“Paul, get out of here. I can’t help you, I won’t help you. What’s going to happen will happen.
He looked at her.
She said, “Get out, Paul, I’m so tired.”
He stood.
“Don’t ever try to see me again. I swear I’ll call the police.”
Chardy stood outside her house in the cold. He wondered if they’d followed him and after a few minutes the van pulled up. He walked across the street and got into it.
“How did it go?” asked Lanahan.
“Terrible,” he said, sitting across from the boy in back. The van started and he looked out the window as lights and dark houses fled by.
“Who the fuck does she think she is? What the fuck does she think this is all about? Okay, she won’t help us, we’ve got some tricks we can throw her way. We’ll—”
Chardy had the boy by the thick lapels of his raincoat and rammed him against the side of the van, feeling the head slap hard against the glass of the window.
“Hey,
But Chardy planted a forearm against the boy’s throat, pinning his neck against the seat, and told him to watch his fucking mouth. Then he released him and sat back.
The boy shook his head woozily and touched his throat. Fear showed in his wide eyes and trembling fingers, but the fear turned to rage.
“You
Chardy looked out the window, into the dark.
They returned to the hotel sullenly. It was nearly midnight. Chardy went to the bar and had a few more beers. He looked around the room — it was pretty packed — for the biggest man he could see, found him, and went to pick a fight. But the man turned out to be timid, and left quickly, and people stayed so far from Chardy after that that he finally decided to go to bed.
He slept poorly, thinking of helicopters.
The phone roused him early the next morning. He blinked awake in the gray light in a messy room. He had a headache and a sour taste in his mouth. He answered.
“Paul?”
“Yes?”
Her voice held promise of a question, but did not ask it. He gripped the phone so tight he thought he’d shatter the plastic.
She said, “I have to see you.”
“Why?”
“Paul, you son of a bitch. Why didn’t you stay in Chicago?”
He looked at his Rolex to discover it was 7:30.
“I haven’t slept,” she said. “I seem to be a little nuts. I did some speed a little while ago.”
“Take a nap, for Christ’s sakes. Then meet me someplace in the open. Outside.”
“By the river. By the boathouse. Off Boylston. Anyone can tell you where it is. At noon.”
“I’ll see you then.”
“Paul. Please come alone. Don’t bring any little men in overcoats.”
9
Ulu Beg sat next to a black man. He’d learned that the black men were best. Between El Paso and Fort Worth, an endless flat monotony, he had sat with a white man who talked and talked. The tales were filled with unknowable references — the Spurs, mortgage rates, gas prices, the Oilers, Johnny Carson, the PTA, waterfront lots, barking dogs — that troubled his brain. He kept a smile on his face and nodded eagerly for the hours of the journey, and when at last he was freed found himself waxen, shaky, slimy with perspiration.
So Ulu Beg looked for black men. You could sit next to a black man for hours and he would say nothing. He would not see you. He would sit encased in his own furious silence, absorbed and bitter. Ulu Beg was somehow drawn to them. Were they America’s Kurds? For, like the Kurds, they were a manly and handsome people, intent upon preserving their own ways. They had a dignity, an Islamic stillness he could understand. And they were skeptical of the America around them, he could sense that too. Yet they had never retreated to the mountains to fight. He wondered why. He thought it might have to do with the music they always listened to, the huge radios they carried with them everywhere.
Beyond the glass of the bus window the state of Arkansas rolled past, flat and green.
The black man stirred. He was a large and silent man with small angry eyes in his huge face. He rattled the newspaper he was reading. Ulu Beg could see in black letters:
MAN TAKEN BY UFO FOURTH TIME
SALLY, BURT: SECOND TIME AROUND?
CHERYL LADD: DAVID ABUSED ME
Ulu Beg tried to get comfortable. He was not used to sitting for long periods of time. He’d sat still very seldom in his life. He shifted his pack, which he carried in his arms rather than storing on the overhead rack, squirming awkwardly. His elbow poked into the black man’s outstretched newspaper.
“Sorry,” he said, drawing into his seat even farther.
The black man made an elaborate ceremony of turning the page, claiming for himself even larger amounts of space.
Ulu Beg looked past him, out the window again.
Arkansas. After Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee. Then Ohio. Then …
They were strange names and stranger places. He almost didn’t dare say them, even though the drilling had improved his English greatly; and he had memorized them, that curious, shambling route up through the middle of America, through dirty towns of no distinction that all looked the same. He’d been on the journey now for many days and would continue for many more.
“There is no hurry,” they had told him. “Caution is better than risk. Three certain steps back are better than one risky step forward.”
Little Rock upcoming. Memphis, then Bowling Green. By bus, by train, but never by airplane. Americans were crazy with fear about airplane hijackers, terrorists, killers, and so there was no more dangerous place for a man with a gun in America than an airport.
Lexington, Huntington. Always the same. Roll into a city bus station late at night, or, if arriving in the day, wait till nightfall. Then, with certainty, there will be a small hotel that caters to travelers without much money, without pasts and futures —
Ulu Beg was becoming something of an expert on such a life, and the places required by it. The hotels were full of old men with bleak eyes who spat and smelled of liquor, who would talk to anyone or no one. This was no America of wealth and might; it was a mean place, like the slums in any country, especially for lonesome men with problems: no money, no homes, no job. Much hate. These men without women lived on and fed off their hate. They hated the blacks — who hated them in turn — and they hated the “others” — that mysterious remainder of the world which they did not fathom but which somehow seemed to have the skill to live nicely. They hated children, who had futures; and they hated women, for not seeing them; they hated each other; they hated themselves.
Yet they did not seem to notice Ulu Beg, or if they did, because he fit into no category, they could not hate him. They ignored him.
