The Traveller (34 page)

He stared at the picture again and thought of the girl on the slab.

‘I could never do it,’ he said softly.

For a moment he did not realize what he’d said.

She did. It seared her. She summoned more control from her heart.

Detective Barren let the silence mount around them before she cracked it ever so gently with a simple question: “But what about your brother?’

Jeffers felt his insides churn. With difficulty he gathered himself together and retreated into his best clinical tones.

‘I don’t believe my brother is capable of such a thing,

detective. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. I don’t

believe it. You’re talking about savagery, uh, despicable,

reprehensible, I don’t know. I’m insulted that you’d even

ask.’

Detective Barren stared at him.

‘Are you really?’ she asked gently.

He managed an ineffectual snort and an impotent wave of the hand in response.

‘Assume, for the sake of this conversation, that…’

He interrupted.

‘Assume nothing, detective. I don’t want to play with

hypotheticals. My brother is a prizewinning photographer.

He is one of the most sought after freelancers in journalism

today. He travels the world. His work appears in every

major publication. He is honored and respected. He is an

artist. In every sense of the word, detective. An artist.’

‘I didn’t ask you about his professional qualifications.’

‘No, that’s correct. You didn’t.’

He hesitated before adding: ‘But it’s important to realize we’re not dealing with some, some …’

She cut in: ‘Ordinary man?’

He nodded. ‘All right.’

Her voice reformed on the edge of rage: ‘You think an ordinary man could do this?’

He reeled.

‘You misunderstand me.’

No, I don’t. I don’t at all.’

She stared at him and he used the moment to try to regain some distance. Jeffers decided to go on the offensive.

‘And this, I suppose, is a routine investigation?’

‘Yes. No…’

‘Well, which?’

‘It is not routine.’

‘It couldn’t be, could it, detective? Not when the victim is your niece.’

‘Correct.’

‘Then explain to me, detective, if you will, why you are here trying to connect my brother to a crime that has already been solved?’

He reached down and thrust another photostat of a news story across at her. She glanced at it rapidly, then pushed it aside.

‘The murder of Susan Lewis was not solved. It was only attributed to that man. I have evidence that indicates he did not commit the crime.’

‘Will you share that with me?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so.’

‘The evidence is circumstantial.’

‘I would imagine so. Because if it were more than mere guesswork, detective, then you would have tried to browbeat me with it already.’

That was true. She nodded.

‘You’re correct, doctor.’

He paused before continuing. He felt stronger, more aggressive. He returned to his best clinical approach.

‘Please, detective, enlighten me. The aunt of a murder victim arrives here seeking to connect my brother to a crime that’s been solved. Now why shouldn’t I find that confusing and unusual?’

He looked across the desk at the detective and realized that there was something new in her eyes. They seemed to glow. He realized, too, that all of his pedanticism was useless. There was silence before she replied in a singularly deep, even voice.

‘You should,’ she said. She paused again before continuing.

‘But if it was so goddamned surprising to hear that your brother was sought in connection with a murder, why didn’t you toss me out then?’

She looked directly at him, her eyes harsh and unforgiving.

‘Why weren’t you shocked? Speechless? Astounded?’

She breathed in and out evenly.

‘I know why,’ she continued quietly, terrifyingly. ‘Because you weren’t surprised to hear it. Not at all, goddammit.’

She hesitated again while she registered the effect her words had on him.

‘Because you’ve been waiting to hear exactly that for some time, haven’t you?’

Her words were like bullets probing for Jeffers’ heart. He forced his mind to go blank, not accepting the questions she’d thrust at him, denying his own imagination simultaneously.

He stood and walked to the window.

She sat watching.

The summer evening was closing in. The dusk seemed gray. He thought it was the hour of the day most like the first few moments after a nightmare, when people are not certain whether they are safe, awake in their bed, or still asleep, trapped by their dream.

He took an immense breath. He released it slowly, then took another. To himself he screamed: Get control! Show nothing!

But he knew these were impossible commands.

