Now and Then

57.

The trip home from Cleveland on Route 90 took me north along the lake, through Euclid and Ashtabula, Ohio, and right past Erie, Pennsylvania. I thought about stopping in and looking at the lake where, I suspected, Bradley Turner had undergone a lake change and become Perry Alderson. But I missed Susan too much. And Pearl. I was beginning to miss Hawk. And I needed to get home before I started to miss Vinnie.

Cleveland to Buffalo was about three hours. Buffalo to Boston was longer than a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. It gave me plenty of time to catch up on my coffee, and think. The coffee was easier.

Certainly Alderson had once been Bradley Turner. Married to Anne Marie. Living in Laurel Heights. Taking some classes at Coyle State. Fooling around with a lot of the coeds, which was probably why he took the classes. No one had found any sign of paid employment, so he probably depended on his wife’s money, which seemed substantial: nice house, nice suburb. For whatever reason, maybe because she caught him fooling around, one day he had taken the missus on a cruise out of Erie and while out there had killed the wife and the boat guy, and, maybe, tied the bodies to the anchor and dumped them in the middle of the lake. It was a big lake. Then he had taken the boat back to shore and, either to avoid observation or because he didn’t know how to dock it, he had run it aground, swum to shore, gone back to his car, and driven off into the sunrise. Probably with Perry Alderson’s ID in his pocket. I stopped at a travel plaza near Batavia. Got gas, used the restroom, bought coffee and a nourishing cinnamon bun in the crowded food court, and went back to the thruway. The leisurely days when Howard Johnson’s was your host of the highways were but a quaint memory. So he gets back in his car, in his wet clothes, and drives on back home, like nothing happened. He takes all the money out of the bank. He’s smart. He doesn’t get greedy, try to sell the house, or the car. He drives the car up to Toledo, parks it in a mall, takes the bus back to Cleveland. He takes nothing from the house that might connect him to Bradley Turner. Then as Perry Alderson he goes to Cleveland, probably, gets a place to 251 live, and starts creating a new persona for himself. By 1996 he’s counseling people in shelters, and ten years later he’s a professor at Concord College, and a lecturer on matters of individual freedom. Is it a great country or what? That’s why he lied about his age, I thought. It wasn’t just vanity. Alderson was younger. Maybe he’d actually done, as Turner, the things he claimed to have done as Alderson. Or maybe his father had done them. Or maybe he’d made them up. Maybe he’d made the father up. He had, after all, made himself up.

I stopped near Syracuse for more gas and coffee. The travel plaza was packed. It was a Thursday in early December. Where the hell was everyone going? More existentially, where the hell was I going. I took my coffee to the car and continued east. I was going home.