Death Will Have Your Eyes (5 page)

Outside a town
named Stonebrook I pulled off the interstate, stopped at a U-Halt convenience store and at the pay phone there dialed a number that shuttled me through several blind relays and redirects before ringing.

The phone was picked up without greeting.

“Sir,” I said, “perhaps you remember Marek Obtulowicz. Also used the name Lev Aaronson. We worked together in Gdansk, then again for a stretch in Santiago.”

“Yes. Went to ground some years back. In Budapest, if I remember. We were never able to confirm.”

“I've been thinking about something he often said, an old Russian proverb: Do not call in a wolf when dogs attack you.”

He waited a moment. “I see. This is the reason you have called on a secure field line, against every policy and all standard practice.”

“Yes.”

“Then let me offer in return something my father read to me when I was a child. It is from Karl Kraus, I believe. ‘To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take him as an example? He is loyal to men, not to other dogs.' Is there anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Stay in touch, David.”

And the connection was gone.

I stood watching a bluebottle fly throw itself again and again at the window, buzzing furiously. The sill was lined with the desiccating husks of its predecessors.

The road gives
us release, reaffirms the discontinuity of our lives, whispers to us that we are after all free, that (around this curve, when we reach the next town, if we can only make it to California) things will change. Twain and Kerouac both knew the great American novel would have to be a book of the road. So did James Fenimore Cooper, before there
were
roads.

When I left the agency, I sank almost my whole severance pay into a car. Since the agency took care of our needs, I'd never been in a position to accumulate things—clothing, automobile, house, apartment—and that car became virtually all I had. It was perforce, for several months, where I lived: a late-fifties Buick with auxiliary gas tank and custom sound, backseat scooped out to make room for sleeping and cargo. And in it I drove from Memphis to Dallas to Akron to Seattle, often reaching my destination only to turn around and start back or veer off towards yet another fanciful destination, spending nights at the side of wayward country roads or in motels that sprang up sudden and solitary as cactus along Oklahoma highways. And always in those months, music was playing: big bands, Bessie Smith, Bix, Trane, Eric Dolphy. Being on the road, and music, were all that made sense to me for a while.

And so I drove southward now, and westward, thinking of Alicia across from me at the diner that morning. I had the radio tuned to a comedy hour. Jokes about wives, dogs, kids, bosses, kumquats, kangaroos. All equally alien to me. An absolutely impenetrable five minutes of double-talk on contemporary relationships from “The Professor of Desire.”

“You ever be back through here?” Alicia had said, watching me over her coffee cup.

I shook my head.

“Yeah. Well, I didn't think you would be. No way. But that's all right.”

The waitress brought our breakfasts and asked Alicia if she worked today. Off, she answered, but I have to pull the night-owl tomorrow.

“There's something in you,” Alicia said when she was gone, “something you keep hidden. Dangerous, maybe. And maybe that's why I wanted to know you. But it wouldn't matter how well or how long I knew you, would it? That something would always stay hidden.”

“There's something hidden in all of us.”

“Dangerous things?”

“For many of us, anyway. Even if we don't recognize them, or know they're there.”

We finished our breakfast and coffee and said good-bye outside by the car. There's never a lot you can say at times like that, apartness spreading like a stain between you, sky dumping its endless spaces over your head.

Alicia had touched my arm, very softly, and gone back into the diner.

My reveries were interrupted (again!) by rude reality, this time in the form of a battered gray Chevy. It dropped onto me outside a town called Carl's Bay, dogged me past the town's dozen or so roadside buildings, and finally announced intentions as we passed a city-limits sign and started into a long curve that quickly bore the town out of sight.

The Chevy came up fast on the inside. I saw only the driver. It wasn't Planchat, of course, or anyone I knew; it wouldn't be. But obviously there wasn't enough road for both of us. Out of town by sundown and all that.

The obligatory car chase was taking place rather early on in the movie.

There are several ways you can handle this sort of thing. Probably the best is just to ignore it, and that's what I did for some time, the Chevy's driver growing ever more reckless and erratic, like a bull throwing itself repeatedly at the same stretch of steel fence.

He came up alongside and made as though to swerve into me. Dropped back till I could barely see him, then all at once closed the distance and shot around. Pulled off to the roadside and waited, rocking the car on its rear wheels, as I went by.

