The Music of Chance (28 page)

Those were the days when he thought most about Flower’s collection of objects: the handkerchiefs, the spectacles, the rings, the mountains of absurd memorabilia. Every couple of hours, it seemed, another one of them would appear in his head. He was not disturbed by this, however, merely astonished.

Every night before going to bed, he would write down the number of stones he had added to the wall that day. The figures themselves were unimportant to him, but once the list had grown to ten or twelve entries, he began to take pleasure in the simple accumulation, studying the results in the same way he had once read the box scores in the morning paper. At first, he imagined it was a purely statistical pleasure, but after a while he sensed that it was fulfilling some inner need, some compulsion to keep track of himself and not lose sight of where he was. By early December, he began to think of it as a journal, a logbook in which the numbers stood for his most intimate thoughts.

Listening to
The Marriage of Figaro
in the trailer at night. Sometimes, when a particularly beautiful aria came on, he would imagine that Juliette was singing to him, that it was her voice he was hearing.

The cold weather bothered him less than he thought it would. Even on the bitterest days, he would shed his jacket within an hour of starting work, and by midafternoon he would often be down to his shirtsleeves. Murks would stand there in his heavy coat, shivering against the wind, and yet Nashe would feel almost nothing. It made so little sense to him, he wondered if his body hadn’t caught fire.

One day, Murks suggested that they begin using the jeep to cart the stones. They could increase the loads that way, he said, and
the wall could go up more quickly. But Nashe turned him down. The noise of the engine would distract him, he said. And besides, he was used to the old way of doing things. He liked the slowness of the wagon, the long walks across the meadow, the odd little rumbling sound of the wheels. “If it ain’t broke,” he said, “why fix it?”

Some time in the third week of November, Nashe realized that it would be possible to bring himself back to zero on his birthday, which fell on December thirteenth. It would mean making several small adjustments in his habits (spending a bit less on food, for example, cutting out newspapers and cigars), but the symmetry of the plan appealed to him, and he decided it would be worth the effort. If all went well, he would win back his freedom on the day he turned thirty-four. It was an arbitrary ambition, but once he put his mind to it, he found that it helped him to organize his thoughts, to concentrate on what had to be done.

He went over his calculations with Murks every morning, toting up the pluses and minuses to make sure there were no discrepancies, checking and rechecking until their figures matched. On the night of the twelfth, therefore, he knew for certain that the debt would be paid off by three o’clock the next day. He wasn’t planning to stop, then, however. He had already told Murks that he wanted to make use of the contract rider to earn some traveling money, and since he knew exactly how much he was going to need (enough to pay for cabs, a plane ticket to Minnesota, and Christmas presents for Juliette and her cousins), he had resigned himself to staying on for another week. That would take him up to the twentieth. The first thing he would do after that was get a cab to drive him to the hospital in Doylestown, and once he found out that Pozzi had never been there, he would call another cab and go to the police. He would probably have to hang around for a while to
help with the investigation, but no more than a few days, he thought, perhaps only one or two. If he was lucky, he might even get back to Minnesota in time for Christmas Eve.

He didn’t tell Murks it was his birthday. He felt oddly out of sorts that morning, and even as the day wore on and three o’clock approached, an overwhelming sadness continued to drag down his spirits. Until then, Nashe had assumed that he would want to celebrate—to light up an imaginary cigar, perhaps, or merely to shake Murks’s hand—but the memory of Pozzi weighed too heavily on him, and he couldn’t rouse himself into the proper mood. Each time he picked up another stone, he felt as if he were carrying Pozzi in his arms again, lifting him off the ground and looking into his poor, annihilated face, and when two o’clock came round and the time had dwindled to a matter of minutes, he suddenly found himself thinking back to that day in October when he and the kid had reached this point together, working their heads off in a manic burst of happiness. He missed him so much, he realized. He missed him so much, it ached just to think about him.

