The Spot: Stories

Nebraska

Where else to begin but beneath the dining room table, where she’s hiding, dazed and alone, tormented by fear and loneliness, lost to time (it seems), most certainly to be forgotten? The annals of history won’t record this lonely moment while the house cracks in the heat, aches high up in the rafters, snaps along the joists; the genuine linoleum in the kitchen glistens oily to the touch, the trees and grass sway in the wind off the river, and she hunches down beneath the table, where she at least feels safe, listening to the wind as it lifts through the trees to make a hushed sound and then depletes itself so that a dog’s bark, husky and dry, can arrive from far off, and then even farther away a soft hooting sound — someone calling — and then another dog, giving a sharper, more precise bark while she examines her knees, worn to white threads, and then extends her legs and says aloud as she touches her shins and ankles, You’ve got good long legs, fine, fine legs. She leans back and looks at the underside of the table, the battered legs and feet (Who left this grand artifact here?), and then, looking up, sees the words GRAND RAPIDS stenciled on the underside of one of the leaves.

How much despair is inherent in lifeblood, to put a name to it and yet to avoid speaking of it; they were that deep underground — and the underground was ethereal, nonexistent, and supplanted by their own hopes. It was all vainglory. It was all desire to overcome some inner chink in the armor — or so they thought. Light seemed to seep through the cracks; that’s how it felt — as if they were able to read each other’s minds. She could look into Byron’s face; she could see it in his eyes, his wide brown eyes, nothing like doubt, nothing like that at all, but some immutable glint of fear. It is fear that will destroy us, he hinted: One wrong move and we’re doomed, and so when we approach, it must be with the utmost certainty and firmfootedness, not a bit of room to spare, not an inch one way or another. The line on the map indicated the route to the mall. The Brinks truck — heavy and swaying under its armored weight — followed the route weekly. In back rooms, monies were counted with great care, then poured into canvas sacks, sealed, tagged, and hefted out into the raw pure daylight and loaded. One could imagine the bags coming out beneath the broad blue sky and seeing the light of day for a moment before being borne up into the dark, cavernous hold, piled up against other bags, the weighty perplexity of cash compiled against cash; the sluggish movement of the truck as it eased out of the parking lot; the shielded windows, the portals for shotgun muzzles, the heavy-block weight, the reinforced tires — the imponderable protective bulkiness of the truck, so fragile and delicate as soon as it was open to air. That space between point and point, through which the bags had to travel; that in itself, of course, was the weak spot, open to human error; the guns belted into holsters, snapped tight, officious, square-handled; that moment when the money made its way through the morning was the caesura, the quest; the main goal, the main purpose of all the planning, was to find a way into that open air, to coordinate their place in time and space with that of the Brinks truck so that they might, with the simple prompting and the pointing of weapons, provoke the security men, the workers, the hired hacks, to peaceably hand over the bags of money without being shot. That was the original plan laid out; the proviso was that lives would be spared and that it would be a clean, neat operation that went from step to step with the swiftness of exacting precision, an almost mechanical process, but of course it was also brutally clear that one misstep and lives would, as they say, be taken; so it was imperative that they strike at the moment when the cash was nakedly open, when the bags were moving, exposed. The mall had been staked out. She parked there one afternoon, watching from a slouch: ladies moving in and out of the stores, bearing bags, a few men going into Sears for wrenches; one woman with sagging hose, pulling her child along with a stretched arm — overburdened with too many demands, her hair up in a beehive, looking threadbare — swatted the behind of her little boy to move; this woman was evidence, she thought, of what the system does; the system creates burnout, the stress of consumption; the system tears into the ankles; it puffs the ankles up and sends you wobbling along in high heels.

