far, Grimes is gonna have me kill him.”
Gorman yawned, then rubbed his cheek. “His friend’s got weird eyes, like he don’t give two shits about nothin’. You notice?”
Valdez said, “I noticed.”
“What are you gonna do about him?” Gorman said.
Valdez shrugged. “If he makes me,” he said, “I guess I kill him too.”
POLK returned to Route 4 and headed northwest. Constantine glanced at the old man, who was grinning now, humming something through his teeth, as if he had not been threatened, as if fifteen minutes earlier he had not been pushed down into the dirt.
“Listen, Polk, about that back there-”
“Don’t sweat it,” Polk said. “That was acting. We’re all a bunch of actors, understand? Anyway, you played it right.”
Constantine watched the signs as they approached 301. He could take that south across the Potomac River Bridge into Virginia, maybe down into the Carolinas, maybe back to Murrel’s Inlet. He could do that and get away from this, right now.
“I’ll get out up ahead,” he said.
Polk smiled. “Don’t give up on me yet, Connie. We’ll swing back and pick up that money tomorrow morning, then shoot south. In the meantime, we’ll just head on into D.C. for the night. I’ve got a girlfriend we can stay with, a swell girl by the name of Charlotte.” Polk turned his head and winked at Constantine “She’s got girlfriends, too.”
Constantine drummed his fingers on the dash as they passed across 301. The traffic had thickened, and the air had lost its green smell. “Washington-I don’t think so, Polk.”
Polk looked at Constantine’s dour expression, his slightly pale face. “What the hell’s wrong with you, son? We drive into town, we spend the night, we’re gone in the morning. You can count on it.”
“It’s no big deal,” Constantine said without conviction.
“So what’s the problem?”
“There isn’t any, I guess. It’s just”-Constantine cleared his throat-“I was raised in D.C., understand? And I haven’t been back in seventeen years.”
Polk and Constantine drove in silence for the next few miles. Finally Polk looked across the bench. “We don’t have to go in,” Polk said. “Not if you don’t want.”
Constantine squirmed in his seat, pushed hair away from his face. “Fuck it, Polk,” he said. “Just drive.”
Polk grinned. “No big deal, right Connie? We pick up the money in the morning, and then we drift south, That okay by you?”
“Sure,” said Constantine. “Long as we keep drifting.”
Chapter 3
Long as we keep drifting.
That had been Constantine’s sole conviction for the past seventeen years.
He had left home at eighteen, a summer graduate of a military high school academy, enlisting immediately for a four-year stint in me Marine Corps. He loathed both the order and the ridiculous concept of uniformed teenagers that marked his high school years, and had in fact possessed both the grades and the SAT scores for entrance into a moderately respectable liberal arts college. But he had enlisted in the corps partly because it was a free, stringless ticket out of the neighborhood, and specifically because it was against his father’s wishes.
His father had said, in a rare display of emotion, that “only trash go into the service these days,” and Constantine had said, “Is that all you’ve got to say about it? How about ‘good luck’?” His father’s only reply was, “You disgust me.”
On the last night before he shipped out, Constantine stayed with his girlfriend Katherine, whom he had met at the Catholic sister school dance the previous fall. They smoked from a bag of Colombian, drank cherry wine, and made love throughout the night on the hill that led to the woods bordering the neighborhood’s elementary school. At dawn, Katherine promised to write every week. Constantine kissed her one last time and walked back to his house to get his gear.
His father was up in his own bedroom dressing for work. Constantine retrieved his duffel bag and sat in the dark stillness of the living room, waiting for his father to come downstairs and say good-bye. But his father did not come down the stairs, and after a while Constantine put the strap of the duffel bag across his shoulder and walked out into the street.
Later that day, his friends Mai and Gary, a couple of spent-heads, drove him to the airport in Mal’s ‘68 Firebird, in part because Constantine said they could finish the rest of his weed before he got on the plane. This they did, and in what was to become an informal pattern, Constantine would desensitize himself with drugs and alcohol before departing for new pastures.
At the airport that day, Constantine bought a magazine from the newsstand. It was the month of October in 1975, and Constantine could always peg the date of his matriculation into boot camp, as at the time he was a mild Springsteen fan (“Kitty’s Back” was his and Katherine’s song), and Bruce was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek on the rack. Mal and Gary were Bachman-Turner Overdrive freaks, and they teased Constantine about “waxing off” on Bruce’s photo in the plane’s head. That was their way of saying good-bye, along with a weak promise to write. Of course, they did not write. As for Katherine, she wrote twice, and that was that.
Boot camp was Parris Island. Constantine felt mentally prepared for it-the sterility, the regimentation, even the waxen, brush-cut DIs-and the whole business was a bit of a relief from the morguish, airless atmosphere that had dominated his father’s house. Vietnam had “ended” the previous April, so there was little danger of seeing any action, lending an unspoken element of relaxation to the proceedings.
The truth was, Constantine enjoyed that time. He learned to handle firearms and found he was something of a natural marksman. The drills made him hard and lean, and there was seldom time for thought. His relative contentment was not universal-often he would be awakened in the barracks by young men who talked achingly in their sleep, mostly to their mothers. But Constantine’s mother had died long ago, and he neither thought nor dreamed of her. In fact, he never dreamed of anything at all.
For the most part, Constantine kept to himself, both at Parris Island and then at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina. He was not disliked, though at first his rather laconic presence was interpreted as snobbery by his fellow marines. Later, when Constantine began to box (a personal challenge for him that held no reward beyond the challenge itself), his quiet and sometimes terse demeanor would be seen as a kind of post-Beat cool. This newfound respect reached its apex when Constantine fought a young man named Montoya, a reputed middleweight with a steel forehead and a steel jaw. The fight was bet heavily on base, particularly by officers, and Constantine was later surprised to find that the bets were split fairly evenly. In the ring, the bout was active and bloody, and the stories about it circulated for months. He lost to Montoya (that steel forehead), bat went the distance; it was his last fight in the service.
Constantine experienced the Beat the first time while stationed at LeJeune. He had gotten a weekend pass, and taken it with a friend named Stewart to Morehead City on the Carolina coast. The two of them had a mutual interest in cars-Stewart was a motorhead and a cracker, and looked the part of both-and that interest had brought them together. Once in Morehead, they found themselves drunk and womanless. Even in civilian clothes, they looked like soldiers, in a time when being a soldier was the least hip thing to be.
Somehow the two of them wound up walking in a residential district at three o’clock in the morning. Stewart had modestly walked to the side of a split-level house to urinate, and then they were both in the backyard of the house looking up at the lit second-story bedroom window, and minutes later one of them had turned the knob on the unlocked back door, and finally they were standing in the pitch-black basement of the house. Later, neither of them could explain or admit why they had walked into a random occupied house in a strange town and stood for fifteen minutes, without attempting to steal one thing, in its basement.
It was in the dark of that basement that Constantine felt what he would call the Beat. At first it had been a weakness of the knees, and then it had been the conscious counter-effort to control the adrenaline that told him to
