The Affair

Later the waitress came back and picked up my plate and offered me dessert. She said she had great pies. I said, "I’m going to take a walk. I’ll look in again on my way back and if those two are still here, then I’ll stop in for pie. I guess there’s no hurrying them."

"Not usually," the waitress said.

I paid for the burger and the coffee and added a tip that didn’t compare to a roomful of hungry Rangers, but it was enough to make her smile a little. Then I headed back to the street. The night was turning cold and there was a little mist in the air. I turned right and strolled past the vacant lot and the Sheriff’s Department building. Pellegrino’s car was parked outside and there was a glow in one window suggesting an interior room was occupied. I kept on going and came to the T where we had turned. To the left was the way Pellegrino had brought me in, through the forest. To the right that road continued east into the darkness. Presumably it crossed the railroad line and then led onward through the wrong side of town to Kelham. Garber had described it as a dirt track, which it might have been once. Now it was a standard rural road, with a stony surface bound with tar. It was dead straight and unlit. There were deep ditches either side of it. There was a thin moon in the sky, and a little light to see by. I turned right and walked on into the gloom.

10

Two minutes and two hundred yards later I found the railroad track. First came the warning sign on the shoulder of the road, two diagonal arms bolted together at ninety degrees, one marked RAILROAD and the other marked CROSSING. There were red lights attached to the pole and somewhere beyond it there would be an electric bell in a box. Twenty yards farther on the ditches either side of the road ended abruptly, and the track itself was up on a hump, gleaming faintly in the moonlight, two parallel rails running not very level and not completely straight north and south, looking old and worn and short on maintenance. The gravel bed was lumpy and compacted and matted with weeds. I stood on a tie between the rails and looked first one way and then the other. Twenty yards to the north, on the left, was the shadowy bulk of an old ruined water tower, still with a wide soft hose like an elephant’s trunk, which once must have been connected to Carter Crossing’s freshwater spring, and which once must have stood ready to replenish the greedy steam locomotives that halted there.

I turned a full 360 in the dark. There was absolute stillness and silence everywhere. I could smell charcoal on the night air, maybe from where the blue car had burned the trees to the north. I could smell barbecue faintly in the east, where I guessed the rest of the township was, on the wrong side of the tracks. But I could see only darkness in that direction. Just the suggestion of a hole through the woods, where the road ran, and then nothing more.

I turned back the way I had come, the hard road under my feet, thinking about pie, and I saw headlights in the distance. A large car or a small truck, coming straight at me, moving slow. At one point it looked ready to make the turn into Main Street, and then it seemed to change its mind. Maybe it had picked me up in its beams. It straightened again and kept on coming. I kept on walking. It was a blunt-nosed pick-up truck. It dipped and wallowed over the humps in the road. Its lights rose and fell in the mist. I could hear a low wet burble from a worn V-8 motor.

It came over into the wrong lane and stopped twenty feet from me and idled. I couldn’t see who was in it. Too much glare. I walked on. I wasn’t about to step into the weeds, and the shoulder was narrow anyway, because of the ditch on my right, so I held my course, which was going to take me close to the driver’s door. The driver saw me coming, and when I was ten feet out he dropped his window and put his left wrist on the door and his left elbow in my path. By that point there was enough light spill to make him out. He was a civilian, white, heavy, wearing a T-shirt with the sleeve rolled above a thick arm covered in fur and ink. He had long hair that hadn’t been washed for a week or more.

Three choices.

First, stop and chat.

Second, step into the weeds between the pavement and the ditch, and pass him by.

Third, break his arm.

I chose the first option. I stopped. But I didn’t chat. Not immediately. I just stood there.

There was a second man in the passenger seat. Same type of a guy. Fur, ink, hair, dirt, grease. But not identical. A cousin, maybe, not a brother. Both men looked right at me, with the kind of smug, low-wattage insolence some kinds of strangers get in some kinds of bars. I looked right back at them. I’m not that kind of stranger.

The driver said, "Who are you and where are you going?"

I said nothing. I’m good at saying nothing. I don’t like talking. I could go the rest of my life without saying another word, if I had to.

The driver said, "I asked you a question."

I thought: two questions, actually. But I said nothing. I didn’t want to have to hit the guy. Not with my hands. I’m no hygiene freak, but even so, with a guy like that, I would feel the need to wash up afterward, extensively, with good soap, especially if there was pie in my future. So I planned on kicking him instead. I saw the moves in my head: he opens his door, he steps out, he comes around the door toward me, and then he goes down, puking and retching and clutching his groin.

No major difficulty.

He said, "Do you speak English?"

I said nothing.

The guy in the passenger seat said, "Maybe he’s a Mexican."

The driver asked me, "Are you a Mexican?"

I didn’t answer.

The driver said, "He doesn’t look like a Mexican. He’s too big."

Which was true in a general sense, although I had heard of a guy from Mexico called Jose Calderon Torres, who had stood seven feet six and a quarter inches, which was more than a foot taller than me. And I remembered a Mexican guy called Jose Garces from the LA Olympics, who had cleaned-and-jerked more than four hundred and twenty pounds, which was probably what the two guys in the truck weighed both together.

The driver asked, "Are you coming in from Kelham?"

There’s a risk of bad feeling between the town and the base, Garber had said. People are always tribal, when it comes right down to it. Maybe these guys had known Janice May Chapman. Maybe they couldn’t understand why she had dated soldiers, and not them. Maybe they had never looked in a mirror.

I said nothing. But I didn’t walk on. I didn’t want the truck loose behind me. Not in a lonely spot, not on a dark country road. I just stood there, looking directly at the two guys, at their faces, first one, then the other, with nothing much in my own face except frankness and skepticism and a little amusement. It’s a look that usually works. It usually provokes something, out of a certain type of person.

It provoked the passenger first.

He wound his window down and reared up through it, almost all the way out to his waist, twisting and leaning so he could face me directly across the hood of the truck. He held on to the pillar with one hand and moved the other through a fast violent arc, like he was cracking a whip or throwing something at me. He said, "We’re talking to you, asshole."

I said nothing.

He said, "Is there a reason I don’t get out of this truck and kick your butt?"

I said, "Two hundred and six reasons."

He said, "What?"

"That’s how many bones you got in your body. I could break them all before you put a glove on me."

Which got his buddy going. His instinct was to stick up for his friend and face down a challenge. He leaned further out his own window and said, "You think?"

I said, "Often all day long. It’s a good habit to have." Which shut the guy up, while he tried to piece together what I meant. He went back over our conversation in his head. His lips were moving.