The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  The bank was cool and dark inside, and Douglas Jeffers removed his sunglasses slowly. It was an old-fashioned building, with high ceilings and polished floors that made shoe heels click. Jeffers walked over to a section of desks where the bank officers worked. A secretary looked up at him, smiling.

  “Miss Mansour, please. Douglas Allen. I have an appointment.”

  The young woman nodded and picked up her telephone. Jeffers saw a middle-aged, open-faced woman at the rear desk pick up her receiver and listen. In a moment he had shaken hands with the woman and was seated at a chair next to her desk. She pulled out a folder with the name written on the top.

  “Now, Mr. Allen, we hate to see a longtime customer depart. How many years has it been . . .”

  “Ten.”

  “Is there any way we can help you? Perhaps at establishing a new account at your . . .” She hesitated.

  “Atlanta,” he said. “Company transfer.”

  “I mean, I’d be happy to call someone . . .”

  He shook his head. “So kind of you,” he said. “But the relocation service with the firm handles most of those things. But I will take your card, and if there’s any problem I could have someone call you?”

  “That would be fine.” She checked out the forms. “Now, in your letter you said you wanted the account closed and the funds in traveler’s checks. I have those waiting for you. So all you have to do is sign them and then sign this closure statement and then clear out the safety deposit box, hand me the key, and you’re all set.”

  She handed him a stack of traveler’s checks and he started signing. He looked down at the name and mentally rolled it about. For ten years, he thought, here in New Hampshire I’ve been Douglas Allen. No more limitations. No more pretenses. We shall expand our horizons.

  “Please count them,” Miss Mansour said. “It’s over twenty thousand dollars.”

  Spare funds from a decade, he thought. Compounded daily.

  He followed her into the safety deposit area, and she handed him his key. “Just bring both keys back after you’re finished,” she said. “I’ll be at my desk.”

  He nodded thanks and went into a cubicle. A secretary brought him the locked box and then closed the door behind her. He hesitated, reveling inwardly in the ease of the plan.

  He opened the box.

  “Goodbye, Douglas Jeffers,” he said.

  On top was the old copy of the defunct New Times magazine that had been the germ of the idea. He flipped the worn pages open to the article. He thought it ironic that the piece had been prompted by the activism of the sixties and seventies. It had seemed such a simple premise: How easy was it to go underground? How hard was it to establish another identity? The answer was: Not very. Particularly in a state such as New Hampshire, with its dogged emphasis on individual freedoms and privacy. He’d followed the article’s path religiously, from obtaining a Social Security number, to opening a post office box, to giving himself an address. Then the bank account and a pair of credit cards, used only enough to keep them active. At the same time that he’d established credit, he’d obtained his driver’s license under his new name and Social Security number. His greatest triumph, however, had occurred after he’d doctored his own birth certificate into his new name. The wonders of modern copying machines, he thought. When he’d presented the battered copy, along with all his other documents, at the local post office, no one had raised a word in protest. Six weeks later, in the mail, arrived his most prized possession. He lifted it from the box. A brand new US passport in the name of Douglas Allen. No fake, no forgery.

  He stuck it in his briefcase along with the driver’s license, credit cards, and Social Security card.

  I’m free, he thought.

  He laughed to himself. Well, not completely. I can’t go to Albania or North Vietnam.

  He stuffed his emergency cash reserve, several thousand dollars in twenties and hundreds, into his pants. He checked his ticket, which lay in the bottom of the box. It was a first-class airplane ticket, open date, one-way, New York to Tokyo. He knew that from Tokyo he could easily backtrack to wherever he wanted, instantly losing himself in the Far East. Sydney, he thought. Perth. Melbourne. The names seemed exotic yet oddly familiar. It’ll be like going home. The last item in the safety deposit box was a clean, blue-steel .357 Magnum revolver, which also went into his briefcase. He had purchased it in Florida several years beforehand, just weeks prior to the time the state legislature passed a new, slightly restrictive gun law. Then, conveniently, he had reported it stolen. Thank God, he thought, for the NRA. For an instant he stared at the empty safety deposit box and thought how comforting it had been to know everything was there, just in case he’d ever needed it. My emergency outlet.

  He sat back in the chair. Australia, he said to himself. A wonderful place to start over. Tie me kangaroo down, sport.

  He hummed “Waltzing Matilda” to himself as he walked back to Miss Mansour’s desk.

  “All set?” she asked cheerfully.

  “All in order,” he replied.

  He signed some papers. He looked down at his signature and felt comfortable with it. Hello, he said to himself. Glad to meet you. And what was it you said you did for a living? Anything you liked. Anything at all.

  The sunlight hit him as he exited the darkness of the bank, and it took a moment for his eyes to readjust. He picked out the sight of Anne Hampton sitting in the car, waiting. Not much longer, Boswell.

  Humming pleasantly to himself, he crossed the street. He nodded to an elderly lady who walked past him, and said good morning to a pair of young boys, probably no older than six or seven, savoring their final days before school started with a set of chocolate ice cream cones.

  Anne Hampton looked up at him as he returned to the car.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” he said.

