Night Passage (8 page)

“The selectmen are aware of the provocation,” Abby said. “And they are prepared to go forward from here. But they would like your assurance that something like this will not occur in the future.”

“It might,” Jesse said.

“God,” Abby said. “You don’t give a damn inch, do you?”

Jesse smiled.

“Since you drew it up,” Jesse said, “you know that my contract here provides recourse to the selectmen if they are dissatisfied with my performance.”

“So, you’re saying the ball is in their court.”

“Yes.”

They looked at each other. Abby held his look, feeling challenged by it. Then she smiled.

“God, you are so much harder than you look.”

Jesse smiled again.

“And what’s my name?”

“Jesse.”

They laughed. Abby sat back in her chair and crossed her legs.

“I mean you look like a history teacher,” she said. “Who might coach tennis on the side.”

Jesse didn’t say anything. He was looking at her legs.

“And yet you handled Jo Jo Genest.”

“Experience is helpful,” Jesse said.

“Have you had that much experience with people like Genest?”

“In L.A. I worked South Central,” Jesse said. “People in South Central would keep Jo Jo for a pet.”

“No one ever confronted him before like that.”

“Guess it was time,” Jesse said.

“You won, but don’t misjudge him. He can be very dangerous.”

“Anybody can be very dangerous, Abby.”

“I believe he has mob connections.”

“ ‘Jesse.’ ”

She smiled.

“Jesse,” she said.

“Good. You married?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with the issue before us,” she said.

“Me either,” Jesse said.

“I’m happily divorced,” Abby said. “Five years.”

“Taylor your own name?”

“Yes.”

They were silent again. Outside his office he could hear the sporadic murmur of the dispatcher’s voice. The occasional sound of a door opening and closing. It was a lulling sound, it went with quiet summer nights and green space in the center of a small town. The office itself was very spare. Jesse’s desk was bare except for the phone and a pair of gold-tinted Oakley sunglasses. There was a window behind his chair which looked out at the driveway of the fire station. A green metal file cabinet stood to the right of the window. There was no rug on the floor. No pictures of anyone.

“Have you ever been married?” Abby said.

“Yes.”

“But you’re not married now.”

“No.”

“Divorced?”

“Yes.”

“Jesse, one of the rules of conversation is that when asked a question you don’t give a one-word answer.”

Jesse looked at his watch.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s suppertime, want to have dinner with me?”

Abby opened her mouth and closed it. She had come in to reprimand this man and he didn’t seem reprimanded.

“I … I don’t … certainly,” she said. “I’d love to.”

