“It shouldn’t take much longer from here,” he said, looking out the window again. “Three days perhaps.”
“You did not pack… Or did you?”
He turned to her. “Enough for three days, in a parcel under the front bench.” He rubbed his jaw with his hand.
“No razor though. Never mind. We’re not stopping at any high society balls on the way are we?”
He poured a fourth cup.
The paths were wide but busy, and with Watson blind and Rosti lame, they had to weave carefully back to the motorcar. They pulled out into the street, punters scattering as the klaxon strained, gurgling over the rattle of the starting engine – the sun was already merciless and Kristian kept his helmet off. Once clear of the city he took a hard left.
“I’m going to take us north then east – rather than north east. That will add some time to the trip over all but get us out of the south faster. Any objections?”
There were none.
*
Drowning one’s sorrows with liquor is always a stupid idea for a variety of reasons, Kristian believed. Coffee was a far better medium for the purpose. As he looked out at the titanic line slashed across the countryside, grey merging into some kind of white in the distance; where, here, all things were burned white in the end – his mind demanded a faster motorcar; a faster everything.
He resisted the urge to speak for some time, knowing that when he spoke it would be at a furious pace and difficult to stop. Instead he watched the road – eyes flicking to anything that broke the landscape on either side; he waved (raising the index finger of his right hand) to anyone – motorist or otherwise – coming back the other way. He snaked around the slow-moving trucks over-loaded with the worldly possessions of failed farming families, and with the failed farming families. They looked sunken-eyed and beaten, moving at a crawl back east or north (or east or north for the first time), hearing there was factory work or some kind of work, the pittance they got for their arid plot stashed preciously away. They watched the faster motorcar, Kristian’s strange two-bench utility, swerve left then right and then pull away towards the vanishing point, and the skinny boys at the back watched another vanishing point behind them, drawn further and further into the past.
He’d crossed the mass of land before, from Pennsylvania he’d gone west very young, landing first in the big named places then in the small named places. He’d gone south into Mexico and worked in oil, then north, then back again. When his bike perished he shipped out to Europe, stayed longer than he’d planned, then returned and wound up in Havana, driving the ambulance. He had saved enough to put the first payment on the Chevrolet – using it to run deliveries in the afterhours to make some more on the side, which enabled him to pay it off fast. When the regular ambulances had needed repairs, Kristian was able to use his truck for the interim, as had been the case when he came for Rosti. The interim became the final stage of his time at the hospital; and he’d been planning to leave town anyway, having paid off the motorcar debt.
Watson rested his right arm out on the edge of door. Mrs Hatfield, still in the back seat and behind him – looked out in the same direction. Rosti had dozed off and she’d placed his hat – which Watson had procured from his bag – on his head, pressed down snugly to avoid being whipped off by the wind and tilted forward to protect his face as much as possible. She turned back and looked at Kristian, studying his jawline – now bristling, his lips (still not dried out) and nose (more Roman than Anglo-Saxon, she thought) under the goggles.
“His wound will need dressing soon, I think.”
He turned back to her for a moment, then to the road.
“But we’d have to remove the cast. How?”
She looked at Rosti and spoke quietly.
“The bone broke the skin – that complicates matters a great deal. In hospital… they’d usually have a steel splint in these cases so the wound could be dressed regularly, but you wouldn’t cart a man around in that condition. A break without broken could be treated with a cast right away. They made a mistake in his case, I think… And we’ll have to deal with that.”
Kristian was silent for a moment.
“They are usually very reliable… But there’s nothing for it now. We’ll need to stop again soon, get him opened up and cleaned up, then put on a new cast. Then do the same thing again in three days, am I right?”
She looked out again.
“You are.”
“You’ve seen this kind of thing before, Mrs Hatfield. So have I – we’ll be sure to take good care of him.”
Watson stirred a little and smiled into the darkness.
“Ma’am, when I think about what would have happened if you’d not been there when Mr Rosti took his fall… Well, it makes me very grateful you missed that train.”
“I did only what I could, Mr Watson. And I’m also grateful I missed that train.”
Watson remembered the note he’d scrawled and pinned to the rail depot door… The café was Rosti’s and he was answerable to no one for closing it, but the depot required an explanation. Watson had not written anything for years but knew where Rosti’s desk was and scrounged for a sheet of paper and then, carefully and painstakingly, inscribed four words on the page from memory, vertically, spaced well apart to avoid the danger of merging.
R O S T I
B R O K E
L E G
H O S P I T A L
He’d pinned it to the front door of the depot without knowing if it were the right way up, something that had bothered him fiercely at the time, but he’d shrugged it off later. He’d been blind when he met Rosti but had asked him the spelling of his name out of curiosity. Now he wondered how the rail company would react to finding the note.
