The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  Will stumbles, distracted, the path narrow and uneven and difficult to manage, especially when it veers along the rocky banks of the meandering river. He’s afraid of falling in. He picks up a waist-high branch, strips it of twigs and leaves, and starts using it as a walking stick. The light is nearing the golden hour, and the sky is coming alive with the birth of bugs in clouds, and the murmurations of starlings, and the call-and-response of bird conversations. He stops to snap pictures, to jot notes, to focus on being here.

  The stream tumbles down a modest rapids. At the bottom is a wide pool where a white-haired man is standing in waders, fly-casting. Will watches the guy cast, a long graceful arc of filament, the man-made midge landing on the water with an inaudible plink, pulled across the surface in hops, attracting ripples from trout underneath, but not a nibble. The man casts again, an exact replica of the previous, with exactly the same result. And again.

  “¡Buenas dias!” Will calls out. “Yo soy Will Rhodes. Yo—”

  “You’re American?”

  “Yes,” Will says. “I am. Are you?”

  The man nods. He begins to wade toward the bank, through water that Will can now see is moving faster than he would’ve thought. The man takes a tentative step in unpredictable footing, then another, then holds out his hand.

  “Taylor Lindhurst. Nice to meet you, Will. You’re a tourist?”

  Will shakes his head. “Journalist, sort of. I’m a travel writer.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do. Are the trout biting?”

  “Well, not in the past couple minutes, since you showed up and started making a fuss. But yeah, in general. I catch my dinner here most nights.”

  “Not a bad diet. You live here?”

  “Yes sir. Retired out here.” Despite the white hair, this guy doesn’t appear to be retirement age. Or if he is, he’s very well preserved. Lean, strong-looking, forearm muscles rippling, straining the collar of his tee shirt and fishing vest. He removes a pack of cigarettes from one of the pockets of his vest, then a shiny gold lighter, out of character with the rest of the getup.

  “And you?” the guy asks. He exhales a long plume of dense smoke. “This is off the beaten path, ain’t it?”

  “I hope so. Otherwise someone’s written about it before. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes I do. Have you been to town?”

  “Had a sit-down with old Rinaldo, holding court in the café. And went out to see Monsieur Larozze’s goats. Interesting combination of Spanish and French and Basque up here, isn’t it?”

  “That’s one of the things that appealed to me. The border is right over yonder a couple klicks.” The guy indicates with his rod, fold after fold of scrub-covered hills leading to the rocky peaks of the high mountains.

  “It’s awfully remote.”

  “That also appealed. Listen, Mr. Rhodes, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s nice to meet you. But I’m runnin’ outta time to catch my dinner. So unless there’s somethin’ special I can help you with?”

  “Nothing in particular. Just trying to get a feel for the place. I’ll let you get back to it. But do you mind if I take your photo? Write down your name?”

  The man freezes, tensed, but then answers, “That would be fine. That’s Taylor spelled as you’d expect, Lindhurst too, unless you’re a very creative speller. I imagine you want to take my picture while I’m in the water?”

  “Yes.” Will smiles. “That would be great.”

  So Will snaps a photo of the guy standing in the trout stream somewhere along the French-Spanish border, casting a long perfect arc into the soft late-afternoon light. It’s a pretty good shot, a gold star on a fine day.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Lindhurst. Thanks for your time.”

  This is Will’s life—in countries not his own, with people he doesn’t know.

  —

  When Will is out of sight, Taylor Lindhurst casts again, but he has lost his concentration, and is no longer really fishing. What he is doing is killing time until the interloper is decidedly gone.

  Then Taylor wades to shore. He glances after the journalist, doesn’t see any sign of the guy. He packs his tackle quickly, growing more rushed with every item. He hustles down the path, stubbing his toe on a moss-covered rock. Comes up limping but continues to hurry, practically running when he hits the turnoff to the landscaped portion of his property.

