Rovers

by RICHARD LANGE

  There’s slot machines by the bathroom. Star Spangled Sevens. I hand the cash register man another twenty-dollar bill and ask for quarters. He gives me a paper-wrapped roll and ten dollars back.

  I sit at the game and tap it three times. Three times for three sevens. It don’t work. I drop coins and pull drop coins and pull but the damn thing doesn’t hit. The cash register man comes over smoking a cigarette. Mind if I watch? he says. I tell him there ain’t much to see but he’s welcome.

  I only got two quarters left when three BARS come up and some coins jingle into the tray. The cash register man says, I’d quit while you’re ahead, and I say, I guess you’re right, and stuff the quarters in my pocket.

  I take my CB into the diner and sit at the counter. The waitress lady is as old and fat as Mama but’s got yellow hair. She calls me handsome when she brings the menu. How are ya handsome? I tell her to give me hotcakes sausage and scrambled eggs. And orange juice. A big glass not a little one. I ask if they got blueberry syrup. Better places got blueberry syrup. Nope sorry, she says, only maple but it’s just as sweet. She asks me, You with the road crew? No ma’am, I say, passing through.

  I set my quarters on the counter and stack them four high. Four makes a dollar and I got four dollars and fifty cents worth. I ask the waitress what time the sun comes up. About five thirty, she says. What time is it now? I ask. She looks at her watch. Five oh five, she says. I shovel my food in and get back to the room when it’s coming light. I got to be more careful. I hang the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob. I make sure the curtains is shut.

  There’s cartoons on now. Gigantor on one channel Bugs Bunny on the other. I put on Bugs but don’t pay attention ’cause I’m worried. It’s day so if Jesse ain’t here he ain’t coming. Could be he ain’t even looking for me. Could be he’s dusted. I wanted that when I was mad but I ain’t so mad anymore. He ain’t been all bad. I know how to do some things but not all of it. I ain’t never hunted. I ain’t never killed. Jesse always took care of that.

  The dark where I see things comes. This time all it is is blackness. Blackness and me crying. Crying and saying no. When it lifts I’m shaking like a goose walked across my grave. Where am I gonna go? What am I gonna do? The only one I got to talk to is the Little Devil and all he does when I ask is belch.

  I feel like if I don’t do something good I’ll do something bad. I take my CB radio out of the box and set it on the bed. I turn the knobs and nothing happens. It’s got a book of how to work it but the letters are too small and the pictures don’t make sense.

  I pick up the microphone and press the button. Breaker breaker this here’s the Wolfman, I say, come back good buddy. I press the button again. This here goes out to Jesse, I say, I know it was your mama’s favorite. And then I sing.

  Oh let me die in winter

  When the night hangs dark above

  And cold the snow is lying

  On bosoms that we love

  Ah! May the wind at midnight

  That bloweth from the sea

  Chant mildly, softly, sweetly

  A requiem for me

  31

  July 5, 1976, Las Vegas (cont.)

  I CAME TO HEARING JESSE ASKING WHERE I’D BEEN SHOT. HE used my shirt to bandage a wound in my thigh. We’d been pinned down by the bikers, but Jesse wasn’t about to give up. He propped me at the window with the .45 and wedged himself in the doorway with the shotgun, and we proceeded to turn two of the Fiends’ Harleys into scrap metal.

  We were about to blast the last one when the bikers opened up on us. Knowing the walls of the trailer wouldn’t stop anything, I dropped to the ground. The pain in my leg was so bad, I thought I’d been hit again.

  When the shooting petered out, I struggled to find some way to sit that didn’t hurt. The Fiends must have been in bad shape, too, because the next thing I knew, Jesse and one of them were going back and forth, negotiating safe passage for the other bikers and myself. I was too dazed to feel much relief about leaving and worried I wouldn’t have the strength to get back to the truck.

