by Don DeLillo
“What’s he doing?”
“I think he’s sniffing.”
“That’s what I think.”
“I think he’s getting ready to kick dirt.”
“Call her over,” he said.
“What’s the rush?”
“Get back to our straight line.”
When the food came they ate quietly. A small white worm moved over a lettuce leaf in the center of Selvy’s plate. He ate around it.
“I used to work in Sample’s Café in Langtry,” Nadine said. “I think it’s uncanny the straight line goes past my sister, goes past my dad.”
“You want to see him, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He was pretty close to being an all-out bastard, no holds barred. It was only my mom made things bearable. When she died, Joanie took off like a bat. It took me a little longer. I was always slow to notice what was going on. But I see it a little clearer now. The man just isn’t very nice.”
“Lives alone?”
“You ought to see the house. It’s a shack, just about. Half the things in our house my mom made out of old feed sacks. Dish towels, face towels, napkins, even a lot of our clothes. Pillow cases. Feed sack pillow cases. Feed sack dresses and skirts.”
“Recycling.”
“Poverty,” she said.
About half a mile from the main highway they passed an abandoned farm. Selvy eased the car into some weeds. He reached into a carton in the back seat and removed the smaller of his two handguns, the .38. He walked through the front gate to a deep-water well not far from the main house. Holding the gun flat on his upturned palm, he tossed it about two feet into the air and watched it fall into the well. A blunt muffled sound came up to him.
Looking into the setting sun, Nadine squinted at him as he walked back to the car.
“What’s this business about a straight line?” she said.
Back in Washington, he realized something was different. A man named Lomax came to his hotel. There was no mention of PAC/ORD or Containment Services. People he’d worked with didn’t return his calls. He no longer seemed to be on salary.
Lomax took him for a ride in a black limousine. He said that Radial Matrix had severed all relationships with official agencies of the government. Systems planning would still be done out of headquarters in Fairfax County. All clandestine work would issue from this operation and its spin-offs. There was no other headquarters. There was no table of organization. There was no structure, no infrastructure. Only the haziest lines of command.
Lomax repeated what Selvy had learned at the Mines. Rebel movements drew their strength from the fact that their political and their military functions were one and the same. Here, Lomax told him, business operations and clandestine activity are combined in very much the same way. One doesn’t support the other. One is the other.
Selvy traveled in North America, then throughout Europe and parts of Asia. He gathered information on Radial Matrix competitors. He made undercover payments to representatives of prospective Radial Matrix clients. He paid secret commissions to agents of foreign governments. He arranged the disappearance of a trade commissioner on holiday in Greece. He financed the terrorist bombing of a machine-tool plant. Legitimate business expenditures.
Lomax called him back to the States. They needed a reader. Temporary assignment. Selvy’s name had popped out of the computer.
Four days a week he went to a white frame house in Alexandria. A woman named Mrs. Steinmetz gave him private lectures, with slides, on art history. She accompanied him on visits to the National Gallery and the Hirshhorn. She showed him reproductions of sexually explicit art and discussed the esthetics involved.
Two days a week he went to a suite in an office building near Union Station. Here a Mr. Dempster explained House and Senate protocol and procedures. He gave Selvy reading matter on the subject. Eventually he provided a résumé—background, education, past employment, so forth. All of it was verifiable, none of it true.
The head of Percival’s staff was impressed. He arranged an interview with the Senator. The Senator kept returning to the subject of Selvy’s art background. He arranged a luncheon, during which Selvy was hired.
The black limousine turned up again. Lomax told him that until further notice he’d be paid by dead-letter drop. There was a pension scheme in the works.
For a month Selvy did staff work in Percival’s office. The Senator arranged a small dinner at his Georgetown house. Selvy remained after the other guests left. They had a few. They talked. They had another. The Senator showed him a room with a spinning wheel and an antique desk. Then he led him through the fireplace to the interior of the house next door.
“This is my true life,” he said. “This is what I am.”
They came out of the hills into ranch country, unbroken skyline and spare plains. They traveled slowly, stopping when possible along the main road for food and rest. Some days they went only twenty miles. Selvy didn’t sleep much. The nights were cool.
On a small rise he spotted a curve in the road up ahead. He closed his eyes and counted to seven, easing the steering wheel left at four, when he’d estimated the car would reach the bend.
Richie Armbrister sat naked in the sauna. The man on the bench facing him was also naked. Through the steamy haze, Richie tried to get a good look at his face, without actually staring. The man was plumpish. Early forties, probably. Some gray at the temples. He seemed perfectly relaxed, which indicated he belonged here, or thought he did.
They exchanged a faint smile through the steam.
Richie got up and put his head out the door. In the passenger compartment a party was going on. People danced in the disco area while others sat around eating snacks and drinking. The co-pilot emerged from the flight deck through a beaded curtain and accepted a sandwich from Richie’s bodyguard’s girlfriend.
