Death Will Have Your Eyes (6 page)

I stopped at
the next town and made a great pretense of looking for an old college friend. Asked after him at a diner and gas station, made several phone calls, kept going back to the car to rummage through the glove compartment and my book bag. Even cruised streets for a while at 20 mph, slowing still further to rubberneck infrequent signs at corners.

As illusionist Howard Thurston used to tell his assistants: If you don't know what's going on, boy, just smile and point the other way.

Soldiers and dinosaurs like myself wouldn't be so easily misdirected, of course, but I wasn't certain just who I was dealing with, not yet, and this could be one way of finding out. Besides, confusion never goes to waste. And it gets to be almost instinctive after a while. All part of the game, chords to play choruses over, steps of the ritual dance we locked ourselves into again and again.

“C'mon, m'am,” I said at the local post office. “Give a guy some help here, all right? We go
way
back. Jimmie—with an
i-e,
not a
y
. Never James: Jim. Last name sounded English. You know? I mean, I can see his face like it was yesterday. Parkingham? Markham?”

“The postal service is not a public information system, sir.” Visions of long, untroubled breaks, lunches replete with fried-shrimp po-boys, and a fine, secure retirement filled her head.

“I know that, m'am. And I know you guys do one hell of a job. Women too, of course. But hey, this is the first chance I've had to look him up in almost twenty years. It ain't like I'm calling in from home to ask you something. I'm standing right here, and I just drove over four hundred miles, and tomorrow I gotta drive at least that again. Just don't tell me I'm gonna have to go all the way back to Portland without ever seeing my old buddy after all this, okay? Just don't tell me that.”

I stared off (fiercely? forlornly?) towards the window. Some double-winged insect the size of a hummingbird butted away at it.

“Hey, hold on a minute.
Berkeley
. That's it! We all used to call him Bish.
Esse est percipi,
the eraser, what eraser? and all that. How could I have forgotten?”

“I'm happy for you, sir. Have a safe and pleasant journey home.”

“C'mon, m'am. Miss? Jimmie Berkeley. How hard is it? I'm begging you. Bail me out here, huh? Whatta we have, if we don't have our memories?”

And wouldn't you know, with all the other towns I might have pulled into, with the name itself (or so I thought) pure invention, just riding way out there on the edge of a blue note, there actually would
be
a Jimmie Berkeley in Marvell, North Carolina.

“I really should call my supervisor—”

“Please. Please do. Absolutely. In your place I'd do the same.”

“—but I can't see the harm in it.”

“Maybe you should call him anyway? For appearance's sake. Cover your bases.”

“And things haven't been going at all well for Jimmie this past few years. It should do him good to see an old friend, talk over better times.”

Johnsson's
should
. That dangerous word again.

“He's living out at the old Swensen place. Caretaking. Not that there's any care to take, or much left to take care of. What do you call it? A sinecure?”

She sketched lightly on the back of an old envelope as she went on.

“The mailing address is route one, box nine. But the way you get there is to take Cherry, that's the main street out front,”—as a bold line crossed the bottom of her improvised page—“on up to Loman's Lane and turn right once you pass the Nazarene church.” A square with a cross inside it. “Then you go on four, five miles. Till you come to an old boarded-up Spur station. That'll be on your right. The road to the left's the one you want, the gravel one.” Thinner lines now. “Half a mile more, over the creek, first house you come to. First one you'll
see,
anyhow. Out behind the big house, where old Swensen lived, there's a cottage, probably used to be a carriage house or slave's quarters. That's Jimmie's place.” An
X
.

Remaining in character, I thanked her effusively, all the time thinking
Damn, damn, damn,
and
What webs we weave
.

But like a good athlete, now I had to follow through.

I had to go out there, shoot the basket, fumble, trip, foul and withdraw.

So I did.

Jimmie climbed down off a tractor overgrown with vines at the edge of trees as I came up the drive. The ruts coming in were bad enough, but these were worse. I lumbered over them, the low-slung Datsun bottoming out again and again, hood heaving up and crashing back down like a ship in heavy sea. I hit the brake and rocked to a stop. Jimmie stood by the big house waiting.

Okay. I'd indulge in a few moments' small talk and tell him sorry, obviously I have the wrong person. Wrong town, maybe. Completion, closure. Then back the Z up, U-turn, and get the hell out of there.

But I saw in his eyes, or thought I saw, some trace of recognition. And something about his face, something in the pace and cadence of his words, was familiar.

“Can I help you, sir?” he said, keeping a distance.

“I…I seem to have lost my way. Can you tell me how to get back to the interstate?”

“Well, I reckon you're lost all right. Leastways the
highway
is.” He laughed. “But you just turn around and go on back down the way you came a few miles, and when you fetch up against the creek, you turn left. Don't you cross the creek, now, just turn
at
it. Mile or two farther along, you'll see your highway.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

He stepped closer to the car.

“I know you?”

“Don't see how.”

“Not from these parts, then?”

“No.”

“And I been here my whole life. But I do know you. We've met up before.” He shook his head and shrugged. “In some other life, maybe. Who knows about these things? You okay now on finding your highway?”

I said yes, thanked him again and sailed back down the ruts.

Who indeed knows?

As I'd told the postal clerk, before this man I thought I was making up out of whole cloth took on flesh and spoke to me: What do we have if we don't have our memories?

What I believed pure invention had become
more,
seemed in fact to have made its way to the surface from some clandestine well of memory.

What if memory itself, in turn—his, my own—were only invention?

For the next
hundred miles a Ford Escort moved up to number one on the charts.

Talk about protective coloration. A Ford
Escort?

It picked me up not long after Carl's Bay and the unseen sniper. A Dodge van had come around some miles back, so for a while it was a toss-up, both with a bullet, as they say, but then the van turned off and never came back, meaning either that it didn't figure at all, or that it was running a classic A-B tail and had passed me on to the Ford.

