Night Passage (5 page)

“I got five kids,” Romero said. “Two of them in college. I can’t risk it with you anymore, Jesse.”

Jesse nodded and shrugged. Romero shook hands with him, opened his mouth to say something, and closed it, and shook his head and walked away. When his new partner quit him in less than a week, Jesse was transferred inside to records. When he started not showing up for work, Cronjager called him in and talked to him and sent him to the police doctor. The doctor got him to AA. He thought the meetings were full of self-satisfied assholes, and he hated the higher power crap. After the second meeting he went home and drank nearly a fifth of scotch and slept through most of the next day. The day after that Cronjager offered him the chance to resign or go through the firing process. Jesse resigned. And went home and sat in his small kitchen with ice and scotch and found himself without connection or purpose. I’ll drink to that. He sat and drank scotch and the tears ran down his face.

Her sister had agreed to take the kids for the night, and Carole Genest had the house to herself. Before she went to dinner with Mark she had changed the bed linens. She and Mark had had two margaritas and a bottle of white wine with dinner and they were laughing as Mark pulled the BMW sedan into her driveway and parked under the big maple tree near her side door.

“You better lock the car,” Carole said when they got out. “I don’t think you’ll be leaving for a while.”

As Mark beeped the lock button on his key ring, and the power locks clicked in the car, Jo Jo Genest loomed out of the shadows by the side door.

Carole said, “Jesus.”

“Where’s the kids?” Jo Jo said.

“Get out of here, Jo Jo,” Carole said.

“You gonna fuck this pipsqueak?” Jo Jo said.

“Watch your mouth, pal,” Mark said. But he didn’t say it with conviction. Hulking before them in the half light, Jo Jo looked like a rhinoceros.

Jo Jo put his huge hand against Mark’s face and slammed his head back against the roof of the car. Mark’s legs buckled and he staggered but remained upright, leaning on the car, clasping his head with both hands, rocking slowly from one side to another.

“Get outta here,” Jo Jo said.

Mark went around the car, still holding his head, got into it, and backed down the driveway, the car running off of one side of the driveway and then the other as he overcorrected, going too fast backward in the dark.

“You son of a bitch,” Carole said. “I got a court order on you. I’m going to put you in jail, you bastard.”

“Kids are at your sister’s, aren’t they? You stashed them there so you could come home and fuck that faggot.”

“And if I did, what’s that to you. Don’t you get it, you jerk. We’re divorced,
D-I-V-O-R-C-E-D
.”

She unlocked the side door as she talked and pushed past him into the house. He followed her.

“Get out of my house,” she said.

“Your house? Your fucking house? You paid for it?”

Jo Jo kicked the side door shut with his heel.

“I’m calling the cops,” Carole said.

“No,” Jo Jo said. “No. I came here to talk. Lemme talk with you.”

“Nice start to a talk,” Carole said. “Smacking my date against the car.”

“I’m sorry,” Jo Jo said. “I just can’t stand seeing you with somebody, you unnerstand? I can’t. You and me are forever, Carole. I can’t stand it, you’re with somebody else.”

“Well, you better get used to it, Jo Jo, because that is how it is.”

Jo Jo felt frantic. She was killing him. How could she kill him like this.

“I was hoping maybe, we could, you know, have sex, just one time, for old times’ sake, you know?”

“Are you crazy? You come up here, two years we been divorced, you beat up my date and push in here and tell me you want to have sex? Get the hell out of here, Jo Jo. I’m calling the cops.”

“Carole, please, I need it. I’m going crazy without it. Please.”

She turned toward the phone and Jo Jo pushed her away. She tried to step around him and he grabbed her arm. She hit him with her free arm, a wild swing punch with her fist closed. He shoved her backward, away from the phone and onto the couch.

“Please,” he said. “Please.”

She was trying to hit him, but he held her wrists as he forced her down. She kicked at him, but it seemed to have no effect.

“Please,” he said. “Please.”

