Wolf Point (3 page)

“I don’t know.”

T said, “May I make a suggestion?”

“What you may do is shut the fuck up,” Lester said. “What you may do is just be quiet before I cave your skull in just for the hell of it.”

Jenny said, “Oh for Christ’s sake, Lester.”

“What?” he yelled, the word percussive and loud as a gunshot.

“What?” she shouted back at him, jumping to her knees. “What?” she screamed again, this time throwing a punch at his face, which T in the rearview saw him ward off by covering his head with his forearms. “Don’t you fuckin’ scream at me!”

“Jenny,” he said from behind his arms.

“What? What, Lester? What do you want to say to me?”

T guessed Jenny was five-five, maybe a little shorter, but knotted up the way she was, clenched and tight and sinewy, he imagined she could throw a substantial punch.

“Jenny,” Lester repeated. “Calm down.”

“Who shouted first, Lester? Who brought out the big-bad-bully voice, Lester?”

“Jenny,” he said.

“What?”

“Jenny, we have to deal with this guy. If we don’t take him off; if
I
don’t take him off, what are we going to do?”

“That’s a good question,” she said. “Are you done screaming at us? Are you done cavin’ people’s skulls in?”

He didn’t answer. He took his hands away from his face but continued to lean back and away from her.

She said, “I asked you a question, Lester.”

“Do you want me to be done?” he said. “Because I don’t know what the hell you’re really thinking, Jen.”

“I’m thinking you should be quiet is what I’m really thinking.”

“Okay, fine,” he said. “You want me to be quiet, fine.” He slid away from her, positioning himself out of T’s sight, directly behind the driver’s seat. “Because I’m sorry about all this,” he added. “But what the fuck are we supposed to do with no money and no car in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere except rip off somebody?”

“So are you done now?” she said. “Are you going to be quiet?”

“Fine, quiet. But we’ve got no money. Not a cent.”

Jenny was still a moment, as if testing to see if Lester were really through talking. When they had driven a while in the
dark and silence, she continued, “So, as I was saying, the plan was to rob you, but I don’t think it was ever really going to happen. I’m not really violent, and I’m not a thief.”

T said, “You’re not violent and you’re not a thief, but you were planning to knock me unconscious and steal my car and my money. Is that right?”

“That’s about right,” Lester’s voice came out of the back seat. “It was my plan.”

“I’d feel more guilty about it,” Jennifer added, “except, as I said, I don’t think you were ever in any real danger.”

As I said . . .
T noted the use of the grammatically more formal
as
rather than the typical
like
. He also noted that her slight Southern lilt had almost completely disappeared. He said, “You’re becoming downright enigmatic, Jennifer.”

“I’m a girl dressed in skin-tight red leather pants with her blouse half open. I would think that’s pretty easy to interpret.”

“A girl dressed in red leather pants with her blouse half open who says
as I said
rather than
like I said;
who knows what
enigmatic
means; and who came into the car with a country Southern accent and a full-tilt airhead act—
My feeet are juust kiillin’ me!
—and who, an hour and a half later, sounds more like she’s from northern Virginia than Opelousas, Louisiana, and is beginning to sound like she might even have some higher education.”

Lester said, laying on the accent, “I got fahmily in Opelousas, dude.”

“All right, so,” Jennifer said, “if we’re not exactly what we
seem—what about you? You stopped for a girl dressed like a whore and a seedy-looking guy in a black leather jacket—”

“Thank you,” Lester interrupted. “Very nice.”

“What are we supposed to think of you?” Jen finished.

“That I’m stupid?” T said. “Or reckless?”

Lester added, “Or a just a horny old man.”

“Want to know what I’m thinking?” Jennifer said. “I’m considering the possibility that you’re majorly fucked up.”

“Majorly fucked up?” T said. “Could you be more precise?”

She shook her head. “It’s getting late,” she said. “And you have no idea how tired I am.”

