Rankin glanced her way.
“Him again,” she said, as if in response to a conversation he’d initiated.
Rankin replied only by staring at her.
She rolled up her window, patted herself down searching for a fresh smoke, pulled one finally out of her left sleeve, said, “Charlie Rankin.”
“Why you bringing him up?”
“I didn’t. You did.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“As that tractor trailer was going by you said his name.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I’m wondering, Samson.”
Rankin, looking back out the windshield, ran a hand over his eyes, smearing in his vision the world captured in the Tranny’s headlights, creating in his mind a picture of him and this girl he’d dared picture himself in the future with as jumbled thoughts in the flickering recesses of a hallucinating brain. He heard himself say, “It was Buddha got him to start talking again after four days.”
“Charlie Rankin?”
“Right.”
In response to being touched on his shoulder, looking up from where he was eating alone in a corner of the cafeteria (still too sore to walk or shit right) for the first time encountering the hypnotic eyes of William Pettigrew.
“Why’d he stop talking?”
Rankin blinked. “He sometimes—ever since he was a kid— just goes mute, nothing’d come out of his mouth for dying. Afterward he don’t remember much, ‘cept maybe in his dreams, of what it was shut him up.”
“How’d this Buddha get him talking again.”
“He invited him to play checkers.”
“Checkers?”
“Charlie Rankin loves checkers. He’d only ever played them against himself though because no one, not even when he was a kid, had ever asked him to play before. They started playing regular in Buddha’s cell. Buddha told Charlie Rankin rabid animals die slow and painful from their own madness if they aren’t put out of their misery. The day after he said it two of ‘em who’d attacked Charlie Rankin were dead, two others fucked up for life in the infirmary, the rest begging for solitary.”
“Buddha sounds like a powerful guy.”
“You don’t want to cross him. He’s got a long arm.”
“The little deskman at the Sinclair one a the fingers at the end of his arm?”
Rankin nodded. “Charlie Rankin too. And me. We’re riding in a car paid for with his money. You’re wearing clothes bought by him.”
“I’d as soon take ‘em off, put back on my old ones.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“What do you mean?”
“His memory, says Buddha, goes back as far as time. He don’t forget a thing, ‘specially what’s owed him.”
* * *
The Tranny’s highbeams delineated in the darkness a guy with his thumb out, holding a briefcase; he stood on the roadside in a knee-length raincoat and an odd sort of hat bunched atop his head; Rankin applied the brakes.
He stopped the Tranny next to the guy. Florence opened her door, called out, “We’re heading, it looks like, to the next town. That help ya?”
The guy wordlessly approached them. Florence, moving her seat back forward, scrunched herself against the dash; the guy climbed into the rearseat. He smelled of aftershave; the sides of his head were razored; he had a bulbous nose; the cloth pile on his hat was comprised of earflaps and a chin strap. His at once blank and penetrating stare unnerved Rankin. Rankin started driving again. Florence said, “My smoking bother you?”
The guy didn’t answer. He seemed to be studying the back of Florence’s head, then Rankin’s face as Rankin eyed what he could see of him in the rearview mirror. Florence turned to the backseat. “I’ll open a window it does.”
The guy gazed blankly forward.
“You from around here?” asked Florence.
The guy didn’t say.
“Where you headed to?”
No answer.
Florence looked at Rankin. “I think he’s deaf or something.”
“And he’s a mute too,” said Rankin.
“How do you know?”
Rankin wasn’t sure how he knew, only that he did know. He glanced again at the guy; the guy appeared as only a dark shadow behind him. Rankin pictured the guy having been there, over his right shoulder, since Rankin had gotten out of prison. Florence said, “Turn on the dome light.”
Rankin looked at her.
“Maybe he can read lips,” Florence told him. “If he can’t, we can talk to him with our hands.”
“I don’t want to talk to him.”
“That’s not sociable, Samson. Why’d you give him a ride, you don’t want to talk to him?”
“I don’t know why I gave him a ride. I only know I ain’t going to talk to him.” Rankin heard what he took for the guy’s briefcase snapping open, the guy’s hands fumbling around inside the case. A white glow appeared ahead of them. Rankin remembered a donut shop sign with two burned out letters in it, feeling as if he were the main character in a movie about an assassin, making a phone call and hanging up when someone answered. “I’m going to at least try to talk to him,” said Florence; she pushed on the dome light. “I don’t want him to think we’re rude.”
She turned to the back seat, as they came out of the darkness (Rankin had the sensation pole lights had been eyeing them from above all along and just now had revealed themselves) onto a boulevard alive with businesses and fast food joints. Rankin turned up the radio. In the corner of his eye Florence was making exaggerated hand motions, silent mouth movements. He heard what sounded like papers rustling in the backseat. He avoided looking in the rearview mirror. A road sign declared “Welcome to Willimette.” The knowledge came home to him that to get out from under Buddha’s weight he’d have to live, or relive, a nightmare.
He thought, somewhere soon he’d need to get a gun.
He wondered if Florence had a clue of the danger she was in poking at the part of him she sensed but hadn’t seen.