Her skirt was up over her thighs. He tore at her hose. His mouth pressed against hers. She tried to twist away. She punched, she kicked, she tried to bite him. But he was so oppressively strong, so irresistibly huge, that her struggles had no impact. His face was pressed against hers. She could smell liquor on his breath, or maybe it was liquor on hers. He had gotten most of her clothing out of the way. His weight pressed her helplessly back and his hands were on her and she could barely move and barely breathe and she thought oh, God, what’s one more time, and gave up.

The rain stayed with Jesse into western Pennsylvania. It had eased when he stopped on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, west of Pittsburgh. He got a cheeseburger in the restaurant, and a cup of coffee. He ate at the counter looking at the scattering of travelers around him. A lot of truckers, a lot of old people, retired probably, who’d arrived in their RVs. See the country: Trailer parks where you could get water and electrical and sewage hookups. Gas stations where you could fill up on gas and buy a pre-made sandwich wrapped in Saran Wrap, places like this where you could sit among your fellow adventurers and not look at them. They all looked like they’d eaten too much white bread. When he finished eating, he went to the men’s room, and washed, and came out and walked to his car. The rain was firm now, and pleasant. Standing beside his car with one hand on the door, Jesse took off his baseball cap and turned his face up to the rain. He stood a long time letting the hard rain soak into him. He didn’t know why he was doing it, and he stopped only when he became aware that other people were watching. His wet clothes were uncomfortable to drive in and when he reached the next rest stop he got some dry clothes out of his suitcase and changed into them in a bathroom stall. He bought a large coffee at the rest stop, and back in the car added a lot of scotch to it. He sipped the laced coffee as he crossed the Delaware River north of Philadelphia and picked up the Jersey Turnpike. He was in the east now, but it wasn’t yet the east he imagined. This part of the east looked like Anaheim. Except for the rain. This was eastern rain. No sudden outbursts, no scudding clouds, no interruption for sunshine before another downpour, no bright colors made more brilliant by the wetness. Eastern rain was steady and unyielding and gray…. What confused him most was that Jennifer would neither embrace him nor let him go. He was a self-reliant guy. He had spent most of his life staying inside, playing within himself. He was pretty sure he could still do that, but there had to be some sort of completion between them. Having been her lover, he was quite sure he could never be her friend and nothing more. In the early days of his dismay he had thought maybe he could share her. He had, after all, in the last year or so of their marriage been sharing her involuntarily. But in a while he understood that he could not. And so he sat one evening in their kitchen, on one of their high stools at the breakfast counter, with a United States road atlas, a police help-wanted listing, and a bottle of scotch, and decided where he would go to look for peace. He had to work and all he knew was cop. Of the possible jobs the one in Paradise, Massachusetts, was the farthest away. With a lot of scotch inside him, which made him ironic rather than sad, he imagined the salt spray and the snowy streets at Christmastime and the cheery New Englanders going steadfastly about their business and decided to try Paradise first. Now as he approached the George Washington Bridge he was maybe two hundred miles away from it and he felt as remote and unconnected as if he were adrift in space. There were other ways to get to New England, but he wanted to do it this way. He wanted to drive over the Hudson River across the George Washington Bridge. New York City stretched along the river to his right looking the way it did in all the pictures. Not to be confused with Los Angeles, he thought. He’d been in Chicago once looking for a guy who’d killed a process server in Gardena, and again for the Paradise job interview. He’d arranged several at a law enforcement convention in the Palmer House. But he assumed he wasn’t getting a glowing recommendation from the LAPD, and Paradise was the only one to offer him a job. He remembered the march of Chicago cityscape along the lake front, but the New York skyline was different. Chicago had been exuberant. This congregation of spires was far too reserved for exuberance. There was nothing exultant in their massed height. There was something like contempt in the brute grace of the skyscrapers standing above the river.