Kristian wondered about the money situation. Care for Mr Rosti was going to cost, and he was sure they’d absconded from Havana before paying for the night at the hospital. He had some savings in cash hidden in his vehicle, as he did not trust banks, and thought Mrs Hatfield looked comfortable – but couldn’t be certain. He was certain about anything pertaining to that woman, he had concluded, to the point of wondering if Hatfield was her real name. The name had sounded familiar from the start and in time Kristian had remembered he’d heard a little about the Hatfields and the McCoys.
The practicality of running out on a medical bill in every town at which they stopped for Rosti was dubious so Kristian considered their options. There was a chance his wound had healed well, and wouldn’t need further dressing – but they needed to have a look to find out.
One of the joys of coffee, Kristian mused to himself, is the speed it gives you to outrun your troubles. He was hurtling towards thirty, or at least he saw it that way, and there was no outrunning that. Time and tide wait for no man, apparently. He asked himself what he had done with his first three decades, then wrote off the first ten years as a learning curve, then excluded the next five out of generosity. Fifteen years is a long time to waste, he decided.
He looked at the dash and the steering wheel in his hands, at the road in front of him – perpetually unchanging. So this is what it’s all about? He wondered. All the books and all the so-called smarts and all his clever facts and sayings had him a glorified taxi driver, then a fugitive from a debt for a stranger, then a potential murderer, then a nobody - nowhere. He looked around and decided he preferred barren wildernesses to farms, though he preferred big cities to deserts – you could get lost in either adequately. He started to increase speed, easing down on the gas. If it were not for his passengers he would have pushed the motorcar to the limit and maybe, in time, plough it into another crowd, or a wall, or off a bridge. Why not? Kristian thought. It’s all immaterial really. He looked at Watson, face and nose turned out to the panorama. What was he thinking? What did he see? Memories connected to the other sensations, Kristian thought, fuelled the imagined vision. He considered those unlike Watson – those born blind. What did they imagine? How did they dream? Did they se
e colours without knowing what they were or what to call them? He could hear Rosti snoring gently behind him and was aware, as ever, of Mrs Hatfield just over his shoulder. He pictured her there, dark hair wild now in the dry wind, but resolute and otherwise unrattled. He pictured her there and sometimes fancied he felt her eyes on him, which brought a prickling heat up his neck distinct from that wrought by the sun. If it weren’t for his passengers, he thought, he could put a decisive end to this nonsense.
Kristian told himself to forget about the lynch mob – they had it coming far more than any poor bastard shot by the police or in war or knocked down by someone driving drunk; infinitely more, he amended. He understood, on a logical level, that the turn of his cynicism into a dangerously virulent strain of fatalism was only temporary - a product of the trauma of the mob - but logical conclusions could be powerless in the face of irrepressible feeling. This too will pass, he told himself. Better to put it aside, get to New York, track down his brother and take it from there.
He reached into the glove compartment and without a word handed a folded map to Mrs Hatfield. She held it and looked up at him, and he turned back to the road.
“Any place in particular you like? We’re going to need to choose one before sundown.”
* * *
While those among Comely’s men at the yard who bore guns did so out of necessity, the man kept a distinct line between the yard and his other activities. How could Comely pay so well? Why did he hire anyone – fresh off the boat, even without English or skills? Why was he comfortable with over-staffing, generous leave provisions (at a time when such a phrase barely existed) and all manner of other things that would have caused seizures in most bosses? Into Comely’s favourite and one hundred per cent legitimate enterprise flowed subsidising funds from a series of unseemly sources. The men whom he employed in unseemly capacities would never meet those of the yard in a professional capacity; though in a big city chance encounters are always possible.
Comely had not slept. He’d come down from the roof and taken the call just after one am, then gone back up stairs, creating a pile cigarette butts as he watched the sun rise over his city. The purge of the den had been a mistake, he knew even before it happened, a massive overreaction generated purely by feeling. (‘Mood is a thing for cattle and love play,’ he reminded himself; using a line he’d heard from some young writer.) He stank of cigarettes and the shower didn’t help. He emerged blearily into the street below and it was too early, even for him. It could be dangerous to be on the streets now; and he reached into his pocket for the comfort of his blade handle. He’d not carried it for years but it had sat in the bottom draw of his desk for an occasion such as this. He remembered he’d not checked with the concierge and quickly turned back. It was a Friday morning, which meant little. It was Sunday he was worried about.
The wiry and brylcreamed concierge, a Mr Jeppe, almost stood to attention as Comely approached. The man held up a worn-out wave and Jeppe relaxed.
“No telegrams or telephone messages AC, but there was some mail.”
