by Barry, Mike
It had worked out fine; Edgerton had taken her out of there and put her in the truck, and just eight miles down the road they had found a motel, and it had been the easiest thing imaginable to take her in, day rates, and bang the shit out of her, not that she was such a terrific fuck, but then again, she beat making the long miles east alone, which he had been prepared to do otherwise but which was never much fun at all. He had looked forward to making the trek just that way, the coke under the seat in the front so she could have the whole converted back of the truck to lie in, and after the first time, when he didn’t have to make an appearance anymore, they had done their banging right there in off-road rest areas or sometimes in actual forests, and it hadn’t been a bad way to make eight hundred miles a day, he figured; it certainly was better than the stereo. The knowledge that she was back there sleeping, that he could stop and fuck her anytime he wanted—all she did was sleep and fuck and eat, which might be a kind of disease, but oh boy, what a disease! All of these cunts should only have it!—had been comforting. But then, rocking down the lanes on Eighty, pulling off on a sudden impulse, deciding that he deserved a fuck after all the good work he had done to pound the stuff this far, Edgerton had run into this Wulff character by the roadside … and now what the hell was he going to do?
It would have been so easy without the girl. But with her it was going to be a bitch; there was no way to conduct a campaign with a witness, let alone the kind of witness this girl would be: he could already hear the screams, the hysteria, the pleas. For all of her waist-length hair and her easy, cool manner, this girl would disintegrate in the face of violence the same way that she would fall apart under sex; time and again he had seen his thrusts reduce her to weeping, and this would be even worse … but that meant that if he were to do anything now he would have to kill her, kill her so that he could conduct his business and collect his ten thousand dollars in peace. He could not do it, Edgerton had to admit that: he was not capable of going behind those panels and killing the girl. She would not be the first person that he had killed, not even the first woman, but it would be the first murder committed coldly and with calculation … and he could not do that. He was no psychotic. He was no murderer; murdering was only a business. It would be a matter of business with this Wulff character. But not with the girl.
No, he could not do that. But where would this leave him, then, stalking the area, waiting for Wulff to emerge from the shelter of the boards walling off the telephone from the sounds of the road? He could not stay here indefinitely. As isolated as the area was, sooner or later a prowl car would come through, state troopers looking for trouble, and they would have questions about the setup here. Also, after dark Wulff would be able to make a bolt for the Fleetwood; even with full headlights he would not be able to open up all of the area; there would be small pockets of shadows into which he might dart, and then too, there was the need for sleep. His own alertness could not be maintained indefinitely. And sooner or later the girl would get up, come to the front, ask Edgerton exactly what the hell he was doing. He could not answer that. He had no response that he could figure out as satisfactory.
So what to do? It was like seeing ten thousand dollars turn into muddy colors, like oil running thickly with the rain and vanishing into a sewer; it was like seeing all hope and possibility draining away, and yet he could not give it up … not with an opportunity like this. It might change his life. A man did not want to run coke forever. He was twenty-five years old and better for other things than this, but if he did not move on, the fine edge of alertness which had kept him going would be rubbed off, and he would be a twenty-six and then a twenty-seven-year-old coke runner, and where the hell would he be then? No, it definitely would not work, Edgerton thought; it was intolerable to continue, intolerable to let it go by, because it would never happen again. And so he sat there, pinned by the wheel, looking at the changing colors in the area of the enclosure, and it was frustrating, by God it was infuriating, it was ten thousand dollars glinting at him from the waters of the sewer just before it fell away forever; it was two gigantic tits of some movie star he would never meet, bobbing and weaving, nipples erect, in three dimensions out of some huge screen before his mouth…. Was he going to run cocaine all his life? Edgerton thought. Was that was what he was going to be? First a twenty-two-, then a twenty-three- and twenty-four- and now twenty-five-year-old coke runner, and then up the rungs of destiny: thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty-six, sixty-two … that was it, he would be a sniveling man of sixty-two, kidneys gone, bladder like a grape, his coccyx rubbed to the bright consistency of a nail, pushing his rig through the western and far western states, the North Dakota circuit; that was it, Fargo, Bismarck, and the Black Hills….
Fuck it, he thought, and the image of a sixty-two-year-old coke runner wiping snot from his nose as he pushed his old 2004 Dodge Hornet to greater and greater speeds through the blasted hills, forty, forty-one, forty-two miles an hour, must have thrown him over the line, because suddenly Edgerton had the gun in his hand, was uncoiling, his hand fumbling at the lever of the panel-truck door. Fuck it, he would have to stalk the bastard. Better to wait it out—that would be the sensible course, and one which could not fail in the long run—but this was not an idealized world in which he lived, and you had to take the bitter with the sweet, you had to keep operative, you had to do the possible … and he could not kill the girl. He had this prejudice; he could not kill anyone he had fucked.
