment of empty hesitation, Carson reached out and took it.

Jesse drove out Route 10 past upland, where he picked up Route 15 and followed it north to Barstow, where he went east on Route 40. He didn’t turn on the radio. He liked quiet. He set the cruise control to seventy and kept a hand lightly on the steering wheel and slowly settled into himself and allowed his feelings to seep out of the compacted center of himself. He no longer had a badge. He’d turned it in with his service pistol. There was no wedding ring on his left hand. He smiled without pleasure. Turned that in too. It made him feel sort of scared to be without a badge or a wedding ring. Not quite thirty-five and no official status anymore. With his right hand he fished in the gym bag on the front seat beside him until he found his off-duty gun, a short-barreled Smith & Wesson .38. He arranged it near the top of the bag, where it would be easy to reach, and he let his hand rest on it for a time. It made him feel less insubstantial. He stopped at a truck stop outside of Needles, sat at the counter and had orange juice, ham, eggs, potatoes, wheat toast, and three cups of coffee with cream and sugar. It made him feel good. The place was full of truckers and tourists, and he was alone among them. No one paid any attention to him. They were going where they would and he was on his way east. He went to the men’s room and washed his hands and face. Back in the car, cruise control set, he felt a small freshet of excitement. It was afternoon now, the sun was behind him. Shining on what he had left. The road spooled out ahead of him, straight to the horizon, nearly empty. Freedom, he thought, and smiled again, no badge, no ring, no problem. You look at it the right way and that’s freedom. He nursed the excitement as long as he could, trying to build on it.

He stayed the night in Flagstaff, 250 miles north of where he had been born, and went to the motel bar for supper. He ordered scotch on the rocks and a chicken breast sandwich on a croissant. There were a couple of guys in plaid shirts and those little string ties they wore in places like Arizona, the kind with the silver hasp where a knot should be. Both bartenders were women wearing white shirts and black ties and short red jackets. One was a fat blond woman, the other a more slender dark-haired Hispanic girl who would be fat in five more years. Beyond the bar was a room with tables and a dance floor, and the setup for a disc jockey. No one was in the room yet. An unlit piece of neon script over the disc jockey stand spelled out “Coyote Lounge.” He sipped a little scotch, felt the cold heat spread from his esophagus. A tall well-built man in his thirties came into the bar wearing a big Stetson hat and earphones. He seemed to be bouncing slightly to music that only he heard. He had on a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and tight jeans and two-toned lizard-skin cowboy boots. The tiny tape player was tucked into his shirt pocket and the slender cord ran up under his chin. He looked as if he’d just come from a shower and a shave and his cologne came into the bar ahead of him. Clubman, maybe. Jesse watched him. There was nothing particularly interesting about him except that Jesse watched everything. The cowboy ordered a nonalcoholic beer and when it was served he left the glass and picked up the bottle and carried it with him as he walked along the bar looking everything over.

“When’s that dancing start?” he said to one of the bartenders.

He spoke loudly, perhaps because he needed to speak over the music in his ears. He drank his nonalcoholic beer from the bottle, holding it by the neck.

“Nine o’clock,” the Hispanic girl said. She had no accent.

The cowboy looked around the bar at Jesse, at the two guys in plaid shirts drinking beer, at the two bartenders.

“Anybody know a happening place around here?”

One of the beer drinkers shook his head without looking up. Nobody else even acknowledged the question. Everybody knows it, Jesse thought. Maybe it’s how loud he talks. Or how he looks like a model in one of those western-wear catalogs. Or the way he walks around in the little backwater bar, like he was strolling into the Ritz. Whatever it was, everyone knew he was a guy who, encouraged by an answer, would talk to you for much too long. The cowboy nodded to himself, as if his suspicions were confirmed, and walked into the empty dance hall and walked around it, looking at the caricatures of dapper semi-human coyotes hanging on the walls. Then he put his half-finished bottle of nonalcoholic beer on the bar, surveyed the bar again, and walked out.

“Takes all kinds,” the blond bartender said.

A jerk, Jesse thought. A good-looking jerk, but just as lonely and separate as the homely ones. His sandwich came. He ate it because he needed nourishment, and drank two more scotches and paid and went to his room. Nothing was going to happen when they opened up the dance floor that Jesse wanted to watch.

In his room he got the travel bottle of Black Label out of his suitcase and poured some into one of the little sanitary plastic cups he found in the bathroom. The walk down the hall for ice seemed too long so he sipped the scotch warm. He didn’t turn on the television. Instead he stood at the window and looked out at the high pines that rimmed the hill behind the motel. He’d grown up in Tucson when
The Brady Bunch
was hot, and while it was only four or five hours away, it could have been another planet. Tucson was sunlight and desert and heat, even in January. Up here they had winter. It was 7:45, getting dark. He was still in the same time zone. Jennifer would be home from work. Actually she’d probably be fucking Elliott Krueger about now. He let the images of his wife having sex roll behind his eyes as he stared at the now-dark windowpane and sipped his scotch. His reflection in the windowpane looked somber. He grinned at it, and raised his glass in a toasting gesture. Go to it, Jenn, fuck your brains out. It’s got nothing to do with me. The bravado of it, buoyed with the scotch, made him feel intact for a moment, but he knew it was scotch, and he knew it was bravado, and he knew there was nothing behind the smile in the empty window.