It was this bodyguard whose eye Richie was trying to catch. Daryl Shimmer. A rangy Negro skittering over the dance floor, all ripples and blind staggers. Richie wondered why this passionate concentration, so typical of his entourage, was forever being applied to ends other than his, Richie’s, peace of mind.
Failing to attract Daryl’s attention, he closed the door, took a pitcher and poured more water on the heated rocks. Then he sat back down.
The man leaned toward him in the fog.
“We want to talk about a can of film.”
“We being who?” Richie said.
“You and me.”
“I don’t want to do any talking about any can of film.”
“It’s on this plane. I think I speak for both of us.”
“You think you speak for both of us when you say what?”
“That’s it’s on this plane.”
“Nothing you mention is on any plane I know of.”
“Richie, be a grownup.”
“Do we know each other?”
“I’m called Lomax.”
“Why are you here?”
“I could tell you I was supposed to meet another party. Aboard a different plane. There was a mixup. I found myself on the wrong plane. That’s one version.”
“Nobody checked? Nobody asked you?”
“Apparently I’m one of those people who blends well. I’m not noticeable. That’s something I’ve had to learn to live with. Blending well. Failing to stand out.”
“They know I’m here. Daryl and those. In case you’re wondering.”
“There’s another version.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“You’re fully grown, Richie. You’re not going to get any bigger. It’s only right we treat each other as adults.”
“Yeah, but for right now I have to start getting ready because we’ll be landing soon.”
“Certainly.”
“Landing is bad enough with clothes on.”
“I understand,” Lomax said. “We’ll continue later.”
Richie got dressed and went out to the passenger compartment. He was stopp
ed by a young woman named Pansy. She was Daryl Shimmer’s girlfriend and for weeks she’d been trying to prevail upon Richie to get Daryl a dune buggy with chromed exhausts for his birthday. Richie was in no mood.
“Look around,” he told her. “All these Vic Tanny imbeciles with their goggles, their male jewelry, their sculptured hair. It’s like helmets they’re wearing. It never moves, short of an earthquake. Get them out of here with their dipping shirtfronts, with their space boots. I want normal for a change. I want ordinary. People with real hair. I want less orgasmics around here. Everybody looks like they’re climaxing. I walk into the warehouse, there’s live bands, people writhing. I get on the plane, they’re still shaking, it never stops. What happened to normal? Where is normal?”
About fifteen minutes later, as the plane approached D-FW, Lomax sat in a swivel chair, belted in, munching on roasted nuts. People were still dancing. He glanced over at Richie Armbrister. With the plane descending toward the runway, Richie had assumed a bracing position. His shoes were off. There was a pillow squeezed between the fastened seatbelt and his stomach. Another pillow lay across his knees. He’d bent his upper body well forward, head resting on this second pillow. His bony hands were clasped behind his knees.
Nadine crawled across the motel bed. Reaching over Selvy’s body, she pointed one end of the cylindrical reading lamp right at his face.
“What are you?”
“Explain,” he said.
“I’m analyzing your features.”
“Racially, you mean. As to type and so forth.”
“What are you?”
“An Indian.”
“You don’t look like an Indian.”
“I’ve trained myself to look different. There’s exercises you can do. Muscular contractions.”
“Those aren’t Indian features, Glen. You’re not Indian stock.”
“You can look different if you train. You start with a good mirror. It’s like anything. Quality tells. You get yourself a quality mirror.”
“If you’re an Indian, that’s not your name, what you’ve been telling people all these years. What’s your real name, your Indian name?”
“Running Dog,” he said.
III
Marathon Mines
1
Van wasn’t ready for solid foods. He was living on milk shakes and soup. He never complained, Cao noticed, but he was clearly more intense than usual. That was worse than complaints.
They listened to country music and kept on driving, through Lexington, Bowling Green, Memphis, Little Rock, Dallas, San Angelo, and on toward a pinpoint on the map called Ozona.
Road signs baffled Cao. The country grew rugged, empty and vast. He wanted to turn back. It was Van who kept them rolling. His cheek was still badly bruised. His upper lip was swollen and purplish. He referred to his road map constantly when he wasn’t driving.
In Ozona, the lone town in a sprawling county, they saw a Toyota that appeared to match the one they were looking for. It was parked in a service station, off to one side, away from the pumps. A young woman sat on the fender drinking a Coke. Using binoculars, Cao checked the license. D.C. plates. Numbers matched.
The rangers were parked alongside the town square. Van showed his partner the map, gesturing excitedly at the line he’d drawn from New York, where they’d started, through a point tangent to the curve in the Ohio River near Huntington, where they’d been ambushed and humiliated, and down across four states and into Mexico. The line was straight and passed very near Ozona.
Cao was happy because Van was happy.
It was decided Van would telephone Earl Mudger. Van knew the place names and had an easier time pronouncing them.
Moll sat in the back of a checkered cab, thinking this was the best time of year, unarguably—the snap and clarity of autumn. The driver kept missing lights, mumbling to himself.
