Pursuit: A Novel

24

Varney awoke and his arm moved quickly but silently, his hand sliding into the space between the mattress and springs where his gun was hidden. As his fingers touched the grip, he already knew it had been another mistake. The soft, rustling sound he had heard was only Mae’s small bare feet padding across the floor to the bathroom. He turned his eyes in that direction just as the door closed softly.

In a moment he heard the shower running. He rolled over and stared up at the old light fixture on the ceiling, slowly reversing the perspective of his thought so that he was up with the half globe looking down on the bed at himself. Was Varney happy? This seemed to be what other people referred to as being happy. He tried to feel it, to feel anything, but he caught himself calculating again, enumerating the things he now had, and insisting to himself, “That is good. And that is at least okay. And that is something I sort of like . . .”

He had never lived with a person who was female since he had left his mother’s house, eleven years ago. At the moment it was not as bad as he knew it would have been if the woman had been confident enough to let her true nature show. Since she had come here, Mae had been on tiptoe, just like this morning, slipping lightly and quietly from one place to another, always on the periphery, where she wouldn’t be too obtrusive and get on his nerves.

She almost lived out of the black overnight bag, taking a few of her belongings out of it, putting them back when she was finished, and pushing the bag under the bed. She kept the apartment neat and clean without ever appearing to touch anything that belonged to Varney, and she had quickly gotten used to his preferences.

Varney didn’t mind listening to her talk, because she had a pleasant, musical voice, but he didn’t like having to give her long answers. He had spent so much of his life alone that he had never developed the habit of talking just to fill up silences, and he didn’t feel any need to deliver a running inventory of every thought that entered his mind. But he understood that women needed to do that, so he let her. The surprise was that she had learned to accept the little he said as sufficient. He knew she was on her best behavior. He could tell that in bed, if no other way, because she even talked there. Everything he did was wonderful, every time was the best ever, and nothing was ever too much or not enough. She was always ready, always watching him closely without seeming to. Varney waited: she couldn’t possibly be as perfect as she seemed to be.

Varney had always been good at observing people, so that he would know how to behave the way they expected him to. Mae, it seemed, was good at the same thing. Probably he was not as good at it as Mae. But he had watched other women closely at all stages of relationships, and he knew what was probably coming. He remembered talking to Coleman Simms about women once when their two female companions had gone to the ladies’ room.

“You offer them a drink, but they say no,” he had said. “So a minute later, they reach over and drink yours. You offer again, and they say no, and look at you as if you must be deaf.”

Coleman nodded. “She don’t want a drink, kid.”

“Then why—”

“Because they’re like that. What she wants is not a drink. She wants an easement.”

“What’s that?”

“The right, like a legal right, to drink yours when she feels like it. It tells her something she wants to know, maybe tells other women she claims you or something.” He shrugged. “If you don’t like them, stay away from them and get a dog.”

Varney knew that if he let things go on very long, Mae would get comfortable and begin to do things like that. She would begin bringing possessions in here, moving things around and cluttering everything up. She would have to revert to her nature at some point. He guessed that the past three weeks must have been what a honeymoon was like. Both people were still being very careful, scared to death they were going to make a mistake and fart.

Mae slipped out of the bathroom, holding her hair dryer in her hand. He could see the alert, questioning look in her eyes. “I hope I didn’t wake you,” she said. “I wanted to get an early shower so I’d be out of your way when you finish your exercises.”

He was almost angry at the falseness of it, but he reminded himself that she was trying to please him. “Relax,” he said. “I wanted to get up anyway.” He put on his shorts and a sweatshirt and began his routines. Before he had worked up much of a sweat, she had pulled her bag out from under the bed and had the strap over her shoulder. She walked to the door and said, “I’ll be back at six.” She paused. “You don’t mind, do you?”

Between crunches, he said, “I heard you.”

“If you don’t want me to—”

“No,” he said, as he dropped to the ground for his first set of push-ups. “No problem.” He heard the door close and went back to counting. When he reached fifty, he went to the closet and moved aside the hangers so he could do his pull-ups.

He couldn’t blame her for being so careful. All these clothes he had to push aside, he had bought so she would be in a good mood. That was another thing about women that he had learned from careful observation. They had all these strange things about them that made little sense. They liked clothes so much that they sometimes bought new ones they never even wore, just kept them in a closet to make them feel good, as though it made a difference. They all thought they were fat, and even if they knew they were thin, they harbored some suspicion that they were fat inside, and were just managing to hide the truth by being thin. Even then, they had to hear people tell them they weren’t fat, so they’d know they hadn’t been caught yet.

They also liked to say that other women who weren’t very attractive were beautiful. He was not sure why they did that, since they never let on that they knew they were lying. He had tried out theories. One was that if they established an unappealing woman as the standard, then they would be, by comparison, breathtaking. Another was that they all knew perfectly well what all men looked at and how they felt about it, but were trying to be subversive, insisting that the system wasn’t fair, and therefore that they could obliterate it by mere denial. None of his hypotheses had been quite satisfactory when applied to even one woman on all occasions. There were a great many oddities. But Coleman’s words came back to him: “If you don’t like them, stay away from them.” It was still astounding to Varney that a man who seemed to know so much about people had been stupid enough to get himself killed.

Varney looked up at the closet ceiling as he did his pull-ups, and once again focused on the square up there. It was an access hatch to the attic—not an attic, really, just a crawl space with bare two-by-fours and insulation. At the top of a pull, he held himself with one hand and pushed up with the other to see how quickly he could open it. Then he did another pull-up and closed it again. He had hidden his extra guns up there, where no casual visitor would find them. When he had finished his second set of push-ups and his crunches and sit-ups, he went out for his run. He completed his usual course to the high school and around the track, then came back and showered.

