The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  They’d driven as far north as Hibbing, Minnesota, as far west as Omaha, Nebraska, almost close enough for her to envision the Rockies rising up above the plains, stirring memories of her home and family that seemed as elusive as the sight of the mountains. Kansas City, Iowa City, Chicago, Fort Wayne, Ann Arbor, Cleveland, and Akron. The locations had blended together in her mind in a melange of rural areas and urban streets. Oddly, she thought that she was fortunate that Jeffers had insisted on such careful note-taking, because even with her newfound precision, her memory still jumbled together the details of the trip.

  Outside the car she heard Jeffers humming. He did this, she now recognized, when he was pleased as he performed simple tasks.

  She closed the notebook and her eyes and tried to remember. She knew that Chicago had been a lecture on Richard Speck and the nurses and the defective-gene theory of murderers. Thin, bony men with acne and arrested sexual development, he’d said. This had been funny to him, and he’d scoffed with laughter. Then they’d driven to the suburbs and a look at Wayne Gacy’s house, where the one-time kiddie clown buried the thirty-three boys in the basement. Jeffers had made her get out of the car and stand in front of the unpretentious white clapboard home. Then he’d quickly taken her picture. It had been raining and he’d said “Smile” and “Say cheese” as she huddled nervously, miserably, against a tree. But northern Minnesota had been dry and hot and she remembered light-brown wheatfields that seemed to wave in invitation like the sea as they drove past. That had been a trip to . . . she hesitated, unable to remember the name. But Jeffers had told her that the crazed farmer who’d eviscerated and stuffed his victims had served as the spiritual basis for the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which he’d disliked, although he’d said he’d admired the director’s sense of expressing fear through visual imagery. She had been unable to understand this, but had not asked him to explain. When Jeffers pontificated, which he frequently did, she knew it wise to let him ramble. It was when he entered more personal areas, that, contradictorily, he allowed her to ask questions.

  He told her that he’d wanted to drive past the Clutter farm in Kansas, but that it was too far out of the way, though that seemed odd to her, as the trip to Minnesota was farther. But near Madison, Wisconsin, he showed her the shopping mall where he had picked up a young woman named Irene, and said her death had been attributed to a rapist-murderer who had plagued the malls and campuses of Minnesota and Wisconsin for nearly a year in the late seventies. In Ann Arbor, he showed her the road outside the university where a half-dozen hitchhiking young women had, in his portentous words, taken their last ride. He claimed one of those as well, saying it had been particularly easy. He drove some five miles down a secondary road, through some wooded areas, slowing and pointing into the forest at one moment, telling her that he’d left the victim two hundred yards in. “Campus Killer, they called him. He was in 1982. The papers made up the same name as they did for that guy in Miami.”

  When they had headed to South Bend, she thought that it would be another campus murder, but he’d stopped beside a brace of nondescript middle-class houses on a quiet, tree-lined street. She saw for sale signs on each lawn. She did not need to look at her notes to remember the words of his long description: “Now, this was interesting,” Jeffers had told her. “I wanted to see this for myself. Just six months ago. Seems like the family on the right was pretty normal. Mother. Father. Five kids and a Saint Bernard. One of the teenagers apparently was pretty heavy into the local drug scene, which screwed the police up for quite a bit. That’s the kind of interesting bit of information that someday I figure to use. Anyway, on one side the All-American-apple pie-Boy Scouts-and-let’s-run-up-the-flag-­on-Memorial-Day family. On the other, well . . . Well, let’s just say not quite the same. One child. Abusive parents. Kid grows to be a teenager harboring some pretty legitimate feelings of persecution. Always hated the neighbors. Thought, you know, that they had everything and he had nothing. Do you know much about psychology? Anyway, my brother would tell you that the situation was ripe for a paranoid personality with a psychotic break. This is pretty much what happened.

