Turn Signal

by Howard Owen

  “If you don’t run, Milo, I’m going to shoot you dead,” Jack says. He’s amazed at how calm he is. He hasn’t ever threatened another human being with a weapon in his entire life until now. “I don’t really have anything to lose.”

  Milo still stands there. Jack levels the gun at his face.

  “Run. And I’ll be here for, oh, about an hour. Better not come back until then.”

  Milo hesitates, tries to say something, then turns and starts running. Jack can hear his heavy footsteps and see his naked butt in the sun’s dying light as he runs across the front of the building and then disappears around back. Jack guesses that Milo will try to find some bushes to hide in, waiting until it’s safe to come back.

  Jack closes the door and locks it, then goes around to lock the one in which he entered.

  When he comes back to the room, Gina has gotten completely dressed, her beautiful dark hair only slightly mussed.

  “Jesus Christ, Gina,” he says, shaking his head. “Milo.”

  “You know, Jack, I’ve tried to tell you,” she says. “I’ve tried to let you know how much I’ve missed not having you the last two-and-a-half years. Not your body. You. But you can’t hear anything, can’t see anything. I’m amazed you even caught us. Somebody must have told you, right?”

  Jack is silent.

  “I promised you,” he says at last. “I promised you everything would be good again, as soon as I get the contract signed. It’s going to happen, Gina. It really is. I’m going to make sure of that as soon as I leave here, believe me. It’s going to happen.

  “And you haven’t exactly been Miss Eager Beaver the last year.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe apathy is catching.”

  He suddenly feels very tired.

  “Jack,” Gina says, unsympathetically, “you need help.”

  “I need help? Big words for a woman whose husband just caught her doing the nasty and who has a big old gun all loaded and ready to go. Maybe you and then me.”

  “You won’t do that. Shannon.”

  Jack can’t deny it. He feels himself grinning, which seems to unsettle Gina.

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’m too busy to deal with that right now. I’ve got some other business to take care of first.”

  He starts to leave.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Gina asks, surprising him.

  “Nah, I’m no good right now. Tell you what: I’ll be back here in a couple of days. We’ll talk about it then. You better get to that basketball game. One of us ought to be there.”

  He turns to go, but then can’t resist going back. Gina flinches as he reaches toward her face, but he only brushes her forehead with his fingers.

  On the way out, he turns again.

  “As soon as I’m a block up the street, you can go find Milo and let him back in. I hope I didn’t scare him to death.”

  As he walks toward the car, he feels light on his feet for some reason. Somewhere out in the bushes, Milo is trying not to give away his position with his chattering teeth. Soon, Gina will find him, although Jack doubts they’ll be having sex again tonight.

  And somewhere in New York City, in Manhattan, a book editor is due for an appointment he never, actually, scheduled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I see elephants.

  We’re coming out of Philadelphia, my face pressed against the window, when suddenly there they are, sad and gray mirages, prisoners of some zoo I’ll never visit. Maybe they remember Africa or India, and now they watch the trains rattle by like strange fellow animals that are separated from them by fences and look neither right nor left.

  Now, every time I doze off, there they are, looking at me with unblinking intelligence in their accusing, tearful eyes. I’d help you if I could, I tell them, but they just stare me down. They remind me, in some way I can’t explain in conscious thought, of people I know. Brady. Gina. Shannon.

  I wake with a start as we approach a bridge, and I see through the fog, in large, resentful letters, Trenton Makes, The World Takes.

  Poor Trenton, I think, or maybe say, because the thin, sweat-soaked black man beside me asks, “Excuse me?” I pretend to sleep.

  I wake up again when we’re pulling into Penn Station, below the city. I’ve never come in this way before, haven’t been to Manhattan at all in years. Gina and I honeymooned here. We stayed in some hotel that cost more than we thought it should have and then discovered that real quality would’ve cost even more.

