When the Man Dances (2) (2024)

1. The Absurd Mansion

Neal drove on through the waning hours of the afternoon, through the evening that settled over brimming fields, and on into the star-spangled night. Near Council Bluffs they passed through a shower, but the clouds fell away just west of Lincoln, and ahead of them lay far horizons, where ghostly plains met the edges of wine-colored skies. Neal stopped for gas once, but otherwise he drove steadily, keeping his speed between 70 and 80, more and more eager to get to some destination as the world around him became emptier and emptier. His eyes were so transfixed by the road ahead of him that when he blinked he could see the white lines behind his eyelids.

Sometime in the night his phone started ringing. Tucker, who had fallen asleep near Grand Island, suddenly jumped awake and grabbed Neal by the shoulder.

“We’re being followed! Speed up, for Christ’s sake! Get off this road!”

Neal slowed down instead, and a six-wheel pickup truck, with two sets of headlights on high beam, sped past them and disappeared down the highway. Neal took the still-ringing phone out of his pants pocket and then shifted over to the shoulder of the interstate.

“Hello?”

“Harold?” Sheila’s voice leaped at him, hard and flat.

“Yeah. What is it?” Neal opened the door, heaved himself out of the car, and began stretching the stiffness out of his legs.

“Your associate said I could call again.”

“Sure,” he said. “My business partner. He must have answered my phone before.”

Neal walked around the back of the car to the edge of the asphalt. Warm animal smells drifted toward him, although the plains that bordered the highway appeared empty in the moonless night.

“Lyle’s out right now,” Sheila said, “taking someone’s car away.”

“You suppose he’ll have to use his rifle this time?”

“He wouldn’t have the nerve. He just carries it to feel brave.”

“What time is it, anyway?” Neal couldn’t read his watch in the dark.

“I don’t know. We don’t have a clock in the bedroom anymore. Lyle doesn’t keep a schedule. He just comes and goes, you know. I’m glad he’s gone right now. I swear, sometimes I could just kill him.”

Neal laughed nervously. “I’ve been married before. I know the feeling. It passes.”

Glancing to his side, he saw Tucker, about ten yards beyond the car, making slow, precise, ritualistic movements. As Neal’s eyes became accustomed to the dark, he was beginning to make out the shapes of cows lying in recumbent heaps in the near distance.

“You don’t know Lyle,” Sheila insisted. “It seems like every time I wake up, he’s just laying there staring at me.”

“Maybe he’s preoccupied. Worried about something.”

“Oh yeah. He’s worried all right.” She wasn’t just speaking to Neal; she was thrusting her words at him with precise, deliberate force. Listening to her now, an image suddenly emerged. He could see her sitting in a chair in her living room, holding herself in place as if waiting for just the right moment to make her next move; he could see her face now, her expression unreadable, except when her eyes wore that cool, calculating look he had recalled more than once. “He’s worried about me,” she said.

“Why would he be worried about you?”

“He thinks he’s going to lose me. He’s keeping his eye on me because he thinks I’ll give something away. Maybe he thinks I’ll say something in my sleep. I don’t know. Sometimes I want to spit on him. There’s nothing I hate more than a weak man.”

“He doesn’t seem insecure to me.”

“He’s got everyone fooled. Believe me, Harold. I know him better than anyone.”

“Have you threatened to leave him?”

“I don’t have to. He knows that he really doesn’t deserve me. He can’t believe I’m not planning to leave.”

Neal felt that she was almost too close, breathing hotly against his ear. He wanted to find some way to end the conversation, but she was only warming up.

“He knows he’s lucky I ever agreed to marry him. You know, my grandfather was a judge. I’ve got cousins who raise thoroughbreds. That’s what I come from. What does he come from? His mother’s been married four times. His father used to drive a school bus until they found out he was selling p*rno tapes to middle school boys.” Neal heard the Vivien Leigh cadence in her voice again, but he couldn’t honestly have said whether she was dramatizing herself purely for effect, or whether some genuine surge of emotion was compelling her to play a well-rehearsed role. “Lyle doesn’t have a single brother, sister, or cousin that graduated from high school. All that talk about college and city planning, and everything … He’s just trying to convince himself that he’s good enough for me.”

She paused, not necessarily because she was expecting a reply. “You know,” she finally said, “it’s a good thing he keeps that rifle locked up in his truck. Not in the house. Sometimes, I think I could really …”

“You should calm down,” Neal said slowly. “Let yourself rest, get some sleep. Don’t you have anything in the house, like maybe whiskey, maybe some good Kentucky bourbon? A nightcap would do you some good.”

“All we have is some of Lyle’s lousy, cheap beer. Pissy stuff It just goes right through me.”

“Maybe you could read something to relax. A good mystery, maybe.”

“Reading just gives me a headache. I’ll tell you what I ought to do. I ought to just to take a warm bath. No telling when was the last time I did that.” Her voice was already softening as she said this. “Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you take a bath, too, Harold? We can just stay on the phone and take a bath together. How does that sound?”

“Tempting,” he said vaguely. “But I don’t know if I—”

“We could blow bubbles to each other, through the …” She broke into laughter before she could finish the sentence.

“Nice idea. I …”

Sheila was laughing too hard to listen to him. His sense of her as a physical presence faded away again and the sound of her laughter, vibrating wildly in the earpiece, was the only thing that remained of her for the moment. Neal became uncomfortably conscious of the sound echoing through the still of the night; turning around, he found Tucker standing right behind him, eyeing the phone with stern curiosity.

“Sheila,” Neal said stiffly. “I’ve got to—”

A new burst of laughter cut him off.

“Sheila … Try to be good, O.K.?”

“I can’t make any promises, Harold.”

Neal ended the call. He turned around to find Tucker still staring, his hands propped against the back of his head.

“What’s so goddamn funny?”

“Nothing.”

“Someone out there thinks there’s something funny. You mind telling me the joke?”

Tucker’s eyes were jumping back and forth, the beady irises seeming to rattle like thrown dice.

Neal took hold of Tucker’s chin and gave him a close look. “You need to get a grip.”

Tucker slapped his hand away. “Why don’t you get a grip? I’ve got all the grip I need, pal.”

“All right, all right,” Neal said in surly voice, walking back to the car.

“I’m full of grip!” Tucker insisted, stubbornly holding his ground. “I’ve got more grip than you could imagine! I invented it, man!”

“O.K. I get it. Just get in the car.”

A deep lowing came from one of the cows in the field, and Tucker, painfully alert, seemed to be locked in place, listening intently as the sound settled into the dry earth.

“Come on,” Neal urged. “It’s time for you to drive.” He tossed the keys to Tucker without waiting for a reply.

Once they were on the road again, Neal fell asleep quickly, though first he switched the zipper pouch to the right pocket of his jacket so it would be underneath him as he rested against the passenger side door.

When he woke a few hours later, the car was parked at a public rest area somewhere in the middle of a bare plain, rimmed by high, flat bluffs. Turning to look through the passenger side window, he could see the eastern horizon brightening with pale orange light, though the sun had not yet risen. Tucker was not in the car, but instead of searching for him right away, Neal reached abruptly for the zipper pouch in his pocket, unzipped it enough to see that the title was still safely stowed away, then got out of the car.

Next to the parking area, Neal found a couple of aluminum picnic tables, with adjoining trash barrels and ash pits covered with iron grills, and just beyond them a concrete building surrounded by a half-acre of sand and brush. Nothing stirred in the brisk morning air, and Tucker was nowhere to be seen, until he suddenly came around the corner of the concrete enclosure.

“The bathrooms are closed, if you were wondering,” he said in a surprisingly chipper voice.

“I think I can manage,” Neal said, unzipping his pants and relieving himself into one of the ash pits. “You must have gotten sleepy.”

“That,” Tucker said, “and plus I saw a couple of state troopers prowling around. You know it’s Labor Day weekend, don’t you?”

“Never crossed my mind,” Neal said. “I’ve been out of work, so I don’t give much thought to holidays.”

“Out of work … which means … what?”

“Never mind what it means,” Neal said quickly. “Aren’t you hungry? Don’t we need to get some breakfast?”

Tucker made a 360-degree gesture. “You see any restaurants?”

“Something’s bound to turn up.”

“I believe it’s your turn to pay. I got the last one.”

“No, no. I’m on the job, remember? All expenses paid.”

“It’s not that far to Denver, now. Let’s save our money and let my mom feed us. They’ve got a hired kitchen staff and everything. Let’s just get going.”

“Fine,” Neal said grudgingly. “As long as we can stop for some coffee. You can afford that, can’t you? You haven’t run through all the money I loaned you already, have you?”

They crossed into Colorado about an hour later, merging onto I-76, as the rising sun pursued them, brightening and warming the spacious tracts of farm land. Here and there the a line of trees came into view, marking the low-lying South Platte, and as they moved further and further west they began to see the Rocky Mountains looming ahead, a dusty blue line of ridges, like the spiny tail of a dragon lying at the edge of the world.

By mid-morning, Tucker was asleep again, while Neal was seeing suburban strip malls spread out like patchwork fields of glass and asphalt on either side of the interstate, and sprawling golf courses, and nine-story office buildings, facing the sun with stacked panels of gleaming steel. Everywhere he looked he found utter vacancy, a thin, limpid Sunday morning lifelessness, as if the holiday weekend and a kind of cold Sabbath dread had combined to keep everyone in bed for an extra two hours.

As the car swept toward the city, and the interstate merged with the lacework of freeways in the heart of Denver, the mountains became an increasingly heavy presence, bearing down on the high rise apartments and glass towers.

Neal had never been this far west before. He had grown up in Fort Worth, Texas, and for him the West meant an ever-flattening horizon, dry gullies, acres of tumbleweeds. Now that he was making his way through light freeway traffic at the foot of the Rockies, he was struck with the way the mountains presided over the city, aloof, imperious, flaunting their scored edges and bristling crowns.

“Where do I go now?” he asked irritably, poking his passenger awake.

Tucker’s eyes popped open, darting in every direction. “Have you seen the University Boulevard exit yet?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You missed it already,” he said, suddenly alert. “Take that exit. Get over to the right, now.”

Descending into the city, they drove past several blocks of old buildings with flat facades and arched windows, most of them apparently abandoned, all of them lined with grime along the undersides of their cornices; along one notably dreary block a row of derelicts had spread out on the sidewalk parallel to each other, motionless, as if they were all spending their Sunday hours practicing to be corpses. Neal and Tucker soon crossed into a section of the city that had been reclaimed for the use of tourists and suburbanites, marked off by the gaily colored flags that fronted the museums and department stores. They passed a park that spread over a dozen city blocks, empty except for a lone jogger, and then passed through another low-rent district, where not even a single panhandler was plying his trade. In some of the spaces between buildings and in the vistas opened up by the park, the mountains still asserted their presence, stacked in layers from the spruce-carpeted foothills, to the blue middle range, to the snow-dusted slivers of peaks that spread their cold dominion over everything within view.

As Tucker spat out the directions to his stepfather’s house, seemingly making them up on the spur of the moment, Neal drove into some well-established and well-kept sections of the city, with overgrown rows of oaks, lindens, and filberts, and the mountains finally dropped behind the thick canopy. Neal was beginning to think that Tucker had fallen asleep again, when his passenger suddenly sat up and looked around. When they reached the next intersection, he held himself still and peered attentively out the window, as if waiting for a yellowing leaf to come drifting out of one of the trees.

“That way,” he finally said, gesturing.

Neal made the turn, and about half a mile down the densely shaded street Tucker told him to pull into the next driveway on the left. The entrance to the property was guarded by two massive trees, the biggest ones Neal had seen since crossing the Mississippi. An eight-foot iron gate blocked the way.

Tucker told Neal to open his window, then reached over, opened up a panel mounted on pole and pressed his index finger against a black plate. The gate opened slowly.

“Fingerprint recognition,” Tucker explained.

“Better not let anyone steal your fingers,” Neal quipped.

The pavement wound around the edge of a high rock wall, and then, looping toward the center of the property, offered up a view of the mansion.

When Neal first saw the house, he felt sure that it must have been the work of competing architects, hired and fired in quick succession, each succeeding draftsman forced to continue what his predecessor had begun. Either that, or the designer had suffered from a personality complex marked by wildly shifting moods and a distorted sense of perspective. The lowest floor of the house had a grand, broad, stately look, with its marble foundation, its semicircular portico and its ramrod columns. The windows, however, were narrow, with pointed arches; they were edged by thick masonry carved to resemble clinging ivy, as if each of them had emerged from some dream of Bavarian twilight. As the building ascended two more stories, the windows multiplied in crowded rows. An array of gables, each topped by stylus-tipped verdigris crests, edged the front of the roof, which rose at varying angles to a flattened top, lined by a railing of iron spikes. The whole thing was absurd at first glance, and still absurd as Neal and Tucker approached along the drive, but Neal was reminded that large things have a way of justifying themselves, as if bulk alone gives them an entitlement to exist, and by the time he had parked the Boccaccio along a curve in the drive, the house had come to seem as inevitable and natural as a towering cloud.

Neal and Tucker stepped out of the car, gazed up at the house for a moment, and then cast skeptical looks at each other.

“O.K., first of all,” Tucker said, awkwardly assuming an air of authority, “you’ve got to lose those shades. They make you look dishonest. It’s important for you to make a good impression.”

“Why do I have to make a good impression?”

“Because …” Tucker cleared his throat and stuck his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants. “I guess my reputation precedes me. I haven’t always been a well-behaved guest. I need you to give me a little cred. Put it another way, I need to be seen in good company.”

Neal frowned. “And I look like good company?”

“It’s that high school principal quality. Like I said before. You just have to get rid of these.” Tucker reached over and slid Neal’s shades off. “If you can’t see, don’t worry; I’ll lead you.”

“Don’t bother,” Neal said darkly. He reached into the pocket of his jacket, took out his glasses, holding them up briefly as if for Tucker’s inspection, and then slipped them on. “Is that O.K.? Respectable enough?”

“Perfect.” Tucker began walking toward the front steps, but turned abruptly and faced Neal again. “Wait. Couldn’t you lose the jacket, too?”

“What’s wrong with the jacket?”

“Nothing. t’s a great-looking jacket. It’s just that … it looks like something I would wear. In fact, I’ve got one almost exactly like it in my closet. You’re supposed to be giving off a different vibe, you know? My good angel.”

Neal spread his arms and studied the sleeves of the jacket. “So this is your style.”

“Small world, isn’t it?”

“Let’s get this straight,” Neal said brusquely. “I am no one’s angel. I may have plucked your neck out of—”

“Yeah, yeah. Let it go already, Superman.”

“And I’ll tell you something else.” Neal reached in for the zipper pouch. “You’re not getting your hands on this. If that’s what you had in mind.”

“Farthest thing, dude,” Tucker said with a half-suppressed growl.

Neal held the pouch between his teeth and took off the jacket; he walked back a few steps, dropped the jacket in the back seat of the Boccaccio, and brought out his well-worn tweed. He put it on, slipping the pouch into the inside pocket.

“Much better,” Tucker said. “Now just one more thing. Hand me your comb.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Do it yourself, then. Just make sure you cover over that thing over your forehead.”

Neal took his comb out of the same back pocket where he kept his wallet, then turned around. Using the Boccaccio’s front driver’s side window as mirror, he gave his hairline just enough of a curve to conceal the bruise. Then, blushing with mild irritation, he turned again to face Tucker.

“That’s the look I was hoping for,” Tucker said. “Now we’ve got it going. We’re halfway to the money. Come on.”

2. Tea Time for Unicorns

Tucker headed straight for the portico, striding with lifted shoulders as he passed between the fluted columns. Neal regarded him with disdain. He felt some sort of heaviness compressing his chest muscles; his feet resisted him, but he pushed himself forward, reminding himself that he still had something to gain and virtually nothing to lose.

Tucker looked behind him when he reached the front door and waited for Neal to catch up. He gave Neal one more look of appraisal and then pushed the button to the right of the door. The chime sounded dully from within the house, muted and distant-sounding, the tentative tones swallowed by large spaces.

When the door finally opened, it seemed as it had been triggered by some automatic mechanism, much like the front gate, even if the reaction was somewhat more delayed. But suddenly they could see a face emerging from behind the door, at about the level of their shoulders. A girl with ragged blonde hair, around twelve years old, was studying them closely; she had a broad forehead and large dark eyes, but below the level of her cheekbones her face narrowed into a sharp, recessed wedge. She was wearing a slightly faded red plaid flannel shirt, some frayed blue gym shorts, and a pair of carefully polished cowboy boots, clearly three sizes too large for her.

Tucker, at a loss for words at first, tried on a simpering smile. “Am I addressing the lady of house?”

The girl blinked twice, but her expression didn’t change. “You want something?”

“I was hoping for a bit of hospitality. After all, I’m not exactly a stranger here.” He gamely held his uncomfortable grin. “I’m Tucker McCurdy. You may have heard me spoken of a time or two. In fact, for all I know we may be cousins, once or twice removed.”

The girl pursed her lips, glanced for a moment at the mud-stained sneakers Tucker was wearing, and then gave him a contemptuous look. “I never heard of you,” she said, as she began to close the door.

Tucker took one step past the threshold and said hurriedly, “Isn’t Lorna … uh, Mrs. Meister here?”

The girl shrugged, peering from around the edge of the mostly closed door. “She doesn’t tell me her business. She could be anywhere.”

“Couldn’t I just come in and wait for her? I’m her son.” Tucker tried another half-hearted smile. “You know, Tucker.”

“I heard you the first time,” she said gravely. Opening the door wide, she grumbled, “You’re probably going to come in no matter what I say.”

The threshold led immediately into a spacious foyer, with a lofty ceiling, from which an unlit chandelier was hanging. Light was coming through three arched windows on the second level of the house, enough to make every corner of the room visible but not enough to dispel the shadows left over from the early hours of the morning. At the other end of the room, about a hundred feet away, two stairways rose to the second floor, to a hallway that rimmed the top half of the foyer like a sort of balcony, with a fluted railing; several hallways disappeared into darkness at the corners of the room’s upper tier and at either side of the stairways on the foyer level. At the other end of the foyer, in the space between the stairways, stood a pair of sculptures cast in rough-textured iron, depicting nude life-size human torsos, male and female, lacking heads, hands, and feet, but otherwise fully, exactly, clinically detailed. Four doorless passageways, to the left and right of the stairways, led out of the foyer into gloomy parlors.

“I don’t get it,” Tucker said, as he and Neal walked into the house. “How come Federico didn’t answer the door?”

“He was fired.” She studied Tucker and Neal with her large, opalescent eyes, giving Neal a particularly close inspection, then she peered out the door, as if expecting a new intrusion at any moment, before finally slamming it shut.

“My, my. When did that happen?”

“Ages ago.”

“Why?”

“He was stealing.”

“You can’t be serious. Federico?”

The girl shrugged. “Tha’s what they said.”

“What about Vitaly?”

“Gone.”

“He wasn’t stealing, too, was he?”

She nodded.

“I can’t believe it. Every trusted servant suddenly gone bad? Who’s left?”

“I don’t know their names. They just come in in the morning and leave after supper. They’re always different now.”

Tucker turned to Neal with a look of genuine bewilderment. “After all these years, he’s started using a service. He’s getting even more paranoid as he gets older.”

The girl had already started walking away, toward one of the passages at the margin of the foyer.

“Hey, what’s your name, anyway? I told you mine.”

The girl said nothing as she strolled through the passage into a sitting room with a stiff-looking sectional and a pair of velvety love seats.

“Hasn’t anyone taught you how to be civil?” Tucker nagged at the girl.

The room they were walking seemed clean in the heavily filtered wash of sunlight, but a hint of mildew had left its signature in the air, possibly leaking out of the brocade upholstery or the silk curtains.

“Maybe we should call her Paul Bunyan.” Tucker said loudly to Neal. “You know, the lumberjack shirt and all.”

She stopped and turned as they approached.

“So, where’s your axe, Paul? Think maybe you could whip me up a stack of giant flapjacks if you’re not busy?”

When he got within a foot of her, she kicked him, hard. He managed to keep the grin on his face as his knee buckled, but it cost him a visible effort.

“My name is Weegie,” she said.

“O.K.,” he said, stubbornly keeping his grin. “I guess you mean it, don’t you?”

“Spell it,” she commanded. “You were so interested in knowing it, why don’t you make sure you can spell it?”

Tucker glanced nervously at the boot on her kicking foot but tried to seem amused. “Let’s see. W…e…e…d…g…”

She kicked him again before he made it to the next letter. His grin vanished as he grabbed his shin.

“No d! It’s Wee-gie! That’s it. You got it now?”

“You’ve got some—”

“Got it?”

“Right.” he said under his breath. “Weegie.”

“Good.”

He flinched, sensing that she was about to strike again, but instead she simply turned and strode on ahead of them, through another entrance into another room.

Rubbing his shin again, Tucker turned to Neal and said, “From now on, it’s your job to protect me from her.”

Neal shook his head slowly. “You’ll have to pay me more for that, partner.”

With nothing else to do, they followed Weegie, at a safe distance, into a room that was dominated by a large keyboard instrument, which looked more like a harpsichord than a piano. Several uncomfortable-looking chairs were spread around the room, and a small, high shelf held a row of Ming ginger jars. A blurry French painting that looked familiar to Neal was mounted on the inner wall. Like the room they had just left, this one seemed to have its own atmosphere, composed largely of the astringent smell of raw ammonia, mixed with lingering traces of pipe smoke.

Walking on through another passage, they found themselves in a cluttered room with two large sofas, a coffee table piled with newspaper sections, another table holding a chessboard with scattered pieces, and a floor-to-ceiling cabinet with a CD player, a stack of DVDs, and a large flat-screen TV, currently showing a black-and-white movie, which featured granite-faced men speaking in clipped voices. The hearth was cold and any remnants of ashes had been brushed away, but otherwise the room felt lived-in. The room had more of a human smell to it, as if real people had perspired there, eaten food there, sniffled there, flossed their teeth there, clipped their nails there, possibly even shed tears there.

Weegie had already settled on the floor in front of the TV, belly down, leaning on her elbows.

Neal and Tucker pushed aside some catalogs and sat down on the nearest sofa. After a brief awkward, uncertain moment, both of them propped their feet on the coffee table.

“Did you notice that painting back there?” Tucker asked Neal in a confidential voice. “That was a genuine Renoir.”

“It couldn’t have been. I swear I saw it in the National Gallery a few years ago.”

“Well it ended up here. Believe it. Everything in this house is genuine. He’s got a fortune in artwork, in antiques. That musical instrument, too. Three hundred years old. Last played by Mozart.”

Tucker leaned a little closer and lowered his voice even more. “I can just about swear that there are actual dollar bills hidden around this house. Big bills. The kind they don’t print anymore.” He nodded as if bravely facing down Neal’s skepticism. “You can believe it, pal. Behind the wallpaper. Under loose floorboards. Inside the air-conditioning vents.”

“I still don’t get it. What kind of neurosis is this?”

“There’s no name for it, as far as I know. It’s just like I was saying yesterday. He wants to be able to put his hands on his wealth. He doesn’t believe it’s real unless he can see it, touch it.”

“Just makes it easier for someone …”

Tucker grinned and nodded, touching his index finger to his lips.

Brisk movie dialogue, punctuated by gunshots, filled the room for a while. After Neal had glanced at his watch a couple of times, he felt Tucker nudging him. “Hey, you know something? I think there’s something hidden behind that end table over there.” He pointed across the room to a sturdy walnut cabinet that doubled as a lamp stand. “Look at the way that lamp just jiggled. There’s something back there. Why don’t you go investigate?”

Neal wasn’t eager to do anything Tucker wanted him to do, but he was actually curious after seeing the lamp move once again. He got up, walked around the coffee table, crossed to the other end of the room, and peered over the back edge of the cabinet. A small boy in pajamas, about five years old, was crouching in the shadow between the cabinet and the wall. The child had Weegie’s large eyes. Unlike her, though, he had a very full, round face; his whole head, in fact, was about the size and shape of a summer pumpkin. He was smiling with some mysterious intent.

“Well,” Neal said, fighting off a rush of unaccountable embarrassment, “what are you up to?”

The child kept smiling in the same enigmatic way, and for a moment Neal wondered if he was deaf.

Neal decided to try to coax the child into the light. Beckoning gently, he began, “Why don’t you …?”

Before he could think of how to finish the question, the child began beckoning him to lean forward. When Neal bent down, the child grabbed him by the hair and whispered eagerly into his ear. The child’s breath tickled him, and he could make out nothing of what the boy was trying to say.

“What was that again?”

The child pushed his lips more firmly against Neal’s ear and whispered louder; Neal thought he could make out a few words, like custard and stigma, but otherwise he could make no sense of what the child was saying.

The boy put his face directly into Neal’s, but all Neal could do was shake his head. The child bumped the cabinet aside, making the lamp wobble dangerously; he brushed past Neal, leaped down to the floor, and began whispering to Weegie, who never took her eyes off the TV, but still appeared to be listening. Once he’d gotten his message across, he turned to look at Neal, while Weegie co*cked her head to the side and said, “He’s trying to tell you that he has a stegosaurus in his closet.”

“Wow,” Neal said, awkwardly, “That must be an awfully big closet.”

“Or an awfully small dinosaur,” Tucker put in.

“When anyone wants your opinion,” Weegie informed him, “I’ll poke you in the eye to let you know.”

“O.K., I’m off,” Tucker said abruptly, jumping up. “Mom’s got to be somewhere around here.” He cast a wary glance at Weegie and then made a straight line for the passage that led further into the house, nearly crashing into the boy, who was zeroing in on Neal.

Neal watched Tucker disappear through the doorway, thinking that unless he accompanied Tucker he was officially an intruder in the house, but the boy grasped his hand and began pulling excitedly in the other direction.

“Are we going somewhere?”

“He wants to show you his dinosaur,” Weegie explained matter-of-factly.

“Well, that should be interesting,” Neal said, briefly standing his ground. “You don’t see one every day.” Neal finally let the child, with his plump arms and stumpy legs, drag him back through the two rooms to the foyer and up the stairs. They passed down a hall decorated with burial urns until they reached another stairway; the child led him up to another floor and down a narrow, dark hall, then turned the corner into an even darker hall, and kicked open the last door on the right.

The room seemed much too large for one child. But in the large space between the door and the disheveled bed, the cold hardwood floor was littered with the remains of a full morning’s worth of restless play. Stuffed animals, die-cast trucks, and plastic space ships were strewn across the room from one wall to another; tiny board games pieces were spilled and scattered; cardboard books with fuzzy-looking covers had been dropped haphazardly in every corner of the room.

The boy led the way to the open closet doors and pushed Neal forward. Assuming he would have to see the whole thing through to the end, Neal compliantly stepped inside the closet, brushing past a few coats and a jangling row of empty hangers. Before he had a chance to turn around, the doors were slammed shut. He swung around and tried to push them open, but the child was heaving every bit of his weight against them, squealing with laughter. Trying a little more force, Neal could feel the child pushing harder on his side, and he knew that he would probably have to knock him over to push his way out.

He stood for a moment in indecision, plunged in the unnerving placelessness of complete darkness. He took a few steps to the side, crunching his way over a spilled canister of Lincoln Logs, over soft plastic dolls. He tried the doors again, but the boy was holding firm, grunting slightly as he exerted a little more pressure.

“Hey … little fellow …,” Neal began, in a voice that was meant to sound good-humored , “you really got me, didn’t you? You think you can open the doors now?”

The only answer was a giggle and another grunt of exertion, followed by quick, heavy breathing.

“Don’t you want to come in and help me find the dinosaur?”

The doors rattled a little as the boy bounced his full weight against them.

Neal began to feel just a touch of panic. He knew that the boy would lose interest in the prank sooner or later, but the darkness was disorienting, and it was maddening to be at the complete mercy of a small child. He paced in the darkness and heard the toe of his shoe clinking against something that made a bell-ringing sound, like glass. Bending down to make sure he hadn’t broken anything, he took hold of something that felt like a porcelain tea cup—and suddenly he had an idea.

“Well, there you are, Mr. Dinosaur!” he said in a loud, hearty voice. “Having tea with your friends, I see! Well, I don’t mind if I do have a cup of tea!”

He put his lips against the edge of the cup and made a slurping sound. The boy leaning against the doors suddenly became very still.

“So,” Neal continued, “you invited my little friend, too? Have I seen him? I think I have! Now where could he …”

The child remained still and silent for another moment, and then Neal could hear the doors creaking open. As the boy poked his head inside, Neal set the teacup on a nearby shelf and grasped the edges of the doors, pushing them wide so he could make his way past the boy and out of the closet. The child rushed into the closet, kicking the scattered toys as he circled twice; when he reemerged he gave Neal an intense, inquiring look.

“Did the dinosaur let you have any tea?” Neal asked innocently.

The boy shook his head.

“That’s kind of rude.” Neal leaned over and peeked into the closet. “Well, they seem to have disappeared.”

The boy looked up expectantly, his eyes wide with wonder, and Neal found himself in the middle of a completely new game. “They were there just a moment ago. The stegosaurus and his friends. There was a … cow, and let’s see, I believe there was a … blue tiger, and …”

“Is a flute fun horn?”

“What? A horn?”

“Moonbeam corn!”

“What?”

The child was beginning to hyperventilate. “Unique mourn! Unique mourn!”

“Ah …” Neal wanted to do something to calm the child down, but he was suddenly out of ideas. Then the answer to the riddle came to him in a flash. “Oh, unicorn? You wanted to know if there was a unicorn, too?”

The child’s face suddenly brightened with excitement.

“Well, of course. He was sipping tea right along with …”

The boy turned around and dashed back into the darkness of the closet, circling two more times before coming out with an anxious look on his face.

“Oh, you know there may be a trap door in there. Maybe you should see if they all went downstairs. There are all kinds of places where they might be hiding.”

The boy hesitated for only a moment before heading out the door of the room, his large feet pounding the floor across the hall and then down the steps to the second floor.

3. Meet Calvin Hemingway

Coming down the curved stairway that led to the spacious entry hall, Neal could hear a sultry, resonant voice radiating from the depths of the house to the right, carrying a sense of assurance in every mellifluous syllable. As he followed the sound of the voice from room to room, he could begin to piece together the phrases cruising on the rich waves of sound:

“… SEC filings, quarterly shareholder reports, confidential white papers, executive compensation agreements, E-mail, blueprints, engineering schematics …”

Neal finally reached the threshold of a sitting room, much like the front parlor, except darker and more crowded-looking, where he could see five people spread across the silk-upholstered furniture. One of them was Tucker, bluffing away his self-consciousness. The others, two women and two men, had evidently just come in from a morning swim; their attire was still slightly damp and they were wearing the mingled smell of chlorine and zinc oxide like an extra garment.

The speaker, sitting at one end of a rococo sofa, was perhaps thirty or thirty-three, a long-armed, long-legged, wide-hipped man, wearing a muscle shirt, baggy trunks, and crocs on his large, flat feet. He had a low forehead, a nose that jutted like a spearhead, and jumpy eyes that seemed to move in a completely different rhythm than his languid body.

At the other end of the couch was a woman with a willowy frame and prominent collar bones, wearing a kimono over her swimsuit; because of her angle of vision, she noticed Neal before any of the rest of them did. As she scanned him from the tips of his loafers to the top of his skull, he noticed that her deep-set eyes were identical to Tucker’s. “I don’t believe …,” she began, but her voice was momentarily drowned out. “Every bit of it could disappear in an instant,” the young man was saying, spinning his goggles around his index finger. “What does it all consist of? Pixels, in one form or another. Optical illusions, really—if you think about it. Every bit of paper is carried away in the dumpster. And every single piece of paper is stamped SUPERSEDED. Just a heap of drafts. Wastepaper, representing history, nothing more. No legal force behind any of it, you understand. The world is becoming more and more wireless with each passing day. Sooner or later, it will all be—”

“And you’ve got to think about the electrical grid,” Tucker broke in nervously, his fists clenched, resting on his knees. “Just think of what a suicide bomber could do at an electrical plant, whatever you—”

“Oh, please.” The first speaker gave Tucker a quick, withering smile. “Forget about the electrical grid. It’s a red herring. Think of what a single hacker can do at an Internet café in Mogadishu. With the most basic understanding of encryption algorithms.”

Tucker wanted to jump right back into the fray, but the third man in the room cut him off. “What do you know about Mogadishu, Willick?”

Willick waved his hand as if brushing away a gnat. “It’s just an example. I could name a dozen other places just as easily. For illustration purposes. Port Said, say. Or Aden. Or Gaza City.”

“Oh, right,” Tucker broke in. “Like there are mathematics Ph.D.’s roaming the desert on camels.”

Willick smiled again. “What an amazing fantasy. Maybe you should run for office.”

“He might cause a little less harm that way,” the other man put in, his intense eyes fixed on no one in particular. “It’s not as if politicians ever do anything.” He was a narrow-shouldered man, closer to sixty than to fifty, with a neat, tight body wrapped in a terry-cloth robe.

“I wouldn’t be so complacent if I were you, Karl,” said the woman who was sitting across the parlor in a wingback chair.

The man she was speaking to had to be Tucker’s stepfather, Karl Meister.

“I’ve played the game enough to know a little about it,” he said petulantly, looking toward the woman but not quite at her.

“For God’s sake, Freddie,” the woman at the other end of the sofa broke in. “You know as well as I do that that so-called campaign of yours—”

“Never mind, Lorna. It’s not as if I didn’t try to bring some dignity to that whole sordid sham.”

Tucker’s mother, Lorna Meister, gave her husband a doubtful look but the conversation halted as a hulking grandfather clock ticked thirty seconds away.

Willick finally picked up the loose thread of his argument. “Technological expertise in the Middle East is not hard to explain. They come here to get their advanced degrees, at M.I.T., Rensselaer, Cornell …”

“You see,” the woman in the large chair said, sitting up abruptly. “You want to know what happens in those sound-proof offices? If we had anything that you could actually call intelligence, border control … The truth is …” She paused until she was assured of everyone’s attention. “The truth is that there are arrangements being made at the highest level.” Her face was ivory-white; her white, air-dried hair was combed back and stiff, looking something like a helmet of ice. “Karl, if you want to know what I

think … you went too easy on them. That’s why you lost the election.”

“Too easy on whom?” Meister’s nose twitched; he uncrossed and recrossed his hairy, spindly legs.

“You know who I mean. The ones who are letting this country be overrun. I don’t care what anyone else says, but I’m not afraid to use the word treason. I see it everywhere I go. In Whole Foods, in Ben & Jerry’s, in Centennial Park. Families of them. None of them speaking a word of English. The parents, the grandparents. All of them with yellow teeth and greasy foreheads. And children. Children everywhere, chattering like large rodents. I don’t care how they get here. Legally, illegally. They come here and reproduce and create citizens either way.” She looked pointedly from one listener to another, even resting her eyes on Neal for a moment. “They’re the new Americans. After a few more of those rodent generations, there won’t be any America worth having.”

The clock ticked away as the sound of her words faded.

“Well, of course,” Willick finally said, with just the trace of a condescending smile, “the statistics do speak for themselves. Any logical analysis of the data will—”

“I’m not talking about any damned statistics,” the woman thundered. “I’m talking about the rule of law. I’m talking about decency.” She clasped the hem of her pink cover-up dress, poised to defend her corner of the parlor. “Let me tell you something. I received an application from a technical support specialist. Just this past week. I looked at the name at the top of the resume and I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I called in my office manager and I asked her could she pronounce that name, and she said she couldn’t. I called in the assistant quality control supervisor and asked him if he could pronounce it. He just looked at it, moved his lips for an instant, and then shook his head. So you know what I did? I ripped the whole thing, including the envelope, and tossed it all in the wastebasket. Someone has to take a stand is what I say.”

“I do take a stand,” Meister replied, setting his jaw tightly. “I’ve told the agency, I don’t want anyone working in this house who can’t speak plain English.” Looking at no one, he grinned with grim satisfaction. “They know what that means.”

“What it means,” Lorna said, “is that we end up with streaks on the windows and grit between the bathroom tiles.” She shot a cutting glance at her husband, then shifted suddenly and pinned her eyes on Neal, who was still standing in the entrance to the parlor. “And apparently,” she said, “strangers can come and go as they please.”

Everyone else suddenly noticed Neal at once. Tucker, shrinking away in discomfort, reluctantly spoke up. “I guess I forgot to make the proper introductions. This is my friend, uh … Cal.”

Meister glanced over the top of Neal’s shoulder. “Cal? Just Cal?”

Neal stiffened himself and gave his best impression of a smile. “Actually, my name is Calvin … Hemingway.”

Neal had decided, standing in the threshold of the parlor, that it was time for him to invent himself again. Surrounded by the frame of the entrance, he was overcome with a sense of freedom, with the feeling that he could move forward or move away, that he had no real obligations driving him in one direction or another. This was a moment of weightless decision-making, and in the interval between pronouncing his first name and the last name he chose to give himself, he had decided that in his new incarnation he had to be a writer.

“Hemingway?” Meister mused, turning his eyes vaguely toward one of the window valances. “That’s a name you don’t hear every day. You’re not related …?”

Neal smiled uncertainly, creating a rather convincing show of modesty. “Well, as you said, it’s not a name you hear every day.”

Meister turned to his wife. “What’s the name of that book …?”

She grimaced. “I don’t know. It was something like For Whom the Sun Rises.”

“Your book club read it, didn’t they?”

“We were supposed to read it. I think I read about five pages and couldn’t take any more of it.”

“Didn’t he kill himself?” Willick asked abruptly, leaning back with an exaggerated air of nonchalance. “Pulled the trigger with his big toe, if I’m not mistaken.”

Everyone was facing Neal, full of anticipation, as if they had all caught a whiff of blood in the air. Neal was once again conscious of the door frame that surrounded him, aware of how exposed he was but also how free he was to disappear behind a sheltering wall. He decided that he could risk a little improvisation.

“He took his own life, that’s true. But I like to think of it this way.” He chose his words calmly, as if he had long been prepared to weigh in on this. “I think of it as the final big game hunt. Like facing a wounded lion head on, stalking the tall grass, rifle poised. He met death on his own terms, with open eyes.”

“You can say that if you want, I guess.” Willick looked around to see if anyone shared his skepticism, but the others seemed mildly impressed.

“Well,” Meister said, breaking a brief, clock-riddled pause in the conversation, “but you have to admit, that’s a name to reckon with, isn’t it? Are you a writer, by any chance?”

Neal was careful not to hesitate. “It’s the family business, after all. What else could I do?”

“What kind of books do you write?” Willick asked, tilting his head and squinting.

“Nothing for publication,” Neal said, mindful that he could be done in by a quick Google search. “Not yet anyway. I’m still honing my craft.”

