Missing Persons

56

I had no way knowing it, of course, and wouldn’t learn about it until much later when he told me the story, but at that moment Raoul was in circumstances similar to my own.

Similar, not identical.

The weather, he told me, was warm in Las Vegas, the air in Nevada’s southern desert hovering in the low seventies. Needless to say, no one was wearing a ski parka or a wool cap. And no one in his right mind was flicking on an electric seat heater.

But, like me, Raoul was thinking about Canada.

The man sitting in the driver’s seat of the car in which Raoul was a passenger was wearing a cap, but Raoul wasn’t totally certain what the cap was made of. Not wool. The stuff seemed to be part of the stretchy family of fabrics ideally suited to follow the curves dictated by women’s swimwear. The cap hugged the contours of the man’s shaved skull and was a dark enough charcoal to be mistaken for black. His shirt wasn’t Gore-Tex; it was a sleeveless, well-ventilated version of the kind of shell that boogie boarders use to retard board rash. Raoul thought the random vertical ventilation slits in the garment had been fashioned with a razor blade. All the man had on his feet were fluorescent orange flip-flops with rubber soles that had been worn almost all the way through at the heels.

“You carrying?” he asked Raoul. “I’m gonna be checking later. Tell me now be better.”

Raoul said, “No, nothing.”

“Cell phone?”

“The cabbie who dropped me off took it. I’d love to have it back.”

“I’ll look into it,” he said. They pulled to a stop at a red light. “U.P. doesn’t fuck around. You have to know that. Just go back home wherever that is, you don’t know that. Don’t even.”

The car was an old VW bug, similar to the first car Raoul purchased in America decades earlier after ignoring the expiration of his student visa. From dashboard clues Raoul guessed that it was a late ’60s vintage, one of the models that came just before what Raoul considered to be the particularly ill-advised bumper design change in ’68. The Beetle still had the original beige paint, and the original radio. From the scratchy sound of the hip-hop that was playing, the car had its original speaker, too.

Raoul liked the car. It brought back memories of uncomplicated times.

The man’s ethnic background and racial makeup were a puzzle, even to Raoul, who prided himself on his ability to distinguish a Montenegran from a Serb or an Egyptian from an Iraqi across a crowded café. The driver definitely had some Asian blood-Raoul was guessing Tibet-and some African American blood as well, but something else was mixed into his DNA cocktail, too, something Raoul couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“U.P. is Canada? Just want to be clear,” he asked.

The man nodded. “Don’t go talking to him that way. People call him that, but people don’t call him that. You dig?” He shifted through the car’s four gears as though it were as natural as breathing, moving the stick with the middle finger of his right hand or with the webbing at the base of his thumb, never allowing the engine’s RPMs to climb into the whining range.

“Thank you for that advice,” Raoul said. “How would you suggest I address him?”

The man seemed honestly perplexed by the question.

“What do you call him?” Raoul asked.

“Boss.”

“That doesn’t sound appropriate. How about Mr. North?”

He thought for a moment. “That’ll work.”

“What’s your name?”

“Tico.”

“Thank you, Tico.”

“Hey.”

After a few days tracking his wife, Raoul knew enough about Las Vegas to know that the VW was traveling away from whatever version of civilization the Strip represented on the other side of downtown. He also knew he’d never been in that particular neighborhood before. Literally, or figuratively.

After Raoul had called Norm Clarke late on Thursday to ask him to warn Canada that the Vegas cops were going to start seriously looking for Diane, Raoul had spent some restless hours waiting to hear back. Norm had finally called Raoul and told him that another meeting was arranged with Canada, and that he should wait in a specific spot outside the meeting-room entrance of the Venetian at 11:30 that night. The man who picked him up had been an old blond guy driving a Vegas cab that was even crappier than the typically crappy Vegas cab. The driver had what appeared to be corn silk growing out of his ears, and he smoked like a crematorium during the Plague. For the short drive down the Strip the taxi was thick with a fetid Marlboro cloud.

Raoul spent much of the next twenty or so hours in a vintage-as in “old,” not in “classic”-sixteen-foot Airstream that had been left forlorn in one of the trailer-park slums that stain the arid fields on Tropicana Boulevard just a few blocks from the faux munificence of the Strip. The not-so-mobile villages-anachronistic oases of transiency, poverty, and despair-consumed conspicuously undesirable real estate within spitting distance of the end of the runways at McCarran International. Raoul’s Airstream hovel appeared to have been in the same spot in that park so long that it looked like the rest of the place was choreographed around it.

Raoul had been alone in the trailer since he’d been dropped off. He’d killed off the long hours counting takeoffs and landings, studying a couple of blackjack manuals printed in the late ’60s, and watching local Vegas news for nuggets about his wife. The TV was a tiny black-and-white with rabbit ears that reached all the way to the concave ceiling of the Airstream. The view out the filthy awning window at the rear of the trailer was of the blunt end of an old Winnebago. The plates on the RV were long gone, the aluminum skin pitted, the paint faded to nothing, and the bumper stickers so sun-bleached that Raoul could only make out the one that was once a lure for Crater Lake. Raoul tried to get lost in imagining cool, deep water and high country air. Couldn’t.

He was trying hard not to think about whatever was happening with Diane. Couldn’t do that, either.

Before he’d assured Raoul that someone would come soon to pick him up and take him to see Canada, the cabbie had instructed him not to wander outside the trailer.

“What about food?” Raoul asked.

“Help yourself to whatever’s there,” the guy had said.

The only food in the Airstream cupboards, it turned out, was a yellow box of cornstarch, a rusty can without a label, and an old margarine tub that was half full of something that resembled ground chilis.

The water from the faucet smelled like a rat had peed in it.

Raoul had decided it was a good day to start a cleansing fast.

Despite his hunger and his impatience and a lot of apprehension, Raoul eventually got it. The last piece of Tico’s heritage puzzle?

Pacific islands. Maybe even Hawaii. Raoul smiled to himself, momentarily savoring the unknowable hows and the whys of the lives that had intersected and the passions that had collided and ultimately melded together in the startling mitotic process that had eventually created this Tibetan/Pacific Islander/African American who was driving a classic old German car out into the scruffy desert beyond the urban boundaries of Las Vegas, Nevada.

But, right then, in Tico’s VW bug, Raoul was-like me-thinking mostly about Diane, and about Canada.

Canada was never far from his mind.