Shooting out in the field in Nebraska, launching shots at a so-called range — really just a pile of old sandbags along one side of a trench — Byron extends his arms, holds his breath, and unleashes a shot that proves him to be the best marksman of them all (because in prep school — a military academy in Tennessee — shooting had been compulsory). When her turn comes she finds pleasure in the gun, solid and heavy with compressed energy as the hammer clicks into place; an enjoyable constriction (in the trigger spring, before the release) sends a bright charge up her arm, and then in answer the kick throws her back on her heels while the blue cloud hangs, reminding her of caps, of firecrackers. (She’ll enjoy this same smell later, sifting black powder from a rolled newspaper into galvanized pipes, tapping the wax into place before slipping the fuses through the softness.) Cans. Green glass insulators from old telegraph poles. Wine bottles. Pieces of fence post. She shoots them all and points the gun wildly into the sky and then down, waving the muzzle in Byron’s face and laughing until he slugs her hard and she falls back into darkness, only to wake in the trailer with a purple bruise on her brow and pain between her legs.

In the evening the men sit in front of the fire, talking softly, conspiratorially, their words quiet, epigrammatic. When they’re planning the heist — as they call it — Byron and August (nicknamed after the month he joined) speak in dainty voices, as if the scheme were an egg to be held with the utmost care. They sketch diagrams on paper — of the mall, the parking lot, the positioning of the truck, the various routes in and out, escape plans and alternates — and then burn the papers ritualistically, poking them into the flames with a stick.

Under the table an electric tingle spreads on her palms when she thinks about the guns and listens as the dogs stop barking, and there is only the rustling of trees, throwing mottled green shadows across the rooms upstairs. The oaks in front of the house have grown close to the screens, touching them, and with the breeze comes a smell from the Hudson that reminds her of summers at Lake George, when her father would come up from the city to visit for the weekends, relaxed, shedding his suit coat, his neck visible, loose-fleshed. Drinkable water, potable, her brother Hank liked to say, trying to get her to sip. You can see all the way to the bottom because it’s the purest lake water in the world. Now Hank’s in a grave, at Arlington, not far from the eternal flame over J.F.K. (I’m gonna blow it out, he had said, going up to pay his respects when they visited on a family trip.) Each summer, her father took them to the end of the lake to visit Fort Ticonderoga and told them how it had been conquered by a distant relative, Ethan Allen, and his Green Mountain Boys (the land of the dead, Hank had called it — hadn’t he?) — and then to a wooded area near the fort where the French had massacred the British, and then the British, a year later, massacred the French. The ghostly aftermath in the wind, the silent vestiges there amid the thin, second-growth forest of quaking aspen and ragged maple. The inaccurately reassembled buttresses. The placards that rang false against the weighty, blood-slicked solidity of history.

Monies to finance the bomb-making! Monies to demolish the status quo! To fight the system you gotta go within and undermine it, kick the scaffolding away. Whatever falls, falls. Those left standing are standing. There are incongruities to any movement, man, errors of judgment, hypocrisies all around, but that’s just the way it is, just the way things are, Byron says. The day is brilliant and clear with beautiful thick clouds drawing themselves lazily across the sky. Heading south from the hideout — following Route 9W, the old post road from Albany to New York, to avoid the cops who hang around tollbooths, moving through the old river towns, each presenting itself as brutal proof of the system’s failure, with boarded windows and dusty shop fronts and sad men smoking cheap cigars — she listens to Byron, a soft lisp rounding his words as he speaks of the downfall of the system, of tort law, of simultaneous orbital spin reversal, of the Rolling Stones at Altamont, of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, of his cohorts and colleagues, those who had failed him and those who hadn’t; of the need to locate plain speech, to find a new vernacular, to absolve the transgressions; he speaks in Latin, quoting Horace—“Nay, Xanthias, feel unashamed / That your love is but a servant / Remember, lovers far more famed / Were just as fervent”—while the river through the trees widens and then narrows as they coast the steep grade around Storm King Mountain. (During all of this, August remains silent with his big, meaty hands atop the wheel. He’s a quiet man. His words — when he does speak — seem to be pulled from a well by the bucket of his jaw.) Then they’re heading down the Palisades Parkway, past the state park, driving carefully, sticking to the speed limit, until they exit to the mall, where they look at their watches and assure themselves — in the bright late-morning light — that the plan is hitchless, locked into simplicity: exploit the open space between the store and the armored truck, the one soft vulnerability in the transportation of great funds. (She imagines the guards on a coffee break, sipping inside the cab of the truck, ignoring the money in the back, bored with the tedium of security work, not so much hoping for a robbery as fully aware that it might be the only way out of the monotonously long days of picking up loot. Perhaps there is some pleasure in staring out the bulletproof glass, far above the fray, and at times peeking through the thick aperture of the arm ports at what seems to be the far-off light of day.) To rob someone takes a sense that certain borders can be violated, she thinks. In the crux of the act, of course, lies violence. One way or another, the space will be, when they get there, neatly clear of other vehicles. (It’s gotta be pure karma, man, Byron had explained. All of the elements have to be aligned. It’s as simple as that.) At that moment, a deep, robust smell will emerge from the willow trees that hang delicately over the chain-link fence at the back of the mall. Long, narrow leaves sweeping slightly in the breeze. Byron will point a gun. August will, too.