“Of course,” Meister said quickly. “You have live up to the family reputation. I understand completely, Mr. Hemingway.” For just a moment, he looked at Neal directly. “You know, it’s funny you should show up just now. I’ve been giving serious thought to a certain literary project of my own. Maybe you could help me with it.”

“Oh …” Neal wasn’t sure how far he wanted to wade into this, but he had to be diplomatic, under the circ*mstances. “I can usually find time …”

“Wonderful.” Meister’s eyes were pointed to a spot just below and to the right of Neal’s chin. “You see, I’m thinking of writing my memoirs. I feel that I tried to tell my story in the campaign, but there’s only so much …” He frowned and his nose twitched wildly. “The public needs to understand what leadership means. It’s high time for that.”

With Meister apparently lost in thought, Lorna studiously fixed her eyes on Willick, who returned her attention with a complacent grin.

“I believe the story will simply tell itself, once I get started,” Meister said. “And you can help me touch it up, can’t you, Mr. Hemingway?”

“What about that other item of business?” Tucker broke in, tapping his feet impatiently. “You know, the car.”

“Well, what about it?”

“I thought maybe you wanted to see the car.”

Meister rolled his eyes. “I suppose I might as well, since you probably won’t give me any peace until I do.” He stood and gestured irritably with both hands toward the entrance to the room. “All of you might as well as come and see this amazing vehicle. Get ready to be astounded!”

They came out into a noon sun that beat down with vigor from an ice-blue sky. The Boccaccio sat at the curve of the drive directly in front of the portico, with streaks of light crossing its horizontal lines, obscuring the patina of dust that it had picked up along the interstate, from passing tractor trailers, from the breezes that had blown off the prairie.

As they circled the car, Tucker drew the tip of his finger along the sharp edge that ran along the rim of the hood to the left headlight.

“How about that? That’s a classic line, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Meister snapped. “It’s a straight line. Where’s the imagination in that?”

“It’s a classic American style,” Tucker insisted. “Straight as the road. Pointing to infinity. It’s like … don’t you remember that car that Jack Nicholson drove in Five Easy Pieces? Straight as a cruise missile.” Tucker’s voice had note of desperation in it, though he managed to produce an All-American grin. “How can a straight line go out of style?”

Tucker’s sales spiel seemed to throw Meister into a funk. He wandered sullenly to the rear of the car, passed the flat of his hand across the trunk lid, and spotted the nameplate.

“Boccaccio? That’s American?”

“Sure. Quentin Boccaccio, the engineering genius.”

Meister suddenly took his hand off the car; his eyes narrowed and his nose twitched violently.

“Didn’t you meet him in Aspen one time?” Lorna asked.

“Not personally. I met one of his people. I was asked if my party would vacate our suite in the Alpine. Mind you, this suite has been reserved for my family since my grandfather first came to Aspen. We created Aspen. We welcomed the whole world.” Meister nodded with surly satisfaction. “Diplomats. Movie producers. The biggest stars. You were talking about Jack Nicholson. When I was just a kid I shook hands with Clark Gable. Genuine royalty. And for that man’s toady to come to me and offer us money to move out of our suite, so he and his damned entourage … His little army of yes men, and his valets, and his personal pharmacist, and his child bride, and his mistress. All of it bought with the flimsiest excuse for money … Where is he now, anyway? In jail?”

“He was indicted,” Neal said, recalling what Tucker’s father had told him. “But he managed to flee the country. Whereabouts unknown.”

“Living in some cave in Zambia, I’ll bet.”

“If you want to know what I think,” said the woman with the white hair, never doubting that her opinion was in demand, “it was a mistake for this country to ever let the Italians in. That was the beginning of all this chaos. The Italians have never had an ounce of decency. And from there it was a short step to the Croatians and the Syrians and all the rest of that … crowd.”

“Well, I suppose there may be some truth there,” Meister said, in a fit of distraction, glaring at the car.

“Of course,” the woman said, “the Irish were never any problem. All you had to do was get them drunk. Right, Karl?”

Meister was startled out of his brown study. “Excuse me? What’s that got to do with me? Our product was never sold in the Bowery, thank you.”

Tucker was running his hands through his hair, anxious to get things back on the right track. “But don’t you see? Boccaccio’s disappearance … it’s a great mystery. Just adds to the value of the car. Isn’t value all about glamour anyway? Think of what Elvis’s Cadillacs are worth today.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Willick broke in. “This is an American car from the 1980’s. There’s no resale value. Cars from that era became junk heaps as soon as they left the lot.”

“Actually,” Neal said casually. “These cars were made in Newfoundland.”

“Well, there’s no real …” When his unformed retort petered out, Willick simply turned his back to Neal.

“You see, here’s the point,” Meister said, with a sudden burst of conviction, his fists tucked firmly into the pockets of his robe. “Anyone can make a fortune. It’s a question of luck, timing, a willingness to lower your standards. And you can have all the things that go with it. Like Boccaccio. But what do you have then? A few years of fun. And then nothing. But a name is something different. Creating a name requires patience and diligence and fortitude. That’s a fact that hardly anyone appreciates anymore.” He turned to Neal suddenly. “But you see, Mr. Hemingway, if you can help me write my memoirs, I can remind people of what it takes to make a name.”

Willick faced Neal, though he was supposedly speaking to Meister: “So you’re going to have him write a book for you? A book? Don’t you know that books are on their way out?”

“You mean,” Neal said, “it’ll be all hand-held devices from now on.”

“That’s just the next step,” Willick replied quickly. “You’re not thinking far enough ahead. Not only will those heaps of paper disappear, but no one will take the time to actually read fifty thousand words of anything, in any form. No one can sustain more than five minutes of attention on anything now. In place of books there will be random dispatches—call them blogs, tweets, buzzes, blurbs, whatever you want. All of it will be nameless. Readers will gravitate to whatever grabs them, exactly five minutes at a time. That’s what publishing will be in the future.” Willick, had approached to within half a foot of Neal, looming five inches overhead.

Again, all eyes were on Neal, who raised his own eyes calmly up to Willick’s and then turned away, hands in his pockets, refusing to hurry his reply.

“You can say all you want to about books. But there’s something solid about them. Even when no one reads them. Take Moby-Dick for example. Have any of you ever read it?”

Willick considered his answer for a moment but in the end decided to play it safe. “Not all of it,” he said. The others either shook their heads faintly or looked at Neal blankly.

“And yet everyone knows who Captain Ahab is. Everyone knows the story, right? The white whale … the wooden leg … thar she blows … and all that. Not because of the movie, because no one even knows that there is a movie. It’s because of this big, fat thing. It has presence, even if no one opens it up.”

He looked directly at Meister. “If your book is the last one ever published … the very last one. Well, who would forget it? Even if no one reads it. Think of what it would mean to be the hero of the last book ever written.”

“Yes!” Meister snapped his fingers and raised his eyes to the sun. “That’s precisely what I was thinking, more or less. Mr. Hemingway, I can see that you have sound instincts.”

Willick was ready to offer a stinging rebuttal, but Lorna, with her husband’s back turned, placed a quieting hand on his shoulder.

“Freddie,” she said, “it’s time to serve brunch. Our guests are probably famished.”

“I’ve got a meeting with my board of directors this afternoon,” the white-haired woman said. “Business can’t wait.”

“Yes, yes,” Meister said, turning and waving his arms toward the portico. “On to the dining room.” To Tucker he said, “You and Mr. Hemingway can take your bags upstairs. First and second rooms to the right on the north side.”

Neal reached into the back seat of the Boccaccio for his vinyl briefcase, then stood contemplating the car. “I guess I need to move it.”

“Leave it there,” Tucker said. “I don’t want Meister to lose sight of it.” He gave the car a conspiratorial smile and then turned toward the house. “You can find your way around upstairs, can’t you?”

He pushed his way through the front door, which had been left slightly ajar; as Neal crossed the threshold, he saw Tucker disappearing into the hall that opened up to the right of the grand staircase. Neal climbed alone to the second floor and deposited his things in a room that evidently hadn’t been aired in months.

He was heading back to the top of the stairs, wondering how he would navigate the interior of the house, when he began to hear Willick’s sinuous baritone again, down in the direction of the front parlor. After a few seconds of silence, he distinctly heard the sound of a kiss.

“So long, kiddo,” Willick said.

Neal heard another voice immediately afterward. He couldn’t make out the words, exactly, but he could tell that it was not the voice of a grown woman. He stood still and presently saw Willick emerging from the room, dangling his goggles by the elastic band and swinging them loosely. He was slightly startled when he spotted Neal leaning over the railing, but he quickly reassumed his air of assurance.

“Oh, Mr. Hemingway. Gathering notes for your next book?”

“You never know what you might see … or hear.”

“Now tell me once again. How exactly are you related to Ernest Hemingway?”

“Actually, I’ve never taken much of an interest in family history.”

“Oh, really? Well, I wouldn’t mind doing a little research for you.”

“I’m sure it would be really boring.”

“Not at all.” Willick said, smirking, smacking his loosely held goggles with a right-hand jab. “Information can be powerful stuff in the right hands.”

Brunch was served in a large dining room facing the courtyard behind the house; the room’s high, pink-papered walls were lined with Japanese prints, and eight windows looked out on flowerless gardens and cobblestone walkways, although now each set of curtains was more than half closed. The hosts and their guests were seated at one end of a Scandinavian pine table that stretched the length of the room.

A uniformed servant with lazy eyes whisked in and out of the room, bringing a platter of Canadian bacon rounds, slightly scorched on one side, a plate of waxy croissants, a small bowl of drippy preserves, and a large bowl of fruit salad, composed of grapes that tasted like canned pineapple chunks, cherries that tasted like overripe apples, peaches that tasted like dried apricots, and mango slices that tasted like nothing at all. Each time the servant brought in a new dish, she waited for just a moment, until someone had taken the first bite, as if double-checking to see whether anything was poisoned, and then scurried out of the room again. Her eyes could be glimpsed now and then from the adjoining room, scouting out anything interesting that might be happening in the dining room, and now and then the smoke from her cigarette drifted toward the dining room, but otherwise she stayed out of the way.

Tucker and Neal ate steadily and silently for several minutes, while the Meisters and the white-haired woman, all three of them still dressed in their after-swim attire, picked grumpily at their food. Three other place settings at the table were conspicuously not being used.

Lorna stopped pretending to eat and began flicking the nail of her index finger against her water glass.

“I still don’t see—”

“Don’t bring that up again,” Meister warned her.

“I still don’t see,” she persisted, “why it wouldn’t be all right to have just a small glass of white wine.”

“You know why,” Meister said, practically under his breath. “I don’t know why I have to repeat it seven times a day.”

“You think it’s too early? I’ll have you know that my father, the most respected man in southern Georgia, had a glass of sherry every Sunday morning after church. He said it was the only way he could possibly swallow a Baptist sermon—chase it down with something cheerful.”

“You know the rule.”

“Might as well bring back Prohibition,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be good for business?”

“Speaking of business …” The white-haired woman picked her napkin off her lap, wiped her mouth carefully and then folded the cloth three ways before setting it down. “I’m astonished, Karl. I would have expected you to manage your household staff more efficiently. The insolence of that servant is appalling. Where was she born? I’d ask to see her passport, if I were you.”

Meister turned his head to glance at the shadowy entrance to the next room, but the servant had slipped away.

“What about this so-called food we’ve been eating? If a cook sent out food like this to be placed on my table, well …”

“I use an agency, you know.”

“You hire the agency, don’t you? You’re an indispensable client, or should be. You have leverage. I’m surprised that you can’t make better use of it.”

“What does it have to do with business, anyway?” Meister asked petulantly, flicking something out of the lower rim of his left eye.

“A question of management,” the while-haired woman said. “It’s only a matter of character, that’s all. You know I own 2500 shares of Meister Brewing. I’m beginning to think I should sell while the price is still slightly inflated.”

Scowling, Meister set his jaw and blinked repeatedly. Looking for a way to change the subject, he glanced at Neal and Tucker, sitting side by side.

“Well, the food may be bad,” he commented, “but the two of them are socking it away.”

Neal and Tucker looked up simultaneously, their mouths gorged at the moment. Neither one of them really cared what they were eating, they were so hungry. It had been almost a full day since their last meal, at the Denny’s in Iowa.

Shifting his attention again, Meister looked pointedly at the three empty settings. “I thought Willick was going to eat with us.”

“He said he had some important research to do, couldn’t wait,” Lorna explained in a slightly tentative voice. “He told me to tell you.”

“He told you to tell me? Why didn’t he tell me himself?”

“What difference does it make? He said it. Now you know.”

“What kind of research?”

“He didn’t tell me. I’ve already said all I know.”

Meister seemed bewildered for a moment. “He never said anything to me,” he said, speaking mainly to himself. I’d like to know what he’s up to, that’s all.” He massaged the underside of his chin and glared at the ceiling for a moment. Then, speaking in a more public manner, he said, “You know I’ve started to wonder about the value of some of his research. He’s been telling me about how the process of synthesizing gold has been developed to the point where, in just about a year, or less, it will be impossible to tell what’s real gold and what’s not. The price of gold will plummet overnight, he says. It will be about as precious as aluminum. I don’t know. I’m beginning to wonder whether …” He seemed unable or unwilling to complete the thought.

Glancing again at the empty place settings, he said, “I thought the children were going to join us, too.” Turning vaguely toward Lorna, he asked, “Where have they gotten off to? Since you seem to have all the answers today, my dear.”

“There’s no point in asking me about those children,” Lorna answered stiffly. “They’re not my children.”

“They’re not my children, either. Just because my daughter left them here with me doesn’t mean …”

“When is she supposed to be back from her … whatever it is? Her safari, I guess.”

“It’s not a safari. A safari is when you go to Africa and shoot things.” He turned to Neal suddenly and added, “I believe Ernest Hemingway did some of that. Didn’t he?”

Neal stopped eating for a moment, smiled uncertainly, and said, “Quite a bit of it, actually.”

“Yes, well.” Meister turned his attention, for no particular reason, to the wall he was facing, beyond the unoccupied end of the long table. “Edna and her husband went somewhere in South America. She said the name of the place but I can’t remember it. She said they were going there to make some sort of dictionary for an unknown language. Only three people in the world speak it, or something like that. She didn’t say when she’d be back, and I haven’t heard from her in three months.”

“The both of them could be dead,” Lorna suggested “Eaten by cannibals.”

“Are there any cannibals in South America? Anything is possible, I guess. They’re out of cell phone range, anyway.”

“Well, I don’t know what can be done with those children.They’re impossible. That girl, especially. She was given such a lovely name, Elise. At least her parents got that right. But she won’t answer to it. She could be a pretty little thing, too. I took her to a boutique in Centennial Plaza, tried to get her to try on dresses, but she refused to take off that hideous lumberjack shirt, and … those boots of hers. Where on Earth did she get them, anyway?”

“Those boots could sell for $900,” Meister said, indignantly. “They’re vintage. She must have found them in the attic.”

“And that boy is retarded, of course.”

Meister gave her a stern, sad look. “His name is Dodd, by the way. And I don’t know why you say that.”

“Well, he can’t speak, for one thing.”

“He can speak. You have to listen carefully, though. It’s true that he has a speech impediment. Edna says it has something to do with mental processing. Some synapses don’t connect, or something. But there’s nothing wrong with that child.”

The white-haired woman suddenly broke her intense silence. “Karl, I can’t sit around any longer.” She pushed her chair back from the table and stood abruptly. “Business, business, you know. I can’t afford to take Sundays off.”

Once she was on her feet, she remained in place for a moment, regarding her pale, slender arms and shapely hands with some satisfaction.

“Well, don’t let us keep you any longer, for God’s sake,” Meister said, glancing at a knot of hair on the top of her head.

“Yes, well I’d say it’s been lovely, but …” She stomped off in mid-sentence, her flip-flops squeaking on the parquet floor.

When she was out of sight, Meister turned to his wife and said, “Why in hell do you keep inviting her over?”

“I didn’t invite her,” Lorna insisted.

“Well, it wasn’t me.”

Tucker, pushing his plate to the side, took advantage of the lull in the conversation. “You know, I think you’re right about Willick. Kind of an odd bird. Sort of full of himself, if you ask me.” He held his fork in front of him, between the tips of his index fingers. “But I think he’s onto something with that stuff about the encryption. Scary when you think about it, isn’t it?”

Meister turned his head slightly, as if listening to someone muttering trade secrets in another room. He blinked thoughtfully and then said, in an ominously soft voice, “What scares me is the fact that you decided to just drop in out of nowhere. What are you doing here, anyway?”

Tucker laughed a little too forcefully. “Do I need a reason?”

“Yes you do,” Meister said.

“Well …” Tucker braced himself with a defiant smile. “It’s just that I saw an opportunity …”

“You mean the car.”

“Sure. An opportunity for both of us. Win-win.”

“Right. Normally, when anyone says that to me I show him the door immediately. But unfortunately, in your case …”

“Freddie,” Lorna broke in, speaking with icy restraint. “He just got here, for God’s sake.”

Meister refused to give way. “How do I know you didn’t just steal that car?”

“I’ve got the papers …” Tucker stole a quick look at Neal. “Signed and notarized and—”

“Papers can be forged.”

“You think that we would …”

“Leave Mr. Hemingway out of it,” Meister snapped. “I’m talking about you. You’re the one I know all too well. You think you can show up unannounced, accompanied by a member of a famous family, and somehow the reputation will just rub off on you. Anyone with eyes can see the difference. Look at the way you’re dressed. Anyone can see that Mr. Hemingway is the one with class. Whereas you—”

“That’s enough, Freddie,” Lorna insisted in a weak voice.

Meister seemed ready to say more, but he stifled whatever it was, mashing his lips together, and balling up his napkin in his fist.

“There’s plenty of room in this house for Tucker and his friend,” Lorna continued, with a little more assurance. “Family is always welcome.”

“Sure,” Meister said, “just knock down the doors and let everyone in. Grandchildren, cousins, aunts, uncles, neighbors, in-laws. Go ahead and tear the doors off the hinges and …”

Interrupting himself he called for the servant to come take away the dishes and bring coffee. She shuffled in, casting lethargic glances here and there, while silence reigned at the table. The pause in the conversation lasted until each of them was fingering the rim of a lukewarm cup.

Meister took a perfunctory sip and said, in an abstracted voice, “Mr. Hemingway, why don’t you tell me what you think about this Mogadishu situation?”

Neal had to alert himself that he was the one being spoken to. He spooned a little Sweet ’N Low into his coffee, in spite of the fact that he never used sweetener. He stared out the window at something that was moving in the leaves of a nearby tree.

“I guess … it’s a little difficult to say … at the moment. Too many unanswered questions.”

“So. You think maybe it’s a problem with intelligence. Not enough people who understand the culture.”

“Something like that.”

Meister turned to his wife. “Isn’t that what they were saying the other night on CNN? You know, what the reporter was saying? What was his name? Steve something.”

“Steve Jones,” she said blandly.

“Anyway, that was the conclusion. Not enough intelligence. I can see that you follow foreign affairs closely, Mr. Hemingway. Family tradition, I guess. Safaris and all that.”

With anyone else, Neal would have suspected irony, but he had already heard Meister being ironic, and this wasn’t what it sounded like.

“I intend to make use of your expertise,” Meister went on, “Sometime this week I’ll have the legal staff draw up a contract, but tomorrow’s a holiday. So we’ll begin work on more of an informal basis. How does that sound?”

Neal made a point of sipping his coffee slowly, waiting to think of a suitable reply. “I believe a gentleman’s agreement is all we need,” he finally said.

“I can see that we’re of one mind, Mr. Hemingway.”

After an uneventful afternoon and a very dull evening, Neal undressed, put his clothes away in a dusty wardrobe, hung up both of his jackets in the closet, turned off the lights, and climbed into bed. He bounced for a moment on the tight coils until he began to feel dizzy, and then he carefully settled his weight and tried to empty his mind.

Someone was pacing in the foyer, spiked heels clattering nervously on the marble floor, and he heard staccato radio sounds from down the hall, and just when he thought he was about to fall asleep, his phone rang. He snatched it off the bedside table but hesitated before answering it. He didn’t feel prepared for another frantic conversation with Sheila, and he had just about reached the conclusion that she was a threat to his peace of mind anyway. As soon as possible, he would see about changing his number; in the meantime he decided to mute the phone, leave her calls and messages unanswered, and allow her to draw her own conclusions.

With the sound of the phone ringing freshly in his mind, though, he was wide awake again. The sound of pacing downstairs had ceased, but now he could hear a jet engine far above him, tracing a white path through the stratosphere, and sleep seemed far away until he found himself already in the middle of a dream.

He was riding in the Boccaccio on a winding road in the dark. An occasional glance through the passenger side window revealed deep caverns just off the edge of the pavement. The car was being driven by a woman—Deirdre, he thought at first, but as he looked closer he recognized the associate or assistant film studies professor whose office he had invaded, seemingly long ago. He could see the traces of gray in her hair, and she was too lithe and lean to be Deirdre, anyway. She was driving expertly, but at a dangerous speed. He could see the needle edging up past 90. He wanted to say something, but as soon as he started to speak he noticed that his clothes had vaporized; not wishing to have his nakedness observed by a fully clothed woman, he feverishly attempted to keep his erect member out of sight. He glanced warily at the woman in her tight black dress, her black hose, her high-heeled pumps, as he struggled to keep his bare, swollen private parts concealed between his thighs, but the woman’s eyes were leering intently at the winding road ahead, as the needle pushed past 100, to 120, to 140 . . . .

He woke feeling stiff and cold. His heart was thumping steadily, and he felt as if he were still moving along a highway, either the hairpin curves of his dream or the real highway that had been spooling out underneath him for the better part of the last six days. He had the odd feeling that he was moving in sync with the turning earth, in defiance of the large, still house, which seemed to have been designed with the hopes of stilling all motion forever.

4. Hiding in Plain Sight

The next thing he knew, his right eyelid was being pried open by stubby little fingers. The little boy, Dodd, was perched on Neal’s chest, leaning forward, pressing his round, broad face into Neal’s face, breathing the odor of strawberry milk directly into Neal’s nostrils. Dodd bounced a couple of times, sending shock waves through the mattress, knocking Neal’s top and bottom teeth together.

The boy was smiling hopefully, waiting for a response. Neal inched his way up to a sitting position, shifting the weight of Dodd’s knees; he pushed gently on the boy’s chest to try to give himself a little more breathing room.

“Well, you’re up sort of early, aren’t you?” he said in a slightly strained voice. “It’s just …” He reached for his watch on the nightstand and saw that it was not early at all.

Dodd jumped off the bed, delivering an inadvertent blow to Neal’s groin, and as soon as his feet were on the floor, he took hold of Neal’s arm and started tugging.

“Where are we going?”

The boy simply grunted in reply and pulled harder.

“Whoa, there. Give me a chance …”

Neal could feel himself sliding off the mattress; he grabbed the headboard and pulled back, holding himself in place long enough to kick the covers loose. Then he shifted around to a sitting position on the edge of the bed and loosened the boy’s hold on his arm.

“You’re in some kind of hurry, aren’t you?”

The boy stared at him intently for a moment, and then grabbed Neal by the waistband of his boxer shorts and started tugging again.

“Hold on. You mind if I …?”

Neal stumbled over to the wardrobe and found a T-shirt to drape himself with. He reached for a pair of jeans, but Dodd balled the hem of the shirt in his fist and nearly heaved Neal off his feet.

“Come on, buddy, tell me what’s up.”

He looked at Neal searchingly before trying to speak. “Fie on his scorcher.”

“O.K. Maybe if you slow down just a ….”

“He hind. He hind. Gourd of a rajah.”

“ ‘Hind.’ Maybe like ‘mind’ or ‘find.’ ”

The boy nodded eagerly.

“Find, find …,” Neal said with a trace of relief. “Find what?”

“Acre up north.”

“Huh? Where’s that again?”

“Eager tone … poooorch!”

Neal suddenly recalled where his last conversation with Dodd had ended. “You mean the unicorn?”

The boy smiled and nearly panted with excitement. “Nook herald! Nook herald!”

“That’s cool. We can look. But maybe you could let me—”

The child was in no mood to wait. He doubled up his hold on Neal’s shirt and threw all of his weight forward. Neal scrambled to stay on his feet, as the boy tugged him to the door and out into the hall. From there, still holding onto the shirt, Dodd slipped around Neal and began pushing until Neal allowed himself be led along down the hall, across the balcony overlooking the foyer, to the hall that ran along the other wing of the house and then up to the next floor, until he was finally back at Dodd’s room, which looked just as empty and cheerless as it had the day before.

As soon as they were in the room, Dodd let go of Neal and ran ahead of him to the bed, heaped with loose sheets and blankets; he dropped to his knees, peered underneath and gestured for Neal to come forward. Neal stooped enough to see whatever Dodd was seeing, but Dodd simply began gesturing more frantically.

“You want me to go under the bed.”

“Orbit. Ganges.” Dodd said this slowly, with solemn emphasis.

“Sure,” Neal said. “No problem.”

He lowered himself to the floor, which was cold and sticky but surprisingly clean-smelling, as if the agency maid had waved the lightest of all possible mops across the surface only a half-hour earlier. He slid himself under the bed, where the floor was much dustier and grittier; he sneezed once and instinctively began to push himself back out but Dodd camped himself on Neal’s back and clamped down on the back of Neal’s neck.

“Harrow wince?”

“Yes. I think so,” Neal said with an air of deliberation. “He was here not long ago, but I think we missed him. Maybe you could let me out now.”

Neal felt Dodd’s weight sliding off him and he backed out, but as soon as he was on his knees, the boy took hold of his hair and pulled.

“O.K. Wait. Let me have my hair.” Neal carefully unclenched the boy’s fingers. “You’re going too fast for me. Maybe after breakfast, I could—”

Dodd stamped his left foot, just missing the hand that Neal was propping himself with.

“You’ve got to take it easy, buddy. This is a big house. It could take … I don’t know. You can’t just go looking anywhere. You’ve got to think it through.” Neal thought for a moment that he should just level with the child; the pretense was becoming a strain. But he hadn’t had enough experience with children to know how to gauge the effect of his words.

“Tell you what,” he said finally. “Maybe we could look just one more place. Just one more place today. Somewhere else tomorrow. How about that?”

Dodd co*cked his head and locked eyes with Neal, becoming suddenly and mysteriously still. Neal reached over to shake him by the shoulder, when Dodd finally said, with strange emphasis, “Rotate matted!”

“Huh? Can’t you slow down and take one word at a time?”

“Gray attar! Gray attar!”

“One more—”

“Ratter!”

Trying to feel his way toward what Dodd would be thinking, he thought of dark places, where large things could hide away, and he hit on the meaning before his thoughts had taken a full rotation.

“You mean the attic.”

The boy nodded once, grabbing Neal’s armpit until he rose and then heaving him forward until the two of them were out in the hall. Dodd took his hand, and Neal allowed himself to be led toward the stairs at the end of the hall, but before they got there they were overtaken by Tucker.

“Hey, Meister’s looking for you.” Tucker was looking both frantic and sullen. He had managed to comb his hair meticulously but he looked as if he had been suddenly awakened out of a nightmare.

“I’m a little occupied at the moment.”

“Meister’s not used to waiting for people. When you’re at his income level, it’s the other people who do the waiting. You’ve got some of a cushy arrangement with him. I wouldn’t go f*cking it up.”

Dodd took hold of Neal’s other hand and began swinging him along down the hall, but Tucker put his hand down firmly on Dodd’s head.

“Hey, little guy. What’s the rush?”

Dodd gave Neal a significant glance, as if asking Neal to communicate for him. Blushing slightly, Neal smiled and said, “It’s just a kind of game we … Well, if you have to know, we’re looking for a unicorn. Seen one lately?”

Tucker frowned darkly. “Come here a minute.” He pulled Neal forcefully away from Dodd and walked a few paces down the hall.

“There’s no time to play around,” he said. “There’s important business going on here, whether you realize it or not. I’ve got to have a little leisure to scope the house for things that can be removed with little fanfare, if you know what I mean. I need freedom to move around the house, so I need you to keep Meister occupied. You’ve got to be in his face, make some kind of noise, or whatever. I can’t operate unless I know he’s got a bug in his ear. It’s incredible how sound travels in this place.”

His eyes shifted from side to side.

“You’ve got to keep your full attention on this. No distractions. Get it? I need a little quick income. For clothes, so I can throw away these sooty Chicago rags. Not to mention other necessities.” These last words seemed to squeeze their way out of him like notes from a spit-clogged clarinet.

“You have any suggestions? This kid doesn’t take no for an answer.”

“I thought you were some kind of a writer. At least this time around. Can’t you come up with something?”

“To be honest with you—”

Dodd suddenly started kicking the wall.

“Stop that!” Tucker rushed over and pushed the child back. “You want the whole house to fall down?”

Dodd looked startled, as if he were already conditioned to believe in imminent calamities. He rushed toward Neal and slipped around behind his back. Neal turned to face him, dropping down to eye level. He thought for a moment about hiding places, and it occurred to him that the best hiding place of all was out in plain sight, something he once learned from Edgar Allan Poe.

“You know, Dodd. There’s a possibility we haven’t been thinking of. Unicorns have been known to turn themselves into things. He could be looking at us right now. Who knows?”

Dodd gave Neal a blank look, as if he were waiting for Neal to tell him whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“It’s not a problem. Not really,” he said quickly. “It’s just a question of what to look for, not where to look. You see what I mean?”

The child shook his head, thoroughly, unashamedly baffled.

“O.K. Listen. Now this is just what I’ve heard. I’ve never proven it myself. But since unicorns are white, what you want to do is look for something white. Could be anything. You see anything white around here?”

Dodd’s finger’s fidgeted wildly, but otherwise he was completely still as he scoped the darkened hall, until he finally spotted an ivory-white light fixture.

“Fraught instep,” he said softly.

“Right,” said Neal. “I couldn’t agree more. Now here’s what we have to do. You mind if I lift you up?”

The boy turned his head slightly as a way of showing that he was considering it all very carefully; without a word, he lifted his arms and Neal hoisted him up, to within a half-foot from the fixture.

“Now just listen carefully. If it’s the unicorn you’ll hear just the faintest whinny. They’re very talented at changing shape, but they can’t change color and they can never quite keep their mouths closed.”

Dodd turned his left ear toward the fixture and listened patiently. Neal shifted uncomfortably under the boy’s weight; with his fingers planted under Dodd’s armpits, he could feel the cadence of the boy’s pulse.

“Nothing?”

Dodd shook his head and Neal gratefully set him down.

“Wonderful showmanship, pal,” Tucker said, exasperated. He was leaning against the wall, pounding his backside against it. “You think we can maybe move on down the hall?”

“So I’ll tell you what you need to do,” Neal said to Dodd, giving all of his attention to the boy. “Go through the house and look for something white. Anything. And just lean over and listen. You think you can do that?”

Dodd made no sign either way, but there was a look of calm assent in his eyes.

“You could start in your room if you want to.”

Dodd still didn’t make any sort of sign or move. It was as if there was one lingering doubt that needed to be dispelled.

“It’s O.K. I think the unicorn wants to be found. It’s kind of like hide and seek.”

This time Dodd smiled, gave Neal one more look to make sure that they understood each other, and then darted back to the door of his room, giving a last wary glance at Tucker.

“Can you get away now, already?” Tucker, biting his lower lip, was still leaning against the wall, his face as pale as skim milk.

“You can tell Meister I’ll be there in a moment,” Neal said, refusing to react to Tucker’s tone of voice. “Tell him real writers never begin work before 11 a.m. He’ll believe it.”

Neal walked up one hall and down another until he found a bathroom with a walk-in shower. After he bathed, he shaved and made himself presentable, then he wandered through the first floor in search of food, finding pastry and coffee on a sideboard in a parlor adjacent to the dining room. He made his way across the first floor, past ivory masks and glass cabinets full of crystal bells, until he found the stairs at the rear of the house.

5. The Next Great American Novel

The study he was looking for was on the second floor, just around the corner from an unused nursery and what appeared to be a large linen closet. On the wall to his left as he walked in, Neal saw a trio of paintings that had a yellowy patina, put there purposefully to make them appear aged; they depicted three men with heavy-looking cheekbones and weak chins, each of them wearing a look of willed resignation. The paintings were framed in fretted gold, and to either side of them were furled flags on brass poles, the U.S. flag to the left, and to the right an unfamiliar-looking flag, bearing something that looked like a family crest, half-concealed in the folds of the fabric. The wall at the other end of the room had a more utilitarian function: a row of filing cabinets stood there, as well as a long, low table with a printer at one end and a television at the other. Just above eye level hung a campaign banner, about three feet high and eight feet wide, with MEISTER printed in large red letters and, in smaller blue letters below, A NAME THAT MEANS LEADERSHIP.

A set of sepia curtains, completely closed, gave the light in the study a sad amber cast. All of the furnishings were spread along the walls, while the middle of the floor was covered by a capacious area rug, robin’s egg blue, dotted with a multitude of diamond-shaped specks.

A grossly oversized, immaculately polished desk faced away from the window. Meister, wearing a yellow blazer and a bone-colored open-neck shirt, was sitting there in a plush chair designed for a man twice his size. He was poring over a document in a leathery brown binder, identical to a stack of other binders that sat next to Meister’s right elbow.

“We must not have arranged a time, Mr. Hemingway,” he said, speaking without any particular emphasis and without looking up. “From now on, let’s try for 8:30. By this time of day, the body has already used up over half the caloric intake from the previous day. Sleep does part of that. The effort of waking takes more energy than you could ever imagine. Once the body’s reserves have been sapped, there’s little left for the mind. I would have thought your famous family member would have taught you that. You knew him, didn’t you?”

Neal waited until he was sure he could suppress the laughter that was trying to bubble up from his diaphragm. “Barely,” he said.

“But the family legacy …”

“Oh sure. But I must not have set the alarm clock correctly.”

“Of course. I’ll instruct the butler to give you a wake-up call tomorrow.”

He glanced briefly at Neal, then back at the document in front of him and then closed the binder. “Well, why don’t you have a seat?”

Neal looked around and saw that the only available places to sit were two right-angled chairs with brocade cushions, arranged symmetrically under the portraits.

He gestured toward the chairs. “Should I . . . .?”

“No. Don’t bother. Sit here.”

Meister stood up and came out from behind the desk. “I need to let my blood circulate anyway. Go ahead and have a seat.”

If Meister had instructed Neal to put on a suit of armor, he would not have felt any odder than he did as he slipped behind the desk and set himself down in the enormous swivel chair. As he settled into it, he felt as if he were becoming an appendage of the desk; he instinctively plucked a ballpoint pen from its holder and dangled it between the tips of his fingers as he tried to wish away his sense of unease.

The pressure of circ*mstances felt suddenly very heavy, as if the whole room, with all of its furnishings, exerted a force that could not be deflected easily. But he tried to assure himself that he could somehow turn the situation to his own purposes. Meister expected him to write something, and he wanted to write something. He could see himself uncovering the secrets of a wealthy family, depicting a half-hidden history of ambition and avarice, and all of the external and internal rivalries that went along with such a history. There was something of interest in that, something that offered a wide scope for Neal’s imagination, something even potentially salable. The other story, the one that began somewhere in a woman’s eyes, could come later. Neal was sure that he could make Meister’s narrative into melodrama, into tragedy, into a comedy of manners, into whatever he wanted it to be. He could write circles around whatever Meister expected and turn it into a Great American Novel, if he wanted to. Moment by moment, as he settled himself more comfortably into the chair, Neal could feel himself regaining that sense of self-possession and endless capability that had come over him a couple of days earlier. He realized now that gaining his ends would require more subterfuge than he had expected, but once again he could see himself playing his way toward his own, self-determined endgame.

“I thought you could begin by looking at a few of the company’s quarterly statements,” Meister said, standing in the middle of the area rug, speaking toward the floor. “You have some there in front of you.”

Neal picked up the binder and let it fall open.

“Those are from 1991. A very interesting year, what with German reunification. Our German operation is one of our most valued assets, the family history being what it is.”

Neal began reading at random, not expecting to find anything interesting or even lucid, for that matter, and he wasn’t disappointed in either respect, but what did surprise him was how much the language of the report resembled the language of student papers. The syntax was more sophisticated, of course, and there were no obvious mechanical errors, but the most striking trait of this prose was its effort to conceal a lack of content. Entire sentences and even paragraphs seemed to exist for the sole purpose of taking up a specified amount of space. The language had density, but it was the density of a sound-proofed wall or a Styrofoam mold used to package a coffee maker.

He skipped from one quarterly report to the next one, and immediately noticed that the language was virtually identical. He scanned page 53 of the June report, skipped back to page 53 of the April report and could see the same words appearing on the left-hand margin of each one.

“If you want to understand me,” Meister was saying, “you must become familiar with the company, because the company and I are one.” He made eye contact with Neal briefly before looking away, toward the wall with the portraits. “I’m the only Karl Friedrich Meister now living, so I am the family, and the family is and always will be Meister Brewing Corporation.”

Neal closed the binder and, picking up the ballpoint again, tapped the cover of the binder as he considered how candid he could afford to be.

“I don’t know how much I can learn from this,” he said. “It all seems like the same stuff.”

“Of course,” Meister said casually. “It’s boilerplate. You’ll find essentially the same language in our stock offerings.”

“So all of the real information . . . .”

“Confidential,” Meister said quickly, wrinkling his nose slightly.

“Well, isn’t there something … not exactly confidential, but …”

“I assumed you would have a talent for reading between the lines.” He put his hands in his pockets, pivoted once on the rug, and then said, “Hand me the 1991 filings for a moment. I’ll show you what I mean.”

Taking the binder from Neal, he flipped through it until he found what he wanted. “See here. Look what it says in the April report.” He spread it open in front of Neal, and pointing to the top of a page, began reading: “‘The Company expects substantial growth in unit sales from three of the four capital ventures currently being financed by dividends from Gerstner Holdings, a subsidiary incorporated in Munich, currently in merger negotiations with Zauberberg AG of Frankfurt.’” He licked his index finger, flipped a couple hundred pages ahead, and then displayed the page he was looking for. “Look. This is from the December report. ‘The Company expects significant growth in unit sales from two of the four capital ventures currently being financed by dividends from Gerstner Holdings, a subsidiary incorporated in Munich, recently in merger negotiations with Zauberberg AG of Frankfurt.’ You see the difference? It was because of a spike in interest rates. We were having trouble working out the financing we were expecting to use for the expansion in our operations and for the acquisition of Zauberberg. And the real story, if you look at the income projections for our Purple Rhino Malt Liquor subsidiary, back here on page 47, is that we were able to make up the deficit in Gerstner’s balance of payments in spite of the credit squeeze. You remember that 1991 was a recession year, a good market environment for malt liquor.”

He placed the binder back on the desk, and then shifted his attention again to the portraits, with an expression that matched theirs point by point, as if he were preparing for his own sitting.

