The Terror of Living

Urban Waite

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011

A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © Urban Waite 2011

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

The right of Urban Waite to be identified as author of this work

has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78

of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85720-434-9

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-84737-972-6

Quote from "Winterkill" in
Rock Springs
copyright © 1987 by Richard Ford.

Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are

either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events

or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

For Karen

'Do you ever just think of just doing a criminal thing sometime? Just doing something terrible. Change everything.'

- Richard Ford,
Rock Springs,
from the story "Winterkill"

'We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.'

- Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Table of Contents

I

BY AIR

II

BY SEA

III

BY LAND

IV

CONFESSIONS

V

SNOW

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BY AIR

    THE KID HAD TAKEN A BUS NORTH FROM SEATTLE and stood outside studying the bar for a long time, weighing the options. A gust of wind brought the smell of sun-warmed tar from a patch of cracked pavement, the day changing warm to cold, airplanes passing overhead in the afternoon, the sound of jet engines firing and planes taking off from the nearby field. The bar wasn't much to look at, just a two-story clapboard with a rock-and- pebble parking strip. He toed a piece of gravel, thinking it over, then went in.

    He took a drink off his beer, looked around the bar, and put the glass back down. With his elbows pushed out on either side, he was leaning hard up against the bar. It was the type of place he used to come to when he was underage-a short bar, dim light, with customers of questionable means - using his older brother's ID and hoping to get laid. He'd been out of the world for two years on a vehicular manslaughter charge. He'd been lucky about it, too; young as he was, the judge had gone easy on him. On his thin frame he wore a red shirt, so worn the material had turned the color of a dried peach. Locked up, he hadn't worn the old shirt in years. The smell of him, in his new old clothes, was something of dust, something of mildew and dark, locked-away places, so deep it seemed to come from his skin itself.

    He looked the beer over, better than the piss-pot stuff they brewed in Monroe, half-fruit, half-saliva, like some sort of Amazon moonshine. He took another swallow. It was his first legal drink and he sat staring at it, watching how the air condensed against the side of the glass and collected around the base in a watery circle.

    Don't fuck this up, he said to himself, looking around at the other customers. Don't do a stupid thing like that.

    When Eddie came up to the bar and sat down, the kid was taking in that dreamy glow of being somewhere he'd never been before. The two were separated by a seat between them, the kid looking down into his beer, staring hard at the way the bubbles bounced against the surface, then sloughed off to one side and collected.

    Eddie ordered a beer from the bartender and waited for the man to pour it. The kid raised an eye to study Eddie, watching him as he waited for the beer to be delivered. After the bartender had gone, Eddie turned to look out on the bar and take it all in. There were two pool tables in the back, one occupied, an assortment of low tables near the wall with two or three chairs at each. Eddie turned back and spoke to the beer in front of him. "I guess you're my man."

    The kid stared at Eddie for a moment and then looked away. Eddie wasn't what the kid had been expecting, a squat, dark- skinned Mexican, his cheeks chewed up with acne scars, and a thin trail of hair along his lip.

    "Kind of young, aren't you?" Eddie said.

    "Old enough," the kid said, drawing himself up on the stool. He knew what he looked like, a kid of twenty-two, barely old enough to be there. Two years of prison had thinned him out, tightened up his muscles. His time there had toughened him, but he knew he still looked like a kid, Adam's apple big as a newborn's fist, the patch of a beard below his chin, drawn in like a child's scribblings.

    "I don't think I need to tell you this," Eddie said, "but it's best you understand from the start that there are no mistakes. I was told you were looking for something and here I am. I wouldn't even be here if someone hadn't put his own life out there for you. You understand?"

    The kid nodded and looked straight on at the liquor bottles behind the bar. His older brother had been the one to put him up to it. He'd been in the driver's seat two years ago, and the kid had slid over, taking the blame. Scared shitless, but taking the blame for his older brother so he wouldn't go back in. It was a stupid thing to do, but he had done it and his brother had walked away. And now his brother would help him out and it would all be even.

    "You don't have to worry about me," the kid said. "There won't be any accidents. I'm as good as they come."

    Eddie smiled. "You don't need to tell me. As far as I'm concerned you're in business for yourself. You're a contractor working for a percentage. You don't have to answer to me. I'm just here to tell you that it's in your own best interest not to fuck this up." Eddie got up from the bar, thanked the bartender, and went out through the front door.

    On the barstool where he'd been sitting was a set of car keys. The kid leaned over as casually as he could and swiped them off the vinyl. He kept them below the bar, and as he finished his beer he fit his finger into the metal key ring and rolled them over and over again, feeling them swing loose in the air.

