The Railroad (37 page)

“Umm hmm.”

“There’s a long chain back to your friend Dennis, but here I am.”

He told me the little bit about him that I needed to know. He was from Burlington and he came from old money. He was on retainer for three of the local ski resorts. What was most important and what he didn’t say was that he was connected. He’d spoken to the local District Attorney and the whole search had become questionable. Yes I had consented, but I was nowhere near my vehicle when the damage occurred. Assuming that I hadn’t trashed my car (a reasonable assumption) it was more than possible that the drugs had been planted. Beth was willing to testify that I hadn’t been near my car for at least eight hours before the incident.

I chalked it up less to good lawyering than I did to Layton’s friends in the court. I didn’t give a shit. Within a couple of hours I was out on the street walking with my new lawyer. “I would suggest,” he told me sotto voce, “that you get out of Selaquachie as soon as possible.”

“That is fine with me, but I have no car.”

“Rent one. Don’t wait for someone here to fix yours. You can come back and get it later. My concern is that, if you wait, something else will happen. Maybe Officer Johnson will get one of his cousins to cause you more trouble. Leave now.”

“Thanks for your help.”

“I’ve been paid.”

I nodded and realized that, despite my blossoming gratitude,  Grant, Esq. wasn’t my friend. I went back to the Selaquachie Inn and gathered my belongings. Bob, who’d been quiet up to that point, revealed himself as a radical. He talked about the fascist police state in Selaquachie and offered to drive me to the nearest rental agency in the next town. Beth watched us in disapproving silence. I guess she had decided that not much good could be expected from people who were part of dysfunctional families like mine. Her only blatant bit of communication was to press a copy of her second book into my hand as I left with her husband.

*

He took me to an Enterprise Rental in one of the nearby malls. I had sat quietly in Bob’s car in a stupor from lack of sleep and feeling, by turns, omnipotent and ready to continue my quest and then paranoid and disgusted with myself for going this far. Still something seemed to be driving me on. There, with the primordial hills around me, I felt like some kind of figure in an old tall tale. It seemed right that I should go on.

Being late in the afternoon, there wasn’t much at Enterprise. I had a choice between a Corolla, a Mercury Sable, and a Pontiac Grand Am. I figured the Grand Am would be better if I had to drive fast, but part of my current persona was not to stand out, so I chose the Sable. As I paid with my plastic I wondered, in passing, if this car would suffer the same fate as my last and what I’d do if it did.

Then it occurred to me that I might suffer the same fate. I didn’t let the thought linger.

Bob seemed almost sorry to see me go. We shook hands in front of the rental agency.

“You’re not going to meet your sister, are you?”

I didn’t see any harm in telling him; my enemies clearly knew where I was. “Not really. She’s a friend and she’s in trouble.”

He smiled. “I almost wish I could go with you.”

I suddenly regretted being brusque with him earlier. “It’s not quite as romantic as it seems.”

“I know.”

He seemed like he needed to hear something from the macho John Wayne side of the world he thought I’d be part of. “You could take Beth to someplace exotic. She might get her head out of child psychology.”

“Or her ass?” he added, laughing.

“Yeah. Sometimes you have to live life and not establish a career.”

“I thought that’s what opening the Inn was all about, but it turned out differently.”

“You’ll figure it out.” I grasped his hand and he got back into his car. I was sure that I’d brought a little revitalizing excitement into his life but I also knew it would last a couple of hours. Maybe Beth would notice something different in him when he walked through the door and then she’d be sure that he’d be back to being an innkeeper by dinner time. In a way I envied him his comfortable life.

*

I stopped at a no name motel just around sundown. I wasn’t going to be very much good to myself if I was half asleep. I figured being stationary for a whole night might make me a better target for my mysterious friends, but somehow I just didn’t give a shit. I suppose it had something to do with being really tired and having had almost no sleep for two nights.

I went down the road to the nearest restaurant and got myself a burger and fries, taking it back to the motel. Somehow it didn’t seem to be the time for tuna on a pita. I sat with my meal beside me and ate while I watched “Orca”. It was a movie I’d always laughed at and it seemed the right thing to be watching at the moment. I looked around my room; I’d put some traps right in front of the doors and windows, things that would fall and make a lot of noise if they were disturbed. It was odd to see myself as just a survival machine, like something out of a bad detective novel, but it occurred to me that, to some extent, I’d been living that way ever since I moved to Bardstown. More than anything else, I felt numb.

I guess what I was really feeling was apathy. I’d lost everything and my life, at best, was like some fixer-upper house you’d buy with no expectations; everything needed work and nothing was okay. Then I caught myself. There were thousands of people down in New York who’d lost everything, including their loved ones. Was I so important?

I pulled out the map and flattened it on my bed. Pesquot was pretty far up in Maine, at least another seven hours drive. I’d been up in that area once and all I could remember was how barren it was. The towns had always made me think of what I’d imagine rural Wales must be like, though I had no basis for comparison. A friend of mine had actually spent a summer on one of those islands off the coast and described it as incredible.

I hoped that I’d be able to keep my sleep light. If nothing else, I hoped they’d try to come in and not just shoot me through the window; at least my booby traps would make some noise. I realized more than once, that the most rational thing to do was to get in my rented car and head back south as far as I could go before I had to sleep.

Of course I didn’t do it.

I woke around 6:10 and knew I was still alive and not much else. I’d only gotten four hours of sleep that night and I could feel myself starting to fray at the edges. I found my mind wandering for a minute at a time while I thought I was concentrating on some important task like planning out my route for the day. I drank two cups of coffee hoping it would make me feel more focused, but it only seemed to make me feel stretched tighter than I already was. I wondered if I should even be driving.