Neal opened the binder, glanced again at one of the quarterly statements, absentmindedly counting the four-syllable words as his eyes wandered across several pages, and then shut the binder firmly, placing it on the stack with its identical siblings.

“You know I’m sure that there’s something of interest there,” he said, after considering his words carefully, keeping his own objective in view. “But there’s also something important missing. It’s what we in the writing business call point of view.”

Meister grinned, apparently pleased to know that writing really was a respectable trade. “I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Hemingway. I can see that I was right about you. I don’t care what anyone else says, all the so-called psychologists and namby-pamby liberals. Blood really means something, doesn’t it?”

Neal had to cough to cover up another sudden spasm of mirth. “Excuse me. What I mean, of course, is that you have your own point of view. The company is you, in a sense, but you make the company what it is—there’s where the difference comes in.”

Meister nodded quickly, reflectively, turning his attention to the floor again. “I see what you mean. I follow you.” He put his hands in his pockets and gradually froze in place, his eyes flickering with indecision. Finally he walked with deliberate steps over to one of the filing cabinets, reached into his pocket for a key, and unlocked the bottom drawer. Neal couldn’t see what Meister had taken out of the drawer until he turned around again; in his hands he cradled something that looked like a composition book—gray cover, frayed binding, ruffled edges. He brought it over to the desk and set it down but stooped over as he opened it.

“This is something that might be helpful,” he said. “Go ahead.” He gave Neal a tense, self-conscious look. “I think you’ll find my point of view well represented here.”

The book was full of dated entries in fine, felt-tip ink, none of them covering more than two or three ruled lines. The notations were full of obscure initials, and the writing was small and blurry; many words seemed to trail off into straight lines, ending in a tiny curl. To the extent that Neal was able to making anything out, he noticed a curious repetition of the word questioned, as in “cost projections were questioned by . . . ,” “R.’s credibility was questioned,” “Z. questioned the need for . . . ,” “suitability questioned once again . . . . ” Now and then Neal would find an entire sentence written in large, precise letters, off-kilter adages such as “Indigestion is the fruit of compassion” and “A man without resentments is a danger to himself.”

As Neal scanned the contents of the book, Meister remained in a stooping posture, hovering over the top of Neal’s head, warming the back of Neal’s neck with his Listerine-scented breath. Neal glanced up and found himself looking directly into Meister’s limpid, searching eyes before both of them reflexively looked way.

“I don’t how much of this I can actually—”

“You may not think it’s very detailed,” Meister said quickly. “There’s a reason for that. I used to keep a very detailed diary, an hour-by-hour account of my day, but it got to be too time-consuming as I took on more responsibilities. And I thought what was the point? When you’re a businessman, overseeing a large commercial empire, you become very practical in your thinking. It’s a survival instinct.” He stood straight and offered a dignified profile. “So instead I began to distill my day into its essentials. The thoughts that stood out, the impressions that carried the most meaning; things that came to me and took up residence in my head. I boiled it all down and deliberately limited myself to fifty words.”

“Why fifty?”

“Fifty for fifty states. There’s authority in that number. Also, my father was fifty when he died,” adding, for no apparent reason, “I’ve outlived him by nine years.”

Neal closed the composition book gently and handed it to Meister, who grasped it eagerly but remained in place, glaring at the back of Neal’s head, seeming both offended and relieved at Neal’s gesture.

“Let’s go a different way,” Neal said. “Why don’t you try to think of … say, the first thing you can remember?”

“First thing when?”

“First thing ever. Your first conscious memory.”

Meister blushed. He rested his right hand awkwardly on the side of his face and stared blankly.

“You mean when I was a child?”

“I assume that would come first. Yes.”

He dipped his head slightly and a shadow descended over the lower half of his face. “I don’t see how that would be of interest to anyone.”

“Oh, it would be of great interest,” Neal said, with as much eagerness as he could generate. Meister appeared dubious but willing to listen. “You are the hero of your own story, aren’t you?”

“If I see what you mean …”

“Sure. And every hero has a backstory. It’s one of the principles of the writing business.”

“But my story is true.”

“Of course. Which makes the backstory all the more important. If someone showed up at your door and told you he’d been born that morning you’d think he was crazy, wouldn’t you? Well, it’s the same principle. A real person always comes from somewhere.”

Meister nodded slowly and palmed his chin. He walked across to the portrait wall and sat in one of the stately chairs, leaning forward with his hands against his temples.

“You don’t have to remember the day you were born,” Neal said, genuinely trying to be helpful. “Just the first thing that comes to you. Maybe not the very first thing. Maybe you can remember a birthday or something.”

Meister’s head dropped nearly to his knees as he brought his arms back behind in his head in a posture that appeared protective and self-consoling. Neal was already beginning to feel sorry that he had set this in motion.

“I do remember something,” Meister finally said. “I remember a cake with a single candle, a white candle on a pretty cake with pink icing. A small cake, just the right size for a single child. I remember that all along the rim of the cake there were little sugar florets, like carnations. Very detailed, like carnation blooms.” He sat up, dropped his hands listlessly onto his knees, and stared at the closed window behind the desk. “I remember thinking how pretty it was, like a bright toy, a bright soft toy. I was so taken with it that I plunged my hands into it, and I burned myself on the candle. I screamed in pain.” His features had a fixed, waxen look as he said this, their stillness only emphasized by a slight fluttering of one eyelid. “They had to put some kind of smelly ointment on my right hand. Two people had to hold me down, while another person—my great aunt, I think it was—applied the ointment. A little while later they brought me back into the dining room where everyone was waiting. I can still see their faces, their eyes on me like a row of knives—have you ever seen eyes like that before?” He glanced searchingly at Neal and glanced away again without waiting for a response. “They put that cake in front of me. Someone had smoothed the icing over, to make it look like it hadn’t been touched, except they had removed the candle. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I screamed as soon as I saw it, and they had to carry it away again.”

Meister leaned back, rested his head against the top edge of the chair and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Someone had to sing to me to make me calm again. They sang something that went like this.” He hummed an unsteady-sounding tune. “The words had something about a hummingbird in them, or a bumblebee, I don’t remember which.”

He stood, put his hands in his pockets, and began strolling aimlessly across the rug. “So that’s the first thing, I believe. You know, the next thing I remember is another birthday. Two candles on the cake. They must have been a little nervous when they set it down in front of me. It was completely different-looking cake. A white cake. White icing. The candles were striped red and white like candy canes. Little curlicues along the rim instead of florets. When I saw it I began to cry.”

Neal listened in a state of mild despair.

“And why was I crying?”

He glanced up expectantly for a moment at Neal, who lifted his shoulders in what he intended as a perfectly respectful shrug.

“Because it wasn’t the pink cake. I missed that cake. I never got to taste it, and after a year it seemed like the prettiest, sweetest thing I could ever have. I refused to eat the white cake. Every year it was the same thing. A beautiful birthday cake, but not the one I wanted. Tears. Refusal to eat. Same thing. Eventually I bowed to my family’s wishes and ate a bite of cake for the cameras, but it was like cotton in my mouth. And did I ever say why I was unhappy? Did I ever ask for another little pink cake?”

“I suppose you didn’t.”

“No. I did not. And why did I not?”

“Because you ...” Neal was already halfway through the sentence before he realized he had no idea.

“Because I had a sense of dignity. Even at two years old, mind you. Dignity is part of the family heritage. It’s in the blood. You understand what I mean by that, I’m sure. Nothing is truer than blood.”

To avoid having to saying anything else, Neal began tapping on the computer keyboard. He had never been a fast typist, had never taken dictation before, so all he could manage to do was to pull the principal nouns and verbs out of the air, leaving the adjectives and prepositions to take care of themselves. He expected to supply his own adjectives, anyway—and adverbs were unlikely to survive the final cut, if he intended to edit by Hemingway standards.

Meister was encouraged by the sounds of clattering keys, and he continued from the story of one disappointment to the saga of another. He recalled an heirloom guitar given as an Easter present. He recounted the hours he spent learning to play an arrangement of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto and performing with clarinet and harp accompaniment the following Easter. “And you know I despised that instrument. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to break it over my knees. You see, I had wanted a dulcimer, not a guitar.”

“And you told your parents you wanted a dulcimer,” Neal suggested, simply wanting to get all of the facts straight.

“No, of course. I said nothing. In my family, we did not express wishes. We understood our obligations. Accepting an heirloom was my duty. The Meister family follows a very strict set of standards.”

“Did you ever buy yourself a dulcimer?”

“Certainly not. The fact that you could even ask such a question shows that you have much to learn about me, Mr. Hemingway. Not that I fault you. Even someone from such a distinguished family as yours … The Meister way of life is not easily understood in our indulgent society.”

He rested his knitted hands on his right knee and settled himself in an attitude of alert repose. With little effort he recalled more disappointments and humiliations and betrayals. He spoke at great length of a summer-long excursion up the Rhine valley; he remembered suffering from an untreated sinus infection and gnats flying into his nose and ears in the evenings as they traced the course of the river in the moonlight; and the guide, who worked as a ski instructor in the winter, making impertinent, offhand remarks, using words with vicious double meanings, insinuations that brought tears to young Meister’s eyes time and time again. “I never said a word,” he insisted. “Not a word. Not a word.”

Neal typed away, at some point losing track of what Meister was saying as he simply spread the key words across the screen. The specifics receded from Neal’s mind, but the general tenor was consistent, so he felt sure he was missing nothing.

He stayed about a half dozen words behind, so when Meister finally stopped speaking, it took a moment for Neal to register the fact; his fingers poised to continue, he turned to see Meister staring at his open palms.

“You’re not hungry, are you?” Meister asked, not looking at Neal.

“No,” he lied.

“Good. Because I was hoping you could go back over everything and polish it up while I’m taking a quick nap. I work twelve hours a day, and I have to nap in the afternoon to maintain my energy level. I’ll be back to see what you’ve got.”

Meister rose and left the room abruptly, closing the door softly behind him. Neal paused, resting his hands flat on the smooth surface of the desk, before he began scrolling back to the beginning of the text, wondering how he was going to make anything interesting out of Meister’s peevish soliloquy. He glanced at the portraits, noting a clear look of disapproval, and he felt the room’s dim light descend on him with a touch of spite. He got up to jerk the curtains open, when suddenly the door cracked open and Meister inserted his nose.

“I was just going to tell you not to open the curtains,” he said. I don’t want the sunlight spoiling the rug.” And then he was gone again.

Neal spent the rest of the afternoon fighting off hunger pangs, tempted to roam the house again in search of food, but telling himself, quite reasonably, that he was unlikely to find anything worth eating. He patiently shaped the fragments from Meister’s dictation into sentences, introducing modifying phrases of his own where they seemed to fit; and then he managed to make relatively coherent paragraphs out of the sentences, sighing with irritation when he saw the results, but promising himself to draft them all over again when he had the chance, making them over according to his own blueprint for a marketable novel, assuming Meister’s musings ever led to something he could actually work with.

He had been working alone for a couple of hours when the phone on the desk rang. After a little hesitation, he picked up the receiver and said, “Hello. Meister residence.”

He heard nothing on the other end for a moment; he wondered for a moment if this was Meister’s way of making sure that he was still on the job.

“Hello,” he said again.

“I guess you’re in the cat bird’s seat now.” It was Willick, sounding sounded calm and contemptuous.

“I’m earning my room and board,” Neal said dryly.

“Pretty easy work, I imagine.”

“You want to do it?”

“It’s your line of work, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Neal said stiffly. “It is my line of work, and I’m good at it.”

Another moment of silence followed, as if he and Willick were speaking across twelve time zones.

“You’ve turned a nice little trick,” Willick finally said. “I have to give you some credit. You didn’t look like much when I first saw you. Getting Meister to disable my fingerprint code was quite a coup on your part. Nice going.”

Neal had had nothing to do with it, but he saw no reason to spoil the illusion. “The guy needs someone to give him decent advice,” he said plainly.

“He always has exactly one person he trusts at any given time. I’ve learned that about him. His psychological patterns are quite predictable. Believe me, I’ve had time to study him close up. Psychology is my true vocation.”

Neal thought about hanging up, but decided if he just let the man speak he might gain some useful insights, about Meister, about Willick himself, about anything that he might be able to turn to his advantage.

“Believe me,” Willick said. “He’ll find some reason to start distrusting you before long. His basic personality profile combines elements of dependency and paranoia in a very peculiar kind of symbiosis. I’m just sorry that my opportunities for observation appear to be somewhat limited now. Not that I don’t have ways …”

Neal resented the way Willick let this last sentence trail, as if he were trying to make Neal’s own paranoid imagination go to work. He especially hated the fact that Willick’s ploy seemed to be working: he felt his pulse quickening a little.

“You mean your research into my family history?”

“That’s part of what I meant. I’ve got a couple of guys doing the legwork for me. Mormons. Best in the business.”

“Any revelations?”

“Don’t worry. They do very thorough work. And I’ve got other means at my disposal. You’ll be lucky if you ever see a contract. He’s got you working on ‘an informal basis,’ I’ll bet.”

Neal winced. “Don’t worry about me,” he said truculently, before clapping the receiver back into place.

Neal reported faithfully to the study each morning; to avoid fiddling with the alarm clock, and to forestall the “wake-up call” he had been told to expect, he reset his mental clock to the exact half-hour before the appointed time. He transcribed Meister’s aimless musings for two hours; after Meister excused himself to go conduct his mid-morning conference call, Neal would try to make something coherent out of what was on the computer screen, straightening the circular narrative into several single-spaced pages of linear prose, and then later in the day he would watch as Meister read over the pages, making barely distinguishable sighs and grunts, as well as very specific comments about what needed to be added or taken out. By the middle of the afternoon, Meister would be gone again, and Neal would be left to edit the pages with as much tact and grace as he could muster. He kept a large file of mental notes about how he would remake each page, but he was reluctant to start putting his own ideas into concrete form, for fear that Meister would show up unexpectedly and look over his shoulder.

As Neal was working on the official version, he would sometimes stop to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, overcome by the utter bathos of what he was committing to print, and in one of those moments he was shaken out of his abstraction by the sound of something breaking down below him. He imagined at first that a servant had dropped a hot stack of plates fresh from the dishwasher, but when another crash followed the first one, he could tell that the sounds were coming from outside the house. He jumped up and went to the window behind the desk; peeking through the curtains he saw a rolling lawn that spread into a pasture, enclosed by an imposing electric fence. As another crash sounded outside, he rushed out of the study and entered the dark nursery, where he opened one of the shades.

Down below he saw the courtyard paving, littered now with the shattered fragments of an alabaster lamp stand, an ivory-colored serving bowl, an unidentifiable porcelain figurine, and at least two dozen splattered eggs. As he was staring out the window, he saw something white plummet from above—a white toaster, it turned out, when its springs, wires and levers spilled onto the pavement.

Neal flung the window open and peered upward, just in time to see a pair of small arms holding a fluted white pitcher aloft and then letting it drop. Neal suspected he was personally responsible for this, so he found the stairs to the third floor and hurled himself up them three steps at a time.

Entering the first room on the left, he saw Dodd standing on an overturned cabinet, surrounded by a pile of white appliances and utensils and ceramics, preparing to hurl a swan sculpture out the dormer window. Neal rushed across the room to pluck the swan by the neck and save it from imminent destruction.

“Hold on, buddy. This is not good. Look at the commotion you’re causing.”

The two of them could see a small mob of uniformed servants below, gaping at the carnage, pulling their hair, scowling at each other, and making occasional glances overhead.

“Someone will be coming this way before long,” Neal said. “We better make sure they don’t find us.”

Dodd smiled. He seemed pleased with Neal’s use of us, suggesting a friendly conspiracy, and he allowed himself to be led down the stairs and into the study.

Neal closed the door gently, to avoid attracting any notice, and then he knelt down and faced Dodd. “You must have been planning this for a while. What was the idea?”

A look of wounded innocence suddenly spread across Dodd’s face, and Neal realized that his tone had been too threatening.

“Did this have something to do with what I told you about the unicorn?” he asked the boy in a calmer voice.

The child seemed reluctant to give anything away.

“I don’t get it. Why did you want to break those things?”

Dodd shook his head mysteriously.

“So you didn’t want to break them exactly? What did you think, that they would fly?”

The boy nodded. He gave Neal a hard, expectant look, making a wet sucking sound between his closed lips as he clenched and unclenched his fists.

“So I’m guessing you think this is a flying unicorn you’re looking for.”

He nodded again, adding a glimmer of a smile.

“Sure,” said Neal matter-of-factly. “What other kind of unicorn is there?”

Neal stood and walked across the room, settling himself on the edge of the desk. “We’ve got to handle this more constructively,” he said, mostly to himself. Somehow, he reflected, he had managed to saddle himself with a baffling new responsibility. Speaking directly to Dodd, he said, “I think we’ve got to consider another possibility. Maybe the unicorn has left the building.”

Dodd’s face drooped. “Retrace topple alert,” he said, in a reproachful tone of voice. “Boss tide.”

“But this is no reason to be upset. I think maybe he’s just waiting for you somewhere. You know where he lives, don’t you?”

Dodd rolled the tip of his tongue along his upper lip but was otherwise absolutely still for a moment, apparently in deep consultation with himself. After a moment he nodded slowly.

“I thought so. Where could he be except Unicorn Island? Right?”

The boy nodded more confidently.

“So what do we need to get there? First of all we need a ride. And fortunately, there’s a fine automobile at my disposal. I’m the one with the keys.” And to prove it he took the car keys out of his pocket and jingled them. “You could almost say it’s one of a kind. You could almost say it’s magic.”

“Gnome radish guitar?” Dodd asked earnestly.

“No question about it,” Neal said with assurance. “So if we were able --- if I had to chance to take you there, we would need one more thing. A map. If I’m the driver, I have to know how to get to Unicorn Island. I think you could help me there. After all, you and the unicorn are friends, aren’t you?”

Dodd affirmed that they were.

“Right. So what you could do …” Neal walked across to the wall on the left side of the door, stood on the long table between the printer and the TV, and carefully peeled off the campaign banner, leaving four blots of putty on the wall. He turned the banner over onto its blank side. “What you could do is draw me a map. From here … to there.” He ran his finger from one end of the paper to the other. “It’s got to be this long, now. Because it’s a long way. You think you can do it?”

Dodd trained his eyes on Neal carefully. He took hold of the banner, his moist fingers moving restlessly over the edge of the paper.

“You want something to write with, don’t you?” Neal took the ballpoint from the holder on the desk and handed it to him.

“Take your time with it,” Neal urged. “Don’t forget to fill the paper. End to end. Then we’ll see what we have.”

Dodd’s feet were already beating time on the rug by the time when Neal opened the door; after the two of them made sure the coast was clear, the boy fled down the hall, the banner streaming behind him like the tail of a kite.

6. A Night on the Town

Neal lay on his bed fully clothed, stretched full length atop the stiffly starched bedspread, with the top of his head just grazing the headboard. It was after the dinner hour. Pale evening light bled weakly through the open window into the otherwise unlit room. He listened to the sounds of doors closing here and there throughout the house. Upstairs, downstairs, down the hall, across the floor.

As he lay on the bed, he was hoping to find a place inside himself where the sounds of the house would be no more obtrusive than the steady hum of time. Lying completely still, first from mild fatigue and then from inertia, he fingered his phone, tracing circles around the edges of the screen. He knew that he had received at least eleven calls from Sheila since he and Tucker had arrived in Denver, four days earlier. He had kept the phone muted the whole time but had seen her number repeated from line to line in the RECENT CALLS list. Every time he saw that he had received another call from her, he checked his messages, but she never left one, not even the sound of her breath.

Thinking about her, the rhythm of the dance insinuated itself into the pulse that throbbed in his fingers as he gripped the phone. He heard the nocturne again. Without moving a muscle, he could feel himself turning; he recalled that weightless sense of anticipation he had felt as he followed her lead from one corner of the room to another.

For the third time that week, he thought about dialing her number. It would take exactly ten beats to dial, another two seconds to wait for an answer. He was well aware that the phone she kept using was a land line and that he might end up hearing Krike’s voice instead of Sheila’s.Not that it would matter, since he would never see either one of them again. But even knowing that it would just be a way to pass the time, he resisted. He still remembered the sense of assurance he had felt back in Iowa, sitting in the car, suspended between uncertainty and the unknown, and how the road in his mind pointed forward, so taking a step backward into an abandoned moment in time seemed foolish—a pointless regression. He rotated the phone a couple of times across his palm and then decided to unmute it, thinking that, if she called again, he might take it … or just as easily he might not. He finally set the phone down on the bedside table.

After possibly five minutes of utter silence, he heard two more doors open and close in rapid succession in different parts of the house and then a pair of muffled voices from yet another corner of the house, and he decided that he needed to get up and do something rather than subject himself to pointless clattering sounds and the muttering of useless people. Wandering the house at various times, he had discovered at least five different television sets. He could watch any of them in private, if he chose. There was a billiard room on the first floor where he could practice bank shots, and there was a foosball table in a back room on the third floor, which could be turned to some recreational use, he supposed. There were bookshelves scattered throughout the house, all of them with small collections squeezed between ornate bookends. The collections seemed to have been put together with the sizes and bindings of the books in mind, not the contents of the books. There were algebra textbooks sitting next to histories of the Austro-Hungarian navy, restaurant guides to the major cities of Europe sitting next to collections of condensed detective novels. Neal had managed to find a copy of The Mill on the Floss, with a few thumbprint marks and coffee stains in the corners of the pages. He had never managed to read the book all the way through, and he had decided to save it for sometime when he could seriously not find anything else to do. He began to wonder if that time had finally come.

Neal felt as if the size and weight of the mansion had begun to bear down on him, inducing an inertia that increased as the days went by. He had begun his work on Meister’s memoirs with some degree of ambition, thinking that there was a marketable novel ready to be unsealed from somewhere within the secret family vaults. But so far, after four days of work, Neal felt that he had uncovered nothing except a spacious crypt full of specific, voluminous, and largely predictable grievances. Meister had complaints to make against nearly every person who had ever crossed his path; his afflictions had multiplied in small increments, with variations that were subtle, yet always marked by silent endurance on his part, small dramas that revealed immeasurable depths of fortitude in his account of them, the sort of fortitude normally associated with the hourly regimen of a monastery. And in fact as Neal reviewed the pages that he had managed to produce during the week, the thing that stood out more than anything else was the absence of anything that you could call a romantic adventure.

Hoping to overcome his growing sense of futility, Neal had made what he considered a perfectly reasonable suggestion that morning. He told Meister that there was one missing ingredient in his story so far, something that readers would consider essential. There needed to be a love interest, Neal explained carefully.

Meister had suddenly stopped pacing the rug when he heard this. He had turned his head in a slow, clock-like motion toward the wall where the portraits were hanging.

“I want you to know,” he said, speaking to the solemn countenances facing him, “that I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. A man and a woman. And I have been married twice, to beautiful women. Women who would be desired by any man with warm blood running through his veins.”

He turned to face Neal with his head slightly lowered. “Marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman.”

Neal was at a loss for words. Meister seemed to interpret his embarrassment as a lack of understanding.

“Here,” he said. “Maybe this will make my position clear.” He swiveled and headed for the television on the long table. He glanced for a moment at the blank spot on the wall where the campaign banner had been mounted, but quickly shook off his confusion, turning on the TV and hitting the PLAY button on the DVD player that sat underneath it. After a brief pause a slickly produced commercial began to play.

It opened with an image of the sun half-risen over a snow-capped peak. An elder- brotherly kind of voice solemnly intoned: A new day is dawning in America … The image of the mountain gave way to intimate shots of people against creamy backgrounds: a twentyish man standing shoulder to shoulder with a twentyish woman who was cradling a round, bald child; a middle-aged woman with short hair and jade earrings; a pair of men in coveralls, one holding a hammer, the other propping a two-by-four in the crook of his elbow; an elderly man with Nordic features in full Lakota regalia. As these images succeeded each other, a synthesizer mimicking a string bass was playing, in a duet with the faint, high sound of a single cornet, while the brotherly voice said, We are searching for leaders who are … genuine … principled …. accountable … leaders who know who they are … At each pause in the voiceover, whoever was standing against the white background would nod thoughtfully. Finally the filtered image of the sun just risen above the mountain appeared, the bass-and-cornet duet gave way to a hallelujah chord from a brass quartet, and the voice concluded, This November you can demand real leadership for America … Karl Meister for Senate … A man whose name means leadership. The screen went blank for just a moment and then the candidate himself appeared, his face turned ten degrees to the right, brightly lit against a black background, saying, I’m Karl Meister, and this is my vision for America.

Meister turned to glance at Neal, searching for approval in his eyes; charitably, Neal smiled and nodded.

Turning to confront the portraits again, Meister said, “I’ll leave that running. It should help give the right tone to the work you’re doing.” He set the DVD player on continuous replay before disappearing from the room.

Neal had steadfastly turned away from the screen the rest of the morning, but he could do nothing to escape the voiceover, and now as the sounds of the house faded out, the traces of the voiceover became more insistent, the narcotic phrases overlapping rather than succeeding each other.

When he heard someone knocking on his door, the sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. He sat up quickly, but the door opened before he had a chance to lift himself off the bed. Tucker strolled into the room, dressed more or less respectably in a yellow-and-pink bowling shirt and black denims, part of a cache of clothes that he had left behind on previous visits to the mansion.

“Let me have the car keys,” he said.

“No.” Neal dropped back down onto the bedspread and glared at the ceiling.

“Come on, man. It’s my car.”

“So?”

“Come on. I’ve got to get out of this creepy house.”

“That makes two of us, partner.”

“All right. Then come with me.”

“Where?”

“Downtown, baby. Down on Colfax Avenue. I’ll show you what this cow town is all about.”

“I’ve seen enough cows in my time. I’m from Texas.”

“Texas? No wonder you’ve got such a mean streak. Come on. Let’s get out of here before Mom tries to start up some four-handed card game.”

Neal sat up and shuddered as he imagined himself spending another yet another endless evening in the mansion. “Yeah, whatever.”

“Great. I’ll meet you outside.”

The Boccaccio was sitting under a tarpaulin on a slab of concrete in front of a row of locked garages on the west side of the mansion. Climbing inside, Neal adjusted himself briefly to the trapped air, redolent of Tucker’s fear-infused body odor from the past weekend.

Tucker gave complicated directions to a section of Colfax that had managed to escape the urban renewal projects of several succeeding city governments. Empty storefronts lurked beyond the reach of the streetlight glare, as bodies moved indistinctly in the gathering darkness. Between the shuttered windows, there were pawn shops marked by globes that hung like fruit on plastic trees, corner grocery stores shielded by jailhouse bars, liquor stores tattooed with jittery neon. Neal circled a couple of blocks before finding a place to park. Toting the shoulder-strap bag that he had brought with him from the mansion, Tucker sniffed the burnt-rubber fumes that filled the air and then pointed.

“Thataway to the show,” he said.

“What show?”

“The Last Waltz at the Cimarron.”

“You didn’t tell me we were going to a movie.”

“Hey, it’s all part of the experience. You think this is just some movie?”

“It’s The Last Waltz. I’ve seen it. I own it.”

“Well, you’ve never seen it in Denver, have you? Come on.”

They took their place at the end of the line that had queued up along the storefronts next to the theater. The people around them were mostly young and white, in clothes that were torn in all the usual places. Some of them were avidly attached to someone else’s body, stealing glances here and there to make sure they were being noticed. Many others appeared to be in a trance, as if they were sleepwalking their way into the early stages of a nightmare. A man in front of Neal and Tucker was urinating on the side of a building while carrying on a heated discussion of whether Scorsese should have stopped making films after Raging Bull, interrupting his hand motions only briefly to zip up his pants. Even before this the smell of urine had drifted with the gentle evening breeze, along with the fragrance of a nearby Thai restaurant and a faint hint of blood.

“You brought money, didn’t you?” Tucker asked when they reached the ticket window.

At the refreshment counter, Tucker ordered popcorn drenched in something that smelled like Pennzoil, along with a half-gallon of iced Pepsi. When it was his turn, Neal shook his head at first, and then asked for a box of Hot Tamales, for old times’ sake He found Tucker sitting next to a woman with broad shoulders and long legs. She was dressed oddly for an evening in late summer—a turtleneck sweater, a leather skirt, and tights with a kind of butterfly-net weave. Her face was as pale as skim milk, her eyes were ringed with mascara as thick as Magic Marker lettering, and her lips were painted with a shade of pink not found in nature.

“I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine,” Tucker said. “We went to college together, didn’t we?” He gave the woman a quick sidewise look.

“Sure thing,” she said in a weirdly uninflected voice.

“This is Calvin,” Tucker said to her. “You know, the guy I was telling you about.”

“I used to know someone named Calvin,” she said with sudden warmth.

“You can call me Cal if you want to.”

“I’d rather call you Calvin,” she said. “I’m Cissy. Short for Frances. I used to be called Fanny, but I got tired of the jokes.”

“I used to be known as Vinny,” Neal said, “but I got tired of people asking for my minestrone recipe.”

Cissy stared at him blankly for a fraction of a second and then, laughing convulsively, she reached across Tucker to punch him on the arm. “That’s good. I didn’t know you was jokin’ at first. I think I’ll call you Vinny from now on.”

The lights began dimming.

“O.K.,” Tucker said, his mouth full of popcorn. “Maybe you two could interrupt your comedy festival for a moment.”

“It’s O.K. with me if it’s O.K. with Vinny.” As Cissy said this, she reached behind Tucker to grab a fistful of Neal’s hair.

On the screen, a local celebrity was reminding everyone of the city’s anti-smoking ordinance, and the audience members held up their cigarettes in friendly acknowledgement. The smoke fumes thickened.

There was silence for a moment until the scene at Winterland emerged and the Band began playing “Baby Don’t Do It.” Half of the audience stood, rocked to the drums, and screamed the words along with Rick Danko.

“They don’t do that with every song, do they?” Neal asked uneasily.

“I told you this wasn’t just some show,” Tucker said. “This is performance art, man.”

Neal slumped in his seat, and he could feel Cissy’s fingers stealing across the top of his scalp.

Sometime during the Ronnie Hawkins scene, while audience members were chanting “Who Do You Love?” in flat, ribald voices, with a few whoms thrown in for good measure, Tucker got up, mumbled an excuse, and made his way to the aisle, clutching the shoulder-strap bag to his stomach, carelessly dribbling Pepsi as he stumbled along.

As soon as he had vacated his seat, almost as soon as the cushion thumped the back of the chair, Cissy jumped in next to Neal. “I’m glad he’s gone. He’s been a real drag tonight.”

“Probably a little preoccupied. He’s been down on his luck.”

“Really? Has he ever been up on his luck?”

“Wouldn’t you know? Don’t you two go back a ways?”

“Huh.” She turned and spat on the carpet behind her chair. “He’s got some sort of scam goin’ on, that’s all.”

“Got any other breaking news?”

Cissy cuffed the side of his head. “You gotta quit that, Vinny. You’re gonna kill me before you’re through.”

Neal slumped a little further down in his seat, hoping to avoid any more physical contact with her, and for a few minutes she actually seemed to be absorbed in the movie. However, during the Staple Singers’ performance she became agitated, jabbing her elbows against Neal’s arm, snapping her fingers, striking the toes of her high-heeled shoes against the back of the seat in front of her.

“I just love Black people,” she said excitedly. “Don’t you?”

“Sure,” Neal replied in a carefully subdued voice, “they’re great.”

“I used to date Black guys all the time.I brung one home to watch TV one time, and my dad told me to never go out with any more of them guys. He said he didn’t want me havin’ no zebra-striped baby.”

“I think I may need to get something to drink,” Neal said. “You want anything?”

“But I done what I wanted to do,” Cissy said, unheeding. “Just because. You know? You ever done anything just because?” She had hooked her thumb behind his ear and pushed her face up against his.

“There was a boy named Calvin that I remember real good,” she said. “A Black boy. He was a nice kid, learning to be a preacher. Wore a suit and tie to school even when he didn’t have to. You should of heard that boy recite the Psalms; I still get wet inside just thinkin’ about it. I wanted to go out with him but I never got up the nerve to say nothin’. You should a seen his arms … and his neck. Nothin’ prettier than a Black boy with muscles poppin’ out.”

Levon Helm was raging his way through “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” but Cissy seemed impervious to irony.

“So when old Tucker boy said he had a friend named Calvin he wanted to

introduce … I was really hopin’ you was Black. It’s kind of a Black name, ain’t it? But you’re O.K., anyway. You got a pretty face. Kind of sad lookin’, but pretty.” She ran an index finger over his eyebrows as she said this.

He gently removed her hand from his face, and she took the opportunity to lace her fingers around his.

“Don’t you want to watch the movie?” he asked. “I think Neil Diamond’s coming up next.”

“Ugh.What a sleazebag. I’d rather look at you.”

“You want some Hot Tamales?” He held up the unopened box.

She shook her head. “Candy makes my eyes water. I rather eat somethin’ salty.”

“Tucker may have left some popcorn. Let’s see.” He tried to squeeze himself out of his seat, but she leaned over him so that he couldn’t extricate himself without giving her a hard push.

“I don’t want none a that popcorn. Too much butter. Makes me sick to smell of it.”

Neil Diamond made his appearance on the screen, in a baby-blue jacket and rose-petal shades, and the audience members drowned out his earnest crooning with their own campy version of “Sweet Caroline.”

“Jeez. I forgot about this part,” Cissy said, settling herself back in her own seat. “This is cool.”

Neal relaxed a little and began popping Hot Tamales in his mouth, one at a time, letting each one dissolve between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He tried to check the time, but it was too dark for him to read his watch.

“Where do you think Tucker went to?” he asked Cissy after about half an hour.

“He didn’t say nothin’ to me.” She sounded surprisingly touchy.

“I thought he was just going to a pawn shop, but I didn’t think it would take this long.”

She turned toward him and wrapped her right arm around his shoulders. “Don’t worry about him. He knows his way around.”

“He knows his way around what?”

She placed one finger softly on his lips. “Let yourself chill for a moment, Vinny. You don’t need to think about nothin’. If Tucker’s got some kind of business with Eusebio, it’s no tellin’. You just have to wait.”

Neal shifted around in his seat to face her and try to anticipate her next move. “Who’s Eusebio?”

“You wasn’t supposed to ask me that, honey,” she said, moving closer. She cupped her left hand around the back of his neck, settling her thumb against his throat. “Why you have to ask so many questions?”

“It’s not nice to answer a question with a question,” he said, swallowing hard as he felt her tighten her grip on his neck.

“Eusebio’s just some guy,” she said in a whispery voice. “He don’t see just anybody and just anybody don’t see him, if you know what I mean. He takes his time. That’s just how he is.”

While she was speaking she slipped her right hand down to Neal’s lap and began unzipping his fly. “Just hold still, Vinny.”

Neal jumped out of his seat. “O.K.,” he said, his voice suddenly shrill, “I think that’s enough for now.”

“Oh come on, honey.”

“It was nice to meet you.” Slapping her clutching fingers off the seat of his pants, he made his way to the aisle, walking crab-fashion, stepping over the sticky residue of Tucker’s Pepsi, turned once to see her gesturing peevishly, and then hurried through the lobby and into the street.

Darkness had fallen completely by now, a cloudy darkness that seemed to be one large shadow. He walked quickly, just short of a jog, up one block and down another, until he spotted the Boccaccio. He climbed inside and locked the doors. All the way he had continued to grip the box of Hot Tamales, and once he began to feel a little more secure, he started popping them in his mouth again, methodically, letting them melt as he waited.

Now and then a passerby would stop and peer through the windshield, tapping the back of his wrist, as if to ask for the time. Neal finally slipped his watch into his pants pocket and, closing his eyes firmly, unconvincingly pretended to be asleep.

A few stray drops of rain pattered on the windows and occasionally he heard the weight of someone’s body flop against the driver’s side door, but he remained resolutely still, trying to rediscover the poise of the dance, the movements of his body and Sheila’s body, somewhere inside himself.

After actually falling asleep for a moment, he was awakened by a playfully rhythmic tapping at the window; opening his eyes he saw Tucker’s face pressed against the window. Neal let the window down halfway.

“Why don’t you unlock the stinking doors?” Tucker was grinning as he said this.

Neal got out of the car, letting Tucker slide into the passenger seat while he hustled over to the driver’s side, slammed the door and locked the car up again.

Tucker tossed the half-empty bag into the back of the car, and then slowly reclined his seat. “What happened to Cissy?” he asked in a placid voice.

“I hope you paid her in advance.”

“Oh, don’t worry. She’ll be taken care of. Never mind about that.”

“I wasn’t minding.”

Tucker had stretched himself out at full length, his knees fully unbent, his arms back behind his head, fingers splayed, as if he were floating on a bed of unusually dense ether. Neal flipped on the dome light to confirm his suspicions: Tucker’s eyes were as pink as a bleached bandanna.

“I see you’ve been enjoying yourself.”

“Still enjoying myself,” Tucker said, smiling with insouciant bliss.

“A little gift from your friend Eusebio?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tucker said calmly, with only a slight hitch in his voice.

“Cissy told me,” Neal said flatly.

“Cissy’s a whor*, remember? Shouldn’t believe anything a whor* says. By the way, your fly’s unzipped.”

Tucker switched off the light and settled into a kind of trance state, but even in the faint light from a nearby neon sign, Neal could see little ripples of agitation crossing the surface of his face.

“You know, I’ve had a little time to think,” Neal said. “And I’m not sure that I’m all that comfortable with this secret business. That thing in Iowa was bad enough.”

“Look,” Tucker said, carefully smoothing down the slight edge in his voice. “You just worry about driving.”

“Even if I’m just a driver, I can still be an accessory.”

“You don’t know anything. You don’t need to know anything. Even if there were anything to know, which there isn’t, you can always say …”

“I don’t really like being in the dark. I don’t appreciate the way you tried to distract me with that—”

“I was just trying to help you loosen up. If Cissy isn’t your flavor, you can’t blame that on me.”

“That’s not what’s bothering me. I just don’t like the idea that you’ve got designs on me.”

“Contrary to popular opinion,” Tucker said, in an almost offhand way, “the world does not revolve around you.” He propped his head on his fist and made Neal the object of a thoroughly indifferent gaze. “There are a quite a few things in this world that have nothing to do with you at all. Believe it or not.” He rested his head on the back of the seat again and spread all ten of his fingers in front of his face, as if critiquing a manicure. “The truth is that I’ve been making some arrangements of a financial nature. I’ve got to make some provisions for my immediate future.”

“You mean before or after you sell the car?”

“Selling the car is practically a fait accompli. It’s a question of dropping one or two more hints. Simple. The first thing I have to do after that is settle my accounts with Voortman.”

“Voortman gets the first piece,” Neal said puckishly.

“Listen, man. Voortman gets every piece. You got that? For all we know one of his goons could be stashed in the trunk right now, listening to everything we say. I’ve got no life at all until I get right with that guy.”