The two men hauling sacks look up from behind their sunglasses; one of them has his pistol stuck between his big swing of belly and his belt. The other guy is lean, thin, boyish, nervous-looking, with his hand resting loosely on his gun, as if about to draw, when August says, Stop. Stop.

They agreed, when they were driving east from Nebraska, that the best way to control someone was with one-word commands, the way you’d train a dog, not by shouting but rather by speaking softly, with complete authority.

The thin one pauses, his lips parted slightly in a half smile, as if to say: This is the part of the job we expected. It was an eventuality, resting in the tedium of pickups, banks, Laundromats, furniture warehouses. The tedium of take-out coffee, of casual banter, of heavy traffic — gone. At some point along the line, I was going to come face-to-face with you. Then he lets his hand tighten down on his gun, taking one step forward, which causes August to say stop again. From the car, it all seems remote, as if on a stage. All four actors are forming a rhombus of tension points, a little toe dance from side to side. Then for a minute or so they rest in a frozen stasis. The fat one — from her view — seems wobbly, lifting his arms to reveal long dark stains below his armpits. Stop, Byron says. Step back to the wall. Step back and don’t make a move. Then August gives the signal, fluttering his hand behind his back, fluttering some more because:

It is decided, passing over the Mississippi in St. Louis — seeing the arch glinting in the sun, cranking the Rolling Stones, talking about the plan — that the unavoidable cost will be two lives. It is the only way. The discussion that ensues will last all the way across Ohio and into Pennsylvania. The counterargument she puts forth is that it would be just as easy to tie the men up and gag them, and then take them into the culvert behind the mall, down into the weeds by the creek, hidden by the willow branches. But this might allow for a slip-up. A passerby might see us dragging the men (Byron argues); whereas if the men are simply shot against the doorway, they will slump down behind the cover of the parked truck and give us ample time to drive away, unnoticed. The gunshots will present a problem because even with the silencers there might be enough of a report to draw notice, so I think you should honk the car horn, a few sustained toots, and then, in the cover of that sound, we’ll shoot both men. August will signal you. He’ll wave his hand behind his back.

Yeah, there are certain moral objections that can certainly be made, Byron admitted, sipping stale coffee at a truck stop in Clearfield, Pennsylvania. Out the windows, past the bright lights over the gas pumps, beyond the tractor trailers lined up along the curb, strip-mine rigs dug coal, their frames lit like constellations, their car-size maws scooping intergalactic darkness. In the wider moral drama lies the truth, man. The truth is in the wide view. We can’t look for it in the minutiae. We’ve got to keep the larger vision in mind. End of story. End, of the fucking, story. Byron sucked coffee from a spoon and looked out the tall windows. Bathed in a colorless carbon light, the trucks were mulling softly, their engines going while their drivers slept. The topic of death seemed perfectly suited to the truck stop, as it had been to the old shack, back in Nebraska. Death was just one of many objectionable qualities in a landscape littered with antelope horns, the whitewashed skulls of long-dead bison, old truck tires, and, scattered everywhere, fossilized remains so long gone as to be ensconced in meaninglessness. Back there — in the afternoons — huge clouds had ranged up into themselves, towering high until they darkened along the bottoms, flattened out by their own weight, and spit toy forks of lightning that produced audible thunder only if they were listening for it; otherwise, the distance, and the ceaseless wind, devoured everything. Byron put his coffee cup carefully in its saucer, stood up, and went outside to stand in the parking lot. She and August finished their breakfasts. I’m afraid, she said. I’m afraid. I don’t think we should kill. I don’t think it’s right at all. August looked at her and fiddled with his eggs. I want to agree with you, he finally said, nodding at the window, but I have to go with Byron. I can’t see leaving them bound and gagged in the ditch, where they might die anyway.

