by Paul Auster
When Dwight told him where they were, Sachs was appalled by how far he had drifted off course. He had evidently walked over the hill and down the other side, landing two towns to the east of where he lived. He had covered only ten miles on foot, but the return distance by car was well over thirty. For no particular reason, he decided to spill the whole business to Dwight. Out of gratitude, perhaps, or simply because he found it amusing now. Maybe the kid would tell it to his buddies on the softball team, and they’d all have a good laugh at his expense. Sachs didn’t care. It was an exemplary tale, a classic moron joke, and he didn’t mind being the butt of his own folly. The city slicker plays Daniel Boone in the Vermont woods, and look what happens to him, fellas. But once he began to talk about his misadventures, Dwight responded with unexpected compassion. The same thing had happened to him once, he told Sachs, and it hadn’t been a bit of fun. He’d only been eleven or twelve at the time, and he’d been scared shitless, crouching behind a tree the whole night waiting for a bear to attack him. Sachs couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that Dwight was inventing this story to make him feel a little less miserable. In any case, the kid didn’t laugh at him. In fact, once he’d heard what Sachs had to say, he even offered to drive him home. He was running late as it was, he said, but a few more minutes wouldn’t make any difference, and Christ, if he were in Sachs’s shoes, he’d expect someone to do the same for him.
They were traveling along a paved road at that point, but Dwight said he knew a shortcut to Sachs’s house. It meant turning around and backtracking for a couple of miles, but once he worked out the arithmetic in his head, he decided it made sense to change course. So he slammed on the brakes, did a U-turn in the middle of the road, and headed back in the other direction. The shortcut turned out to be the narrowest of dirt trails, a bumpy, one-lane sliver of ground that cut through a dark, tree-clogged patch of woods. Not many people knew about it, Dwight said, but if he wasn’t mistaken it would lead them to a somewhat wider dirt road and that second road would spit them out on the county highway about four miles from Sachs’s house. Dwight probably knew what he was talking about, but he never got a chance to demonstrate the correctness of his theory. Less than a mile after they started down the first dirt road, they ran into something unexpected. And before they could move around it, their journey came to an end.
It all happened very quickly. Sachs experienced it as a churning in the gut, a spinning in the head, a rush of fear in the veins. He was so exhausted, he told me, and so little time elapsed from beginning to end, that he could never quite absorb it as real—not even in retrospect, not even when he sat down to tell me about it two years later.’ One moment, they were tooling along through the woods, he said, and the next moment they had stopped. A man was standing up ahead of them on the road, leaning against the trunk of a white Toyota and smoking a cigarette. He looked to be in his late thirties: a tallish, slender man dressed in a flannel work shirt and loose khaki pants. The only other thing Sachs noticed was that he had a beard—not unlike the one he used to wear himself, but darker. Thinking the man must be having car trouble, Dwight climbed out of the truck and walked toward him, asking if he needed help. Sachs couldn’t hear the man’s response, but the tone sounded angry, unnecessarily hostile somehow, and as he continued to watch them through the windshield, he was surprised when the man answered Dwight’s next question with something even more vicious: fuck off, or get the fuck away from me, words to that effect. That was when the adrenaline started pumping through him, Sachs said, and he instinctively reached for the metal bat on the floor. Dwight was too good-natured to take the hint, however. He kept on walking toward the man, shrugging off the insult as if it didn’t matter, repeating that he only wanted to help. The man backed away in agitation, and then he ran around to the front of the car, opened the door on the passenger’s side, and reached for something in the glove compartment. When he straightened up and turned toward Dwight again, there was a gun in his hand. He fired it once. The big kid howled and clutched his stomach, and then the man fired again. The kid howled a second time and started staggering up the road, moaning and weeping in pain. The man turned to follow him with his eyes, and Sachs jumped out of the truck, holding the bat in his right hand. He didn’t even think, he told me. He rushed up behind the man just as the third shot went off, got a good grip on the handle of the bat, and swung for all he was worth. He aimed for the man’s head—hoping to split his skull in two, hoping to kill him, hoping to empty his brains all over the ground. The bat landed with horrific force, smashing into a spot just behind the man’s right ear. Sachs heard the thud of impact, the cracking of cartilage and bone, and then the man dropped. He just fell down dead in the middle of the road, and everything went quiet.