“You’re thinking the price of the car will cover that?”

“Sure. But then what do I have left? Especially after I settle a few outstanding debts. See, this is where my mind has been for the last few days, while you’ve been … whatever you’ve been doing.”

“You’ve pawned a few things, I assume.”

“That just took care of a few basic needs. I’ve got to have some funds that will carry me through one more year, possibly two.”

Neal understood now that Tucker was trying to buy time for himself, the easiest way possible—not such a different thing from what Neal was trying to do. And if Tucker was working with known criminals, what could Neal say for himself? Where was his moral advantage? In fact, Neal was shocked to find himself developing a kind of criminal intuition, because what else could explain his sudden insight into Tucker’s plans?

“You’re going to the sell the car to your stepfather and then steal it right back, aren’t you?”

“You’re out of your mind,” Tucker said frigidly.

“That’s it, isn’t it?”

Tucker sat up suddenly and slammed his fist against the door. “I told you I have to do something for myself. This is life and death we’re talking about. My life. It’s not your concern. Why don’t you start driving already? And thanks for queering my buzz, by the way.”

Satisfied that he had finally dug up at least a small grain of truth, Neal started the engine and made his way slowly down the dark streets. He and Tucker said nothing to each other until they reached the freeway.

“What did you mean a moment ago, when you were talking about needing money for a year or two?”

Tucker stared straight ahead, seemingly with no intention of saying anything else to Neal, ever.

“O.K. Don’t answer the question. Just tell me which exit to take.”

“I need to hire a better driver. You’ve got a crappy sense of direction.” Tucker hooked his thumb to the side. “That way,” he said and then lapsed into another long silence.

Under the darkness of broad-leafed trees, about two blocks from the entrance to the Meister estate, Neal made another smart guess. “You must have found out something about your father.”

“He’s dying,” Tucker replied flatly.

“Dying of what?”

“I don’t know. Some disease. Mom told me what it was, but I forget. She found out from Dad’s g.p. They had an affair a long time ago, and he still carries a torch.”

“Must be incurable.”

“You know how those things are. Affairs of the heart.”

“I meant the disease.”

“Of course it’s incurable. I said he was dying.”

“That was what you used to tell your poker pals back in Chicago, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, well now it turns out I was telling the truth. Go figure.”

Unwittingly, Neal slowed the car to a crawl in one of the long gaps between the feeble streetlights. His one encounter with Tucker’s father was something of a blur in his mind, but he had a single distinct recollection: the sardonic glee on the face of the gargoyle above his office door and the grim resignation on the man’s face as he glared back at it, as if he and the marble creature were alone in the room, if not alone in the world. In Neal’s memory, the room appeared several shades darker than it must have been in the middle of the afternoon, with a yawning unshaded window filling the opposite wall.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Neal asked.

“What?”

“It’s your father. You know you’ve only got one father.”

“So they tell me.”

Overcome with a sudden heartsick feeling, Neal pulled the car to the shoulder of the road and cut the ignition. Tucker didn’t bother asking why Neal had stopped the car. In the dusty glimmer of available light, Neal could see his jaw muscles working turgidly.

“You think you’ve got some right to judge me,” he finally said. “Think again, champ. I’ve got something coming to me, after what I’ve been through.”

“I’ve heard something about a prison. Weren’t you smuggling Bibles?”

“I’ll tell you exactly what to do with that sarcasm.” Neal heard the whirring, subtle machinery of the seat reclining backward, letting Tucker settle again into full repose, something like the inertia of a dead body. Tucker put his hands over his eyes and appeared to be pressing hard, as if he were forcing his fingers into the cavities of his skull. “No one has the right to judge someone who’s been through torture.”

If there was anything counterfeit in Tucker’s voice, it was an expert job. Nothing cut the ensuing silence except the sound of sprinklers pulsing over a distant lawn, until Neal finally ventured one more good guess:

“Did it have something to do with forks?”

7. C-Section

Once the Boccaccio was back under the tarpaulin, Tucker walked doggedly ahead of Neal toward the front portico. In one corner of his mind, Neal realized that he would probably need Tucker’s help to get back intp the house, but he was momentarily entranced by the raw softness of the night air, permeated by lingering late-summer warmth but infused with hints of the season to come. He wandered into a grove of maples, gazed up into the gloom of the laced branches, listened to the intermittent clapping of the drying leaves, like cards being shuffled by an absentminded dealer.

The lowest branch of the nearest tree was temptingly within reach. Neal gazed a little nervously up toward the highest branch and felt a sudden throb of pain near the edge of his scalp, from the spot where he had hit the windshield of the Boccaccio. He had no interest in climbing to the top of the tree, but he was willing to indulge himself in the idea of climbing just far enough so that he could see over the surrounding trees and get some glimpse of the mountains looming to the west. His room faced north and the office where he had been working faced east, so he had never set his eyes on the front range once he and Tucker had come through the front door of the mansion. Only a little while earlier, he had seen the mountains out of the corner of his eye while driving along the freeway, but the overcast sky had only offered him the view of one darkness meeting another darkness. Now that the clouds had glided away from the western horizon, leaving a bright spread of moonlight, he wanted to see the bare peaks as they would appear in that silvery sheen.

He planted his right foot on a knot in the bark, pushed himself up, reaching for the outstretching branch, grazed it with his fingers, and dropped down with a muffled thud into the grass below, just managing to keep from tumbling over onto the ground. He made another quick effort and this time took hold of the branch, heaving the upper half of his body over until he could rest himself momentarily in the hollow where the branch separated from the trunk. As he caught his breath, he stared again at the top branch of the tree, which now strangely seemed even further away. Standing gingerly in the crotch between the tree and the branch, his fingertips bared missed the next branch up, although there was a slightly lower branch on the opposite side of the trunk. Hugging the tree like a lover plunging toward a forbidden kiss, he extended his left leg, searching for some break or protuberance in the bark; imagining for a moment that he had found a purchase for his foot, he lifted the other foot off the branch and immediately began to slide. He swung his right arm wildly, catching the branch in the crook of his elbow, swung for one painful moment by his arm and then let himself drop into a smooth, two-footed landing. He held his ground, even as the world began to whirl around him.

Slumping against the tree, he closed his eyes, praying for a quick end to his vertigo. If he had ever needed any confirmation, he had it now: his tree-climbing days were over.

Eyes still closed, catching his shallow breath, he let himself imagine what he had hoped to see. He pictured clear white lines along the edges of the peaks, limning the course of wind and glaciers over countless centuries. He pictured granite bowls where bluish shadows were caught and long flat shafts marking the surfaces of inaccessible lakes. After spending a week immersed in Karl Meister’s world of petty indignation, he longed for a glimpse of something that belonged to a completely different order of existence. Even in this spacious grove, he felt hemmed in by Meister’s dwarfish majesty; every tree had been selected and placed to honor a co*ck-eyed family’s sad parody of grandeur. He might as well be standing on his head in one of Meister’s stifling parlors.

As if to underscore the point, before he opened his eyes again he could hear the intonation of a voice he had first heard in one of Meister’s parlors—a voice with a nerve-wracking undertone and a sickening reach.

Neal peered around the tree to his left but saw no one. He could almost make out what Willick was saying. Caught between contempt and curiosity, he decided that it might be useful to hear what was being said.

Moving stealthily from tree to tree, pantomiming a scene from The Last of the Mohicans, he searched the moonlit darkness for the speaker and his listener, but saw neither one. However, Willick’s words were beginning to be clear:

“There are disturbances in that house, irregular electromagnetic disturbances.” Three beats of silence transpired. “So what I’m saying is that you can’t trust anyone there. You have no choice but to think of them all as strangers.”

Neal heard something that sounded like a reply.

“Sure. Even him. I’m sure you’ve read about dybbuks, spirits of the departed who possess the living, causing all kinds of deranged speech. Your brother is living in an old house, full of troubled souls. Now, I’m just trying to be objective. I respect you enough for that. The best you can say about him is that his mind is completely opaque. I’m certain you know what I mean by that.”

Again Neal heard the other voice, sounding more emphatic and even a little urgent, but still not quite clear enough to be understood.

“Haven’t I told you that before?” Willick resumed. “In every possible way? Haven’t I made that clear to you?”

Neal was struck by the fact that, even while maintaining a thoroughly consistent register, Willick’s voice was vacillating between the cold complacency Neal was already used to, and a new note, a sort of minor-key variation.

“You’re old enough to make the necessary distinctions,” Willick was saying. “I won’t bore you most of the details. But if you’re ever in the attic late at night, you’re likely to hear a kind of slow dripping sound. It’s the leaking of condensed ectoplasm, according to all the research I’m familiar with. Something distilled by the walls of any house where spectral phenomena have persisted for at least three generations.”

The other voice sounded like nothing more than syncopated panting from where Neal was listening, nothing more than a suggestion of a voice, something that Neal detected only through the contrast with silence.

“So we have an understanding,” Willick said after a pause. “I don’t need to say anything more, do I? And just remember that …” Willick’s voice became suddenly unintelligible, as if he were dropping it down a hole in the ground, and then became clear again: “You don’t have to answer to anyone in that house. You are an unusually well-developed young woman.”

There was something about that last statement that gave Neal a twist in his stomach.

“You’re safe as long as you remember to trust me,” he heard Willick saying and then he heard footsteps scuttling away to the rear of the mansion—one pair of footsteps making surprisingly loud thuds before the sound finally faded away.

Neal remained in partial hiding, listening until he heard the other footsteps making their way slowly, deliberately toward the front of the house, and then sprang forward to place himself directly between Willick and the walkway lining the front drive.

Willick, about twenty yards away, was taken aback for a fraction of a second, just long enough to rock back on his heels, but he seemed to have put himself back together after a quick glance at an invisible, full-length mirror. He smiled broadly, like a badly made wax figure, and seemed about to step forward and continue his progress toward the front of the mansion, straight through Neal’s crossed arms if necessary, but some signal seemed to pass from the corner of his left eye to the back of his skull, and swerving in a precise circle, he began making his way back through the maple grove.

Neal followed him at a careful distance until he reached the clearing beyond the trees, and kept following as Willick made his way along the rock wall that rimmed the courtyard, the top of his body angling away from his hips, while his lower half made smooth balancing motions. Just beyond the box hedges that screened the swimming pool, Willick seemed to be swerving back toward the house, but catching a glimpse of Neal, he made a seemingly purposeful swivel to the right, crossed the bridge over the brook that angled its way across the riding path, and finally disappeared into a patch of acacia bushes. Neal waited to see if any movement appeared in the direction of the east lawn, then made his way back up the slope until he reached the garages, following the concrete road to the main driveway.

When he reached the front door, he recalled the problem that had dimly occurred to him before. He tried the handle, just in case Tucker had left the door unlocked. No such luck. He touched the doorbell softly, afraid of raising the whole moribund life of the house, both spectral and organic, into some semblance of wakefulness. The reverberations of the bell made him slightly queasy. He tried whistling away his vague uneasiness but his lips were a little sticky from the Hot Tamales. Instead, in a spasm of impatience, he started pounding on the door with his fist.

He paused as another round of reverberations died away, and as he raised his arm again, the door swung open swiftly. He was face to face with Lorna Meister, who was just about his height, even barefoot, as she happened to be at the moment. She was wearing a silk dressing gown whose hem just touched her knees. The two ends of the belt dangled, untied.

“It wasn’t supposed to be you,” she said, seemingly speaking to herself. She stood squarely in the door jamb, holding the door open with one fully extended arm while she gripped a half-full fluted goblet in her other hand. “Where did you come from, anyway?”

Neal smiled uncomfortably. “Do you want the long version or …?”

Lorna glanced over Neal’s right shoulder and seemed to be peeking around the portico columns. “You didn’t see anyone, did you?”

“Could you be a little more specific?”

She gave him one contemptuous glance and then, with a thrust of her hip, tried to push the door in his face. He stopped it with his shoe.

“I’m just trying to come inside. O.K.?”

“You don’t have to, you know. You could just as easily spend the night in that freakish purple car.”

Neal leaned against the door, forcing Lorna to retreat several paces into the depths of the foyer. She regained her composure quickly, though, gripping her robe, wrapping it tightly around her hips with one hand as she took a lingering sip from her glass. Just as Neal made a move toward the central stairway, she stepped carefully in front of him and gripped the sleeve of his jacket.

“I don’t want you to think you’ve fooled everyone in this house,” she said. “I could see from the beginning that there was something sketchy about you. That knot on your forehead didn’t escape my notice. You’ve been through some scrapes. And I have a pretty good idea of why you came here.”

“Don’t you remember? I was brought here.”

Lorna leaned forward and huffed, emitting the fragrance of Cabernet Blanc. “You wanted it to seem that way, sure.”

Neal shook his head in a very deliberate way and began taking roundabout steps toward the stairs, hoping to pull away from her grip. But Lorna, keeping her fingers firmly in place, traced his steps point for point, flexing her thick calves, gliding on the balls of her feet to keep herself exactly one step ahead of him.

“I guess you think you’ve got it made right now,” she said, leaning toward him again, fixing him with an insolent gaze, “but Willick’s going to settle your business for you.”

“Funny how he hasn’t been around much lately.”

“Right. As if you didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“I actually didn’t.”

“Liar, liar, liar,” she said, firmly, but in a soft undertone, leaning a little closer.

Not especially interested in defending himself, he grasped her wrist, trying to break her hold on him and push his way past her, but she tightened her grip and swerved to the side to keep herself in front of him again, tipping her drink, spilling a little down the side of her hand.

“Don’t start anything you can’t finish,” she said, after licking the wine that had dripped down her forearm. “And just for your information, I keep my bedroom door locked. Deadbolt.” She gave him a slitted glance, then sucked her pinkie and took another sip of wine. As she tipped her glass, she released her hold on his sleeve but remained stubbornly in his way.

Neal stuck his hands in his pockets, giving himself an air of disinterestedness, in the correct sense of the word, as he plotted his route to the staircase, wary of something dangerously hormonal in her body language.

The only light in the foyer came obscurely from the right-hand parlor, creating shadows that nearly concealed the two nude sculptures, giving a sidewise extension to Lorna’s thin nose. At the foot of the stairs Neal glimpsed an open bottle and another goblet, identical to the one that Lorna was holding.

“You haven’t been stood up, have you?” Neal suddenly inquired, with both a touch of spite and a touch of pity. “I’d hate to think you’re drinking alone. It’s not healthy.”

Lorna averted her eyes and tipped her left shoulder away from him. She seemed to be looking at her reflection in the wine that remained in the glass. “Not as if it’s the first time,” she said, speaking into the cup, just before draining it.

Neal glimpsed an opportunity to slide across to the right of her and make a straight dash to the stairs. But she gripped the sleeve of his jacket again before he had taken more than a step and a half.

“Give me your hand,” she said.

When he tried to pull away, she let the goblet fall from her hand, apparently unconcerned about the breaking glass. She turned to face him, with some earnest purpose in her eyes; she gripped his wrist with her newly freed hand, jabbing the nail of her middle finger in the back of his hand.

She pulled his hand down into opening in her robe and pushed his fingertips against her torso, guiding them below her navel, over the hump of her belly, tracing a line across flesh furrowed by waistband lines.

“Feel that,” she said.

“Feel what?” he asked in genuine confusion.

“The scar.”

With her index finger over his index finger, she guided his fingertip until he found the rubbery seam.

“C-section,” she commented dryly. “Tucker McCurdy.”

Neal yanked his hand away, freeing it from her grip, but she held on to him with her other arm.

“Do you have any children?” she asked him.

“No,” he said quickly.

“Liar,” she said. “Liar, liar.” And as she said this, the image of Lainie’s sullen, large-eyed boy flashed through his mind, like an overexposed newspaper photo. “And if you’d said yes I would have still called you a liar. It was a trick question. Men don’t have children. Children aren’t ripped from their bodies like they’re ripped from ours. No implies that yes is a possible answer, and it isn’t. Liar.”

Neal saw that there was blood tricking from a puncture wound on his hand, where Lorna had planted her fingernail. He jerked his arm free, pulled back the sleeve of jacket, and dabbed at the blood that was trickling down his arm. He reached under his belt and wiped his bloodied fingertips on his shorts.

“When one body is torn out of another body,” Lorna continued, tying the belt of her robe tightly, “there’s a connection that can’t be broken. You don’t even have to call it love.” As Neal continued to dab at the blood on his right wrist, she grasped his other arm again, this time in a gesture of forced conspiracy, and whispered the rest of what she had to say: “This is why I can’t let you take advantage of Tucker’s good will. I know that you’ve got some sort of hold on him. I can see that.”

Neal began to speak, but she placed two fingers on his lips.

“I’ve known people like you. You’re like one of those things, those fish, that attach themselves to bigger fish. You’ve read a few books. You can probably tell me what they’re called.”

Neal actually couldn’t think of the word.

“Better yet,” she said, raising her voice slightly, “you’re a tapeworm, because something is sucking the life out of Tucker from the inside, and I think you’re part of whatever it is.”

“You know,” Neal replied finally, firmly detaching her hand from his arm, “your son brings a lot of this on himself.”

Her eyes were level with his, and for a moment she seemed to be searching his face for some sign of genuineness, but without warning she reached up to slap him; with her hand flat against the side of his face, she dug in her nails just before he ducked away. He turned twice as he backpedaled and then headed straight up the stairs, kicking the empty goblet as he went by. When he reached the hall leading to his room, he felt his cheek and found three deep indentations, but this time there was no blood.

He dreamed and woke, dreamed and woke, many times during the night. The dreams were vivid but nearly beyond recall once he rose to consciousness again. He thought that the dream of nakedness in the speeding car was in there somewhere, and the airport dream. He also seemed to remember some kind of phosphorescent slime oozing from the edges of the ceiling, but wondered if he was simply conjuring something out of his conscious imagination, a residue of the overheard conversation in the maple grove.

8. The Missing Key

After a few unbroken hours of sleep, Neal awoke in broad daylight, and he immediately sensed that something was wrong. He lifted his pillow, and found that the zipper pouch was gone.

He tore the covers off the bed in some sort of desperate hope that the pouch might have slipped from under the pillow during the night’s incessant tossing and turning. He ripped the fitted sheet from the mattress and nonsensically lifted the mattress off the box spring. He sprang to the dresser and opened the drawer where he’d been keeping the car keys, under a pile of gaudy scarves and silk handkerchiefs, imagining that he might have put the pouch in the wrong place just before dropping into bed. He pulled the drawer all the way out and did the same with all of the other drawers.

His frantic motions slowed and then came to an absolute stop as the cold truth stole over every part of his body. He recalled Tucker’s sullen silence the night before as the two of them parted ways.

Neal was determined to approach the situation objectively. As he got dressed, he reminded himself that he had a couple of reliable cards to play: one of them named Voortman, the other named Eusebio. Desperate situations sometimes called for blackmail, he told himself with reassuring coolness.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he found himself in the midst of well-lit, crystalline surfaces and a kind of mortuary stillness. He heard slightly agitated voices and followed them through the now-familiar run of parlors until he found Tucker and Meister in the TV room, playing chess.

“What you have, you see,” Tucker was saying, as he gestured with one of his bishops, “is a set of parallel lines, straight lines. You can see what that means, can’t you?”

“Set your piece down,” Meister growled.

“Look at it this way,” Tucker said, rolling the piece along the length of his outstretched fingers. His face had that charmingly roguish look that he was able to conjure up from time to time. “Those lines make you think of a white line, don’t they? Whether the car is moving or still, in the city, on a dirt road, in the garage, wherever. They make you think of a white line on a highway spearing straight ahead over the plains, through mountains, toward an unseen horizon. That’s where the permanent value of the car resides.”

“Are you going to play your piece sometime this decade?”

Tucker lowered the bishop, almost to the level of the board, but not quite. “And did you happen to know that it has seven forward speeds? Seven is the number of perfection, if you didn’t know that already. Anyone will tell you … I mean, what other car will not only hold its value but—”

“For the love of …” Meister swept his hands across the board, scattering the pieces across the floor. “I’ll buy that … that car, just to get you out of this house!”

He kicked the table over, pressed his hands against his temples as if forcing his agitation back within the bounds of his skull, then swept out of the room with inadvertent gallantry.

“We’ve got to talk about a few things,” Neal said, in the queasy calm that followed Meister’s swift exit.

“Sure, sure,” Tucker said frantically. “But first let me see the title to the car. You’ve got it on you, don’t you? I’ve got to make sure everything’s in order so we can seize the moment. The bastard could change his mind before his next trip to the bathroom.”

Neal fiddled with his glasses and gave Tucker a close look. “You think I’ve got the title?”

“Who else?” He gripped Neal’s shoulder and leaned in close. “You didn’t lose it, did you?”

“Well, no … I didn’t exactly.”

“Well, what exactly? Man, I thought you had it all figured out. What’s the matter with you all of a sudden? You look like you just swallowed a ping-pong ball.”

“I thought you had it.” Just when he was learning that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion, the whole thing made perfect sense. The unformed recollection of an intruder must have troubled his sleep, keeping him dream-addled and half-awake most of the night. A moment earlier, he would have assumed that the intruder was none other than Tucker McCurdy. But what was he supposed to think now?

Tucker was shaking his head. “I should have gone with my intuition, man. I should have dumped you somewhere in Nebraska. I could have done it so easily. I could have—”

A soul-splitting scream pierced the stale air of the house.

Neal and Tucker stared at each other bitterly, as if each of them thought the other one knew something. Frozen in place, they listened as moments of inhuman silence succeeded each other like shock waves and as the silence was finally broken by the sound of footsteps above their heads coming from opposite directions, sounds made by distinctively feminine shoes, followed by the muffled frantic voices of Lorna and the maid, clashing, merging, growing louder. Neal and Tucker remained fixed in a conspiracy of inaction as they listened to a set of heels clattering down the stairway, across the marble floor of the foyer and wood floors of the parlors, and then, as if in response to a single signal, turned to look as Lorna appeared in the entrance to the room, in a full-length dress and pearls, her hair newly fixed and tilted to one side, her face drawn and haggard and pale, having lost the benefit of the tender light that had caressed her the night before.

“Freddie has collapsed,” she announced in a thin voice. “The two of you need to carry him downstairs. You’re the only other men in the house right now. The agency hasn’t replaced the butler and the gardener yet.”

“Shouldn’t someone call an ambulance?” Neal wondered aloud. After posing the question, he instinctively patted his right pants pocket and then it dawned on him that his phone had not been sitting on the bedside table—a fact that had been somewhat overshadowed by the loss of the zipper pouch.

“Freddie would never, under any circ*mstances, permit strangers to enter his bedroom. We’ll decide about the ambulance once we get him downstairs.”

Meister’s bedroom was on the third floor, at the rear of the house. It was the size of a modest drawing room, filled with furniture in a kind of Mennonite style, upholstered in smoky masculine colors. The man of the house was heaped across the floor in an undignified way, his bottom up and tilted to the side, like a man preparing to deliver an after-dinner fart; his knees were bent in a fetal crouch, his head awkwardly propped on his chin.

“You sure it’s safe to move him?” Tucker asked, clearly trying to find some way to wriggle out of the situation.

“He fainted,” Lorna said. “This is not abnormal. One of you take his feet, the other one hold him by his armpits.”

Tucker jumped to claim the feet and threw a smirk at Neal, who stepped slowly to the other end of the body. Turning and bending, he caught a glimpse of an open safe on the opposite wall, the contents unseen. he door of the safe was made to look like a vent cover; there was even a whisper of air coming from it, rocking it gently on its hinge, emanating apparently from some battery-powered device built into the back of the door.

They turned him on his back, and then Neal lifted his end of the body while Tucker heaved up on the feet. Meister’s bottom sagged almost to the floor.

“Take his knees, Tucker,” Neal said.

“I’m not touching anything but his shoes, buddy.”

Neal grunted and heaved Meister’s shoulders up, settling his chest under Meister’s backbone.

As they made their way down to the foyer, eal had to nag Tucker to keep the feet up so Meister’s rump wouldn’t drag the steps. When they reached the bottom, they let the body slide to the floor and shook their arms in relief.

“Go on to the parlor,” Lorna commanded.

They looked down at Meister’s body, hoping for a moment that the touch of the cold surface would revive him.

“You can’t just leave him there,” Lorna insisted, a touch of fear finally creeping into her voice.

They hauled him into the parlor to their left. It was only after they had dropped him on a full-length sofa, and his right arm had dropped to the floor, that they noticed one of his hands was clenched.

Lorna squatted down, cupped the fist in her hand and began prying the fingers apart. As soon as she had freed the clutched object, Meister opened his eyes and anxiously scanned his surroundings.

“What have you got in your hand?” he demanded, with the vocal equivalent of tears.

“It looks like a key to the vault.”

He sprang to his knees on the cushions. “Give it to me! Give it to me!”

Coldly indignant, she dropped it into his outstretched palm.

“It’s not a key to the vault!” he shouted. “It’s a copy of a key to the vault!”

“Do you have to shout?”

“You don’t see what this means, do you?” He held the key under her nose. “Smell it,” he said. “You can smell the difference.”

She deflected his hand. “Smell it yourself,” she said, standing, tugging on her hose and smoothing out her dress.

“There were three keys to the vault in the bedroom safe,” he said. “And this one is a copy. The other two are originals, but this one is a copy. A copy.”

Lorna frowned darkly, as if the logic behind his hysteria had finally reached her. She gave Neal and Tucker separate questioning glances; she was ready to say something incisive and bitter, but turned her head quickly. Everyone else followed the direction of her glance.

They all glimpsed Weegie’s large eyes peeking around the entrance to the parlor, and in the next moment they heard her boots clopping across the foyer. Lorna didn’t miss a single beat before swirling away in pursuit.

“Come here, you little sneak!”

Neal and Tucker stepped to the edge of the parlor as Lorna overtook Weegie about four paces from the front door, nabbing the hem of her shirt from behind, jerking her backward, wrapping her arms around the girl’s waist.

“Let me have those stinking boots! You’re hiding something.”

Weegie aimed a fierce backward kick, but Lorna released her hold on the girl just in time to catch the toe of the boot. She pulled up on it, sending Weegie to the marble; as she yanked and twisted, she dragged Weegie across the floor, pulling until the boot finally gave way.

Lorna tipped it upside down, shook it once, and Neal’s zipper pouch came tumbling out. She picked it up, unzipped it, and rifled through the contents. She took out Neal’s phone and held it up curiously before dropping it back into the pouch.

By this time, Meister had staggered to the entrance of the parlor, and he snapped his fingers, giving Lorna a quick signal that Weegie was inching her way to the door.

“Tucker!” Lorna snapped. “Grab her!”

Weegie bared her teeth at Tucker, freezing him in place, and Lorna herself lunged in pursuit, dropping the zipper pouch on the floor. She tackled Weegie and pushed her against the door, then reached down to bend her left leg back and tug on the other boot. When it popped off, a key flew into the air, dropping with a tinny ring on the floor.

Meister swung himself into the foyer, scooped up the key, and mashed it against his nose. “Yes! That’s the original! Oh God in Heaven, I’ve got the original again!”

Lorna gave him a close look, as if fearing that he would faint away again from sheer relief, but after a moment she turned her attention to Weegie, heaped like a pile of wrinkled sheets by the door. “Where did you get the key?”

Weegie’s face was pressed against the door, shielded by one pale arm. A sob forced its way out of her throat.

“I don’t care if you cry all morning, you’re not leaving this room until you tell me where you got the key.”

“There’s only one place she could have gotten it,” Meister pointed out.

“No,” Lorna said. “There’s only place it could have come from, but—”

She was interrupted by the ringing of the phone inside the pouch on the floor. Neal stepped forward to claim it, but Lorna flashed him a forbidding look and she reached down to retrieve it herself.

“Hello?” She listened briefly, raising her eyebrows with ironic effect, and then she put her hand over the mouthpiece, and addressing no one in particular, asked, “Is there a Harold Hill in the vicinity?”

Neal felt as if he had reached another threshold. He knew his way around the house just well enough by now to sketch out a quick, improvised route to one of the back doors. But now he sensed that he would be escaping from nowhere into nowhere. Running away seemed just as pointless as remaining in place.

He cleared his throat weakly. “I believe that’s for me,” he said, stepping halfway across the foyer and taking the phone from Lorna’s extended hand.

“Yes?” He forced himself to speak in a normal tone.

“Who was that woman, Harold?” Sheila’s voice sounded strained, indignant, yet remarkably cool.

“She’s the, uh, mother … of a friend … that I know.”

There was a significant pause on the other end, a silence that seemed to be filled with deliberation.

“Well at someone answered when I called. This time. What the f*ck have you been doing all this time that you couldn’t spare one minute for—”

“You know, you might want to call back … Or let me call you.”

“Nice idea, Harold. You never do call me.”

“But I will …You see, there’s some people who—”

“Just say you don’t want to talk to me, Harold,” she snapped, her agitation suddenly breaking to the surface. “Just say it. I don’t care. It’s not as if I don’t have a life.” She hung up.

Neal waited a moment before dropping the phone into his pocket, then he looked up to face a very attentive audience.

“Important business, I assume,” Lorna said.

He smiled weakly and shook his head and would have said something self-deprecating and possibly smart, but Weegie spoke first:

“It was him.” She was sitting against the door now, tears dribbling down her cheeks.

“You mean him?” Lorna pointed a crooked finger at Neal.

“Him. He told me the combination of the safe. I don’t know how he got it. But he told me to take the key.”

Neal was shaking his head in disbelief. “You really don’t—”

“Hush,” Lorna commanded. “What were you saying … Weegie?”

“I said it was him. He made me. He said if I didn’t he would do something to me.” She wiped each cheek once with the back of her hand. “I can’t even say it … it’s so bad.”

Lorna leaned down toward the girl. “You can say it to me, can’t you?”

The girl nodded and murmured into Lorna’s ear. Lorna nodded patiently, and several times she furrowed her eyebrows. When Weegie was finished, Lorna stood and shot a cold, penetrating look at Neal.

“She’s a thief,” Neal sputtered. “You know you can’t believe her.”

“How do we know that?” Lorna asked. “What do we know about you? A few minutes ago, your name was Hemingway. Now it seems to be Harold Hill. Give us another name. Maybe we can believe that one.”

Neal felt a shift in the atmospheric condition of the room. It was like the density that fills the air when a ridge of heavy clouds rolls ponderously through the sky, darkening the shank of the afternoon, sending a thick static charge through the air. Meister was looking at him closely, his features now limp and creased with fatigue. Tucker regarded him askance, with a glimmer of something that looked like genuine fear. Lorna’s eyes remained fixed in a sharp, predatory glare.

“Maybe you could pull out your driver’s license and let us see,” she said. “It’s a wonder that no one in this house has asked to see any identification,” she added, glancing reproachfully at her husband.

Neal could feel himself backing away.

“Surely you have no reason to refuse. Maybe you have a copy of your birth certificate. Or a library card. A literary man like you.” She extended her hand, fingers twiddling in mockery. “Come on, now. If you won’t enlighten us, there are authorities in this city whose job it is to find out the truth. We’ve got the accusation from the girl’s own lips. All we need to do is make the call. You’ll make the call yourself, won’t you Freddie?”

“I want everyone out of my house,” Meister said with unexpected firmness. “I want no strangers, no stepchildren … I want my house back, now!”

“Freddie, you can’t mean Tucker, too,” Lorna raged. “What has Tucker done? You can’t blame him for this—”

“Listen to me! This is my house, woman, and I still haven’t rewritten my will!”

“Oh, Freddie.” There was a sudden note of defeat in Lorna’s voice. “I’m only trying to protect you, Freddie.”

“I want silence NOW!”

After he had bellowed out the last emphatic word, Meister’s face suddenly froze. He appeared to be forcing air from his throat, and his torso seemed to be wrenching itself away from his hips. Suddenly he began to shiver so hard that his teeth clicked like the jaws of a nutcracker in a child’s hands. The key dropped out of his fist, and his eyes rolled up into their sockets until only the whites were visible.

9. Getting out of Denver

After driving past the gate, Neal brought the Boccaccio to a stop, letting it idle serenely under the massive trees. He looked at Tucker without saying anything. They had said nothing to each other while they packed up their few clothes and valuables, while they made their way to the door of the mansion, through a cacophony of sighs, cries, and whispers emanating disconnectedly from every direction, while they packed their things in the trunk of the car, while they made their way along the winding drive pursued by the sounds of blackbirds in the trees that lined the pavement. Now they glared at each other, eyes heavy with mutual loathing, and then looked away again.

“Which way?” Neal finally asked.

Tucker slumped in his seat and shrugged.

“Come on,” Neal said. “This is your town. Which way?”

“It’s not my town. It’s not like I ever lived here.”

“So I guess Chicago’s your town.”

“No way, sucker. I don’t have a town. I stay an inch off the ground at all times … And I’d advise you to do the same thing.”

Neal sensed that there was something behind that last remark. “Look,” he said tensely, “you don’t believe anything that girl said, do you?”

“I don’t believe anything about you. One way or the other. The way I see it, everyone’s got his own scam, so—”

“Just shut up and tell me which way.”

“Either way is O.K. It doesn’t make any difference.”

Neal reached into his jacket and felt the zipper pouch nestling in the left inside pocket, glad that he had thought to scoop it up in all of the chaos following Meister’s seizure. He eased the car into the street and turned left.

For about a mile they passed between a scalloped wall on one side of the street and a screen of poplars on the other side. After crossing a major thoroughfare, they entered a zone of three-story apartment buildings with patio balconies. There were streetlights at every intersection, and Neal kept meeting red lights, waiting as elderly women with leathery skin walked their Dobermans and Pomeranians across the street. Neal followed the traffic into narrow streets that wove through the University of Denver campus, inching along as students lugging backpacks darted out in the front of the car. Looking around at the red-brick dormitories and lecture halls, Neal had the eerie feeling that he had inadvertently come full circle.

“You went the wrong way,” Tucker said.

“O.K. Got any idea where we’re going, by any chance?”

“All I want to do is find a dealer so we can unload this thing.”

“So which way, now?”

“Just turn around.”

The Boccaccio was stuck in a slow, halting stream of traffic for another block, but Neal managed to spot a loading zone to the left, and he made a quick zip across oncoming cars, executed a swift K-turn and was about to work his way back into traffic going the other way, when his neck was suddenly gripped from behind.

He hit the brake and then reached for the hand that had locked onto his windpipe. It was a small, sticky hand.

“You didn’t tell me you were planning to take him with you,” Tucker said.

Neal turned around and found Dodd looking intently at him, the side of his face pressed against the headrest.

“News to me, too,” Neal said in a froggy voice.

Dodd pushed himself forward and thrust a large, heavily creased wad of paper in Neal’s face. Neal recognized the block-style lettering from Meister’s campaign banner.

“Fice kahuna,” Dodd said, sounding very businesslike. “Cola . . . engrain factional.”

He threw a hostile glance at Tucker and then turned his attention to the folded paper and tapped it vigorously.

Neal set the crumpled paper on the dashboard and unfolded it foot by foot as Dodd leaned forward, stretching himself in the gap between the seatback and the gearshift. The back of the banner had been decorated meticulously in crayon, every inch covered in glossy, waxy colors. The beginning of the road was in ink, apparently from the pen that Neal had taken from Meister’s desk, but after the first eighteen inches, it continued in grainy silver, sloping, looping, careening up the page and down, passing through groves of trees with scissor-like leaves, through tunnels peopled by gloomy-eyed worms, over mountains shaped like popsicles. The Boccaccio was represented by long, flat strokes of maroon atop four black circles. At various points along the way, the car would be equipped with butterfly wings, or with fins to negotiate underwater byways, or with bayonets to combat monsters that looked like overgrown dust balls. At the far right edge of the banner, the destination appeared, a high cliff where a solemn trio of winged unicorns stood looking down. The car was flying off the end of a stunt ramp, hurtling toward the edge of the crag.

As Neal leaned forward, studying the map, Dodd set his head on Neal’s shoulder and kept up a running commentary: “Mice beholden … stringent varicose gunny blunderbuss … roiled monotone bunting … braise enticing dingo …”

In the middle of the paper, Neal noticed a couple of dusty-looking boot prints.

“I see you had a few obstacles to overcome,” he remarked.

“Cistern … inkpot,” Dodd commented drily.

“Still, you did a great job, I—”

A truck driver blared his horn, as he tried to wedge his vehicle into the loading zone.

Tucker brushed Dodd back and frowned at Neal. “Got to get off the pot, dude.”

Neal continued to gaze with some wonder at the boy’s handiwork. “Sure,” he said absently. Then turning to Dodd, he said, “Why don’t you sit back down? We’ve got to … we’ll have to make some plans. O.K.?”

Dodd looked at Neal expectantly, with an immeasurable degree of trust. Finally, he nodded faintly and dropped back down onto the backseat. The truck driver honked long and loud and the blocked cars joined in. Neal pulled into the street and began the halting trek back to the estate.

When they pulled into the drive, Neal turned his head and found Dodd looking back at him, with the same expectant expression.

Tucker reached over and tried his fingerprint on the security panel, but nothing happened.The tall iron gate remained firmly shut. “How’s that for efficiency? They’ve already disabled my print. Meister must have made a complete recovery.”

“What are we going to do with him?” Neal whispered.

“Give me your phone. I’ll have to call and see if someone will override for me.”

Tucker dialed, waited, rolling his eyes. “Hey,” he said. “We’ve got the boy. Someone better let us in … We didn’t kidnap him. The bugger stowed away … Well, go ahead then.”

Over their heads in one of the trees, a bird was making kookaburra-like sounds. An autumn breeze wafted through the window.

Finally, the gate began to swing open, but not enough for the car to fit through.

“They made that loud and clear, didn’t they?” Tucker commented bitterly.

Neal turned spoke to Dodd, coaxingly: “You better run on. They’re waiting for you.”

Dodd sat still, his arms clutching his knees.

“Go ahead, buddy. We’ll catch up with you some other time.”

The boy blinked reflectively, gazed at Neal with a touch of reproach, and calmly refused to move.

“You know what?” Neal said, speaking before he had given himself a chance to think his way ahead. “I think that … that the unicorn … might be waiting for you back at the house. Wouldn’t that be funny? If you went looking for him just when he came looking for you?” Neal smiled at Dodd and nodded, hoping to foster a cheery sense of irony. “You know what,” he added, improvising feverishly. “I think I left a window open upstairs. Your buddy probably flew right in there and he’s looking around right now … Maybe back in the closet where I saw him. What do you think?”

Dodd seemed unconvinced. He blinked quickly a couple of times, but otherwise remained unmoved.

“Listen,” Tucker put in quickly. “If you don’t get hopping right now, you’re going to end up with a very sore behind. If I was you, I’d—”

Neal jabbed him hard on the shoulder.

“Hey,” Tucker complained. “It’s not like you’re doing any better.”