Byron elaborates on the plan: You’ll give the horn a good threesecond toot to cover the shots (one-apple, two-apple, three-apple), and then another shorter one to make it sound as though you’re signaling someone inside to come out. We’re a great nation of horn blowers, he adds vis-à-vis the plan, so no one’s gonna notice so long as it sounds like a normal, audible transaction, like you’re calling to someone to come out, or giving someone a friendly warning. The passing of a signal. My sister’s boyfriend used to sound his horn outside our house all the time. Late at night he’d pull up in his car, tap the horn, and I’d look out my bedroom window and watch her sneak out. Then one night he drove up and gave a delicate little signal, just the lightest tap, you could barely call it a honk, and I watched as she skipped down the sidewalk, got in his car, and disappeared into the firmament never to be seen again. So a horn honk is perfectly apropos. No one’s gonna notice if you do it right. Later that afternoon, as they drive through eastern Pennsylvania, barreling down toward the Delaware Water Gap, she thinks about the apartment on Park Avenue and how as a young girl she had looked out at the evening traffic, counting the taxis and the buses, listening intently until the mull of noise that normally lay submerged beneath consciousness would dissolve to reveal the sounds of horns. She thought of the view — all the way down to Grand Central if she stuck her head out the window and arched to the right — and the sad elegance of the light, near nightfall in winter. The blueness of the vista, the glory in those lights.

The parking lot is glazed with heat around the car, and near the doorway to the store the men are still stuck in the rhombus of tension, moving slightly in a congruence, a sidelong motion, while August crabs his hand behind his back, signaling away. There isn’t really fear inside her; there’s nothing except a bag of air inflating against her rib cage, and her fingers light on the metal horn band that makes a half circle around the steering wheel, unwilling to push — no, it’s not that simple. She conspired with herself to avoid making a sound that would cover the shots, and she knows what she’ll do next, and she does it, backing the car up and then heading off across the parking lot, not too fast, but fast enough, naturally, focusing her eyes straight ahead and trying to picture Hank in her mind, his boyish face in his uniform, the collar tight up against his neck, and his smile, bright and hopeful, as he tells her not to worry, that he’ll be back in the summer and they’ll go to Lake George together just like the war never happened; trying to keep that vision in front of her and her hands steady, she drives onto the main road and heads east, while a wild posse of police cars — old ones with rounded fenders and single dome lights — roars west in a fury of rage and torment.

