especially alert to that. He’s one of us. Not wealthy of course, but the right background generally.
College-educated, too.”
“Really? What school?”
“Out there,” Hathaway said. “One
of the big ones, USE , UCLA, 1 can’t keep them straight.
Criminal justice.
He took courses at night.“
“It’s always a shame, I think, when a
young man can’t get the full college experience. You know, not only classes, but football games and pep ‘rallies, proms, intense discussions in the dorms.”
“I know, but many young men are not as fortunate as we were. They have to make do.”
“Yes.”
As he did every morning Hathaway had a bowl of Wheaties for breakfast and two cups of coffee. Cissy sat across from him in her bathrobe with black coffee and a cigarette.
He had quit twenty years earlier. They both wished she could quit, but she couldn’t, and they had concluded that there was no point discussing it. She was a tallish woman with a youthful body.
She rarely wore makeup, and if she did it was only lipstick. Her blond hair was starting to show silver and she wore it long. It looked nice with her youthful face.
“Well,” he said, “have to run.
Got a bank to run. Got a town to manage.”
“Busy, busy,” she said.
It was what she always said, because that was what he always said. She put her check up to be kissed. He kissed it and left, walking out the back door and down the driveway toward the town hall. His clothes always looked slightly unfashionable, as if he had spent money on them a long time ago and then outgrown them. The trouser cuffs were always too high. The jacket sleeves always showed too much shirtsleeve.
His belt seemed too high and the waist of his suit coat always seemed a little pinched. Like her smoking, it was something put aside in the long years of marriage, under the heading “for better, for worse.” She put his cereal bowl and coffee cup in the sink, poured herself another cup of coffee, and lit another cigarette and hugged her robe a little snugger around her and looked out at the flower garden which occupied most of her backyard.
She’d been flattered to marry a man from such a good family.
Later maybe she’d take a bath and shave her legs.
hillsides litte.d with beige rocks. Every once in a while a tiny funnel of wind ran up a drywash and spiraled a handful of dust across the interstate. Jesse had seen no wildlife, and no vegetation
‘other than the lifeless-looking desert scrub.
He saw no water until he crossed the Colorado River near Needles. He was driving the Explorer. He’d left Jennifer the red Miata with the balloon note that she’d pay out of her first big break, she said. Now on his second day out, he was still in the mountains, east of Flagstaff. Green, clean, cool, full of evergreen trees. Very different from the southern Arizona of his childhood. The water bounded gullies and gushed out of fissures in the rock face.
The water ran with an abandon that Jesse had never seen, as if God had too much of it and had simply flung it at this part of the landscape. On cruise control, the car itself seemed to flow through the rich green personless landscape.
He turned on the radio and pushed the scan button. The dial flashed silently as the radio sought unsuccess-fully for a signal strong enough to stop on. One way to tell when you’re in the boonies. It was clear in the mountains and still crisp. Even in late spring, there were still patches of snow, under the low spread of the biggest pine trees.
Elliott had probably already screwed her under a tree. By the time he had reached Albuquerque he had dropped two thousand feet, though he was still high.. It-was impossible to drive across the country without imagining Indians and cavalry and wagon trains and mountain men, and Wells Fargo and the Union Pacific. Deerskin trousers and coats made of buffalo hide and long riries and traps and whiskey and Indians. Bowie knives. Beaver traps. Buffalo as far as you could look. White-fuced cattle. Chuck wagons. Six-guns with smooth handles.
Horse and man seemingly like one animal as they moved across the great landscape. Hats and kerchiefs and Winchester rifles and the creak of saddles and the smell of bacon and coffee. East of Albuquerque he was back into sere landscape with high ground lying ominously in the distance, like sleeping beasts at the point where the-.vast high sky joined the remote landscape. At a rest stop the sign warned of rattlesnakes. He stt;pped for gas at an Indian reservation in New Mexico. He didn’t know what kinds of Indians they were. Hopi maybe, or lima. He didn’t know anything about Indians. The gas was’ cheaper on the reservation and so were cigarettes because neither was subject to federal tax. Signs for miles along the interstate advertised the. low price for cigarettes. A couple of Indian men in jeans and white tee shirts and plastic mesh baseball caps were hanging around the self-service pump.
One of them eyed the California plates on the car.
“Where you headed,” he said with that
indefinable Indian accent.
“Massachusetts,” Jesse said.
The two men looked at each other.
“Massachusetts,” one of them said.
“All the way to Massachusetts?” the other one said.
“Yeah.”
