At length I let him catch my eye. I let him nod me to the door. Outside in the lot the tan Buick overhung the parking spot just opposite the one Alex’s Honda had been in.
Sam spoke once we pulled back onto the interstate. He told me we were doing the right thing, the smart thing.
“I’ll be the one to talk to him,” I said. “That’s a requirement. You don’t even come near us. Promise me that or I’m out right now.”
“Of course,” he said. “That was always the plan. Why do you think we needed you?”
“You don’t come within a block of the address. I keep the address, actually. Hand it over.”
At length Sam did as I asked.
“You drop me at a place where I can get a taxi. He thinks I’m coming up from the city—it should look that way.”
“Of course.”
We dropped back into silence while the green overtook us at either side, closing in on us. It dulled the senses, doing to the eye what the tires’ steady keening through the car’s thin floor did to the ear—white vision, white noise. I remember perking up as the steepled clock-tower sprawl of New Haven came and went, the red-brick city like the miniature landscape in a model train set. I perked up more when the road dipped down and hugged the shore and a great infinitesimal light danced over the water—a late sun had come out—and curved Connecticut, staring, ran out across the molten Long Island Sound. It occurred to me that Sam was probably a fugitive.
“Let’s not get dramatic,” he said.
“Let’s not get dramatic? You were just questioned by the police about a murder, weren’t you? Are you supposed to be crossing state lines? Aren’t the cops keeping tabs on you?”
“It’s not a drunk tank, Eli. They don’t take your keys.”
“What did they say to you? What did they ask you? What do they know? Sam? Will you cut the fucking sphinx routine already? Aren’t I basically your accomplice now?”
“Relax,” said Sam. “Relax. I don’t know what Alex told you, but you can relax, okay?”
It was suddenly all I could do not to leap across the wide leather console and yank that grief-counselor calm off Sam’s face. He knew everything except how to keep us out of prison! He knew everything except how to put out the fire we were presently dying in, our bodies chucked in for meaningless tallow. Sam told me again not to be so dramatic, almost whispering the words now, shaking his head—I was shouting—staring ahead at the paying-out road and shaking his head like a disappointed father.
“Tell me everything the cops said to you, right now,” I shouted, “and I’ll decide whether or not it calls for drama. Right now, you sphinxy fuck! Aren’t I here? Aren’t I in the car with you? Haven’t I given everything to your fucking suicide march?”
“Not everything,” Sam said. “Not everything. You can’t pretend you haven’t had divided loyalties.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“In the world, sometimes, but never really of it, huh?”
“Will you put your fucking New Testament Greek away and speak—English!”
“You were a member of the House but never all the way. You were there on a trial basis, a need-to-know basis—it was all over your face. It still is, Eli. And what you need to know now is that the cops found me. Somehow they found the House. How did that happen? Do you know?”
“I have no idea. That’s what I’m asking you.”
“Oh I have an idea,” Sam said. “I have an idea. His name is Greg. Your buddy Greg. Anything physical, anything solid and the cops would have never let me go. They wanted to talk about the Bosch protest, in Phoenix—two years ago and on the other side of the country? How would they know about that?”
“You think Greg informed on you? You’re saying he sent the cops to the House? Why would he do that?”
“I’m not saying he did that. I’m not saying that.”
“What are you saying? What are we doing right now?”
“I’m just saying it’ll be good to talk to him. I just want to talk to him. Maybe he’s confused. Maybe he’s scared. Maybe he thinks he knows something he doesn’t.”
“I’m talking to him,” I said. “I’m doing the talking.”
“Sure,” said Sam. “Of course, sure. We just need to remind him that he doesn’t know anything. None of us do. We hold our nerve, this goes away. That’s the message, all right? Stamford five miles.” He nodded to the sign.
He took out his phone and handed it across to me. We could use it to navigate the last stretch, he said. He was planning to destroy it anyway.
“Shouldn’t we stay off cell phones altogether?” I said. “Don’t you have some kind of map in here?” I reached for the glove compartment’s handle that didn’t give, noticing for the first time the small round lock in the handle’s corner.
“No map,” said Sam. “Sorry.”
“You’re sure?” I said. “I could check it for you. Which one of these opens door number one?”
Sam arrested my hand, violently, just shy of the ring of keys hanging off the ignition. “There’s no map in the glove compartment,” he said. “Trust me on that. And look—let’s be realistic for a second.” Slowly Sam unfastened his grip on my wrist, the blood surging. “I’m going to need to know where you are, and I don’t think tailing a taxi into quiet residential streets is a good idea. Just put the address in the phone, Eli.”
“Let me out,” I said.
“No.”
“Let me out. I’m serious, Sam.”
“You’re welcome to try—that’d be, what, the drop and roll at seventy miles an hour?”
I was suddenly desperate. “Sam, please, come off it. Let me out! Please let me out!”
“And where would you go?”