    DEPUTY BOBBY DRAKE GAVE THE CAR ANOTHER LOOK. Drugs had always been a problem north of Silver Lake, but these days, smugglers would have to be real idiots to take anything across the border crossings. Security had doubled, a real task force going now, after all the years of people passing on through. For a time it was as if the two countries were one, a driver's license the only thing necessary to get up into British Columbia.

    The drugs just spread out, finding other ways of crossing, as the borders tightened. If you had the experience or the know-how, it could be a good business. Drake knew that. His father, the former sheriff-locked up now-had known that. This land, these mountains and valleys, carved by glacier and erosion, were about all Drake had left of a former life. A life that had seen horses raised in his father's field, now taken and gone. A life built of apple orchards and fall harvests, sold off and forgotten, nothing there now but a wooden fence melted away with age into the ground, trees left behind as withered and bony as skeletal hands. From one side to the other, Drake's life so cleanly cut in half as to be unrecognizable.

    He took out his binoculars and scanned the clear-cut. It was all forestry land, leased out to the big lumber companies. Everything a patchwork of fresh-cut brown or newly planted green. Hills stretched off and became mountains, the white tip of Mount Baker poking up into the high blue. Jumbo jets could get lost in a place like this, he thought.

    The deputy propped his door open, letting the mountain air into the cab of the cruiser, sticky smell of pine needles, resin, and damp, windblown earth. He left one leg outside and worked an old basketball injury in his lower thigh. He was tall for the cruiser, and his leg stretched out onto the gravel. Sharp chinned, with thinning brown hair. He was still young enough to push the ball up the court and keep in shape, but he was starting to lose it, starting to get comfortable in this job.

    The license plate had come back clean. He stared at the onboard computer, then got up and walked over to the car. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it. No forced entry. It was in the middle of nowhere, just a car on the side of the road. He knelt and fingered the raised edges of a wide double tire track in the soft ground. Drake traced it back to where the tires had come off the road and then walked to the other side and saw how they caught the far edge and made the turn to go back up the road. He guessed it to be something big, a semi without a trailer, or a big Chevy or Ford, something with a tow. He couldn't put his finger on it, couldn't say, but he did know - judging from how the larger tire tracks lay across the smaller-that whatever it was had come after the car had been there, and he knew from driving this road every twenty-four hours that the car hadn't been there for more than a day.

    Drake walked back across the road and looked the car over. He cupped his hands and put them to the window. The car was clean. Not even a gum wrapper on the floor. He'd expected an old McDonald's bag, a grocery bag, even a receipt, something.

    He watched the wind come down from the mountains along the trees. Heard the rush of it through the branches, evergreens moving all at once, like cresting water on the tip of a wave, rolling smooth and fast down the face. The sky marvelous and clear above, he felt the wind play at the back of his neck. He didn't know what he was doing, why he couldn't just let it go, this car, this feeling, everything. He was battling an old, familiar sense of unease, some loneliness he'd been left with. Just he and his wife living up this way, in his father's house, now theirs, left to them for the keeping while his father was away.

    He looked back up into the mountains, glassed them with his binoculars. Running his vision along the ridges, pausing to focus, then running on. He stood for a while next to the car. The wind came up off the lake and whipped some of the gravel dust into a dervish. He walked back to the cruiser and called the ranger's station over at Baker.

    "You got anyone up from Seattle in the Silver Lake area?"

    "No one up there, Deputy."

    He read the ranger the license plate. "Anything?"

    "That's all clear-cut and logging roads. Don't know why anyone would want to see that."

    "Don't know either," Drake said, thanking the ranger.

    THE TRAIL CLIMBED STEEP AND JAGGED IN FRONT OF them. It was not a place for the kid, someone who couldn't ride and sat straight-backed in the saddle, unyielding to the horse's steps. Phil Hunt turned to look the kid over. The horses would follow each other up one hill and down the next, but the kid made him nervous.

    "You been in this line of work long?" Hunt asked.

    "Not long."

    "How old are you?"

    "Twenty-seven."

    "That a lie?"

    "Yes."

    "I'd say you don't look older than twenty-two, twenty-three?"

    "That's about right," the kid said. He turned in his saddle to look back down on what had passed before, hemlock and fir trees stretched into the narrow valley. Farther on, a patch of clear-cut and a newborn forest sprouting up in rows. The kid began to drift off to the left.

    "Careful now," Hunt said, lowering his hat to shield his eyes from the sun and watching the kid.

    "Didn't expect this when I signed up."

    Hunt rolled this around in his head and let it rest. The kid couldn't have had much experience for the thing, riding up one ridge, then down into the following valley, just to do it again. Still, the kid reminded him a bit of himself at that age, thirty years ago, a head of brown hair, skin tanned brown as desert soil, a little too cocky, too sure of himself, body lean as a razor blade and with a mouth like one, too. "It's not all cigarette boats and fancy parties," Hunt said. "Maybe down in the Keys that's how they do it. But up here it's a bit different."