Edgerton came out on the ground on the far side of the truck, the side facing away from the telephone enclosure, weaving slightly from seven hours of road fatigue, rubbing his scalp, pushing his blond hair out of his eyes. The truck provided him with perfect cover; no way that he could be seen, much less attacked, with the truck between him and the man, but the trouble was that it also blocked his own view; and as quiet as he had been, this Wulff might understand that he had left the truck, might make a break to his own Fleetwood … and if he did that, then all bets were off. He probably had armaments stashed away there, and once he got to the Fleetwood, he was a quicker, deadlier, more effective killer than Edgerton thought he ever could be. No; he could not wait it out. He would have to make his move now or not at all, Edgerton thought, and bringing the Magnum up against his chin in a stalking position, he came against the door and then around the hood, the grass arching against his feet, moving quickly, now slowly, quietly, looking for just that one angle, that one slash of light in which he could find his man and kill him.
Coming around the hood, moving into an open space of light, he thought that he had it for a moment: he could see Wulff framed by the booth, the partitions, thin as paint, cutting him off left and right but providing Edgerton with a shot dead-center. It must have been the excitement that destroyed him, the excitement of having the shot, the realization that he had ten thousand dollars waiting for him there; either that or it was the coke; hard to tell, a little of one and a little of the other. He raised the gun, leveled it, urged himself to take the trigger, and then, before he could complete the circle of death—hand, trigger, form, enclosure—before he could loop it all together and bring the man down, he heard a high scream from the truck, the sound of a bird in agony, and his arm twitched, he vaulted away his attention, not for a long time, just for an instant, but time enough, time enough, and something landed hard in his stomach, like a fist, and then like a fist began to flower. He felt shards and slivers of pain dig in, expanding, and then, as he fell, he realized that he had done something terribly stupid. He should not have shifted his attention. He should not have let himself be carried away from the point of focus.
But too late, too late, the screaming was still going on, but Edgerton was not in the same place; he was moving away, and as he cycled out of life in small, cautious strokes like a beginning swimmer’s, it was with the thought that right up to and past the end he had been stupid. How could this have happened to him? He should have understood that no man such as Wulff would have gone anywhere, done a
nything at all, without a weapon in his hand.
Stupid … but, all right, it beat being a sixty-two-year-old coke runner.
IX
On a bleak October morning, the morning after the phone call from Canada, Hamilton went out into the North Side of Detroit for a rendezvous. He drove his new Continental cautiously, easy on the gas and brake, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, but there was no way on the North Side that a white Continental could look inconspicuous; he should have known better than to take the car to this rendezvous; he could have taken instead his wife’s Corvair, but what the hell, he might as well face it, driving the car gave him enormous satisfactions, satisfactions which often he could get nowhere else. It was a big baby too, a monster; the shield of metal, plastic, and rubber around him gave him a feeling of security that he could have gotten from nothing else. If someone was going to make a move at him—and they might, he might as well face that—he would be far better off in the Continental than otherwise.
Driving through the North Side, he could see the marks of the riots; the wound had scarred over, but the scar tissue was as thin and perilous as the city of Detroit itself, and anything could have ripped it open; then the gash would have oozed again. The city was dying. He knew that; that was no different, every big American city was dying, of course. But there was something different about Detroit, something which put it in an entirely different category: the riots had ripped up the shell of Detroit, destroyed parts of the geography, but it was coming apart from the inside as well, for the industry around which all was centered was dying. There would not be, Hamilton thought, maneuvering the Continental past a sullen pack standing outside a candy store, the bombed-out look of junk in their eyes, there would not be an automobile, as he had grown up to understand it, within ten years. That was clear. There would be something else, and Detroit would make that too, but they would never make it on the margin and in the same way that the old automobiles had been built. And that meant that the city was destroyed, and with its destruction America, because it was the car that made everything go.
One glance in the right, remote mirror to see the group receding as he drove farther into the wasteland, toward the point of his rendezvous. Moving away from him, they no longer looked menacing; indeed, they had the appearance of artifacts, human figures frozen by process into sculpture, so that a hundred years from now they might be plastered in a museum: Junkies at Rest; but all of this was possible only because he was shielded by glass and plastic, because the wheel was in his hands, because the car had the power of movement. If he had been on that street corner, Hamilton knew, they would have killed him. It was as simple and devastating as that. Half of the reason would have been racial, but the other half would have been pure smack. It brought death. Shit was death. But he saw no connection between what he was doing and the men on the corner. If there had been any connection to make, he would have been the first to have seen it, but anyone who said that he had responsibility for this was full of crap. If not from him, then from somewhere else. He was merely filling a place which would have been instantly seized by any one of a couple of thousand people. No one would turn it down if they were in the same position.
And besides, he was moving the stuff out of the country. No American junkie was his responsibility. If anything, Hamilton thought, he could be conceived of as a great patriot; what he was doing was getting the shit out of the country. More in Canada, less here—that was one way to look at it. It wasn’t that he was trying to put the best face on it, either, trying to rationalize or escape his responsibility; if anything could be pinned on him, he would be the first to say.
But as it was, he was merely doing the country a favor, And Canada, that haven for draft dodgers, Communists, free-love advocates, and lunatics of almost any political persuasion, could fuck itself.