  He owns the entire side of this hill, a few hundred savage acres and a pristine stream, a sturdy old house surrounded by a wildflower field, a swimming pool to one side, and a very long driveway, the keys sitting in the ignition of a beat-up Renault truck. He wants to live well, but he doesn’t want to look that way when he’s in town, buying groceries.

  Taylor stuffs items into his overnight bag, wondering if he should take the truck or hike into the mountains, over the border, disappearing into the wilds of northwestern Spain.

  He never expected it to happen like this. If indeed this is really happening; he’s not sure. It’s possible that this guy is exactly what he claims, a harmless travel writer.

  Taylor climbs into the faded yellow truck he bought from the same grizzled old farmer who sold the house to him. Taylor turns the ignition, a sputter, a cough, a stall.

  Damn.

  He primes the engine, turns the key again. Another sputter, another cough…

  This time it turns over, thank God. He hopes he can reach the main road before the young American can return to his car, which probably sits a kilometer downstream.

  The truck bumps down the narrow dirt drive, hemmed in on either side by tight dense shrubs and towering vine-choked trees, a spine-rattling thud through a deep pothole, the glove box popping open, ejecting insurance papers and his driver’s license and a tattered Faulkner paperback he keeps in there for unanticipated reading opportunities.

  He ignores the new mess, and twists his torso to retrieve his mobile from his pants pocket, but bangs his knee. Even in the privacy of his own truck, he refuses to cry out.

  Taylor scrolls through his contacts, one distracted eye on the treacherous road, doing a poor job of both tasks, and the front right side of the vehicle suddenly falls away, a loud thud and a violent jarring that he feels in his entire body, with an emphasis on the rib cage and the top of his head, which hits the ceiling.

  The truck is no longer moving.

  “Damn.” He pushes open the door, a creak and a hitch halfway through, a loud screech at the end, the panels hanging even less plumb now. But the upside is that with the truck stopped, Taylor can pay full attention to his phone. He finds the contact, hits Call.

  Call failed.

  “Oh you’ve got to be joking.”

  The single bar of reception blinks, disappears, reappears, disappears again. He shakes the phone, to no avail, to no surprise.

  Taylor glances around, looking for altitude. He sets off away from the river, trudging through the low scrub and small trees, scrambling over dusty rocks. He looks at his screen, a solid single bar, a second bar flitting in and out, a flirty little tease.

  He tries the call again, waits fifteen seconds for the ringing to commence, a multicarrier call to a different country.

  Finally: “Yes?”

  “It’s Panther,” he says. “I’m blown.”

  NEW YORK CITY

  Will holds up his racquet, applauds into the strings, game-set-match to Malcolm, again. Will heads for the net, his water bottle.

  “Good match,” Malcolm says untruthfully, holding out his hand for the customary shake. Both men grab their phones, scroll through emails, searching screens for things they hope not to find: problems, urgency.

  “So France was good?” Malcolm puts down his device, picks up his water, watches an errant ball bouncing away from another court. Malcolm follows the ball’s path to the woman chasing it. Today is that first spring day when every woman in New York seems to be wearing something short.

  “I love tennis skirts,” Malcolm says, pi
cking up the eternal thread. Malcolm’s lust is equal-opportunity, everywhere, all the time, there are women he wants, and he tells Will about it. Will usually indulges the train of thought, but not today.

  “France was terrific,” Will says. “The wine-bar piece will be good. But I don’t think there’s anything to say about the château dinner. It didn’t feel special.” This is not true, not remotely, but the dinner’s specialness isn’t something Will can write about.

  “Okay. Did you forward your notes to the Paris bureau?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You talk to anyone particularly interesting?”

  Malcolm’s new mandate is to try to make every single story personality-driven. Whether those personalities are international celebrities or local nobodies, people are supposed to be the hook of every story, a face in every photo, a quote in every column.

  “Not really, no.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Such as?”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. You know such as what. I’m sure there was someone. There always is.”

  Will shakes his head.

