The Music of Chance (29 page)

“A fine piece of work,” Calvin said. “Handles real good. Takes the curves and hills like nobody’s business.”

“You must have enjoyed driving around in that thing,” Floyd said to Nashe.

“I did,” Nashe said. “It was the best car I ever owned.”

“There’s one thing that puzzles me, though,” Floyd said. “How did you ever manage to put so many miles on it? I mean, it’s a pretty new model, and the odometer’s already showing close to
eighty thousand miles. That’s an awful lot of driving to do in one year.”

“I suppose it is,” Nashe said.

“Were you some kind of traveling salesman or something?”

“Yeah, that’s it, I was a traveling salesman. They gave me a large territory, and so I had to be on the road a lot. You know, lugging around the samples in the trunk, living out of a suitcase, staying in a different city every night. I moved around so much, I sometimes forgot where I lived.”

“I think I’d like that,” Floyd said. “It sounds like a good job to me.”

“It’s not bad. You have to like being alone, but once you’ve taken care of that, the rest is easy.”

Floyd was beginning to get on his nerves. The man was an oaf, Nashe thought, a full-fledged imbecile, and the longer he went on talking, the more he reminded Nashe of his son. They both had that same desperate desire to please, that same fawning timidity, that same lostness in the eyes. To look at him, you would never think he would harm a soul—but he had harmed Jack that night, Nashe was sure of it, and it was precisely that emptiness inside him that had made it possible, that immense chasm of want. It wasn’t that Floyd was a cruel or violent person, but he was big and strong and ever so willing, and he loved Granddad more than anyone else in the world. It was written all over his face, and every time he turned his eyes in Murks’s direction, it was as though he were looking at a god. Granddad had told him what to do, and he had gone ahead and done it.

After the third or fourth round of drinks, Floyd asked Nashe if he would care to play some pool. There were several tables in the back room, he said, and one of them was bound to be free. Nashe was feeling a little woozy by then, but he accepted anyway, welcoming it as a chance to get up from his seat and end the conversation. It was close to eleven o’clock, and the crowd at Ollie’s
had become thinner and less boisterous. Floyd asked Murks if he wanted to join them, but Calvin said he’d rather stay where he was and finish his drink.

It was a large, dimly lit room with four pool tables in the center and a number of pinball machines and computer games along the side walls. They stopped by the rack near the door to choose their sticks, and as they walked over to one of the free tables, Floyd asked if it might not be more interesting if they made a friendly little bet on the action. Nashe had never been much of a pool player, but he didn’t think twice about saying yes. He wanted to beat Floyd in the worst way, he realized, and there was no question that putting some money on it would help him to concentrate.

“I don’t have any cash,” he said. “But I’ll be good for it as soon as I get paid next week.”

“I know that,” Floyd said. “If I didn’t think you’d be good for it, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“How much do you want to make it for?”

“I don’t know. Depends on what you’ve got in mind.”

“How about ten dollars a game?”

“Ten dollars? All right, sounds good to me.”

They played eight-ball on one of those bumpy, quarter-a-rack tables, and Nashe scarcely said a word the whole time they were there. Floyd wasn’t bad, but in spite of his drunkenness, Nashe was better, and he wound up playing his heart out, zeroing in on his shots with a skill and precision that surpassed anything he had done before. He felt utterly happy and loose, and once he fell into the rhythm of the clicking, tumbling balls, the stick began to glide through his fingers as if it were moving on its own. He won the first four games by steadily increasing margins (by one ball, by two balls, by four balls, by six balls), and then he won the fifth game before Floyd could even take a turn, sinking two striped balls on the break and going on from there to clear the table,
ending with a flourish as he sank the eight-ball on a three-way combination shot in the corner pocket.

“That’s enough for me,” Floyd said after the fifth game. “I figured you might be good, but this is ridiculous.”

“Just luck,” Nashe said, struggling to keep a smile off his face. “I’m generally pretty feeble. Things kept falling my way tonight.”

“Feeble or not, it looks like I owe you fifty bucks.”

“Forget the money, Floyd. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

“What do you mean, forget it? You just won yourself fifty bucks. It’s yours.”

“No, no, I’m telling you to keep it. I don’t want your money.”

Floyd kept trying to press the fifty dollars into Nashe’s hand, but Nashe was just as adamant about refusing it, and after a few moments it finally dawned on Floyd that Nashe meant what he was saying, that he wasn’t just putting on an act.

“Buy your little boy a present,” Nashe said. “If you want to make me happy, use it on him.”

“It’s awfully good of you,” Floyd said. “Most guys wouldn’t let fifty bucks slip through their fingers like that.”

“I’m not most guys,” Nashe said.

“I guess I owe you one,” Floyd said, patting Nashe’s back in an awkward show of gratitude. “Any time you need a favor, all you have to do is ask.”

It was one of those empty, obliging remarks that people often make at such moments, and under any other circumstances Nashe probably would have let it pass. But he suddenly found himself glowing with the warmth of an idea, and rather than lose the opportunity he had just been given, he looked straight back at Floyd and said, “Well, now that you mention it, maybe there is one thing you can do for me. It’s a very small thing really, but your help would mean a lot.”