  Much of the day she dozed as Douglas Jeffers drove across Massachusetts toward Cape Cod. He seemed preoccupied, but in a carefree fashion. He turned on the radio and found a station that played sixties rock and roll, which he told her was the only music worth listening to on the radio. He insisted in a lighthearted way that the only musician he would pay any attention to whatsoever was the guy from New Jersey, and that was because he behaved like a refugee from two decades back. He told her about the one time he’d been assigned to get some pictures at a rock concert. “Only time I was ever really afraid for my life. They had us down in front of the stage and when these four guys in leotard pants, glitter makeup, and feather boas, for Christ’s sake, strutted out, everyone behind the barricades in back of us pushed forward. I thought I was going to be crushed by a phalanx of teary-eyed adolescents. All the cameramen were fighting for air and space and I looked up and saw this one guy with blond hair down to his ass and beady eyes waving his arms, whooping it up, encouraging the crowd. Death by rock and roll . . .” Douglas Jeffers laughed. “There I was, getting pushed back against the stage, no room to move, screaming kids everywhere, and all I could think about was it was what our parents warned us against. A commie plot. At least it seemed so at the time.”

  He drove leisurely, letting the other cars slide past. She thought he seemed in no rush, yet he was clearly keeping to a schedule.

  The afternoon was fading when they reached the turnoff for Route 6, which meanders up Cape Cod. She had never seen the Cape before, and looked carefully at the rows of battered antique stores, saltwater-taffy shops, and tee-shirt emporiums that mixed with fast-food restaurants and gas stations by the side of the road.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought Cape Cod was supposed to be beautiful.”

  “It is,” Jeffers replied. “At least where we’re headed it is. But no one ever said the road there was beautiful. And it isn’t. In fact, it sets some kind of world record for ugliness.”

  They passed over the Bourne Bridge in th
e day’s last light. Anne Hampton could see barges far beneath them, moving steadily down the canal. There was a rotary ahead, and Jeffers made jokes about the free-for-all, survival-of-the-fittest element to driving in the state of Massachusetts. They ate a quick dinner at a diner in Falmouth, then proceeded down the road to the Woods Hole Ferry dock. She could see a Coast Guard cutter’s bright white paint gleaming in the darkness. The ferry itself was bathed in light from mingled streetlamps and car headlights. There was a row of cars lined up on the street and a teenager in a baseball cap carrying a walkie-talkie. Jeffers rolled down the window.

  “I have a reservation on the eight-thirty boat,” he said.

  “Great,” said the teenager. Anne Hampton thought he probably looked exactly like the young men they’d seen the night before. “Just pull in behind the station wagon.”

  Jeffers drove down. Another teenager came up and he produced tickets.

  “You know what I’ve always loved about this ferry?” he asked. He didn’t wait for her acknowledgment. “It has this perfectly functional design. The boat has no front, no back. That’s to say, the front is like the back. You drive on in Woods Hole, drive off in Vineyard Haven. It has the same big old opening on either end. The boat just yo-yos between the two docks.”

  She looked over and watched people stream in and out of the squat ferry office adjacent to the dock. She saw a line of bicyclists with backpacks move to the front of the line of cars. She could see boat handlers waving vehicles into an opening on the ferry, which loomed up stark white and black against the evening sky. She could not see the open water from where she sat, but she sensed the sea in the air that tumbled through Jeffers’ window.

  “Where . . .”

  “The island of Martha’s Vineyard,” he said. “Summer home to the upscale. Old money, new money, all dressed down in jeans and work shirts. It’s where they filmed Jaws . . .” He started to mimic the ominously familiar music. “All sorts of Kennedys, too. You remember when Teddy swam from Chappaquiddick to Edgartown? At least he said he did. Jackie O has a place and so does Walter Cronkite, half the staff of the New York Times, and more poets and novelists per square foot than you can count. John Belushi owned a house in Chilmark for about five minutes before he managed to get himself killed in L.A. and now he’s buried there. A striking place called Abel’s Hill. Kids go to the graveyard all the time. It’s a very benign island,” Jeffers said. “Filled with East Coast elite sophistication. It’s quiet, pleasant, beautiful, and relaxed. The islander’s idea of controversy would be a shortage of swordfish steaks or too many mopeds on the roads. It’s friendly, and filled with appreciation of the nicer things available to anyone with scads of money, wrapped up in this faded-blue-denim approach to day-to-day life. Lots of beautiful people living in intellectual harmony. From June first through Labor Day.”

  He hesitated.

  “The perfect place for something unspeakably unsettling.”

  Jeffers drove the car in a haphazard course around the island, slicing through the narrow, unlit roads. The headlights tore bizarre shapes from the light fog and overhanging trees. Around one corner they came up upon a Great Horned Owl feeding on some muskrat or rabbit that had failed to maneuver the road successfully. The bird’s huge white wings spread out abruptly, and it cried in irritation at the unruly interruption. It seemed to rise ghostlike in front of them right over the hood of the car, and for an instant she thought they would collide and she gasped in a sudden fear that penetrated her exhaustion.

