Sincerely,
Lily Hazelton
I tried to maintain as measured a tone as possible, in part to act as though it would be no big deal for Moses to provide Lily with Raven’s new address, and in part because it was the only way I could begin to calm myself. Was it true? Patty didn’t seem to be bluffing, and had she been, it would have been too easy to catch her in that lie. It must have been true. Raven had never mentioned an appeal. Was it some sort of surprise to him? That wasn’t how prisons were run. Raven must have been expecting it. He should have told Lily. I couldn’t stand it. All of the emotional reticence I’d assembled for the letter to Moses Lundy started to crumble. I was overwhelmed by Lily’s sadness, Lily’s confusion. It wasn’t fair. My head spun and my heart dragged. I was like a child trying to put a wooden block into a series of misshapen holes, not understanding that the block I held belonged to another toy altogether.
We had an appointment to see a couples specialist that Monday. I wasn’t sure how I was going to approach the session. I didn’t believe that anything less than the truth would be useful therapeutically, but I also didn’t believe that telling the truth would be of much use to me. I still had to stick it to Raven somehow, and spilling the beans of my plan would not bring me closer to that goal.
I was in a therapy-pickle. Show up on Monday and go through the rigmarole about book research, or start to tell the truth and make some real progress with Patty. I was genuinely on the fence. Yes, I had a plan. Yes, it had been watertight and clever. But I was not blind to what was happening in my life and my marriage. I was not too stupid to know that the damage I’d done by now wasn’t going to get magically stitched up. Tell the therapist the truth. It’s the only way out. It is over. Then the feeling would return, the feeling in the pit of my gut the moment Patty told me he’d gotten out, the primal feeling of anger I felt when I thought about how he had so coolly and cruelly dropped Lily without so much as a goodbye.
Could the man who had corresponded so openly and eloquently with my Lily Hazelton really be so purely cruel? Was all his tenderness and insight and soul-searching a simulation? I could not believe that. I knew Raven. Underneath the predator, behind the mask of cruelty and unfeeling, was a regular human being. How else could he have written Lily those letters? I did my best to keep that anger in check with the hope that Moses’s response would explain everything.
Monday morning rolled around, still no response from Moses Lundy. I was supposed to meet Patty at the therapist’s office at noon. I’d offered—in a gesture of goodwill—to pick her up, but she said the therapist preferred us to arrive separately for now. I guess the therapist didn’t want us comparing notes on the drive home.
The only thing I knew about this session was that it was supposed to be a “fact-finding mission,” each of us describing the series of events leading to our arrival at therapy. I still had not decided whether I was going to tell the truth. So much was uncertain. What if I were to spill the beans and then find that the overturned verdict thing had been an error, or that Raven was indeed out but he wanted to find Lily and surprise her in person? I couldn’t tell the truth, not yet. But frankly I didn’t feel like lying to Patty anymore. I had been very lonely lately and I wanted to patch things up. It is amazing how life can put us right on the edge of a sword. It might have turned out differently if we’d gone to the therapist in the same car.
30
I had some time to kill before the appointment with the therapist, so I drove over to Second City to check my mailbox. It was a windy day, and traffic was light. Trees waved their branches at me as I drove past, urging me toward my fate.
“Mail hasn’t come in yet,” said the wife/sister behind the counter.
I waited fifteen minutes, then left.
I was backing out of my parking spot when a postal truck pulled up. I reparked and went back in. It was about noon when I finally opened the mailbox. Inside was a letter from Moses Lundy. I unsealed it right there and read it. I was dizzy by the time I reached his signature.
“Sir? Are you okay?”
I needed to lean on something, so I leaned on the wall, but then I needed to sit, so I sat on the floor. Once seated, I needed to lie down, so I lay down, but even lying down, I still felt like I needed to lie down.… When I came to, the wife/sister was hovering over me. She had her hand on my wrist, taking my pulse. I had always found her to be strange looking, but now, with her face so close to mine and her clammy hand on my wrist, and me just having come to, she was a vision out of a nightmare.
