The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  At night he did not try to touch her, though she expected it each minute. She had given up on any idea of privacy, dressing and undressing in front of him, not shutting the bathroom door when she went to the toilet. She accepted these things as part of the arrangement which left her alive. She would have accepted sex as well, but so far it had failed to materialize. She did not expect this hiatus to last.

  In the time since the derelict’s killing, she had come to realize that she was scared of everything: of strangers, of Jeffers, of herself, of each passing minute of daytime, of each moment of night; of what might happen to her when she was awake or when she slept. When she did manage to fall asleep, her dreams were more often nightmares; she had quickly become accustomed to awakening in terrified flight from some sleep image, only to settle into the constancy of fear that was her waking world. Sometimes she had great difficulty separating the two. She would lie in darkness, remembering the vision of the derelict on the New Orleans street. She saw his mouth circling, puckering in acceptance of the bottle, a safe, familiar act, that gave him a kind of easy joy. Only this time it wasn’t the accustomed touch of the wet bottle neck that he felt, but the hard, dry, awful taste of the gun barrel. She could see a glimmer of confusion in his eyes as they looked up in surprise, meeting hers. His eyes were like those of a dog who hears an unusual sound and cocks his head in curiosity. It was a terrible sight; her vision fixing on the derelict’s open, accepting mouth, expectant eyes, waiting for all the world as if he were going to be kissed.

  And sometimes it would be worse, it would be reversed. She would see the derelict, see him lift a bottle to his open lips. And when her own mouth dropped wide in surprise, wondering where the gun had gone, it would be there, in front of her. She would try to snap her mouth shut, but the gun moved too quickly and she could taste the metallic death on her own tongue.

  She would see all this, and then scream.

  At least she thought she screamed, and more often than not she felt as if she had screamed. But she realized that in reality she had made no sound. Her own mouth had opened, demanding noise, but none had emerged.

  That too frightened her.

  Outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Jeffers slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road. He pointed past her and said, “See there?” Anne Hampton turned and looked out upon a wide green field with a grassy knoll in the center. At the top of the knoll was a weathered, gray-brown oak tree, an ancient tree with gnarled leafy branches that reached out over the field, throwing shade about with the determination and duty that comes with old age.

  “I see a tree,” she replied.

  “That’s wrong,” he said. “What you see is the past.”

  He took the car out of gear and turned off the engine. “Come on,” he said. “History lesson.”

  He helped her over a ramshackle wooden fence, and together they walked up to the knoll. Jeffers looked hard at the ground the entire time, as if measuring something. “It’s grown back,” he said. “I didn’t know if it would, but it’s been eight years.” He looked pensive. “I always thought that when gasoline burned the ground, it was scorched, it would take decades to grow back. Do you remember those pictures the German war photographers took in World War Two? From the Ukraine? They were very powerful shots. There would be these immense fields of wheat waving about in the distance, surrounding a huge pillar of black smoke. You always sensed the impotence through the picture, that’s what made the pictures so damned good; you knew they couldn’t do a fucking thing to stop those fires once the retreating Russians set them. Gasoline and wheat burning. Scorched earth. Damning the future to save the present.” Then he stopped and pointed. “Look carefully—there! Can you see the way the grass changes color?”

  “It seems like a shape,” she said.

  “Damn straight. A cross.”

  “You were here before?” she asked. Her voice quivered slightly; she saw the tree and remembered the tree lost in the rain and wind along the Louisiana coastline that they’d been unable to find.

  “Standing right there.” He pointed down the hill slightly. “It was a great shot,” he said. “The fire from the cross framed all the men in their silly little white pointed hats and robes. But that wasn’t what made it so good,” he continued, “it was the way this huge crowd of blacks—spectators, I guess, I don’t exactly know why they came out—anyway, they watched in utter silence. All their faces, every eye, was turned up toward this hill. The firelight drifted across them, as well, and I was able to get it all. A fantastic picture. You know why they chose this tree? Because fifty years ago the old Klan hung three men from that single wide branch, the low one.

  “Symmetry is important.” he said. “History. We are a nation of memories. The old Klan hung three men from a tree, and so the new Klan wants to evoke the same terror.

  “And so out they march, all bedecked in their robes, all their kleagles and klaxxons and grand dragons in silks and some not so grand dragons waving the stars and bars, to have a rally. Not too many of them, really, but I understand that now their numbers are growing. Anyway, this time there were almost as many reporters and photographers as there were Klansmen. And twice as many blacks.

  “That surprised me, you know. I mean, I would have thought that those people would have stayed far away. Ignoring the rally. After all, who wants to go listen to a lot of silly, insulting rhetoric? But they didn’t. They showed up in droves. And you know what was really curious about it? These weren’t educated people. And they weren’t organized. They were farmers and sharecroppers and their wives and children. They came in old trucks and cars and I saw some arrive by cart and mule, too.

