Few motels around this part of Texas require identification and I know the ones that do. Even the most dutiful clerks never pay enough attention to see that the picture on my license doesn’t quite look like me. But I’m prepared to move quickly all the same—if it’s a double-decker, I request a room on the ground floor, explaining that I have a fear of heights, which gets a good laugh from behind the desk.
If my luck is working I draw a room with a door connecting to the room occupied by the owner of the vehicle I will later drive away. I watch him closely, taking up positions at the ice machine and the diner, listening through the door for the schedule of his comings and goings.
My liability is that I no longer steal with the objective of converting what I’ve taken as soon as I can get it off my hands. Instead I keep what I get for as long as I can, in order to live a normal life as free as possible from the strictures of legal possession. On the road, I pass myself off as a farm agent or an oil company representative, one of several traveling professionals whose particulars I’ve picked up. But my real profession is the careful and highly precarious maintenance of a life almost completely purified of personal property.
It feels like a calling, as I said, or a condition—in either case something I don’t have a choice in. When it first came on, I thought I would end up by renouncing all worldly possessions, like a monk, but I knew I didn’t have the courage to live the life that required, so I adapted what I already knew and started living this way, having but not owning. I also thought I’d have to disappear, to go away for good from all the people and places I knew, but I had no idea where I’d go besides a monastery or a prison, neither of which sounded appealing. So I decided to disappear right where I lived, to become a ghost in the middle of everybody and everything I knew.
I once ran into a man who said he could help me disappear, legally. He told me he had already done it, that he didn’t exist anymore as far as the United States government was concerned.
“I checked into a room at an undisclosed Hiway House motel in an undisclosed Southwestern state,” he told me. “And a few days later, with the help of some undisclosed people, I checked out a dead man. That’s who I am right now, as I speak to you. Dead to the law.” This required constant maintenance, he said, and constant vigilance. He read to me from a kind of primer he carried, called How to Disappear in America by a man named Barry Reid: “You have to keep from depositing traces of yourself. Every place you go you inadvertently leave pieces of yourself. Every article of clothing, every doorknob, every carpet, every telephone, every toilet seat you use will contain pieces of you. Your skin is flaking off all the time.”
He sounded far more paranoid than I was, which was a lot.
“You’ve lost the ability to own anything . . .” he said after listening to me for a while. “Meaning what? You’re broke?”
“No, that’s not it. I can always get money if I want it. But I don’t want it. I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Do what anymore?”
“Any of it. The whole thing. So I take what I need to live. And when the stuff starts to feel too much like mine, I dump it and steal everything again from somebody else.”
He looked me over and nodded. “I like the way you think. But it sounds like a hell of a lot of work to me.”
It’s been almost two years now. I worry that when this run comes to an end—it can’t go on much longer—people will think I’m some kind of hippie or communist, anti-American in some way and that would be a serious misimpression. If my sin is anything it’s being too much of an American—a throwback to the pioneers who settled this great country, always headed somewhere to claim something with little more than a horse and the ragged clothes on their backs. Or before them, back to the Comanche, who made no permanent home in this part of the country and considered most of what he had only temporarily his. His livelihood was based on what he could hunt, what he could take, especially the horses, whose leads he could slip from beneath the hand of a sleeping soldier without causing so much as a rustle in his dreams.
My kind of horses aren’t as easy to take or leave behind. After I steal a new car the last one sits where I left it, testifying against me in the parking lot. It’s the fatal flaw in an otherwise functional system: the trail that will lead to my numbered door somewhere between Amarillo and Odessa. When it does, these pages will probably be with me, too, notes I’ve made on nightstand stationery, the only thing I’ve allowed myself to keep from job to job besides an extra driver’s license and a paperback or two. It’s my trail back to myself. And the most elaborately detailed confession a jury could hope for. I could say I made it up, but who’d believe me?