Sachs ran over to Dwight, but when he bent down to examine the kid’s body, he saw that the third shot had killed him. The bullet had gone straight into the back of his head, and his cranium was shattered. Sachs had lost his chance. It was all a matter of timing, and he had been too slow. If he had managed to get to the man a split-second earlier, that last shot would have missed, and instead of looking down at a corpse, he would have been bandaging Dwight’s wounds, doing everything he could to save his life. A moment after he thought this thought, Sachs felt his own body start to tremble. He sat down on the road, put his head between his knees, and struggled not to throw up. Time passed. He felt the air blowing through his clothes; he heard a blue jay squawking in the woods; he shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he picked up a handful of loose dirt from the road and crushed it against his face. He put the dirt in his mouth and chewed it, letting the grit scrape against his teeth, feeling the pebbles against his tongue. He chewed until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and then he vent over and spat the mess out, groaning like a sick, demented animal.
If Dwight had lived, he said, the whole story would have been different. The idea of running away never would have occurred to him, and once that first step had been eliminated, none of the things that followed from it would have happened. But standing out there alone in the woods, Sachs suddenly fell into a deep, unbridled panic. Two men were dead, and the idea of going to the state troopers seemed unimaginable to him. He had already served time in prison. He was a convicted felon, and without any witnesses to corroborate his story, no one was going to believe a word he said. It was all too bizarre, too implausible. He wasn’t thinking too clearly, of course, but whatever thoughts he had were centered entirely on himself. He couldn’t do anything for Dwight, but at least he could save his own skin, and in his panic the only solution that came to him was to get the hell away from there.
He knew the police would figure out that a third man had been present. It would be obvious that Dwight and the stranger hadn’t killed each other, since a man with three bullets in his body would scarcely have the strength to bludgeon someone to death, and even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to walk twenty feet down the road after he had done it, least of all with one of those bullets lodged in his skull. Sachs also knew that he was bound to leave some traces behind him. No matter how assiduously he cleaned up after himself, a competent forensic team would have no trouble unearthing something to work with: a footprint, a strand of hair, a microscopic fragment. But none of that would make any difference. As long as he managed to remove his fingerprints from the truck, as long as he remembered to take the bat with him, there wouldn’t be anything to identify him as the missing man. That was the crucial point. He had to make sure that the missing man could have been anyone. Once he did that, he would be home free.
He spent several minutes wiping down the surfaces of the truck: the dashboard, the seat, the windows, the inside and outside door handles, everything he could think of. As soon as he was finished, he did it again, and then he did it once more for good measure. After collecting the bat from the ground, he opened the door of the stranger’s car, saw that the key was still in the ignition, and climbed in behind the wheel. The engine kicked over on the first try. There wer
e going to be tread marks, of course, and those marks would remove any doubt that a third man had been there, but Sachs was too frightened to leave on foot. That’s what would have made the most sense: to walk away, to go home, to forget the whole nasty business. But his heart was pounding too fast for that, his thoughts were charging out of control, and deliberate actions of that sort were no longer possible. He craved speed. He craved the speed and noise of the car, and now that he was ready, all he wanted was to be gone, to be sitting in the car and driving as fast as he could. Only that would be able to match the tumult inside him. Only that would allow him to silence the roar of terror in his head.
He drove north on the interstate for two and a half hours, following the Connecticut River until he reached the latitude of Barre. That was where hunger finally got the better of him. He was afraid he’d have trouble holding the food down, but he hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours, and he knew he had to give it a try. He pulled off the interstate at the next exit, drove along a two-lane road for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then stopped for lunch in a small town whose name he couldn’t remember. Taking no chances, he ordered soft-boiled eggs and toast. After he was done, he went into the men’s room and cleaned himself up, soaking his head in a sinkful of warm water and removing the twigs and dirt stains from his clothes. It made him feel much better. By the time he paid his bill and walked out of the restaurant, he understood that the next step was to turn around and go to New York. It wasn’t going to be possible to keep the story to himself. That much was clear now, and once he realized he had to talk to someone, he knew that person had to be Fanny. In spite of everything that had happened in the past year, he suddenly ached to see her again.
As he walked toward the dead man’s car, Sachs noticed that it had California license plates. He wasn’t sure what to make of this discovery, but it surprised him just the same. How many other details had he missed? he wondered. Before returning to the interstate and heading south, he turned off the main road and parked at the edge of what appeared to be a large forest preserve. It was a secluded spot, with no signs of anyone for miles around. Sachs opened all four doors of the car, got down on his hands and knees, and systematically combed the interior. Thorough as he was, the results of this search were disappointing. He found a few coins wedged under the front seat, some wadded-up balls of paper strewn about the floor (fast-food wrappers, ticket stubs, crumpled cigarette packs), but nothing with a name on it, nothing that told him a single fact about the man he had killed. The glove compartment was similarly blank, containing nothing but the Toyota owner’s manual, a box of thirty-eight-caliber bullets, and an unopened carton of Camel filters. That left the trunk, and when Sachs finally got around to opening it, the trunk proved to be a different matter.
