CHAPTER 10 #2
“The room closes tonight,” I said, “and it does not open in this town again.”
“The room is closed. It does not open in this town again.”
“It is closed,” the man with the book said. “You have my word on it and you have the book to go with it.”
He slid the room’s paper across the felt at me and I told him to burn it where I could see him do it.
He did that in the steel sink behind the bar, holding one corner until the last of it curled and went.
The signed sheet itself was five hours east in another man’s file and I did not pretend otherwise.
What I bought in that room was the room.
The boy rode with the bag on his knees and would not put it in the back seat when I told him twice that he could.
“I want to know about the house.”
“It sits there and nobody takes it off you,” I said. “I had the water shut and the mail held this morning.”
“I have been out of this county twice in my life,” he said.
“You are about to be out of it for good, and that is not a punishment.”
“I want to know if she has been told.”
“She has not been told yet,” I said. “She hears it from me tonight, all of it, and by then you will be somewhere with a door that locks.”
“I do not know one person outside this county.”
“You will know one person,” I said, “and she is going to call you every night until you get sick of hearing from her.”
He cried with his face turned to the window and his jaw locked down so it would not make any noise. He did it fast. He had the whole of it finished inside a minute, which is quicker than most grown men manage the same job.
“Do not tell her I cried. Tell her I was rude to you.”
“You were rude to me,” I said. “I will lead with that part.”
Seventeen days. I had known her seventeen days.
I drove five hours west with somebody else’s money for a boy who is nothing to me, and there is one reason for it and I am not going to dress the reason up. I love her. That is the entire answer, it arrived in a hot car at the top of her street this morning, and it has not moved an inch since.
It costs me the part of my life where I got to say I did not want anything.
I had that for six years. It was restful, it was cheap to run, and it is gone, and I am not getting it back by pretending I did any of this for the paperwork.
The tunnel key was on the ring in my pocket, copper and dead since they changed the core, and I have not taken it off.
The sun goes off that street early. The hills take it. I pulled into the unlit lot across from the gas station to look at a front tire I had been listening to since the county line, and by then it was dusk, and the canopy over the pumps was the brightest thing for nine miles in any direction.
A man stood under it with his hands empty and hanging. No pump in either one. No cup, no phone, no keys, no reason to be standing where he was standing. He was not looking at me and he was not looking away from me either.
I crouched to the tire. Four seconds, five. When I came up off my heel the concrete under the canopy was empty, and no car had pulled out, and the door of the store had not swung, and the light went on burning over nothing at all.
Telling the boy about it would have bought me nothing. I got in, locked the doors, and drove east until the hills flattened out and let go of us.
Thorne called me on the road at twenty past eight and asked, courteously, whether I would give him half an hour at the house before I went in. I said yes before I had decided to. I put the boy where he is going to be, and it is out of that state, and it is nobody’s business but hers and mine.
The gravel at Harrowgate is raked white and at half past ten at night it read blue.
There were lilies in the hall, in a month with no business having them, and enough of them that somebody had ordered them over a telephone from a city.
Thorne met me at the door himself, which he did not have to do, and that was the first move of the night.
The library had a longcase clock at the far end with the moon dial painted out.
Painted, and never taken off, a flat cream disk of house paint over the aperture with the brush marks left standing in it.
On the table beside his chair sat a japanned box with a wax seal across the hasp.
Neither of us touched it and I did not ask him one thing about it.
He waited until I was through the door and had heard it shut behind me. “You have driven a long way for a boy who is not yours, Mr. Ferrante.”
“I had the day free.”
“Sit down, please,” he said. “You have not eaten since the middle of Pennsylvania.”
I stayed on my feet. He poured two glasses anyway and set one down where I would have to reach across the table for it, and then he never mentioned it again.
“You settled a room today that was not yours to settle.”
“It is settled.”
“You paid a local book with money that did not come from this state,” he said. “It interests me a great deal more than the boy does.”
“The boy is out of that town and the room is shut,” I said. “I am not going to walk you through the accounting.”
“I am not scolding you at all. I am admiring the economy of it.”
Silver hair, and hands gone papery at the knuckles, and no hurry anywhere in the man. He turned his glass a quarter turn on the wood and did not drink out of it.
“There is a board that would restore your license, and I sit on the thing that appoints it.”
He was not selling it to me. That is the part that got in under my ribs. He said it flat, with no hook on the end of it, the plain tone one man uses to tell another man his tail light is out.
“Tell me what it costs.”
“It costs nothing at all for the moment,” he said. “In a quiet month I would like a standing answer to a single question. Tell me who comes and goes from that building at night, and what they carry.”
“No.”
“You have not asked what the answer would be worth.”
“I do not need the number,” I said. “It is no tonight and it is no the next time you ask me.”
He nodded once. He did not look disappointed and he did not look surprised, and I have met precisely two men who can do both of those at the same moment. He walked me to the door himself. He did not ask after her, and that was worse than being asked.
“Go carefully,” he said. “The deer are bad on that road after a warm day.”
The gravel took my weight loud all the way to the car.
I had the driver’s door open and the keys in my left hand and one foot inside when the shape at the corner of the house came off the wall and set itself three feet off my shoulder.
Shaved head. A white scar hooked into the corner of his mouth.
The man from under the canopy, five hours west, hands empty and hanging, unchanged.
“I have already been where you are going.”