  I have no idea what comes next, between now and the time Gerald Prince and I talk. I’ll have to figure something out. I’ll have to trust the Ouija board that’s taken me this far. Faith has brought me here, and it’ll carry me out the other side. I’m sure of it.

  After I left Gina and Milo back at the insurance agency, I went home and got a few things, just what I needed. I was gone again in 45 minutes. Couldn’t think of anyplace specific to go, so I just let the car guide me. And first thing I knew, I was pulling up at the same run-down motel, out by the interstate, that Brady had stayed in the night before he left for California.

  The VACANT sign was still on the fritz, but now the T had also burned out completely. The sign just blinked on and off: CAN CAN CAN CAN. Yes, I thought. My kind of sign.

  After I checked in, putting the room on my last valid charge card, I went down the road to a truck stop where they had an ATM and drew out most of what little was left in my account. Then, I got one of about everything they had at Burger King and went back to sit and wait. The information office for Amtrak said the next train I could get going north was at 8:25 in the morning.

  In the letter I wrote to Shannon, I told her that I loved her and I was sorry I’d had to miss her game, but that I was pretty sure I’d be back before very long at all, maybe in time for her next one Friday night. No point in being an alarmist.

  I set the bedside radio alarm for 7, and then I took out the manuscript like I’ve been in the habit of doing lately whenever doubt starts to creep into my brain.

  I read a few pages, with a pro basketball game and the rumble of big trucks gearing up and down as my background noise.

  And I was reassured. It hit me again just how right it was, how right the old man was to leave it with me, how right I was to pick it up and run with it, no matter what.

  No matter what. The real thrust of the phrase hit me for the first time last night. I was sitting by myself in a strange little box in the world’s weirdest little motel, watching TV lights flicker off concrete walls, with my home and family in shambles, maybe behind me forever, just a few miles away.

  No matter what, indeed.

  I was ready, I felt, for no matter what, for the WPO.

  The old man didn’t tell me this might be part of what I thought I couldn’t live without but really could.

  The thing is, I felt like I was already on the other side of some wall, one that separated me from all that I loved. I might never get back to them, but my only chance was to do what had to be done, to follow the Gospel of No Matter What.

  In Penn Station, I just stand for a minute, trying to get my bearings in all the chaos. I have the address, in my shirt pocket, but it’s almost 3 o’clock now, and it strikes me that this isn’t going to be the day. I’m somewhat dead on my feet.

  A man in what looks like a thousand-dollar suit stops and speaks to me, and at first I shrink away from him. People have been avoiding me for the last seven hours, probably with good cause, and here’s some all-business guy in the meanest, hardest city in the world, and he’s talking to me. Can’t be good.

  But, against all odds, he’s asking me if I’m lost, if I need directions. I must look a little intense, a little disoriented, and it takes me a couple of seconds to answer. I tell him I’ve got to see somebody tomorrow and need to find a place to stay. Already, the light that filters through is puny and fading. The sun slips behind all these tall buildings pretty early. If it were summer, I could just sleep in a park, wash up in some bathroom somewhere.

/>   The man tells me where a YMCA is, just a few blocks away, and then he reaches in his pocket and hands me five dollars. That’s how rumpled I must look.

  I try to refuse him, but it seems like it would just hurt his feelings. He’s already moving off as I try to thank him. Even the good Samaritans here have to keep moving.

  “Try a bagel,” he yells to me.

  And so I do. It is the best bagel I’ve ever had. It is almost certainly the first one I’ve ever had in New York. I’m sure we didn’t try one on our honeymoon. I buy it from some little stand or kiosk or something right in the station. I’m sure the fact that I haven’t eaten much today sways my opinion, but everything about that bagel is perfect: the taste, the texture, the shape, the cream cheese, the sheer mass of the thing. It is dinner.

  I walk outside, and there’s the Empire State Building towering over everything. I’m tempted to walk toward it, but the day’s fading fast, and the fog that’s followed me up the East Coast is still there. I’m a little anxious about finding my lodging for the night.