“I’ll hitchhike. I’ll go to a bus stop. You’ll never hear from me again.”
“I need to talk to him,” Sam said, “and I need to make sure it’s done right, okay? Say you’re worried about me—say I know where he lives, I could be close, say I’m crazy and unhinged and all the stuff you probably do say about me. Say you’d feel a whole lot better if you two were on the move—a talk in the car. Or maybe you’re paranoid about wiretaps, whatever. Say whatever you need to say to get him in a car and away from his house. Okay? Then you park somewhere—maybe you need to pee or you thought you saw a cop. Make him park and I’ll take it from there. That’s the plan. That’s all you need to do, Eli. Then you’re free. Okay?”
In the taxi now, numbness spreading—
Nothing twitched or grabbed anymore, nothing troubled the glassy surface. It was a new phase in the sensorial Tilt-A-Whirl of the last several days. Now the surgeon put the knife in but all you sensed was the blunted pressure of it, the smell of blood like copper in the air. It could have been anyone’s blood.
I felt the dull weight of the gun through the JanSport bag in my lap. I’d insisted to Sam that I bring it with me—not that I’d use it, not that I knew how to use it. It was a lucky rabbit’s foot, merely, a dark charm, the prospect of rhetoric by other means. This is what I’d told Sam—Sam in his loose road-race T-shirt, in his police-evidence car, with something locked away in the glove box, Sam with the whitish dark rings under his eyes like pats of butter melting down his face.
Through the broad tinted windows of the taxi I could make out Greg’s town unspooling like a straight solid line. The manicured hedges, the narrow drives, dormer windows cut out of the gray shingled roofs, the ineffectual white wooden fences and stacked stone walls—it was Norman Rockwell’s America, privilege koshered by quaintness. I’d seen this town before. I’d seen it before I’d ever laid eyes on it—a sin, yes, a violation of etiquette, but not a falsehood. You’re brought up to believe that the world will always slip your stereotypes of it, resist your generalized ideas about it with the force of its thingness, each snowflake unique, etc. How disappointing to
realize that this myth too has been debunked—I think of the Cheever story in which all the husbands and wives of a town turn up to a costume party in football jerseys and wedding gowns. A whole slew of humanity playing to type, uncoordinated, unplanned. It’s all they can do to laugh about it.
And my type? What was the role I was trapped in? I walked down the slight decline of a driveway to the house I’d written down the number for, the numbness lifting, dispelling like a sun-chased fog, a certain brightness churning out of the motion of my legs. The taxi hummed off up the road, and underneath it I thought I heard Sam’s Buick cutting its engine through the trees. A stone wall rose in sliding scale with the driveway—it ended at the garage at the side of the split-level green-shuttered house, pine green against the whitewashed clapboard. You could have taken my parents’ house in Plymouth and set it down some two hundred miles away and there you’d have it. Here you had it. A mulched garden at the level of the retaining wall with pods of green topiary bushes, a black-brown wooden fence at the side yard, dark with weather and age, a line of maples and oaks foreshortening the backyard, mooring to their shadows that stretched like prison stripes across the roof. I rocked myself up into the garden, noticing the inset stairway only a few feet ahead, feeling the gun at the bottom of the JanSport rebounding against my back. A sudden rapping from somewhere behind me—a storm-window rattle. I backed up enough to see the twin glass slits in the white garage door, like robot eyes in their darkness and narrowness. A moment later a jack-o’-lantern light came on in the windows and there was Greg’s face looming up baldly, smoothly, wide-eyed in the left-hand glass.
I could hear the heavy breath coming out of him as I scooted under the lifted garage door. I saw the boat shoes he wore, the navy khakis capping thick white legs, an almost comic self-impersonation.
“What’s with the paranoia routine, captain?” I tried to sound bluff.
“What?” said Greg. “What you said on the phone, the way you sounded—”
“I know, I know. Okay, look. Why are we in a garage?”
Particleboard lined the walls, a suite of power tools hanging off hooks in the switchboard of holes. There was a small gray Jetta with rounded edges like a cocoon just behind Greg, who faced me again.
“My little sister’s upstairs,” he said. “I’d rather talk down here.”
“Whose car is that? Is it yours?”
“Not really. I use it when I’m here.”
“Okay,” I said. “I want to show you something.”
I brought the JanSport bag around to my front and peeled open the zippered compartment to Greg’s view. Like a wounded man, I uncovered my spleen to him, dark and shining, lit at odd angles—a spill of black blood, it could have been, a squid’s ink filling the bottom of the bag.
“What is that?”
“It’s what you think,” I said. “It’s not mine, it’s Sam’s, all right?”
“What are you doing with it?”
“I need your car. I’m not stealing it—I just need it.” I closed up the bag. “Listen to me.”
When I laid my hand on Greg’s arm he flinched dramatically, thrown back against the car’s back window, a stuntman’s reaction.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“My sister’s upstairs,” he whispered.