  “All-Americans head out to work and school one day, lunch pails, kiss on the cheek and see-you-laters all said. Twisted neighbor breaks into the house with his old man’s forty-five and a couple of clips of bullets. First thing he does is nail the Saint Bernard and drags her body into the basement. Buffy was the dog’s name. Then he pops the family one by one as they come home, putting all the bodies into the basement. Then he exits, walks home, puts his dad’s gun away, and acts like nothing’s happened. You know what really got people upset, I mean, besides the idea that there was some crazy killer in the neighborhood? The dog. The local paper ran three pictures out front, but the biggest, widest, deepest was a shot of the ambulance crew carrying out that dog. The readers went berserk. They wanted to lynch the guy who killed that dog. What kind of monster would shoot a big, lovable, defenseless—you know what I mean . . . that’s what all the letters to the editor said. It took the cops weeks to guess that the weirdo living next door did the crime. Finally, when they hauled him in, he told them everything. He was pretty proud of himself. Which is, more or less, what you’d expect. I mean, after all, he had this hatred and this problem and he’d solved it. Why not be satisfied? Didn’t like dogs much, either.”

  Anne Hampton picked up the notebook numbered 10. Near the back she found her notes on this crime, including much of Jeffers’ long soliloquy. She checked her memory against the rapid scrawl which covered a half-dozen pages and found they fairly closely matched. Sitting in the car, she remembered a phrase or two that weren’t in the notes, and she wrote these into the margins. She saw that she had taken down verbatim the joke with which he’d ended his speech: “The paper should have called it the Canine Caper.”

  She looked up sharply as Jeffers slammed down the hood.

  The car was still quivering when he jumped into the driver’s seat and said, “Time to go. Many a mile before we sleep and all that.”

  Then he asked, “Do you like the races?”

  “What kind of races?”

  “Cars.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been to one.”

  “They’re loud. Engines roaring, tires squealing. Lots of smells, gasoline, oil, suntan lotion, beer and popcorn in the stands. You’ll like it.”

  She nodded. He glanced at his watch. “We’ve got to go now if we want to catch the first heats. Don’t you remember driving around in some boy’s convertible in the summertime listening to the radio and all of a sudden this mad, frantic advertisement would come on . . .”

  He changed his voice into the tinny wild radio sound:

  “Sunday! Sunday! At Fabulous Aquasco Speedway! Dragsters! Fuel-injected Funny Cars! Sunday! See the Big Daddy take on the Okie from Fenokee in a three-race eliminator! Sunday! See the Bad Mama with its two-thousand-horsepower jet engine! Sunday! Tickets still available! Sunday!”

  She smiled. “I remember,” she said. “But the name of the racetrack was different.”

  “Aquasco is outside of New York, on Long Island, I believe. In New Jersey we used to hear the same ad for Freehold Raceway. And, in the summers, the family would drive up to Cape Cod and we’d hear it for Seekonk Speedway, just past Providence. My brother and I used to do a fair imitation of the ad together, shouting back and forth, ‘See Fabulous Funny Cars! Fuel-injected dragsters! Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!’”

  She paused.

  “I’d forgotten what day it was.”

  “Day of leisure for most. But not us. Much work.”

  He steered the car onto the interstate.

  It was noontime before they approached the exit for the raceway. The interstate was nearly empty through the morning hours, and Jeffers kept up a steady pace, just a little below the average of the eighteen-wheelers that rushed past, the immense diesel noises seeming to thre
aten to crush everything they found in their path, buffeting the car with wind velocity. Truckers driving Sunday mornings are invariably late, Jeffers thought. They’ve rammed a broom handle down on the accelerator and popped a couple of black beauties with coffee and they’d just as soon run over you as past you.