  A motorcycle carrying a pair of Fiends drove off, and then it was my turn to go. Jesse said if he wasn’t at the truck by dawn, I should leave without him. In that case, I asked, what about Edgar? He quickly and coldly told me I should kill him. My God, I thought, this truly must be hell. I was dealt another blow seconds later, as I prepared to leave the trailer. I warned Jesse not to forget about the fat man I’d shot, said he must be close to healed by now.

  “He won’t be healing,” Jesse said.

  I asked what he meant.

  “He’s not a rover.”

  Hoping he was mistaken, I made a beeline for the body as soon as I limped out of the trailer. There the man lay, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and dead, dead, dead, and I was confronted with the awful fact that I’d killed a human being.

  I’m not sure how I kept going after that. Some instinct for self-preservation kicked in and powered me out to the highway. Every step was agony, and my existence narrowed to the task of keeping moving. Prayer helped, but my plea got simpler and simpler, until in the end it was just, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” repeated over and over.

  I hardly recall reaching the truck, Jesse’s return, or the ride to the motel. The trek had done me in. I truly believe I was straddling life and death, and death seemed like the better option. Jesse dressed my wound properly, and a long, dreamless sleep followed. My leg still hurt when I came to, but I could sit up without feeling like puking, and I managed to hobble to the bathroom on my own.

  The sun set while I’ve been writing this. Edgar’s watching television, and Jesse is stirring on the floor. I killed a man helping him get his revenge and was almost killed myself, so I hope he keeps his promise to let me go. I’ll say a prayer now for the soul of the dead man and another begging forgiveness for his murder. I doubt they’ll earn me any grace, but maybe they’ll get me through the night.

  July 7, 1976, Outside Truckee, California

  Czarnecki’s cabin is the last place I thought I’d find myself, but here I am. In a way, I guess, it’s appropriate: This nightmare will end where it began.

  To backtrack a bit, Jesse was a man of his word. The night after the shootout at the trailer, he returned my wallet and Czarnecki’s .45, and he and Edgar drove off in a stolen car. My first thought was that I should leave the motel too, put some distance between me and the scene of my crime, but my leg still ached, and I needed more rest. My appetite was back, so I had a pizza delivered. After eating my fill, I thought of Beaumont chained in the camper. He’d been without food or water for nearly twenty-four hours.

  He didn’t say anything when I lifted the lid of the crate, didn’t reach for the jug of water I offered him.

  “I won’t beg you,” I said.

  “I need to use the toilet,” he said.

  I told him to go on. He stood slowly, awkwardly, chains jingling. I turned away while he squatted over the bucket.

  “May I stand for a bit?” he said when he finished.

  I let him lean against the counter while he ate a couple of slices of pizza and drank some water.

  “Where is Jesse?” he asked.

  “Gone,” I replied.

  “But I’m still a prisoner.”

  “For as long as you earn your keep,” I said. “You’re going to help me hunt rovers.”

  “While living in a box and shitting in a bucket?”

  “Better than you’ll do in hell.”

  “I’d rule hell in a week.”

  I took his arrogance as a warning. After being surprised by Sally, I’d never again let my guard down around a rover, but I’d have to be extra cautious with Beaumont. I could tell from his sneer, from the tilt of his head, that even in chains he thought he was superior to me and would always be scheming to escape. The first chance he got—when I was feeding him my own blood to keep him alive?—he’d be on me like a tiger. I hurried him into the crate and didn’t feel safe until he was locked inside.

&n
bsp; Back in the room I changed the dressing on my leg. It didn’t look any better, but it also didn’t look any worse. I tried to get lost in a ballgame on TV, but you know how that goes. Whatever’s bedeviling you always wins out.

  That I’d killed a man, even mistakenly, weighed heavily on me. Rovers were soulless demons, and with not much twisting I could convince myself that putting them down was doing the Lord’s work. Killing a human being, though. Even if the man I shot was a killer himself, murder is a mortal sin.

  And then there was the matter of the future. If I continued down the road I was on, I’d be hunting rovers in earnest, carrying on Czarnecki’s crusade, a crusade that had always felt more like a curse. Driving around night after night with a monster beside me searching for other monsters, then becoming a monster myself in order to put a bullet into the brain of what was once a man, to stick a knife into the heart of what was once a woman, to saw the head off of what was once a child. Doomed to darkness, doomed to danger, doomed to death.