No one had disturbed my booby traps during the night nor did there seem to be any sign of “them”. I wondered for a moment if I’d start seeing “them” even when they weren’t there, due to my depleted condition; I was at the point where rationality was beginning to battle with fantasy.

I shook off the thought. I knew I couldn’t afford that sort of self-indulgence, so I dragged myself into the office and got some more paint remover quality coffee, which I drank while lounging by the front window watching the scant traffic pass.

I was on the road heading north by seven, figuring I should get to Pesquot by around two. That would give me at least a few hours to ask around if anyone had seen Eileen and Megan and about a farm that boasted a barn that looked like
Noah’s
Ark
. I felt a strange calm, despite the fact that I looked in my rearview mirror occasionally. Nothing much to see back there.

As I drove I watched what had seemed quaint and isolated become sparse and desolate. The New England that had seemed Norman Rockwell-esque in the Green Mountains, seemed like a whole different thing as I moved northward into central Maine. I had been here before, but barely remembered it. At one point, as my mind was wandering, I was visited by a fleeting memory of my sister looking around at the Maine countryside and saying, “I don’t think anyone actually lives here. It’s like some national park.”

I made good time, not stopping to eat, and making it to Pesquot around 1:15. The day was fittingly bleak for a dreary New England town; it was cloudy and the entire town was cast in grays and blacks. I stopped on the main street which gave me more of a feel of an old western frontier town than an ancient New England village. An old man sat on the street in front of the one store in the town; I couldn’t see anyone else. Despite clapboard and white picket fences, I expected to see Clint Eastwood wandering down the main street, eyes squinting, settling some old wrong.

The old man gave me a blank look as I walked up to the store. “I’d like to find the glass works,” I told him.

“Most folks do that when they come up here.”

“Oh. It must be a good place to visit.”

“Only place to visit around here.”

“How would I get there?”

The old joke about “can’t get there from here” surfaced in my mind, but I shrugged it off. I was sure that there were a lot of stereotypes about New Yorkers too. The old man sneered. “You thought I was going to say that old joke, didn’t you.”

I smiled. “It popped into my mind. But I don’t know you. Let’s just call it a reaction. I’m tired.”

“Most folks sit there and wait for me to say it. One fellow got real peeved at me because I didn’t. Then he got even madder because I wouldn’t let him take my picture.”

“Tourists,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“You’re one too.”

“True. Which way?”

“That way out of town. You can’t miss it.”

“This your store?”

“My Daddy died and left it to me.”

I pulled out the picture. “You seen these two?”

He stared. “Why?”

“I was supposed to meet them back down in the Green Mountains a couple of weeks from now, but I got away from work early and I knew they were going to come up here. The little girl likes glass.”

“Who are they to you?”

“My sister and my niece.”

“You don’t talk about them like they were your sister and your niece.”

“They’re very special to me.”

He shrugged again. “I think I’ve seen them, but if I did it was weeks back. Can’t tell you where they went. Or if they stayed here.”

“That’s okay. I’ll catch up with them later. It’s good to take a drive up here.”

There was a sudden silence and I think that he suddenly had tired of conversation. “You ever hear of a place with a barn in the shape of
Noah’s
Ark
,” I asked quickly.

He concentrated for a moment. “Damned if I don’t remember hearing something like that when I was a kid. But I don’t know if it was something someone told me about or something that was real. Maybe up North. Anyway, it isn’t around here because I’d know about it.”

“That’s okay. They mentioned something about that to me, but I’m not sure if it was a real place.” I was getting good at lying.

He stood up. “Well got to go back in and do inventory. My body doesn’t work the way it used to. I can work about an hour and then I have to take a rest.”

“No hurry so why rush?”

“True enough. And I’m headed to the same place no matter how fast I go.”

“Where’s that?”

“Death.”

“Oh. I guess you’re right.”

“Good day to you.”

“Good day.”

*

The glass works were as I suspected. There were tours, demonstrations of glass making and the obligatory gift shop. Pretty standard. What was worse was that no one remembered either Eileen or Megan. For all I knew they’d never been there or the people I was talking to weren’t working the day they’d come to the glass works.

I sat out in the parking lot of the glass works, feeling suddenly stupid and immensely tired. I was running around with a big flag on my back that said “Shoot me” with all the attention I must be getting. There might be no end to my quest. I might just go on and find myself at a dead end. Looking at it from that perspective, the whole thing seemed stupid and self-indulgent.

I found myself staring again, my mind drifting. I was staring at the glass works and I’d been thinking about…it seemed that I’d been thinking about the squid at Thai Palace on Eighth Avenue. Ten minutes had gone by. Realizing I’d been somewhere else for at least ten minutes, I began to feel the first stirrings of fear, thinking that I was going to lose my edge and become one of those people I’d seen for years in New York who spoke to themselves.

Pushing the thought out of my mind, I drove on.

*

Piedmont was another four hours north  and, as it turned out, very close to the Canadian border. The scenery became more barren, more monotonous, and I became a little dazed. After driving for days I was getting punchy; I felt like I was traveling in my own little universe. This impression was reinforced by the fact that there were very few houses or people to be seen.

I ran out of steam a good two hours from Piedmont, driving in the dark. It took far longer to find a motel than it had before and I was exhausted. I had long since stopped looking out my back window. Anyone following me would have been obvious even if I’d looked once every half an hour.