‘Detective, what you say is provocative. I think we had best continue this conversation tomorrow …’ It was weak and ineffectual, but he knew he needed time. Insist on it! he said to himself.

She started to speak, but he wheeled away from the window and held up his hand.

“Tomorrow! Tomorrow, goddammit! Tomorrow!’

She nodded.

‘After my group session, around noontime.’

‘Okay.’

She paused before asking, ‘You’re not going to cancel that like you did today’s appointments?’ He glared at her. He didn’t reply.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll take that as a negative.’

She stood and looked at him.

‘You won’t call him?’

‘I told you, detective, I can’t.’Jeffers, she saw, was struggling for composure. What a fragile man he was, she thought suddenly. She wondered how she could use this to her advantage.

‘Suppose he calls you? Suppose that happens — what’re you going to say?’

‘He won’t.’

‘He might.’

‘I said he won’t.’

‘But if he does?’

‘He’s my brother. I’ll talk to him.’

‘What will you say?’

Jeffers shook his head angrily. ‘He’s my brother.’

8 Other dark places

Douglas Jeffers called it ‘The mighty Miss-sah-sip’ and gave Anne Hampton a short course on Mark Twain. He was clearly disappointed to learn that she’d read only Tom Sawyer, and that when she had been a senior in high school. -She was uneducated, he told her bitterly. If she did not know about Huck, he said, she knew nothing. She certainly would find it more difficult to understand him. ‘Huck is America,’ Jeffers insisted. ‘I am America.’ She did not reply, but scribbled down his words in her notepad.

He spoke this in a low voice. Then he adopted a pedantic, lecturing tone and told her that the river had once been the most important route for commerce in the nation, that it had been the signaling point for the jump across the West, that it slid through the heart of America, carrying politics, culture, civilization, and sustenance on the backs of its waters. To understand the river, he said, was to know how America formed. He told her that the same was true of people; one merely had to determine what river coursed through a man, or woman, then follow it to the basin of comprehension. She looked bewildered and he suddenly screamed at her, ‘I’m talking about myself, goddammit! Can’t you see what I’m saying? I’m trying to teach you things that no one, no one in the world knows! Don’t sit there like a slug!’ She cowered, waiting for the blow, but be held off, though she saw his hand clench into a fist. Then, after a momentary pause, he continued musing about the river.

Occasionally they would swing close enough in the car

for her to see the gleaming wide surface reflecting the daylight, the waters flowing ceaselessly, steadily onward toward the gulf that lay behind them. He insisted she take down all of his rambling speech, almost word for word, saying that someday she would recognize the value inherent in the phrases and fragments, and she would be thankful that she had managed to copy them down properly.

She did not understand that, but during the past days she had found it comforting when he would talk about the future, no matter how vaguely, as if there were some world extending beyond the windows of the car hurtling through the countryside, a life past Douglas Jeffers’ long reach. She obeyed, scratching letters, shaping words as quickly as she could.

When he asked her to reread it to him, she obeyed.

He asked her to make a small correction, then a small addendum. She obeyed.

She obeyed everything. To refuse him anything was utterly alien to her.

Several nights had passed — she had trouble saying to herself precisely how many — since he had shot the derelict. Since I shot the derelict, she thought. Then: No, since we shot the derelict. They stayed each night in some forgettable motel near the edge of the highway, the kind of places with neon red vacancy signs blinking in the darkness, where the water-glasses are wrapped in paper and the management puts signs on the toilets to say that they have been properly sanitized.

As they were entering their room in one of the motels she saw a man standing next to a soft-drink machine a short distance away. He wore a cheap brown suit and a tie loosened by the day’s heat. She thought of Willy Loman and realized that he was a travelling salesman. He was leering at her as he fed quarters into the machine. She watched as he purchased three cans of orange soda and saw that he had a bottle of vodka in his pocket. She cringed at the man’s look, shrinking in fear from the design in his eyes. Jeffers snarled at the man like an animal surprised at the door to its den, and the man shuffled away, protecting

his soft drinks and liquor and the evening’s oblivion that they held out in promise. Jeffers had said, ‘Why kill him unless you’re a punk looking for a fifty-buck score? What

he’s drinking will kill him just as sure as a bullet. Just not quite as quick.’