Pulling up to the point of rendezvous, a huge, blasted lot, shards of rubble still glinting coldly three years after it had been torn up, two years after the so-called urban reconstruction project had been supposed to start, Hamilton could see his contact’s car parked just a little bit down the line, the motor idling, little plumes of smoke coming from his exhaust. This was the only part of the situation which he did not like, the fact that the meeting could not be in his car, the fact that Hamilton had to leave his vehicle and walk fifty feet through the rubble to the car of the other man. It was not fair, strictly speaking; he did not like to expose himself to the situation here, even for an instant, and there was no reason really why he should—he was above his contact in the line of supply—but it could not be fought, there was nothing to fight, it would do him no good at all.
He walked slowly toward the car, his body tensed, alert to sounds of any kind, watching the way that the rubble in the lot seemed to fade into landscape, the landscape into sky, all of it gray and muddled in northern Detroit, all of it reduced to homogeneity. Detroit had reduced differences; now everyone within it was boiling in the same pressure cooker, steaming toward the same dreadful end; but where, he thought, where did this kind of thinking get him? Right or wrong, there was certainly no profit in it.
He opened the door of the car and stepped inside an interior so idiosyncratic, so odorous, so compressed that it seemed to be less of a car than a room, the place where a certain kind of adolescent might retire for sixteen hours a day to consider his life and the possibilities of mass murder. His informant looked at him, a square blank man in his fifties holding a gun; and Hamilton, even as he tugged the door closed, felt a vague twinge of fright; it was unusual for the man to be actually holding his gun. It was visible at all times, bulging in his side pocket near the belt line, but Hamilton could not recall that it had ever actually been taken out before this. “Pull it shut quietly,” the man said, “and then sit back on the seat.”
Hamilton did so. “Put that gun away,” he said when he was done.
“Making you nervous?”
“Everything makes me nervous right now.”
“It ought to. I can’t blame you for that.” His contact shifted on the seat, faced him squarely, the gun bearing down on Hamilton. Slowly, drifting in like smoke from the corners of Hamilton’s mind, was the thought that there was death in the car. This man could kill him. He could shoot him in the head and kill him. All the time, their relationship had merely been based upon the element of faith that he would not; that Hamilton, conversely, would not kill him. Now, as if in the glinting bulbs of the dashboard, was illumined the fragility of this connection. The contact had the bulbs rigged so that they blinked every time the brake pedal was pressed; apparently he was pressing it now, because the bulbs blinked like the eyes of frantic animals in the dark. Otherwise he gave no sign of movement, his leg concealed behind the other, casually flung over the seat. “You have a right to be nervous,” the man said.
“Put that away,” Hamilton said, “put that damned thing away.” He had always had a certain authority over the man. After all, he passed him a great deal of money, money which made a significant difference in life style. He had thought that that would be enough to assure control. That had been stupid, Hamilton thought. That had been very stupid.
“I’ll put it away when I feel like putting it away,” the man said. “The impulse doesn’t strike me right now.” Then, as if picking up reverberations in Hamilton’s own skull, he said, “You’ve been damned stupid.”
“What did you want to see me about?”
“That’s what I wanted to see you about. That’s all. To tell you how stupid you are.”
“I think I’ve had enough of this,” Hamilton said. “I shouldn’t have come here.” He ducked down, moving toward the door, and shadows from the raised gun glinted at him. He eased back on the seat, feeling his shoulderblades palpitate like hands might run over the upholstery. It was a 1954 Chevrolet, customized. He was terrified, he realized. He was completely terrified.
“Damned right you shouldn’t have come here. But that wasn’t your first mistake. You shouldn’t have killed Shi
elds. That’s making a big stink. The man was a foreman.”
“I don’t know anything about Shields.”
“You know everything about him. You’ve made a lot of people learn too much about him, too.” The gun descended on Hamilton’s shoulder, and he heard the bone crack even before he felt the pain; then, in little igniting flames, it came, lurched down his arm. He screamed once, froglike within his throat, and then held steady against the seat. The contact adjusted the gun in his hand, business end again protruding. “You’ve fucked me up,” he said.
“I didn’t fuck anybody up. I—”
“Yeah? You’ve opened up things the way they’ve never been opened up before. I got a call from Canada last night.”
Hamilton leaned back farther into the canvas covering the upholstery, only dimly aware of the tension of his body. On the periphery of his mind passed the thought that he might faint, and then the thought drifted away like a scuttling animal in the grass; he would not faint, he was far beyond that. He was in control of himself. He had not gone this far, accomplished this much, planned even his retirement and flight from the country, to end this way. “How could they know?” he said.
“That is what I want to find out. That’s one of the reasons we’re having this little interview right now.”
“There’s no way. There’s no way at all.”
“That’s what you say. The man I spoke to sounded pretty thorough to me. He seemed to know more about me than I might have thought you did.”
“He knew that you were passing the shit on….?”
“He knew that I was passing the shit on,” the contact said. “And I want to find out who told him. Why did you tell him? Why did you do something like that? That wasn’t bright, you know, Hamilton. Our relationship is based on confidentiality.”