  He passed a pair of Pennsylvania state troopers with radar who were scanning the road and decided that the next time he took a road trip he would get a fancy radar-detector, the kind that reads several bands of police radar. He also thought that by investing in a portable police scanner he could monitor police radio traffic. He considered flying down to Miami and visiting a store that he’d heard about from a journalist returning from a trip to Colombia on a drug-connection story. The store, the man had told him, was a favorite of the folks in the trade. It specialized in surveillance gear and the latest in high-tech electronics. Devices that let you know if a wiretap was listening to your phone. Devices that turned on your car from fifty yards away. Perfect for those people who might be worried what else would happen when they switched on their car engine. Night-vision binoculars and portable secure-channel radios. Jeffers wasn’t exactly certain what the store held that would help him precisely. But, he thought, we’re entering a more technical age and it is important to stay abreast. He knew that the police would. Then he realized that in effect this was defeatist thinking. His whole approach, he told himself, was predicated on the supposition that the police would not ever be searching for him.

  I am invisible, he thought.

  Anonymous. Deadly.

  And that is what makes me completely safe.

  He glanced over at Anne Hampton and saw that she seemed to be dozing. “Boswell?” he whispered, but she didn’t reply. He decided to let her sleep.

  She’ll need her strength, he thought. But not for too much longer. He reflected on the road ahead and thought there was something inherently comforting about America’s highways. They stretched out in endless lines, looping back and forth, hundreds of thousands of small connections forming a great grid of the country, like the arteries through a body. There is no beginning and no end, he thought.

  Anne Hampton stirred beside him.

  No end to anything.

  He spotted a billboard for the racetrack and felt a rush of excitement. A lesson in acquisition, he thought. To help round off her understanding.

  Anne Hampton awoke when Jeffers pulled into the toll booth. She stretched her arms as wide as the confined space inside the car would allow. She pushed her legs against the firewall, trying to reinvigorate the muscles. “Are we there?” she asked.

  “Almost. Couple of miles down the road. Just follow the signs and the hot rods.”

  A ten-year-old fire-engine-red Chevrolet with its tail end jacked up blasted past them. She knew it was a Chevrolet because each window in the vehicle was adorned with huge white chevy decals.

  “How can that guy see out?” she blurted.

  Jeffers laughed.

  “He can’t. But you got to understand that’s not the most important consideration. Appearances are crucial; they take precedence over such mundane considerations as safety, any day.”

  “But wouldn’t a policeman stop him every time for having obscured windows? And no muffler, either.”

  “First off, he does have a muffler. Probably a set of glass packs. At least that’s what everybody talked about twenty years ago, when I was in high school. Gotta have glass packs and a hemi engine, whatever that is. Or maybe was. And the reason most cops won’t stop a kid driving one of those is that it wasn’t so long ago that they were that same kid. And they remember how much they hassled the local fuzz just a couple of years back, so now that they’ve got the gun and badge, they’re smart enough to leave things alone. The kid would have to be doing eighty to get hauled over. Or the cop would have had to have had an argument with his wife this morning, kids late for school and screaming in the background and the coffee burned and his whole mood just one big jangle of nerves and bad attitude, to flag the kid. It would be like giving a ticket to your entire history.”

  Jeffers looked over at Anne Hampton, who grinned and nodded.

  “You see,” he said, “everything comes around.”

  They had to wait in a line of almost a score of cars at the entranceway to the racetrack. Anne Hampton rolled down the window and absorbed the sounds coming from the stadium. The whining and roaring of the engines seemed to her at first to be like the sounds of animals searching for partners. Then she realized that each engine made a different noise, uniquely its own, and that all together they blended into a wall of different-pitched loudness. It was like an aural quilt of many different patches of fabric.

  The parking lot was a dusty field, filled with rows of brightly colored cars and trucks that stood out against the brown dirt of the ground. Jeffers parked close to a telephone pole that was marked with a handwritten sign that designated the area 12A.

  “Wait a minute,” he said.

  She sat quietly, watching as he exited the car. She saw him jog down the aisle of cars a short ways. She saw him pause behind a pair of sports cars. He wrote something down and then loped back. Before opening her door he paused at the trunk and took out some items which she couldn’t see.

  She thought: It’s part of a plan.