Another response is to bail out, just refuse to play, and when I thought the time was right, the stew just about ready for serving,
that's
what I did.

I braked, neither fast nor slow, and came to a stop in the road.

The Chevy's driver zipped on by, braked hard with an eye on the rearview mirror, then tried a fancy turn and almost lost it. The Chevy sat facing me about thirty yards down the road.

I waved.

Then I floored the little Datsun, feeling everything it had cut in, and headed straight for him.

I was outweighed by at least a ton and would have wound up crushed against his grill like a bug, but reflex won out. I watched him haul the Chevy hard right and, in the rearview, saw him try to bring it back around and fail. It went over on its side, then heavily onto its back in the roadside ditch.

Saw it start to, saw it had to, saw it happen,
as Archibald MacLeish wrote.

Everything was very still.

This is where the audience whoops it up for the good guy, I told myself.

But there weren't any cheers or applause. Only more road waiting to unwind, most of a day left to unwind it, and god knows what waiting ahead.

I slowed again and drove on.

It was the sixties, a woman said on the radio, and I decided to drop out,
really
drop out. I went down to Sears and bought me a sleeping bag, a camp stove, some heavy boots. Gave everything else away to friends. Then I hitched out to the middle of Montana with everything I owned stuffed into a backpack. Found this neat cave. Moved in. Lived there four days in absolute, wonderful solitude; and on the fifth day the bear came back.

I once read
a story by this guy named Harlan Ellison ending: That night it rained, everywhere in the known universe. I was never too sure what the ending meant in terms of Ellison's story, but anyone who sits alone in a motel room for hours, watching rain wash the world away, begins to understand. Knows what it
feels
like.

I'd lost the Chevy and later in the day, with appreciably more finesse and less violence, another car, a recent Buick; but I had little doubt the stalking continued. He was (they were) out there somewhere in all that water, in what remained of the world, what hadn't been washed away, waiting.

A coded call from another phone booth, though not on a secure field line this time, had brought information at best equivocal: no further incidents involving Planchat, no further sign of him. Presumably I was the distraction from whatever program he'd previously been pursuing. And presumably it was Planchat, or his soldiers, dogging me:
I
was the program now. Just as I wanted.

I'd driven into Helena (pop. 11,972, all nice people, it said so right there on the sign) in a downpour. There were two motels, one at either end of town, the Sleep Inn and The Deluxe, and I chose the latter, then went back out to sea for provisions.

After me, the deluge? Well, it sure
seemed
to be after me.

I sat on the swayback bed eating canned ham, water crackers and longhorn cheese and watching reruns of old TV shows about humble crises within happy families. Each was resolved when a character decided to do what he or she had known all along to be the right thing. There weren't a lot of families left, happy or otherwise, among the people I knew. And very few people seemed to know what was the right thing to do.

I shifted the dial over to FM music and drew a bath so hot my skin reddened. I soaked in it till the water grew cold, through sets of Buddy Holly, the Beatles and the Talking Heads, then came out and lay on the bed. It was seven-thirty. Lots of night left to fill. No letup in the rain.

Back a few months before I met Gabrielle, for a short while, there had been someone else, a young woman named Carol whom I met in a used bookstore. She was in line ahead of me with a stack of science fiction and biographies and needed forty-two cents. We had coffee at the lunch counter of a drugstore nearby. I followed her home.

Carol lived about as close to the ground as anyone I'd known, in the beachlike expanse of an unreconstructed second-floor commercial loft relieved only by five or six folding chairs, upended crates, an exercise mat she used as a bed, a scatter of bright cotton rugs. Walls were hung with photographs of the city's many baffles and dead ends, and of its denizens. Often there would be a dozen or more versions of the same subject, a battered face, an alleyway opening onto dark sky, each so like the others that only with close examination could I discern subtle shifts in angle or focus, in lighting, in contrast.

Carol had put on water for more coffee and a Tom Waits album. Listening to “Tom Traubert's Blues” there beside her in what was more akin to the waiting room of a train station than a place where someone actually lived, so aware of her, so taken by a woman's softness and scent after so long, buzzed with the coffee we'd already drunk, I was overcome by Waits's music, by the way he became what he sang. By the all but unendurable pain in his voice and the petty, doomed heroism of his people.

