Pitch Dark (7 page)

But there we were, he and I, haring single file through the Southern Irish countryside. I was no longer alone. A new fear, a sort of paranoia, crossed my mind: had he hesitated because he planned to mislead me, was he heading, not toward Dublin at all but straight back to that place named, come to think of it, like some hybrid out of Freud and Kafka, Castlebar? Miles and miles. No signs that I could see. Irish road signs, in any case, are grey-black on grey-white, and in print so small that they are virtually illegible to any driver on the road. From time to time, I kept looking at my gas gauge. Then, I sped past him, drove, slowed, stopped, switched on my hazard lights and stood in the road to flag him down again. Patience, no look at all of What is it this time? on his face. I said I was running out of gas. I secretly hoped he had some, but I did not mention it. Is there likely to be a gas station pretty soon? I asked. Not till nine-thirty in the morning, he said. How much gas did you have when you started out? Three-quarters full, I said. Well, then you ought to be all right, he said. Of course, like so many things that were said to me in Ireland, this seemed to make no sense. I mean, surely it depended, not on how much gas I had when I set out, but on how much would be required for the distance that remained, or at least how much I had where I was starting
from.

Maybe what we have here is Mayerling for one. Maybe Mayerling always was for one.

There we stood, though, this tall broad man and I, in the sleet, on the road, in the beam of his enormous headlights. I asked how much farther it was to Dublin. He said, About a hundred twenty miles. Are there no all-night gas stations in Ireland? I asked. He said no. Well, then I guess I won’t make it, I said. My flight from Dublin leaves at ten. A pause. We stand, not looking at each other. The sleet has abated. His headlights are muted now, and diffused by mist. Do you suppose, I ask, speaking as slowly as the thought evolves, that I could drive till I run out of fuel, and then ride the rest of the way with you? He reflects. He looks toward his truck. He seems less surprised by the question than I am. That would be all right, he says. I ask, Where shall I leave my car, at some closed gas station, or just any place where it runs down. Oh, he says, locked, I think, on the street at Ballyhairness. I find it difficult to understand what he says, not just because he speaks softly and I am unfamiliar with his accent, but because, as I now notice, he has a stammer. In any event, I have grown by now to love him. I wonder whether he is going to leave me after all. But as we drive, miles and miles, at speed, the sky is sometimes black, with that clear moon and stars, sometimes mauve, sometimes filled with rain; though my gas gauge has gone well beyond the red and rests firmly now on empty; though I have no clear plan, and I’m in my way alone again; in due course, a sign appears. What it says is Ballyhaunis 10. And though I have a moment of free-fall panic, what if he doesn’t stop? on the whole I trust him now, and what I think is, Well met, teamster.

The truth was, there was something in the ice cube.

The turning point at the paper was the introduction of the byline.

Here’s who I knew in those days: everyone.

Everyone?

Well, not everyone in the world, of course. But a surprising number and variety, considering the lonely soul I was when I was young, and the sort of recluse I have since become.

“It’s really too much. I can’t tell you who they’ll seat next to you,” Claire said, after dinner, at the guarded island villa. “Wives, Canadians. They sit you next to anyone.” Also, “The daughter married an octoroon. A baboon. I don’t know.”