The best way to handle it was to do nothing, he decided, just go on working and ignore the whole business, but at three o’clock he was jolted by a strange piercing noise—a whoop or a shriek or a cry of distress—and when Nashe looked up to see what the trouble was, he saw Murks waving his hat at him from across the meadow.
You did it!
Nashe heard him say.
You’re a free man now!
Nashe stopped for a moment and waved back with a casual flip of his hand, and then he immediately bent down over his work again, fixing his attention on the wheelbarrow in which he was stirring cement. Very briefly, he fought off an impulse to start crying, but it didn’t last more than a couple of seconds, and by the time Murks had walked over to congratulate him, he was fully in control of himself again.

“I figured maybe you’d like to go out for a drink with me and Floyd tonight,” Calvin said.

“What for?” Nashe answered, barely looking up from his work.

“I don’t know. Just to get out and see what the world looks like again. You’ve been cooped up here a long time, son. It might not be a bad idea to do a little celebrating.”

“I thought you were against celebrations.”

“Depends on what kind of celebrating you mean. I’m not talking about anything fancy here. Just a few drinks over at Ollie’s in town. A workingman’s night out.”

“You forget that I don’t have any money.”

“That’s all right. The drinks are on me.”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass. I was planning on writing a few letters tonight.”

“You can always write them tomorrow.”

“That’s true. But then again, I could be dead tomorrow. You never know what’s going to happen.”

“All the more reason not to worry about it.”

“Maybe some other time. It’s nice of you to offer, but I’m just not in the mood tonight.”

“I’m just trying to be friendly, Nashe.”

“I know you are, and I appreciate it. But you don’t have to worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

Cooking dinner alone in the trailer that night, however, Nashe regretted his stubbornness. There was no question that he had done the right thing, but the truth was that he was desperate for a chance to leave the meadow, and the moral correctness he had shown in refusing Murks’s invitation felt like a paltry triumph to him now. He spent ten hours a day in the man’s company, after all, and just because they sat down together and had a drink, it wasn’t going to stop him from turning the son of a bitch over to the police. As it happened, Nashe got precisely what he wanted anyway. Just after he finished dinner, Murks and his son-in-law came around to the trailer to ask him if he had changed his mind. They were
going out now, they said, and it didn’t seem fair that he should miss out on the fun.

“It’s not like you’re the only one who’s been set free today,” Murks said, blowing his nose into a large white handkerchief. “I’ve been out there in that field same as you, freezing my butt off seven days a week. It’s about the worst damned job I’ve ever had. I’ve got nothing personal against you, Nashe, but it’s been no picnic. No sir, no picnic at all. Maybe it’s about time we sat down and buried the hatchet.”

“You know,” Floyd said, smiling at Nashe as if to encourage him, “let bygones be bygones.”

“You guys don’t give up, do you?” Nashe said, still trying to sound reluctant.

“We’re not twisting your arm or anything,” Murks said. “Just trying to enter into the Christmas spirit.”

“Like Santa’s helpers,” Floyd said. “Spreading good cheer wherever we go.”

“All right,” Nashe said, studying their expectant faces. “I’ll go out for a drink with you. Why the hell not?”

Before they could drive to town, they had to stop off at the main house to get Murks’s car. Murks’s car meant his car, of course, but in the excitement of the moment Nashe had forgotten all about that. He sat in the back of the jeep as they bounced along through the dark and icy woods, and it wasn’t until this first little journey was over that he realized his mistake. He saw the red Saab parked in the driveway, and the moment he understood what he was looking at, he felt himself go numb with grief. The thought of riding in it again made him sick, but there was no way he could back out of it now. They were set to go, and he had already caused enough fuss for one night.

He didn’t say a word. He took his place in the backseat and closed his eyes, trying to make his mind go blank, listening to the
familiar sound of the engine as the car moved along the road. He could hear that Murks and Floyd were talking in the front, but he didn’t pay attention to what they said, and after a while their voices blurred with the sound of the engine, producing a low, continuous hum that vibrated in his ears, a lulling music that sang along his skin and dug down into the depths of his body. He didn’t open his eyes again until the car stopped, and then he found himself standing in a parking lot at the edge of a small, deserted town, listening to a traffic sign rattle in the wind. Christmas decorations blinked in the distance down the street, and the cold air was red with the pulsing reflections, the throbs of light that bounced off the shop windows and glowed on the frozen sidewalks. Nashe had no idea where he was. They could still be in Pennsylvania, he thought, but then again, they could have crossed the river and gone into New Jersey. For a brief moment, he considered asking Murks which state they were in, but then he decided that he didn’t care.