So that's the song we were dancing to.

I drove along thinking of those first weeks in the Buick following my retirement, the endless miles of highway I covered and recovered, all the open road I had felt beginning to unfurl in my mind and life, Brubeck and Bird and Sidney Bechet unwinding on the tape player the whole time. That stuff wasn't readily available then; I'd paid dearly to have collectors dub it for me from their stashes of old records and acetates.

I thought of men long since dead, of a woman's face in Chile, of part of a child I found beside the road one morning in Salvador. I remembered what it felt like when someone died there beside you, how your own body became in that instant instantly more real, more alive.

I wondered what use a soldier with a conscience could possibly be, and if indeed I had one (but I was here, wasn't I?), and what conscience was.

No more trustworthy, no less unreconstructed, perhaps, than was memory?

Just after lunch the Escort ceded favor to a Mazda pickup that paced me at such a calm distance I became certain I was this time in the presence of a pro.

Mazda sat uncomplaining in a vacant lot the whole while I stretched a steakhouse dinner to almost two hours. When I left, it came along quietly. And when I went to ground, it pulled into the parking lot between tourist cabin number nine and the sole exit.

Fair enough.

He knew the moves without having to work them out. I was no longer dealing with amateurs.

The cabins were pure fifties postcard: fake frontier, as though some Titan's idiot child had been given a set of Lincoln Logs for Christmas and turned loose, complete with brown plastic chimneys and slab doors painted to look like four planks with crossties. Inside, it was even worse. You could barely turn around in there without bumping into
something;
it was packed full with a green Naugahyde sofa and chair, a bed whose headboard put one in mind of tombstones, matching blond dresser and bureau, a corner desk shelled with aqua Formica that after many years of bondage and struggle had almost succeeded in emancipating itself from its support brackets.

I used the cabin's phone and my own calling card to send a telegram to a deadfall address:
Xanadu tomorrow stop
.

More confusion and background noise.

I left open the canvas curtain with its frontier scenes—wagon wheels, lariats, a chuck wagon—and turned on the TV to a Special Report about recent mass murders in Utah. Canted newsreel footage of the suspect, of abandoned backyards and one-time schoolrooms, of a town square, a storm-laden sky. Interviews with a psychologist specializing in (caps? italics?) the criminal mind and with, unaccountably, a “television consultant.” (A
what?
) Having become instantly, momentarily, an actor, each spoke his lines with heavy sadness and certitude. Apparently it occurred to no one that, inasmuch as explanations and answers
did
exist, they were complex ones, and might only be found in the suspensions of true discourse or of art, certainly not in homilies, slogans, threadbare aphorisms.

Strike another blow, I thought inanely, for American no-how.

The newscast was followed by a poorly dubbed Japanese mystery,
Ransom,
that nevertheless immediately swept me up and carried me off, more from the intensity of the lead character's features and the stark, angular black and white of the film itself—like something out of his own mind—than for any facility of plot or technique.

A three-time murderer (though none of them committed in passion), Osho is released from prison during war with the understanding that, in return for his freedom, he will kill again: this time a most peculiar patriot, an old, once-great soldier now leading his people away from confrontation and towards negotiation. Osho instead flees, settling in an obscure mountain village where he becomes protector for a young, mildly retarded woman with whom he falls slowly in love, and for her family. Raiders—refugees from various war zones, deserted soldiers—periodically come upon the village by chance only to be dispatched, violently, by Osho. There are brief flashbacks to beatings he received from his father as a child; to (at the beginning of this same war) the imposition of martial law and subsequent confiscation of his home village's sole source of income, its fishing boats; to the single boat he and a friend carried into the hills and the officer they struck and happened to kill when he came upon them there; to the man whose throat he slit years later in a barroom brawl over a woman whose name he never knew or asked; to the face of a man he almost killed, but from whom he drew back at the last moment, in prison. By film's end, despite all he has done, despite his final, passionate killing, one feels a great compassion, a spilling tenderness, for Osho. In the movie's last frames, half a dozen policemen in plainclothes climb slowly up the mountain to put him to death for defaulting on his bargain. The country is at peace.

I walked to the window, half-expecting the Mazda's driver to be in the window opposite looking back, the same film coming to its end on the screen behind him.

But there was only blackness out there, blackness shot through from time to time with the lash of passing lights, broken by the dull thunder of trucks on the interstate a mile away.

And behind, there was only more news, more detective shows and sitcoms, endless advertising, an interminable hour of sophomoric British comedy in tuxedos and drag.

I slept well, dreaming of the countryside of southern France, its small
caves
and restaurants, its pâtés, oversize bottles of local wine, cassoulets, greens and rolling green hills. I was a leaf carried along by wind. Wind whispered softly to me and would never grow tired.
Ma feuille,
the wind said,
ma petite feuille, ma jolie feuille
…

In the morning, no less surprised than I might have been upon receiving, by return post, a reply to a message in a bottle, or to words whispered into the darkness, I received a response to my telegram.

“Mr. Anderson?” the desk clerk said when I picked up the phone. He was probably also owner, maintenance man and half the housekeeping staff. “I'm sorry about disturbing you at such an early hour, but I have a telegram here for you.”

“Yes?”

“You want me to read it?”

“Please.”

“Oh. Okay. Let's see…it says:
I await you
. And there's something else here, a name maybe.
K-U-B-L-A?
That's it. Be checking out this morning, will you?”

“Yes. Thanks again.”

“Oh no: thank
you
.”

Ten minutes later, the Mazda pulled out behind me. We drove up the street like a very small circus and stopped at a truck stop for breakfast. Plenty of parking in front. This time he came in, sat at the counter and ordered coffee.