The Search

CHAPTER TEN

By morning the train was passing through a silent expanse of wheat. When the sun moved over the roof and slid in through the open door Walker retreated to the back of the car, into the cool. From here, with the golden fields and blue sky framed by the black doors, the view was exactly like the projected image of a movie screen, an endless panning shot of prairie.

Then, slowly, the view began to shrink. Houses began to appear, roads; in the distance, factories. By late afternoon the train was heaving into the outskirts of Eagle City. The number of tracks visible from the freight increased until they stretched away like a wide river.

Walker’s train clanked and squealed over points, drawing parallel to other trains and then sliding away again. Beyond the railroad tracks was an actual river. A bridge squatted iron-heavy in the distance. Cranes, warehouses, water towers and brooding clouds. Faded signs with speed limits and warnings that no longer mattered. Old stock that had been plundered for spares and left to rust in sidings. The broken windows of an abandoned signal house. Littered with gulls, even the sky looked old, run-down.

The train slowed almost to a crawl. Walker jumped down and waited for it to pass, guessing that the centre of the town was on the other side, away from the river. Some way off a gang of workers in orange bibs walked across the tracks, shovels and picks over their shoulders.

When the train had passed, Walker began making his way across the expanse of tracks, ducking under the bumpers of stationary coaches, stepping ahead of departing freights. Beyond the station rose the office blocks of the city’s business district, high glass buildings made from cubes of sky.

Next to the railroad was a car park, cordoned off by a high perimeter fence. Walker waited behind a stationary shunter until there was no one in sight and then tossed over his bag and hauled himself up, the fence sagging and bulging with his weight. He dropped to the other side and walked out of the car park and into the town.

Eagle City had grown up as a crossing-point and small port on the Eagle River; with the coming of the railroads it became the commercial centre of the region and was now a large, depressed town on the edge of the prairie. Walker spent two days asking after Malory or Carver without success. He had lost track of them both. Which meant that he himself was lost. He thought about leaving and going on to Despond, a couple of hundred miles away, but did not have the confidence to rationalize this in his usual way: if he felt like leaving, then the chances were that Malory had felt the same. Besides, what would he find there? Sitting on the steps of an abandoned building, drinking milk from a bottle, he glanced up and saw, on the wall opposite, a torn poster for a Western. In films cowboys spoke of the trail going cold, but he had no way of knowing if the trail had gone cold or had actually frozen over. And what trail was there except the one that he left in his wake? What else was there to guide him?

He tossed the empty milk bottle into a bin and began walking. Soon after embarking on the search he had given up trying to guess the real significance of what Rachel had asked him to do. He had concentrated instead on the smallest things, on a trail of imagined footprints. He had given no thought to where they might ultimately lead because the question overwhelmed him, dwarfed his efforts and made them seem futile, absurd — whatever that meant. Now that he was pondering the larger purpose of the search he felt, for the first time, like giving up, abandoning it. And then what? Abandoning things was all very well but what did you do once you had abandoned them? Something else. It was impossible to walk out on one thing without walking into another. . What Rachel had asked him to do. Perhaps it was as simple as that. He had left so that he could return. All this shit just so he could fuck her. Like a story he’d heard in prison, using up the nothing days.

He had come to a network of steam-drift streets, crowded with cafés, bars and clubs. He walked past a club where a new kind of music was playing loudly. A bottle smashed a few yards in front of him. Whoops of laughter and a voice calling out: ‘Sorry, man, just an accident.’ Walker looked up to a second-floor balcony: a guy with his arms around a giggling woman, the pair of them so huge it seemed likely that the next thing to come down would be the balcony itself. ‘Take a full one with my apologies,’ he said, letting a beer bottle drop from his hand. Walker caught it, twisted off the top and took a gulp, held it up appreciatively. He smiled and walked on, pleased with himself for catching the bottle, ears ringing with the laughter of the pair on the balcony.

Pounding from the entrances to clubs, different kinds of music thumped together in a disjointed beat. The streets were littered with vomit, glass, even, Walker realized with revulsion, a bloody clump of teeth. A drunk lurched towards him, his face reeling yellow and blue in the flash of lights. His hands were on Walker’s lapels. Walker began pushing him away but already his battered mouth was spraying words: ‘He’s in Despond. That’s where you’ll find him. He’s waiting for you.’

From across the street a guy came crashing through the window of a bar. The shower of glass held a thousand scattered glimpses of the scene before falling like hail over the figure sprawled on the sidewalk, blood laking around him. The drunk had let go of Walker, had vanished in the boozesodden crowd. Walker looked round, could see no sign of him. There was a cheer from the bar and then silence, passers-by standing clear as the guy on the sidewalk dragged himself to his knees, shambled to his feet. He swayed uncertainly, gazing into the bar until a stool came spinning through the window and knocked him back into the angled grit of glass. Another cheer from the bar. This time he didn’t have the strength to get to his feet and he crawled away from the window on his hands and knees. Another stool came sailing out, followed by a chair, glasses and more stools, the remains of the window. The man sagged under the bombardment and lay motionless, one arm curled protectively around his head, surrounded by a broken mass of furniture. A dapper man from the bar stepped through the window frame and stood over him, counting him out — one-ah, two-ah — all the way to ten until he waved his arms to declare the bout oyer and stepped back through the window. All around from the street and bar were whoops, cheers and applause until people drifted away.

Walker moved on, replaying the drunk’s few words over and over. The crowds thinned out. He came to the river and gazed across at an area of derelict buildings. The girders and pillars of burnt-out tower blocks showed stark against the sunset. Something in the nature of skyscrapers suggested that these bare skeletons of metal represented the final flourishing of their vertiginous aspiration: this is how they had been intended to look.

