The Traveller (55 page)

A sudden car horn shattered his words and bright lights filled their car.

He pulled abruptly to the gravel shoulder, the car swerving sickeningly as another car roared past. She thought that the other car was somehow inside theirs and she shouted out some sound of half-fear and warning.

She caught her breath sharply and cried, ‘Watch out! Oh, my gosh!’

She was aware of the terrifying closeness of the other car. Then she heard a pair of voices yelling in the night and saw the taillights of a jeep roar past. It was a hopped-up model, with fat tires and bright paint, a roll bar, and two kids hanging out the side, gesturing wildly.

Jeffers was cursing uncontrollably.

Teenagers!’ Douglas Jeffers said angrily, his voice a runaway cacophony of rage and relief. ‘Must be a week or so before school starts and they’re blowing off steam. Christ, I almost dumped the car …’ He gestured toward the side of the road. ‘I know this road. Damn! It drops off sharply over there. Down an embankment and into a little river. Christ, we’d have been killed. The little bastards. Christ. Out joyriding on a Monday night, for crying out loud. They could have killed us.’

He continued driving at his slow pace.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

‘Oh, sure,’ she replied. ‘But they scared the daylights out of me.’

‘It was my fault,’ he said apologetically. ‘I should have seen them coming up behind us so fast. Sorry.’

He smiled. ‘They scared me, too.’

He held out his hand, holding it palm down, horizontally.

‘Look at that. A little shake. Nerves, I guess.’

He smiled again.

‘I suppose it means that regardless of who you are, an auto accident that just barely doesn’t happen still gets to you. A moment of complete fear, then life goes back to its own petty pace.’

After a moment he added, ‘There is nothing, nothing, as obnoxious as a teenage boy with a car and confidence and a little bit of booze. Christ, they act like they own the world. Immortal. Boy, did that piss me off.’

Then he laughed. ‘And it makes me feel old.’

The darkness ahead on the road was interrupted by the luminous presence of a gas station. As they drove past,

both Anne Hampton and Douglas Jeffers saw the jeep parked at the pumps.

‘Look,’ she said, almost inadvertently. ‘There they are.’ She could see two boys, backs to them, standing by the soft-drink machine. Both were tall and thin and wore baseball caps and slouched with a natural insouciance and rebellion.

Jeffers drove deliberately past the station. After a quarter mile he accelerated sharply, throwing her back in her seat. She reached out to steady herself.

‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘The classic highway fantasy.’

His voice was suddenly suffused with excitement.

‘There’s an interesting spot up ahead,’ he said. ‘Where the road forks and one side heads down a small ravine, next to the interstate.’

In seconds they’d reached the fork. He took the upper half, and, after a hundred yards, slowed. He found a dark turnout and parked the car.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘We’ll see if luck’s with us. You don’t move.’

Again command entered his voice. She didn’t even twitch.

Douglas Jeffers raced to the back of the car and flung open the trunk. His hand reached out and seized the polished steel of the Ruger semiautomatic rifle. He rummaged about amidst the other weapons until he found the clip of nine long shells. He slid the clip into the gun, feeling the satisfying click as it locked into place.

Jeffers left the rifle on top in the open trunk and searched for a moment until he found a long, cylindrical leather case. He grabbed this and turned, jogging back down the road. As he ran, he sharpened his eyes, trying to pluck shapes from the black of the night. He surveyed the area, looking for any sign of life. He peered into the darkness, looking for the telltale sweep of headlights in the distance. He concentrated his hearing, trying to find some sound that might indicate the presence of another person or of a vehicle heading in his direction. All was silent save for a slight rustle of wind in a nearby stand of pine trees. He looked

off into the distance, toward the ravine, and tried to hear the sound of the water rushing through the bottom. He suddenly remembered the childhood adage: If you want to be able to see at night, eat lots of carrots. I ate lots of carrots. All the time. And my night vision is fine. But it is a lot finer when I use a night starlight scope.

He opened the leather case and held the cylinder up to his eye. It made the landscape a dirty green, and he swept it about to satisfy himself that his senses had not lied. He was alone. He thought that he must have appeared for all the world to be like some ancient and abandoned mariner, desperately searching for land. He peered down the roadway, into the distance.

‘Aha,’ he said out loud. ‘Company comes calling.’