It began at the airline ticket counter. No, it began with another lorry driver, three days earlier, at midday, in a small town, on the road from Shannon. No, with the fact that we were brought up to be honest, or the fact that my parents fled. Well, wherever it began, the ambassador, a great and kind man, in his youth a poet and a war hero, now a banker and owner of vast farms in Iowa, had offered me his house, a castle really, empty now but for its little staff, on the Irish coast at Cihrbradàn. In his absence, the house, the grounds, the staff, especially, were forlorn. Talk to them, he said, as he spoke of Celia, Paddy, Pat, and Kathleen. They are lonely and a friendly people. Celia, the cook, missed having guests at table, and preparing picnics for them. Paddy missed shooting parties. Ask Paddy where to shoot, if shooting was what I wanted. Otherwise, ask him where to go for walks. Talk to them. Stay all of November if I liked. The offer was not only kind; it seemed providential. I am a reader of horoscopes in tabloids. Even at the best of times, I look for portents. Within hours, I had set out, standby, on a crowded flight to London. All night over the Atlantic, beside me, a coughing man, evidently feverish. In the morning, at Heathrow, the shady business at the airline ticket counter. But, when I got to Shannon, and had crossed the tarmac in the rain to a dim hangar marked Baggage Claim, I thought, Well, at least, at last I have done something. I have come this far. I found a booth, and a pale operator, who put me through to Cihrbradàn. I asked Paddy for directions; he said, just follow the signs, it is all quite clearly marked. I passed down a long corridor, through customs, and entered the airport itself. The stalls for the car-rental agencies were lined up in a row. It was like a Levantine bazaar, a bazaar in Baghdad, Cairo, or Damascus. The men in the stalls were shouting, hawking, gesticulating, hissing at me, psst, psst, as though I were a cat, or (but this is another story) a woman who has inadvertently wandered, in Manhattan, into the wrong room of the Century Club. For some reason, I was apparently the only likely customer. The other passengers had already left, or were walking with a clearer sense of destination. I stood, hesitant, at some distance from the stalls. The wheedling and hectoring so surprised me that I headed toward the exit, and the taxi stand. I reconsidered. I approached the youngest man in the row of stalls, a frail dark-haired fellow of about eighteen. How much would it cost, I asked, to rent his smallest car for about a week. He named a sum. I paused. He cut the price by nine dollars a day. I said all right. But then he both miscomputed the amount and drew up the sum in Irish pounds instead of dollars. When I mentioned it, he tore up the form and began again, with an air of exasperation and absent-mindedness, as though he had never done anything so practical as to rent a car before. There’s no charge for mileage, he said. He crossed out Mileage, and wrote in Fuel: $35, and added a line: Misc. Tax: $19. Finally, he asked whether I would like insurance. I wavered. My sense of the transaction somehow gave me no confidence in the quality, or even the fact of this insurance. I said, No, thank you, I am insured. Why, so are we, he said. This is just for the initial liability, eight hundred dollars. I would normally take this kind of insurance without question, but there was something makeshift about even the piece of paper, which he now held out to me as if it were a raffle ticket; and, in fact, I was insured, as a driver, for major accidents. So I signed the waiver of insurance, and the contract for the rental of the car.

Talk to them, the ambassador had said, they are a friendly people. Well, the hell they are. An occasional creature of great poetry and beauty; the others, suspicious, crafty, greedy, stubborn, incurious, stupid, devious, violent, and cruel. And, of course, that is what the history of the country is. Point, set, and match, as the American professor’s wife said, at dinner, at the Waltons’, on the night I concluded that I had to leave the country. On the night I drove and drove, and became ever more certain that I had missed my turnoff, in which case I was bound, not for Dublin at all, but for Tuam and for Shannon; or perhaps worse, lost entirely. So that I would drive, through this alternating sleet and mauve and breathless clarity till daylight, calling attention to myself at daylight, when what I needed was to catch the first flight of the morning out of Dublin. A flight on which I had no reservation, but on which I had been told, in response to an anonymous call the night before, there were still seats. Then, when I had stopped and turned around, there were those headlights coming toward me, the first car I had seen in more than twenty minutes; and I thought, Could the police have alerted one another, in every little town along the way, ever since I set out from the castle, dropping my key in the intense dark at Cihrbradàn, and could this be another of their agents, sent to follow me out of the station at Castlebar? Not so paranoid a thought as that, for many reasons; not least, because the police in this country must be accustomed to following nightriders of all descriptions, Protestants, Catholics, gunrunners, suppliers, enemies, members, betrayers of the IRA. And then, of course, I was following my teamster. But what grounds to trust him, after all? In extenuation; but why raise so defensively this matter of extenuation, since, so far, I have done nothing; I have only come this far.

“My dear,” the English publisher said, “we were in their dining room, looking out on their balcony, and the skyline of Beirut. With each course, the talk became more gruesome. ‘Tell them, Mina,’ the brother would say, ‘in what condition they left your fiancé, that night, on your doorstep. And about the note they enclosed, in the small box, with his hand.’ ‘Ah, but I will tell also,’ the girl would answer, ‘in what manner, and how quickly, we exacted our revenge,’ Mind you, we were eating. I looked at them, and I thought, This is la crème. La crème de la crème de la Phalange.”

