Night Passage

Chapter 9

The rain stayed with Jesse into western Pennsylvania. It had eased when he stopped on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, west of Pittsburgh. He got a cheeseburger in the restaurant, and a cup of coffee. He ate at the counter looking at the scattering of travelers around him. A lot of trackers, a lot of old people, retired probably, who’d arrived in their RVs. See the country: Trailer parks where you could get water and electrical and sewage hookups. Gas stations where you could fill up on gas and buy a pre-made sandwich wrapped in Saran Wrap, places like this where you could sit among your fellow adventurers and not look at them. They all looked like they’d eaten too much white bread. When he finished eating, he went to the men’s room, and washed, and came out and walked to his car. The rain was firm now, and pleasant. Standing beside his car with one hand on the door, Jesse took off his baseball cap and turned his face up to the rain. He stood a long time letting the hard rain soak into him. He didn’t know why he was doing it, and he stopped only when he became aware that other people were watching. His wet clothes were uncomfortable to drive in and when he reached the next rest stop he got some dry clothes out of his suitcase and changed into them in a bathroom stall. He bought a large coffee at the rest stop, and back in the car added a lot of scotch to it. He sipped the laced coffee as he crossed the Delaware River north of Philadelphia and picked up the Jersey Turnpike. He was in the east now, but it wasn’t yet the east he imagined. This part of the east looked like Anaheim. Except for the rain. This was eastern rain. No sudden outbursts, no scudding clouds, no interruption for sunshine before another downpour, no bright colors made more brilliant by the wetness. Eastern rain was steady and unyielding and gray... What confused him most was that Jennifer would neither embrace him nor let him go. He was a self-reliant guy. He had spent most of his life staying inside, playing within himself. He was pretty sure he could still do that, but there had to be some sort of completion between them. Having been her lover, he was quite sure he could never be her friend and nothing more. In the early days of his dismay he had thought maybe he could share her. He had, after all, in the last year or so of their marriage been sharing her involuntarily. But in a while he understood that he could not. And so he sat one evening in their kitchen, on one of their high stools at the breakfast counter, with a United States road atlas, a police help-wanted listing, and a bottle of scotch, and decided where he would go to look for peace. He had to work and all he knew was cop. Of the possible jobs the one in Paradise, Massachusetts, was the farthest away. With a lot of scotch inside him, which made him ironic rather than sad, he imagined the salt spray and the snowy streets at Christmastime and the cheery New Englanders going steadfastly about their business and decided to try Paradise first. Now as he approached the George Washington Bridge he was maybe two hundred miles away from it and he felt as remote and unconnected as if he were adrift in space. There were other ways to get to New England, but he wanted to do it this way. He wanted to drive over the Hudson River across the George Washington Bridge. New York City stretched along the river to his right looking the way it did in all the pictures. Not to be confused with Los Angeles, he thought. He’d been in Chicago once looking for a guy who’d killed a process server in Gardena, and again for the Paradise job interview. He’d arranged several at a law enforcement convention in the Palmer House. But he assumed he wasn’t getting a glowing recommendation from the LAPD, and Paradise was the only one to offer him a job. He remembered the march of Chicago cityscape along the lake front, but the New York skyline was different. Chicago had been exuberant. This congregation of spires was far too reserved for exuberance. There was nothing exultant in their massed height. There was something like contempt in the brute grace of the skyscrapers standing above the river.

The memory of the interview embarrassed him. He had been drinking scotch in the bar downstairs and his memory was the embarrassing memory of all drunks, he thought, the struggle to seem sober undercut by the half-suppressed knowledge that you were slurring your words. What bothered him even more was that he had needed to drink even though he knew it would jeopardize the job. His face felt hot at the memory. But they hadn’t noticed. The two interviewers, Hathaway, the selectman, and a Paradise police captain named Burke, seemed oblivious of the times when he couldn’t stop slushing the sʼs in Los Angeles. It was late afternoon. Maybe they’d had a couple before the interview themselves. They’d talked in a one-bedroom suite that Hathaway was in. The police captain had a single room down the hall. Jesse remembered the room being too hot. And he remembered that Burke hardly spoke at all, and Hathaway didn’t seem to be asking the right questions. Heʼd had to excuse himself twice to go to the bathroom, and each time he had splashed cold water on his face from the sink. But drunk is drunk, as he well knew, and cold water didn’t change anything. Hathaway had sat in front of the window eleven stories above the loop with a manila folder in his lap, to which he occasionally referred. Hathaway asked about his education, his experience, his marital status.