  She did not know what time it was, but she knew it was past midnight, crawling into morning. Jeffers seemed indefatiguable, his adrenaline coursing, his voice alert, bantering.

  He drove back and forth across the island several times, thoroughly confusing Anne Hampton, despite the fact that he kept up a running travelogue throughout. He would point at different locations and link them with memories, like any person visiting a favored spot after many years. She tried taking some notes, but found that his attention ricocheted from one mundane recollection to another. None had anything to do with death or dying. Instead, he talked about the best place to find wild blueberries, or the secret paths down to the nicest beaches on the island. He drove her out to the Gay Head cliffs and let her stand up by the edge, looking out toward the ocean. She could see white foam where the waves pounded up onto the beach, and even in the darkness could make out the steady movement of big rollers on the black sea. There was a steady breeze that pushed against her face and she felt it restoring her. But the height made her dizzy and for an instant she fantasized tumbling down over the great red and gray cliffs, spinning into oblivion. She felt his hand on her arm, and she saw he was pointing out into the deep ocean night.

  “Out there,” he said, “is an island called No Man’s Land, where the Navy tests weapons. You can see it on a clear day, and if the wind is right occasionally you can hear the thump thump of high explosives. I’ve always wanted to go there, ever since I was a kid. Not because of the practice runs the Navy makes, which are interesting, sometimes you can see the jet vapors, but to see what it looks like after being bombed so steadily for so many years. Like some vision of the future, I think . . .

  “Never went, though. Got pretty close once, when I was a kid and we went out fishing for blues. We were in some pretty good action, when all of a sudden there was this Coast Guard helicopter hovering overhead, telling us to get the hell out of there.”

  He laughed.

  “We obeyed.”

  “Did you come here often?” she asked.

  “A bunch of summers when I was a kid. We stopped after, well, when I was a teenager.”

  He looked about.

  “It’s changed. It’s the same, yet different. Some new things. Lots of old things. There’s steadiness, continuity. But growth, too.”

  He laughed again.

  “Everything changes. Everything stays the same. Like life.”

  He thought of the passport, air ticket, and money waiting in his briefcase. Like me.

  They got back into the car and he slowly headed back into the center of the island. She did not dare ask about plans or accommodations.

  Jeffers wondered why, instead of his usual rigid delight, he felt a sort of leisurely pleasure, almost a lassitude. He felt a headiness, like having drunk too much of some excellent wine, not stumbling drunk, but giddy. After adhering so strictly to ideas and concepts, having planned right down to the ferry tickets on and off, now he was in no rush. He thought he wanted to savor this last act, draw it out. He felt a rush of blood through his veins, warm, exciting. He listened to his own heart, and thought that it was going to prove to be hard to say goodbye to his old identity. But—he smiled inwardly—think of the creation of the new.

  They passed through the tiny town of West Tisbury and Jeffers summoned himself to attention. Not far now, he thought. He tightened himself mentally, concentrating on the problems at hand.

  Anne Hampton looked over at Jeffers and saw that he was suddenly paying close attention. He had hunched forward in the seat slightly, and she knew that this meant something was going to happen. It caused her body to stiffen and she moved to the edge of her seat. He had said so much about an ending, and, she thought, now it is starting. She could feel her own sleepiness flee her, and she marshaled her emotions like a military reserve being held in check for that critical moment in any battle when victory and defeat are held in balance.

  Jeffers turned down a sandy secondary road and immediately they were bumping along a washboard dirt single-line trail. The scrub bushes and gnarled trees of the island seemed to envelop them in a tunnel, and she felt immediately as if they had stepped from civilization into some wilder, prehistoric place. The car pitched and yawed as he steered it slowly down the road. Occasionally the tires spun briefly in sand, and the cockpit was filled with the scratching, screeching noise of bushes rubbing against the car side
s. After traveling what she guessed was more than a bumpy mile, deeper into the beech forest, they arrived at a juncture of four tiny roads. There were a few small arrows in various colors pointing down the alternate routes. The dirt roads seemed ever smaller, tighter, and darker.

  “The arrows are for the different homes,” Jeffers explained. “It’s precious. You have to know the right color to get to the right house. Other­wise you end up on the wrong side of the pond.”

  He steered down the left-hand fork.

  The yawing and bumping of the car started to make her nauseated. She tried to see through the overhanging branches and she caught a glimpse of the moon, high in the sky.

  They traveled another ten minutes. At least a mile, she thought. Perhaps farther.

  Then, as if by some stroke of a knife, they passed out of the forest into an open area. Jeffers doused the car lights as they emerged from the trees, steering the car slowly by the moonlight.

  She could see off to her right a wide expanse of water.

  “That’s the pond,” Jeffers said. “Pond isn’t a good word. It’s actually as big as a lake and as deep as one.” He stopped the car and rolled down the window. “Listen,” he said.

  She could hear the surf pounding on the shoreline in the distance.

  “The pond separates the houses from the beach,” he said. “We used to have to take a little motorboat or a rowboat over. A lot of people used little sailboats. Canoes, kayaks, windsurfers, too, I guess. Now, look carefully. See across there?”