“Hope y'enjoyed y’stay,” she said. She was working on a box of chocolate coconut doughnuts and had got to the halfway mark.
“Sure did,” Andy said, and left.
Charlie was waiting for him outside. The woman had given him a carbon copy of his bill, which he stuffed into the side pocket of his cord jacket as he went down the steps. Change from the Albany pay phones jingled mutedly.
“Okay, Daddy?” Charlie asked as they moved away toward the road.
“Lookin good,” he said, and put an arm around her shoulders. To their right and back over the hill, Ray Knowles and John Mayo had just had their flat tire.
“Where are we going, Daddy?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I don’t like it. I feel nervous.”
“I think we’re well ahead of them,” he said. “Don’t worry. They’re probably still looking for the cab driver who took us to Albany.”
But he was whistling past the graveyard; he knew it and probably Charlie did, too. Just standing here beside the road made him feel exposed, like a cartoon jailbird in a striped suit. Quit it, he told himself. Next thing you’ll be thinking they’re everywhere-one behind every tree and a bunch of them right over the next hill. Hadn’t somebody said that perfect paranoia and perfect awareness were the same thing?
“Charlie-“he began.
“Let’s go to Granther’s,” she said.
He looked at her, startled. His dream rushed back at him, the dream of fishing in the rain, the rain that had turned into the sound of Charlie’s shower. “What made you think of that?” he asked. Granther had died long before Charlie was born. He had lived his whole life in Tashmore, Vermont, a town just west of the New Hampshire border. When Granther died, the place on the lake went to Andy’s mother, and when she died, it came to Andy. The town would have taken it for back taxes long since, except that Granther had left a small sum in trust to cover them.
Andy and Vicky had gone up there once a year during the summer vacation until Charlie was born. It was twenty miles off the nearest two-lane road, in wooded, unpopulated country. In the summer there were all sorts of people on Tashmore Pond, which was really a lake with the small town of Bradford, New Hampshire, on the far side. But by this time of year all the summer camps would be empty. Andy doubted if the road in was even plowed in the winter.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “It just… came into my mind. This minute.” On the other side of the hill, John Mayo was opening the trunk of the Ford and making his inspection of the spare tire.
“I dreamed about Granther this morning,” Andy said slowly. “First time I’d thought about him in a year or more, I guess. So I suppose you could say he just came into my head, too.”
“Was it a good dream, Daddy?”
“Yes,” he said, and smiled a little. “Yes, it was.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think it’s a great idea,” Andy said. “We can go there and stay for a while and think about what we should do. How we should handle this. I was thinking if we could get to a newspaper and tell our story so that a lot of people knew about it, they’d have to lay off.”
An old farm truck was rattling toward them, and Andy stuck out his thumb. On the other side of the hill, Ray Knowles was walking up the soft shoulder of the road. The farm truck pulled over, and a guy wearing biballs and a New York Mets baseball cap looked out.
“Well there’s a purty little miss,” he said, smiling. “What’s your name, missy?”
“Roberta,” Charlie said promptly. Roberta was her middle name.
“Well, Bobbi, where you headed this morning?” the driver asked.
“We’re on our way to Vermont,” Andy said. “St. Johnsbury. My wife was visiting her sister and she ran into a little problem.” “Did she now,” the farmer said, and said no more, but gazed at Andy shrewdly from the corners of his eyes. “Labor,” Andy said, and manufactured a wide smile. “This one’s got a new brother. One-forty-one this morning.” “His name is Andy,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that a nice name?” “I think it’s a corker,” the farmer said. “You hop on in here and I’ll get you ten miles closer to St. Johnsbury, anyhow.”
They got in and the farm truck rattled and rumbled back onto the road, headed into the bright morning sunlight. At the same time, Ray Knowles was breasting the hill. He saw an empty highway leading down to the Slumberland Motel. Beyond the Motel, he saw the farm truck that had passed their car a few minutes ago just disappearing from view.
He saw no need to hurry.
6
The farmer’s name was Manders-Irv Manders. He had just taken a load of pumpkins into town, where he had a deal with the fellow who ran the A amp;P. He told them that he used to deal with the First National, but the fellow over there just had no understanding about pumpkins. A jumped-up meat cutter and no more, was the opinion of Irv Manders. The A amp;P manager, on the other hand, was a corker. He told them that his wife ran a touristy sort of shop in the summertime, and he kept a roadside produce stand, and between the two of them they got along right smart.
“You won’t like me minding your beeswax,” Irv Manders told Andy, “but you and your button here shouldn’t be thumbin. Lord, no. Not with the sort of people you find ramming the roads these days. There’s a Greyhound terminal in the drugstore back in Hastings Glen. That’s what you want.”
“Well-“Andy said. He was nonplussed, but Charlie stepped neatly into the breach.
“Daddy’s out of work,” she said brightly. “That’s why my mommy had to go and stay with Auntie Em to have the baby. Auntie Em doesn’t like Daddy. So we stayed at home. But now we’re going to see Mommy. Right, Daddy?”
“That’s sort of private stuff, Bobbi,” Andy said, sounding uncomfortable. He felt uncomfortable. There were a thousand holes in Charlie’s story. “Don’t you say another word,” Irv said. “I know about trouble in families. It can get pretty bitter at times. And I know about being hard-up. It ain’t no shame.” Andy cleared his throat but said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. They rode in silence for a while. “Say, why don’t you two come home and take lunch with me and the wife?” Irv asked suddenly.
“Oh no, we couldn’t do-”
“We’d be happy to,” Charlie said. “Wouldn’t we, Daddy?”
He knew that Charlie’s intuitions were usually good ones, and he was too mentally and physically worn down to go against her now. She was a self possessed and aggressive little girl, and more than once Andy had wondered to himself just who was running this show.
“If you’re sure there’s enough-“he said.
“Always enough,” Irv Manders said, finally shifting the farm truck into third gear. They were rattling between autumn-bright trees: maples, elms, poplars. “Glad to have you.”
“Thank you very much,” Charlie said.
“My pleasure, button,” Irv said. “Be my wife’s, too, when she gets a look at you.”
Charlie smiled.
Andy rubbed his temples. Beneath the fingers of his left hand was one of those patches of skin where the nerves seemed to have died. He didn’t feel good about this, somehow. That feeling that they were closing in was still very much with him.
7
The woman who had checked Andy out of the Slumberland Motel not twenty minutes ago was getting nervous. She had forgotten all about Phil Donahue.
“You’re sure this was the man,” Ray Knowles was saying for the third time. She didn’t like this small, trim, somehow tight man. Maybe he worked for the government, but that was no comfort to Lena Cunningham. She didn’t like his narrow face, she didn’t like the lines around his cool blue eyes, and most of all she didn’t like the way he kept shoving that picture under her nose.