*
For the trip back home he stole a car in Fort Sumner, a 1965 sierra-tan Chevy Nova that he picked over several more attractive options because of its overwhelming inconspicuousness, the kind of car nobody would want to steal or even look at twice. The keys came from the motel room of a professional livestock judge who had registered for the week at the old Bosque Redondo Motor Inn on the south side of the city. The judge was in town for a regional 4-H show, and when he returned from the stock barns he would go out in the early evening for a constitutional around the motel grounds, pulling his dress hat down over his forehead and whistling in a piccolo-like tone that sounded like something he’d practiced. His favorite tune was the old march number “Under the Double Eagle.” Smoking a cigarillo, he would make several circuits of the motel before ambling down to the bridge and staring wistfully out over the Pecos, maybe imagining himself in a previous life, fording it with a band of mounted men.
Habit was Troy’s chief accomplice; the judge always walked for half an hour. When he returned one night, his car was gone, along with his suitcase, his dopp kit, his wallet, his second hat, and his best suit—a mahogany two-button gabardine with yoke stitching over the pockets, slightly too big for Troy in the shoulders. Besides the clothes the judge was wearing, the only possession he had left was his toothbrush.
Troy parked the Nova well off the road on the pasture side of the house, on a grassed-over strip of caliche alongside the fence, so that if anyone saw it they might mistake it in the shadows for a parts car. He got out and walked to the corner of the fence and stared down the alley, empty except for topless oil drums stationed in pairs beside every picket gate, filled with household garbage now instead of the Texas crude they had once held. He turned and walked close to the fence line, making sure no one was coming up the street before he cut quickly across the yard to the front door.
This house, legally his brother’s and before that his father’s, was a low, hip-roofed ranch, repeated with only slight variation up and down the block and for several around, all built in the late 1940s on dropseed prairie at the western edge of town as it neared what no one then knew would be its peak of population.
More than six years had passed since Troy had last set foot on this concrete slab porch. But even by the weak wash of the streetlight he could tell something about the house didn’t look right and he paused instinctively to gauge the distance back to the fence corner, trying to remember the type of handle on the Nova’s door in case he had no time to waste. The lawn badly needed cutting and the flower beds had been graveled over into rectangular gray moonscapes choked with cocklebur and turpentine weed. Along the half-bricked house front he saw corners chipped off some of the asbestos shingles, exposing the tar paper and nailheads beneath, giving the place a shot-at look. Then he saw something hanging from the frame of the storm door, a thing that surprised him to recognize so readily in the near-dark—a spirit ribbon, a paper pennant with black and gold silk streamers, a decoration handmade by high school cheerleaders and Scotch-taped to houses up and down the street to commemorate the night’s varsity football game, a purely obligatory show of civic pride because the other team, the Morton Indians, a team of poor-town boys, almost always won. The ribbon might as well have been an eviction notice; no one would have thought to put such a thing on the fron
t door of Harlan’s house if it still belonged to him. Even in a place this small, he had always managed to keep himself just beyond the boundaries of people’s attention, the way a crow in a field intuits the range of a rifle and settles a few feet outside its reach.
No lights were visible in the house or in the houses across the street. Troy walked to the storm door and pulled it open and knocked several times in a hard, purposeful way, with a story arranged in his head in case anyone answered, though he was sure by now that no one would.
He went over and squinted through one of the smoked oval garage-door windows and saw no car inside. Glancing up the street again for car lights, he walked back to the porch and cupped his hands to the kitchen window, letting his vision settle into the darkness while the metallic dust of the window screen stung his nostrils.
Through two panes of glass separated by a thin metal muntin, the contours of the room where he had spent the mornings and evenings of his childhood and adolescence began to take shape slowly in front of him. They materialized like a diorama in a history museum, manufactured under the direction of memories Troy hardly considered his own anymore: the same gray-flecked Formica countertops, the same panel cabinets still painted canary yellow, the same pipe-legged dinette atop which he and Harlan had eaten for years.