  “Come on.” Malcolm punches him in the arm, not all that lightly. “Do you know when the last time I was on a date was?”

  “These aren’t dating trips, Mal. I’m not going on dates.”

  “Eleven years ago. Eleven goddamned years, you lucky bastard.” Malcolm pulls his sweat-wet tee over his head, and Will can see the thick ugly scars across his shoulder, the wartime injury that changed his life. There’s also the leg scar from a previous life-changing injury, a quarter-century ago. Malcolm is a constellation of scars.

  “And you’re gallivanting around the world in your cuff links, with women heaving themselves at you in five-star hotels. Let a guy live vicariously, will you? I’m dying here.”

  “Really? It looks to me like you have the perfect everything. What is it you’re complaining about, exactly?”

  “It’s all just different shades of green, Rhodes.” He pulls on a fresh shirt. “So are you telling me you didn’t stumble across one single interesting attractive woman?”

  There’s a certain amount of confessing—or would it be bragging?—that Will would like to do; discussing it would make it more real. But does he want that? Or would it be better if he forgot about it, turned it into a fantasy instead of a memory? Maybe if he doesn’t mention the kiss, if he keeps the truth of his small indiscretion—and it was small, he keeps telling himself—a secret, then maybe it doesn’t really matter, maybe he didn’t do anything terribly wrong. Just one kiss with an irresistible woman who threw herself at him. And he resisted.

  He should get a goddamned medal, is what should happen. Or a citation, calligraphy, parchment, a wax seal. Albeit presented at a very low-key, extremely private ceremony.

  “Well…”

  “Tell me.”

  “There was this woman. Australian.”

  “Ooh. I love Australian women. They live on the other side of the world. The only thing better would be Japanese.”

  “We were leaving the dinner—we were all staying at the same inn, this was very late—and she asked me—get this—she asked me what room I was staying in.”

  “No way. No fucking way. So what did you do?”

  “I’ll tell you, it was hard.”

  “I bet it was.”

  Will wonders if Malcolm will ever behave like a grown-up. A married man in his mid-forties with two schoolchildren, the editor of a famous magazine, dozens of people working for him. Shouldn’t this guy be an adult? Or is there no such thing? Maybe all men are permanently trapped in psychological adolescence. Some just do a better job than others of hiding it.

  “I can’t tell you, Mal, how attractive—how appealing in every single way—this woman was.”

  “Show me a picture.”

  “It’s not just that she was great-looking.” Will opens his phone to the web browser, a few pages already loaded, among them a search of Elle Hardwick images. “And smart and funny and entertaining, and that accent—”

  “I love that accent.”

  “—but it was clear that she wanted me.”

  Taps his screen, a picture of a browned blond bikini’d babe.

  “And her desire was just…irresistible. Or, rather, extremely difficult to resist.”

  Behind them, a train rumbles by on the Williamsburg Bridge, a loud angry growl in the bright blue sky, one of those crisp cloudless days that Will has long thought of as September 11th weather, even if it’s on the other side of the summer solstice.

  Will hands over his phone. Malcolm looks down at the screen, then closes his eyes, and nods, as if finally comprehending a nugget of sage advice.

  “You,” Malcolm says, handing back the phone, “are a jackass. You know that?” Malcolm sighs. “We get only one life, Rhodes. It could end at any given moment—poof, over, dead. Don’t you want more?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better—fairer—if there could be more before we die? More experiences. More women. More everything. If you could just go bed a beautiful Australian woman in France? What would be the harm?”

  They’ve covered this topic before.

  “So, Rhodes, are you telling me that you did?”

  “Did what?”

  “Resist?”

  Will takes a swig of water. “I always do.”

  Malcolm shakes his head.