He saw the fancy jeep moving erratically through the night.

‘Well, well, well, will wonders never cease.’

The vista remained deserted save for him and the approaching vehicle. He envisioned the two teenagers in the jeep, laughing, heads thrown back in the rush of wind through the open sides and convertible top. The stereo would be thumping, he thought, and their attention will be stripped by a couple of beers. He turned and rushed back to his own car. He saw Anne Hampton’s face through the window, watching him. He could see her shrink into the seat, beaten down by the force of action. He moved quickly, but deliberately, grabbing the rifle and feeling its heft in his hands. Nothing is as comforting in one’s arms as a rifle, he thought. He hurried back through the pitch-black night toward his vantage point, slightly hunched over, but assured, like a veteran soldier evading small-arms fire.

He glanced about himself quickly one last time to be certain of his solitude. He thought of Anne Hampton in the car, then shut her away. He lifted the rifle to his cheek and brought the sight to bear between the front headlights of the jeep, tracking it carefully.

‘Take the bottom trail,’ he commanded.

They did.

He was impressed with the almost electrical connection

that linked him, his finger on the trigger, and the target in his sights. He snugged the gun up against his cheek, caressing the trigger with his finger.

‘Good night, boys,’ he said.

He fired seven shots. The cracking sound seemed to him oddly heavenly, as if the rifle were being held up in the dark sky, sighting down some minuscule shaft of light from a star.

As he lowered the weapon, he saw the jeep start to swerve, battling for purchase on the roadway. He could hear nothing, though, save the echoing of the gunshots. The sound was like the music one hears in one’s head from an oft-recalled song. He suddenly remembered a moment in Nicaragua - or was it Vietnam? - when he’d turned at the stolid sound of a rocket-propelled grenade bouncing into a jeep. There had been an explosion and he’d lifted his camera swiftly, firing the shutter as he focused, trying to catch the great ball of fire and shattered bodies pitching through the air. He remembered how little he’d heard then. No screams, no explosions, no cries for help, just the brother noises of the shutter and the autodrive. He started to lift his rifle, then realized that it wasn’t a camera and let it rest.

The jeep flipped onto its side. He knew that it was screeching with the sound of twisting metal and complaining tires. He saw it thud toward the edge of the ravine, like some dying dinosaur seeking the refuge of dark waters. He thought of the millisecond of time after touching the first domino before it leans up against the next in line.

Then the jeep rolled over, disappearing into the black.

He could no longer envision the teenagers inside.

He turned away, knowing that it had slammed into the bottom. He felt a complete satisfaction. He did not turn around when he felt the shock wave from the explosion. He saw Anne Hampton’s face in the car, horrified, her eyes catching the glow of flames from behind him. He walked toward the car with the steady discipline of Lot.

He dropped the rifle in the trunk and slammed it shut.

Jeffers moved behind the wheel and deliberately put the

car in gear and accelerated away gently. Within a few moments they swept around first one dark turn in the road, then another.

Anne Hampton swiveled in her seat and shivered.

‘I told you,’ Douglas Jeffers said. ‘The ultimate highway fantasy.’

She threw one more quick glance back and thought she could see the glow from the wreck. She turned away and saw the signs for the interstate. Hurry, she thought. Get us away from here. Please.

Jeffers maneuvered the car through the ramps and accelerated on the thruway. ‘We are,’ he said, ‘a nation of assassins and snipers. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. Charles Whitman and the Texas Tower. We have a great and storied tradition of ambush.’

‘They didn’t have a …’

‘Not really. That’s what’s important in an assassination. An X-ambush. An L-ambush. Think of it. Bushwacked. Dry-gulched. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to turn. Nowhere to hide. That’s the point of the entire exercise.’

She did not reply. Nowhere, she thought. She watched the headlights peel away a sliver of light from the darkness. Sixty miles per hour. A mile a minute. Every second takes us farther.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

She knew the answer: All the way to the end.

‘The Granite State,’ Jeffers replied. ‘Luckily, our little adventure took place in Vermont. And by the time anybody figures out what happened, which they won’t, by the way, we’ll be history. What a shot,’ he said. He seemed suffused with excitement. ‘What a shot. Damn! And you know what the cops will think? Nothing. They’ll find some beer cans in the jeep and that’s that. An accident, until someone thinks twice. Out of sight, out of mind. And who would suspect a nice-looking pair of tourists, anyway?’