Everything appeared almost the same as he remembered it, making even the smallest differences conspicuous; it reminded him of the kind of dream in which everything presents itself as normal until you realize with a shock that it’s not and never was—people’s faces are altered, the layout of rooms is reversed, primary colors take on unfamiliar shades.
On the back wall of the kitchen he could make out two framed portraits, both showing a large man in a cowboy hat, a nice-looking woman, and a small straight-banged blond girl. In both pictures they were posed together formally in a lopsided triangle with the man at the apex. The girl was no more than a baby in the first picture and maybe four or five in the second. She and her parents smiled serenely out over the kitchen as if it had belonged to them for years.
On the far end of the counter sat some kind of radio set, a ham or CB with a stand-up microphone, official-looking. The dinette itself was surrounded now by unmatched wooden chairs, heavy, varnished municipal-looking ones, and the surface of the table was half covered with a horde of condiment bottles and containers—ketchup, Tabasco, Worcestershire, salt and pepper, mustard, margarine, grated Parmesan cheese, honey, a yellow plastic lemon juice bottle in the shape of a lemon—a lazy-man’s spread he knew his brother would never have created or allowed.
Troy took out his key ring and found the one to the house. It had never occurred to him he would actually need it again. When he found it on whatever ring he had stolen he wondered why it was there, a tarnish familiar in a succession of shiny car keys. But he kept transferring it, motivated less by nostalgia than by stubbornness, a refusal to admit that he couldn’t reopen the door to an old life just by wanting to.
He tried the key and it passed into the deadbolt the way old keys do, easy under the pins, the way he had expected—he would have put money against anyone here paying to change a perfectly good tumbler. He pushed the door open and stepped quickly inside, marveling as he had so many times that in a world full of deeds and liens and property rights all you really needed to render something your own was a ten-cent piece of brass with the right kind of ragged edge.
The hallway was black. He remembered where the light switch was by feel and flipped it on. He quickly opened the coat closet, yanked the light string, pushed the closet door almost shut, and turned the hall switch off again, giving himself just enough light to see but not so much that anyone would be able to notice from the street.
He stood completely still and unbreathing in the interior hush, luxuriating in the feeling of being momentarily invisible. He hadn’t expected to be worked up by being back here again, even just in this too-narrow entryway, where a cherrywood hat rack had once hung over an old Truetone floor-model, more furniture than radio, rarely able to reel in any of the weak waves ricocheting between the atmosphere and the plains.
Troy had lived in the house with his father and Harlan from the time he was eleven until he was seventeen and began spending most of his nights elsewhere, returning only occasionally for money or to try to avoid paying it to partners in low-level criminal arrangements he had started to make.
Within a year of their mother’s death, before Harlan had started school, their father had had the boys start to call him by his name, Bill Ray, a change they accepted for its novelty and its advertisement of their loss. The name didn’t stop Bill Ray from being their father, exactly, but over time it seemed to give him permission to settle into a role that suited him better, that of admired older brother, unpredictably attentive, occasionally feared. The arrangement wasn’t bad for any of them. It bound the boys more strongly to each other in those first years, and it gave Bill a way to retreat to a time before Ruby, before he’d ever met her and found the happiness that would be so short lived.
His attempts at fatherly responsibility tended to involve teaching the boys things his older brother had taught him in their own father’s absence—showy, mostly useless things, like how to wink, how to snap their fingers, how to whistle and spit, to whittle, to catch thrown peanuts in the mouth, to throw a pocketknife to make it plant, to throw a punch, to find arrowheads in the pasture; but sometimes also practical knowledge—how to tell a bullsnake from a rattler by the neck, how to handle a pistol, rifle, and shotgun (though he had a personal aversion to hunting and never let the boys shoot at animals in his presence), and how to drive: first Troy, then Harlan, boosting him up to the steering wheel with a bed pillow. The secret to good driving, Bill Ray had said, was to let your eyes come to rest on the road in the middle distance, not too close to the nose of the hood and not too far out to where it ran up into the horizon.