Jeppe handed over a note – it read only ‘The yard at seven.’ and he recognised Robert’s writing. No stamp, of course, he’d delivered himself that morning – before sunrise.
Comely made for the subway quickly, eschewing the habits of a lifetime in favour of speed. ‘Phobias are foolish,’ he told himself and moved down the stairs with ease. He was tired; the kind that turns keeping your eyes open into a gymnastic effort and makes you feel like you need to brush your teeth every half hour. So what. He stood on the subway despite the abundance of empty seats, drawing curious looks from the smattering of patrons. The suits usually rode the subway between eight and nine, if at all, so he looked out of place. He smiled at their curious looks and gripped tightly the leather handle hanging down. This is not so bad, he told himself. In every room and every situation Comely would firstly establish the nearest exit in the event of an emergency. In the subway, once aboard, such a thing was impossible. He had always thought of it as a giant coffin on wheels, and had no such fear of buses or street cars.
An old woman sitting next to him looked up.
“Nice suit fella.”
“Thank you ma’am.”
She smiled more gap than teeth; her face balling into a spidery map of history. She was stocky-framed and strong; you could have built (and did build) a nation on her shoulders. He decided to sit down beside her rather than seem aloof.
“You eye-talians know how to dress.”
“I’m not…”
“Sure you’re not fella, assimilated and all that, probably changed your name to Stone or something. But it’s no big deal, we’re all from somewhere ‘part from those poor damn heathen savages. They’re from here, which means they’re from nowhere.”
Comely watched.
“Here is nowhere fella. Here is the big empty. Isn’t that what you people are looking for?”
“Us people?”
“You people, any people. There’s plenty of you all going to Aus-tray-lya too. Old countries are too full of people and thoughts; too full of debts and sorrows you know. Out here we got nothin’ and it goes on forever.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“People sure, cities too, roads roads and buildings too, but what else? What before that? Graves too, (maybe) blood out here watering the cotton and under the bridges; but it’s red and black, fella, and you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Someone has to.”
“Well not you. Your fingerprints not on the handle, you know? I just got here, you can tell ‘em, it was like this when I got here. But some of these other people, these people so proud they’ve got the founding fathers in their tree, they’ve got to ask themselves what it is they’ve really inherited, what else is in that damn tree of theirs. So you’re lucky, fella, no one knows anything about your tree – you left it behind, roots and all!”
She rattled out a laugh and the few others around her on the train shifted uncomfortably, but not Comely.
“What do you see when you look out these windows? Bricks. Twenty years of bricks and not a name on ‘em. Boys that built these tunnels – some of ‘em never even got to take a ride. No one knows they are buried here too you know. No one cares anyhow, so what’s it worth if they know? Now you know fella, are you going to care? You don’t have to. You didn’t put ‘em there. Who have you put in the ground?”
He watched her eyes; sparking in the middle of that web, brightly striking off against her mess of hair and tightly crumpled face, flashing its lonely yellow teeth and smiling.
“Sometimes,” he started and she nodded with joy. “Sometimes they aren’t buried deep enough.”
“The whole city’s full of them that are like that fella!” she said triumphantly.
The train was shuddering to a halt and it was Comely’s stop.
“My stop,” he said. “So long ma’am. You take care now.”
“You too sweetheart.”
As he stepped through the doors and she cried out;
“And fella!”
He turned sharply and she smiled, holding up one hand.
“God bless.”
The doors slid shut.
* * *
Impatience is the child of stupid people and the mother of stupid actions.
As such; the right kind of demagogue - no matter how ridiculous, or hideous, or even charmless - can find followers enough to be dangerous.
Judah Bauer, Judd to the goyim, was safe from the demagogues menacing the lands of his ancestors. Six years previously, he had written to cousins in Gdansk and Praha; urging them to come to the United States. When these were met with a cool response; he persisted – and in time they looked for an exit. America too far, they had said. ‘From where?’ he had answered. First they found the doors closed throughout the seemingly safer parts of the continent and its satellite, and then when lady liberty looked like gathering up her toga and turning tail
Bauer had written letters and knocked on doors like a man possessed. No Nazi sons of bitches would get their hands on his people, he resolved, even if he had to swim the Atlantic towing them on a raft.
“That suit of yours,” his wife Stella had said. “With that suit of yours we could have put our kids through college.”
He’d stumped up a small fortune for a tailored-suit, shirt and tie (with a pin), paid the barber for a cut-throat shave (every important morning) and had been a gadfly in the office of every official he had to charm, flatter, threaten, pester and pound.
Before that, Bauer had been a man of simple tastes – intelligently frugal, always thinking of the future – but he remembered what his old man had said to him the day they stepped off the boat from Russia.
“Here is as home; you must be twice as good for them to think you half the man.”