“Sure, Jim,” Floyd said. “Just name it.”

“Let me drive the car back home tonight.”

“You mean Granddad’s car?”

“That’s right, Granddad’s car. The car I used to own.”

“I don’t think it’s for me to say whether you can or not, Jim. It’s Granddad’s car, and he’s the one you’ll have to ask. But I’ll certainly put in a word for you.”

As it turned out, Murks didn’t mind. He was feeling pretty tuckered, he said, and he was planning to ask Floyd to drive the car anyway. If Floyd wanted to let Nashe do it, that was all right with him. As long as they got to where they were going, what difference did it make?

When they stepped outside, they discovered that it was snowing. It was the first snow of the year, and it fell in thick, moist flakes, most of it melting the instant it touched the ground. The Christmas decorations had been turned off down the street, and the wind had stopped blowing. The air was still now, so still that the weather felt almost warm. Nashe took a deep breath, glanced up at the sky, and stood there for a moment as the snow fell against his face. He was happy, he realized, happier than he had been in a long time.

When they came to the parking lot, Murks handed him the keys to the car. Nashe unlocked the front door, but just as he was about to open it and climb in, he pulled back his hand and started to laugh. “Hey, Calvin,” he said. “Where the hell are we?”

“What do you mean where are we?” Murks said.

“What town?”

“Billings.”

“Billings? I thought that was in Montana.”

“Billings, New Jersey.”

“So we’re not in Pennsylvania anymore?”

“No, you have to cross the bridge to get back there. Don’t you remember?”

“I don’t remember anything.”

“Just take Route Sixteen. It carries you right on through.”

He hadn’t thought it would be so important to him, but once he positioned himself behind the wheel, he noticed that his hands were trembling. He started the engine, flicked on the headlights and windshield wipers, and then backed out slowly from the parking space. It hadn’t been so long, he thought. Just three and a half months, and yet it took a while before he felt any of the old pleasure again. He was distracted by Murks coughing beside him in the front seat, by Floyd rattling on about how he had lost at pool in the back, and it was only when Nashe turned on the radio that he was able to forget they were there with him, that he was not alone as he had been for all those months when he had driven back and forth across America. He never wanted to do that again, he realized, but once he left the town behind him and could accelerate on the empty road, it was hard not to pretend for a little while, to imagine that he was back in those days before the real story of his life had begun. This was the only chance he would have, and he wanted to savor what had been given to him, to push the memory of who he had once been as far as it would go. The snow whirled down onto the windshield before him, and in his mind he saw the crows swooping down over the meadow, calling out with their mysterious cries as he watched them pass overhead. The meadow would look beautiful under the snow, he thought, and he hoped it would go on falling through the night so he could wake up to see it that way in the morning. He imagined the immensity of the white field, and the snow continuing to fall until even the mountains of stones were covered, until everything disappeared under an avalanche of whiteness.

He had turned the radio to a classical station, and he recognized the music as something familiar, a piece he had listened to many times before. It was the andante from an eighteenth-century string quartet, but even though Nashe knew every passage by heart, the name of the composer kept eluding him. He quickly narrowed it
down to Mozart or Haydn, but after that he felt stuck. For several moments it would sound like the work of one, and then, almost immediately, it would begin to sound like something by the other. It might have been one of the quartets that Mozart dedicated to Haydn, Nashe thought, but it might have been the other way around. At a certain point, the music of both men seemed to touch, and it was no longer possible to tell them apart. And yet Haydn had lived to a ripe old age, honored with commissions and court appointments and every advantage the world of that time could offer. And Mozart had died young and poor, and his body had been thrown into a common grave.

Nashe had the car up to sixty by then, feeling in absolute control as he whipped along the narrow, twisting country road. The music had pushed Murks and Floyd far into the background, and he could no longer hear anything but the four stringed instruments pouring out their sounds into the dark, enclosed space. Then he was doing seventy, and immediately after that he heard Murks shouting at him through another fit of coughing. “You damned fool,” Nashe heard him say. “You’re driving too fast!” By way of response, Nashe pressed down on the accelerator and pushed the car up to eighty, taking the curve with a light and steady grip on the wheel. What did Murks know about driving? he thought. What did Murks know about anything?

At the precise moment the car hit eighty-five, Murks leaned forward and snapped off the radio. The sudden silence came as a jolt to Nashe, and he automatically turned to the old man and told him to mind his own business. When he looked at the road again a moment later, he could already see the headlight looming up at him. It seemed to come out of nowhere, a cyclops star hurtling straight for his eyes, and in the sudden panic that engulfed him, his only thought was that this was the last thought he would ever have. There was no time to stop, no time to prevent what was going
to happen, and so instead of slamming his foot on the brakes, he pressed down even harder on the gas. He could hear Murks and his son-in-law howling in the distance, but their voices were muffled, drowned out by the roar of blood in his head. And then the light was upon him, and Nashe shut his eyes, unable to look at it anymore.