A frost bump under the tires sent a shiver through the car. Visible past the streetlamps downcast arc were stars, an airplane’s pulsating light, a winged shape bisecting the blackness.
“He wants out,” said Florence.
Rankin looked at her.
“Up here he does.” She chinpointed ahead to her side, at a little cluster of buildings—a gas station, a restaurant, a Krispy Kreme shop emblazoned by a neon sign in which both Rs were dead. Rankin swung the car into a parking lot facing the buildings; he stopped it before an outdoor phone; averting his eyes from the Tranny’s interior, he aimed them out his window; he felt, at the same time he was anticipating it, a tap on his shoulder; a tremor passed through him; his stomach pain intensified as it had in that church; Florence said, “He’s trying to give you something, Samson.”
Rankin turned to the backseat; the ear and chin flaps now dangling loosely around his face, the hitchhiker held a pamphlet out toward Rankin.
“It’s got a picture on its front of a guy burning in hell,” said Florence.
Rankin suddenly had an overwhelming fear of being recognized. “Who’s the guy in hell look like?”
“He doesn’t look like anybody alive. He’s covered with boils and stuff.”
Rankin said, “Tell Elmer Fudd the ride’s over.”
“You’ll make him feel good you take one of his books, Samson.”
“He don’t stop looking at me like he knows me I’ll make him dead.”
“I think he’s retarded,” said Florence, “and this is just something for him to do.” She smiled at the guy, directing at him a bunch of hand motions.
The guy, eyeing Rankin still, pointed to the roof.
“What’s he saying?” demanded Rankin, imagining the guy was seeing him not just sitting there, but at places in the past and at a place, after this night was over, down the road.
“He was answering a question I asked him.”
“What question?”
“Who does he work for.”
Rankin whipped from his wallet and handed Florence a hundred dollar bill. “Give him this and tell him to get out.”
The guy acted blind to the money. He shut his briefcase (the sharp snap it made struck Rankin as the closest thing to a voice from the mute). Touching her sweater over her heart, Florence, extending in her other hand the hundred toward the guy, mouthed to him, “Accept it for the pleasure of your company.”
The guy made no motion either to take the cash or to leave; he kept looking at Rankin. “Use it for the Lord’s work.” Florence formed the words deliberately into the mute’s face.
Rankin reached over and snatched the C-note from her; he pulled another one out of his wallet, grabbed the guy’s coat front, then pushed both bills down into the coat’s outer left pocket. He told the mute, “You don’t know me, get it? You ain’t never seen me before. You ain’t never going to see, think or dream about me again.”
The mute grinned at him.
Rankin leaned into the back seat, opened the left rear door, and shoved the guy out of the car into the parking lot. He slammed shut the door. He sped the car forward. He stopped it at the entrance to the road.
Florence said, “Was it last night he saw you last, Samson?”
Rankin revved the Tranny’s engine, not answering her.
“Was it in this same parking lot?”
“You got it all wrong,” said Rankin.
“What do I?”
“About what’s going to happen on this ride you wanted to take with me.”
“I ain’t got a crystal ball, Samson. I don’t see the future. I only see you so twisted up inside you can’t eat and me here taking a chance on you.”
“I don’t aim to die. I aim to live long’s I can.”
“That’s good. You’re back to wanting to the way most everybody else does.”
Rankin looked at her.
“Last I heard you was ready to cash in your chips, try a new game.”
“What I got to do to live ain’t what most everybody else has got to do to live.”
“You talking about you being a finger at the end of this guy Buddha’s arm?”
“You don’t take his money and walk away.”
“Is that what you did?”
Rankin, without replying, put the Tranny in reverse and backed it up so fast its tires squealed on the asphalt. He halted it next to the phone. Leaving the car running in park, he hopped out of it. Florence shouted to him something he didn’t catch.
No phone book hung next to the phone, only a thin chain dangling from an empty hook.
Rankin glanced over his shoulder at the restaurant; facing him in its doorway stood the deaf-mute holding an armful of his pamphlets. Rankin turned away from him; he picked up the phone’s receiver, withdrew a quarter from his pants pocket, dropped the quarter in the change slot, and dialed the first seven numbers that came to him. On the line’s other end a phone began to ring. It rang four times, then was picked up. “Hello?” a man’s voice inquired.
“Who is this?” asked Rankin.
“Who is it that’s asking?”
“I’m taking a survey and need your name for it.”
“I don’t give out my name to strangers,” said the voice. The phone went dead.
* * *
The thought struck him that miles ago he ought to have dumped Florence, that if he didn’t dump her soon he was as good as signing either his own or her death warrant.
They passed two bus stops and a taxi stand where he could have left her with a bunch of the money, told her to find her own way home, and lied to her he’d catch up with her later. But when he imagined driving away from her, watching her disappear to him in his rearview mirror, he imagined the last good part of him disappearing with her. He envisioned her still with him someplace way past all this, someplace that would feel as good to the two of them together as those woods he’d run off into as a kid had felt to him alone. “What’s his or her name?” she asked.
Rankin looked at her, the motions of her near-constant smoking appearing to him to be as unconscious as breathing. She treated his silence as a question.