  I couldn’t think of anything else but to put it in God’s hands. They say Jesus prayed so hard the night before he was crucified, he sweated blood. I don’t know if that’s true, but at 4 a.m., after hours of beseeching the Lord for forgiveness, for direction, for a sign he was even listening, my leg started to bleed again, a red rose blooming on the bandage, and at the same moment I heard a voice in my head, a voice saying, “All debts are paid.”

  I’ve been a prayerful man all my life, a questioner, a petitioner, but I’ve never experienced anything like that. I don’t know if it was God speaking to me or through me. I don’t know if the debt was to Benny or to God or to the dead man, but I do know this: I received permission from someone I needed permission from to change course, to abandon the brutal path I’d found myself on.

  I slept a few hours. My mind was clear and quiet when I woke, and the rock that had filled my gut ever since I learned of Benny’s death was gone. I decided to leave immediately.

  There was one final horror to be lived through, though.

  Beaumont, knowing it was day, was uneasy when I opened the crate. He tried to sit up, but I pushed him back.

  “Don’t do it, Brother,” he said. “I’ve lived too long and suffered too much to have it end like this.”

  “I’ll pray for you,” I said.

  “Unchain me, and we’ll pray together,” he said. “That’s what God wants, Brother. Listen to God.”

  I stuck an ice pick in his chest. His eyes widened, his heels drummed on the wood of the crate, but then he stilled. I used a hacksaw to take off his head, and he collapsed into dust, a king no more.

  I loaded my things into the truck and drove north, arriving here at Czarnecki’s cabin around 4. I mean to be gone before dark, which isn’t far off now. I only came back to get the Econoline and cover my tracks some.

  I sank the .45, the murder weapon, in the first lake I came to and scrubbed everything here that might have my fingerprints on it with a bleach-soaked towel. Doorknobs, the dishes I ate off, the lock on the shed, even the shovel I used to bury the old man. I wiped down the camper and truck, too, cleaned the shoe polish off the van, and burned the posters of Benny and my scrapbook.

  When the work was done, I ate a can of tuna and took a nap, and I’ve spent the last hour writing this, the final entry in this journal, which started as a chronicle of my search for Benny’s murderer and ended up a killer’s confession. Afterward I’ll burn it too, because there’s no reason for you to read it, no reason you should be burdened with such awful knowledge.

  When the pages have turned to ash, I’ll drive to Reno, check into a nice hotel, and eat the biggest steak I can find. And then I’m going to call you. I’m going to call and tell you I’ve finally accepted that I’m never going to find the person who killed our son, and I’m going to ask if I can come home.

  If you say yes, I’ll be in San Diego before you know it. I’ll wrap my arms around you and hang on for dear life as I thank you for taking me back. I’ll start teaching again, I’ll go to dinner at Chuey’s with you on Saturdays, and to church with you every Sunday. And the only thing I ask is that if I ever wake up screaming, you forgive me when I don’t tell you what the dream was, and if some night we’re out and you catch me staring at someone and I suddenly grab your hand and say, “Let’s go,” you don’t ask why, you just come along, quickly and quietly. Hopefully that won’t happen too often. Hopefully, with the Lord’s help, I’ll become very good at forgetting.

  TODAY’S PASSAGE: Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing. Now shall it spring forth. Shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.

  —Isaiah 43:18–19

  32

  ELIJAH SQUINTS AT ANTONIA’S ITALIAN PHRASEBOOK, RUNS HIS finger down the page. He can barely see the words in the dim light of the church but finally finds what he wants to say.

  “Ho fame,” he whispers into Antonia’s ear.

  She’s staring at a statue of Mary cradling Jesus. A mother and her dead son. One of the most famous sculptures in the world by one of the most famous artists, she said. Elijah whispers again.

  “Ho fame.”

  “What’s that mean?” Antonia says.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Un momento.”