  “I couldn’t get over how quiet they were. The more inflammatory the speeches got, the more outrageous and insulting, the more they stood in silence. It was the strangest thing: you’d think that silence is an absolute, I mean, if someone’s not making any noise, they can’t get quieter, right? Not that night. Those people stood and never made a sound and the longer they stood there, the more profound their quiet was.”

  He shook his head.

  “Now, that was strength. They showed that their memories were just as long and heartfelt. A singularity of purpose.”

  He looked at Anne Hampton.

  “Complete dignity,” he said. He paused.

  “You have to understand how much I admire true strength. Because to do what I do requires an absolute dedication. A solidarity with your soul.” He smiled and broke into a grin. “I like that,” he said. “Solidarity.” He made a clenched fist.

  He looked at her. “To do what I do,” he said.

  She would not let the words form in her mind.

  He laughed. She saw that he had a camera in his hand. He lifted it, twisted the lens quickly, and clicked her picture. He bent down, changing the angle, and took another. “What I do, of course, is take pictures.”

  He laughed again, and she stood stiffly in front of him, awaiting a command with a kind of military attention.

  “Come on,” he said. “I will explain more.”

  She scrambled after him as he stalked down the hillside.

  In the car he said, “What’s the most important thing about America?”

  She hesitated, but her mind moved swiftly: She pictured in grainy grays and dark shadows the pictures that Douglas Jeffers had taken the night of that rally, hooded rowdy Klansmen and silent, reproachful farmers. She responded, “Free speech. The First Amendment, right?”

  He glanced away from the highway at her, smiling. “Boswell learns!” he said. “Correct.”

  She nodded and took out the notebook, oddly pleased with herself for answering one of his cryptic questions properly.

  “But can you think of a freedom more frequently abused?”

  She recognized it really wasn’t a question for her as much as it was the start to some speech he
was about to make. “Think of the evil generated on that hilltop. Think of the wrongs it represented. And protected by what? Our most important freedom. The Nazis want to march in Skokie and who stands up to defend them? The ACLU. A bunch of Jewish lawyers. It’s the principle, they say. And they’re right. The principle is more important than any individual act. That’s what’s so silly. We are a nation of hypocrites because we adhere so strongly to rigid concepts. Right. Wrong. Free Speech. Manifest Destiny. What did Superman defend? Truth, Justice, and the American Way. A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. No one ever wants to mention the scoutmaster who likes dressing up in short pants, telling ghost stories around the fire, and diddling the boys beneath the sleeping bags . . .”

  He took a deep breath, paused, then added, “Do you want to truly understand this country? It’s simple, really. You just have to understand that on occasion we use our greatest strengths to create the biggest evils. Not always. Just sometimes. Just enough to make it interesting, of course.”

  He was speaking in a rush. Not angry, just wired. She was writing as fast as she could.

  He stopped.

  He giggled.

  “From the First Amendment to faggot scoutmasters . . .” He threw back his head and shook it wildly, laughing hard.

  He looked at Anne Hampton.

  “I must be crazy,” he said, grinning.

  “No, no, I mean, I think I understand . . .”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. His voice abruptly changed back to hard and harsh and the smile on his face evaporated. “I am crazy. I’m completely, terribly, totally, mad. We all are, in our own way. It’s our national pastime, really. My way just happens to be worse than some . . .” He looked at her. “Worse than most.”

  He turned back, staring down the highway.

  “Tell me,” Douglas Jeffers asked, “what you know about death.”

  She remembered a time when she was young and visiting her grandparents on their farm. It was before Tommy had died: it had been summer and they had wanted to swim in the pond. But when they got to the edge they had found a mess of gray and black goose feathers strewn about wildly. Her grandfather had nodded and said, “Snapping turtle. Big one, too, I’ll wager, if he took apart that whole bird.” The swim had been canceled and her grandfather had gone back and taken a shotgun from a locked cabinet. He’d let her stick with him, though Tommy had been relegated to the house. Her grandfather set out some leftover chicken by the side of the pond, walked a short ways downwind with her, and then waited.

  It had been over twenty pounds. She remembered the explosion of the shotgun, the sound crashing into her ears, deadening them. Her grandfather spread the bloody jaws apart with a stick, saying, “Turtle that big’d break your leg no problem.” The turtle died, and then Tommy died and two summers after, her grandfather as well. She thought of the neighbor across the street who died of heart failure one humid summer morning, trying to catch up for too many years of indulgence by taking up jogging. Ambulance lights seemed dull, somehow less urgent, in the bright sunshine. She remembered seeing the man stretched out on the lawn, pasty white, rigid. His shoe had been untied and she’d had the strange thought that it had been fortunate that something had stopped him before he tripped and fell. She’d noticed, too, that his socks didn’t match. One had a green stripe, the other blue. She’d thought that terrible. To die was bad enough, but to be embarrassed as well seemed doubly horrible.

