“I want to look up an old friend of mine,” Tom said.
“Is this an excursion or an adventure? I wonder. And I wonder who the old friend could be.”
“Someone I used to know. Someone from the hospital.”
“That nurse who thought you were so cute? I remember
“No, not that nurse, another one,” Tom said, amused and disconcerted. “Named Hattie Bascombe. But she might be able to tell me something about the other one.”
“Aha!” Sarah said. “I knew it. Okay, I’ll come along, just to protect you. Are you bringing your gat, or should I pack mine?”
“Let’s both pack our gats,” Tom said.
“One more thing. I think this will be an automotive excursion, not a walking trip.”
“I can’t drive.”
“But I can,” Sarah said. “I’m an ace. I could barrel through a passel of gunsels as well as anybody in Dashiell Hammett. And this way I can look out for Bingo on the way.”
“Should I come over there, or—”
“Be outside of your house in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I’ll be the doll in the shades and the snap-brim hat behind the wheel of the ostentatious car.”
Twenty minutes later he was seated in the leather bucket seat of a little white Mercedes convertible with what seemed to him an abnormally loud engine, watching Sarah Spence downshift as she accelerated through a yellow light and turned on Calle Drosselmayer. “Bingo doesn’t do things like this,” she was saying. “He’s not really a very adventurous dog. He seems to worry a lot about whether or not we’re going to feed him.”
“What happens to him when you go up north?”
“We put him in a kennel.”
“Then he probably figured out that he was going back to the kennel in two days, and he wandered away to brood about it. I bet he’ll be back by dinnertime.”
“That’s brilliant!” she said. “Even if it’s not true, I feel better already.” Then: “Bingo doesn’t brood much, actually.”
“He didn’t strike me as a broody dog,” Tom said. Sarah’s driving delighted him—Sarah’s company delighted him. He thought he had never been in a car with anyone who drove like Sarah, with as much control and exhilaration. His mother drove at an uncertain five miles under the limit, mumbling to herself most of the time, and his father drove wildly, in a rage at other drivers the second he pulled out of the driveway. Sarah laughed at what he had said. When she drew up at a stoplight, she leaned over and kissed him. “A broody dog,” she said. “I think you’re the broody dog, Tom Pasmore.”
Then the light changed, and the little car flashed through the intersection, and sunlight fell all about them, and Tom felt that he had entered into a moment of almost inhuman perfection. His sense of guilty responsibility had suddenly disappeared. Sarah was still laughing, probably at the expression on his face. People on the sidewalk stared at them as they zipped past. The light streamed down, and the pretty shop fronts of Calle Drosselmayer, golden wood and sparkling glass, glowed and shone. Men and women sat beneath striped umbrellas at an outdoor cafe. Behind one great shining window, a model railway puffed through mountains and snowy passes, circling around again to a perfect scale model of Calle Drosselmayer—he saw their reflection in the window, and imagined himself and Sarah in a tiny white car on the model street. A great unconscious paradise lay all about him, the paradise of ordinary things.
Now they were in the lower end of Calle Drosselmayer, driving by the grey, prisonlike St. Alwyn Hotel. Years ago, someone had been murdered there—some scandal that had ended in a bigger scandal his parents had not let him read about, and which he had been too young to understand.…
“This isn’t much like being with Buddy,” she said. “He only ever wants to go to gun shops.”
“Do you ever think about what you want to be?” she said when she drove them down the hill to Mogrom Street. “You must—I think about it a lot. My parents want me to get married to somebody nice with a lot of money and live about two blocks from them. They can’t imagine why I’d want to do anything else.”
“My parents want me to make a lot of money and live eight hundred miles away,” Tom said. “But first they want me to get an engineering degree, so that I can set up a construction business. Mr. Handley wants me to write novels about Mill Walk. My grandfather wants me to keep my mouth shut and join the John Birch society. Brooks- Lowood School wants me to straighten up at last and learn how to play basketball—turn right here, go past the alley, and turn right again onto the next street—Miss Ellinghausen wants me to learn how to tango. Dr. Milton wants me to stop thinking altogether and be a loyal future member of the Founders Club.”
“And what do you want?”
“I want—I want to be what I really am. Whatever that is. Here we are. Let’s stop and get out.”
Sarah gave him an uncertain, questioning look, but pulled over to the side and stopped nearly on the same few feet of roadway where Dennis Handley had parked his Corvette. Both of them got out. In the valley that was Weasel Hollow, the air steamed and stank.
The smell of boiled cabbage that came from the yellow house mingled with the stench of rotting garbage from the fly-encrusted, glistening heap some yards farther down the street. The pile of garbage had grown since Tom had been here with Dennis Handley: several broken chairs and a rolled-up carpet had been added to it, along with five or six stained paper bags. Tinny radios sent conflicting fragments of nearly inaudible music into the air. Far off, a child screeched.
“What was burning around here?” Sarah asked, sniffing.
“A house and a car. The house is a block away, but the car’s just up ahead.”
Sarah stepped out into the empty street and saw it. She turned to look at Tom. “You were here before?”
“The car hadn’t been burned then. The owner abandoned it here because he thought it would be safe. He thought nobody would see it.”
Tom walked into the dusty street and joined her. What was left of Hasselgard’s Corvette looked like a crushed insect left in the sun. The seats, dashboard, and steering wheel had been burned away to metal skeletons; the tires were ashy black chips beneath the rims; the whole body was a blackened shell already turning orange with rust. Someone, probably a child, had hammered at it with a heavy stick and then tossed the stick through the empty windshield.
“Who was the owner?” Sarah said.
Tom did not answer this question. “I wanted to see if they’d really burn it. I was pretty sure they’d burn the house, because it was so destroyed by gunfire that it must have been in danger of collapsing. And they couldn’t be sure of what might be inside it. But I wasn’t really sure about the car. They must have come over on the same night—come right through the lots, carrying their gasoline cans.” He looked up into Sarah’s puzzled face. “It was Hasselgard’s car.”
She frowned, but said nothing.
“You see how they act? How they do things? They don’t even sneak it away on the back of a truck—they just douse it with gasoline and burn the shit out of it. They solve everything with sledgehammers. The people around here certainly aren’t going to say anything, are they? Because they know if they do, their own houses’ll burn up. It wouldn’t even be on the news.”
“Are you saying that the police burned Hasselgard’s car?”
“Didn’t I make that clear?”
“But, Tom, why—”
It seemed, at last, that he had to tell her: the words nearly marched out of his mouth by themselves. “I wrote the letter the police got—the letter was supposed to be about that ex-con, Foxhall Edwardes. Fulton Bishop talked about it at his press conference. It was an anonymous letter, because I didn’t want them to know a kid wrote it. I told them how and why Hasselgard killed his own sister. The next day, all hell broke loose. They killed Hasselgard, they killed this guy Edwardes, they killed a cop named Mendenhall, and injured his partner, Klink, they