When T was in his late twenties, living in Manhattan, his life wrapped up as it would be for another twenty-plus years in the development of his businesses, he had taken a late-night drive east, out to the island, heading nowhere in particular, as was his wont when he was stressed and tense, though probably better to say overly stressed and tense since stressed and tense was pretty much the normal state of affairs at that time. He was a man whose idea of a great day in the city was to spend an afternoon wandering through MOMA or the Met or the Guggenheim, followed by dinner somewhere nice and a play that people were talking about, something like Albee’s
The Play About the Baby
or a new production of Chekhov; and at that time he was married to a woman who thought his interest in art was pretentious, who once actually laughed at him when he told her he dreamed of being a photographer and showing
his pictures in the downtown galleries. Given that he didn’t even own a decent camera at the time, it wasn’t hard to understand why his admission elicited a quick, spontaneous laugh. It hurt nonetheless, and he still remembered the moment vividly, as was also his wont, to protect and nurture wounds for a lifetime. He was married to the wrong woman and would be for a few more years; he was spending the bulk of his life developing maintenance, house-and-office-cleaning, and restoration businesses that were of no interest to him beyond the large sums of money he was coaxing them to generate; he was edgy and anxious all the time; and during this aimless, calming ride out on the island he came upon two girls hitchhiking on an almost deserted back road.

He stopped for them, of course, though he couldn’t see much in the dark beyond that they looked like girls, small of frame, with long hair and delicate features. After he pulled over, they both got in the back seat without a word, just opened the door and got in the back seat, so that he had to turn around and look before he understood that he had just picked up two very drunk, barely teenaged girls. They looked back at him with wide eyes and dopey smiles. “Ladies?” he said. “Where would you like to go?” They giggled in response. For a moment he thought they might be drugged out on acid or who knew what, maybe one of the designer psychedelics that were popular with teens those days, but the smell of whiskey on their breath cleared up that question quickly as it began to suffuse the closed atmosphere of the car. He looked them over more closely and saw they might not even be teenagers. Their
small breasts might not just be small, they might be still developing. Their shortness of stature might not just be shortness, they might still be growing. But clearly they were two very young girls, drunk in the back seat of his car. He mustered the most benevolent and avuncular of smiles. “Ladies,” he repeated gently, “you’ve been drinking.” Which brought on more giggles. “Would you like me to deliver you someplace?”

“Not really,” the one on the right said. “We don’t really have anyplace to go.”

The one on the left smiled coyly and said, “Have you ever been in the back seat of your own car?”

The one on the right added, “It’s cozy back here.”

T had never doubted the moral correctness of what he had done at that point, which was to get out of the car, open the back door, lead them one at a time out onto the dark road, and leave them where he had found them. Chances were slim that another car would pass before they sobered up and made their way back to their respective homes, which were almost certainly in one of the nearby developments. It was very late. The area was remote. The road was lightly used, even during the day. He had never considered even for a second doing anything else but escorting those two girls out of his car. That was real. That was something that had happened in the real world, and he had revisited the incident often during the endless months of disgrace preceding his banishment, and it came to mind again as he drove through the dark, some thirty years later, with two new hitchhikers in his car.

“Help me out here,” he said to Jennifer. “Forget about me,
whether I’m majorly fucked up. What about you two? You’re not kids. This isn’t a joyride. What are you thinking? You rob my car and take my money, then what? You risk several years in jail for a few hundred bucks and a ride? That doesn’t make sense. What are you thinking?”

Jen said, “You’re being far too rational.”

Lester added, “Via circumstances beyond your control, you find yourself with no money, no transportation, and your life in danger if you don’t immediately get very far away from where you are. What would you do, Tom?”

“Your life in danger?”

“I bet you—” Jenny said to Lester. “I’ll bet you he wouldn’t go and put the only friend he’s got in mortal danger with him.”

“Jesus Christ, Jenny— If I could take it back—”

“Yes, but you can’t,” she said. “Here we are.” To T, she said, “Look,” and then paused as if collecting her thoughts. She seemed changed again, as if several layers of masks had fallen away and the real person smoldering under the pretense was burning closer to the surface. “Look,” she repeated. “You said you’d take us to the Thousand Islands. I wasn’t lying. We really are trying to get there.” She dug into her bag and came out with a scrap of blue-lined yellow paper, which she put on the dashboard in front of him. “This is where we’re going,” she said, indicating an address handwritten on the paper in red pen. “If you’d just take us there, I promise: we’ll say goodbye. We’ll be out of your life.”

