It was Dudley, Dudley with his hair cut short and his earring banished, dressed in a white apron over a long-sleeved shirt and tie. He didn't know what to say. Tried to stare right through him, hello, goodbye, “You talkin' to me?” But it wasn't working, wasn't going to work. He was William Peck Wilson, and though he hadn't been anywhere near Peterskill in three years, he'd already been sniffed out. “Newburgh.” Jesus Christ. It was twenty-five miles away and on the other side of the river. Who would have thought anybody would know him here?
Dudley was standing there grinning as if they'd just gone in together on a winning Lotto ticket. His eyes were like grappling hooks. His lips were drying out. “Yeah,” Peck said, ducking his head, “yeah. Good to see you.”
“Oh, man, I can't believe it. So you're back, huh?” And then, before Peck could answer, he was calling down to the bartender, “Hey, Rick-Rick, give this man anything he wants. What do you want? A little nip of that single-malt scotch-what did you used to drink?”
The name stuck in his throat like a wad of phlegm. “Laphroaig.”
“Yeah, right: Laphroaig.” He stole a glance over his shoulder. “I'm not supposed to drink while I'm working, but hey, this is special, a special occasion.” He shifted on his feet, took a step back to widen his view, then reached out a balled-up fist to rap Peck on the shoulder. “Shit!” he barked. “Shit, Peck, it's great to see you. Balls up, man. Balls up!”
He couldn't help himself-something just snapped at that point-but suddenly he seemed to have Dudley by the arm and he was gripping that arm in his right hand as if he wanted to crush it and he was pulling Dudley to him so that he could drop his voice to that Greenhaven register: “Don't call me that,” he said. “Don't call me by name. Not ever.”
The light banked in Dudley's eyes, then came back in a soft glimmer of recognition. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I can dig it.”
Then they had the Laphroaig. Then they made some very quiet, very general conversation until Dudley had to excuse himself to go back to work. There was that moment of farewell and goodbye and see you next time, but Dudley just wasn't ready to let it go yet. “So,” he said, already leaning toward the kitchen, “am I going to see you around, or what? Are you back?”
Peck watched two women get up from their table by the window and fuss around over their purses and shopping bags and whatever else they'd dragged into lunch with them, their backsides tight in their skirts as they bent down and came up again. Beyond them, out on the river, a lone high gull coasted on the streaming currents of the air. He stood, tucked the paper under his arm. “No,” he said, “just passing through.”
Two
THEY WERE SOMEWHERE in Utah, staring out at the salt flats that were so blanched and bleak and unrelieved he might have created them himself for the backdrop to some post-apocalyptic thriller, but he was too tired, sweat-slicked, dehydrated and vaguely feverish even to guess at the storyline or get beyond the long-distance shimmer of the (hackneyed) opening shot. Dana was driving. She'd been gazing into her laptop all day as if it were the crystal ball in “The Wizard of Oz,” and then they'd stopped to gas up and use the restroom and she'd taken over the wheel. For the last couple hundred miles he'd been steeling himself to call Radko, just to see how things stood, though he knew in his heart that by now somebody else would be occupying his cubicle and plying his mouse. It was hot, the car's air conditioner barely functioning, the sun glancing off the hood, the dashboard, the buttons of the radio. His underarms were clammy and abraded and his T-shirt was stuck to his back and he kept playing with the vents to maximize the minimal airflow, without much success. He took a moment to glance at Dana, her jaw set and hands rigid on the wheel, then pulled out his phone, punched in the number and raised his eyes to the white vacancy of the horizon.
The phone picked up on the second ring. “Rad,” Radko announced, delivering his standard telephonic greeting, as if pronouncing the two syllables of “hello” were a waste of time.
“Rad?” Bridger repeated stupidly. He'd been listening to talk radio out of boredom, some reactionary demagogue of the airwaves spewing about communists and liberals and Mexicans in a high inflammatory voice, and though he'd turned down the volume, the noise was still there. The term “eco-Nazis” rose up out of the chatter and fell away.
“Who is this? Bridger? Bridger, is that you?”
“Yeah, uh-hi.”
“Where are you?”
“That was what I wanted to talk about, what I wanted to tell you-”
“You tell me nothing. You are at airport, you are in your house, you are standing in lobby of this building where I am running a business and paying the rent, and it does not matter, does not”-he paused to snatch at the word-“register. And you know why?”
“I'm in Utah.”
“Utah.” There was an infinite sadness in the way he pronounced it, as if Utah were a prison or a leper colony.
“That's what I wanted to tell you, I'm sorry, but Dana, I mean, Milos-”
“No, do not bring my cousin's name into this.”
“We have to go to New York, because this thief-”
“Thiff, thiff, always this “thiff”-give it up why don't you? Already, enough.”
“He's got “me” now-somehow he managed to get hold of my identity, taking out credit cards in my name and I don't know what else, and if anybody comes there looking for me, creditors or collection agencies or whatever, I want you to know it's not my fault. I'm not guilty. Don't blame me.”
“Blame? Who is blaming? I want to tell you something, that there is a woman, very young woman, sitting in your workstation right now, a quick worker, bedder, I think, than you-if you are even here, is what I mean.” Bridger tried to cut in, but Radko had raised his voice now, hooking the words on the caps of his teeth and spitting them into the receiver. “But you are not here, are you?”
“I understand. I know where you're coming from. I just want to say that this is all way beyond my control, and, well, I guess when I get back I'll give you a call. Just in case-”
“In case what?”
“You need me. Again.”
“When “do” you come back?”
The voice on the radio flared and died. Dana hadn't moved, even to blink her eyes, everything stationary except the shapes of the distant cars and trucks ever so gradually enlarging on the far side of the divider. “I don't know. As soon as I can.”
“You don't know?” Radko paused for effect. “Then I don't know too,” he said, and cut the connection.
That was Utah. Then there was Wyoming, and after Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa and the worn green underbelly of Illinois and on and on, the road a whip and the car clinging to it like a drop of sweat or blood or both. They alternated behind the wheel, one of them unconscious in back as the other fought the tedium, and he tried to take most of the burden on himself because it was especially hard on her with conversation a virtual impossibility and no radio to distract or absorb or infuriate her. She wasn't a bad driver-the deaf, as she'd pointed out to him a hundred times, were more visually alert and spatially oriented than the hearing, hence better drivers, hands down-but he couldn't help worrying she'd drift into a trance and do something regrettable, if not fatal. Exhaustion crept up on him, though. And the heat. It seemed as if they were following a heat wave all across the fat wide hips of the country, hardly a cloud in the sky and not a drop of rain.
They stopped one night at a motel in a college town in western Pennsylvania, both of them so keen to escape the torture chamber of the car they no longer cared whether Frank Calabrese got to New York ahead of them or if he'd defrauded another half-dozen people in the interval or set himself up as President and CFO of Halter/Martin Investments. For his part, Bridger was ready to let it go, give it up, repair the damage and move on, but Dana was intractable. “You're like Captain Ahab,” he said, clumsily finger-spelling it for her as they stood in line at a Subway crammed with students slouching under the weight of their backpacks.