Driving toward Gillette on Route 59 north of Bill, Wyoming, Tom Carson felt alien in the rolling landscape. Pronghorn antelope appeared here and there in the hills, grazing in herds, strung out along a stream drinking. Buffalo grazed too in the gently undulant pastures. They weren’t wild herds, he knew. They were ranch buffalo, healthful, destined to be slaughtered and sold in specialty stores. He’d never been anywhere very much until he moved to Wyoming. Lived all his life in Paradise, and his parents too. His mother taught seventh grade at Paradise Junior High. His father ran the Gulf station. The only gas station in the downtown area. He had no military experience. He hadn’t gone to college. He’d joined the cops after working three years for his father. The complete townie, he’d married a girl from his high-school class and lived with her in a house his parents helped him buy, near Hawthorne Park on the hill above the harbor. Along the empty roadway, he saw several mule deer, nervous and gangly as they grazed and looked up. More skittish than the pronghorns, he thought. Always looking over their shoulder. Now he was marooned here, vastly alone with his family in an emptiness of grass and rolling hills over which the huge blank sky hovered comfortless. He’d been proud to be a policeman, proud of the right to carry a gun. It hadn’t been very hard. Life in Paradise had been largely law-abiding. He had been polite to the selectmen, and firm with the high-school kids who used to congregate on the stone wall around the historic cemetery across from the common. He had taken courses in criminal justice at Northeastern University in the evening, and he had practiced regularly at the pistol range, in case he ever had to use the gun, which he hadn’t. He wasn’t spectacular, maybe, but he hadn’t done anything wrong either and when he was appointed chief he felt it an achievement which he had earned. He wasn’t much with budgets and finance, but Lou Burke was able to take care of that end of things for him, and he got along well with the men in the department. The townspeople liked him. He was genial and nonthreatening, and he looked pretty good in dress uniform at the Memorial Day parade. He liked the weekly Rotary Club meetings, where he got to fine people for various violations of Rotary procedure, and to participate in the general bonhomie. He collected the fines every week in a chamber pot. Now that was over. His wife was neither understanding nor forgiving of the move to Wyoming. His children went miserably to a regional grammar school with the children of plainsmen and miners. He could not explain to any of them why they were here and they badgered him angrily about it nearly all the time. He was ashamed to have been sent away, ashamed that he hadn’t stood firm and seen justice done. Often he thought of going to the FBI office in Cheyenne. It was the closest one. He’d looked it up in the phone book. But he was afraid to. Afraid for his wife and children, and, he had to admit it, afraid for himself. But every day here became more bitter. He missed the ocean, the faces on the evening news, the closeness of the horizons back home where you could only see as far as your neighbor’s house across the street. He missed the sense that he was enveloped by the civilization as old as the country. Out here he felt vulnerable and exposed. He felt skittish. He was afraid to act, but he hated his inaction and he hated the life he was leading. He hadn’t found a job yet in this wilderness and he was running out of the money they gave him. He didn’t dare ask them for more. There was something about the steeliness in Hasty’s prissy eyes … But he couldn’t go on like this, his family miserable, all of them lonely, himself frightened in addition. He spoke aloud in the cab of the new Dodge pickup they’d provided.

“Sooner or later,” he said. “Sooner or damn later.”

He drove on toward Gillette, alone in the big prairie, no one else in sight on the narrow road. The only other car, a maroon Buick behind him, had turned off at Bill. He felt exhilarated by the thought that he might do something to change things. As long as he could think about it without actually doing it, he felt excited, and possible. He’d felt it before, but he was not introspective and he didn’t think much about the difference between thinking it and doing it, or how often he’d thought it before without doing it. When he actually began to imagine doing it, what he would say to the FBI agent in Cheyenne, what he might do if he had to go back to Paradise and testify, the bottom of himself got watery and loose, and his throat narrowed so it was difficult to swallow. But he wasn’t thinking of that now, he was thinking about how he would face the problem someday, and he was feeling as good as he was able to feel in his exile when the Dodge exploded beneath him. The hood of the truck, and part of the dashboard, and some bits of Tom Carson, went a hundred feet in the air and landed thirty yards from the roadway, sending two mule deer into a terrified run. The remainder of the truck, and of Tom Carson, was an impenetrable ball of flame in the empty roadway that burned unobserved as the deer, their white tails flashing, disappeared over the hillcrest.

They were outside the Gray Gull Restaurant, on the deck overlooking the harbor. Abby had an Absolut martini, up, with several olives. Jesse had a beer. He didn’t look like the beer type to her. Her father had been a beer drinker, burly, red-faced, tending to fat as he got older. He always said he didn’t have a problem as long as he drank beer. But he had drunk a lot of beer, and she knew he had a problem. She wondered sometimes if she did. Originally she had switched from white wine to martinis because she liked white wine too much and felt that martinis would be something she could sip through an evening. She smiled to herself with some sadness as she sipped this one. She had learned to like martinis very much and, sometimes, if her self-control slipped, would sip four or five during an evening.

“What’s a lobster roll?” Jesse said as they looked at the menus.

“A lobster roll?”

“Yes. Is it a kind of sushi or what?”

Abby smiled.

“God, you California kids,” she said. “A lobster roll is lobster salad in a hot dog roll.”

“Oh,” Jesse said. “Actually I wasn’t a California kid. Didn’t move there until I was fifteen.”

“Where’d you grow up before then?”

“Around Tucson. My father was with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Ah,” Abby said. “Second generation.”

“Un huh.”

“Why’d you move?”