Bill Ray had been raised on a dryland cotton farm perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy, and as soon as he was old enough to leave home he said goodbye to farming for good. He worked several years as an oilfield equipment driver, but after Ruby died, he lost that job and never held a steady one again, getting by with piecework, mostly driving tractors and checking wells. When the oil companies needed extra hands he roughnecked, earning good cash pay, though it never came often enough, and in late summers, when hailstorms brought business, he roofed for extra money. For a time, because he had no fear of heights, he hired on as a maintainer for a radio tower company, scaling the metal armatures with a bucket of aluminum paint tethered to his waist and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, but that job ended one afternoon when he was caught dozing in the harness at a hundred and fifty feet and handed his severance as soon as he got back to the ground. He told Troy and Harlan he had walked off the job on his own. “I got tired of smelling all that bird ass up there,” he said, winking and working a matchstick in his teeth.
His reputation as a drinker wasn’t undeserved, but it was exaggerated in the way such things can be in small towns, by people who considered themselves empathetic and thought it was only to be expected. As a practical matter, it meant that whenever work came his way he had to take it. Pulling on his work boots he would tell Troy and Harlan that it was time for them to hold down the old fort again, deputizings that could last for days when he was working on a rig and sleeping at the drill site. As the boys got older, the absences grew longer. Sometimes a week would pass before they heard from him again between jobs, and they made a habit of checking the odometer of his pickup, which indicated that he could have crossed three states in the time he was gone.
While Bill Ray was away Troy, older by three years, did most of the cooking, what he could manage, because he was particular—cowboy supper, pimento cheese, tortillas fried on the burner, Mrs Baird’s fruit pies heated in the oven. But it was Harlan who ended up as overseer of almost everything else in the household, to keep it from falling to pieces—the dishes, the trash, eventually the groceries and the b
ills. Harlan didn’t try to conceal their growing parentlessness but people in town, even at the school, seemed not to notice, as if they had reached some private agreement that the Falconer residence was a situation that should be allowed to take care of itself as long as it was able. Harlan was acutely aware of the spectacle of it—of an awkward, overgrown twelve-year-old boy walking up to the window of the county assessor’s office to pay the school taxes. In his stolid way, in a voice that had already begun its steep descent into manhood, he would say “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” and “a quarter acre” and “Bill Ray’s doing fine, thank you.” He rarely complained and when he did his anger seemed to be softened by the satisfaction of knowing that he was the only one in the family capable of taking things in hand.
Just often enough, or during those times when his attention was absolutely required, Bill Ray would be around. And when he was, he had the ability to inhabit the present with the kind of fierce attention most people lose as children, so that Troy and Harlan would forget he ever had a desire to be elsewhere, just as they feared he would never come back when he was gone.
But he came back, sooner or later, sometimes with a full money clip and a grocery bag of sirloins, like a prospector who had tapped a vein. When a job set him up especially well he would take the boys out of school and drive them to Lubbock to buy new shirts, to see a picture at the State Theater on Texas Avenue, to visit Pinkie’s on the strip, where he bought his beer. He’d give each of them a bottle and the three would sit in the pickup drinking like ragged-ass cowboys in town on a ranch furlough. They never did things other families did, never went to school functions together, never went on vacation, rarely visited another family. Once, Troy remembered, Bill Ray took him and Harlan fishing a couple of hours from town at a man-made lake—most lakes in Texas are man-made but this one looked especially artificial, surrounded by a berm of gravel, too square, too near some kind of industrial facility. It was brutally hot but the lake had just been stocked and they caught a decent-size fish in fifteen minutes and put it in a bucket and took it home. The boys wanted Bill Ray to cook it but he said it was a carp and they would have to beat it for three days with a two-by-four to make it tender enough to eat. Instead, he filled the bathtub and left it there for the afternoon. It swam around briefly but then seemed to accept its fate and floated motionless, staring down the length of the tub, as if waiting for an appointment. When the boys woke the next morning the carp was gone, along with Bill Ray.
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