‘ In bed each night she slept fitfully, if at all, tossing about as much as she dared, but more often lying rigid, listening

to his even breathing but not believing that he slept. He never sleeps, she thought. He’s always awake and ready. Even when he emitted a snore, she refused to believe that

it signaled sleep. When she listened to him, she tried to remain absolutely quiet, as if even the slight whisper of her own breath would rouse him. She thought at those times that she could no longer hear or feel her own body functioning. She would surreptitiously put her hand to her breast and try to sense the heartbeat beneath. It seemed distant, weak; it was as if she were close to death, mortally fragile.

At night he did not try to touch her, though she expected it each minute. She had given up on any idea of privacy, dressing and undressing in front of him, not shutting the bathroom door when she went to the toilet. She accepted these things as part of the arrangement which left her alive. She would have accepted sex as well, but so far it had failed to materialize. She did not expect this hiatus to last. In the time since the derelict’s killing, she had come to realize that she was scared of everything: of strangers, of Jeffers, of herself, of each passing minute of daytime, of each moment of night; of what might happen to her when she was awake or when she slept. When she did manage to fall asleep, her dreams were more often nightmares; she had quickly become accustomed to awakening in terrified fight from some sleep image, only to settle into the constancy of fear that was her waking world. Sometimes she had great difficulty separating the two. She would lie in darkness, remembering the vision of the derelict on the New Orleans street. She saw his mouth circling, puckering in acceptance of the bottle, a safe, familiar act, that gave him a kind of easy joy. Only this time it wasn’t the accustomed touch of the wet bottle neck that he felt, but the hard, dry, awful taste of the gun barrel. She could see a glimmer of confusion in his eyes as they looked up in surprise, meeting hers. His eyes were like those of a dog who hears an unusual sound and cocks his head in curiosity. It was a terrible sight; her vision fixing on the derelict’s open, accepting mouth, expectant eyes, waiting for all the world as if he were going to be kissed.

And sometimes it would be worse, it would reversed. She would see the derelict, see him lift a bottle to his open lips. And when her own mouth dropped wide in surprise, wondering where the gun had gone, it would be there, in front of her. She would try to snap her mouth shut, but the gun moved too quickly and she could taste the metallic death on her own tongue.

She would see all this, and then scream.

At least she thought she screamed, and more often than not she felt as if she had screamed. But she realized that in reality she had made no sound. Her own mouth had opened, demanding noise, but none had emerged.

That too frightened her.

Outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Jeffers slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road. He pointed past her and said, ‘See there?’ Anne Hampton turned and looked out upon a wide green field with a grassy knoll in the center. At the top of the knoll was a weathered, gray-brown oak tree, an ancient tree with gnarled leafy branches that reached out over the field, throwing shade about with the determination and duty that comes with old age.

‘I see a tree,’ she replied.

‘That’s wrong,’ he said. ‘What you see is the past.’

He took the car out of gear and turned off the engine. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘History lesson.’

He helped her over a ramshackle wooden fence, and together they walked up to the knoll. Jeffers looked hard at the ground the entire time, as if measuring something. ‘It’s grown back,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know if it would, but it’s been eight years.’ He looked pensive. ‘I always thought

that when gasoline burned the ground, it was scorched, it would take decades to grow back. Do you remember those pictures the German war photographers took in World War Two? From the Ukraine? They were very powerful shots. There would be these immense fields of wheat waving about in the distance, surrounding a huge pillar of black smoke. You always sensed the impotence through the picture, that’s what made the pictures so damned good; you knew they couldn’t do a fucking thing to stop those fires once the retreating Russians set them. Gasoline and wheat burning. Scorched earth. Damning the future to save the present.’ Then he stopped and pointed. ‘Look carefully — there! Can you see the way the grass changes color?’