Neal twisted himself around and leaned toward the child. “You know what? If you went with us, I’ll bet someone would be very unhappy. Someone would really miss you.”

Dodd looked searchingly at Neal and then glanced out the window. He sat up slowly, reached for the door handle and pushed his way out of the car, reaching back to grab the map just before his feet hit the pavement. He took several reluctant steps toward the gate, looked back at Neal with a mute question in his eyes, and then quickened his pace as he slipped through the opening, dragging the crumpled, color-splashed paper behind him.

Neal and Tucker spotted a row of car dealerships just off the freeway near Englewood. They pulled into a lot full of gleaming new Mercedes sedans and were soon approached by a salesman in a blue jacket.

“Good morning, sunshine!” he exclaimed, his eyes fixed on the Boccaccio, not on them. “I haven’t seen one of these in years.”

The salesman was short, wiry, and copper-skinned. His face had small, elegant features, though his good looks were marred by pock-marked cheeks; his dark, thinning hair was sculpted in a meticulous way, neatly covering the bald patch at the top of his skull. “You’re not looking to trade in today, are you?” The car still had his full attention. As soon as he was close enough, he ran his fingers lovingly along the sharp crease that rimmed the hood.

“We were wondering what you’d give us for it,” Tucker said matter-of-factly.

The man nodded as he walked to the back of the car, gazing in utter abstraction. He fingered one of the taillights and then reached down to feel the sheen of the back bumper. He walked around to the passenger side of the car and finally looked Tucker in the eye.

“I gotta tell you, guy. We’d love to have this car on our lot. It would bring in customers, just to look at it, and then they might end up buying something.” He toyed absently with the rearview mirror. “But it’d cost too much too insure something like this. And my boss wouldn’t be able to pay what you’re probably expecting. He’s got to put his profits into cars he can actually sell.”

“You can’t sell this car?”

The salesman co*cked his head a little and gave Tucker a sidewise look. “Well, I’m not saying we couldn’t sell it. But who knows how long it would take to find a buyer? There’s not a lot of interest in this kind of car in Colorado. It isn’t made for mountain driving, for instance. Sure you could run it along U.S. 36 as far as you want to go. And see the irrigation units and impress all the beet-pickers.” He laughed softly and patted the hood. “People with money in this state will buy a condo in Steamboat Springs before they’ll sink it into a car like this. To buy something like this, you have to have some serious money to waste.”

“How much could we expect to get for it, if you don’t mind saying?”

The salesman shrugged. “It’s always what people are willing to pay. It’s like with anything. This car is a curiosity. It doesn’t have a bluebook value.” An impish look spread across his face. “It’s got the value of the buyer’s lust, to put it bluntly.” He strolled around to the front of the car and examined the grill. Looking up again, he said, “To find the right buyer, you really need to advertise it online.”

“We don’t have time for that. We need to go ahead and sell it.”

“Oh? Short of money, huh?” The salesman grinned. “Well then, maybe I could take it off your hands.”

Neal broke in, exasperated at the turn the conversation had taken: “Do you know of any dealers that, like, specialize in high-end used cars? That might be willing to give us a fair price?”

The salesman nodded briskly. “There’s one in Colorado Springs, about an hour from here. One of my buddies knows the owner pretty well. He’s an honest man. He’ll deal straight with you. But I’ve got to tell you that you can do better somewhere else, outside of Colorado. Like I said before, this is not the best market for a car like this.”

“Any suggestions?”

“You have to go where the buyers are. Florida’s a good market. I know of a Lamborghini dealer in Sarasota who would probably make a decent bid on this car. Anyone rich enough to throw away money on one of those things … Well, it’s a natural fit.” The salesman rubbed the back of his hand against his chin. “There’s a guy in Monterey, California, who buys Maseratis and Ferraris from bankrupt movie producers and sells them to collectors. This car is really hot with collectors right now … Oh, and that guy has a brother in Vegas who’s in the exact same business. They’re sort of unfriendly competitors, actually. And come to think of it, there’s a couple of dealers in the New York area that do pretty much the same thing, snatching up bargains from 35-year-old tycoons on their way down. There’s one in Sagaponack on Long Island, one in White Plains. And if these dealers won’t buy from you, they might give you a lead on private buyers.”

“Hey, doesn’t your dad have an apartment in Manhattan?” Neal asked Tucker. “He told me he goes there several times a year.”

“Yeah. He’s got his own place.”

“Maybe he’d let us use the apartment for a little while, give us a chance to find a buyer in the area.”

“Not a bad idea,” the salesman put in. “These cars are very popular in those Connecticut suburbs. In fact there’s a Boccaccio Club in … now what was the name of that place?”

“We don’t have to ask Dad’s permission,” Tucker insisted. “I can get in. I know where to get the key.”

“That might give us our best chance.”

Tucker looked away, his eyes veering toward his brows. “I don’t know, though. You really want to go all the way to New York?” Neal understood the weariness in Tucker’s voice because he shared it. The idea of spending another three or four days on the road with Tucker, and an indeterminate number of days cooped up in an apartment, wasn’t exactly an enticing prospect.

“Thanks for the advice,” Tucker said blandly, nodding vaguely to the salesman. Neal took this as a cue to start the car.

As they headed out of the lot, the salesman stood and waved fondly at the Boccaccio; he seemed to be giving the gleaming chrome one final caress.

In the fewest possible words, Tucker let Neal know that their next destination was Las Vegas. When they stopped for lunch, Neal got out his road map and traced a very simple route via I-70, through Vail and Grand Junction, into the Mormon wilderness, until the highway dead-ended at I-15, which cut through the desert into Nevada.

As they approached the mountains early in the afternoon, a brown haze cast a veil across the peaks until they disappeared behind the looming blue foothills. Neal dropped the car into third gear, listening to it hum in a deeper register as the road began to climb, as it hurtled up between the nearest hills, between the heaped layers of exposed rock. After several turns, though, the walls of rock opened up again, giving an immense view to the east, showing the city spreading out from its silver-toothed, iron-flecked core, across the rising plain into suburbs that spilled into more suburbs, with just a bare margin of open, orange-yellow scrubland at the edges of the farthest-flung clusters of houses.

Turning his face to the white lines ahead, Neal squinted in the sun that was beginning to dip toward the tops of the mountains. He reached back to where his steel-silver jacket was still heaped on the seat, pulling it toward him and groping in the inside pocket for his shades.

Tucker was leaning forward, turning the radio dial in an impatient search for stations, settling back for a moment when he found one that would send a steady signal and then leaning forward to reach the dial again when the annoying voices inevitably dissolved into even more annoying static. Finally he switched off the radio, stretched his limbs with loud accompanying groans, and wrapped his arms around the back of his seat.

“How long to Vegas?” he snapped, as if Neal were solely to blame for his impatience and his boredom.

“From what I can tell, it’s about 750 miles. That’s ten hours if I can speed a little and we don’t stop.”

“Why don’t you speed a lot and don’t stop? Maybe we can get to that place before they close and sell this thing. And spend the night at … what’s the name of that hotel with the pyramid?”

“You mean the Luxor?”

“That’s it. I always wanted to stay there.”

“Already spending money you don’t have.”

“My luck’s turning, man. I’ve told you before I’m due for a change in fortune.”

Neal glanced at Tucker and saw that a tense stillness had settled over him. “Look,” Neal said carefully. “I thought you had plans for that money. I thought you had to get yourself out of some trouble … of some kind. Not that I’m taking notes or anything. But if you have any ideas about visiting a casino …”

Tucker sat up and crossed his arms. “You think I’m some sort of weekend slot-grinder? Listen, man, I know how the games are fixed.”

“You have a few friends in Vegas, I assume.”

“I know one or two people,” he said with a careful show of nonchalance. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about science. I’m talking about chaos theory. I’m talking about random predictable coincidence.” He began explaining that cards in a blackjack deck would appear in clusters. “Like three out of every eleven cards played would be a queen, for example; four of the next fifteen would be a nine. Every denomination has its own separate weight, you see. The cards are manufactured that way. These are trade secrets. I probably shouldn’t be letting you in on all this.”

Nonetheless, Tucker spent the better part of an hour describing roulette wheels with hidden grooves, dice with blunted edges, room fresheners disseminated through hidden apertures in casino ceilings, scents formulated to inhibit rational thinking … Meanwhile, Neal periodically let his eyes drift away from the turns in the road, keeping a mental record of the upcoming curves as his attention wandered up the sides of the pine-blanketed mountains that surrounded them.

They had gone about thirty miles and had passed one small town situated near a bridge over a churning, white-capped creek, when peaks began to appear in the gaps between the lower mountains. These were dry peaks, well above the tree line but below the September snow line. The road seemed to be heading straight toward one triangular crag whose edges were clean and sharp in the glare of afternoon sunlight. The face of the peak was slate-gray with vein-colored streaks. The rock seemed somehow colder for the lack of snow, and the contrast between the bare rock and the rich covering of the lower mountains made the peak seem infinitely, chillingly remote.

Neal had been hungry for a closer look at the mountains ever since he first glimpsed the front range, as he was speeding through the plains nearly a week ago. But now that a clear view presented itself, he felt his heart sink. The sight of the peak made him feel small and pitiable. He wanted to claim some share of the mountains’ careless serenity, but now he was faced with something that had no affinity with human aims, purposes, or desires; it seemed to grow more distant as the Boccaccio burned the miles away.

He felt as if he had been drawing too heavily on his imagination for the past few days, creating and recreating himself in a hothouse world, and he was finally unequal to the challenge that the massive blankness of the mountain presented to him, unable to turn it into a projection of his will. He was relieved when a turn in the road screened the peak from view.

Tucker was still droning on when Neal’s phone rang. Grateful for something to break the heavy boredom stealing over him, he reached into his pocket to pluck it out.

“Harold.” Sheila spoke tensely at first and seemed about to plunge ahead with what she wanted to say, but then stopped, pacing herself. “You’re not busy now, are you?”

Neal glanced at Tucker, who seemed to be speaking entirely to himself. “Not exactly busy, no. What’s on your mind?”

“I hear someone talking,” she said, giving a resentful edge to her words.

“Just background noise. Tune it out.”

She waited a moment before saying anything and then began speaking in a rapid, anxious voice. “Harold, you know that I’m not trying to make any demands … Because you might get the wrong idea or something. It’s not like that.”

This was clearly a preamble to a major announcement, and her insistent tone showed that she expected him to help her along; perversely, he resisted.

“I was just wondering,” she said, slowing her cadence a little, “when you were heading back. To New York. Are you already on your way back? You’re not already there, are you?”

“Uh-uh. Got my hand on the wheel at this very moment.”

“Good. I mean, I was hoping … You have any idea when …?” She allowed a moment to lapse, again hoping for some help from him; then, with sudden aggression, she plunged ahead: “Because if you come this way again, I want to go with you.”

Neal declined to react right away, imagining instead how he would have reacted to that statement a week earlier, when he could still remember how it felt to have his hand on her thigh.

“I meant what I said, Harold, I’m not … Harold, are you still there?”

He grunted noncommittally.

“Harold, I don’t mean to burden you. I just need some help. I need to get away. Don’t you understand by now?” Her tone was becoming more demanding, even as her words took on a note of pleading. “All I want is to go to New York City. I’ll figure out the rest.”

Neal tightened his grip on the wheel as he listened to her flinty voice and then to the silence that followed. He felt his pulse thumping in the ear that brushed against the phone.

“How long is it going to be, Harold?” Her imagination was already taking flight with him. His defiant silence deepened. “Harold … I’m going to kill him. If I have to wait any longer I’m going to find a way to kill him, if I have to use my bare hands.”

He knew that her anger was mounting as she waited for him to reply, but he refused to let himself be bullied into speaking.

“If you would just … Harold, if you would just …” Her voice began to sound tight and forced, as if someone’s fingers were pressing against her windpipe.

“It’ll be a couple of days,” he said briskly. “Just hold on until … it might be Sunday. Sunday night, maybe.”

“I’ll call you to let you know when the coast is clear,” she said, sounding suddenly impassive.

“We’ll work it out,” he said. “Just sit tight.” He hung up.

Tucker was staring at Neal as he ended the call. “Who was that?” he asked peevishly.

Neal just shook his head and kept driving, searching the side of the road for the Georgetown exit. Glimpsing the town just ahead, its low, blocky buildings spread out along the contours of a narrow valley, he let the car coast into the turn lane and descend the ramp. The exit ramp led into a street full of turn-of-the-century brick buildings refitted into gift shops, bars and outfitters, their signs and window trimmings recently repainted for Labor Day visitors, draped with patriotic bunting. Neal stopped the car in front of a stone church with a slightly tilted wooden steeple.

“Good time to stop,” Tucker said. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

“Wait. I need to inform you about our change of plans.”

“What change of plans?”

“I’m heading back the other way. We’re going to New York City.”

“Hey, in case you’ve forgotten, you’re the driver. The driver just drives. I say where we go.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve still got the title.”

Tucker looked utterly balked for a moment, but in the next instant he lunged toward Neal, reaching for the inside of his jacket. Neal blocked Tucker’s outstretched hand and thrust his arm back.

“Just listen, O.K.?”

“Let go of me.”

Tucker tried to wriggle out from the grip of Neal’s hand, while Neal took some satisfaction in proving that he really was the stronger man. After a purposeful delay he released Tucker and settled back into the driver’s seat.

“Look,” he said, “you still owe me money. Nine percent of the sale price, plus the money I loaned you.”

Tucker flexed his shoulders, trying to recover some kind of swagger. “Yeah. What of it?”

“My point is that if you cooperate with me, and we go to New York, all you’ll owe me is the money I loaned you, plus the interest. I believe we agreed on twenty percent.”

Tucker ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip and gave Neal a cool, calculating look.

“There’s nothing to decide here,” Neal said flatly. “I’ve told you what we’re going to do. I just wanted to let you know why it’s a good deal for you. As soon as you hand me the key to your dad’s apartment, I’ll hand you the title. You can repay the loan after you sell the car.”

“Man, I was planning to pad my margins at the blackjack table,” Tucker complained.

“Well, there’s always Atlantic City,” Neal reminded him. “Take my percentage with you to the casinos and put the rest in escrow.”

Tucker nodded. “Thank God for Atlantic City.”

10. An Oz of a Different Color

So they headed east, out of the mountains, through the city’s restless sprawl, out into the plains toward Kansas. After several hours, when they reached the state line, they were greeted by a billboard welcoming them to “The Land of Ahhhs,” and the notion of a technicolor dream flashed through Neal’s mind, but he reminded himself that he was heading for something real, whatever it might be. There was an element of fantasy to it all, but he told himself that he was headed for a place where unformed dreams would take some sort of gritty, grippable shape. The transition from dream to reality was fraught with uncertainty and risk, but the only thing that mattered was his willingness to make the leap.

If he had once thought that going to Kentucky was a backward step, he now knew that he had been wrong. The return was actually a forward movement in the dance. Sheila had initiated the dance, had taken the lead at first, but she had only been teaching him his first steps, and now it was his turn to take the lead. She was willingly yielding to his strength. He was only beginning to discover what kind of strength he possessed.

He remained at the wheel for the rest of the day, facing the darkening flat horizon, reflecting obsessively on what lay ahead, never questioning his decision, yet never permitting himself to think that any scenario he could evoke had any relation to what would actually happen. He allowed himself, though, to play out certain conceivable storylines in his mind. In one version, he would be doing field research for the novel he expected to write. The tale of the beautiful student in peril and the saga of the self-mocking robber barons both seemed now like little more than half-remembered dreams, like the ones that had troubled his sleep the night before. The real story, the one he was meant to write, had already left tread marks in the dust. The car crash would be written out of the plot, replaced by … some other random circ*mstance. Maybe the protagonist would have to stop for directions … or while stopping to get gas he would see a young woman with radiant eyes and a supple gait crossing the street. One thing would lead to another. The dance would come about and would happen exactly as it did, except the final steps would lead out the door and into the world. Once he arrived at Sheila’s house he could begin rehearsing and discovering what would eventually go into his novel. Or instead of plotting out the course of a novel, he would begin plotting out the course of a love affair, maybe the beginning of a whole new life, even further removed from the one that ended several weeks ago. The role he was planning to take on might become the role he would inhabit. Naturally, at some point she would have to know more of the truth about him, but why did the truth have to be an obstacle? If being with him was an adventure to her, why did the source of interest have to come from the identity he had clothed himself with? Why couldn’t she discover something in him that was just as enchanting. He kept reminding himself that he wasn’t the same man that he used to be. He was in the process of becoming something else, and why couldn’t he finally be what she was imagining, or something like it? His thoughts ran in cycles, and every time he reached this point he experienced a feeling of passionate assent, followed by irony and satire at his own expense, and a return to the distanced perspective of the aspiring artist, but again and again he returned to the cusp of faith and cherished it while it lasted.

Tucker spent the return trip napping occasionally, spending most of the rest of his time gazing out the window and cursing the flatness and dullness of the surroundings. He made Neal promise that they would make their way through Mt. Pleasant again, complaining that he had been on half-rations for the better part of the week. He had shared a joint with Eusebio, but down on Colfax Avenue he hadn’t actually found the merchandise he was looking for at a price he was willing to pay. There was money left over from his pawnshop transactions, enough to keep him well supplied until they got to New York, but first he had to get to his supplier. When he wasn’t mocking the sameness of Kansas grain silos or repeating slogans on billboard signs in falsetto, he asked Neal how much farther it was to Iowa. Neal humored him by pulling a mileage figure out of thin air; it always seemed to keep him quiet for half an hour.

By the time they crossed the next state line, dark night had long descended, presided over by a quarter moon, which Neal could see when he glanced up at the Interstate exit signs. The Missouri river shimmered in the delicate light—broad, imposing, frigid-looking, offering some kind of inert truth that Neal was unable grasp as the Boccaccio, speeding through light traffic, left the bridge behind. They spent the night in the car, at a truckers’ rest stop a few miles east of Independence. Neal slept uncomfortably, with one hand firmly on the zipper pouch, waking frequently to meet the baffled, bleary eyes of truckers who circled the car and peered through the windows. At his first glimpse of daylight, he started the car and made his way back onto the Interstate, headed toward St. Louis.

About an hour before noon, Neal exited onto U.S. 61, about twenty miles west of the Mississippi. Tucker was awake by this time, and after readjusting sullenly to his surroundings, he began asking about Iowa again.

“We’re headed there,” Neal said. “Just hold on. You want me to stop and get you something to eat? I stopped and had some drive-thru while you were still asleep.”

Tucker shook his head vaguely. “I don’t have any appetite. I feel like I could go a year without eating.”

Neal glanced at him. He had the washed-out, listless look of someone sitting in a dentist’s chair waiting for the lidocaine to take effect. Neal almost felt like saying something encouraging, but he had a nervous reluctance to involve himself in Tucker’s affairs any more than he was already forced to, as if even empathy could somehow make him a willing accomplice.

They were in Iowa by mid-afternoon, and they reached the outskirts of Mt. Pleasant just before four p.m. However, when they got to the end of the route they had followed a week earlier, there was nothing there. Nothing except some decoupled connections—a pipe running from a well and the end of a power cable dangling from a pole. They could see the rectangle marked by the underpinning and a few scattered leaves from the canopy of trees, but there was amazingly nothing else.

Tucker jumped out of the car and ran toward the center of the empty space, then stopped and stared, his arms spread wide, expectantly, as if he thought that the vacancy was nothing more than a mirage and that the trailer and the cordon of dogs would appear like a palace in The Thousand and One Nights. After a long, watchful moment, he began stumbling around, looking intently at the ground, kicking dried dog turds, reaching down to pick up a plastic sand shovel embedded in the loose soil, turning to gaze back in the direction of the road, apparently toying with the theory that they had taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Suddenly he fixed his eyes on Neal, who had climbed out of the car by this time. “This is your fault!”

Neal returned his stare and just shook his head in bemusem*nt.

“He was tipped off,” Tucker said. “He left in the middle of the night because he knew they were coming after him.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“It was you.”

“You mean I tipped him off?”

“I mean you ratted. I mean you made a call to the FBI or the DEA or the CIA, or whoever. He got wind of it and bugged out.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you thought there was some reward. Or because you hate me, you’re jealous of me. Or because you’re evil.”

“O.K. Back up just a little. I’m jealous of you. How does that work?”

“Because of what I have coming and you don’t.”

Neal shook his head and laughed. For an instant, he glimpsed the way Tucker saw himself, or the way that Tucker imagined he was seen by others, and the contrast between this fictional crown prince and the thunderstruck wraith shuffling clumsily through rocks and excrement was unimaginably ridiculous.

“Listen,” he said with slow, heavy emphasis, “I am so sick of taking crap from you and the other members of your half-assed family.” His words, breaking the surface tension of his mind, sent ripples of anger from his gut to his fingernails. With a dramatic gesture, he yanked the zipper pouch from his jacket, opened it, and took out the title. “Don’t forget,” he said, “that this is the only thing standing between you and the street. I could rip this thing in pieces, and then just see how long it would take you to get your money and your … whatever it is you’ve got to have right now.” He studied Tucker’s eyes. He felt a rush of power as he measured the intensity of Tucker’s need. “And if I wanted to, I could drive it away now. I could take it to Eusebio and make a deal. Do you think you’d ever get that car back? And where would you be? Running for your life from that Voortman character.”

Tucker’s face was turning quickly from one shade of white to another, more sickly shade. “Don’t say that—”

“Quiet. I’m not finished yet.” Neal replaced the title in the pouch, placed the pouch on the roof of the car, and then turned to face Tucker again. “I want you to put your hands on your head and get down. On your knees.”

Tucker gave Neal a disbelieving look, and the two of them faced off in silence, until Tucker finally guessed that there might not be any bluff in Neal’s voice. He did as he had been told.

Neal removed his tweed jacket and tossed it in the back seat of the Boccaccio. Grabbing up the silver jacket, he put it on, and pressed the lapels with the flats of his hands.

“Now,” he said with studied calmness, “I want you to understand a few things. Starting now, I own a record company headquartered in New York City. And I think you know my name. What is it?”

Tucker was still coming to terms with his unforeseen humiliation. All he could do was to glare at Neal resentfully.

“I want you to say my name so I’ll know you’ve got it. Who am I?”

Tucker flirted with insubordination, but prudently gave in. “You’re Harold Hill,” he mumbled.

“I didn’t hear you.”

Tucker rolled his eyes, but gave in again. “Harold f*cking Hill.”

“Right. And you’re my business partner. My junior partner. So if I tell you to fax a contract to a honky-tonk piano player in Tupelo, Mississippi, what do you say?”

A queasy-looking smirk played across Tucker’s lips. “I guess I say, ‘All right.’”

“‘All right … who?’”

“‘All right, Harold. ”

“Try again. Remember, you’re my junior partner.”

Tucker grunted hard, as if he were forcing a gust of profanity back down his throat. “‘All right, Mr. Hill.’”

“I guess that’ll do. Now get up.” Neal picked up the zipper pouch from the roof of the car and held it, gesturing with it as he continued his instructions to Tucker. “You’ll cooperate with me fully, not just because of this, but because of what I know about you. You think I want to rat on someone? I know enough about you to have you put away for two hundred years.”

“You’d be a dead man.”

“Worry about yourself, O.K.? And I wouldn’t have to go to the authorities, anyway. All I’d have to do is tell your father about a few of your transactions. You think he’d impressed by your little attempt at Grand Theft Auto? You think he’d like the idea of his fortune being sucked away by bookies and drug dealers?”

Tucker’s shoulders crumpled. “He wouldn’t care,” he said weakly. “He’s never cared about what I do,” he added, with a little more conviction.

“I don’t think those odds would be good. I wouldn’t try those odds in Las Vegas if I were you. By the way, while we’re on the subject, I’ve got to give you this letter. Like I said before, it’s all about your inheritance. That’s what I was told, anyway.” Neal unzipped the pouch, withdrew the sealed, unmarked envelope, and extended it to Tucker, who made no gesture to take it. “Come on. I have to give it to you or I don’t get the rest of my money.”

“I don’t need to—”

“You’re afraid to read it, aren’t you?”

“Screw you. I just get bored reading financial stuff.”

“You don’t have to read it. You just have to tell your father that you read it. Here.”

When Tucker still didn’t reach for it, Neal stepped forward and wedged it in one of Tucker’s pants pockets. Then he dropped the zipper pouch into the inner lining of the silver jacket and snapped his fingers.

“Let’s go.”

Tucker refused to move.

“Fine,” Neal said. “I’m headed for New York.” He got into the Boccaccio, started the engine, and gunned it twice. The sound appeared to jolt Tucker out of some nirvana of self-pity, and he dragged his way to the car, scraping dry dirt with the tips of his shoes.

Neal drove back the way he had come until reaching I-70 again near St. Louis, then merged onto I-55 toward Cape Girardeau. They had hamburgers at a deserted truck stop somewhere along the way, staring at each other throughout the meal. Tucker picked at his food and ran his thumb along the edge of his fork, muttering something that sounded vaguely like a prayer. Neal, fantastically hungry, ordered dessert and coffee, waiting all along for a call from Sheila to let him know he could make his final approach. He was just a little over an hour away by this time, and he knew that Krike might go prowling for business in the night. Everything seemed to be falling into place so perfectly for him, that all he felt now was cool, confident anticipation. Every moment his power seemed to be more fully revealed to him, so that now he calmly expected everything within his reach to yield to the unfolding of his will.

They crossed the Mississippi near Cairo. Neal kept following the same highway until he reached Paducah, where he drove around aimlessly until dark, pulling out his phone from time to time to make sure it was still charged. He found a cheap-looking motel on the outskirts of the city and thought about checking in, but decided to hang on to his dwindling supply of cash and just spend the night in the parking lot instead.

Not long before midnight, Tucker got out of the car and went into the front office. He came out again a few minutes later, wearing a look of persecution, and climbed back into the car without bothering to glance at Neal.

“What was that about?” Neal asked.

“Nothing,” Tucker said. “It’s just that night clerks can sometimes be a little helpful about some things.”

“Are you in need of a woman?”

“I’m in need all right,” Tucker snapped.

“No help?”

“She was someone’s grandmother. Very nice lady. Not very open-minded, though. I hope she rots in Hell.”

Tucker gazed at a streetlight, apparently abandoning himself to unpleasant reveries. Occasionally he seemed to be thinking aloud, but all that Neal heard was a string of names and places that had no apparent relation to each other. Neal managed to fall asleep and stay asleep until daybreak. When he woke he found Tucker still staring at the same streetlight, its globe now extinguished.

Neal started the car and drove back into the city in search of a cheap place to have a quick breakfast. Tucker fell asleep at the table before the food arrived, and Neal had to punch him on the arm to rouse him so he could eat. Once they were back in the car, Tucker fell asleep again quickly, his head slumping off the headrest of his seat, his lips slack and parted, snores escaping in fits and starts.

Neal pulled up at a shopping mall at just after nine and went into an expansive Barnes & Noble, leaving Tucker in the car. He took a perfunctory look at the display of hardcover books adorned with glossy images of happy, well-fed pundits and celebrities and then passed along to the restroom. Satisfied that it had been recently cleaned, he stripped off all of his clothes and gave himself a stand-up bath at the sink with foamy hand soap. After splashing himself all over and drying with handfuls of paper towels, he stood back and regarded his body in the mirror. He felt sure that he had lost a few pounds over the last ten days, with his irregular meals, his now-engrained habit of eating just to tide himself over for a few hours. With relatively little effort he was able to draw his stomach taut, leaving just a modest knot of extra flesh around his navel; his chest was still flat thanks to a weight-pumping regimen he had maintained for a little over a year, until a combination of cost and annoyance had caused him to drop his gym membership. Turning, he took a backward glance at his buttocks and thighs; he’d had thirty-nine years to get used to his own nakedness, but for the first time he tried to see it through a woman’s eyes. He took a half-step to the left, as if following a fox-trot pattern stenciled on the floor, and he noted the way his thigh muscles flexed. After another moment he turned himself back around and coolly regarded his veiny member, slightly aroused but still angling down, pink-tinged and raw-looking after the scrubbing he had given it.

Stepping out of the pool of water on the floor, he dressed, put on his shades, and took one last look in the mirror, now convinced that the veils he had created for himself merely heightened the latent authority of his flesh.

His phone finally rang as he was walking back to the car through the vast, mostly vacant parking lot.

“Lyle got a call about a big wreck near the Tennessee line,” Sheila said. “He should be gone for a couple of hours at least. I think it’s time to move.”

At the sound of her voice, his pulse quickened, and he was instantly halfway to a complete erection. After four weeks of celibacy, he felt his need so powerfully that his knees trembled. Instinctively, he looked around to see if anyone was around to notice his embarrassingly obvious condition; he made an effort to bring himself under control and give his voice the proper degree of assertion.

“I’m there,” he said brusquely. “Half an hour, tops.”

“O.K.,” she said. “But park around the corner. Just in case he comes back. Don’t call me. Let me call you.”

Neal climbed back into the Boccaccio and slammed the door unintentionally hard. Tucker still didn’t wake up. He made his way down U.S. 45 under an overcast sky, passing through the town limits from a different direction than before; however, once he reached the town center with the public park, he was able to orient himself with little trouble. He pulled up to the curb just before reaching the intersection with the street where the Krikes lived. Preparing to exit the car, he reflected that he was really only now taking the great leap. Either that, or he was faced with a new way of living that involved one leap after another, toward landing places that were always out of view. Gripping the wheel as he psyched himself, he nodded very deliberately, absorbing the truth about what it meant to fully become himself.

He turned to the still-sleeping Tucker and punched him on the arm.

“Lemme be,” Tucker said with his eyes closed. “I told you I’ll have the money

on …” His head slumped as his voice trailed off.

Neal punched him harder, and he jerked awake, his eyes wide and bloodshot.

“Get in the back seat,” Neal commanded. “And don’t forget my name.”

Neal sprang out of the car, stepped up to the corner of the street to check for Krike’s truck; seeing nothing, he walked briskly along the cracked sidewalk. The neighborhood was so completely vacant-looking that he momentarily imagined he was the last man left alive in the world. Crossing the bare lawn, now strewn with a few crisp leaves, he glimpsed the dog on the chain next door, asleep now. But the sound of Neal’s footsteps roused him. He rose to his feet and began skulking in a semicircle, ducking his head but fixing his eyes on the vaguely familiar intruder. Neal stopped and mentally measured the length of the chain, stepping to the side a couple of feet as he continued toward the door. He knocked three times and heard the dog growling softly behind his back.

His phone rang and the dog began barking.

“Yes?” Neal’s chest muscles knotted as he prepared to jump back.

“Is that you, Harold?”

“Yes.”

“Come on in. The door’s not locked.”

He was relieved to be able to enter the house, but he could feel his throat tighten as he made still another leap into the unknowable.

Nothing about the look of the living room surprised him. He had memorized the features of the small room already and nothing had changed except that the pieces of Krike’s Lego city had been swept away and replaced by something constructed of silver-painted plastic blocks. It was actually just the foundation to an incomplete structure, rising in uneven narrowing tiers. The smell of the house was mostly familiar to him as well. It occurred to him now that the food odors were probably embedded deep in the carpet and furniture. The residue of meals from any number of years—probably as long as the Krikes had been married—were merged with the chemical substance of the paint and the white dust of the drywall and the pores of the studs holding the house together. There was still that same well-known but unidentifiable odor he had noticed before, but now, overlaying everything else, there was a wispy scent of lavender.

Neal could hear someone moving through the rooms in the back of the house, and in another moment he saw Sheila stepping into the living room, wearing a blouse with long, loose-fitting sleeves, tight at the bust; a knee-length black skirt and sheer black hose; open-toed black pumps with two-inch heels that clattered sharply as she strode across the vinyl floor carrying two suitcases.

She was stunning. Her face still had the smooth, blank expression she had worn before, but now she was wearing makeup that covered her freckles and made her cheekbones prominent, giving her an air of confident reserve. Dark outlines gave her eyes a wakeful gleam; her lips glistened like strips of pink satin. Her hair now had a deep auburn tint; the top layer was swept across her temples and pinned behind, while the rest tumbled in a profusion of curls around her shoulders.

The moment he saw her, Neal’s fantasies of dominance fled. He knew in that instant that he would do anything—humble himself, disgrace himself, perjure himself, injure himself, if necessary—to possess her.

“Here, carry these for me,” she said hurriedly, heaving the two suitcases and plopping them at his feet. “I’ve got to get a couple more things.”

She disappeared down the hall again. Neal took hold of the suitcases and lifted them easily, swinging them to gauge the heft of their contents. As he breathed in the aroma she left behind, the mingling of powder and scented soap and some blossomy fragrance that wrapped her like a scarf, he imagined what the suitcases must be holding—silk blouses, gossamer nightgowns, lace-edged slips, a whole garden of colorful, fine-textured clothes that had lain in the darkness of her closet until given the chance to bloom in the light of sudden liberty. He began thinking of how he might extend the journey to New York into some seven-day fugue, working his way through the rest of his cash and credit, splurging on hotels and fine restaurants in a dozen states, ranging across latitude and longitude chasing the southbound summer warmth … What to do with Tucker might be one small but manageable problem. By the time he heard her heading back down the hall, his head was already miles ahead of his feet.

She clattered across the floor again, this time with a bag hanging from a strap on her shoulder and an infant car seat gripped in her right hand. She tipped the seat so that Neal could see its chubby, alert-looking, nine-month-old occupant. The child had brown eyes, frizzy, coarse-textured black hair, and translucent skin; she seemed to be looking so purposefully at him that he was tricked into giving her an idiotic smile.

“You remember Matilda,” Sheila said, matter-of-factly.

“Matilda …” Neal seemed to be searching for a last name.

Sheila laughed heartily. “Oh, Harold. Don’t be so silly. I know you remember my daughter. Of course, she was napping when you came here before, but I brought you into the nursery to look at her. I know you remember.”

Neal knew that he had been in something of a daze that day. Perhaps there would be nothing remarkable in forgetting something. But would he have forgotten that? Every minute of that afternoon seemed to have been so perfectly choreographed, from the moment that Krike left the house to the final, comic catastrophe. Where would this have fit in?

“Don’t you remember?” Sheila insisted. “You said the way the light glistened on her hair made her look like she had a halo I thought that was such a beautiful thing to say. You’ve got such a way with words, Harold.”

Neal smiled stiffly to acknowledge the compliment, and he wished he had actually said it. He was beginning to picture the scene by the cradle; it seemed like yet another half-remembered dream.

“Here,” she said. “Maybe you can carry the diaper bag, too.” She slipped it off her shoulder and draped it over one of his. “We better be going.”

She strode briskly toward the door while Neal remained in place, his mind too full of contrary motives to permit a clear sense of purpose. He stared at the unfinished plastic edifice in the corner of the room.

Sheila followed the trend of his gaze and let out a full-throated huff. “Boys and their toys,” she said. “Come on, Harold. There’s no point in wasting any more time here.”

Neal’s head was beginning to throb. As soon as Sheila opened the door and stepped through the threshold, he followed her automatically, pulled along by a force too great to resist. When they got to the Boccaccio, Sheila ordered Tucker into the front seat, so she could spread out in the back. A few words of introduction were exchanged, but Sheila was clearly anxious to put the town limits behind her.

After half an hour, Neal merged onto I-64, but they had not gone twenty miles on the interstate before Sheila instructed him to take the next exit. “I’ve got to get the formula warmed up. I forgot to feed Matilda before we left. She’s starting to get a little fussy.”

She ran inside a McDonald’s with her diaper bag and came back out ten minutes later shaking a full bottle of formula. Back on the interstate, Tucker turned to Neal and began wondering aloud how many stops they would have to make on their way to New York, what with a child needing food and a woman needing bathroom trips at small, regular intervals—until Sheila shushed him with a harsh, peremptory whisper. For the next thirty miles there was no sound except for the baby sucking on her bottle, Sheila murmuring a monotonous lullaby, and the tires whining faintly on the asphalt.

11. The Return of the Repo Man

Neal kept a phantom map open in his mind as he navigated his way from I-64 to I-65 at Elizabethtown, then north to the loop around Louisville, where he merged onto I-71, intending to link with I-80 in eastern Ohio. From there he would have a straight latitudinal route to New York City. As Tucker had correctly guessed, he had to make frequent stops to attend to the needs of his newest passengers; between stops, he kept the needle close to 80 to make up for lost time.

The inside of the car filled up with a nursery smell, that essence of changed diapers, baby powder, spilled formula, and puke-scented drool which had made up the distantly familiar aroma in the Krikes’ living room. Adding to the thick atmosphere of the car was Sheila’s increasingly pungent perfume, which seemed to be breaking down into its discrete chemical components, all of them acidic and even faintly tarry. And there was no escape from the thickening miasma; after crossing the Ohio, they met with a steady drizzle, making it impossible to open a window for relief.

Sheila’s voice seemed to be going through the same kind of dissolution as her scent. All along the way she gave instructions to slow down, pull over, stop, move the seat up, move it back, turn the air on, turn the air off, and each time her voice seemed to have a different tone—grating, pleading, softly insistent, steel-edged, weary. Now and then he would look back and see her wearing the same remote, bloodless look on her face, the only proof that the same woman was still occupying the same space. Mile after mile, Neal felt his muscles getting tighter and increasingly twitchy, while Tucker sat slumped with an unvarying expression of numb disbelief. Of all the passengers, the baby seemed to be holding up the best. She slept frequently, and while awake she could suck contentedly on a pacifier for up to an hour at a time, intermittently emitting single-syllable babble that expressed either curiosity or momentary annoyance. Clearly, over the course of her nine-month existence she’d gotten used to situations that were not exactly suited for human comfort and had learned to make the best of them.

As darkness approached, Neal pulled up at a budget hotel on the outskirts of Akron. As he was checking in, Sheila strode into the lobby carrying Matilda in the car seat. Her hair had half-uncurled in the close air of the long drive, and her makeup seemed to have thickened into a sallow patina, spread over her face like a sheet of tissue. But she was walking with the same queenly demeanor that had propelled her out the door of the tiny house in Kentucky. For whatever reason, she had reapplied her lipstick and was facing the world with gleaming, clenched lips.

“Two rooms, right?” she asked abruptly.

Neal hadn’t thought to ask for more than one. He had been renting one single room after another for the better part of two weeks. “Actually, I …”

Tucker came shuffling in through the lobby door, hands in his pockets, kicking the carpet with every third step.

Sheila fixed him with a distant look and then turned back to Neal, her eyes full of cool indignation. “We’ve got to have two rooms, Harold. What were you thinking?”

“Ditto that,” Tucker said, glancing at Sheila and her child with a visible shudder.

Neal gave one set of key cards to Tucker; then, after slinging the diaper bag over his shoulder, he wedged his briefcase under his right arm, gripped both of the suitcases, and made his way to the other room. After he had opened the door for Sheila, she paused at the threshold and sniffed twice. Looking over her shoulder, across the matted, mealy-colored carpet, Neal could see dark spots on the canvas drapes.