I screamed. She leapt backward. The husband/brother behind the counter held his hands up as he crept toward the phone.
“Now, now,” he said, “it’s going to be all right.”
“It’s not!” I yelled. “It’s not!” I snatched up the letter and ran out of the Mailboxes Store in a state of profound agitation. When I recollect that outburst—always in embarrassment—I picture the lonely mailbox key still stuck in its lock, its identical twin affixed to the same cheap wire ring, swinging back and forth in the turbulent wake of my departure.
Dear Lily Hazelton,
Henry Joe did get out, the lucky guy. He spent some time writing goodbye letters to his penpals but yours must have gotten lost in the shuffle. I know he’s gone back to live with his woman in Mount Pleasant who has been keeping an eye on his truck and things since he went in. You can probably find her in the phone book, her name is Portia Snow, they been together a long time. Too bad you didn’t get his goodbye note. Specially because out of all Raven’s penpals we liked your letters best.
Sincerely,
Moses Lundy
I never made it to therapy. I went home. Straight to my computer, where I performed a directory search for Portia Snow in Mount Pleasant, CO. There was no Portia Snow listed there. No Henry Raven. I broadened the search to the whole state of Raven’s incarceration. No Henry Raven, no Portia Snow. Finally, I generated a list of Snows, any first name.
P. Snow, Mount Pleasant, CO. A phone number. No address listed.
I threw the printout into my bag, along with a ratty, old, dying-battery laptop, the letters Raven and I had sent each other, the Xerox of CJ’s journal, my microcassette recorder, and all the pictures I had of Lily and Raven. I ran into the bedroom and filled a suitcase with the most conveniently accessible clothing I could find. I would wear my suit no more.
It was only a matter of time before Patty would realize I wasn’t going to show up. I knew she would come looking for me at home. I was in a rush. Nevertheless, I made a special, time-wasting trip to the front closet to retrieve our Frisbee, for what better memento of our time together could I carry with me out on the open road? I never used it, of course, for lack of someone to play with.
It was in the back of that closet, behind the rack of coats, below the shelf of board games, that we kept a safe. Among the items in that safe was a big wad of emergency cash. I opened the safe to retrieve it. Then, on impulse, I removed the Glock semiautomatic and ammunition, too. I was headed onto the open highway, with cash, and I would need protection from my fellow Americans.
I scanned the house quickly to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I stuffed some extra mouthwash and deodorant into my bag. I threw some food into a plastic garbage bag. I took a gallon of water from the earthquake kit in the garage. The car was loaded and I was ready to depart, but something was bothering me. I had to go back to my office. It held nothing I needed and yet I was forgetting something. The big desktop computer in the center of my work table looked like it was going to miss me, I thought, and then it struck me. The book. Patty would go looking in there for the book, and, encrypted or not, she would soon realize there was no book. I started up the computer, but it took a long time to boot up, and I was getting impatient. I had planned to copy some large document, encrypt it, and name it MY_BOOK.DOC or something like that. Instead I poured a half gallon of milk into the computer’s tower, dousing the motherboard and hard drive with a gurgling, bubbling, creamy-whit
e electrical storm.
The whole pileup was smoking when I ran out the door. I pulled out of our garage into our alley and drove to the end. When I reached the cross street, I stopped and looked in my rearview mirror. Why did Lot’s wife turn into salt? Did I turn into salt when I saw Patty enter the alley, a block down, and drive into our garage, no doubt wondering what had happened to her husband?