There were three bags inside it. The largest one was filled with clothes, shaving equipment, and maps. At the very bottom, tucked away in a small white envelope, there was a passport. When he looked at the photograph on the first page, Sachs recognized the man from that morning—the same man minus the beard. The name given was Reed Dimaggio, middle initial N. Date of birth: November 12, 1950. Place of birth: Newark, New Jersey. The passport had been issued in San Francisco the previous July, and the back pages were empty, with no visa stamps or customs markings. Sachs wondered if it hadn’t been forged. Given what had taken place in the woods that morning, it seemed almost certain that Dwight wasn’t the first person Dimaggio had killed. And if he was a professional thug, there was a chance that he had been traveling with false documents. Still, the name was somehow too singular, too odd not to have been real. It must have belonged to someone, and for want of any other clues concerning the man’s identity, Sachs decided to accept that someone as the man he had killed. Reed Dimaggio. Until something better came along, that was the name he would give him.
The next article was a steel suitcase, one of those shiny silver boxes that photographers sometimes carry their equipment in. The first bag had opened without a key, but this one was locked, and Sachs spent half an hour struggling to pry the hinges loose from their bolts. He hammered away at them with the jack and tire iron, and every time the box moved, he heard metallic objects rattling around inside it. He assumed they were weapons: knives, guns, and bullets, the tools of Dimaggio’s trade. When the box finally relented, however, it yielded up a baffling collection of bric-a-brac, not at all what Sachs had been expecting. He found spools of electric wire, alarm clocks, screwdrivers, micro chips, string, putty, and several rolls of black duct tape. One by one, he picked up each item and studied it, groping to fathom its purpose, but even after he had sifted through the entire contents of the box, he still couldn’t guess what these things signified. It was only later that it hit him—long after he was back on the road. Driving down to New York that night, he suddenly understood that these were the materials for constructing a bomb.
The third piece of luggage was a bowling bag. There was nothing remarkable about it (a small leather pouch with red, white, and blue panels, a zipper, and a white plastic handle), but it frightened Sachs more than the other two, and he had instinctively saved it for last. Anything could have been hidden in there, he realized. Considering that it belonged to a madman, to a homicidal maniac, that anything became more and more monstrous for him to contemplate. By the time he had finished with the other two bags, Sachs had nearly lost the courage to open it. Rather than confront what his imagination had put in there, he had nearly talked himself into throwing it away. But he didn’t. Just when he was on the point of lifting it out of the trunk and tossing it into the woods, he closed his eyes, hesitated, and then, with a single frantic tug, undid the zipper.
There was no head in the bag. There were no severed ears, no lopped-off fingers, no private parts. What there was was money. And not just a little money, but lots of it, more money than Sachs had ever seen in one place before. The bag was packed solid with it: thick bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills fastened with rubber bands, each bundle representing three, four, or five thousand dollars. When Sachs had finished counting them, he was reasonably sure that the total fell somewhere between one hundred sixty and one hundred sixty-five thousand. His first response on discovering the cash was relief, gratitude that his fears had come to naught. Then, as he added it up for the first time, a sense of shock and giddiness. The next time he counted the bills, however, he found himself getting used to them. That was the strangest part of it, he told me: how quickly he digested the whole improbable occurrence. By the time he counted the money again, he had already begun to think of it as his own.
He kept the cigarettes, the softball bat, the passport, and the money. Everything else he threw away, scattering the contents of the suitcase and the metal strongbox deep inside the woods. A few minutes after that, he deposited the empty luggage in a dumpster at the edge of town. It was past four o’clock by then, and he had a long drive ahead of him. He stopped for another meal in Springfield, Massachusetts, smoking Dimaggio’s Camels as he filled himself with extra coffee, and then made it down to Brooklyn a little after one in the morning. That was where he abandoned the car, leaving it on one of the cobbled streets near the Gowanus Canal, a no-man’s-land of empty warehouses and packs of thin, roving dogs. He was careful to scrub the surfaces clean of fingerprints, but that was just an added precaution. The doors were unlocked, the key was in the ignition, and the car was sure to be stolen before the night was out.
He traveled the rest of the way on foot, carrying the bowling bag in one hand and the softball bat and cigarettes in the other. At the corner of Fifth Avenue and President Street, he slid the bat into a crowded trash receptacle, angling it in among the heaped-up newspapers and cracked melon rinds. That was the last piece of business he had to think about. There was still another mile to go, but in spite of his exhaustion, he trudged on toward his apartment with a growing sense of calm. Fanny would be there for him, he thought, and once he saw her, the worst of it would be finished.