We listened to a lot of Waits that summer. It was a world I knew all too well, a world of bars and bleak mornings, of forfeits and endless beginnings-over that never took. A world Carol was courting.

To create his music, to give that world voice, Waits had transformed himself as unmercifully as did castrati or Rimbaud, burrowing ever deeper into the city dweller's brutish, subterranean, neon-struck life. And so, for similar reason, did Carol. I never knew whether art or access to that world was her primary motivation: if the photographs were intended somehow to earn her entry, or if perhaps she had come to believe her assumption into that world essential to continuing, to perfecting, her art. At any rate, she followed in Waits's wake, turning away from privilege, family, comfort and safety to live in poverty and to spend her nights roaming the city's black heart, her days slogging down hard coffee and (as she said again and again of her work)
trying to get it right
.

I don't know if she ever got it right. But that world, or some other, did finally open and let her fully in: one morning she didn't come back to the loft, and I never saw her again. In a way, I think, I'd been expecting it. But for a long time I went on looking down into the street half-thinking she would be there; for a long time I listened for the sound of her feet on steel stairs. I waited, there in the loft that later became my own studio. And now, far away from there, I remember.

Dawn was rosy-fingered,
just like in Homer. But did someone want it bloody?

Waking every hour or so from old habit, I had been aware of the rain's slow passing. By five, when I came fully awake, it was over. By six I was on the road.

I drove for a couple of hours before stopping for toast and tea at a café, Sam's, in the middle, possibly on the edge, of nowhere. Nowhere consisted of Sam's, a gas station and a dance hall. The gas station and the dance hall weren't open.

Oddly enough, Sam's was almost filled.

Or maybe that wasn't so odd, considering the choices available.

I sat over my tea—a generic bag of English Breakfast loosely packed with leaves as dry and brittle as insect legs, all they had—and listened to splinters of conversation, trying to reconstruct in my mind something of the lives around me.

I was, I supposed, in the very heartland of America now, among people whose values, families and bottom-line way of life I had been protecting in all my years, in all my actions, with the agency. A quarrelsome dictator removed here, a cooperative military junta supplied with weapons there, an assassination or two. Eyes-only information passed along, overthrows, “tactical support.” All so that (nominally, at least) these people could go on about their lives of Budweiser, proms, sitcoms, Saturday-night football and Sunday church. They'd never know about most of it, of course, and if they did, would never understand. One of the reasons—just one—that I felt so terribly apart from them.

I was still in that contemplative frame of mind thirty or forty miles down the road when the holes appeared in my windshield.

There was no sound or real sense of impact, only two sudden holes about the diameter of pencils, spaced an inch or so apart, slightly to my right. I looked down at foam protruding from the seat just above my shoulder where one of the loads had entered. It looked like a small flower.

I pulled off into a patch of sunlight and killed the engine, not so much looking or listening for anything in particular as simply
opening
myself: becoming a receptacle for whatever sensation might fall in.

Why had I had no indications at all, no premonition?

A raucous flight of birds overhead. An approaching semi. The purr of other engines far off.

Nothing that shouldn't be here, as far as I could see or sense.

No Hollywood glint of steel in the trees or hills.

Ten minutes passed.

I was reaching down to turn the key when two more holes appeared in the windshield, this time to my left, again an inch or so apart.

Two flowers in the seat beside me.

Basically, if someone wants to kill you, if he's any good at it at all—if, say, he's an expert marksman, as this guy seems to be—and especially with current technology, there's not a lot you can do about it.

I got out and stood by the car, breathing deeply, feeling muscles let go. It's a trick you learn, at first. Then it becomes a reflexive response.

Nothing…

Sunlight and silence.

Against the horizon a frail-looking biplane skimmed the top of remnant clouds.

Of course, if he
doesn't
want to kill you, you may have to wonder why he's making such a show of trying to.

I got back in the Datsun and started the engine. Switched the radio on and sat there. “Sympathy for the Devil”:
bamboula
drums, shouts. Called
hocketing
back in Senegambia.

A hawk dived from a nearby treetop and swept low over the Datsun, banking.

No new holes or flowers.