31
I drove east. Out of Our Little Hamlet by the Sea, onto the freeway through the heart of the megalopolis, past the fiefdoms of the Inland Empire, and into the desert. A brief but powerful squall marked the end of the halcyon days. When the skies cleared they were not the same skies as before. Some force other than my will pulled my car forward, and that force would not be satisfied until I had found Portia Snow, and with her, Henry Joseph Raven. The fundamentals had not shifted. The scales of justice remained off-kilter. It was still up to me to balance them. I did not listen to the radio. I opened my windows periodically to make the rush of wind match what I was feeling. Desert dust rose from invisible trucks. Out there, everything had been stripped from the surface of the land, leaving behind only shadows. In those miserable sunny hours, my mind reeled with what I had left behind. A baffled therapist, a confused Patty, a clueless Calvin Senior, a sympathetic Minerva, a pair of keys, a PO box, a smoking computer, a collapsed plan. Their nagging pull was no match for the massive magnet of Mount Pleasant. They were gum on the sole of my shoe. At sundown I drove past blinking Las Vegas and considered for an instant where my life might lead if I decided to stop and gamble, drink too much, and then use the anxiety and guilt of my Viking Hangover to propel me, apologetically, into the arms of my sweetheart.
It would be another life, not mine.
At gas stations, at diners, on the verge of collapse, I brought myself back to life by reading the letters, by reading CJ’s diary, until I knew it all by heart. All the wreckage was Raven’s. He would pay. I had in my pocket, as the record will show, Moses Lundy’s crumpled note. I did not reread it. I stuffed it away and forgot about it. His sentences were suffused with falsehood. I was under no illusions, however. Raven had, in a gesture of criminal camaraderie, shared some of Lily’s letters with his cellmates. That I understood. I am quite sure he did not share all of them. And while he might have kept other second-tier penpals to occupy him while waiting for new letters from Lily, none of them had pierced his heart quite the way she did. It was impossible.
I made exactly two detours on that 1100-mile journey.
My first detour took me seventeen miles out of the way. 1.4% of my journey. Off the Silver Mine exit, up a two-lane road into the mountains. Pine trees, a clearing, a turnoff, and there it was, a low-slung, weathered wood roadhouse. Diana’s Grill. I sat at the same bar, maybe on the same stool, as dead CJ.
Later in the night, I drove down a side road until I was in total darkness. I stopped and lay on the hood of my car, absorbing heat through my back even as the night air went to work freezing my features. The stars were breathtaking. Surely out there, among the stars, were other inhabited planets. Other intelligent creatures. Staring into their night skies. Alter-Owens, lying on the hoods of their little hovercrafts. All is not lost, I said to them, there is still time to set things right.
I fell asleep behind the wheel. I do not recall falling asleep, only waking up to the sound of my tires crossing into another lane. The driving threatened to sap my reserves. I decided that I would face him fresh-faced and clear-headed. Stopping at a motel was no indication of weakening resolve. I was strong. I was an arrow. But once I was in that mothball-smelling bed, sleep eluded me. I lay awake for hours, listening to the semis roll in and out of the truck stop adjacent to the motel, and to metronomic humping in the room next to mine. I clocked the woman’s squeaks—the sound of a paper towel on glass just after the Windex has evaporated—at sixty-four per minute. The man was quiet. Finally I fell into a dreamless slumber.
32
At two forty-three the next afternoon, I arrived at the town of Mount Pleasant, a hillside community with a small, failing, alpine-themed ski operation. The entire place was covered with gray slush. No answer on P. Snow’s phone. I scoured the commercial strip, asking questions at the local diner and the local pharmacy, but I came up with no leads. Those mountain people were naturally suspicious of strangers like myself. I could feel everything slipping away from me. It got dark. Things started to shut down. Still no answer on P. Snow’s phone. I did not know where to turn next. Then, while driving around looking for a place to stay for the night, something familiar called out to me from a paint store parking lot.
Despite Brewster’s Paints being closed, the lot, bathed in the orange glow of sodium lamps, was nearly full. Among the vehicles: a 1970s Dodge pickup truck. The color looked wrong at first, under those lamps, but when I pulled into the lot, the cross-eyed beams of my headlights revealed what I already knew. This was Raven’s truck, candy-apple red, the same truck I’d seen in that picture long ago. I parked a few spaces down and walked over to the truck, my footsteps crunching in the freezing slush. I could see my reflection in the paint. There I was, there was my image, reflected in Raven’s truck. I placed my hands on the hood. It was still warm. Inside the cab, a red checked winter jacket lay across the passenger seat. The interior looked clean. I tried to tell myself that this could have been anyone’s truck, that Dodge had made thousands of trucks just like it, that I hadn’t actually tracked down my quarry.
