The Fugitives (18 page)

“Kat.” It was Nables. “Before you term  ate this con    ation, ple       sider the   inciples I am attemp      uphold in    unicating with you. Communi  ting, I might add, with forebea     ,    ience, suppor   or you goals if no    cessarily the means by which you   tain    m, yet wi          anding of the nee  you pro    y   casionally feel to  perate outs      gular channels. I—”

“You’re breaking up,” Kat said.

“  at’s that, Kat?  hat did  ou s y?”

She hung up on him. “Makes you sound blacker, somehow,” she muttered. She spun around and her legs shot out from under her. She landed hard on her side and remained there for a moment, carefully awaiting additional pain. A man stood over her. Her first thought was that she hoped he hadn’t overheard her intemperate remark, but he merely offered his hand. She said, “I’m all right,” and got slowly to her feet. She rubbed her elbow. “My butt got the worst of it.”

“Are you sure?”

She took him in for a second, nodding. He had the same big dumb yokel look as lots of the people you encountered in the boonies, but his clothes were expensive, and so new that she wondered that the price tags weren’t still dangling from them. He was holding out her phone.

“Thanks,” she said, taking it. “How do you manage to get a signal in this place? I’ve been trying all morning, it seems like.”

“You dang city slickers,” he said. “They got one of them there telephone booths at the general store.”

She shook her head. “No offense. You just get used to reception one hundred percent of the time, and then—bloop! It’s gone.”

His earnest, round, American face broke into a smile. Then he started talking: “Relax. What do I look like, the chamber of commerce? Don’t worry, I don’t have any interest in the esteemed reputation of our local cell service. If you ask me—which you’re not, of course, but here we are—I think this country needs one guaranteed dead zone per county. Preserve the uncellular space! That’s the bumper sticker I’m going to have printed up as soon as I succeed in my nationwide grassroots movement to have bumpers brought back instead of those plastic things they have now. If this is indeed Unabomber, Michigan, then tell me where I sign up for my forty acres and a mule. Digital zero. Streets named after trees and presidents and pioneers, and good old-fashioned directions like north, south, center, up, down. Welcome and Get Lost! You saw it on the billboard on your way in, right?”

He shrugged, turned, and trudged toward the library entrance. She followed, waiting a moment to allow him to get well ahead of her.

She spotted him inside, sitting in a baby chair among a bunch of little kids. She took care to position herself on the other side of the room, although the guy looked harmless enough. If he hadn’t said a word to her she might have thought—spotting him here, sitting hunched forward on the ludicrously low chair with his knees together and his hands thrust into the tight gap between his thighs—that he was retarded, but his awesomely weird monologue proved him to be more exotic than that. She gazed at him with wary interest. Leave it to her to attract the town nut. Something about her made strangers wander up and raise the lid on whatever was bubbling inside their skulls.

Kat forgot about him when Salteau arrived. She took out her phone and discreetly took several pictures of him. Despite Becky’s colorful description, and the photo she’d seen that seemed to bear it out, he was dressed in a Carhartt jacket and a baseball cap, not in any special way that connoted I N D I A N, although the buckles, braids, beadwork, and embroidery generally had been regarded with distaste, even suspicion, by the working men and women she’d grown up around. He certainly made no attempt to “sound” Indian, either in accent or in phraseology, except for a throwaway joke about the weather being a result of the wrath of the Great Spirit over Cherry City High’s basketball team losing to Gaylord the previous afternoon. He could be an Indian. He could be an Italian, or a Jew, or an Arab, or an Armenian, for all she knew. She shrugged, put away the phone, and took out her notebook. His true identity may have been the story’s hook, but it wasn’t the point. The point, she reminded herself, was the money, the theft, the crime. People hid for all sorts of reasons that nobody cared about. People hid and nobody came looking. People walked right out of their high school nicknames and goofy hairstyles and into jobs of rickety dignity at IT firms and real estate offices in Toledo and Pittsburgh, where nobody would ever think of searching for either star or stoner. They joined the marines and got good posture. They gained weight and lost their hair scanning groceries at Kroger’s. They earned doctorates in classics and comp lit and, really: if it were even possible to locate him, what would you say to the guy whose most salient trait had been his habit of carrying a skateboard from class to class once it turned out that he could read dead languages? Why would you want or need this new definition of someone locked in amber? Not the point. This was different. Saltino was a fugitive, of a kind, operating under an alias. The point was the past not worn away into unrecognizability but amputated. He began to speak.

She walked out immediately after he finished. Her review: so-so. She kind of saw what Becky had meant about his being a little off. This too was not the point. She tried to remain focused on the point, but was basically excited. He was surely who she thought he had to be. She went outside and began trying to upload the photos to Becky. When the man from before came and stood next to her, she ignored him for as long as she could.

“What?”

“How’s your hip?”

“Oh,” she said, “OK, I guess. I’ll find out when I wake up at four a.m. in the throes of pain.”

“Put ice on it.”

“The country doctor speaks.”

“Scotch helps too. It’s long experience speaking. I have a bad back,” he said. He pursed his lips. “So, you’re writing about John Salteau?”

“What makes you think that?”

“I saw you taking notes. You don’t have a kid with you.”

“Not bad,” she said.

“What paper?”

“Who says it’s a newspaper? Maybe I’m a blogger.”

“Ah. A blogger.” He formed a cross with his index fingers and aimed it at her.

“Welcome to the digital frontier.”

“No. You forget, I’m the one trying to escape.”

“Then you’ll be relieved. I’m strictly old media. The
Chicago Mirror
. I feel like I have to identify myself because my boss would not be amused for one second by my impersonating a blogger.”