In Nebraska, smoking cigarettes in the shack and acting tough — with Byron in a leather cowboy hat cured from the sun and salt-stained, with the stitching coming loose where the crown was attached and the brim curled up in front — she let August bleach her hair (he had a sister who’d taught him how), and for a few days she felt like Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits—rugged, rustic, embraced not only by fear but also by something deeper, a landscape urgently, almost sexually, unforgiving. She felt during those days a new physicality; her body seemed born anew as her thighs slid against the denim. Her hips turned bony, hard, and she lurched like a cowpoke when she walked. They strove for a certain élan, a style to the mission, as if they might capture the spirit of Bonnie and Clyde — not the actual historical characters, who seemed messy and dirty, not to mention dead, but the ones portrayed by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the movie, hazed by the lens filter, eternally laughing and skipping their way through bank robberies and gas station holdups until they were devoured again and again by their love for each other and by the fate — a hail of bullets — that was waiting for them along that road in Louisiana. She felt an elegance emerge, not just in her movements but in her posture, her stance, the way she stood on the earth, facing the horizon, alone on the ridge, while the men worked on the plan back in the shack. Sometime around then a guy named Jamake appeared, a local Sioux Indian who arrived one afternoon on his motorcycle and offered to lend a hand. He looked squint-eyed, walked with a slight limp, and made smirking, knowing looks behind Byron’s back. When they hiked together, he put his hand against her back in a way that was unthreatening, keeping it fanned out high near her shoulders as he told her about plants that were edible and freely available from the land, prairie turnips and Jerusalem artichokes, and in the southern ranges the leaves of the lechuguilla, which had to be cut up and baked properly for several days. You don’t cook them exactly right, they’re as hard as bayonet blades, he said. There are things like that all over the place, man, things that have to be tempered under a steady heat for days on end or they’re just another thorny plant and not worth shit. Up on the tattered edge of the ridgeline they sat and talked, and he told her that he had been born in Utah and lived on the lam from the lawmen who were after him for some activities he had performed as part of the movement. And she told him about her early days living with Byron near San Francisco, in a bungalow with a view of the Pacific. She told him about her childhood in New York, with her businessman father, sailing toy boats in the Central Park pond. She did not talk about Hank, or about the war, or about those things that drove her to join the underground. There was a perplexity between them that was pleasurable and right. The conversation was limited. He withheld his condemnation of the white boys making plans down in the shack. He did not say — as he obviously wanted to say — that these were foolish rich kids playing a game and afraid of real confrontation; these were kids couched in money and self-righteousness and an old sense of propriety that was unearned and therefore unwarranted; these were boys who had been taught a predestination that went against the truth of nature. He did not advise her to ignore their orders — except in the way he looked when she told him of their plans (askance, squinting his eyes and spitting to the side). Instead he told her that he was pure fuckin’ AIM, nothing more and nothing less — American Indian Movement all the way, from Wounded Knee to Wounded Knee — while he fixed her with the gracious element of his eyes, dark blue in one but white and cloudy in the other. A sucker punch caused that a few years back, he said. I was walking along the road, and a man came up on his chopper and begged directions. I showed him the way to Highway 29, and in gratitude he struck me from behind with an implement, a crowbar or tire iron. He took that side of my sight but he gave me vision, pure Indian vision. And now I see the way I was meant to see even though, truth be told, I was actually born with the name Bill Winston, outside of Chicago, in Oak Park, and, until I reclaimed my real name, I was nothing but a plain old white man. Then he told her about the standoff with the state troopers somewhere out in the Great Basin, and how men and women (himself included) had blocked a supply road to a research center where the white man took advantage of the vast emptiness, securing a parcel, cordoning it with barbed wire and high fences and security checkpoints. You see, at night there were ghostly casts of light in the sky that killed the stars, he said. There were the appearances of strange flying craft that devoured the migrating birds and cut holes across the heavens, rending them apart so you could see the guts of the universe. So in protest we lay in the road and let the police drag the women into the culvert and the men, who gave no struggle, away into the system of justice you’ve created. You see, man, the sky was weeping and strange, and it was sorrowful and purple, like that bruise there on your head. So now the universe is a fucking mess. Then he kissed her, and she kissed him back, and he said, It’s fucked up. There just isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it, man. And then he leaned his head against her shoulder and wept quietly. When they met again up on the ridge, one final time, early in the morning with the dew on the grass and soft cobwebs on their cuffs, they made love quickly with their pants down around their ankles so that only their bellies seemed united, hot, eager. Byron was down below, packing up, loading stuff into the car while August checked the camp to make sure they weren’t leaving any clues behind. There was a fire in which the papers were being burned, sending up a trickle of black smoke into the morning sky, which was shrouded in a thin white haze around the edges but beginning to turn blue overhead. The guy named Jamake was moving softly over her, and she had her eyes open and was looking into his good one, trying to see something, and when he came she noticed that he didn’t blink but instead looked directly at her until he leaned down to kiss her with lips that tasted of ash, dew, and smoke. The wind was twining his hair around her lips and cheeks. Then, from down below, Byron was giving the horn a toot, a soft, short report that said: We’re ready to go now, and you’re gonna have to leave that ridge and come down from there, leave that Indian asshole behind and get in the fucking car. Up on the ridge she didn’t move for a minute as she lay against Jamake, who was reaching down, wiping her softly with a bandana, cleaning her up so that she might go off into the world. The car horn was sounding again, angry and persistent. It seemed there was nothing she could do but get up, smooth down her jeans, and hike back, holding tight to the side of the narrow trail, stepping carefully along the ridge where it fell off into nothing, a dusty wash of stones just starting to catch the full brunt of daylight.

