by Daniel Quinn
“All what will be over?”
Wolf went on rocking.
“I probably won’t be needed for what?”
Wolf hunched his shoulders in an expressive shrug.
CHAPTER 35
David would have had a hard time recognizing the old woman sitting with Howard and Tim at their breakfast table. Standing at the cashier’s window pounding him on the shoulder, she’d been wearing a faded house dress and broken-backed slippers, and her hair had been a dingy, bedraggled gray. Now, in quite a smart little blue suit and high heels, wearing makeup that took a decade off her age, her hair rinsed with a discreet touch of life-giving color and swept up to make the most of what was there, she might have stood as a model for the president of the garden club.
She hadn’t hesitated to take full credit for the fact that Tim had received a check for twenty thousand dollars.
“I stood there and looked him in the eye and told him a mother’s curse would surely fall on his head if he didn’t send some of that money home. And, believe me, he thought for just a second that he wasn’t going to do it. I know that look; he had the fever, no two ways about it. But I looked him down, right down, till he came to his senses and did what a man should do.”
She was no more hesitant when it came to advising them on their next move. “You just sit tight here for a couple of days,” she told them. “He’ll be back, that’s for sure.” She fixed Tim with a bright, accusing eye. “Your daddy’s a school teacher, isn’t he?”
“No. He’s in educational publishing.”
She nodded exactly as if he’d agreed with her. “I know the type, son—weak as bone soup. Seen ’em all my life. He’ll be back. He’s got the fever up.”
But at that point, the waitress had arrived with a copy of the morning’s Review-Journal, already turned back to a second page story that she displayed with an air of unconcealed triumph.
After scanning the story, which was headlined Life In Fast Lane Too Fast For El Moreno Winner, Howard read it aloud.
GALLUP, NM—David Kennesey, a recent Vegas visitor who made gambling history at the roulette wheel, was arrested Tuesday afternoon driving 50 mph in a 35 mph zone, according to city police officer Richard Valdez. Kennesey was detained and charged with illegal possession of a firearm when a search of his vehicle turned up a .357 magnum pistol for which he had no license.
With characteristic good luck, Kennesey slipped the toils of the law with a guilty plea, collecting a $500 fine and a suspended jail sentence.
Kennesey’s legendary win, which observers claim exceeded $60,000, came when he backed the number 1 nine times running at two different tables at the casino of the Hotel El Moreno Monday morning.
“Well,” Tim observed, “at least we know what direction he’s heading in.”
Howard nodded thoughtfully. Looking up, he saw that the old woman, apparently shaken by the story, had paled under her makeup.
“Do you think we should go to Gallup?” Tim asked.
Howard mentally consulted the map of the southwest he’d studied the night before; he was fairly sure Gallup lay on the interstate that ran through the center of New Mexico. “Looks like it,” he admitted without much conviction. It seemed a very thin hope. David certainly wouldn’t hang around Gallup after having a brush with the law there. But a direction of pursuit was clearly indicated now, and if they followed it, they’d have to pass through Gallup anyway.
“Yes,” he repeated, “that looks like the way to go.”
“Nonsense,” the old woman spat out, her face contorted with disgust.
Howard looked at her curiously. “Nonsense?”
“Of course it’s nonsense. Do you think he’s still there? He’s long gone.”
“Of course he is. But he’s only a day and a half gone from there. He’s two and a half days gone from here.”
“No,” she stated flatly. “He’ll be back. You just stay right here and be patient.”
Howard shook his head and put some money down on their breakfast check. Then he counted out five twenties, handed them to Tim, and told him to pay their hotel bill while he went upstairs to pack.
“If you leave …” the old woman began as Howard stood up.
“Yes?”
“If you leave,” she repeated, thinking furiously, “no one will know where to reach you.” She nodded aggressively, as if this settled matters. “That’s right. No one will know where to reach you.”
“I really doubt that anyone will be trying to reach us.”
Scowling, she licked her lips. “You’re wrong. Someone …” She hesitated, obviously torn by indecision. “Someone’s bound to know where that boy’s gone. I’m sure of it.”
Howard shrugged, thanked her politely, and left her plucking angrily at the table cloth.
A few minutes later Wolf answered the phone in the living room of the farmhouse outside Glenwood Springs. He listened, frowning, noted a number on the cover of an ancient telephone book, hung up, and turned to Artie Goodman, who was sprawled on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling.
“Get her,” he said.
Artie pulled himself up, disappeared down a hallway, and returned a minute later with Ellen.
“What is it?” she asked in a frightened voice.
“You’re going to be needed after all, Mrs. K,” Wolf said, giving her a crooked grin. He held up a hand to forestall her questions. “In a minute I’m going to dial a number and ask for your son. You’re going to talk to him. Okay?”
“I’m going to talk to Tim?”
“That’s right. Will you do that?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not looking for anything difficult. I just want you to tell him to stay where he is.”
“To stay where he is? Where is he?”
“That doesn’t matter. Tell him to stay where he is. Tell him …” Wolf paused and closed his eyes for a moment. “Tell him everything’s being taken care of. Tell him you know where his father’s going. Tell him to stay put till he hears differently. Understand?”