“Feels like his world is vanishing, huh?”

“It
is
vanishing. Blogs are like the good old days. It’s Twitter we have to worry about now.”

“What’s ‘Twitter’?”

“Never mind. Just aim that cross somewhere else.”

“Long as you’re not a blogger.”

“When in doubt, blame the bloggers.”

“It’s all their fault.”

“And so where’s
your
kids?” she asked.

“Brooklyn.”

“You mean like,
Brooklyn
Brooklyn.”

“Over the famous bridge.”

“I thought you seemed out of place.”

“Back. In place, I mean. I’m from the midwest originally.”

“Imagine that.” Kat checked to see if the pictures were uploading. The guy muttered something; can’t believe you found him or thought nobody would find him or something like that. She looked up sharply. “What?”

“I said, I guess Cherry City is about to lose John Salteau to the big time.”

“You’ve got a funny idea what the big time wants.”

“Oh, that’s not true. I watch a lot of television. There’s an endless supply of celebrity out there. A crisis of overproduction. Celebrity fry cooks, celebrity closet organizers, celebrity grocery store clerks. There’s a shoe salesman on the Foot Channel who was on the cover of
US Weekly
.”

“No,” she said, “there wasn’t.” She giggled, shaking her head. He was probably right. She glanced at her phone.

“You wouldn’t want to grab a bite, would you?”

“You’re kidding, right? You’re coming on to me at story hour?”

“It’s not like I’m asking you to huff Krylon behind the hardware store Dumpster or anything. Maybe I just want to compare notes.”

“Oh, you’re writing about Salteau, too.” She laughed again.

“I’m his number one fan. You could quote me.”

“Oh, you’re quotable all right. Local color.”

“I’ll buy.”

“I can expense my meals.”

“Come on. I’ll tell you everything I know about John. Deep background.”

“You know him.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

15

S
HOULD
I have heard of you?” she said.

“The dreaded question. Do I say, yes, you should have and you’re hopelessly ignorant if you haven’t, or do I say no, don’t worry, I’m completely insignificant.”

“How about this.” She folded her hands. “Have they made any movies out of your books?”

They were sitting in the back room of an Italian-style deli, eating sandwiches out of plastic baskets. A pair of high school kids hung out nearby, bored already by the abundance of time that was one gift of bad weather. The two adults were as insignificant to them as the mortar holding together the bricks of the walls, but the guy—Alexander Mulligan was his name—shot a glance at them and lowered his voice.

“Yes.
Fallen Sparks
.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Hollywood changed it,” he said, with irritation. He gave her the title of the movie.

“That’s the one with the great car in it.”

“’67 Chevelle. That was their idea. I very specifically gave my character a ’78 Civic.”

“Your first car.”

“I’m tempted to say my best car. What, tempted. Definitely my best car.” He’d begun warming to the subject. “Not cinematic enough, though. In one of the very rare instances when I had direct contact with anyone having to do with the movie, I asked the producer why they’d changed it. He looks at me like I’m mildly retarded and says, ‘It’s not a comedy.’ ”

She laughed. “Oh yeah it was. I saw it. I didn’t read the book, though.”

He shrugged. “I heard about this new trend in book clubs. You pick a book that they’re making into a movie. Then you don’t read the book, but go see the movie and then talk about that.”

“I believe it.”

“Why shouldn’t you? And you’re not even old enough to remember
Classics Illustrated
.”

“No, I’m not.”

“
The Scarlet Letter
with ads for X-Ray Specs and pimple cream every third page. People thought it was the end of Western civilization. If only they knew.”

“Personally, I thought
The Scarlet Letter
itself was the end of Western civilization.”

“Conversation terminated. You wonder why a writer retreats to the boondocks.”

“I didn’t wonder, actually.”

Alexander put his sandwich down and began talking to her for a while about what it was like being a writer. She nodded periodically. It was halfway interesting; a little pat. If anything, the overrehearsed aspect of the thing convinced her that he actually was who he claimed to be. She looked in her purse for her notebook but found her nicotine lozenges instead.

“See?” he said. “You should interview me sometime. You’re a natural. You bring out the talker in me.”

“A,” she said, “I don’t think you need any help from me, and B, I thought I already was interviewing you.”

“
About
me, I mean.” Then he blushed. He seemed starved for attention. A bad divorce, maybe, what with the kids back in Brooklyn and zero sign of that passing reference to
my wife
which she’d noticed married men often liked to make, if only to establish a thin veneer of honesty while they came on to her. No wedding ring, either. Puffy, like someone whose body had filled out with too much beer and too many bar burgers. Or from antidepressants.

“OK,” she said. She got out her notebook and pen. “You’re working on an important new book?”

Hopeless laugh, as if she’d asked how his terminal cancer was progressing. Try another tack (why was she bothering, she wondered).

“Why Michigan?”

“My father used to rent a cabin up here. We came up every summer.”

“Who?”

“The three of us. Me, my dad, my mom.”

“Do they still come up?”

“No. They cut it out. My mother started wanting to be close to home. Got funny about travel. She wasn’t old or anything, just stopped wanting to go out.”

“To go out or to travel?”

“Well. To go out. Which made traveling out of the question.”

“Sounds difficult.”

“It was difficult. They hardly knew my wife. They hardly knew their
grandchildren
.”

“Have they passed away?”

“My dad died. He got cancer and died a few years ago. Very quick. Big surprise.”

“I’m sorry. And your mother?”

He made a sour face. “She’s alive,” he said. He drummed his hands on the tabletop for a second, looked around. The teenagers got up and left. He watched them as they went, then looked at her.

“So, the man of the hour. John Salteau.”

“That’s my quest.”