“Whoever you’re on your way to see. Isn’t that what this ride— and your bellyache—is about? “
That she’d not asked him earlier where they were headed or why they were going there he’d taken as evidence that maybe she really was an angel, a sorceress, something not entirely of this world. Now he wondered if she was just stupid; he had an impulse to tell her that knowing him as much as she seemed to want to know him could get her dead in a heartbeat. Instead he said, “What’d your old boyfriend do for cash?”
She blew smoke out her nostrils. “Most recently he worked in a video store.”
“Renting ‘em out, you mean?”
“And rewinding them when customers didn’t, putting them back on the shelves. Once in a while somebody would ask him for a recommendation and he’d be in hog Heaven thinking he was Roger Ebert.”
“What ones did he like?”
“Horror ones.” She scrunched up her face, showing Rankin her opinion of horror movies. “I never told him about LuAnn’s films.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“He wouldn’t been able to see nobody but me in ‘em. Not like how you and I can, Samson.”
As if recalling scenes from a movie he’d watched half-asleep Rankin had flashbacks of getting lost in a stolen car on these or similar streets. “I like you,” he said.
She nodded. “I knew it without you saying it.”
They entered a renovated riverfront area called Old Town. “I never have much a woman—or anybody—before.”
Florence pulled from her lips the cigarette, tapped ash from it into her empty Coke can. “Yeah, so—tell me something I don’t know.”
Rankin tried to get in touch with what he’d been thinking, the feelings he’d been experiencing, when last he’d been on this route. He couldn’t though. He remembered only looking into a mirror over his visor and seeing a stone-killer’s face. “Charlie Rankin,” he said.
Florence returned the cigarette to her mouth. “Charlie Rankin. What about Charlie Rankin?”
“You wanted me to tell you something you don’t know.” Rankin, by rote, moved into the right hand lane, passing shops and restaurants, close to half of them unlighted, and pedestrians, going in and out of them, weaving along a boardwalk lined with yellow street lamps. In the distance, past the milieu, pinpoints of light marked a bridge spanning the river. “You don’t know him.”
He stopped behind a column of traffic at a red light. Florence leaned back against her door, facing him. “What about him should I know?”
Rankin eased open his window; into the car came a whiff of buttered popcorn, exhaust fumes, snatches of conversation, string music from a band of old duffers playing under a gazebo near the water to a sparse crowd, a foghorn’s muted bay. “He’s Buddha’s biggest convert. He weren’t nothing till Buddha made him what he is.” Rankin stared hard at Florence. Florence stared hard back at him, smoking without her hands. “Buddha gives him a job, he’s going to do it.”
A longhaired kid on a bike darted through the two feet of space between the Tranny’s front bumper and the car before it, headed for the boardwalk. The light changed to green. The vehicles preceding them didn’t move. Florence said, “You ought to take a blow from the place you’re at.” She made a wavy line in the air with one hand. “Come cool out with me on this beach awhile.”
“You ain’t on no beach. You’re riding right Goddamn next to me.”
“What makes you right and me wrong? “
“I know where I am at least.” A couple of horns honked. Voices from behind them shouted. Rankin envisioned the Charlie Rankin that William Pettigrew had given a face to coming alive in the skin of Charlie Rankin driving the Tranny. “And you’d do best not forgetting you ain’t anywhere but here too.”
Florence wordlessly snuffed out in the ashtray her c
igarette; she didn’t light another one.
“I’ll leave you off, pick you up on the way back.”
“On the way back from where?”
“I got business the other side that bridge ahead.”
Florence rolled down her window. “Magic Carpet Ride” reached them from a neighboring truck’s radio. “If you tell me to get out now I will,” said Florence, “but don’t look to find me later. You won’t have this girl better-looking than any girl you’ve ever seen still thinking good thoughts about you.”
“I’m trying to tell you.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“You can’t, Goddammit, be as stupid as how you come off.”
“Damn straight I can’t be. And you’d be smart to bear in mind I ain’t.”
A siren started whining; a red bubble light was seen flashing on its way toward them. A sudden fear of being swooped down upon and ripped to pieces prompted Rankin to reach out and snatch Florence’s purse from her. She didn’t try to stop him from taking it. He withdrew from it her .22, checked to see it was loaded still. In the same tone she’d invited Rankin to join her on some beach she wasn’t at, Florence said, “How could they—the cops—ever know to look for you in this car?”
“What?”
“Unless somebody told them to and that person would have to know both that you were in the car and that you’d done something the cops might want to talk to you about.”
Rankin’s sudden paranoia focused on the wall phone outside the room in Randy’s Watering Hole he’d found Florence in with Stitch Marks. As if reading his mind, Florence, nodding at the .22, said, “Was me who first offered it to you, remember?”
Rankin, not answering her, slipped the .22 into his pants waist beneath his shirt; he had the sensation that Florence, even while sitting next to him, was in his head, turning over— maybe even orchestrating—his thoughts. He peered through the windshield to see if the flashing light was still coming for them, but the vehicle carrying the light (Rankin could now make it out as a cop car) had stopped a hundred feet up the road, beneath the traffic light. Florence stuck her head out her window.
Boot Tracks Page 15