  Wandering south from Penn Station, I try to follow the man’s directions but get lost a couple of times. The blocks are really short, not like the kind of blocks you’d expect in New York City, and my mind wanders. I get forgetful.

  No one I stop and ask for directions seems as eager to help as my first Samaritan—some of them just rush away when I approach them—but after a half-hour or so, I find the place.

  They’re all full up, it seems, but they direct me to another place, which looks even less ritzy than the Y. There is no television in my room, which smells faintly of curry. It’s two flights up, no elevator. The sink is across from the bed. There’s a toilet down the hall.

  But it passes one major test: Unlike most places of lodging in Manhattan, it is within my price range. And, hell, I’m a guy who’s spent several years of his life sleeping in a truck.

  I wander the streets for a couple of hours, thinking, planning. Nobody is panhandling me, and the potential panhandlees give me a wide berth. I see my reflection in a store window. I seem to be intense.

  It occurs to me that I should have come up here just for the hell of it at some time. What a shame it takes a honeymoon or an errand like this to get me here.

  Eventually, I go back to my little room. There, I read Lovelady for an hour or so and find it to be just as compelling as I have always thought it was. “Compelling” is a word that comes to me now. I’ve taken to reading reviews of other people’s books, imagining what they’ll say about mine, once somebody really sits down and reads it. Compelling: forceful, demanding attention. I like that. I might have to be a little compelling myself tomorrow.

  I drift off to sleep about 9, and then am awakened about 11. The walls are so thin I’m surprised they hold out light, and the guys next door, who sound like Arabs of some kind, come roaring in from somewhere and seem determined to talk until dawn.

  I bang on the walls. The guys on the other side bang back and answer with what are almost certainly curses in some unknown tongue. I try to ride it out, but around 1:30, I go next door, dodging a cockroach in the barely lighted hallway, and knock.

  The one who comes to the door jerks it open, greatly agitated. I have my hand in my jacket pocket, and the man, dark and round, sees what I must be holding. I ask him to please hold the noise down, and he seems to understand English. Fifteen minutes later, I’m asleep.

  There is no clock radio in this place, no telephone.

  I awake on my own, though, before dawn, in the orange near-darkness of the city. I experience the worst case of disorientation I’ve ever had. I lie there for what seems like 10 minutes trying to figure out where the hell I am, what day it is, what I am doing here. I look at my watch, see it’s 7 o’clock and have to think: a.m. or p.m.? What brings me around is the chatter from next door, a link to something that has happened outside this dark little chamber I’m in.

  On my way to wash up, I pass one of the Arabs from next door. He rushes past me, avoiding my eyes, and I hear his door slam behind me.

  I’ve brought a fairly clean shirt and a clean pair of pants. I have a ridiculous Jerry Garcia tie Gina bought me that goes with no other article of clothing ever made. It was the first thing I grabbed off the tie rack. It’ll have to do.

  On the way out at 8:15, I slip on the corduroy jacket, all the outer wear I packed. The cold hits me in a way it didn’t last night. The wind strikes me in the face as soon as I step out the door. No matter where I turn, it’s there. It reminds me of the heartless sea winds from my Navy days. But at least the fog seems to have lifted a little bit.

  Some might think I look a tad out of place in the busy street into which I’m sucked. It seems that everyone here who bothers to wear a coat and tie is wearing something more expensive than my whole wardrobe back in Speakeasy. Here, you apparently either dress up or dress down.

  You don’t walk out a hotel door in Manhattan and stop to think where you’re going, I learn quickly. The streets are like interstates. The little space between the door and the crowd is your entrance ramp.

  I jostle and finesse my way toward my destination. By the pocket map I bought yesterday, it looks to be about 14 blocks away.

  Unless David has actually lied about that, too, Gerald Prince arrives at 9 on the dot every morning.

  I walk faster.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Gerald Prince is humming to himself as he turns to walk down Fifth Avenue, pink and radiant among the wind-pummeled and winter-weary.