  “But I’ll tell you,” Will says, “not having sex with that woman? That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  —

  Chloe pulls open the iron-and-glass door of Ebbets Field. She glances around the standard-issue industrial chic—bare brick walls, Edison bulbs hanging from cloth-covered wires, brass-bladed fans, recycled floorboards and matte metalwork and dark gray paint. It’s the sort of studied place that she knows is going to feature small-batch bourbon and homemade bitters, with those really big ice cubes that stack one atop the other in a highball glass. Half the barstools are taken by dining-alone guys parsing the menu.

  “Hello there.” It’s a good-looking stubbled man, with a great big smile for her.

  “Oh my God, if it’s isn’t Dean Fowler. What in God’s name are you doing here?”

  “Will didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll have you know that I own this place.”

  “Really? Since when do writers own restaurants?”

  “Well, co-own. Which is to say that I dumped a shitload of money into the build-out, and since opening night I haven’t seen anything except more outstretched hands. It turns out that a pretentious gastropub isn’t quite the fail-safe investment vehicle I’d been led to believe.” He gives Chloe a once-over. “You’re looking pretty damn good, Chloe Palmer. You know that?”

  “I’m married, Dean.” She gives the smallest grin she can manage, which isn’t that small. “I go by Rhodes now.”

  “Of course you do. Can I get you something?” He beckons the bartender with no more than raised eyebrows. “This is Marlon, our resident professor of mixology.”

  Marlon nods.

  “I’ll have a Negroni, rocks.” She knows she’s supposed to specify the brand of gin, probably the vermouth too, but she refuses. Marlon, to her relief, doesn’t ask, despite the seriousness of his tie-barred skinny necktie and his sleeve garters and his porny little mustache.

  “Were you always this hot, Chloe Palmer?” Dean meets Chloe’s eye firmly, direct and unambiguous.

  Marlon grins down into his mixing glass, with the look of a man who’s heard something similar before, and not just once or twice.

  “Or is it that marriage to Will has treated you surprisingly well?”

  Chloe doesn’t dignify any of this banter with a response; she knows that Dean doesn’t expect one. He’s just tossing these lines out there, information to be filed away, a port in a storm. But it’s a good compliment to get. As part of her post-Travelers lifestyle, she has been exercising like a madwoman, and it
’s nice for someone to notice, and to say so. Will hasn’t.

  Dean and Will have been friends for a long time, but recently they’d been drifting apart. Chloe didn’t kid herself that it was because Dean had a thing for her—he wasn’t the type. In fact she suspected it was the opposite: Dean resented Chloe for domesticating Will, for absenting him from singles bars and ski weekends and all the other fun that Dean manufactured. As a married couple, they hadn’t socialized with Dean once.

  “So you finally succumbed,” Dean says, “to the inevitability of Brooklyn.” He has the sense to push past his own ridiculous come-ons. “Your parents’ house, is it?”

  “My dad bought it as an investment. But he filled it with a variety of problems that are nearly impossible to get rid of.” The house, like so many other of Chloe’s parents’ pursuits, was not in itself a terrible idea. But they had an uncanny knack for half-assed execution, poor timing, and bad luck. Then her dad died, and Chloe inherited the problems.

  Will was the one who’d been convinced they should fix it up. “We can do this,” he’d said. “We’re good at doing things!”

  “Are we?” Chloe hadn’t been so sure. They were by no means a broadly competent couple. Will was good at a small handful of things, and Chloe was good at most of the same plus a few other skills, none of which had anything whatsoever to do with fixing up a house.

  “We could be!” he’d said. “It’ll be fun.”

  “Are you sure? That’s not what people tend to say.”

  “But”—he pulled her close, kissed her on the lips—“that’s what we’ll say.”

  Will had been confident that they were special, that they’d be immune to the problems that beset other couples, rip them apart. His irrational optimism, his unwavering belief in the possibility of perfection, was one of the things Chloe had loved most about Will, a foil for her own dispassionate pragmatism. Now it has become one of the things that makes her crazy. And although their old apartment on the Lower East Side had been tiny, cockroach-infested, and even dangerous, at least the infrastructure problems had not been their responsibility.