At one of these lights a car appeared on the right, a silver Chrysler. From the corner of her eye, Moll watched the driver’s window come steadily down. Reflections gradually vanished, replaced by Earl Mudger’s smiling face.
“I called.”
“Once.”
“I see,” he said. “You have a point system.”
“Did you leave a number?”
“There’s a point system in effect. I lost points.”
“I don’t think you left a number.”
“I called only once and I didn’t leave a number. I’m dead. They’re taking me away. A new low, pointwise.”
The light changed. Her driver edged the cab forward. Mudger kept pace so that his front door was even with the taxi’s rear door.
“My car or yours?” he said.
“I like it this way.”
“Tell you what.”
Horns were blowing. Her driver was mumbling again. They crawled up Central Park West. Mudger suddenly floored it. There was a split second of noisy tire-gripping and then the Chrysler sprang forward. Half a block away he braked into a U-turn and went slamming into a parking space nose first. The door opened and he came ambling out, crossing the center stripes just as the taxi approached. He kept on walking, forcing the cab to stop, and then came around the right side and opened the rear door. Moll slid over in the seat. Mudger got in and closed the door as the sound of horns grew thick behind them.
“We want the park,” Mudger told the driver. “Flip an R first chance and make some circles in the park.”
He looked at Moll.
“You like these old cabs.”
“Character.”
“I don’t know how to talk to you. You know that? I think that’s why I’m here. To learn how to talk to you.”
“I thought our chat went fairly well.”
“You had me on the defensive,” he said.
“It was your territory.”
“You don’t know what to call me, do you? We have this little difficulty with names.”
“It was your territory. You managed my arrival and departure.”
“We have this little tension between us.”
They were in Central Park, heading north toward the Eighty-sixth Street transverse.
“Here on business, I think you said.”
“Lining up customers.”
“What for?”
“The Mudger tip.”
“Yes, your invention. I recall.”
“Steel,” he said.
Heading east they passed the volleyball courts where she’d played tennis with Selvy. These goddamn bastards. Who were they and what did they want?
“This is your territory,” he said. “Which means I don’t stand a Chinaman’s chance.”
“You’re still managing the arrivals.”
“Only my own.”
“You’re commandeering taxis. That little old man is terrified.”
“After we ride around a while and get all this dialogue out of our systems, I think we ought to have some dinner.”
“I’ve given it up,” she said.
“What else have you given up?”
“You guessed it.”
“Now why would you want to do a thing like that?”
“The humor’s gone out of it. It’s basically a humorous pastime, but lately the laughs have been few and far between.”
“Two myths about women. Women see the humor in sex and appreciate men who do the same. Women care more for tenderness than for the act itself, the hardware involved—techniques, proportions, etcetera.”
“Who’s talking about sex? I’m talking about movies. Going to the movies.”
“I said it, didn’t I? Don’t stand a chance. She left me gasping.”
“What is it about our sparring and jabbing that gives you so much pleasure?”
“Does it show?” he said. “I didn’t know it showed.”
“I think that’s called a shit-eating grin.”
“It’s my military smile. Can’t seem to shake it.”
“We’ve all read about the tough time you combat vets have had making the tr
ansition. One day you’re standing around a provincial interrogation center, supervising the torture of some farmer.”
“Better slow down,” he told her.
“Next day you’re back in the States, looking around, a little bewildered. It’s no wonder you’re still using the same smile. I know, the farmer was dangerous. The enemy was everywhere.”
“You’re way beyond your range.”
“True,” she said. “It’s prim and smug for noncombatants to criticize Those Who Were There. I understand that viewpoint and sympathize with it. Still, I’ve always felt the best view is the objective one, and sometimes this is made sharper and keener by distance. By thousands of intervening miles. The suffering we witness on either side can amount to a lie. But you’re right, by and large. In my ridiculous urge to be fair, I definitely see your viewpoint. And I agree. I’m beyond my range. So let’s stay closer to home. Things I’ve heard and seen.”
The cab headed downtown along the western edge of the park.
“You and the Senator are chasing the same item. I know what it is, although I can’t say I fully understand the various motivations. Doesn’t matter. What’s important is that a man was killed because of it.”
“You think that’s important.”
“It merits consideration.”
“I don’t think it’s so important.”
He was crowding her a bit, edging her way, his left arm moving along the back of the seat.
“Are you learning how to talk to me?” she said.
“What?”
“You said you didn’t know how to talk to me. That’s why you’re here, you said.”
“I’m learning something. I’m not sure what it is. You think that’s important. A man was killed. Did you think that was important ten years ago? In the days of your demolitions expert.”
“You know about him. Of course.”
“Of course I know. Late, great Gary Penner. And there you were, a slip of a girl, in your greatcoat with epaulets. How many people did Gary put into orbit, plying his trade? You ought to know. Living with the man. Having lived with the man. A few night watchmen. A few passersby. Arm here, leg there.”
She looked out the window.