“I just wanted to show you what we’re dealing with. Sam’s nearby, okay? I need your car. I’m going to leave it at the train station—look for the keys under the wheel well. Sam wants to talk to you but you don’t want to talk to him—trust me. As soon as I’m gone, lock your doors. Call the police. Tell them everything I just told you, okay? Greg?”
He stared past me, a sudden porcelain doll, the white skull and forehead and cheeks, the great brown Marxist eyebrows unmoving. I wondered if he’d heard me, if he’d taken any of it in. Then he whispered, “In the ignition. I leave the keys in the ignition.”
“Call the police,” I said.
I took the turn out of Greg’s driveway smoothly but at speed, expecting a certain restraint from Sam, a discreet following distance that would have kept my hapless passenger in the dark, if I’d had one. I was the passenger now, the passenger and the driver, the doubter and the doubt—I was the lure. And discretion had never been Sam’s style. The big rattling boat of the Buick came up in my rearview as the town quickly gathered the line it had cast—picket fences blurring by like clouds of spirit, the spirited measure-marker progress of lampposts and telephone poles, the trees, the sky, everything, all of it respooling.
Sam was half a block behind me. When I looked in the mirror I could make out his mute stern features hovering there, his face like the face scrawled onto a balloon floating above the steering wheel. It gave nothing away. Could he see who was driving? Could he tell that the passenger seat was empty? The Jetta’s windows tinted the last of the daylight through the car, making a vacuum of deeper purpler dusk inside—was it hiding me, protecting me? Could Sam really not see what was happening? What was to stop him from just turning around?
I paid little heed to a stop sign out of the residential blocks, turning onto a larger hilly street that still looked small, quaint in the way the stores and red-brick buildings cozied it, but big enough for a traffic light at the bottom of the hill—red, of course. I was a mile from the train station, more—Keep straight, an automated female voice directed me from my phone. Maybe Sam couldn’t tell I was alone from a distance, but now his Buick nosed up and over the same hill, cresting it like a Viking ship over a gray wave, a steady speeding up as gravity did its work. With the crossway traffic speeding smoothly through the intersection, Sam’s face filling the mirror again, bearing down on it—just as the front of Sam’s car disappeared into the back of mine, the mirror’s trick, I stuck my hand out the window and hooked it right, over the roof, pointing largely, frantically, gesticulating with all the subtlety of an air traffic controller, all subtlely abandoned now. I peeled right onto the shoulder to avoid a speeding car, the Doppler wail of its horn as it swerved into the oncoming lane to pass me. I cut left and into the rush of traffic, cutting off a green sedan and another car behind it—a moment’s relief—before Sam could make the turn. I didn’t know where I was going, where this road was leading us. Panic filled up my veins, made my chest thin and weak. When the green sedan dropped off behind me it was to turn into one of the long, obscured driveways that sudden remoteness had scarced—we were in deeper woods now, green covering everything, thickening everything. Sam was coming up behind me. The other car had gone. I felt the gravity lift in my stomach as the Jetta turned hard and we slalomed, the car and I, down the first narrow street that came to hand. Why I sought out this isolation that could only jeopardize me—a sandy clearing up ahead on the left, an abandoned construction site set back from the woodland houses stretched like grimy gray pendants on the little string of road—I couldn’t say. I couldn’t access self-preservation just then, or maybe I was still trying to keep up the ruse.
I was out of the car, in any case, before Sam could cut his engine. A reddish mound of heaped crusted earth stood off to one side of the clearing, a scatter of tree stumps like excised moles on the rocky land around it. Something was supposed to have been built here, but who knew how far back that supposing stretched, how many years of waste this clearing represented—I think of this now with a coroner’s objectivity.
“Playtime’s over, Sam,” I was shouting, “playtime’s over.” I had the empty JanSport slung over my shoulder, the gun in my hand. “Give me your keys.”
In the wedge of the open door Sam shook his head woefully. “You stupid fuck,” he said.
“Fuck you, Sam. Give me your keys.”
“I was talking about myself,” he said. “I’m the stupid fuck. He’s not in there? Just to confirm?”
“Give me the keys, Sam. This is ridiculous.”
“Maybe I’ll see you around, Eli,” Sam said, and
he got back in the car.
“I’m pointing a gun at you!” I shouted.
“That’s right. You are.” Sam sprang up and out of the front seat, a sudden lilt in his movements, in his voice.
“Why don’t you give that back to me,” he said. “It doesn’t belong to you. You really don’t want it.”
“Give me the keys,” I said.
The snub-nosed pistol trembled horribly in my hand. Looking around I saw a snatch of a shack-like house through the trees, an old car on blocks—strange rustification.
“You look ridiculous with that thing,” Sam said. “I should have listened to Alex. You’re an amateur.”
“Give me the keys.”
“You’re going to shoot me, Eli?”
The Radicals Page 23