Hasty Hathaway had never really worked. His father had made a great deal of money in banking, and while he spent time in his office at the bank he’d inherited, he was mainly busy with being the most prominent citizen in Paradise, chairman of the Board of Selectmen, Commander of Freedom’s Horsemen, and president of the Rotary Club. He stood now in his bedroom with the closet door open thinking about which jacket to wear. His wife lay in bed in her nightgown watching him.

“What about the blue seersucker?” he said.

“Blue looks good on you, Hasty,” Cissy said.

“New chief of police is arriving this week,” Hasty said, “from California.”

“Didn’t you meet him already?”

“Chicago. Burke and I went out to interview the finalists. Stayed at the Palmer House.”

Hasty pulled out the blue seersucker and put it on and turned so Cissy could see him.

“Good,” she said. “Are you going to wear that plaid bow tie?”

“You think I should?”

“It would go very nicely with that shirt and jacket.”

“All right, then,” Hasty said and took it off the tie rack on the back of the closet door.

“Is he a nice boy?” Cissy said.

“The new chief? Well, I hope he’s more than that,” Hasty said. “But he is young, and looks younger than he is. And he has a good record.”

“And he’ll fit in?” Cissy said.

“Yes, we were careful about that,” Hasty said. “That was one of Tom Carson’s problems, so we were all especially alert to that. He’s one of us. Not wealthy of course, but the right background generally. College-educated, too.”

“Really? What school?”

“Out there,” Hathaway said. “One of the big ones, USC, UCLA, I can’t keep them straight. Criminal justice. He took courses at night.”

“It’s always a shame, I think, when a young man can’t get the full college experience. You know, not only classes, but football games and pep rallies, proms, intense discussions in the dorms.”

“I know, but many young men are not as fortunate as we were. They have to make do.”

“Yes.”

As he did every morning Hathaway had a bowl of Wheaties for breakfast and two cups of coffee. Cissy sat across from him in her bathrobe with black coffee and a cigarette. He had quit twenty years earlier. They both wished she could quit, but she couldn’t, and they had concluded that there was no point discussing it. She was a tallish woman with a youthful body. She rarely wore makeup, and if she did it was only lipstick. Her blond hair was starting to show silver and she wore it long. It looked nice with her youthful face.

“Well,” he said, “have to run. Got a bank to run. Got a town to manage.”

“Busy, busy,” she said.

It was what she always said, because that was what he always said. She put her cheek up to be kissed. He kissed it and left, walking out the back door and down the driveway toward the town hall. His clothes always looked slightly unfashionable, as if he had spent money on them a long time ago and then outgrown them. The trouser cuffs were always too high. The jacket sleeves always showed too much shirtsleeve. His belt seemed too high and the waist of his suit coat always seemed a little pinched. Like her smoking, it was something put aside in the long years of marriage, under the heading “for better, for worse.” She put his cereal bowl and coffee cup in the sink, poured herself another cup of coffee, and lit another cigarette and hugged her robe a little snugger around her and looked out at the flower garden which occupied most of her backyard. She’d been flattered to marry a man from such a good family. Later maybe she’d take a bath and shave her legs.

The first day’s drive had been tan and parched, the hillsides littered with beige rocks. Every once in a while a tiny funnel of wind ran up a drywash and spiraled a handful of dust across the interstate. Jesse had seen no wildlife, and no vegetation other than the lifeless-looking desert scrub. He saw no water until he crossed the Colorado River near Needles. He was driving the Explorer. He’d left Jennifer the red Miata with the balloon note that she’d pay out of her first big break, she said. Now on his second day out, he was still in the mountains, east of Flagstaff. Green, clean, cool, full of evergreen trees. Very different from the southern Arizona of his childhood. The water bounded down gullies and gushed out of fissures in the rock face. The water ran with an abandon that Jesse had never seen, as if God had too much of it and had simply flung it at this part of the landscape. On cruise control, the car itself seemed to flow through the rich green personless landscape. He turned on the radio and pushed the scan button. The digital dial flashed silently as the radio sought unsuccessfully for a signal strong enough to stop on. One way to tell when you’re in the boonies. It was clear in the mountains and still crisp. Even in late spring, there were still patches of snow, under the low spread of the biggest pine trees. Elliott had probably already screwed her under a tree. By the time he had reached Albuquerque he had dropped two thousand feet, though he was still high. It was impossible to drive across the country without imagining Indians and cavalry and wagon trains and mountain men, and Wells Fargo and the Union Pacific. Deerskin trousers and coats made of buffalo hide and long rifles and traps and whiskey and Indians. Bowie knives. Beaver traps. Buffalo as far as you could look. White-faced cattle. Chuck wagons. Six-guns with smooth handles. Horse and man seemingly like one animal as they moved across the great landscape. Hats and kerchiefs and Winchester rifles and the creak of saddles and the smell of bacon and coffee. East of Albuquerque he was back into sere landscape with high ground lying ominously in the distance, like sleeping beasts at the point where the vast high sky joined the remote landscape. At a rest stop the sign warned of rattlesnakes. He stopped for gas at an Indian reservation in New Mexico. He didn’t know what kinds of Indians they were. Hopi maybe, or Pima. He didn’t know anything about Indians. The gas was cheaper on the reservation and so were cigarettes because neither was subject to federal tax. Signs for miles along the interstate advertised the low price for cigarettes. A couple of Indian men in jeans and white tee shirts and plastic mesh baseball caps were hanging around the self-service pump. One of them eyed the California plates on the car.