“I’ll take you,” T said, without bothering to look at the address. “I said I’d take you where you’re going.”

“Thank you,” she said, and she straightened herself out in her seat, stretched out her legs, buttoned up her blouse, laid her head back and closed her eyes, as if to say,
Okay. I’m done. Bullshit’s over
.

Lester leaned forward out of the shadows of the back seat and wordlessly dropped a lead pipe alongside T’s thigh. Then he lay down out of sight.

A moment later they were both sleeping soundly, and T realized how exhausted they must have been all along. Jenny had closed her eyes and literally a few seconds later her face went slack and her body relaxed into the seat and her chest rose and fell in a regular pattern of deep breaths. In the back seat, Lester moaned, making a sound so embarrassingly and unguardedly sexual that he had to be deep in sleep. A moment later he did it again, only this time it was a mix of sexual pleasure and agony; then with his next breath he groaned yet again, and that final time it was all suffering, the kind of sound someone might make after learning of an irrevocable loss. Then they were both still and the only sound in the car was the whisper of their breath as they slept.

They weren’t far from Alexandria Bay, a place T hadn’t seen in more than thirty years, since his college days at Syracuse University, where he had been a terrible student, cutting more classes than he attended before miraculously managing to graduate with a C average and a degree in English. That he
had managed only thanks to a professor who in effect gifted him with twelve credits for independent studies he had never taken: Professor Carolyn Wald, an immensely proper-looking woman in her fifties, with whom he used to smoke pot, have sex, and go fishing off Lake Ontario and sometimes in the Thousand Islands around Alexandria Bay. She taught English literature, specializing in the Romantic poets, and she would sometimes recite poems to him from memory while they fished. He’d been thinking about her a good bit these days too, and he suspected her memory—she was long dead, of cancer—had something to do with his choice of the Thousand Islands as a destination once he had decided on this spontaneous trip.

He spent a lot of time lately reviewing the whole career of his sex life, which he reasoned was understandable, given what had happened to him, given the place where he arrived early one evening when a indignant young woman slapped him across the face in disgust. Police had arrived at his Long Island home in a dozen official vehicles, all with brightly colored, flashing, revolving, strobing lights that turned the quiet dusk of his street into a carnival—which was what the whole thing was designed to be, a carnival sideshow, meant to attract attention, meant as a warning to others. They came in early evening, when the daylight was just beginning to fade, when all his neighbors were home, the families gathered around the evening meal. He had just finished dinner and was about to watch the news. From the place where he sat in his flung-back leather recliner, he could see the police cars through the living room’s bay window. They lined the curb in front of his house
and pulled into his driveway, and still it didn’t occur to him for even a second that he was the one they were coming for. When what seemed like a small army of police piled out of the various cars and vans and four officers—two men, two women; two in uniform, two in street clothes—walked up his blacktop driveway and along the red-brick path to his front door, he assumed they were looking for someone in the neighborhood and wanted to ask him if he knew this person or that one, or had he seen this person or that one, and he was only slightly alarmed that all four officers had their guns drawn.

His wife wasn’t home. She had a convenient dinner engagement in the city. He opened the front door and a uniformed officer opened the screen door simultaneously; someone asked him his name—
Yes, Thomas Walker
—and then everything started to go very fast: someone grabbed him roughly by the arm, someone read him his rights, someone yanked his wrists behind him and put him in handcuffs. All the while, once all this started happening, he was laughing. He kept saying,
Wait. This is obviously a mistake
, and he laughed good-humoredly, as if he understood how embarrassed they were all going to be when they discovered their error, whatever it was, that they had the wrong Thomas Walker or whatever, since they could not possibly be sending a tiny army of police to arrest him, this Thomas Walker, who hadn’t done anything seriously illegal since his pot-smoking days as a college student.