Voices at the other end of the parking lot, some laughter. A pair of dark figures emerged from the alley behind the paint store, a short bearded man and a round woman, stumbling their way to a dilapidated car. They disappeared into the vehicle; it groaned under their weight. The engine turned over several times, weakening with every revolution. It started up finally, and I stepped through a cloud of blue smoke into the alley. There, tucked behind Brewster’s Paints, lay the Hart’s Head Bar. Two blacked-out windows, a rotting plywood door between them.
I pulled the door open. Smoke, stairs leading down. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness inside. I descended, passed through another door at the base of the stairs, and entered the Hart’s Head. People looked up, didn’t recognize me, looked away. I leaned on the bar and ordered a beer. The room was lined with tall-backed booths; coats hung on the partitions, blocking the view into the booths. There was a jukebox at the end, and a pool table in the middle. Neither of the men playing pool was Raven. He was not on a bar stool, either. I would have to walk slowly through the place. I would have to pretend I was looking for someone. I was looking for someone. Classic rock emanated from the jukebox. The men on the stools were focused on some baseball game unfolding on the dusty television set above the bar. I asked the bartender for some change.
“To feed the jukebox,” I explained.
I held my beer in one hand, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with the other hand. The pool table’s felt was covered with scars. Everyone was talking at once. I made my way to the jukebox. There was nowhere to put my beer. The song ended and everything was silent. I scanned the room but I couldn’t see past all the coats. I went to set my beer in the booth next to the jukebox. A man was sitting there, alone. He looked up.
I had found Raven.
How many times had I considered what I would do with him when I found him? I had visualized pounding his face in with a hammer, kicking his lifeless body over and over, slicing him from gut to gullet. He looked at me with as blank a look as a man can make. I thought he’d recognize me somehow.
“Excuse me,” I said, “can I set this here?”
He shrugged. I put my beer down. I fed the jukebox a dollar and hit random numbers until my credits were gone. He was only a few feet away. He’d cut his hair short, military-style. His chin showed several days’ stubble. I should have destroyed Raven right then. I could have. Instead I returned to my beer. He sipped at his drink—whiskey, with a little glass of beer—and stared across the booth at nothing. The crack of a pool break. I tur
ned my face toward the pool table, but my attention was still on him. I had to act as casual as possible while remaining vigilant. Distract the prey on the ground while the eagle dives from above. I should have picked up the ashtray and smashed it over his head.
Most of the booths in the bar were occupied. I turned to Raven. He did not look up this time. I could have walked away—every part of my animal self was telling me to walk away—but I knew I might never have this opportunity again. I had to steel myself. I cleared my throat.
“Mind if I join you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
I sat down. The booth was smaller than I thought it was going to be, and the view different. The world was shut out on three sides, and partially obscured by hanging coats on the fourth. This was going to be an intimate showdown. Raven took a long drag off his cigarette. He exhaled slowly through his nose, flicked ash toward the ashtray. He had slender fingers, with little knots for joints. The jukebox played one of my random selections. Country, female, ballad.
“The jukebox busted?” I asked.
“How the fuck should I know?”
His eyes were on the pool game, but he wasn’t watching it. He had been staring at the other side of the booth before I sat down, and now that I was in his way, he had to stare elsewhere.
“I’m just passing through,” I said.
“Huh.”
“I said, I’m just passing through town.”
“I heard you.”
“I’m from California. Out here to see a friend.”
“California.” He raised his whisky glass and drained it in one swallow. Then he polished off his beer. He started fishing around in his pockets, as if he might be about to leave.
“Let me get the next round,” I said.
The Interloper Page 18