“I guess we could have done a little better than this,” Neal said tentatively, groping for a plausible lie. “It’s just that … on the road I like to stay in touch, you know. With everyday American life.”

“It’s fine, Harold. It’s just one night anyway, right?”

She made her way into the room and set the down the carrier, holding a peaceful pacifier-sucking Matilda, on one of the twin beds. Neal set her things down next to the bed she’d chosen. He glanced at her for a cue, but she simply returned his look with the blankness that was becoming increasingly familiar; he wavered, shifting his feet without moving anywhere, and then with a bold impulse he set his briefcase down next to the other bed.

“I guess I’ll just settle myself right here,” he said, with a thin pretense of casualness.

“Sounds good,” she said noncommittally as she set herself down on the bed and began unfastening her shoes.

He sat on the other bed and watched her tugging at her hose, pulling the fabric away from her toes. He studied her feet with an obscure tenderness, a strange new feeling for him. He kept expecting her to say something, possibly ask him to leave the room so she could change clothes, possibly begin posing questions about what they would do once they reached New York, but she remained silent as she leaned back, propping herself on her elbows, gazing at the ceiling as if searching for seams in the plaster. She tilted her head to look in his direction, her expression still unreadable. After a couple of silent moments, they heard Matilda spit out her pacifier and begin to complain in an eloquent string of shapeless vowels. Sheila got up and unstrapped the child, lifting her and then setting her down against the side of the bed, letting her stand on her own feet. Both of them watched her as she stepped slowly sideways along the edge of the bed, gripping the coverlet with one hand, beating the bed with other hand, commenting on her own movements with energetic, gleeful sounds.

Sheila lost interest before Neal did. She gave him another brief, empty glance and then reached over for the remote on the nightstand and turned on the TV. She picked her way rapidly through the channels, pausing only for a moment at the telenovela on Univision.

“You hungry, or anything?” Neal finally said, standing.

“Not at all.”

“What about Matilda?”

“I’ve got her food with me. Thanks.”

“O.K.,” Neal said with an air of decision, even though he had no idea what he meant to do next. “Well …” He decided he had to leave the room and at least get some fresh air. Possibly a drink. He remembered seeing an Applebee’s on the way in. “I think I’ll stretch my legs,” he said.

She said nothing for a moment, still gazing at the parade of images on the small screen.

“Be quiet when you come in,” she finally said. “I’ve got to get Matilda to sleep.”

They both glanced at the child, who was making kissing sounds as she pressed her face against the coverlet, over and over again.

When Neal reached the lobby, he found Tucker at the front desk, apparently trying to ingratiate himself with another desk clerk, still having no success. He darted toward Neal as soon as their eyes met. Neal continued to head toward the door, but Tucker took him by the sleeve and pushed him in the direction of the breakfast tables.

“I want to know what you were thinking,” he said hoarsely. “What kind of idea is it to drag along a woman with a baby? No one told me about any goddamn baby.”

Neal jerked his arm away. “Just go along for now,” he said. “We’ll be in New York tomorrow, and you can have your own way then.”

“But listen, man. Listen to me.” He put his hands on Neal’s shoulders and turned him around while pushing him further into the corner of the room. “Don’t you know . . . babies, they’re a fountain of germs. They’ve got spit, sh*t, everything … bubbling over with bacteria, man. I can’t survive another day in a car with that … puking …” His voice sputtered to a stop.

Tucker’s face was drawn and pale. He had a look of intense, strained concentration, a kind of earnestness that didn’t fit his personality very well. “Don’t you understand? I’ve got a compromised immune system. Eight months of torture will do that to you. Measles, chicken pox, diarrhea, anything could kill me, man.”

Neal turned sharply out of the way but couldn’t pull himself from Tucker’s grasp. He took hold of Tucker’s wrists and angrily broke his grip. “Why don’t you get your head out of your ass for just once? Just one time in your life.”

A couple of men in khaki slacks and golf shirts, passing by on their way to the elevator, interrupted their conversation and paused to stare at Neal and Tucker with cold fascination.

Neal looked shamefully away and began heading for the outside door again. Silently, Tucker kept pace with him until they were outside, where a slithery breeze was blowing and an autumn chill had descended with the coming of complete darkness.

Tucker took hold of Neal’s jacket again, this time with a light, supplicating touch. “I just need you to drive me downtown. Just go to wherever you start seeing a lot of busted streetlights. I’ll ask around.”

“Come with me and I’ll buy you a drink. That’s the best offer you’re going to get tonight.”

Tucker let go of Neal’s jacket and his shoulders slumped. He gave Neal a dispirited look and then shook his head. “Forget it. I’ll just hitch my way downtown.”

“Better be careful,” Neal said, with no particular conviction. He waited for a moment, feeling a sudden, inexplicable need for male companionship and thinking that Tucker might change his mind; finally he turned away and headed for the car. As he drove out of the parking lot, he saw Tucker still standing in the same spot, coatless in the chilly breeze, his arms wrapped around his waist.

When Neal returned, the lights were off, the room lit only by faint radiance from the security lights in the parking lot and a green glimmer from the motel sign. Sheila, stripped to her underwear, was sitting with outstretched legs on one of the twin beds, cradling Matilda in her arms; her bra was unhooked and the child was feeding from her left breast.

“It’s the only way I can get her to go to sleep,” she commented sourly, speaking to the general darkness.

Carrying a newspaper that he had bought in the lobby, Neal made his way carefully over to his bed and stretched out on the coverlet with his clothes on. He switched on the light next to the headboard and let his eyes drift over the words and pictures, while he listened to the rhythmic slurping sounds coming from across the room, occasionally followed or preceded by a sigh, a soft, distinctly feminine sound that could have come from either the mother or the child.

The sounds gradually ceased, and then he heard the rustling of the bedclothes and an indistinct murmur. He could hear Sheila setting her feet down on the carpet, and after another quiet moment he could hear her padding across the floor. When she came into his field of vision, she was gliding on the flattened soles of her feet toward the open suitcase, which had been propped on the tiny loveseat near the window.

Her back turned to him, she slid her bra off and dropped it into the suitcase ; as she started peeling off her panties, she darted a quick glance at Neal, who looked away in a fit of shyness, his heart thumping briskly as he imagined what he wasn’t allowing himself to see. He could hear the rustle of fabric and when she crossed his field of vision again, moving to the window to close the drapes, she was wearing a filmy nightgown. She turned, looked pointedly toward him again and appeared to be smiling, although her expression was veiled by the murky space between them. She stood on the balls of her feet for a moment, seemingly poised to move in any imaginable direction, but when she finally moved she headed back toward her bed. Halfway there, she pirouetted, pivoting on one taut leg while bending the other knee in a supple, inviting way, as the hem of her gown lifted and fluttered. One turn complete, she continued her swift progress toward the bed and then settled herself carefully next to the sleeping child.

“Should I turn the light off?” Neal asked gingerly.

“Do you what want,” Sheila replied in a soft, expiring voice.

Neal briefly tried to concentrate on the paper; giving up finally, he switched off the light, swiveled to the edge of his bed, and undressed. After setting his clothes down on the air conditioning unit, he began stepping lightly around his bed until he reached the edge of Sheila’s. Leaning over, he looked for signs of wakefulness, but her head rested in perfect stillness on the oversized pillow she was sharing with Matilda, as if she had fallen asleep the instant she had spoken the last word.

Retreating, he got under the covers of his bed, and lying flat on his back, closed his eyes. He wanted to conjure up Sheila’s body from what he had seen, imagining her in different shades of light, in different settings, in different postures. But instead his mind kept taking him back to that inexorable moment when he had watched Lainie dressing for work, and she had pressed her own belly with tenderness and serene anticipation, and he had said, “You’re not pregnant, are you?” He could hear himself say it again and again, with every conceivable intonation, none of which sounded exactly right. And he could hear her answer, each word coming home to him with a quiet thud: “Don’t worry. It’s not yours.” Those were the words that he’d wanted to hear, and every now and then, when he thought about the exchange, it troubled him that she’d said exactly what he’d wanted her to say. It was as if her words were an echo of something that she had heard in his voice. His question had seemed perfectly natural, perfectly neutral. Yet he could have said it differently. Instead of “You’re not pregnant …,” he probably should have asked, “Are you pregnant?” Or, with of a note of sympathy, “I didn’t know you were pregnant.” His phrasing was an accusation, not an expression of interest or concern. Then again, the words themselves may have had nothing to do with it. He recalled that there had been a perceptible quaver in his voice. Possibly because it was the first thing he had said all morning and he hadn’t had a chance to wring the gunk out of his throat. Possibly because he was still sleepy and not yet ready to process any new thoughts. Possibly because he was terrified. Because he dreaded being imposed upon in that way. Because he’d assumed she was taking certain prudent measures and was shocked to find that he had been dangerously vulnerable all along. Regardless, what she had heard in his voice had told her all she needed to know about his ability to take responsibility for the consequences of his own actions. So by the time she had said, “Don’t worry,” he had failed some important test of character, and she was ready to release him from anything other than an incidental role in her life. He didn’t know how many times he had reverted to that moment, and he had tried to recall what, if anything, had gone through his mind just before he had said, “You’re not pregnant …” Had his words carried any deliberate purpose or had he simply been following the drift of his thoughts? He couldn’t understand why the question so often loomed large for him, but he had sometimes suspected that a maddening secret about himself had lurked under his tone of voice.

Neal’s mind was in mute turmoil until it finally went blank. He woke up six hours later in moonlit darkness, roused by a metallic whine coming from the parking lot, just below the window. It was a sound that he had heard exactly once and knew very well. Whipping aside the sheets, he thrust himself out of bed, and reached for his glasses on the nightstand; stepping across to the window, he pushed the drapes apart and pressed his face against the cool glass. Splashes of white moonlight and yellowy artificial light illuminated the parking lot, and he watched as the back half of the Boccaccio was being lifted up, the back tires hitched to the yoke extending from the rear of Krike’s truck. Neal continued to watch until the arm of the wheel-lift stopped moving and Krike himself emerged from the cab of the truck, taking off his cap to scratch his scalp, looking up toward the second-floor window from which Neal was observing him, his attention probably drawn by the just-opened drapes. Some prominent features—the rims of his glasses, his cheekbones, his forearms, his boots—stood out in the scattered light, but much of him reposed in shadow, as if he had only halfway materialized out of the darkness.

Neal put on a pair of jeans and one of his black T-shirts. He pulled his leather loafers on, not bothering with socks. Just before leaving the room, he checked on Sheila and the baby, both making peaceful sleeping sounds, and then he reached into the closet for his jacket. After opening the door, he replaced his glasses with his shades and finally headed down the hall to the stairs.

He walked across the lot, kicking gravel purposefully as he approached the tow truck, determined to let Krike know that he was equal to the situation. Krike turned to look as Neal approached, but he said nothing and made no further movement.

“You might want to explain what you’re doing,” Neal said flatly.

“You can see I’m doing,” Krike replied, in an even flatter voice.

Neal stared at him coldly, hoping to seem too outraged for words. Yet he suspected that, even in this ambiguous light, his strained stiffness was betraying him. For a moment the elusive pain in his forehead passed through him, and he felt as if an angel’s lance was piercing him, passing through his head and the base of his spine while holding him fast to the asphalt.

“Maybe you could tell me …,” Neal began slowly, hoping to work his way toward the right kind of manly firmness.

“I can tell you anything you want. But first I want you to go get that wife of mine and bring her down here.”

“So you think …,” Neal began, relieved that he was finally being given a definite role to play.

“I’m not getting into some stupid war of words with you, Harold. I’ve got this much interest in what you have to say.” He made right thumb and forefinger into a perfect 0 and held it up close to Neal’s face. “All I want is for you to go get my wife and bring her down here, or just tell her to come down here, and then I’ll let your car go. And then you can go on your own way back to New York City and have a bowl of spaghetti with one of your Brooklyn whor*s.”

Neal shook his head. “You’ve got the wrong idea, man.”

“Oh, man. Oh, man, man, man, man. Don’t give me that. I’m not some pal of yours. I’m just some guy that saved you from jail, that’s all. Now shut up and go get my wife.”

Neal felt as if he had something rubbery and wet stuck in his windpipe. For a moment he was utterly unable to speak.

The effect of his muteness, though, was to make Krike slightly nonplussed, even a little agitated. For whatever reason, it was Krike who broke the silence. “I guess you think I’m a real idiot. Because I wear a cap and drive a truck with grease under the axle. I know she’s been calling you. We have a phone with memory, and I know how to retrieve the records. Bix told me someone saw your car in town yesterday morning and when I came home my wife and my daughter were gone. Don’t you think I know how to add up one and one?”

Krike’s outburst had a perverse effect on Neal. The tightness in his throat went away; he felt himself relaxing into a comfortable, grounded stance as he faced Krike directly and steadily.

“O.K., I’ll quit fooling. She’s up there asleep right now. And I’m not going to wake her. She had a long day yesterday; she’s a got a baby to take care of …” Neal noticed a grimace spreading across the lighted part of Krike’s face when he said this. “She deserves her sleep. Whatever you want to say can wait.”

Krike stared at his feet as he stirred gravel with the toes of his shoes. “Let her sleep,” he said. “But I want her down here by sunrise. I’m not going away without doing some business with her.”

“We’ll see,” Neal said, feeling senselessly bold.

Krike moved his head slightly and the lenses of his glasses filled with a silver glare. “We’ll see about whether you get to drive your car away, city boy.”

Neal felt another twinge in his forehead, but he smiled irrepressibly. “I wonder what the local authorities would say … about hitching up to a car without any papers. If anyone wants to see the title …”

Krike cleared his throat. “All I’m asking …,” he began in a slightly weakened voice, “I just want …”

“I bet you have an operator’s license to lose, don’t you? You better let that thing down.”

Krike shot a spray of gravel with the heel of his boot, and Neal stood his ground. Hands in his pockets, he watched with curiosity as Krike bit his lips and shuffled his feet, stuck momentarily in a state of genuine uncertainty, until he finally turned around and climbed into the cab of his truck. There was a moment that might have lasted five seconds or five minutes, in which it seemed entirely possible that Krike would simply drive away with the car. Neal waited until finally the hitch mechanism began to jerk and whine, the arm began to lower slowly, the brisk air was filled with the relentless sound of scraping metal as the hitch was released and the arm withdrew, folding slowly, inexorably back into the attitude of a recumbent cross.

Neal kept waiting with his hands in his pockets until Krike came out of the cab again and walked up to face him. “You can say what you want to, but I’m not moving my truck. I can park there as much as anyone.”

Neal fixed his eyes purposefully on the blank lenses of Krike’s glasses. He waited until he saw his antagonist’s jaws make a sidewise move, the equivalent of a nervous blink.

“I’m not moving until I get a chance to talk to her,” Krike insisted. “Daylight. First thing.”

“Enjoy yourself,” Neal said, already turning away and heading back to the side door of the hotel wing.

Neal lay in his bed for an unknown amount of time, letting the silence of his mind speak fretfully to the silence around him. Once in a while a breath would escape one of sleepers in the other bed, a bare suggestion of a sound.

He glanced periodically at the curtain to the right of his bed, tracing the slow creep of cool light flushing the thick fabric. Once the light had crept far enough into the room to reveal the beige coloring of his coverlet, he pushed aside the sheets and went to the window. He pulled the cord and opened the curtain just enough to see Krike leaning against the side of his truck, his drawn features pink in the virgin sunlight, his cap co*cked back to reveal his stony, furrowed forehead.

Neal heard bedclothes rustling and in the next moment Sheila asked, “What are you looking at, Harold?”

“Nothing,” he said automatically.

He could hear her set her feet on the floor and move swiftly across the room. She yanked the curtains open all the way and stood next to Neal, gazing down at the impossibly forlorn figure of Krike standing watch next to his truck.

“How long has he been there?” Sheila asked.

Neal ignored her question. “You’d better go ahead and get dressed.”

“Why?”

“Because he won’t leave until you go down there and … talk to him, I guess.”

“I don’t want to talk to him. You go down and tell him that.”

“He’s not going to take no for an answer. You’d better go down there.”

Neal could smell the residue of sleep in her hair. He wanted to put his hands on her shoulders and caress her bare arms. “I’ll go with you,” he assured her in a soft, breaking voice.

She glanced at him blankly and then turned away. She padded back across to her still-dark half of the room and lay back down on the bed, placing a hand gently on the head of her sleeping child. “Go on down there. I’ll be down when I’m ready.”

Neal lingered at the window, watching as Krike fingered the visor of his cap, shuffled bits of gravel under his boot heel, arched his shoulders, and finally looked up toward the window. Neal felt that if he had to exchange uncomfortable glances with Krike, he might as well do it from here, but Sheila was apparently refusing to move until he left the room, so he dressed again, then grabbed his briefcase and the suitcase that Sheila hadn’t opened. He decided that they all needed to be ready to make a quick departure, so he made his way his way down to Tucker’s room to warn him to get ready.

He banged on the door and waited, banged again and waited, banged again, until several minutes had gone by. A series of loud sighs finally came from the other side of the door.

“Get dressed and pack up whatever you’ve got,” Neal said firmly.

He was answered by a long bovine moan, followed by a thick moment of silence.

“Come on, it can’t be that bad,” Neal insisted. “Get up and get ready. We can stop and get some coffee once we’re on the road.”

“You’re sick,” Tucker griped. “You’re a sick, sick man. Go away.”

Neal kicked at the bottom of the door, making a noticeable dent. “I’ll leave you if you’re not ready. I’m not kidding around. Get the hell up!”

He paced three times in a circle across the full width of the hall, and then began heading down the hall to the alcove near the stairs. He bought an overpriced can of Pepsi, drinking it in one continuous gulp, listening to the brazen whine of the ice machine. Obeying a civilized reflex, he searched for a recycling bin; finding none, he aimed for the trash can but missed; he began to reach for it on the floor but instead chose to flatten it under the soles of his shoes and leave it for someone else to discard. Taking hold of the luggage, he leaped forward into the hall, pushed his way through the stairwell door, and bounded down the steps.

He made himself slow down when he reached the outside door, and he walked toward the Boccaccio and the truck and Krike with a determined show of indifference. The morning air was still and cool, the still-fresh sunlight limpid and mild; the sun itself had just risen over the top of the gas station across the street. Krike moved from around the truck and watched as Neal approached, pushing his glasses firmly against the bridge of his nose.

Much to his surprise, Neal saw Tucker emerging from the door at the other end, stiff but dogged, swinging his small suitcase almost jauntily. The idle threat must have done some good, Neal thought.

The three men formed a gradually shrinking triangle as both Neal and Tucker slowly approached; the car, sprawling between them, formed a neat line of symmetry. Tucker stopped twenty feet away from the car, close enough to give Neal a livid, questioning look.

“He’s an old acquaintance,” Neal commented dryly.

“He’s not coming with us, too, is he?”

“No, he just wants to give us a good sendoff.” Turning to Krike, Neal asked, “You do, don’t you?”

Krike looked at his watch. “The sun’s been up for almost an hour.”

“You obviously don’t have any work to do,” Neal said. “The repo business must be pretty slow these days. No one’s getting any credit anymore, I guess.”

Krike took off his cap and flattened his hair against his scalp. He studied the cap for a moment, tried to flick something off of it, and then slapped it against the hitch frame before jamming it back on his head.

“I’ll make a deal with you, son,” he said. “I’ll mind the hell out of my own business and you can attend to yours. You can get right back to your work, whatever it is, as soon as that wife of mine comes down here. You better go up and get her.”

Krike looked ahead as he spoke, not condescending to look at Neal, not giving Neal a chance to stare him down.

Around the corner, near the hotel’s front entrance, a man and a woman were exchanging snippy-sounding demands as the doors of a minivan opened and closed in rapid succession. The vehicle finally backed out with a thunderous growl and then spat gravel as it rolled away. The three silent men could hear someone whistling from another end of the parking lot. Some kind of animal screeched in the rutted alley behind the hotel.

“Hey, you got a packet of Tabasco sauce or something?” Tucker asked Krike.

Krike shook his head and irritably adjusted his glasses.

“A stick of Big Red? Some B.C. powder?”

Krike pushed back the bill of his cap and looked straight at Neal. “Tell her I mean it.”

“Look, I’ve already—”

As if on cue, the nearest door opened and then shut, and the three men all looked to see Sheila approaching. She was wearing a corduroy jacket, black pants, and the same high-heeled pumps she had worn the day before. A wool scarf was looped loosely around her neck and the diaper bag was hanging from her shoulder. She held her other suitcase in one hand, and with the other hand she gripped the car seat in which Matilda was nestled, straining against the straps, casting lively looks at her strange surroundings, her wild, dark hair half-concealed by a pint-sized wool cap.

All three men were spellbound for a moment, as if the thought of Sheila and the baby had been a mere abstraction up until the last moment.

Sheila walked in a straight line toward the middle of the triangle formed by her three spectators, wearing a look of sober determination. Sidling up to the passenger side of the Boccaccio, she leaned her hip against the car as she let the suitcase drop. She pivoted abruptly, turning toward Neal as if intending to offer him a distant pledge of affection, but instead she simply said, “Maybe you could put my suitcases in the car, Harold.”

Neal nodded but remained where he was standing.

Without further ado, Sheila turned to face Krike, her expression firm and frigidly pleasant. “I don’t know how you can stand it, Lyle,” she said, “always showing up when you’re not welcome.”

Krike straightened himself up as he faced her, his feet set in a fighter’s stance, yet he seemed measurably less sure of himself. “All I came for was to bring my baby home.”

“You’ve got to get your sh*t together, man,” Neal said bravely. “That little shack isn’t her home anymore.”

“Go get yourself a clue,” Krike growled. “You’re not part of this anyway.”

“Oh, so you think—”

Sheila silenced him with a quick, steely glance. “I know what he wants, Harold. Never mind it, O.K.?”

“Yeah, she knows.” Krike was speaking to no one in particular at the moment, staring at the asphalt. “She knows she’ll never be any kind of mother to that child. That’s my little girl.” Then he looked up and spoke directly to Matilda. “She’s my little Tillie, ain’t she? Ain’t she?” His voice had suddenly lost its shape, and he seemed to be imagining himself alone with the child in a world with softer edges.

Gazing up from the carrier, Matilda trained her large, dark eyes on him and began squirming under the straps. She said something that might have been any number of different words or any combination of small words, made up of whole new consonants that she had invented herself.

“See that,” Krike said with naïve eagerness. “She’s asking for me, she’s asking for her papa.”

Sheila slowly set the carrier down and then she kneeled to release the child. She picked her up and held her tightly against her bosom, pressing her head into the folds of her scarf. “I wish I could be a better mother,” she said softly. “I want to be a better mother, but …”

“Hey Harold,” Krike said with a bitter twang, “you want to know what kind of mother she is? I came home one day, just a few weeks ago, and the first thing I—”

“Please, Lyle,” Sheila said, hugging the child tightly.

“—first thing I said was, ‘Where’s Tillie?’ And this princess bride, she’s on the phone, see. And she gives me this look, like ‘What the—?’ So I have to go looking for my baby. Up the house and down the house. Nowhere. My heart’s like a bomb about to go off.” He thumped his chest with his fist.

“She was at the babysitter’s,” Sheila said coolly.

“Yeah, but which babysitter?” He looked straight at Neal, his sleepless eyes refracted crazily by the lenses of his glasses. “She couldn’t f*cking remember.”

Sheila, not bothering to defend herself, looked slightly askance; her flat, smooth face had the creamy luster of a pearl in the fresh sunlight.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come home and found that child with her fingers in her mouth. That means she’s hungry, Harold. I know what that means but does that mother of hers? So I give the child a spoonful of applesauce and she wants it so bad she’s shaking. Shaking … She wants to eat the spoon she’s so starved. No telling what that mother of hers had been doing all day.”

Sheila covered Matilda with both of her hands. “You don’t have to, Lyle. You can—”

“So now, to top it all off, so to speak …” Krike gave Neal a sudden fierce look. “She decides to run off with some glorified gigolo …” He waited for the effect of this to settle in, but Neal, with his hands wedged firmly in his pockets, his lips fused, refused to give him anything.

“So here she goes, running off with my little baby,” Krike went on, his voice starting to break. “Probably hasn’t fed her yet this morning,” he added with calculated spite.

A question seemed to linger in the air as silence gently descended on all of them. Sheila looked pointedly at Krike, then she lifted Matilda, gave her a searching look, and planted a kiss on her wet chin. She cradled the child in the crook of her arm and began approaching Krike with careful steps, as if she were making her way across a sheet of misty glass.

“You don’t have to say another word, Lyle. I know who she belongs with.” Sheila lifted Matilda again, extending her toward Krike, face forward, as the child twisted uncomfortably.

Krike reached for her. His fingers had just touched the hem of her flouncy dress, when Sheila lifted her right leg, a move that seemed a fluid extension of her slow forward momentum; she reposed for fraction of an instant on one leg and then planted her foot in the middle of Krike’s stomach, thrusting him forcefully away.

Krike’s sudden backward fall had a surprisingly graceful arc; his arms extended in shock, he seemed to be holding a huge ball of vapor as he glided through the thin morning air, hitting the back of his truck and then folding into himself as he hit the asphalt, his cap slipping to the side of his face, his glasses dropping to the pavement.

As Neal and Tucker gaped stiffly at the crumpled body, Sheila turned and made a dash for the passenger-side door of the Boccaccio, the child wrapped tightly in her jacket.

“Don’t stare at him!” she snapped. “He only looks like he’s dead. Get the luggage and come on!”

When they were all in and the doors were shut, Neal tried to get a glimpse of Krike in the rearview mirror. Seeing nothing, he shot a quick glance out the rear driver’s side window and saw him rising to his knees, gripping the arm of the hitch, heaving himself up as he yanked the bill of his cap back around, his face screened from view. Neal’s main concern now was backing far enough to make a sharp left turn. Deciding he could let Krike fend for himself, he jammed the back bumper up against the back of the truck, pushing a little to give himself an extra inch of turning space, and then he gave the steering wheel a hard left turn and shifted into first. With the car moving smoothly under his control, he remembered what the thug in Chicago had said about the Boccaccio’s peerless turning radius and immediately saw the proof.

As Neal quickly upshifted, the car rolled over the walkway surrounding the building, past the front bumpers of two parked cars, and then shot out into the free expanse of the parking lot. Neal caught a glimpse of Krike, with naked eyes, reaching into the cab of his truck. Just as the car reached the edge of the street, he glanced back again and could see a sharp glint of sunlight on the shaft of Krike’s rifle.

12. How They Do Things in West Virginia

Every nerve in Neal’s body was poised for a sudden blast, but as he wedged the car into the street, slipping into the space between two garbage trucks, he heard no sound above the ordinary morning traffic noise. Still, moving anxiously down the street, conceivably still within firing range, Neal trembled at the thought of a sudden blowout. He skimmed past a plodding, belching tractor trailer as he accelerated up the I-76 ramp, desperate to reach the smooth blacktop.

Once the car was headed due east, he let out a deep breath and said, to no one in particular, “Any suggestions?” Only Matilda seemed to react, crowing and beating the window as her mother restrained her loosely with a limp hand.

“She needs a new diaper,” Sheila said numbly. In the chaos of their sudden departure, Sheila had taken the front seat and had no room to spread out, so she turned around and asked Tucker, “Can you do it?”

“Be serious,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “Guns and babies. Guns and babies. What next? Clowns with bazookas? Man-eating marigolds?”

“Well, I’m not doing it,” Sheila insisted. “Not now.”

“You really are a crappy mother,” Tucker said.

He reached forward and cuffed the back of Neal’s head. “I like to know what I’m getting into, boss. No one said anything about rednecks with rifles.”

“Just hold onto your pants, we’ll—”

Neal suddenly glimpsed the rack of yellow lights on Krike’s truck, peeking over the tops of the two sedans cruising behind the Boccaccio. He shifted into the left lane and darted forward until the Boccaccio was nearly brushing the mud flaps of a sixteen-wheeler, then shifted back quickly to the right and charged ahead again.

Alert to the sudden acceleration, Sheila looked back and got a clear view of Krike’s truck, the gold lettering aflame in the morning light. “Can’t you go faster?”

“If you’ll look out for the troopers,” he said, biting his lower lip and pushing the needle steadily up to 85.

Sheila stared blandly ahead, deep in thought for a moment. “Give me your phone, Harold.”

Shrugging, Neal reached into his pocket for it. “If you’re calling for help—”

“I’m not.” Sheila opened her window, pulling Matilda back from the brink, and tossed the phone into the weeds along the shoulder of the interstate.

Neal was too stunned to speak.

“How do you think he tracked us so easy, Harold? I can’t believe I didn’t think of it until now.”

Neal kept his speed between 80 and 90 for about five miles, until he felt sure that the Boccaccio was out of Krike’s range of vision, then he took Route 14 south, one of at least four possible options. He slowed once he merged onto the highway, guessing that his speed would be watched more closely on the state road. Sure enough, they passed a parked cruiser just two miles from the ramp.

He glanced compulsively at the rearview mirror, keeping a nervous vigil, his heart leaping once when he spotted another wrecker; it was blue rather than red, with no lettering and a more streamlined hood, but he couldn’t stop himself from checking and rechecking, grimly wondering from moment to moment if Krike had the wiles or the wherewithal to stop for a quick paint job.

He decided to keep heading south, by way of Route 45 and U.S. 30. When he reached Route 7, he began seeing mileage signs for Weirton, West Virginia, and he decided that might be a safe place to begin heading east again. Cruising along the Ohio River, between hunched hills bearing slate-colored scars, Neal was falling under the shadow of darker and darker skies. Without closing his eyes, he kept going in and out of the dream he had had back in the Meister mansion—darkness, blinding lights blaring from nowhere at random moments, ragged rims and sheer drops just over the side of the road, intermittent nakedness. Trying to take a firmer hold on his immediate surroundings, he gazed across the Ohio at the charred hulk of an abandoned blast furnace, a cluster of smokestacks, pipes and silos, threaded with dead power lines strung from leaning black poles. In spite of the grim concreteness of the structure, there was enough suspended mist in the air to give it the look of something conjured by Neal’s own darkening mood.

Sheila had given her breast to Matilda some thirty minutes earlier, and the child was cradled in her mother’s arms, swaddled in the wool scarf. Sheila kept rocking her until her eyes closed and then she would set her against her right shoulder; but as soon as the child was still, her eyes would pop open again and she would begin wriggling, until Sheila began rocking her again, each time a little faster and more insistently. Meanwhile, Tucker had stolen a blanket from the diaper bag and had stretched out across the back seat, dumping all the luggage onto the floor; he had finally drifted off to sleep but could still be heard murmuring irritably from time to time.

Neal took U.S. 22 across the river. He knew that Pittsburgh was not far away, and he figured that he could make a random choice of crossroads once he got there.

Just past the Ohio bridge, his heart froze when he glimpsed jittery lights flashing, but the whine of the siren told him he was in a different kind of trouble, although he was sure he hadn’t been going fast over the bridge. The blue cruiser pulled ahead and led him into the empty parking lot of a strip club. Neal heard Tucker rustling under the blanket in the back seat and saw Sheila give him an accusing glance.

“I swear I wasn’t speeding,” he whispered loudly.

Sheila kept a sharp eye on the officer as he made his way slowly out of the car. “Just let me do the talking, O.K.?” She dropped the squirming child onto her lap and pushed her bosom forward.

The policeman was a Black man with a thick body, filling every square inch of his shimmery uniform. He strode across the blacktop, measuring each step with military precision. Neal opened his window in anticipation. The policeman stood a foot away, straightening his belt with both hands, clearing his throat, asking Neal for his driver’s license.

Neal unfolded the wallet and held it out, but the policemen shook his head.

“Take it out,” he said.

Neal slipped the plastic card out of its sheath and offered it to the policemen, who studied it with apparent displeasure.

“Do you know why I stopped you, Mr.—”

“Actually,” Neal said quickly, “I didn’t think—”

“Officer,” Sheila broke in, “maybe you could help us. We’re new here and we’re looking for a good pediatrician.” Shifting her shoulders so she could face the policeman, she patted the tip of the cap on Matilda’s head, and the child suddenly kicked out with both of her feet, her brown eyes wide and alert.

The policeman tipped his hat and smiled distantly. “Pretty thing,” he said. “I’ve got four of my own, so I reckon I can suggest a doctor.” He leaned forward and peered into the back seat. “Kind of looks like that fellow needs a doctor. You sure he’s still alive?”

“He’s just sleeping off a hangover,” Sheila said promptly. Seeing the officer raise his eyebrows, she added, “We’re social workers. It’s just part of our job.”

“Is all that his luggage?”

“Yes,” Sheila said with an air of impatience. “He’s been evicted, and we’re finding him a new place.”

“I thought I knew all the folks at the welfare office,” the policeman said, seeming distracted as he stared at Neal’s license.

“Like I said, we’re new,” Sheila insisted.

The officer nodded vaguely. “Figured you folks were from New York, but this

license—”

“Officer,” Neal interrupted nervously, “I really didn’t think I was speeding.”

The policeman gave the plastic card back to Neal and said, “You weren’t. That’s not why I stopped you.” He leaned forward, as if to speak confidentially. “I’m honestly surprised. A man of your age. Surely this isn’t your first child.”

“Well …,” Neal began slowly, the image of Lainie’s son once again flashing through his unfocused mind. “As a matter of fact …”

“I’m thirty-nine myself. Like I said I’ve got four of my own.” He waited for a response.

“You must be proud,” Neal said with a weak smile.

“And you,” the policeman, gesturing tenderly toward Matilda. “We fathers have a great responsibility, don’t we?”

Neal nodded vaguely.

“I don’t know for sure where you come from. But let me tell you, we take our responsibilities seriously in West Virginia. Surely you know that carrying a child in the front seat can be fatal. Where is your car seat, sir?”

“I believe we left it at …” He exchanged a blank look with Sheila. “At home. Didn’t we?”

“Why, I believe we did,” Sheila said, running her free hand through her hair.

“Right,” the policeman said, straightening up, wedging his thumbs under his belt. “Maybe you better sit in the back seat ’til you get home, ma’am. Get your … client to move over.”

Sheila hesitated for a moment, but the policeman stood patiently as she finally dragged herself and the child out of the car and then wedged back into the car behind the front seat, pushing Tucker’s covered head into the crease between the seat cushions.

The policeman took a pad out of his shirt pocket, scribbled on the top sheet, tore it off, and handed it to Neal. “Name and phone number,” he said. “Best kid doctor in the county.” Taking one more look at the blanketed heap in the back seat, he added, gesturing with his thumb, “Better check his pulse when you get a chance.”

As soon as they had pulled away from the cruiser, Sheila spoke up sharply from her new perch in the back seat: “Stop at the nearest McDonald’s, Harold. I’ve got to go to the bathroom and I’m starved as a beggar.”

Tucker poked his head out of the blanket, peeking cautiously through each car window in turn, and then he threw off the blanket.

“Let me out of here,” he said.

“We’ll be stopping in just a moment,” Neal said.

“No, I mean I want out of this deal. Pull over.”

Neal shook his head. “Go back to sleep.”

“I mean it. I’ll jump out of this freaking car if you don’t pull over. You people are dangerous. I didn’t expect to have some jackass point his rifle at me, and I sure didn’t expect any coons with pistols.”

“He was a policeman, you idiot,” Neal said, pulling the car slowly onto the shoulder.

“Like that makes any difference.”

“Do you have a point, or something?”

“Don’t kid me, man. A Black police officer in West Virginia? Maybe in Detroit or Newark, but a Black man totes a gun in West Virginia for only one reason.”

Tucker was speaking with such conviction that he compelled Neal and Sheila to give their full attention, and even Matilda stopped wriggling for a moment.

“Remember my old friend Voortman?”

“Here?”

“Here … everywhere!”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“Voortman is Black. Black as tire rubber. If there’s a Black man with a gun between Cleveland and Philadelphia … there’s a V stamped on the trigger.”

“You’ve got it bad, don’t you?”

“You don’t know anything. Voortman’s got his grip on every police department in every medium-sized city from central Jersey to the Mississippi. He’s got people who speak his language, if you know what I mean. They’re spread out through the countryside, about ten miles apart. A whole network, and Voortman’s in the middle of it. There’s probably a hundred armed Black dudes in western Pennsylvania alone.”

Tucker convulsively reached for the latch and pushed the door open. He heaved himself out of the car and stumbled around in an erratic circle until he was sure of his footing.

“You’ve got some idea that things just happen, don’t you?” Tucker’s voice would have sounded smug if he hadn’t been so inexplicably short of breath. “A Black man here, a Black man there. No reason. Just happens to be like that, right? Well there are reasons, there are always reasons, and Voortman’s the biggest reason I know of.”

He turned around suddenly and scanned the tops of the seedy buildings across the street; he glanced over the roof of the car and then leaned in through the open door.

“He’s got his eyes on this car now,” he said, his voice thin and muffled-sounding. “I can’t take any chances, man.”

“What are you going to do?” Neal asked. “Walk to New York?”

Tucker rubbed his eyes with his fists, as if he were still emerging from his nap. “I’m going to find the bus station,” he said. “I’ll transfer to Grand Central when I get to New York, and I’ll meet you there tonight.”

He slammed the door. Without looking back, he dashed to the middle of the road, hopped nervously as he waited for the traffic to pass, and then disappeared down a dismal side street.

Neal and Sheila looked at each for an uncomfortable moment, said nothing, then looked away. It was as if they were trying to figure out how to make conversation with each other again, now that Tucker was far out of earshot.

“What was he talking about?” Sheila finally asked.

Neal slumped in his seat and glowered at the abandoned storefronts across the street. “I could explain it, I guess …” He hoped his vagueness would be a cue for her to drop the subject.

“How did you hook up with him, anyway, Harold?”

“I forget,” he said. “Must have been payback for a favor.”

Neal glanced at Sheila to see if she needed him to say anything else, but her thoughts seemed to be drifting away already. She ran her fingers through the spray of hair spilling out of Matilda’s cap, and then she kissed the child on her cheek; yet her eyes had an unfocused, absent look. She might have been tired, but her face had a warm, pleasant flush; she was intent but calm, as if her quiet stirrings of fear could somehow be savored.

After another long silence, Neal said, tentatively, “You know, I think maybe we should have …”

“I know what you’re going to say,” Sheila said quickly, sounding surprisingly harsh. “I don’t think it would have been a good idea to say anything to that cop about Lyle. Using the law against him doesn’t make sense. I don’t even know if he committed a crime.”

“He would have shot a hole in one of the tires if he’d gotten a good angle.”

“Maybe. But he didn’t.”

“There’s no telling what he might do with that gun.”

“You don’t know him, Harold. He’s not as tough as he wants people to think.”