The river was dappled red by the sun as Walker made his way along the tow-path. Further along the path was barricaded off and he entered the fringes of the Latin Quarter. Lines of washing hung between cramped balconies, the late silhouettes of birds were hemmed in by the redness of the sky. Preoccupied with the drunk’s startling appearance Walker had been paying little attention to exactly where he was. He had been told to be careful in certain parts of the Quarter at night and became abruptly anxious. A pair of youths in ripped jeans and biker jackets appeared from around a corner, nodded as they passed by.

Top-floor windows glowed furnace-red but it was growing dark in the narrow streets. Walker glanced round and in the shadows behind him thought he detected a figure moving. When he looked again there was nothing. Dogs barked nearby. From behind, car headlights illuminated the street and flung his shadow up the wall of a building to his right. He turned down a one-way street and stepped into shadows. The car slowed by the NO ENTRY sign then continued on its way, perpendicular to the street Walker was now on.

He walked for a few blocks, past a grocery store — closed now — whose name he recognized from earlier on. If he was right, then Canal Street, at the edge of the Quarter, was only five minutes away — though in which direction he was not sure. A car slowed to let him cross the road. He gestured ‘thanks’ and stepped out from the sidewalk, trying to see the driver behind the dark windows. The car turned the corner after him. He trotted across the road, walked briskly to the next right. The instant he was out of sight of the car he sprinted thirty yards, hoping that by the time it turned the corner he would have disappeared around another. When headlights swept the walls and filled the street he resumed walking. Up ahead was another one-way street. He trotted as soon as he was round the corner and was relieved to see that the car did not follow him. In evading the car, though, he had lost all sense of direction. He didn’t even know the name of the street he was in, the area was totally deserted: no cars, no shops, no passers-by. He wondered if the driver had been deliberately nudging him in this direction so as to intercept him a few blocks later. He looked up and down the street and began running back to the crossroads.

He was almost there when the street was again filled with the white lights of a car behind him. He heard the car accelerate. No longer attempting to disguise his urgency, he sprinted to the crossroads. He ran to another one-way street where a sign said closed — roadwork and this time the car trailed him into it. The street was so narrow that there was no sidewalk, just enough room for a car. After running thirty yards he could see no side streets between himself and the roadworks.

He was trapped. He stopped running, breathing hard. The car stopped. High up in the gap between buildings was a glinting catwalk of sky. He heard the car revving behind him. Up ahead, flashing yellow lights and black-and-yellow tape indicated where the road had been dug up. He began running again, knowing he would never make it that far. The car revved harder. There was a screech of rubber and the street was filled with the roar of the car accelerating, bearing down on him. The roadworks were a hundred yards away. He stopped, turned. Began running straight at the approaching car, into the white glare of the headlights.

The car was a wall of white lights and noise. He had to wait till the last possible moment, a split second before he was splashed all over the windshield, until –

‘— NOW!’

The word exploded from his throat. He leapt as high as he could, forcing himself higher, tucking his feet under his body, the bonnet rushing beneath him, the windshield — at the height of his leap now and the roof slipping by beneath him and then just clipping his foot, destroying his balance and sending him tumbling down the sloping back of the car.

He hit the floor hard, jarring his wrists, gouging lumps out of his palms and knees — but he’d made it, he’d made it. Not even winded. He looked up at the brake lights straining red as the car ricocheted from one wall to the next, trailing sparks and ploughing into the barriers and lights of the roadworks. With flashing hazard lights sprawled all around and one wheel still spinning in mid-air it looked as if both car and street had been ripped apart by a land-mine.

Walker was trembling uncontrollably, his knee was throbbing and cut, his palms bleeding. He had an impulse to sit down in the street and let someone bandage his cuts. Hauling himself to his feet took more effort than the jump. His strength had left him. He forced himself to trot to the end of the street and turn left, back the way he had come. It was only after he had put several streets between himself and the crashed car that he slowed to a walk. He was shaking so much he had to stop and rest for several minutes but, now that his panic had subsided, it proved surprisingly easy to find his way back to Canal Street. On Canal he hailed a taxi and gave the name of his hotel, clenching himself tight to control his shaking for the duration of the journey.

Seeing his ripped trousers, bloodied hands and ashen face, the hotel desk-clerk asked if he had been in an accident.

‘Not quite,’ he said, leaning on the lift button.

‘You need first-aid box?’

‘Could you bring it up?’

‘Si, si.’

Back in his room he took off his shirt and shoes and filled a bath. His trousers were stuck to his knee, swollen, hurting. He eased himself into the stinging water and lay soaking before floating them off. There was a knock at the door — the clerk — and Walker called out to just leave the box on the bed, everything was fine, thank you.

Luxuriating in the feel of hot water over his limbs, bruised but still intact, he went over the scene again and again: the car stalking him, the white charge of headlights, the flashing reflection of the windshield, the roof sliding beneath him, almost clearing it perfectly until he clipped his toe like an athlete hitting a hurdle and falling to the road in the wake of exhaust and noise. It was amazing that he had got away so lightly: grazes, gravel in his hands, a cut knee — but nothing, nothing really. .

It had been Carver in the car, he was convinced of that. He reached a hand out of the water and touched the chain Rachel had given to him. Smiling to himself, he thought of Kelly standing in the midst of devastation, naked except for the stone around his neck and his indestructible shorts. He felt elated, partly by the mere fact of survival, partly by the reappearance of Carver which was as reassuring as it was threatening. It meant he was still in the race, still on course.

He hauled himself out of the bath and reached for the towel. He climbed into bed, easing his knee gingerly between the sheets.

Tomorrow, first thing, he would head to Despond.