  Her heart plummeted and she glanced around at some of the couples and knots of people straggling through the lot toward the racetrack. The flow of people was steady and she imagined there would be a significant crowd.

  She felt hot, then cold, and if she could have made herself be sick, she would have. She thought of the derelict and the man on the street in St. Louis.

  We’re going to do it again.

  She shook her head, shivering slightly. Somehow the act of visiting Jeffers’ memories and his landmarks, regardless of how macabre, was at least safe, separate from action.

  Jeffers opened the door and she got out.

  But her knees buckled as she stood and Jeffers had to catch her.

  He stared hard at her for a moment.

  “Ahh,” he said finally, slightly amused, but with a horrible calculating flatness to his voice that she had not heard since St. Louis. “You’ve guessed that we’re here not just because we’re racing fans . . .”

  He didn’t complete the sentence. Instead he took her by the arm and directed her to the back of the car.

  First he took two khaki photographer’s vests from a bag. He slid one onto her, one onto himself. “Good fit,” he said. He took half a dozen boxes of film from a case and fitted the canisters into the loopholes on her chest. Then he hung a camera bag around her neck. “This,” he said, picking up a long black lens, “is obviously the long lens.” He replaced it in the bag. “This shorter one is the wide-angle. When I ask for one or the other, or for the camera, you just hand them over as if you were an expert.” He hung a pair of cameras around his neck. One rode in a chest harness, just beneath his chin, the other swung loosely.

  “All right,” he said. From his bag he produced a stack of small white business cards. He opened the breast pocket on her vest and stuck them inside. “Hand these out to anyone who asks for one.” He plucked one out and showed her. It read:

  John Corona

  professional photographer

  Representing Playboy, Penthouse and

  Other Publications

  “Discreet Work Is Our Specialty”

  Office: 1313 Hollywood Boulevard, Beverly Hills

  213-555-6646

  “The name is an in-joke,” Douglas Jeffers said, “especially for Californians. Obviously you call me Mr. Corona. Or John if it seems appropriate. You are my assistant. I’ll introduce you. Listen carefully and you will get the story quickly enough. Ready?”

  She nodded.

  “Let me hear your voice,” he demanded harshly.
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  “Ready,” she replied quickly.

  “Remove the little-girl scaredy-cat tone and try again.”

  She swallowed hard. “I’m ready,” she said firmly.

  “Right.” He looked hard at her. “I shouldn’t have to remind you of these things.”

  “I’ll be good,” she said.

  “Make me believe that.”

  This was more a threat than a request. She nodded.

  Douglas Jeffers turned swiftly and she hurried after him.

  Halfway across the parking field, Jeffers started talking again, but his voice seemed distracted.

  “One thing I’ve always wondered about was why we are so mystified by certain types of animal behavior. We can’t understand why lemmings dash into the ocean. Scientists spend years studying why pilot whales suddenly beach themselves and broil to death, which, if you think about it, must be a horrible way to go. Ecologists haul the whales back out to sea, and the silly beasts nine times out of ten just head for the beach again. And these are intelligent animals. Healthy, too. I went and shot a bunch of them once, on a North Carolina coast, for Geo, which paid great and promptly went out of business. But the whales were beautiful. They are jet black and wonderfully powerful, with bodies that seem like great blunt bullets. They can communicate across great expanses of ocean with hearing-and-sound capabilities that we mere humans can only emulate electronically. They are an ancient and proud race, related to the greatest beasts. Why, then, would they upon occasion commit mysterious mass suicide? What reason do they have? Sickness? Delusion? Confusion? Mass hysteria? Madness? Boredom? How do they become tired of life? It makes little sense.

  “Yet they do it. Often, or at least often enough to cause interest and dismay. It is the same with people.”

  He seemed lost in thought.

  “Have you any idea how frequently people beach themselves? I’m not talking about the solitary, despondent type, clinically depressed and naturally suicidal. There are enough of them around. But people who acquiesce in their own deaths. How they contribute to the worst things happening to them.