Ellen glanced uncertainly from one to the other. “Won’t he want to know where I am?”
Wolf gnawed on a lip. “Tell him …”
“Tell him you’re on your way to meet David,” Artie said.
Ellen blinked. “Am I?”
The two men exchanged a look.
“Yes,” Artie said.
She examined their faces and said, “I don’t believe it.”
Wolf folded his arms and stared out of the window for a few moments. “We’ll leave in the morning. I swear it.”
“To go to my husband?”
“Yes.”
Ellen wavered, her lips set in a grim line. “All right.”
Wolf turned to the phone, dialed, and, after rolling his eyes through a brief wait, asked to speak to either Howard Scheim or Tim Kennesey. Then, with a bitter sigh, he hung up.
“Just missed them,” he said, shooting Ellen a venomous glance. “They walked out the door one minute ago, while you were babbling.”
She shrank back as if he’d dealt her a blow. “Does this mean …? Will you still keep your promise?”
He gave her a sour, twisted smile. “Oh yes, Mrs. K. I guarantee it. We’ll be gone by ten or eleven. There’s nothing keeping us here now.”
Driving down Fremont Street in their rented Ford, Howard caught himself enjoying a small sense of gratification because they were now traveling in David Kennesey’s own tracks: fifty or sixty hours ago he had driven down this very street on his way southward out of town. It distressed him that he should feel gratified by something so idiotic, and he began to wonder seriously whether his normal professional instincts might have deserted him forever. It seemed entirely possible.
He slowed down as a stoplight ahead of him turned red, and watched curiously as a shabbily-dressed Hispanic man and boy rushed off the curb and began searching the cars ahead, ducking down to peer into the windows and then quickly moving on. The light turned green just as they reach
ed the Ford. The man put his pinched brown face against the window beside Howard, did a double-take, and yelled, “Hey, man, we need a ride!” The boy on Tim’s side echoed him: “Hey, give us a ride!”
Howard put the car in gear, and they started pounding on the windows and shouting. “Hey, come on, man! You got lotsa room!” As Howard moved off, they ran alongside, pleading and thumping windows and fenders until they were left behind.
“What was that?” Tim asked.
Howard shrugged. “Different cultures, different customs.”
CHAPTER 36
Over a shared lunch of Texas-style chili at a table in the kitchen, David’s bewilderment dissipated, and he began to question whether Dudley Case really was Horse Killer. He’d had no doubt at first sight that he was standing before the same man, but there’d certainly been no answering recognition in Case’s eyes. It was true that Case was reticent and something less than friendly, but Horse Killer had been downright hostile. At one point, while still in shock, David had been tempted to ask him point blank if he had another identity but wisely restrained himself.
David asked him about his studies, and Case gave him a perfunctory reply that made it clear that, in his opinion, David would neither understand nor want to listen to anything beyond that. He complimented Case on the chili, quite sincerely, and was rewarded with a solemn nod.
They were just finishing up when Marianne appeared out of nowhere to tell Case he was wanted on the telephone in the living room. David was relieved to see him go. Belonging to two different generations, two different races, two different cultures, they seemed unlikely to ever get much beyond polite inquiries, polite replies.
Watching Marianne clear the table, wash the dishes, and scrub the counters, he analyzed his mood and realized that, for the first time since leaving Runnell, he didn’t feel restless, wasn’t itching to get back on the road and go someplace. He was someplace.
During his sophomore year at college he’d had a brief flirtation with Roman Catholicism and had made a retreat at an old Trappist monastery in Iowa. It was an unforgettable place, radiating security, harmony, mystery, completeness. Troll House, oddly enough, had much the same aura. It felt like a retreat house designed for a different sort of quest—more worldly, to be sure, but in its own way perhaps no less spiritual.
David smiled to himself, realizing that he was being completely fanciful.
Marianne turned from finishing her work and asked if there was anything she could get him. There was something waiflike and vulnerable about the girl, with her narrow, fragile-looking shoulders and undeveloped breasts. She wasn’t even close to being pretty, but there was a lot sexy in the way she fell short of it. Her too-wide mouth demanded brutal exploration; her acne-scarred cheeks invited a sympathetic caress. Her wide set, luminous eyes promised more than her small, unalluring body, perhaps.
David told her he didn’t need anything and asked where Andrea was.
She blinked. “Santa Fe, I think. Left early.”
“Not in the Ferrari,” David observed with a smile.
“The Mercedes.”
He nodded. “Did you get the Ferrari taken care of, then?”
“Yes.”
David felt mildly frustrated. She was standing there dutifully answering his questions like a schoolgirl summoned to the headmaster’s office, making him feel old and beyond interest.
“And what are you doing here, Marianne?” As soon as it was out of his mouth he regretted it, remembering Michelle’s description of him as the type who asks what a nice girl like you is doing in a place like this. But it was too late to be recalled.
She frowned over it for a moment and said, simply, “I live here.”
David nodded wordlessly, not trusting himself to be able to take his foot out of his mouth any more gracefully than he’d put it in.