He tried to keep himself from feeling annoyed that Mae had gone out alone. He would have liked to walk somewhere with her and buy her lunch and listen to her talk. That thought brought back a dull worry. He had only brought with him the cash hidden in his house in Buffalo when he had left, and that had amounted to twenty thousand. The used car he had picked up had cost him eleven, and paying for Mae for two weeks had cost him most of the rest. He owed Tracy about four thousand for various expenses, and he didn’t exactly have it where he could easily reach it.

He should just get into the car right now and drive away. These people were taking advantage of him. Tracy was charging him outrageous rent for living in this ratty apartment that had been vacant so long it had smelled musty, and outrageous fees for getting Mae to dye and cut his hair and get him a pair of clear glasses and help him pick out different clothes. She had implied she wasn’t taking any of the money he was giving her for Mae, but he didn’t believe her. He had asked Mae about it, and she had just avoided his eyes uneasily and said, “Tracy takes care of me okay.” He should walk away from this place.

He tried to decide why he wasn’t leaving, and it came down to the fact that he wasn’t ready to give up Mae yet. He couldn’t detect any particular attachment to her when he tried to detect one. He knew that someday he was going to get into his car and drive away, and when he imagined it, he could not imagine wanting her to go with him. He just wasn’t ready to leave yet. He liked having sex with her: the shape of her body, the sound of her voice, the shine of her hair, even the smell of her perfume all seemed pleasant to him. He wasn’t ready to quit yet.

Even with his new hair and clothes, he couldn’t go back to Buffalo and hope to walk into his bank and come out with enough cash to last more than another month. He was going to have to wait longer before he went back there. He had a lot of cash in a safe-deposit box in Chicago. It was over a hundred thousand. Chicago would not be as dangerous as Buffalo, but he wanted to stay invisible for as long as possible.

He decided that on his way to lunch he would stop by the office and try to come to some agreement with Tracy. He walked, and noticed that he was going by a long, indirect route that he hardly ever took. For a few blocks he told himself he was doing it because the extra exercise was good for him, but after he had gone too far to go back to his usual route, he admitted that he had just been putting off talking to Tracy.

Varney remembered there was a good restaurant three blocks ahead. He had been there with Mae about two weeks ago. What was it called? Antoine, or Auguste, or something like that. He stepped inside and ate lunch by himself. The food was still the same, and he noticed that the prices were lower on the lunch menu. He seldom ate much during the day, but he’d made an exception and ordered a steak. By the time he was outside again it was two o’clock, but he felt better, more ready for Tracy.

When he reached the office he climbed the steps and went into the Crestview Wholesale office without knocking. Tracy was sitting behind the desk with her head down, staring from six inches away at a necklace made of silver and turquoise. She raised her eyes at him, sighed, and looked down again. “Damned things,” she muttered. “We don’t get much turquoise. What do you suppose this is worth?”

“I don’t know.”

“More than we can get for it. The fake stuff they make now is so good you need a chemist to catch it. And Indian silver work is so distinctive any insurance company can tell you who made it, where, and when, so you have to ship it practically to the moon to sell it.” She looked at Varney as though she had just noticed him. “But that’s not your problem, is it?”

He shook his head.

“What is? Mae?”

He stared at her. He wasn’t sure what she meant.

“I’m afraid I’m going to need her again tomorrow, too. I’ve got a couple more men coming back from the road, and I promised them a party if they’d behave themselves while they were out there.” She chattered on, as he stood there, not quite believing what he was hearing. “I’ve got two girls out sick. They’re roommates, so it’s probably some damned thing they ate. But there’s nothing else I can do.”

“You’re using her for parties? I’ve been paying you, and you’re—”

“That’s an ugly thing to say,” Tracy snapped. “I never said that for five hundred bucks you could own her. She’s a free person, and this is America, not some sandbox country where women wear veils and stay home. I just asked her if she wanted to pick up some extra money, and she did.” She let her irate glare soften a bit, and she looked at him with bleary, mock-sympathetic eyes. “Maybe the poor thing is worried. After all, you did fall a little behind on your payments . . .” Her voice trailed off so he could finish the thought himself.

“What do I owe?”

Tracy’s eyes glowed, opening wide to let a flash of greed show through for an instant. “Let’s see. A hundred a day for two weeks for the apartment suite is fourteen hundred. Five hundred a day for Mae for a week is thirty-five. I’ll only add a hundred for the lost interest, and keep it at an even five thousand, if you’ve got it today.”

“You want me to pay interest when you’re charging me in advance?”

“Sugar,” she said in a wheedling voice, “I’m just going by the due date. If money is due on a certain date, and you’re late, you always pay interest, don’t you?”

“I thought you were doing this as a favor.”

“I am, honey, I am. I’m fronting for you, putting up my own money in advance, keeping you safe. If you have the money today, I can knock off the interest, and make it forty-nine.”

“I don’t have it on me.”

“I know you walked here, but I can drive you home to get it.”

“It’s not there.” He could see the skeptical look coming into her eyes, so he said, “I’ll have to drive someplace out of town to pick it up. It’s going to take a couple of days.” He frowned. “I want to take Mae with me.”

Tracy sighed deeply and rolled her eyes. “You don’t even have the money you already owe me—let alone poor Mae—but you want everyone else to change our plans at the last minute?” She raised a penciled-in eyebrow. “Maybe you ought to get a job.”

No sign of emotion appeared on his face. He might have been a photograph of a man looking off into the distance. When Tracy saw that, she felt relieved. She had been surprised by an instant of hot panic after she had said the part about the job, thinking maybe she had gone a tiny bit too far. Her own word “job” had reminded her of what he did for a living. As he walked out of the office, she began to feel the cool relief begin to turn into pride, then anticipation. The next time she saw him, he would be bringing more money.