“Divorced,” Jesse said.

He didn’t like saying it. It still seemed to him somehow a shameful thing to admit. It made him feel less.

Hathaway, if he thought it shameful, made no sign. Burke was silent in the shadow near the window to Hathawayʼs left.

“What do you think, Jesse,” Hathaway said, about fifteen minutes into the interview, “about the right to keep and bear arms?”

“Constitution’s clear on that; I think.” Jesse had trouble with all the tʼs in constitution.

“Yes,” Hathaway said, “I think so too.”

They talked a bit about Jesse’s life in the minor leagues and how it was too bad that he couldn’t make the throw anymore. They talked of how many cases he had cleared in L.A.

“Nobody clears them all,” Jesse said with a smile, trying enlist Burke, who remained silent, his arms folded. Clears came out clearth.

“We talked with your Captain Cronjager,” Hathaway said, referring to his folder.

Jesse waited. Cronjager was a decent enough guy, but he believed in police work and he might not recommend a cop who drank on duty.

“He speaks very well of you, though he said you might have been developing a drinking problem when you left.”

Jesse made a minimizing gesture with his right hand.

“I probably went off the deep end there for a bit during the time my marriage was breaking up,” Jesse said. “But I’m fine now.”

He had started to say I am, and then wasn’t sure he could transit between the two vowels, and changed it to I’m. Did they hear the stutter?

“All of us like a drink,” Hathaway said. “And in times of personal anguish, many of us need one. When one sees a man with your record applying for a job like this one, questions occur. I think I can speak for Lou when I say it is a relief really to hear that you maybe drank a little too much at a time when most of us would. I don’t have a problem, do you, Lou?”

Burke’s heavy voice came from the shadow where he sat.

“No problem, Hasty.”

And that had been it. They had hired him on the spot and brought out a bottle and had drinks to seal the bargain. It had worked out fine. But I shouldn’t have been drinking, Jesse thought as he went down the circular ramp off the bridge. Especially I shouldn’t have needed to be drinking.

Jesse turned north along the Henry Hudson Parkway. He drove over the Harlem River Bridge and through the Bronx, where the city was already beginning to green. He followed the parkways, as he had planned, into Connecticut and up Route 15 feeling almost disembodied. He picked up Route 84 in Hartford, crossing the Connecticut River, with the cluster of small-city skyscrapers off to his left. It was dark by the time he crossed the line into Massachusetts and stopped for the night in Sturbridge. He could have driven last seventy-five miles or so, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to arrive in Paradise in the morning. He didn’t know why, anymore than he knew why he had stood on Ocean Avenue and stared at the Pacific before he left. But after Jennifer left he had decided that if he was going to be alone, he probably ought to pay attention to what he wanted, even if he didn’t always know why he wanted it. In his motel room he poured the almost ritualized drink and sat in the one chair in the silent room with his feet up on the bed. Heʼd read somewhere that two drinks a day were thought be good for your heart. That was not bad, two drinks a day. It would give him something to look forward to every evening. It wouldn’t scramble his mind. He thought that two drinks a day was about right for him. When he’d been with Jennifer he had tried to pay attention to what she wanted. If she’s happy, he always said to himself, I’m happy. It wasn’t true. But he had thought at the time that it ought to be true, and he insisted on trying to make it true, no matter how unhappy it made them both. He shook his head sadly in the small room. He was a cop, a guy who took pride in seeing evidence, on making judgments on what was really there. And he failed entirely to do that in his own life.

“What an asshole,” he said.

His voice seemed so loud in the quiet room that he wondered if someone next door could hear him talking to himself. When you start talking to yourself... He smiled and sipped his scotch. He could see himself in the full-length mirror on the wall beside the bed. He raised the glass at himself. Get a grip, Jesse. Then he leaned back in the chair, holding the whiskey in both hands, and closed his eyes and thought about the next day. Maybe three drinks a day.