As she walked out of the kitchen, he glanced at her narrow, denim-clad buttocks and was astonished at the thought that crossed his mind: Next time, my dear, it will be the birch rod for you.
A little exploring confirmed that he’d seen most of the house. He spent an hour in his room, examining the treasures in the cabinet. In a museum, untouchable, owned by the state or some faceless foundation, they would have held no interest for him. These were personal possessions and, by invitation, briefly his own.
He’d forgotten how entranced the artists of the deco period had been with the slender female form then in vogue and wondered whether the artwork had created the vogue or the other way round. She was there everywhere, the twenties girl, in dozens of postures—graceful, saucy, swooning, kittenish—only innocently alluring even in the nude, which she mostly was. He was particularly taken by a Lalique mermaid who drifted languorously in a swirl of bubbles within a glass plate—and equally by a bronze and ivory gamine, shrugging in her high heels, her hands plunged into the pockets of her clinging trousers, a cigarette dangling from her pouting lips. Not sleek enough for serious work, the male figure appeared only in caricature, as in a collection of rubbery black jazz men in glass.
He was tempted to take a look inside the other bedrooms to see if they were furnished with the same incredible extravagance as his own, but the doors were closed, and he didn’t want to be caught snooping. Instead, he went down to the lower living room and spent a while just sitting, soaking up its dark, earthy presence.
Finally, bored, he went outside. Crossing the windowless front of the living room and the attached three-car garage, he went around the side of the house and began to ascend the hill against which it was built. It was a steep climb and apparently one rarely made, since there were no steps (though David reflected that an escalator would have been more Andrea’s style). At the top he came to the wide patio outside the upper living room. He paused there and decided the patio was the only thing about the entire house he’d change; it was carpeted with redwood chips; he’d have decked it.
The view from this point was vast, with jagged mountains on every horizon. The bowl containing Taos lay to his right. West of Taos rambled a canyon that he supposed had been carved by the Rio Grande. A series of low hills lay in front of him, and, since he felt like walking, he decided to explore them. As he descended the first, he remembered doing much the same thing one afternoon at the Trappist monastery—wandering in a contemplative mood while pondering the Meaning of Life. Perhaps Andrea was right. Nearly twenty years of living hadn’t profoundly changed him—not in the depths of his mind and heart. Though he hated to admit it, he was very little different from that boy briefly in love with sanctity, incense, and the echo of men’s voices raised in hushed, yearning Gregorian tribute to the Virgin. He was a bit behind and had some catching up to do. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what he’d really left Runnell to do—some catching up.
He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that, passing around a room-sized rock at the peak of the next hill, he almost walked into Dudley Case, sitting cross-legged in the dust. Startled, he backed up and very nearly went down stumbling over a rock. Case watched him with a puzzled frown, as if David were rehearsing a pathetic burlesque routine.
“You startled me,” David said lamely.
“If I hadn’t heard you coming, you would have startled me,” Case replied.
David saw some papers in the Indian’s lap and a pen in his hand.
“Working?”
Case glanced at the papers and capped the pen. “Writing a letter.”
“I’m sorry I interrupted you.”
“That’s all right, it’s finished.” He picked up the top sheet, gave it a brief glance, and skimmed it into the air in front of him. It traveled for about five yards and sank to the ground.
David stared at it for a moment and said, “You decided not to send it?”
The Indian gave his lips a sardonic twist and waved a hand at the letter. “It’s sent.” As if in response to his wave, the sheet of paper was lifted by a breeze and sent tumbling down the hill for another ten yards.
“Well,” David observed brightly
, “it saves on postage.”
Case gave him a dark look. “I can’t address it. I don’t know where he is.”
“Who?”
“My brother. Just got out of jail in Shiprock.”
“Ah,” David said, as if he now understood.
“Gets windy as hell out here in the spring.” As though illustrating the point, a gust swam up from behind them and sent Case’s letter bounding downhill a few more feet. “Good time for sending letters.”
“I’ll bet.”
The conversation seemed to have come to an end, and David was considering his choice of exit lines when Case looked up and told him to sit down.
David thought about this, gazing out at the mountains, his hands in his pockets. He didn’t feel much like sitting down, and it wasn’t exactly an invitation—more like a command—and David was tempted to ignore it as presumptuous. On the other hand, it was an overture of sorts, even if rather gruffly tendered.
As he started to sit down, Case stopped him: “Not there. Across from me.”
David sighed and moved to the indicated position.
After a moment Case said, “Andrea says you have a son.”
“Yes, that’s right,” he replied, not entirely pleased that Andrea felt at liberty to share his confidences with anyone she pleased. A minute passed in silence, and he began to wonder if Case had made him sit down just to affirm that he had a son. Then the Indian said:
“You could send him a letter.”
David decided to conform to the Navajo’s conversational pace and make him wait for a reply, even though he already knew what it would be.
“Yes, I suppose I could,” he said at last, adding, “if I thought it was a good time to do that.”
Ignoring this clear invitation to mind his own business, Case offered him the pen and paper. David glared at them, his annoyance mounting, then thought, Oh, what the hell difference does it make? and snatched them from his hands.