“My father was working paid detail with a film crew in Tucson, and he got friendly with one of the stars and took a job as the star’s driver, personal assistant, bodyguard, whatever. So we moved.”

“So do you know a lot of famous movie people?”

“Nope, my father lasted about a month and got fired and took a job at Hughes.”

“Oh my,” Abby said. “Who was the star?”

Jesse shook his head.

“Why not?” Abby said.

“Old news,” Jesse said.

“Well, aren’t you private,” Abby said. “Your folks still alive?”

“No.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“Brother.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He and my father didn’t get along. He took off.”

“And you don’t know where he went?”

“No.”

She drank the rest of her martini. The waitress stopped by at once. The profit here was on drinks. Abby nodded yes, she’d have another one, and she noticed that Jesse had another beer.

“I wouldn’t have figured you for a beer drinker,” Abby said.

“I’m not. I’m a scotch on the rocks drinker, but I didn’t want to get drunk on our first date.”

“Do you get drunk?”

“I have some trouble stopping when I start,” Jesse said.

“You’re open about it,” Abby said.

Jesse shrugged.

“I have trouble too,” she said.

“Stopping?”

“Un huh. My father was a boozer.” She smiled. “Drank only beer.”

“In my house it was my mother.”

“What did she drink?”

“Port,” Jesse said.

Abby wrinkled her nose.

“Ugh,” she said.

The waitress came back and took food orders. It was a noisy crowd out on the deck. Young men and women, many of them from the same condo complex where Jesse was renting, single, well employed, affluent, stylish, and loud. They were drinking things like Long Island iced teas and tequila sunrises. As Abby looked across the table at him, Jesse seemed to her a figure of stillness in the midst of turbulence, as if he were the only boat with an anchor. He sat perfectly still, his hands resting on the tabletop. When he moved it was for a reason, to pour beer, to drink beer, to pick up the menu. He wasted no energy. It was hard to imagine him drunk and out of control. It was hard to imagine him kicking Jo Jo Genest in the balls, too. Though her official position required her to disapprove, she was glad he had. No one deserved a kick in the balls more than Jo Jo Genest, she thought. Her martini was gone. She could handle one more, all right. She loved the feeling of integration and certainty the drinks gave her. He would be an interesting guy to have sex with. See how contained and steady he was then.

“I’m going to go ahead and order another martini,” she said to Jesse. “If you want to order a scotch, go ahead. Our cards are on the table, I’m willing to risk it, if you are.”

Jesse smiled and ordered a Black Label on the rocks.

“You have any children, Jesse?”

“No. You?”

“No, we tried and couldn’t seem to. I guess I’m barren.”

“Or he is,” Jesse said.

The drinks came. Jesse was barely able to stifle a sigh as he took some of his scotch in and felt the ease begin to seep through him. Abby smiled at him over the rim of her martini.

“Good times,” she said and held the glass out. He clinked it with his. Each of them drank again.

“Can a man be barren?” Abby said.

“You mean is it a word you can use about men?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “But if the two of you couldn’t have children, it doesn’t mean you were the one that couldn’t. You do any testing?”

“He refused,” she said.

Jesse nodded as if his point had been made. There was something about his eyes, she thought, as if he saw the world in a funny way and was quietly amused. He had on a blue blazer and a white shirt open at the neck and his skin had a healthy out-of-doors look to it. He was clean-shaven, his dark hair was cut close, and the sideburns were neatly trimmed.

“How long were you married?” Abby said.

“Five years.”

“What happened?”

“She was, is, an actress. She started sleeping with a guy, maybe guys for all I know, who could help her in her career.”

“Did you know?”

“Not at first.”

“Did you suspect?”

“Eventually.”

“And that was the end?”

“Yes, I think.”

“You think?”

“Well, at first I sort of denied it, and then I increased my drinking and finally, in fact, she left me. I got fired in L.A. for drinking. It had to be in my record. Hell, I was sort of drunk when I interviewed for this job.”

“Did they know?”

“I don’t know how they could have missed it,” Jesse said. “I must have smelled like a rum cake.”

“And they hired you anyway?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be damned. They must have seen something in you.”