Ollie’s was a dark and noisy place, and he took an immediate dislike to it. Country-and-western songs thundered out of a jukebox in one corner, and the bar was thronged with a crush of beer-drinkers—men in flannel shirts, for the most part, decked out in fancy baseball caps and wearing belts with large, elaborate buckles. They were farmers and mechanics and truck drivers, Nashe supposed, and the few women scattered among them looked like regulars—puffy, dough-faced alcoholics who sat on the barstools and laughed as loudly as the men. Nashe had been in a hundred places like this before, and it didn’t take thirty seconds for him to realize that he wasn’t up to it tonight, that he had been away from crowds for too long. Everyone was talking at once, it seemed, and the ruckus of loud voices and blaring music was already hurting his head.

They drank several rounds at a table in the far corner of the room, and after the first couple of bourbons Nashe began to feel
somewhat revived. Floyd did most of the talking, addressing nearly all his remarks to Nashe, and after a while it became hard not to notice how little Murks was contributing to the conversation. He looked more under the weather than usual, Nashe thought, and every so often he would turn away and cough violently into his handkerchief, hawking up nasty gobs of phlegm. These fits seemed to take a lot out of him, and afterward he would sit there in silence, pale and shaken from the effort to still his lungs.

“Granddad hasn’t been feeling too well lately,” Floyd said to Nashe (he always referred to Murks as Granddad). “I’ve been trying to talk him into taking a couple of weeks off.”

“It’s nothing,” Murks said. “Just a touch of the ague, that’s all.”

“The ague?” Nashe said. “Where the hell did you learn to talk, Calvin.”

“What’s wrong with the way I talk?” Murks said.

“No one uses words like that anymore,” Nashe said. “They went out about a hundred years ago.”

“I learned it from my mother,” Murks said. “And she only died six years back. She’d be eighty-eight if she was alive today—which proves that word ain’t as old as you think it is.”

Nashe found it strange to hear Murks talking about his mother. It was difficult to imagine that he had once been a child, let alone that twenty or twenty-five years ago he had once been Nashe’s age—a young man with a life to look forward to, a person with a future. For the first time since they had been thrown together, Nashe realized that he knew next to nothing about Murks. He didn’t know where he had been born; he didn’t know how he had met his wife or how many children he had; he didn’t even know how long he had been working for Flower and Stone. Murks was a creature who existed wholly in the present for him, and beyond that present he was nothing, a being as insubstantial as a shadow or a thought. When all was said and done, however, that was precisely how Nashe wanted it. Even if Murks had turned to him
at that moment and offered to tell the story of his life, he would have refused to listen.

Meanwhile, Floyd was telling him about his new job. Since Nashe seemed to have played some part in his finding it, he had to sit through an exhaustive, rambling account of how Floyd had struck up a conversation with the chauffeur who had driven the girl from Atlantic City on the night of her visit last month. The limousine company had apparently been looking for new drivers, and Floyd had gone down the very next day to apply for a job. He was only working on a part-time basis now, just two or three days a week, but he was hoping they’d have more work for him after the first of the year. Just for something to say, Nashe asked him how he liked wearing the uniform. Floyd said it didn’t bother him. It was nice to have something special to wear, he said, it made him feel like someone important.

“The main thing is that I love to drive,” he continued. “I don’t care what kind of car it is. As long as I’m sitting behind the wheel and moving down the road, I’m a happy man. I can’t think of a better way to make a living. Imagine getting paid for something you love to do. It almost doesn’t feel right.”

“Yes,” Nashe said, “driving is a good thing. I agree with you about that.”

“Well, you ought to know,” Floyd said. “I mean, look at Granddad’s car. That’s a beautiful machine. Isn’t that so, Granddad?” he said to Murks. “It’s a stunner, isn’t it?”