The part when the guns go off and the horn doesn’t honk: There is a random anarchy of the moment — amid the yelling, the shouts, the fear — smoothed by the swaying willow branches, which make a soft, almost broom-sweep sound against the chain-link fence; men face one another with weapons drawn in a standoff, posited, posted, tensions created; the wiry guard is stark-still, frozen, producing more fear in Byron because the immutability, the cold posturing seems — and this is a quick mind-flash — inhuman, his eyes unmoving. The larger guy sways on his heels, both arms out with his gun. The swaying is imperceptible to everyone except August; August, too, is moving a little, and he feels, amid the conjoining of many sensations, an awareness of his weight and heft, hanging over his belt, tightly packed in his legs, as a significant disadvantage. He is a large target. But he is too involved in the tension, in the urgent dynamic before him, to think too much about this fact. The entire thing resolves itself down into those positions, into that tension, into the guns drawn and the directions they are pointed while, from the car, from her vantage, she watches and tries to see and sees only one side, one angle of the action: two men dressed in uniforms of pale olive, with stitched patches indicating their names, one fat and one thin, standing fearfully with their guns out, beneath the direct implications of the noon sun; Byron and August out of sight, positioned almost behind the truck, just their guns visible, pointing; the bags of money weighty and heavy at the feet of the larger man; all frozen there for a moment in the fear and agony until there is the flash of muzzle fire and then — in what seems to be a modulated time/space, not slow motion but rather something else, a kind of compact glimmering shimmer of movement — the fat man falls to the side, collapsing under the weight of his torso as his knees give, falling to the ground and then bowing down, prayerfully, his dark oil-slicked hair glinting in the light and his scalp bright red with sweat until another bullet hits and the top of his skull flowers with bone and spray; then the other man falls, too, his lean, slim body folding over sidelong and leathery; his own bones frail and delicate so that he appears to come down to the earth with a sliding motion, like a leaf in the wind, crumpling over himself.