  She remembered her parents being handed a small white urn containing Tommy’s ashes, seeing her mother’s hands quake as they reached out. She could still hear the disembodied voices of the guests, mumbling, exhorting under their breath: Be brave. But why? she wondered. What was the point in bravery? Why not simply sob uncontrollably? That made a lot more sense. But she’d seen her mother compose herself, dropping a veil across sorrow. A moment later the urn had been taken away and she had not seen it again. She wondered whether they had burned Tommy’s clothes as well. He would probably have preferred seeing the tight blue suit that they’d bought him for church go up in smoke, she thought. All little boys both loved and hated their good clothes. There was a wonderful moment, when they were first dressed, that they looked so grown-up and solemn, handsome and sophisticated. Then, inevitably, they dissolved into the usual melange of dirt, grass stains, flying shirttails, and ripped knees. The turtle had been female, and she had helped her grandfather find the babies. He’d collected them in a sack, but would not tell her what he was going to do with them.

  That’s death, she thought. When you’re not told. But you know.

  “I don’t know much,” she answered. “My grandfather died. A neighbor, too, jogging. I was there. I saw him.” She hesitated before mentioning her brother.

  No, she thought, that’s enough.

  But she could not make herself stop.

  “My brother died, too. A skating accident. He drowned.”

  She was silent, then she added, “He was just a little boy.”

  Jeffers paused before replying.

  “My brother is drowning, as well. He just doesn’t know it.”

  She did not know what to say, but she stored the information away: He’s got a brother.

  “He just doesn’t know it yet,” Jeffers continued. “But he will, soon enough.”

  He drove in silence for at least a quarter hour before he spoke again. She had turned, looking out at the other cars that they passed, looking in on families, young men, young women, trying to imagine who they were, where they were going, what they were like. Occasionally her eyes would meet another pair, if only for a second, and she would think how surprised the person would be if they knew of the trip she was on.

  Douglas Jeffers only half-concentrated on the task of driving, instead allowing his mind to swing to problems of expression. The countryside that swept around him seemed nondescript, farms and vegetable fields and small towns blending into a constancy of rolling, simple green and brown backdrop. He steered the car back up onto the interstate, still heading north, barely registering speed, distance, destination, traffic. He thought for a while about his brother, then about Anne Hampton, and then about his brother again.

  Marty had no passion, he thought. He would never act. He absorbed everything quietly, like those blacks on the hill.

  It was odd that they’d never fought. All brothers fight, if not constantly, at least frequently. They struggle over everything, trying to carve out their own fiefdom in the family. It was that tension, he believed, that created the bond between brothers. After enough blood and anger, all that remained was a mutual dedication.

  In all the battles with their father, the phony father, he’d maintained a distance. Jeffers grimaced and bit his lip, filling suddenly with a multi­faceted anger: rage at the man, rage at the boy, rage at himself.

  “I hate neutrality,” he said out loud. “I despise it.” He saw peripherally that Anne Hampton had been startled.

  Well, Jeffers thought to himself, he’s not going to be able to remain so damn detached much longer.

  He spun a quick glance at Anne Hampton, then turned back to the highway. He pictured her limbs, her body. But his mind wandered quickly back into the past, and instead of his traveling companion, he saw the druggist’s wife. When she dressed in the mornings, after her husband left for work, before the boys left for school, she would leave the door ajar. It was a slow, lingering process. She knew he watched her. He knew she knew. When he tried to get Marty to watch as well, his brother had turned away and walked out wordlessly.

  “Did you love your brother?” he asked Anne Hampton.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Even though I thought he was, well, I don’t know, strange, I guess. Mysterious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I was only three years older th
an he. And we didn’t, I don’t know, have much in common. Does that make sense? He was a boy and he did little-boy things and I was a girl and so I did little-girl things. But I loved him.”

  “It does make sense. In actuality, I think you share little with your brothers or sisters. A certain shared commonality of memory, because your pasts are the same. But they aren’t, really. Everyone remembers the same things differently. So they mean different things to different people.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” she said.

  He nodded.

  They were quiet.

  “There,” he said. “We had an almost normal conversation. Wasn’t so terrible, was it?”

  She shook her head.

  After a moment she asked, “What about your brother?”

  “He’s a doctor,” Jeffers replied. “A head doctor. And he’s just as unhappy as the folks he treats. He lives alone and doesn’t know why. I live alone but at least I know why.”

  She nodded. He noticed that she was taking notes.

  “Good,” he said. She didn’t reply.

  But her unsaid question was the same as the one he’d directed to her, and he answered it: “No, I don’t think I love him,” he said. “No more than I love anyone. Or anything.”

  He shook his head. “I gave up on love a long time ago. Happiness, too.”

  He laughed bitterly. “I sound like a character in some daytime soap opera. Did you watch them?”

  “No,” she replied. “A lot of the kids at school were devoted to them. It was like a fad, I guess. But I never bothered.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  She hesitated, then asked, “But you love your work?”

  He smiled.

  “I love my work.”

  The grin on his face was one that reflected a sudden internal humor, and she felt a rush of panic. What does he think his work is? she said to herself. The thought seemed to punch her insides.