  His tan camel-hair coat, which weighs less than Jack Stone’s corduroy jacket, keeps the relentless chill almost completely at bay. His black fedora looks good when he glimpses himself in the store window, a perfect fit. His sunglasses, which cost more than the used car he took away to Duke in the fall of 1970, reflect back the weak sun overhead and give him, he thinks, a kind of cold-blooded killer aura, raffish yet intellectual.

  He is almost certain one of the junior editors wants to sleep with him. She is a lush, dark-haired young woman—he can’t resist thinking of her as a girl—one year out of Swarthmore, subsidized in a Manhattan apartment by her rich father. She reminds him of Monica Lewinsky on SlimFast.

  Gerald never ceases to be amazed at the power of power. Power makes people want you. Power makes you know they want you, sprays you with the fine, precious mist of entitlement. Six days shy of his 48th birthday, he realizes that his 40s, a decade in which he rose like cream to the good graces and best offices of one of America’s largest book publishers, have been the most sexually exciting of his life. Power.

  He wonders, sometimes, if Caitlin would even mind all that much if she knew that he had spent a few afternoons in a midtown hotel with the occasional such fledgling over the last few years. Wouldn’t she expect it? Isn’t that what people like Gerald Prince do? He is only mildly embarrassed to realize he is thinking of himself in the third person, like some pro football player or halfwit politician. He has learned, over his years in Manhattan, to be easy on himself. If you can’t love yourself, you cannot love others.

  There are times when he thinks the battered, frightened little bit of humanity he was at 18 has been completely exorcised from his being. Everybody knows that it’s all over by the time you’re five years old, or three, or six months, whatever, that all you’ll ever be is already set in stone, by nature or nurture. But he can find scant evidence, most days, of little Jerry Prince from Speakeasy, Virginia.

  He did think he might have felt a slight stirring from that long-buried coffin when he went back for the reunion and saw all those bullies of yesterday, laughing and swaggering as if they owned the world instead of one tiny, fourth-rate, forgotten—no, never-known—corner of it, masters of all they can see from atop the piss-ant hill where he grew up. On the way back north, he promised never to go back other than to see his mother, never again to invite into his realm the leering, snickering Ghost of Humiliations Past.

  When Gerald Prince came to New York 24 years ago with
a master’s from Harvard and a couple of short stories published in journals that paid in free copies of the magazine, he aimed to immerse himself in the world of books. He saw himself laboring away for a few years as a poorly paid editor (and, yes, his errant father subsidized him, too) before achieving glory when his talent as a writer was finally, inevitably recognized.

  His one published novel, bought by a woman editor he knew at a smaller rival house, got a good enough review in Publisher’s Weekly, a so-so one in Kirkus, and a Books in Brief mention in the Times that said he “shows some promise despite a tendency to overstate the obvious.” The book, which had an initial run of 10,000 copies, sold less than 3,000. Gerald still has 100 of them boxed up in the basement.

  The promise was not realized in two other manuscripts, neither of which was published, but something amazing happened. He discovered he had a talent for finding talent and developing it. He touted a couple of first-time novelists who soon were Mayfair cash cows. He became known as someone who could not only spot future stars but also gain writers’ trust and get them to believe Gerald’s ideas were their very own, thus ensuring that the changes Gerald sought were realized with a minimum of tantrums and threats to change houses.

  The boy who had to screw up all his courage to ask a girl to the Senior Prom—and was laughed at for his trouble—found himself unbound and reinvented in Manhattan. Over the years, he talked now and then about writing another novel, but he knew finally that he never would. He was what he was, and what he was, was damn good.

  This first day of February, he is on the verge of landing a writer of suspense thrillers whose books make the best-seller list just by bearing his name. Gerald has almost convinced the man that his star can—will—shine even brighter with the determined, relentless commitment of Gerald Prince Books and Mayfair. One more lunch at Le Cirque ought to seal the deal. The pièce de résistance will be when Gerald shows him a proposed cover for his next work-in-progress, with the author’s name approximately 50 percent larger than the title.