All noise and commotion held off for a moment until she realized that she had honked the horn and was leaning on it too long; that behind her in the parking lot a lady, pushing a cart, had paused to look over and was coming toward her; that she was still on the horn, the sound bending and turning in on itself; and the men were now waving to her to stop, lugging the bags in her direction, Byron with two to balance himself and August just two-fisting the bags in one hand while he waved his gun wildly in the other; she realized that behind the lady, far off at the entryway of the lot, there was the flash of red light indicating a cop coming, and then another flash of light behind it, all under that bright noon sun with the swish of willows to her left and beneath that, down past the chain-link, a musky earthen smell of the river that seemed to bring the whole scene — the cracked dirty macadam, the green Dumpsters stenciled with white lettering, the drab back doorways (each painted a russet color) — into some congruence with the natural world, the everlasting world that would eternally outlast these stupid sinning willful men who were dying by their own clock. So when she backed up and around to escape she was thinking of that smell, and of the river, and she turned too fast and struck the lady with the car, clattering her load, spilling her cart and sacks of groceries and knocking her to the ground. (She was an older lady, not so enfeebled but frail-looking, in a long smocklike coat, pale yellow, with eyeglasses of wire rims and a duskylooking hairdo, pulled up; she was one of those old ladies who went to the beauty parlor weekly and had her bouffant arranged and neatened and listened to the patter and gossip but with a certain reserve; she was originally from St. Louis and had a certain composure that came from the Middle West and still, at times, found herself strangely and oddly out of place in her New Jersey town, right on the border of New York.) The men shouted to her to stop and not to go, holding the bags up and then coming over and trying to stand in front of the car to block her way and to limit her options to two: to drive over them and kill them or to stop and let them aboard, to hold off; Byron had his gun forward and was trying to find her face through the glare of the windshield and she knew, right then, seeing him, that if need be he would shoot her and be done with it, because he had shown, in his beatings, that he had the capacity to hurt without thought and that his body was at times out of his control. He held the gun out and sighted along it and said stop and she did; she did stop for a moment, until she continued into her reverse turn, moving the car around the lady, who was trying to clamber up, and then swinging forward so that she was facing the police cars, which were wending around among the parking spaces, looking for something to lock on to, their sirens wailing loudly now. But they didn’t spot her, really; they were moving around to the right, to the south, and coming along the back side of the lot, coming around and heading toward the armored truck but not seeing her, apparently; she was now driving forward, slowly, not too fast — to avoid attention — but just fast enough to look leisurely. In a matter of one or two minutes she was out on the main road heading south; she was blending in with traffic and silently congregating with the others out shopping, running errands — the plumbing trucks, the delivery vans, the women loaded up with kids. She went from the scene behind the mall with death and mayhem to something else instantly; on the other side of the meridian a cluster of police cars — sirens wailing, valiant in their formation — passed quickly and unaware. She got on the old road heading north; it would be the long route but it would be safer, probably, and although she hadn’t heard all the details of the plan and was kept from knowing them, she did know one thing, and that was that the old road — which went up through the depression-ravaged Hudson River towns — would probably be safer.

She would begin to look for the house; she would track it down intuitively. What she knew was only what she remembered from coming down; there was an old lumberyard in the town where she would turn right, gloomy old storefronts empty of wares and falling into disrepair, a store that sold party items and gags and magic tricks wholesale, and then, after that, an old public library, stately and grand up along a sloping hill. There she would turn down the narrow road that, from what she remembered, sloped toward the river; at a street called Ross she would turn right into another road, narrow and elegant; she would go back to the old house and sit alone and find a way into something else, she thought; the weeds outside would give under the wind and sway softly and it would be beautiful; the soft tarry smell would arrive from the road; the house would heave and creak softly under the hot sun, and she would go from room to room and examine them for clues, for some long-lost remnants of the life that had gone on there before it was reduced to broken glass, to long cracked wounds in the plaster that showed the lath behind; she would bow down on all fours to God; she would find herself in the basement amid the dusty light from the window wells and the smell of heating oil and the earthen floor, compacted into the corner there, under the old table, in the cobwebby recess she knew was there because she had gone with the men when they explored the house and Byron had bonged on the old tank while August, heaving his weight around, did a dance and sang “Sympathy for the Devil”; she’d feel an urge to spend the rest of eternity there in the dark and the cool, because right now, driving in the car, her desire was to get away from the bright sun and the sensation of the wild passing landscape that seemed so surfaced with light that it was impossible to look at; then in the morning if she saw some kind of new light from the window, sifting down through the motes of dust, she might go up and out again into a new world, entering with bare feet and walking the dew-wet road down to the river, where maybe if all was right and the world was back into some order she would find a cool cove loaded with myrtle and elderberry, and sit and watch the currents move and the boats far off. Maybe there, in that place, she would be located and identified and brought forth into the world of men and justice the way Byron said she would; then fate would play its hand and she’d be where she was intended to be, she thought, holding the wheel, driving carefully, avoiding speed traps, passing through a town named Newburgh that seemed depleted of all life and grace except where a few old grand homes hung on, big and robust, kept up nicely; she was a good and careful driver when calm, and she knew that one way or another she would get back to the hideout and fulfill the vision she had of how this whole thing would come to an end.