“Tough or not, he could do some harm.”

Sheila turned Matilda over, onto her shoulder, and began stroking her back. “I just want to get away from him. Once we’re in New York he won’t be able to do anything. They still have gun laws there. If I try to press charges against him, I’ll be stuck with him for months, a year.” She sighed in a very demonstrative way. “Like I said, I just want to be free of him.”

Neal was ready to make another argument, but he suddenly lost the will to speak; yet another tense silence ensued.

“Let’s get going,” Sheila finally said, snapping the ends of her words off sharply. “I’m still hungry.”

Neal drove down a couple of side streets; not finding a McDonald’s, he pulled up at a nondescript diner with whitewashed cinder-block walls. A waitress ushered Neal, Sheila and Matilda to a booth near the back exit; she poured coffee for them and then gestured wordlessly at the buffet, where a slow-moving mass of people milled around pans of steaming, grease-laden breakfast food.

“Jesus,” Sheila said, “I think I’m losing my appetite already.”

“I guess I can eat something.” As soon as he had said this, though, Neal began succumbing to the stifling atmosphere.

“Maybe we could share,” Sheila suggested. “When no one’s looking. I could use a biscuit, maybe, and a piece of fruit if they have any.”

“I’ll see. What about the baby?”

“I don’t know. I fed her a little while back.” She reflexively reached under her jacket to massage her breast. “I could maybe get them to heat up some mashed carrots.”

“Maybe she could eat some grits.”

“She’s fussy. She’s really impossible to feed.”

As if retaliating for her mother’s last remark, Matilda grabbed a clump of Sheila’s limp hair. Sheila yanked the child’s hand away and then set her firmly down on the seat cushion, but the child lunged forward and gripped the edge of the table with her gums. Sheila yanked the cap off her head, letting her wild hair spring free, then picked her up and threw her over her shoulder; mashing her head down, she began to rock from side to side.

“So go get something,” Sheila said abruptly. “I’m starting to get hungry again.”

Neal came back with a plate full of food picked almost at random, none of it very appealing. He and Sheila ate methodically, out of sheer necessity, thinking about the long afternoon ahead of them. Neal was starting to feel safe, but the sheer terror of being pursued was beginning to give way to the sheer tedium of the road. After he had eaten all he could stand, he shoved the plate aside, while Sheila continued to pick at the cubed potatoes and French toast sticks, casting occasional glances at the distracted waitress. Matilda glanced at the food curiously from time to time, but mainly kept herself busy by diving under the table to investigate the pieces of gum stuck to the floor and to try untying Neal’s shoelaces. Whenever she noticed her child’s whereabouts, Sheila would drag her back up by the sleeve of her dress, and then she would turn away again to take another bite of mealy sausage, as Matilda resumed her under-the-table explorations.

After finally pushing the plate away, Sheila sat back and began sipping her coffee. “Harold, why don’t you go get me a pack of Camels?”

“They won’t let you smoke in here.”

“Just see if they can stop me.”

“I think I spotted a convenience store down the block.”

On his way back into the diner with the cigarettes and a new lighter in his pocket, Neal stopped to look through the large plate-glass window and found that Sheila and Matilda had left the table, although Sheila’s scarf was still draped across the plastic seat cushion. Neal stood still, poised on the balls of his feet, suddenly ready for departure. The idea of leaving his passengers behind, along with all of the trouble they carried with them, had occurred to him once or twice already over the past few hours. Now that the impulse had come to him again, he felt as if he were being given a final, fleeting opportunity to make his way alone to New York, or wherever else he wanted to go. He had another vision of an extended road trip, this time back in the direction of the dry, lonely west. He could travel due south, more or less, to the old tried-and-true I-40, and then go as far as he wanted through Arkansas, the Panhandle of Texas, into the far, empty reaches of New Mexico. His fortieth birthday was only a week away, and he could see himself celebrating the bittersweet occasion by cruising at some ungodly speed in seventh gear. As long as he was behind the wheel of the Boccaccio, why not try the final gear? It had been waiting underneath his grip all along.

In another instant he stepped back from the window, off the curb and onto the parking lot pavement. This wasn’t how he had expected the story to play out, but he had never really been sure how it would go. He certainly hadn’t expected to see the barrel of a rifle aimed at his fleeing backside, or to take responsibility for a small child. Sheila had to take more responsibility for her own circ*mstances, he told himself, as he quickened his stride. She would land on her feet somewhere, somehow. She had a dancer’s instincts, after all.

He moved through two rows of vehicles, toward the far corner of the lot where the Boccaccio was parked, and as he moved he had the distinct sensation that he was being watched and even followed. He stopped, turned around, and saw no one, although he could almost have sworn that he heard the scratching of gravel, even after he had come to a full stop. It wasn’t that he imagined Sheila trailing him, either in person, baby in tow, or with a distant, demanding gaze; no, he had the strange feeling that someone was peering at him from behind a white ’85 Cadillac, someone just small enough to conceal himself behind the rear passenger-side tire and peer around the rim of the exhaust pipe. Yielding to the queer reflex, he rushed over to the car, leaping over an oil stain on the way, and rounded the back end, expecting to find Dodd crouching in the fuzzy shadow. As soon as he had spoiled that illusion, he sensed that Dodd was kneeling in the back of a blood-colored F-150 in the next row. He reached the truck in five strides, gripped the rim of the bed, and leaned forward enough to get a full view—nothing but two sacks of mulch.

Once he’d turned around and gotten his bearings again, he could see any number of hiding places for a small boy in the crowded lot. At that moment, he could almost believe that Dodd had been squirreled away in the Boccaccio, possibly under the front passenger’s seat. A gravy brown station wagon pulled into the lot as he was scoping it out with fevered eyes, and he quickly came to his senses.

Still a little unnerved and increasingly unsure of himself, he made his way to the Boccaccio and reached for the door handle. Before opening the door, he found himself looking intently at his reflection in the glass. The image of himself in the silver jacket and the dark glasses seemed foreign to him—a peculiar mirage made of clouded light and curved glass, an improvisation of happenstance and whim. The face he saw was something apart from him, something securely fixed to the glass, but attached to nothing in himself. In fact, he sensed that he was now standing completely apart from the image and the events that had brought it into being, seeing both the image and the events with distant eyes lodged in the recesses of his skull. Possibly the eyes that Bix had warned him about. The eyes of whatever it was that went by the name of God. Or maybe just that way of seeing which he always reverted to in the first moments of awareness every morning, when the world seemed to have an existence separate from his customary ways of imagining it. Or an especially austere, selfless kind of consciousness that he experienced in moments of profound silence. Or when he was surrounded by a nameless crowd.

He turned and gazed across the parking lot again; he actually wanted to find Dodd somewhere out there, looking at him. That small boy, after all, had seen something in him that was worthy of trust, and though the trust of a child might not be entirely reliable, it was instinctive and not given to everyone. Neal now wished he could see himself as Dodd as seen him. He took off his shades and, after a moment’s thought, snapped them in two; he considered dropping them on the sidewalk, but instead slipped them into one of his pants pockets. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out his glasses; after wiping the lenses on his shirt, he put the glasses on and squinted slightly. He started to look at himself again in the car window, thinking he would see something entirely different, but instead he decided to walk back to the diner, so he could view his reflection on the undistorted surface of the plate glass window. It was that important to him.

While trying to make out his reflection, he saw Sheila making her way back to the table, lugging the diaper bag on one shoulder while hoisting Matilda on the other. As soon as he spotted her, their eyes met. He still had a chance to escape, he realized; even if she made her way out of the diner that moment, clutching the child in the crook of one arm, he was at least ten steps ahead, and he could probably dump her suitcases out before starting the car and driving away. He continued watching her, though, and as she slumped down into the seat again, she returned his gaze expressionlessly. Without another thought he headed back into the diner.

13. Ricochet

After leaving West Virginia, they followed U.S. 22 through Pittsburgh, in and out of a blinding downpour. On the spur of the moment, Neal decided to take the Pennsylvania Turnkpike to Philadelphia, then find the shortest route to New York from there. He now felt that the surest way to elude Krike was to use the Boccaccio’s speed to his advantage, and the Turnpike seemed like the best option if he wanted to make time.

Waiting in line to go through the toll booth, he began settling into an almost restful state of mind; the arduous pace of the traffic moving toward the entrance ramp, diffusing a mist of exhaust that permeated the Boccaccio’s sealed windows, actually filled him with a perverse calm, as if he were creeping inexorably toward limitless freedom. This slow, intensifying anticipation seemed to him like the tight pressure on a bowstring at the exact moment that an arrow was about to fly. As soon as this thought had come to him, though, he was gripped by a sudden sense of panic, as if this expectation of freedom was too fanciful to be trusted.

On an impulse, he turned his head and was surprisingly unsurprised to see Krike’s truck rolling along in the queue, several lanes to his left. Sheila quickly interpreted the look on his face, and she glanced back to confirm her worst fear.

“Don’t worry,” Neal said. “We’re faster. There’s no way he can keep up.”

Shaking her head in disbelief—either at the sudden turn of events, or Neal’s assurance, or both—she gazed forward wearily and uttered soundless curses, mindlessly patting her child.

Neal felt that, through her silence, she was dropping the responsibility for their safety squarely in his lap; a flush of desire passed through him, leaving him limp and slightly queasy. Once he had passed through the toll booth, he leaned toward the steering wheel and squeezed the leather lining so hard that his fingers felt hot. Checking to see that Krike was still behind the gate, he moved up the Philadelphia ramp and began steadily accelerating.

He had to squeeze the Boccaccio between a couple of tractor-trailers, and he waited momentarily for a chance to change lanes, but once he was able to surge into a clear stretch of road, he accelerated from fifty-five to seventy, and then from seventy to eighty, and in less than fifteen minutes he was ready to laugh away every trace of his fear.

Truck convoys, sometimes tying up both lanes, forced him to slow down now and then; whenever the speed of the car began to slack off, he felt some kind of weight dropping into the pit of his stomach. Still, regularly checking the rearview mirror, he saw no sign of Krike, and the implicit power of the car gave him a touch of smugness. He boldly hugged the trucks’ mud flaps, waiting for an opportunity to bolt through the gaps, promising himself that he would push ninety once the highway opened up again.

Whenever he could take his eyes off the road, he glanced back at Sheila in an almost possessive way, as if the role he had now assumed as her protector gave him privileges that he was only now becoming conscious of. For her part, Sheila kept her eyes to herself, but they wore a jaded look that made her seem newly vulnerable. Matilda, meanwhile, was on her own, holding herself up against the seat cushion, mashing her cap between her gums.

After another twenty-five miles, the highway began climbing, winding through mountain passes, under tunnels, under rock outcroppings. Neal had to shift down to third gear only on the steepest climbs, and even then he was able to make his way easily past the straining tractor-trailers, the freezer trucks, the car carriers, the flatbeds, the tank trucks, the tour buses; every time he passed a large vehicle of any kind, he imagined that he was putting another mile between his passengers and Krike.

Once he reached the top of the grade, he coasted until the trucks, powered by their tonnage and the laws of physics, began catching up with the Boccaccio; to stay ahead of them he shifted into sixth gear whenever the road was level and he could see far enough ahead.

In the vicinity of Seven Springs, the traffic slowed to a crawl, and then to a near standstill. After two jammed lanes had inched two long miles uphill, the cars and trucks in the right lane began shifting into the left, meaning that a merge into a single lane was not far ahead. Neal tried to hold his ground in the left lane, but the driver in front of him had stopped his car and had gotten out, and was now peering through binoculars up the slope of the road to the scene of the likely accident. From the right lane, one vehicle after another angled ahead of the stopped vehicle while drivers directly behind Neal began honking frantically.

Sheila gripped the back of Neal’s seat. “Why can’t we move?”

Neal gestured in frustration at the stopped car in front of the Boccaccio. “You can

see …,” he began, but then, shaking his head, he tried inching over to the right, looking for a break in the line of cars.

Glancing back to see how far the line of traffic stretched, he felt his heart leaping into his throat; it was as if he sensed Krike’s wrecker at the end of the line before he saw it; and the moment he saw it he could feel the rumble of the truck’s engine rattling his bones.

With a new urgency, Neal forced the Boccaccio between a Prius and a lumbering RV; just as he managed to wedge himself into the right lane, though, the sightseeing driver in the other lane climbed into his car and began pulling forward again. Now he had to look for a chance to merge left.

By the time he made his way back into the single moving lane, Krike was only three cars behind. Sheila was leaning forward, her face close to his, her breath coming quick and uneven.

“We’ll outrun him as soon as we get over the hill,” Neal assured her.

She aimed a finger at the dashboard. “Isn’t that the gas gauge?”

Neal suddenly remembered that he had planned to fill up in Weirton, but the idea had mysteriously slipped his mind after they had left the diner. He hadn’t pulled into a station since leaving the Cincinnati suburbs the day before, and now the needle was nearly kissing the mark on the right.

“All we have to do is make some space. I swear, once the road clears out, we’ll do it in no time. We can’t gas up at one of the exits, but we can find someplace if we can get off on a side road.” Neal now dimly remembered something that McCurdy’s housekeeper had said about the gas gauge; maybe the car had more fuel than the gauge was showing, he considered, although the more he thought about it, the more he began to think that it was the other way around. “We’ll be in the clear in no time,” he said, defying his doubts.

Neal cruised ahead as space suddenly opened up. Near the crest of the hill they passed the place where one tractor-trailer had rear-ended another, crushing the cab of the rear vehicle, a sight that made Neal shudder for one passing instant, as if he were seeing the end of recurring nightmare. He accelerated again until he was able to veer over into the free lane and took the crest of the grade in sixth gear. Speeding up more as the road smoothed out, he kept his eye on the rearview mirror and looked out for exits. He calculated whether he could risk taking the next one or whether he should wait for the one after that and hope for the gas to hold out.

Bypassing the next exit, he saw that 985 to Johnstown, a plausible escape route, was only five more miles away. The road was straight enough to allow him to reach eighty-five, and by the time he got to the ramp he felt as if the Turnpike belonged to him, there was so much clear space behind and in front of the Boccaccio.

Once they were on the state highway, the car moved through curtains of protective maples, heavy with green leaves, some tipped with orange. The blurry crests of blue-green mountains rose in the distance. Neal was relieved to see only an innocuous Volvo in the rearview mirror and ahead he spotted a billboard for a convenience store ten miles away. He nodded to himself and smiled and was on the point of saying something encouraging to Sheila, when he felt the steady thrum of the engine suddenly cease, and the car began coasting down a slight grade, slowing as the road flattened out. The needle of the gas gauge was still a millimeter from E. So that was what the housekeeper had said, Neal muttered silently. The Trojan horse’s missing widget. As the blue Volvo zoomed around the Boccaccio, Neal managed to the steer the car onto the shoulder of the highway, across from a gravel driveway.

“What is it now?” Sheila’s voice had a flat, fateful sound.

“I’m going to go see if anyone’s home,” Neal said, his thoughts moving forward swiftly.

“What home? Whose home? What do you mean?”

Neal turned to face Sheila. “Maybe you’d better take the baby and get out,” he said. “Stay with me. That’s the thing.” She looked at him as if he had suggested leaping hand-in-hand off the edge the world. “Come on,” he insisted.

He climbed out of the car and then pushed the front seat forward to let Sheila out, toting Matilda against her chest. The child had napped for just the last twenty minutes, and now she began to whine and kick. Neal took Sheila by the elbow and pulled her alongside him up the gravel driveway to a pink clapboard house, surrounded by a well-tended lawn.

He glanced at his watch: 1:30. Was anyone likely to be home on a Monday afternoon? The unbroken stillness, save for the rustling of leaves, did not bode well. The noise of distant crows only deepened the more immediate silence. Nearing the edge of despair, Neal stepped forward up the walk to the bare concrete porch, still tugging Sheila and the baby behind him.

There was nothing but an empty crevice where the doorbell should have been, but the door had a knocker that looked like something out of A Christmas Carol. Neal rapped three times.

When nothing happened for a moment, Neal set his ear against the door. If any sounds were coming from inside, they were muffled by the background sounds of cars moving along the highway. Against a mounting sense of futility, Neal rapped two times again and once more pressed his ear to the door. His heart jumped when he felt distinct tremors on the wood surface of the door, suggesting slow, heavy motion on the other side. He heard a deadbolt retract and saw the doorknob shake with the twisting of the lock; the door cracked open only enough to show a sliver of dull light.

“I’m sorry to …” Neal struggled to find the right tone of voice. “I’m just wondering if … if you have any gasoline … in a gallon can or something.”

“I’ve told you already …” The voice was hoarse and shaky. “When I saw you that time, and that other time.”

“You’ve never seen us before, ma’am. If you’d just open the door a little.”

Instead the door slid shut.

“No! No! Please open the door.” Neal resisted the impulse to start rapping again. “All we need is . . . .”

The woman on the other side had not shot the deadbolt, so Neal guessed that she was still standing at the threshold. “Look, please,” he said, still loudly but less forcefully. “We’ve got a small child with us.”

The door opened again, this time wide enough to reveal the woman’s face, broad, wide-eyed, with pale, quilted flesh drooping away from her hollowed eyes, puddling into her looped jowls. “They told me all about you on the TV,” she said stridently, her voice shaky but stern. “I know what you’ve been doing, and I won’t stand for it.”

“But what we want is—”

“Please,” Sheila interrupted, while trying to balance Matilda on her hip. “There’s a man with a gun. You’ve got to help us.”

“Don’t you think I can see it? I can see he’s got a gun. He’s always got a gun. That’s why you’re not coming in this house.” With that, the old woman slammed the door and shot the bolt.

Following the woman’s last senseless remark, Sheila and Neal looked at each other blankly. Then Neal suddenly rushed away from the porch and skidded far enough down the drive to see the Boccaccio, relieved to find no sign of Krike. He turned back to the house and veered off toward the closed garage. He approached one of the four small windows arrayed along the width of the garage door, about four feet up from the bottom edge. There was enough light for him to make out the shapes of recognizable objects—a plastic trash bin, a cluster of garden tools, a gas-powered generator, a push-style lawn mower, a roll of carpet, and—most pertinently—a five-gallon gas can.

Neal whistled to catch Sheila’s attention and gestured toward the garage.

“It’s in here!” he shouted eagerly.

Looking lost and weary, Sheila remained standing on the porch, as if overcome with inertia, with the child hanging from the lapels of her jacket. It was as if she was waiting for Neal to explain something that wasn’t entirely self-evident to her, but just as he began heading around the corner of the garage in search of a door, she tucked her arm under Matilda’s armpits and followed him, moving with sudden urgency.

The side door was windowless and narrow, painted the same lusterless pink as the rest of the house. Neal was disappointed but not surprised to find the door locked. The frame of the door was made of soft-looking wood, though, and when Neal tried the knob he jostled the whole door, so he quickly guessed that he could break it open. He threw himself against the door, shoulder first, then hip first, then shoulder first again, before pausing to catch his breath.

Sheila gave him another of her unreadable looks and then said, plainly, “Step aside, Harold.” As soon as he moved back, she lifted the mat he had been standing on, uncovering a key. “People are such idiots,” she commented as she reached down to pick it up.

Once the door was open, Neal hurried across to the other side of the garage, picked up the gas can, and immediately discovered that it was nearly empty. He swung it futilely, listening as a few drops swished along the bottom of the can. Before Neal could say a single discouraging word, though, he could hear the dark rumble of a truck, approaching, slowing, stopping, the growl of the engine deepening and then ceasing.

Sheila tightened her hold on Matilda, and moved abruptly in the direction of the open door. Neal shook his head, closing the door softly and locking it.

“No way,” he said. “He’d spot us in no time. This is the best place for us to be right now.”

“What about the windows? What he if comes looking this way?”

“If we get down at the bottom of the door”—Neal pointed as if Sheila couldn’t have understood without a visual cue—“he won’t be able to see us. From those little windows you can’t see straight down.”

Matilda seemed to giggle at something Neal had just said.

“Keep the baby quiet,” Neal said, whispering hoarsely.

Neal dropped to his knees at the base of the door and Sheila followed his cue. Both of them stretched out on the floor, spreading their legs and their backs over the cold, dust-covered concrete. Sheila pressed Matilda to her belly and, when the child began to make angry groans, she clamped her palm over the child’s mouth and tried to quiet her with a sound that was halfway between a shush and a hiss.

Not a breath seemed to escape any of them as they waited, listening to the heavy sound of a man’s feet on the gravel.

The sound of the steps changed to more of a brisk march as the man outside seemed to be exploring the walkway and the porch, but the sounds of feet crunching over gravel again drew closer until they could hear shoes shuffling on the other side of the door. They could hear the latch being jiggled, and then both heard and felt a body pressing against the door. Gazing up from the floor, Neal got a blurry impression of Krike’s face looming against the glass, blocking the pale sunlight. There was one long moment when nothing but the sound of Krike’s sniffling and coughing filled the world for Neal, and then in the next moment he could hear the sound of Krike’s feet shuffling off across the gravel again, moving back, seemingly, in the direction of the road.

Once the steps had faded away, Sheila breathed an exhausted sigh and scooted away from the door. Smiling exuberantly, she lifted Matilda up over her head. The child hooted with delight, her black, frizzy locks dancing as her mother stood and swung her around in two full circles.

“We’re free, baby! We’re free! The bad man went away!”

Neal lifted himself up into a sitting position, but his arms and legs were tense, ready for a sudden leap or roll.

“Don’t celebrate yet,” he said dully, eyeing the spread of trees beyond the windows. “He hasn’t driven away. He might just sit down there by the car, like he did last night. We’ve got to decide whether we’re going to try to slip away through the woods or just wait until the owner of the house gets home. If you ask me—”

Neal stopped speaking when he began hearing steps fast approaching across the gravel. He glanced up just in time to see one of the middle windows shattered and the bent end of a tire iron poking through the opening. He heard the tool drop to the ground on the other side of the door, as Krike leaned his head through the jagged frame of broken glass.

Matilda laughed louder and jumped excitedly in Sheila’s arms, as if the game she and her mother had been playing had just taken an unexpected, hilarious turn.

Sheila was speechless, but only for a moment. It was as if she had to adjust for a moment to the sight of her husband’s isolated head, but once she registered that it was him, her contempt was unbounded.

“You’re such a freak, Lyle.”

“I don’t need any opinions from you,” he said. “I’m done with you and all of your stupid ideas, Shel.” Peering forward through the frame, he fixed his eyes on Neal. “You deserve her, chump. You deserve every bit of her.”

Facing Sheila again, he said, “Go open that door over there.”

“Open it yourself.”

“I can see from here that it’s locked.”

“Good luck, then.”

Shaking his head in aggravation, Krike withdrew his face from the window and instead pushed the barrel of his rifle through the frame.

“Oh, good, Lyle. That’s fantastic. You’re going to shoot me if I don’t open the door?”

He shoved the rifle a little further through the window, training his eyes along the polished muzzle, bending the elbows of his left arm at an awkward angle to fit his hand just under the magazine. “Just put the baby down, all right?”

“So you can shoot me.”

“Put her down.”

“You’re really going to shoot me, aren’t you?”

“I just want you to put her down,” he said in a soft but firm voice, “and I want you and loverboy to walk out of this place and just go away. Leave Tillie to me.”

“Are you going to shoot her?”

“I’m not planning to shoot anyone. I just want you to know I’m serious about this. I want my baby.” His voice grew softer as he spoke, until he was almost inaudible. “I want you to know that this is one thing I care about.”

Sheila lifted Matilda down to the concrete floor, gently standing her on her two feet.

“I’m putting her down so you can put a bullet through my heart, if you want to. Go ahead. It’s what I deserve for marrying you.” She sensed his weakness and was ready to make the most of it. The set of her jaw and the hard look in her eyes seemed ready-made to face a moment just like this, something she had long been preparing for.

Krike sniffled. He pressed the gun’s bolt handle against his cheek as if he were scratching an itch.

“Maybe I can’t fire at you,” he finally said. “But with him” —he tilted his head so he could angle the rifle toward the middle of the floor, where Neal was still sitting—“it could be different. Move over a little, Harold.”

Neal hesitated until Krike grunted, gestured with the rifle, and flipped the safety. Then he scooted about two feet farther away from the garage door. As soon as he could see the tip of the rifle, he felt as if his joints were melting. Unable to resist the demands imposed by that small, dark aperture, he blanched with helpless rage.

“All you have to do,” Krike said, aiming squarely at Neal, “is just—”

Krike interrupted himself as he saw Matilda toddling forward, arms stretched out to her side.

“When did she—”

“Yeah, Lyle. She can walk. Didn’t you know that? If you were really any kind of a father—”

“If you didn’t try to keep her away from me all the time. Sending her off to some babysitter’s half the time. Stowing her away in her crib so she’s asleep when I get home.” His eyes followed the child’s progress as she shuffled across the floor toward the lawnmower, tipping forward as she approached the lawn mower.

Once his attention was distracted, Neal managed to scoot slowly back toward the garage door, out from under the black glare of the rifle’s tip, to a spot where he could just see the upper rims of Krike’s glasses.

“Why don’t you grab her hand?” Krike said, looking nervously toward Sheila.

“She’s fine,” Sheila said. “No thanks to you and your beautiful gun.”

Matilda reached the handle of the mower, grasped it with her pudgy fingers, swung backward, then, losing her grip, fell back safely onto her padded bottom.

“I can take care of her if you can’t, Shel,” Krike said with sudden anger. “Both of you need to get of here now.”

“We’re out of gas, Lyle,” Sheila said bluntly.

“Then hitch-hike for the love of God! Just get out of here and leave my baby with me!”

“Funny how you keep talking about your baby,” Sheila said coolly, “when she isn’t really yours.”

Krike wedged his head into the frame of the window, next to the forestock of the rifle. Neal could see him licking his lips as he let Sheila’s last blunt words sink in.

“That’s such …,” he began slowly. “You’ve got a damned lying mouth on you.”

“Come on, Lyle. Open your eyes.” She gestured toward the child sitting comfortably on the floor. Matilda looked up curiously at the adults around her, as if suddenly aware that she was the center of attention. “Her eyes. Her hair. Are you blind, Lyle?”

Krike blinked rapidly. “That’s nothing,” he said. “I’ve got some of that in my family. Maybe you’ve got some in yours.”

Krike’s withdrew his face, and then he inched a little more of the rifle through the window. Neal felt thick resentment welling up in the pit of his stomach. He was still terrified by the long black barrel of the gun, but his fear was increasingly matched by a sense of indignation at being cornered in this way, pressed down on the cool concrete, a mute, disengaged witness to the Krikes’ family drama. Over the last couple of days, he had begun to lose the sense of self-possession that he had recently embraced as his natural birthright; now, the feeling of compulsion under the pressure of the gun, confining him in a feeble crouch, was getting to be more than he could stand. Among other discomforts, the remains of his shades, which he had jammed into his right pocket, were pressing painfully against his thigh. He sensed that he was reaching some kind of breaking point.

“I don’t know how you’ve managed to fool yourself all this time,” Sheila was saying. “You know damn well she couldn’t be yours anyway. It doesn’t happen by magic, Lyle.”

Neal could see Krike nervously shifting the gun. “I don’t know what you’re . . . .” He cleared his throat instead of finishing the sentence.

“You know what, Harold?” Sheila acted as if she were speaking confidentially to Neal, although she made a point of raising her voice. “We’ve been married for five years and he’s never exactly been in the mood, if you know what I mean.”

“I’ve never heard such a lie.” Krike blinked three times and let the barrel of the rifle angle away slightly. “Harold, you can’t believe anything she says.”

“Listen, Harold,” Sheila said, with a touch of laughter in her voice, “this man has never been anywhere near my—”

Krike silenced her with a sound that could have been mistaken for the bark of a wounded wolf. “Have you ever in your life told the truth?” he demanded once he had regained some composure. “Are you capable of telling the truth?”

“Sure. Here’s something that’s true: Lyle Krike is a sissy. How about that?”

“She’s an ice princess, Harold,” Krike said in a deadened voice. He wedged his head through the window again, a little farther this time, as if trying to get close enough to spit.

“Five years of being married to a man who isn’t a man,” Sheila said. “It’s no wonder I had to go somewhere else to—”

“Don’t try to make me think … Don’t try to tell me that it was Bix’s nephew. You’re not going make me believe that for one moment, you …”

Neal edged a little closer to the door and looked straight up. From his new vantage point, he could see Krike’s lower lids twitching behind his glasses. Krike appeared to be holding the rifle with only the loosest grip; Neal could see the muzzle shift and angle away a little again, as if the muscles in Krike’s trigger hand were going slack. Krike seemed to have one eye on Sheila, the other eye on Matilda, who was pulling herself up by the handle of the mower. Noting Krike’s distracted attention, and the uncertainty that seemed to have sapped his strength, Neal could imagine himself leaping to his feet and taking hold of the barrel, pushing it up away from his body, snapping the grip of terror, and no sooner had he imagined what he could do than he found himself doing it. Rising swiftly, he heard a single, random thought ramming like a steel spike though his brain: Neal Pilchard gets the first piece!

He slid his right hand up the length of the barrel and then pushed it down and away. While he took of the smooth wooden forestock with his left hand, he could see Krike jerking forward, his trigger hand catching on a fragment of glass, causing him to gasp in pain.

The gunshot exploded in Neal’s ears, nearly muffling the sound of the ricocheting bullet.

He could see Sheila and the baby screaming but heard nothing but a steady drumbeat inside his skull, as the sound of the shot resonated with awful force. He was stunned to find himself clutching the entire rifle to his chest and to see Krike staggering backward, blood streaming from his right hand. They stared at each other for a moment, and then Krike backed away quickly, finally turning and running down the gravel drive toward the highway.

Neal felt Sheila grabbing him from behind and turning him around to face her so she could make herself heard. With the sound of the gunshot still pounding in his ears he could just manage to read her lips:

“Shoot him, Harold! Shoot him!”

She pushed him toward the door.

Neal waited for a moment, as gunpowder fumes burned his nostrils; he watched Sheila sweep up the still screaming child in her arms, and then, having no better idea, he made his way to the door and began stepping briskly down the drive.

When the highway was in view, he saw that Krike had already climbed into his truck. Neal raised the rifle to his shoulder, vaguely aware of what he was supposed to do to fire it, and he sighted toward the tow truck, aiming in the general direction of the front tires. Just as he was delicately placing his finger on the trigger, he realized that he had no earthly desire to keep Krike from driving away, and he gladly held his fire.

Standing firmly in place like a granite sentry, he watched as Krike started lowering the hitch mechanism. This simply puzzled him for a moment, and then he began to feel the onset of vertigo. Krike pulled off the shoulder, onto the highway, making a wide U-turn, then backing up toward the trunk of the Boccaccio. Neal realized what was happening and what he needed to do, but his dizziness made it hard for him to aim.

Krike’s truck suddenly shot backward, and the hitch smashed the trunk of the Boccaccio, flattening it into something like the face of a scarecrow. Without hesitating to see what he had done, Krike drove forward, swerving a little to the left, and then backed in a wide circle across the asphalt, hitting the driver’s side of the car so hard that the hood buckled, popping one of its hinges. Neal was still struggling to fix his aim, staggering to keep his feet, when the truck jerked forward again. The hitch was lowered a little more; then the wrecker, swerving backward and catching the underside of the car, heaved one side up and then flipped the whole vehicle. With one more backward thrust, the truck shoved the Boccaccio over a patch of grass, finally pitching it into a shallow roadside ditch.

Sometime after the car was flipped and before it landed in the ditch, Neal suddenly, pointlessly, obeyed the impulse to fire. The stock of the gun caught the tip of his shoulder blade as the bullet snapped the upper limbs of conifers on the other side of the highway. Neal pitched backward and landed on his seat, accidentally firing the gun again, straight up, in the general direction of the sun.

As Krike began driving away, Sheila approached, clutching the child, who was now lying limply against her shoulder with wide, dazed eyes, feverishly sucking her thumb.

Sheila bent down toward Neal and with her free hand she held out something that was partially wrapped in her scarf. “Look what I’ve got.” It was a rounded, grooved chunk of metal, mashed and splayed on one end, dented on the other. “It’s proof that Lyle Krike is a monster,” she said bluntly. “He won’t dare sue for custody now. Matilda and I are free.”

Her face had that flat, vague look he had come to know, but her eyes were touched with a glint of fire.

14. Railroad Reveries

A moment later, uncanny silence prevailed under the low white sky. Neal stared at the rifle he was clutching. Had it not been for the sharp pain in his shoulder and the steady pulse beating through his fingers, he might have thought someone had just thrust it into his hands. Both Sheila and the quietly thumb-sucking Matilda were looking at him expectantly—so intently, in fact, that he began to think he was missing an important cue, as if the rifle were intended to remind him of a neglected duty.

He pushed himself up off the ground and gazed down to the road, peering through the screen of trees to the upsloping stretch of asphalt that curved away to the north. Suddenly he was overcome with the primal fear that he had so far managed to suppress. He dashed back up the driveway and plunged into the woods on the other side of the garage, searching blindly for a gulley or creek bed. Tripping over a tree root, he tumbled head first and landed in mealy loam, his knees breaking his fall before his head could hit the ground. Leaves overhead tittered gently as he picked himself up, letting the rifle remain on the ground. He searched for fallen leaves to cover it up, but finding few of them, instead he kicked chunks of loam over the barrel and the stock, reaching down to finish the work with his hands. He pulled up chunks of soil, ripping out the roots of bushes and saplings, and piled them on the heap until not an inch of the gun could be seen.

Making his way back out of the woods, he found Sheila waiting for him, walking in a circle at the edge of the driveway, holding Matilda against her stomach.

“Why would you want to get rid of it like that?” she asked with just a touch of exasperation. “You never know when you …”

Neal just shook his head and looked anxiously toward the highway again. A silver BMW was just pulling off the road. As Neal and his two companions were heading down the driveway, toward the shoulder of the road, a man in a tan sport coat emerged from the car—sandy-haired with bushy eyebrows so lightly colored that they nearly blended into the lower edge of his broad forehead.

He waited genially for Neal to approach.

“Is this your car?” he finally asked with a puckish smile.

Neal glanced at the wreckage of the Boccaccio, with an impassiveness that he maintained stubbornly.

“Yes,” he said casually, brushing the dirt off the knees of his pants with a few careless swipes.

The man walked to the edge of the ditch and examined the wreck curiously, in a kind of reverential silence but with a slight smirk. He looked across the road at Neal, as if to glean some hint of an explanation; disappointed, he looked back at the wreck, then at Neal once again, then again at the wreck.

Still smiling, he said, “Must have been quite a collision.”

“Nothing fancy,” Neal insisted. “I just took the turn a little too fast. It’s easy to lose track of your speed, you know.”

The man nodded skeptically, pulling at his chin, his smile slowly losing its shape. “You must have crawled out right there, huh?” He gestured toward the rear window, glassless except for a pebbly rim. “I don’t suppose you’ve called a wrecker.”

“Not yet,” Neal said. “I lost my phone. I’ll find a pay phone when I get to Johnstown.”

“Not easy to find a pay phone these days,” the man observed. “I can call for you.”

“Never mind,” Neal said. “Maybe you could just give us a lift to Johnstown.”

The man studied the wreck some more, nodding pointlessly as he reached out to touch one of the rear tires.

“I could call the Sheriff’s Department for you,” he said carefully.

“Why?”

“Well … they might have some questions.”

“I’ll start answering questions when I get to Johnstown,” Neal insisted blandly. “Can you give us a lift or not?”

“Sure,” the man said after some hesitation. “You got any luggage you want to carry?”

Neal shook his head. They had stowed the luggage in the trunk during their stop in Weirton, and the crushed lid was now wedged against the side of the ditch.

The man peered through a shattered window into the rear of the interior.

“I see something that looks like a diaper bag. Don’t you want that?”

Neal looked at Sheila, who shrugged.

“Can you reach it?” Neal asked.

The man was about ready to laugh. “I can try.” Gripping the frame of the car with one hand, he lowered his head through the window, gingerly avoiding the remaining shards of glass; he pitched forward until his left shoulder disappeared and then emerged again dragging the bag by his extended index finger.

Making his way across the highway, Neal turned to make sure that Sheila was following him. Without a word, she took the diaper bag from the friendly stranger, leaving Neal to mutter, “Thanks.”

On the way to Johnstown, the sandy-haired driver tried to make his impatient queries sound like small talk, but Neal remained steadfastly vague. Long silences ensued, broken only by Matilda’s babble and Sheila’s shushing sounds. The driver tried to sneak sidewise glances at Neal, which bloomed into innocuous smiles whenever he was caught looking.The man politely followed Neal’s instructions once they reached the city, leaving the three vagabonds at the Walnut Street station.

“If you want to get to New York before dark,” he said, “you’ve got to transfer at Harrisburg. The Pennsylvanian stops at every one-horse crossing from here to Philadelphia. Take the Keystone on into Manhattan. Penn Station.” He ventured one more awkward smile before adding, “Don’t forget to call the State Police first.”

The train to Harrisburg arrived five minutes early, and they were hustled aboard, along with the jazzed-up, musk-drenched members of a high school cross country team.

As the train passed through blunted hills, under piles of furrowed clouds, Matilda sat in fidgety sullenness on Sheila’s lap. She tugged on her mother’s hair until her hand was slapped away; then she wrapped her fist around the sleeve of Sheila’s blouse until her hand was slapped away again. Sheila turned Matilda toward her and bounced her in mock playfulness. She patted her back with clipped strokes, hoping to settle her into sleep by force of will. Matilda pushed herself up, stood on Sheila’s thighs and placed her face against her mother’s face until their eyes nearly touched. Lifting the armrest between the seats, Sheila tried to wedge her between her left hip and Neal’s right, holding her fast with one hand as she bit the nails of the other. Finally she picked the child up and plopped her on Neal’s lap.

“Maybe you can do something,” she said.

Feeling antsy himself, Neal walked the child up and down the narrow center aisle of the train, setting her down when she bucked in his arms and letting her walk along the rows of seats, holding herself up by the cold aluminum armrests. Aside from the athletes, the passengers were an older crowd, their eyes fixed on sadoku paperbacks, electronic readers, portable DVD players, phones with Scrabble flashing on their screens. Some of them gave Matilda a casual glance; some stared in mild concern, as if observing that a small animal—a marmoset, perhaps—had escaped from the city zoo; some extended a crooked finger; some reclined lifelessly, as if they’d imbibed embalming fluid through their earbuds.

After the three travelers transferred to the faster train, Matilda finally settled onto her mother’s lap and went to sleep, lulled by the train’s incessant rackety patter. Sheila gradually let her head sink onto Neal’s shoulder. All of the excitement of the early afternoon had receded into that mysterious place where her emotions lay dormant until she needed them. As she turned sleepier, her voice drifted like vapor into the sterilized air of the passenger car:

“I’ve been thinking about New York, Harold. The first thing I want to do is sleep. Sleep most of the day, and then maybe go to a show at night. A restaurant and a show. Maybe we could do that, Harold. Just spend a week going to the shows so I can get to know Broadway. What do you think?”