He sang: ‘We’ll be gone, gone, gone …’

‘Why Vermont?’ she asked hesitantly. ‘Can’t you kill anyone in New Hampshire?’

‘Well,’ he laughed, ‘the Devil had a bit of unpleasantness

in Marshfield a few centuries back. And since then he keeps his works in the neighboring states. As per agreement, of course. And so I follow suit.’

He smiled.

‘But that doesn’t mean we can’t pay a little visit.’

He drove on.

The morning sun was strong and Anne Hampton shielded her eyes. For an instant it reminded her of Florida, and she looked about her for a palm tree clattering in the light breeze. She stared down the main street of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and wondered whether she had dreamed everything. She tried to pick out specifics from her memory; there was the fear, when they’d almost been driven off the road; there was the darkness on the bend; Jeffers walking with the rifle into the deep black; the cracking sound followed by the nauseating muffled roar of the car exploding. She examined each facet of her recollection like a jeweler assessing a precious stone. Surely, she thought, there’ was some flaw that would show her that it hadn’t happened, something to show that this was a dream, a fake, a piece of cut glass refracting light.

She shook her head and forced order on her memory.

Of course it wasn’t a dream, she said to herself. She thought of her night, tossing on sweat-soaked sheets. The dreams are much worse.

She turned and peered through the plate-glass window of the delicatessen. She could see Jeffers at the cash register, paying for coffee and doughnuts. She watched as he pocketed his change and sauntered from the store. As always, she felt amazement. He was whistling, unencumbered by anything so mundane as fear or guilt.

‘I got you the jelly kind,’ he said as he slipped into the car. ‘And coffee and juice.’

He gestured toward the town. ‘Pretty, huh? Filled with antiques and outlet stores. Yankee magazine always has pictures of Jaffrey. Happy white women standing in front of tables heaped high with freshly baked goods. Calico. This is a calico town. Calico and rag wool in the winter.

Not the kind of place where anyone would notice a visiting couple driving a car with out-of-state plates.’ He rolled down the window.

‘It’s going to be a scorcher,’ he said. ‘Late summer up here is completely unpredictable. A little Canadian air tumbles in one day and it’ll snow. Then the cross-country currents bring something humid up from the South on the next, and it hits a hundred.’ He took sunglasses from his pocket and cleaned them on his shirt-tail. She felt the heat entering the car, penetrating her, almost sensual. She tipped the coffee as Jeffers opened a newspaper. He scanned the pages rapidly.

“No, no, no, see, I told you so, aha! Here’s something.’ He paused, reading. Then he read out loud: ‘Two killed in Vermont crash. A pair of Lebanon teenagers were killed Monday night when their four-wheel-drive car failed to negotiate a curve on a back road four miles from Woodstock, Vermont. Police suspect that the youths, Daniel Wilson, seventeen, and Randy Mitchell, eighteen, had been drinking prior to the nine-forty-five crash at the juncture of State Road eighty-two and Ravine Drive

He looked over at Anne Hampton. ‘I could go on. There’s a couple more paragraphs.’ She didn’t reply. She drank her coffee and savored the bitter taste.

‘No? I didn’t think so.’

He dropped the paper on her lap. ‘Read it for yourself.’ She sat up sharply when she heard the edge in his voice. ‘Now, I have business. I want you to wait in the car.’ She nodded rapidly.

‘Good. It’s almost ten. I should be about an hour.’ Jeffers seized his briefcase and left. She watched him walk across the street and into the New Hampshire National Bank. She felt a momentary panic, looking about wildly, thinking: He’s going to rob a bank! Then she recognized that she was being foolish. She settled back in the seat and waited. The idea of escape did not occur to her, even when a police car rolled past. That she could rise up

and flag down a patrolman and end it for herself seemed simplistic and impossible. She had no confidence in some obvious and easy denouement. She knew that she was still powerless; that Douglas Jeffers pulled all the strings for the two of them. So, instead, she thought only of the moment, letting the building heat around her take over her imagination. She wondered what would happen next, and she closed her eyes to the outside world, looking inwardly, thinking: Find some strength. She inspected her heart for bravery, wondering whether there was any there. She knew she would need it to survive.