The memory of the interview embarrassed him. He had been drinking scotch in the bar downstairs and his memory was the embarrassing memory of all drunks, he thought, the struggle to seem sober undercut by the half-suppressed knowledge that you were slurring your words. What bothered him even more was that he had needed to drink even though he knew it would jeopardize the job. His face felt hot at the memory. But they hadn’t noticed. The two interviewers, Hathaway, the selectman, and a Paradise police captain named Burke, seemed oblivious of the times when he couldn’t stop slushing the s’s in Los Angeles. It was late afternoon. Maybe they’d had a couple before the interview themselves. They’d talked in a one-bedroom suite that Hathaway was in. The police captain had a single room down the hall. Jesse remembered the room being too hot And he remembered that Burke hardly spoke at all, and that Hathaway didn’t seem to be asking the right questions. He’d had to excuse himself twice to go to the bathroom, and each time he had splashed cold water on his face from the sink. But drunk is drunk, as he well knew, and cold water didn’t change anything. Hathaway had sat in front of the window eleven stories above the loop with a manila folder in his lap, to which he occasionally referred. Hathaway asked about his education, his experience, his marital status.

“Divorced,” Jesse said.

He didn’t like saying it. It still seemed to him somehow a shameful thing to admit. It made him feel less.

Hathaway, if he thought it shameful, made no sign. Burke was silent in the shadow near the window to Hathaway’s left.

“What do you think, Jesse,” Hathaway said, about fifteen minutes into the interview, “about the right to keep and bear arms?”

“Constitution’s clear on that, I think.” Jesse had trouble with all the t’s in
constitution
.

“Yes,” Hathaway said, “I think so too.”

They talked a bit about Jesse’s life in the minor leagues and how it was too bad that he couldn’t make the throw anymore. They talked of how many cases he had cleared in L.A.

“Nobody clears them all,” Jesse said with a smile, trying to enlist Burke, who remained silent, his arms folded. Clears came out
clearth
.

“We talked with your Captain Cronjager,” Hathaway said, referring to his folder.

Jesse waited. Cronjager was a decent enough guy, but he believed in police work and he might not recommend a cop who drank on duty.

“He speaks very well of you, though he said you might have been developing a drinking problem when you left.”

Jesse made a minimizing gesture with his right hand.

“I probably went off the deep end there for a bit during the time my marriage was breaking up,” Jesse said. “But I’m fine now.”

He had started to say
I am
, and then wasn’t sure he could transit between the two vowels, and changed it to
I’m
. Did they hear the stutter?

“All of us like a drink,” Hathaway said. “And in times of personal anguish, many of us need one. When one sees a man with your record applying for a job like this one, questions occur. I think I can speak for Lou when I say it is a relief really to hear that you maybe drank a little too much at a time when most of us would. I don’t have a problem, do you, Lou?”

Burke’s heavy voice came from the shadow where he sat.

“No problem, Hasty.”

And that had been it. They had hired him on the spot and brought out a bottle and had drinks to seal the bargain. It had worked out fine. But I shouldn’t have been drinking, Jesse thought as he went down the circular ramp off the bridge. Especially I shouldn’t have needed to be drinking.

Jesse turned north along the Henry Hudson Parkway. He drove over the Harlem River Bridge and through the Bronx, where the city was already beginning to green. He followed the parkways, as he had planned, into Connecticut and up Route 15 feeling almost disembodied. He picked up Route 84 in Hartford, crossing the Connecticut River, with the cluster of small-city skyscrapers off to his left. It was dark by the time he crossed the line into Massachusetts and stopped for the night in Sturbridge. He could have driven the last seventy-five miles or so, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to arrive in Paradise in the morning. He didn’t know why, anymore than he knew why he had stood on Ocean Avenue and stared at the Pacific before he left. But after Jennifer left he had decided that if he was going to be alone, he probably ought to pay attention to what he wanted, even if he didn’t always know why he wanted it. In his motel room he poured the almost ritualized drink and sat in the one chair in the silent room with his feet up on the bed. He’d read somewhere that two drinks a day were thought to be good for your heart. That was not bad, two drinks a day. It would give him something to look forward to every evening. It wouldn’t scramble his mind. He thought that two drinks a day was about right for him. When he’d been with Jennifer he had tried to pay attention to what she wanted. If she’s happy, he always said to himself, I’m happy. It wasn’t true. But he had thought at the time that it ought to be true, and he insisted on trying to make it true, no matter how unhappy it made them both. He shook his head sadly in the small room. He was a cop, a guy who took pride in seeing evidence, on making judgments on what was really there. And he failed entirely to do that in his own life.