Neal’s mind was still reeling from the sound of the gun that had discharged between his hands. There were seven distinct images that rolled through his memory, isolating moments of decision and action: Krike’s agitated blinks, Neal’s absurd leap, the jerk and recoil of the rifle, Krike’s backward lurch, Neal’s unsteady aim, the shots that he had fired into the trees, into the sky … Seven distinct images rolling together as if they had happened at consecutive moments, rolling from point to point and then circling back to begin again. It was as if there was no act of memory involved, just a continuous visual reverberation, punctuated by a single, consuming, irrepressible sound—as if the world itself had popped, sucking all other sounds into a hole from which nothing could escape. It was difficult for Neal to hear anything but that endlessly repeated popping sound.

“I don’t really mean for very long,” Sheila was saying. “I could stay with you for a couple of weeks, couldn’t I? Maybe you could help me get in touch with some people. Didn’t you say you could do that?”

Neal dipped beneath the rolling surface of his mind, deep enough to feel shame for whatever he might have said before, but he immediately forgave himself. All of his lies, he said to himself, had been told under the assumption that he would never see her again. Whenever he could clear his mind, he reflected that things had changed forever, because of what had happened that afternoon. He would have something to say to her, but now he could afford to let it pass.

“I don’t know how long it takes to get a part in a show,” Sheila said. Her thoughts were running along parallel grooves, and she spun out compulsive fantasies that differed only in small details. “I’ll do almost anything,” she said more than once. “They’ll need dancers, won’t they? For revivals, like for South Pacific and, I don’t know, what’s another one of those musicals, Harold?” She never waited for an answer. “I’ll take my clothes off, if I have to. I don’t mind doing it on the stage, where no one knows you. Besides, with the full-body makeup it’s not like you’re really naked anyway. But I won’t be a stripper. It’s too close in those places. I won’t let anyone get close enough to touch me. I’d rather wash dishes if it came to that.”

There were pauses in her monologue when Neal could have said something, but all she really needed was to catch her breath and then she could continue. She needed a listener, but she wasn’t really in the mood for conversation.

“I can sing, too. I had a great aunt who told me I should join the church choir. She heard me singing to myself at night when I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to sing in public, though. Not in a group anyway. You can’t really hear yourself when you’re singing in a group.” She always paused for a moment at this point, as if she needed time for her mind to catch up with her memory. “Of course, in a chorus … in a Broadway chorus, that would be different … It’s different when you’re part of something like Broadway. I have an untrained voice. I could take voice lessons, but don’t you think a natural voice is better? Don’t you really think so, Harold?”

The clouds had broken up by the time they approached Philadelphia, and warm sunlight was now sifting through a powdery haze. The gunshots in Neal’s mind were beginning to sound farther away, but Sheila’s voice seemed equally distant.

“I think I could learn pole dancing. I could do that for a while until my career really takes off. Pole dancing is an art form. You have to have agility and dexterity and a sense of rhythm. And balance. I’ve got all of that. It’s not like stripping. I can see myself wearing a black two-piece, with spangles. Not bad at all. I might have to lose the last ten pounds I gained when I had Matilda, but I can live on cantaloupe and Melba toast if I have to. I have will power. I have more will power than anyone knows, Harold … I wonder what the poles feel like. Are they made of brass? Are they made of polished wood? … You have no idea how determined I am, Harold.”

Matilda was still sleeping when the train left the North Philadelphia station, heading for Newark. Sheila shifted in her seat about every ten miles, moving Matilda from one shoulder to another, to her lap, to the middle of her chest, now facing toward her, now facing away. Her monologue continued with barely a pause. She seemed about to fall asleep from time to time, but even at her stillest moments she spoke like a gossipy sleepwalker.

As the train raced northward, the seven rolling images in Neal’s mind gradually descended into his nerves and his tendons, blending into his pulse, leaving his mind freer for thoughts of his own making. He began fitting together the pieces of his own not-so-distant future. Once he reached Grand Central, he could bargain for the key to the apartment before handing off the title and the keys to the car. Then he could describe what happened to the car, making sure that Tucker understood the catastrophe was actually an incredible piece of good luck. Tucker could sue Krike for more than the car was worth. For a small under-the-table fee, a specialty car dealer from Long Island could provide an inflated appraisal. Tucker might even end up owning his own wrecker and repo business.

Neal, for his part, could see himself continuing his complicated tango with Sheila. She was a definitely a high-maintenance woman, but after witnessing her cool, steely composure in the garage, he was somewhat in awe of her again, and he was once more eager to see where the steps of the dance would lead. Krike seemed to be out of the way for good, but even if he wasn’t, Neal had decided that Sheila was worth a little risk. Yes, at some point he would have to tell her the truth about himself, but Neal knew he could convince her that she was better off with him than with any fantasy man. After all, it wasn’t Harold Hill that had grasped the rifle, whose shots were still rippling along the surface of his skin. It wasn’t Voortman’s henchman who had chased away that man that stood between her and the life she wanted. It was Neal Pilchard. She already knew him for who he really was. Once Tucker informed his father that he had read the letter, another thousand dollars would replenish Neal’s resources. He was entitled to the extra thousand because he had done what he had agreed to do, delivered the car and the letter; everything that happened after that could hardly be considered his fault. He could now see himself and Sheila … and Matilda, he supposed … thriving rent-free eleven stories above Central Park, in a space filled with large windows bringing blue skies and brash autumnal light into every corner of existence. With the new funds in his bank account, he could pay off his card and live on credit for weeks, even months. After all, Tucker’s father was in North Carolina, wasn’t he?

With a slight shudder, Neal suddenly remembered what Tucker had told him about his father. And just as suddenly, Neal remembered the gargoyle over the door of the office. And with the swiftness of starlings emptying into a November sky, Neal imagined that the train was carrying him into a future filled with shadows.

The shift in mood was so seamless and complete that something more than a fleeting thought had to account for it. When Neal tried to reimagine that Manhattan apartment with all of its open spaces and polished surfaces, his memory kept turning it into something else, and it struck him that ever since Tucker had mentioned his father’s approaching demise, he had been silently shadowed by another death. He could see himself sitting in a creaking wicker chair in his parents’ cramped apartment, the one they had moved into after his father’s early retirement. The reverberating gunshots still roiled his bones, but it was as if they were part of a distant world outside, while the cramped interior of the poorly lit apartment had been set aside for him like a private screening room.

He remembered holding a saucer awkwardly on his knees, and a cup of weak, undrinkable coffee teetering and tipping out watery driblets as he looked in vain for a place to set the saucer down. His mother sat on a sofa across from him, staring at her empty cup on its own saucer—pieces of wedding china, he recalled. She was wearing a dress that she might have worn to an ordination service; the fabric drooped over her knees like a flag on a windless day. Her hands with their thick veins were folded on her lap, and she was looking up at him through the large, plastic-rimmed glasses that had been unfashionable for over a decade. Her eyes were limpid and still, yet there was no supplication in them, no reproach, no query, no bemusem*nt, no expectation.

In the well-rehearsed version of this memory, Neal was in the midst of an apology, or sort of an apology, though not in so many words. This was the first time he had spoken with his mother alone since his father’s death, the first time, in fact, he had spoken with her alone since he was fifteen years old, as far as he could recall. His own words were too indistinct to register, but he remembered the gist of what he was saying. He remembered expressing some surprise that the end had come so soon. If he’d known that his father had gone downhill so fast following the second stroke, he would have left North Carolina sooner and might have reached his father’s bedside in time.

“It was all in the letter I sent you,” his mother said, tonelessly, without any apparent rancor.

Neal remembered saying something about how his dissertation director had set a firm deadline for the second-to-last chapter. One of his committee members had objected to Neal’s ironic interpretation of the last paragraph of “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio.” Another committee member wanted him to use the original title of the story. There were questions raised about Hemingway’s correspondence with Mike Gold, editor of The New Masses. The letter arrived in the midst of this. He wasn’t in the habit of opening his mother’s letters right away anyway. They tended to sit on the edge of his desk along with the light bill for a day or two. He assumed that anything truly urgent would be communicated by phone or by email.

“I don’t want you to blame yourself,” she always said to him in this memory. “It was all right. Audrey helped us move into the apartment. She’s got a real talent for packing and unpacking. And Blaine is an absolute dream. She was so lucky to find someone like him. I hear so much about husbands who go off looking for younger women and leave their wives with families to care for … Blaine was so good after your father’s first stroke. You should have seen the gentle way he would lift him off his bed and help him to the bathroom. Such a gentle way for such a large man. I used to be sort of annoyed by his jokes. I used to think he laughed a little too hard. But it was good to have laughter in the house then.”

Neal must have made some kind of feeble gesture then. He recalled his mother reaching forward and touching his hand with cold, feather-light fingers.

“We really had lots of help. The neighbors … members of the congregation. We understood. You had things to do.”

Words were on the tip of his tongue, indistinct, half-formed. This was the point in the memory where he always wanted to speak aloud to his mother’s image, say something he had failed to say before. Each time he recalled this moment, he wanted to call her and apologize for everything, but she had died two years before, suddenly, unexpectedly, in her sleep.

15. The Old Rolling Cross

The three travelers arrived at Penn Station at 7:30. They pushed their way through the crowds swirling through the basem*nt concourse and plunged down the escalator to the subway tracks. To Sheila’s repeated questions, Neal kept reminding her that they had promised to meet Tucker at Grand Central.

“Why can’t he come here?” she kept asking. “I’m tired. I’m hungry.”

“He doesn’t know we’re here,” Neal kept repeating. “He thinks we’re driving into New York. He doesn’t know we’ve lost the car.”

“You could have him paged, couldn’t you?”

“That would take just as long as …”

At this point, Neal would shake his head, take her arm and pull her along, while she dragged the diaper bag by one hand, Matilda by one hand, letting the child’s feet skitter along the concrete floor of the platform.

They took the Eighth Avenue Local to Lexington and 51^st, then descended through another escalator to the Lexington Avenue Express and emerged into trapped, sweltering air in the 42^nd Street station. Pushing their way through the crowds at the platform, they lost Matilda for a fraction of a second, until Neal retraced three steps and swept her into his arms. They jostled their way onto the escalator up to the street level of Grand Central. Reaching the 42^nd Street passage, Neal was momentarily at a loss for what to do, so he followed the crowd into the depths of the terminal, using a raised elbow to plough a furrow through close-packed bodies, until he and his companions reached the concourse, where suddenly he became fully conscious that he was actually in New York City—time and space were bearing down on him with an urgency that couldn’t be evaded.

Under the vaulted, constellated ceiling, under the spacious flags, in the white light from ticket windows, in the sunset glow from the arched windows above the balcony, Neal felt a new rush of vertigo. He closed his eyes for a moment; opening them again, he staggered forward, dodging the commuters who rushed in every imaginable direction, and he forgot briefly why he had come to the terminal in the first place; it was only when Sheila jostled him and began complaining again that she was hungry, that he remembered. His next impulse was to scan the crowd milling around the round information booth at the center of the expanse. He had forgotten what Tucker was wearing, so he tried to identify him by height, by leanness, by the generally erratic trend of his movements.

Sheila bumped him hard, whether intentionally or not seemed irrelevant.

“This baby needs a new diaper,” she announced, seemingly to the entire population of the concourse.

She looked at Neal petulantly, and Neal just looked away, his gaze roving from one arched passageway to another.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll go find a bathroom somewhere.”

She heaved the diaper bag back onto one shoulder and flattened Matilda against the other, before walking away with an affected limp.

There was nowhere to sit in the concourse, so Neal walked over to a vacant ticket window and leaned against the wall. He kept mechanically scoping the length and breadth of the concourse, stealing an occasional glance at his fingernails, which were still jammed with loam from the woods in Pennsylvania. His mind settled into a state of uneasy repose. He felt that one sequence of events was drawing to an end—one that began on an unpropitious day in Kentucky, evolved through mostly predictable phases of cause and effect, starting with his inability to remember his name, unfolding in a series of lies and bad faith gestures until a moment of truth had arrived. He didn’t blame himself for playing his part as long as he could. But he was relieved to know that truth exerted its own kind of force, and he would soon be dealing with Sheila on a completely new set of terms. Already, he began to practice what he would say to Sheila, even as he continued scanning the concourse for Tucker.

Tucker appeared suddenly behind him while he was gazing in the wrong direction.

“Where’d you park, man?” Tucker’s eyes peeked out of their hollow sockets like small animals peering in furtive terror from their holes. He looked as if he had lost ten pounds in the past ten hours. “No telling what’s happened to the car by now. Some two-bit thugs have probably stripped the chrome already.”

“Not exactly …,” Neal began uncertainly. “What happened was …” He paused, noticing that Tucker was clutching a folded sheaf of papers in his sweaty hand. “So you read that?”

“What? You mean this?” Tucker held out the letter to Neal as if trying to dispose of it in sheer disgust.

“From your father, right?”

Tucker nodded. “From him. Right. Just tell me where you left the car.”

“So did you tell him that you read it? Did you call him or something?”

“I told him. I left a message. I told him a lot of things.” Tucker grimaced. “I blew chunks of sh*t at him, if you really want to know. Where’s the car?”

“So I’ll get my other grand,” Neal said, speaking more to himself than to Tucker.

“You’ll get what’s coming to you,” Tucker spat out. “Give me the keys to the car, God damn you.”

Neal reached into his pocket and fished them out. Tucker snatched at the keys and studied them for a moment as if he had trouble believing that they were finally in his grasp.

“Where’s the title, you bastard? That belongs to me. It always belonged to me, you four-eyed chiseler.”

Neal reached into his jacket pocket for the zipper pouch, fished out the title and handed it over, smearing the textured paper slightly with the dirt from his fingertips.

“O.K.,” Tucker said with a sudden surge of confidence. “Now, where did you leave the car?”

“In Pennsylvania,” Neal said matter-of-factly. “The highway south of Johnstown.”

Tucker stared at him in dumb horror.

“I ran out of gas,” Neal explained feebly. “And other things happened. I came here on Amtrak.”

Tucker continued staring at him, his mouth beginning to twist in the direction of speech, his lips forming the outlines of the word how.

“It’s really kind of a good thing …,” Neal began with an effort at smiling.

Tucker acted as if he couldn’t hear, as if he couldn’t even see Neal anymore. “Johnstown,” he finally said. “The highway.” He seemed to be trying to commit the words to memory.

He rested his hands on the top of his head as he stood completely still, muttering the words hypnotically, and then he began moving stiffly away. As he moved, he seemed to be shaking his legs out of some sort of paralytic shock, and halfway along the width of the concourse he began moving faster, until he had broken into a run by the time he melted into the crowd, clutching the title to the car as he disappeared.

Neal belatedly decided to follow him. It wasn’t fair for Tucker not to know the whole truth, he finally told himself. He had gotten so used to thinking of Tucker as simply an x factor in his own affairs that he was almost shocked to think of himself suddenly as responsible for the other man’s well-being. Just as he was beginning to start off in pursuit, he noticed the folded pieces of paper that Tucker had evidently dropped when he took hold of the title. Neal picked up the letter and automatically started to read it as he made his way into the thick of the crowd:

Dear son,

I don’t know how much you know right now. Your mother knows more than she’s supposed to, so I guess you do too. I don’t really care. I’ve got all I can handle just bothering about myself. They finally came up with a pain co*cktail that works for me, but instead of the pain what I’m getting is this numbness that works its way up from my gut to my chest to my left armpit. My spit tastes like tarnished pennies. I don’t sleep at night. If I sleep at all my eyes feel raw and scratchy in the morning like they’ve been open the whole time. I get dizzy if I stand up too quick, but I suspect that’s from the pills. Next week they’re going to start doing things to me, just so they can say they did something. I’m finished, though. I know it.

The doctor who gave me the news smelled like mothballs. It was his death jacket that he was wearing, I guess. I might as well not have not been in the room, it’s like he was speaking to the wall behind my head. When you’re all but dead …

As he read, Neal was bumped from behind twice and at least once was told that he should watch where he was going. He slowed until he finally stopped and then looked up. Realizing that Tucker could have gone in at least three different directions, he gave up the chase, headed back to where he had been standing, and continued reading the letter:

When you’re all but dead like I am and still alive, you take up space but no one sees you anymore. All they see is death staring at them and no one wants to look at that. I wouldn’t either, to tell you the truth.

I guess Ruby knows though I haven’t said anything. She listens in on phone calls. She reads my email. I think I’m going to fire her and hire some stupid girl with fake eyelashes and ears pierced in fifty places. Too stupid to know what’s what. That way I won’t have to have anyone around who thinks she’s superior to me because she’s still going to be here when I’m gone.

That’s the thing I hate the most. I knew I wasn’t going to live forever. But I never knew how long I could go. I could tell myself that I would outlive any loser I saw standing at a bus stop. Anyone I talked to on the phone. I don’t care how old. Sixty years old, fifty, twenty-five. I never knew. I could outlive any of them. My old man lived to be ninety-two. But now I know. They’re all going to be alive when I’m gone. Every mealy-mouthed rat who wants my money. Every splay-footed idiot who tries to sue me. Every maggot-brained drunk who looks at me funny on the street. It’s like how it was in the westerns when they lynched someone. They’d sit him on his horse, hang the rope around his neck, and fire a pistol. He must have known that the damn horse would outlive him. Crows squawking in the tree, flies circling the horse’s ass. They would all still be there when he wasn’t. That’s me. They’re putting the noose around my neck right now. I can feel the splinters from the weathered hemp.

You probably skipped down to the bottom line already, not even reading this. But maybe you’ve seen what I’ve had to say and you skipped back up here to figure it out. If you really want to know what it’s all about, here it is.

I’m looking death in the face. I’m literally looking at it right now. It’s hanging over the door to my office. This thing. I can’t remember the word for it now. Sort of dog like, with wings that come to a point at the top. Claws. This smile that makes you feel like something’s scraped the inside of your bones. I hung it over the door so I could look square at death every moment of the day when I’m here. So I could keep it in the front of my brain so it wouldn’t show up in my dreams, when and if I’m ever able to sleep. Maybe I thought if I looked it in the face, all day long … I don’t know, maybe I thought that it would give me a new way of thinking. Well, forget that Nothing’s changed. I’m still the same bastard I always was.

You might as well know the rest of it. I was sitting in front of the TV one night. Probably having a cigarette because I didn’t know I was sick yet. There was probably something in my lap, some prospectus, some report from my man in Bangalore. I wish I could at least outlive him. I was sitting there with the TV on and there was this report about a man who was dragging a cross from Maine to Key West. Dragging it along U.S. 1. They kept showing his feet. No shoes, no sandals. Open sores on his heels. Dried mud spattered on his ankles. The cross was about eight foot tall, made of unfinished hickory, white rough-looking wood. The underside of the cross piece was wedged onto his left shoulder, with some ragged towels between the wood and his collar bone. The base of the cross was rigged with wheelbarrow wheels on a steel axle.

This was just a freak show, as far as I was concerned, until I got a look at the man’s eyes. Small, sharp eyes, still-looking, blue as a shard from a broken window. I knew I’d seen that face and especially those eyes before. The face was sharper-looking now. But it was the same face.

It was maybe five years ago. I was in Philadelphia fighting a lawsuit about some patent I had purchased from an MIT chemical engineer. It was a process for making jet fuel from fish oil, if I remember right. I was planning to sell it to Shell Aviation so they could keep it from being developed commercially. I thought I could convince them it would undercut the price of Jet A-1. Some prick from Stanford claimed that he and my MIT guy had collaborated on it, and he was trying to squeeze out a settlement. This man I’m talking about, the one dragging the cross, was part of the plaintiff’s legal team back then. He was in charge of the deposition. He spoke very softly and plainly, but in this kind of measured way, like he was carefully keeping his wind in reserve. His eyes were boy’s eyes. They had that sort of coy, well-meaning look that a boy will get when he’s trying to figure out how to steal the key to your liquor cabinet.

After my testimony was done, I was having drinks at the Templar Club, and I saw him at a table in a corner of the bar. This was one of those places where the carpet soaks up all of the sound in the room. There are battle axes and leather shields mounted on the wall. I’ve been inside cheerier mausoleums. Anyway, this guy nodded to me. He was sitting there with his hands folded over a yellow envelope. I was making my way out of the room, and he followed me with his eyes. Like he had something to say.

I don’t go out of my way to be rude. If a man has something to say to me. I stopped and walked a couple of feet toward his table.

He smiled and then he said, “If you want to join me …”

I pulled up a chair and faced him, glancing at my watch to let him know my time was more valuable than his. He was just sitting there with his hands folded across the envelope. A couple of empty glasses. Like he had to take a couple of shots of courage.

“It’s not like I really want to talk about the case …,” he said. And then he just stopped there.

There was some defamation case going through the courts back then, so we talked about it for a little while. I was curious about his view of the case, given his legal expertise. He just kind of flicked his eyes at me now and then and drummed his fingers on the envelope. He was waiting for me to make an offer.

Didn’t cost me as much as I thought, and in the end it may have saved me a hundred grand. The Stanford egg was asking for two point five million.

Anyway, this was the guy. I thought so. I guess I wanted to be sure of it, but don’t ask me why it mattered.

The next day after seeing the TV story, I drove along U.S. 1 until I was almost at the South Carolina border. Traffic slowed suddenly, and I could see some trucks ahead of me swerving to the left. Lots of honking. Finally I could see him up the road, trolling along on the paved part of the shoulder. Just like on TV, he was wearing clothes that looked like they’d been hanging on the line through a hurricane and a dust storm. As he trudged along, he was leaning a little to one side, but he kept up a good marching pace.

I pulled well off the road, up against a wire fence. Stepped through some weeds and had to kind of huff it to get up to him. If he saw me coming he didn’t show it. When I got close the first thing I noticed was the cuts along the tops of his feet. Straight lines, one next to the other, clotted but still angry-looking. Somehow those cuts didn’t show up in the close-up shots on TV. Maybe the cameraman thought it would make people uneasy to see it. This was supposed to be an uplifting news story, I guess.

I started walking alongside of him, keeping stride with him, not easy to do. He still didn’t act like he noticed me, but he must have seen me out of the corner of his left eye.

“One for every state line,” he said.

“What?”

“The cuts on my feet. One for every state line I’ve crossed. Eleven altogether.”

I counted. Six on one foot, five on the other. Then I looked up and locked onto his eyes, and it was sure enough the same guy.

“Been a long time,” I said. “You’re a long way from Philadelphia now.”

“Not far enough,” he said. “I’ve still got a long way to go.”

“Key West,” I said.

“Farther than that,” he said.

“What do you plan to do when you get to Key West? How’re you going to go any farther?”

“I might just have to walk into the ocean,” he said, not smiling. “Too bad I can’t swim.”

The wheels at the base of the cross were squeaking, another thing you couldn’t tell from the TV story.

“You better get those wheels oiled,” I suggested. “They’ll seize up on you if you’re not careful.”

“Then I’ll just have to pick the cross up and carry it. I’m carrying heavier things than that already.”

“How about if I run down the road and find a hardware store, maybe bring you a can of WD-40?”

“If you feel like you have to do that … I’m not asking.”

I did it. When I caught up with him he was in South Carolina. I persuaded him to stop for a moment and I squirted a few drops of oil into the bearings.

“Try that,” I said.

He went on a little ways, still a little squeak there, and I got him to stop again. Squirted a little more oil. He looked down as I was kneeling there, and he seemed to be studying the little drops of oil that dribbled onto the ground. That’s when I thought to check his feet and saw the new cut on the left one, with bright, fresh beaded blood.

“I’m not trying to make a mess,” I said, still looking at his foot.

“No, you’ve done a good day’s service. I hope it was a blessing to you.”

He turned again and started walking. The wheels were just whispering along now. I watched him for a few minutes. Cars were veering around both of us. I thought about getting him something to eat, but decided I would leave that for someone else to do—someone else might need the next blessing, I thought.

When I got back to Raleigh it was five o’clock, time for the bells at St. Martin’s. I don’t know why, but something told me that I was going to hear those bells differently that day. I thought it would do something to me finally, after hearing them for years from my office, back when I was on Jones Street. After what I had seen you’d think a man would come to an understanding.

But I could hear the bells as plain as whitewash, and I got nothing from it. That was before I was sick. I mean that was before I knew I was sick. I’ve probably been rotting from the inside out for at least twenty years. Now that I’m looking death in the face, you’d think that would finally make a difference, but no. The church bells didn’t do it that day, and a chill wind from the graveyard can’t do it now. I’m all done inside.

You might think this has got nothing to do with you, but listen. If there’s anything I can still do for you, maybe at least I can save you from the way money has rotted out my insides. If you want to ruin your own life, go ahead and do it, but I’m not going to help you.

So this is what I’m handing down to you. Freedom from the soul rot of wealth. It’s the best thing I have to give.

The car is yours. Do what you want to with it. But that’s the last thing you’re getting from me.

Sincerely,

Yore ole dad.

Once Neal had finished the letter, he spent a moment asking himself, quite earnestly, which of the two McCurdys he pitied more. Then he realized he had forgotten to ask Tucker about the apartment, and his empathy was swallowed up in a sudden fit of self-pity. He was homeless in New York City. At least now, he told himself, he knew for certain that the second thousand was coming to him, and with a new credit line a lot of things were possible; he couldn’t have used the apartment forever anyway.

16. More Than a Thousand Reeds

A rush of new commuters came through the 42^nd Street passage, as if both the subway and a trio of city buses had disgorged their contents and heaved them into the terminal. From the midst of the crowd Neal could see Sheila making her way toward him, swinging Matilda beside her, accompanied by a strange man with a dangling shoulder-strap bag, his right hand grazing her as they strode along.

The man was scraggly-bearded and long-limbed, so oddly erect that he appeared to be tilted backward. His legs moved in a practiced, fluid way that seemed to reflect breeding, filtered through several layers of irony. His hand on Sheila’s shoulder looked feathery light, but there was an air of insinuation about it, increasingly so as he and Sheila approached.

Sheila was moving briskly, putting her new companion to some effort to keep abreast of her.

“This is so amazing, Harold,” she said from ten feet away. By this time, Matilda had slumped to the floor and was being dragged along by her newly diapered bottom.

When they finally halted at hand-shaking distance, Sheila introduced her new friend. “This is Roger. I met him at Michael Jordan’s. I had to get a drink and kind of freshen up.”

As Roger ran one hand through his scruffy beard, he held out the other one at an angle and allowed Neal to grasp it by the fingertips.

“The pleasure’s all mine,” he said crisply, with no pretense of sincerity.

“Roger’s from England,” Sheila said with mysterious urgency.

“I’m from Kingston upon Thames,” he said through his teeth. “Lovely little village, if I do say so.”

“You won’t believe what Roger told me, Harold.”

“Well, to be perfectly …” Roger waved away the rest of the abortive phrase. “You see I’m here with a documentary crew. We’re interviewing Americans about their sense of history, who they think they are, and that sort of thing. Sounds blatantly dreadful, I know.”

“Roger says I have a look,” Sheila said with solemn emphasis.

“It’s brilliant, really,” Roger affirmed. “I’ve been looking at American faces for the past three weeks, and this is the most American face I’ve seen yet.”

“I always thought I was pretty American,” Neal said dryly.

“Well, it’s just that I have a feel for faces, you know. I’ve been to film school, so I know a bit about typecasting.”

If there was any insult in this remark, Sheila didn’t catch it.

“Roger’s got some ideas, Harold,” she said, still solemn, still urgent.

“I’ve got some friends, as it happens.” Roger fondled the whiskers at the tip of his chin as if he were examining a swatch of silk. “Feature film makers, actually. The real thing, you know, not this educational rubbish that I’ve been slaving over. They’re always on the lookout for an American face. One that you look at and say … that’s it.”

“Harold, he wants to take me to England,” Sheila said.

“Her face is a bloody gold mine. It’s one of those faces that don’t seem to have a single feature on them. Blank, flat as a picket.”

Neal glanced at Sheila and immediately saw what Roger meant; he had seen it from the very beginning, in fact. “That’s the American look?”

“Bloody right. It flags an American the way a Nikon on a lanyard pegs a Jap. It’s what we always expect where I come from. That look … anything could cross that face and disappear the next moment. It’s like one of those celluloid doodle pads. You write anything you want and then erase it with one flick of the wrist.”

“I don’t get it. What’s so American about that?”

“It’s the way you Americans come across, you see. It’s like you’re a nation of faces … well, anyone has a face, but an American has nothing but a face, you see. So what’s behind it? Everything? Nothing? You can never can tell with you blokes.”

Neal and Roger both looked at Sheila suddenly as if looking for confirmation of this truism. Facing their stares, Sheila’s eyes seemed to have been turned back on themselves; she looked suddenly distant and vague, her cheeks suffused with a white chill that deepened the tint of her freckles.

“You see what I mean, don’t you? She’s a f*cking Sphinx, that one.”

“What’s this about going to England?” Neal asked.

“That’s right,” Sheila said with sudden conviction. “Roger’s going to get me in the movies.”

“I’ve got to meet up with my partners. They’re in Boston right now. I’m taking a red eye out to Logan. In fact …” Roger angled his wrist and pantomimed a glance at his watch while doing a sprightly drum tap on the strap of his bag. “Bloody good to know you,” he said, wincing pleasantly.

Sheila zipped open the diaper bag and took out a battered-looking pocket book. “Can’t forget my passport,” she said.

“You’re really going with him?” Neal gave Sheila an intent look, but giving nothing away, she merely handed him the diaper bag.

“You’ll need this, Harold.” Artfully averting her eyes, she explained, “I’m going to leave Matilda with you.”

The child had dropped to the floor and was now looking for her reflection in the buffed surface.

Neal shook his head. He wasn’t prepared to disagree with her; he hadn’t yet reached the point where he understood her well enough to argue. “What was … I

don’t …” The question spinning dizzily in his mind wouldn’t turn itself into words.

“She’s much better off with you. I’ve got practically no money, and you’ve

got … you can treat her right, Harold.” She looked at him seriously for a moment. “You really proved something to me back there, Harold. I’m so lucky I hooked up with you.”

Neal shook his head again, more forcefully this time, but Sheila had already turned away, reaching for Matilda, lifting her off the floor and kissing the back of her head. She gently handed the child to Neal, and then she grasped the strap of Roger’s bag as he pivoted efficiently toward the 42^nd Street passage.

Abruptly, though, she turned back again before taking a step. “It’s just until I get settled,” she told Neal. “I can reach you through your company, right? Asphalt Records. I remember that. Oh, and look.” She took the diaper bag from Neal, unzipped it, and rummaged around until she found a small envelope. “You may need this. It’s the key to Matilda’s safe deposit box. With her birth certificate and everything.”

Sheila placed the envelope in Neal’s right hand and closed his fingers over it. Dropping the diaper bag at his feet, she turned, exchanged a collusive smile with Roger, and began moving away with him in a sudden rush.

Stiff with panic, Neal stood holding the child loosely by one arm, grasping the key in the other hand. “Wait!” he called out weakly. “This isn’t—”

Sheila and her new escort were halfway to the passage before he was shocked into action. As he started off in pursuit, the child began slipping out of his grasp, and he stopped to wrap his arm around her; putting the small envelope in his pocket, he took his other arm and lifted her up until she was securely cradled, and then he began moving toward the passage. He was almost there when he realized that he had left the diaper bag behind.

After rushing to retrieve it, he headed down the corridor, alight with the glow of chandeliers above, but darkening at foot level. Skirting the subway lines, he pushed his way past serious-looking men and women in business suits—the late commuters still charged with the nervous rush of a twelve-hour day—until, leaning with his burdens against the glass doors, he found himself in the electric glare of twilight on 42^nd Street.

About a hundred feet down the street, he could see Sheila and Roger climbing into a taxi. The cab was signaling to enter the stalled traffic, and as he approached he began shouting, “Sheila! Listen to me!”

Matilda’s fingers were wedging his glasses off his face and the diaper bag was slowly slipping.

“I’m a fraud!” Neal shrieked as he came up alongside the cab. “I’m a liar! I’m no one!”

He was so close now that he could nearly touch the passenger door handle, and he could see Sheila looking wistfully at him, but then the cab suddenly lurched and knifed its way between a bus and a limousine, raced under a yellow light just turning red, and then was lost in the traffic on the other side of the cross street.

Neal swung away in search of a cab; several approached the curb and were claimed by busy people in evening clothes. He had to wait five minutes before he could flag one down.

Making his way into the cab, he said, “Take me to the airport.”

The driver, a bald, honey-colored man wearing horn-rimmed glasses, looked at him blankly. “You mean LaGuardia?”

Halfway through the door, Neal stopped to think. “I don’t know,” he said. “Where would someone get a flight to Boston?”

“You’ve got three choices, boyo,” the driver said in exasperation. “Make up your mind quick. The meter starts now.”

Neal had no idea what to say.

The driver looked dubiously at the child barely clinging to Neal’s shoulder. “I don’t want any baby spit-up in here,” he said. “I just had the upholstery cleaned.”

“Maybe you could follow another cab,” Neal suggested hopelessly. “It may not be—”

“Hey, boyo. Look at your baby, now. See. She’s got her fingers in her mouth. What do you suppose that means?”

“I don’t know,” Neal said, his mind a perfect fog.

“I’ll tell you what it means. The child is hungry. You should feed her before you go anywhere else. Take a bus to the airport if you want to. It’s cheaper.”

Neal stepped out of the cab and the driver reached back, slamming the door shut. The cab pulled away, leaving acrid invisible exhaust in its wake.

Neal stood helplessly on the curb, attracting the curious eyes of the scattered crowd that passed along the sidewalk. The night was lit by a thousand lights that illuminated his desperate state.

He rushed back into the terminal, where the diminishing crowds seemed too preoccupied with their own needs to bother with his. Back in the main concourse, he decided that his only course of action was to buy a ticket for Boston. He approached the circular information kiosk to see if he could he find out something about the schedule.

A black woman with sparkling red hair and heavy eyelids informed him that if he wanted to take the express to Boston he would have to go to Penn Station.

“I was just there,” Neal complained.

“Well, I guess you’ll be going back,” she commented, laughing hoarsely.

“I don’t know.” Neal felt that he was suddenly in the middle of a very bad, very familiar dream; he imagined that he would never find his way back to Penn Station.

“You’ve got a little crisis on your hands, don’t you?” The woman spoke briskly, but not unkindly.

Matilda was beginning to wail in a low, choked voice; her eyes were glistening and red.

“Hey there,” Neal said softly. He patted the child, pumping her up and down in his arms. He glanced at the woman in the kiosk, as if to see whether he was doing the right thing, but she was already speaking to someone else.

He remembered what the cab driver had said and realized suddenly that he couldn’t remember seeing Sheila feed Matilda since they had crossed the Ohio. He looked around for a place to sit down so he could fumble through the diaper bag for food, and he finally headed for the steps leading to the balcony.

He seated himself alongside the marble railing, and zipped open the bag, looking for a jar of applesauce or a bag of crackers. After removing a soiled rag, a rubber hippopotamus, a rectal thermometer, and a box of tampons, he dug out a can of dry formula, then he hunted around for the bottle as Matilda’s cries began to ratchet up in volume and pitch.

An elderly man in a gray sport coat leaned over and told him that there were benches in the Station Master’s Office.

“Looks like you could use a woman’s touch,” the man said with a well-meaning smile.

Happy to have an excuse to move, Neal hoisted the child and the bag again and headed back around to the hallway on the left. Passing through a glass door, he found himself in a cool, bright waiting room. Autumn flowers in vases mingled with murals spread with fantasies of spring flowers, butterflies and halos of mist. The room’s temporary inhabitants were spread out on the polished, spacious benches, secure in their own ruminations; when they moved they walked at a decidedly indoor pace, unlike the masses rushing through the concourse.

Neal spied a narrow space at one of the benches, and when he approached, the large, florid woman settled in the middle of the bench scooted her coat and handbag over to make room for the man with the whining child. He plunged his hand into the diaper bag again and finally found the bottle; he glanced at the directions on the formula can, shook some of the mix into the bottle and then, still lugging Matilda, headed over to the drinking fountains. Along with way, Matilda slipped out of his grasp, but she managed to keep her feet, executing an impromptu pirouette with her arms extended in frustration and despair. With an eye on the child, Neal shook the bottle to make liquid formula, then scooped up Matilda, settled down again at the bench, and held the nipple to her lips.

Matilda glanced at him curiously, tested the nipple, and then turned her head away and began to cry softly.

Someone standing behind the bench said, “You got to warm the bottle, dude. You must be new at this.” Neal turned and saw a young man with a craggy face and tattoos circling his throat, wearing a St. John’s hoodie. “All you got to have is something hot to dip it in. There’s a Starbuck’s across from here. I’ll go get you a venti. Be right back.”

The man hurried out the door. Neal struggled to keep the wiggling, protesting Matilda in his arms until he returned with the coffee.

“How much do I—”

But the young man scurried away without a word.

Neal dipped the bottle into the coffee, which had been filled only halfway. After waiting about ten minutes, keeping his arm around Matilda as she tried to squirm away, he lifted her up to his shoulder and offered her the bottle again. This time, when the nipple touched her lips, she calmed down and started to drink, but after a moment her eyes met Neal’s eyes; she turned her head away, and began to shake it irritably. He offered the nipple again, and again she shook her head, trying to wriggle away.

“Such a pretty child,” the large woman said in a Carpathian accent. “Why aren’t you singing to her?”

Neal pulled Matilda closer, stiffened his arm, and held the bottle up to her once more. He glanced at the woman, who was giving him a chiding, coaxing look, and then began moving his lips softly, almost mutely, mumbling the opening lines of the first and only song that came to mind. After getting past the first flush of self-consciousness, he began to sing a little louder and more clearly:

They were followed by rows and rows of the finest virtuosos . . .

Peering curiously at the blue vein that crossed the bridge of her nose, barely veiled by her translucent skin, Neal gently touched her lips with the nipple of the bottle. His heart thudded in suspense as he raised his voice a little more:

There were more than a thousand reeds

Springing up like weeds . . .

Her body became limp in his arms and she gave him a look that suggested tentative good will. She began to suck while Neal made his way unconsciously through the stanzas:

There were copper bottom tympani in horse platoons

Thundering, thundering, all along the way. . . .

He tilted the bottle up to let the formula flow more easily, and she rewarded him for this by flashing her dark eyes in a sudden rush of pleasure. As she began concentrating on the business of feeding, she averted her glance, but there was nothing in this except a calm acceptance of where she was, what she was doing, and who was holding her. His voice gradually softened as the words continued to pulse through his lips, one repetition of the song followed by another:

Seventy-six trombones led the big parade . . . .