  It’s been five months since the shootout at the motel and the end of the Fiends. In the aftermath, Antonia and Elijah threw away their leathers and dumped the Harley. Elijah shaved his beard and cut his hair; Antonia grew hers long and has taken to wearing embroidered Mexican dresses and turquoise jewelry. New identities, new beginnings. They’ve had a few.

  They took a night flight from New York to London and another to Rome, where they’ve been for a week. Every afternoon at 4:30, when the winter sun sets, they leave their hotel to visit sites on Antonia’s list, and every one of them has been more beautiful than she imagined. Her knees shook in the Sistine Chapel, the Trevi Fountain made her dizzy, and now this, Michelangelo’s Pietà. The marble figures are so lifelike, she wouldn’t be surprised to feel a pulse if she put her fingers to Mary’s throat, wouldn’t be shocked if Jesus’s flesh was warm to the touch.

  The sculpture is surrounded by bulletproof glass. A few years ago a madman attacked it with a hammer, breaking off one of Mary’s arms and her nose. Luke used a hammer when he went crazy too. Went crazy and beat little Abigail to death. Went crazy and murdered wee James. She came home right after, had been to the grocer, was carrying a sack of onions and potatoes. Luke greeted her naked, bloody, raving. “Hello, wife. I’ve done for your piglets, and now I’ll have you.” Because she’d threatened to leave him, to take the children and go.

  She went crazy herself then, got hold of a kitchen knife and stabbed him twenty times. If she hadn’t discovered that she had killing in her that day, that she could kill and not care, would things have been different? If she hadn’t been shown that all men were beasts, would she have so readily become a rover, a beast of all beasts?

  She blinks away the questions. She blinks away the past. Those babies died of the pox. Her eyes climb a column to the church’s vaulted roof, to the dome hazy with scented smoke from an earlier Mass. All the pain of her life has been worth it if that’s what it took to get here, to see the candles flickering like fireflies in front of the chapels.

  She and Elijah walk to the statue of St. Peter. Visitors, kissing rosaries and crossing themselves, are lined up to touch its foot. They join the queue.

  “You’re not getting religion, are you?” Elijah says.

  “It’s tradition,” Antonia says.

  When it’s her turn in front of the statue, she gazes at its toes, worn shiny and shapeless by the caresses of countless pilgrims seeking mercy. Fools, she thinks, before reaching out to stroke the foot herself.

  She and Elijah eat at a restaurant on a little square with a fountain. Their table is against a window fogged by the warmth of the room. Elijah uses the edge o
f his hand to clear a patch so they can watch people rushing past, bundled against the cold, their breath puffing and trailing like steam from locomotives. Christmas lights are everywhere even though it’s only a week into December.

  The waiter, with his droopy gray mustache, speaks enough English to guide them through the menu. Elijah orders spaghetti carbonara for the third time. Antonia frowns at his lack of imagination and asks about the specialty of the house.

  “Saltimbocca,” the waiter says. “This means it will jump into your mouth.”

  “I’ll have that,” Antonia says.

  She opens her guidebook.

  “The Coliseum is open late tomorrow,” she says. “That’s something we’ve got to see.”

  “All right,” Elijah says.

  “It’s where gladiators fought. Sometimes it was man against man, and sometimes they fought lions and tigers and elephants.”

  Elijah’s staring out the window, watching a bum in a ragged coat stagger to the fountain and splash water on his face. Antonia sees the bum too.

  “You’re not that kind of hungry, are you?” she says.

  “Not yet,” Elijah says.

  “Did you notice the camp by the river, those drunks?”

  “Are you telling me not to worry, there’s plenty of good hunting?”

  “I’d like to stay here a while. And then we’ll go to Madrid. You can show me where you were born.”

  “You’re the one with the memory,” Elijah says. “I’ve forgotten everything about the place.”

  “You don’t know what’ll happen when you see it again,” Antonia says. “It might all come back to you.”

  She signals the waiter.

  “I believe I’ll have wine after all. Do you want some?”

  “Sure,” Elijah says.