The airport, I notice, is absolutely silent. A carnival silence, of crooks, muggers, embezzlers, terrorists, thugs, burglars, traitors, swindlers, rapists, but here I am on shaky ground. This is the age of crime, but it is not yet at this moment that I begin to be in the shade or the shadow of the wrong. I pick up my bags. The frail dark-haired man, key in hand, and carrying an umbrella, accompanies me out into the rain, and across the parking lot, to a small yellow car, with a slightly dented door. It is true that he is talking amiably, about the weather, about the route, but I am still carrying my bags. Finally, he opens the car door for me, says, Safe journey then, and walks away. Well, the car’s radio doesn’t work, nor does the heater; and I misunderstand, it turns out, the windshield wiper, which flaps (as I drive, I count) only once every thirteen seconds. Bidden or unbidden; that is, whether the switch is on or off. The road signs, virtually indistinguishable in this weather from the color of the sky, often do not mention even the largest towns. Galway, for instance, is sometimes mentioned, sometimes not. The car-rental man, like Paddy, said to follow the signs for Westport. But there are no signs for Westport. I do not look at the map of Ireland, which lies folded on the seat beside me, because, in the intervals between those desultory, spastic, and somehow each time startling flaps of the windshield wiper, the windows are completely misted over. For some reason, I am also disinclined to stop. The car-rental man also said that the distance from Shannon to Cihrbradàn was about thirty miles, but I’ve already driven more than sixty. I begin to persuade myself that what the car registers is kilometers. I have heard and read so much, through the years, about Galway, however. I know there will be, there is sooner or later bound to be a large, clear sign for Galway. Finally, I pull over to a large gas station, and wait beside the fuel pumps. Nobody stirs. I walk through the rain toward the office. A pudgy young man, with sandy hair and freckled lips, is standing just inside the door. I say, Could you tell me, please, am I still on the right road, and how far is it, to Galway? He stares off into the distance. I stand there in the rain. Then, looking me straight in the eyes, he says, with unmistakable satisfaction: I’ve no idea. He watches as I get back in my car, and set off, on the same road, in the same direction. I try the radio and the heater again. Nothing. A silence and a chill. Of the three forward speeds on the floorshift, I now notice, one is only intermittent; on even the smallest hills it does not always hold. I wish I had thought to ask him which was the nearest town. I have just about decided that I am in fact off course, so far off, and so long ago, that the man had looked, not sullenly pleased, but just bewildered, never having heard perhaps of Galway. Within half a mile of that gas station, there is a large sign: Galway 6. Well, maybe he didn’t like me, or understand my accent. Maybe he’s never traveled as far as six miles from where we stood, and the sign is so familiar to him he forgot. Maybe he has a mother, or an older sister, who likes to look at him blankly and say, in that tone of voice: I’ve no idea. Whatever it is, the rain stops, and the road is right. Still bemused, but taking heart, I drive.

I enter a small town; and, as I round a curve, on the cobbled road, I hear and slightly feel a sort of crack, or smack, on my side of the car. I think I’ve grazed a truck, a very large truck, parked half on the sidewalk, half in the road, along that curve. I get out and, to my great relief, I find that I have only hit his bumper. Or rather, his front bumper, being high off the curb, has hooked under my left front fender, just above the hubcap, tearing that fender in a straight line, from the rim behind the tire to the door hinge, a distance of about a foot. The fender, oddly, is not bent, only cut in that straight, tidy line. The edge of the truck’s bumper, on the other hand, heavy steel covered in thick rubber, is bent very slightly forward. That is all. A young man walks across the street. I say, I’ve hit your truck. He says, I guess you have. When he sees what has happened, he is at first as relieved as I am. He says, Fortunately, there’s no harm, fortunately; and starts to bend his bumper back. Then he sees the rental agency’s sticker on the rear window of my car. His eyes narrow, and he says, Is that a rental car? I say it is. He says, very slowly, Rental cars have insurance, and asks to see my insurance form. I say I haven’t one, just the rental agreement, and start to look for it in my purse. Still trusting, I say, I guess I ought to see your driver’s license then, we ought to exchange them. He says, There’s no need. It’s nothing. Fortunately there’s no harm, fortunately. He looks at my car, says, I just don’t want them coming after me. I find the rental agreement. He takes it, says, I’ll just be a minute, show this to the agent, for his advice. Then, he walks rapidly away.