Tony and Susan

EIGHT

Susan Morrow, following Tony Hastings along the country road in the murdering dawn, wonders if she can stand what’s coming. Like Tony she assesses the possibilities. She knows what Tony does not, that there’s another compulsion in these events, the hand of Edward creating destinies. What happens to Laura and Helen depends on the kind of story it is. So while Tony struggles for hope, the reading Susan considers Edward, preparing some unbearable thing. Yet even as she fears, she encourages him, saying, Good work, Edward, you’re doing fine. She’s on edge not only for Tony’s sake but for Edward’s, wondering how he can avoid anticlimax without disaster.

Nocturnal Animals 7

Tony Hastings indoors. He sat in the rickety chair by the telephone inside the door, while the old farmer looked up the state police number. Thinking what to say, he had been thinking half the night. He thought: I must remember Tony Hastings. Mathematician, professor, organizing lectures and making everything clear. Emulate Tony Hastings. Afraid the police wouldn’t listen, if they didn’t understand, crackpot, joker, bum.

Nameless, abject, a speck of survival out of the woods. Yet already it was better, indoors, the chair, the burr of the telephone bell in his ear, the old farmer and his wife looking on.

The dark voice said, “State Police, Morgan speaking.”

Shock of having to speak, yet Tony Hastings was coming to life, organizing, who when where what why.

“Excuse me, my name is Tony Hastings. I’m a university professor from Ohio traveling through. I’m trying to find my wife and child. Mrs. Tony Hastings. Has she called in?”

Silence on the other end, Morgan trying to figure out, a bad start. “What’s your problem, professor?”

Come back to civilization, Tony. Who where when what why? Try what.

“We ran into trouble on the Interstate. I think my wife and daughter have been abducted.”

Another definite silence. “You need an ambulance?”

“No, I need help, I need help.”

The silence was conspicuous. Start with what your audience knows, state police: “We were traveling on the Interstate—”

“Hold on a moment.” He sank into the silence, not yet indoors, though excused for a second chance. He realized it was not necessary to say what he was afraid to say, though. Another man came on. “This is Sergeant Miles. Can I help you?”

“Yes, my name is Tony Hastings.”

“Yes, Tony. What seems to be the problem?”

“We ran into trouble on the Interstate. I think my wife and daughter have been kidnapped.”

Again the silence, enough for Tony to notice.

“Okay Tony, relax. Let me have your name and address.”

Then, “Your wife’s name?”

“And where you are calling from?”

He looked at the old farmer. “I’m at Jack Combs’s house in Bear Valley.”

“Okay Tony, take it easy and tell me exactly what you think happened.”

Never mind the skeptical silences, the patronizing Tonies, the interjected you think, at last Tony Hastings felt safe, back in a world he knew, with organization and machinery and civilized hearts to take care and protect him from horrors. The curious old farmer and his wife, listening, were no longer not kindly, the house was warm, the growing light outside was already adding pale green to the spread of the field across the road.

He was back in the world with a story to tell, an invisible listener taking it down, and two others standing in the hall because there was no place to sit.

He began. “Last night, sometime after eleven. Traveling on the Interstate on our way to Maine. We were attacked by another car and forced off the road.”

He told it all, it took him several minutes. He told about the bumping of the cars and how they had to stop. How the guys changed the tire and drove off with Laura and Helen in his car, leaving him to go with Lou in theirs. He told how Lou led him along many roads before taking him finally up the grassy track into the woods where he was put out. How he walked out alone in the dark and met the other car coming in but hid from it and how when it came out again they tried to run him down. And how he had walked miles to find a house, Jack Combs’s, with a light on.

It was as if telling the story made him safe. The police had it, the danger was dispelled, he had come back from the wilderness to five thousand years of progress in a warm house linked by telephone to computer, radio, and a trained specialist. Nothing bad could happen now. In the warm farmer’s house with its breakfast smell, despite the crazy thought that wouldn’t go away saying, you haven’t found them yet.

Sergeant Miles asked questions. What exit did you leave the Interstate? Tony could not say. Describe the three guys. He did that eagerly. Describe their car. That was harder. License plate? Do you remember any landmarks while you were riding with Lou? (He remembered the small white church. He remembered the trailer above the bend in the mountain road with the light in the window.) Are you sure they were trying to run you down? Could you find your way back to the woods road from where you are now? Oh it was good to be asked questions, he didn’t know how much life he had lost until it was restored by them.

Finally the sergeant said, “Thank you Tony. We’ll look into it and call you back.”

“Wait!”

“What?”

“I can’t stay here.”

“Oh. Hold on a minute.” The phone went dead.

He glanced at his hosts, who looked away. Strangers at the edge of a village in the early morning, good enough to let him make a phone call, can’t stay here—but where can he stay, with his wife and daughter missing and his car gone and nothing but the clothes he wore and his wallet?

The phone clicked back to life. “Tony? Tell you what. We’ll send a man over, pick you up. You can wait here.”

“Okay.”

“Man will be over about a half hour.”

So they were coming for him, they would take care of him, the good police, comforting and fatherly. He wanted to rejoice, but the farmer and his wife were looking at him.

“I’ll give you a bite to eat,” Mrs. Combs said.

She fed him well at the checkered kitchen table in the harsh light of the hanging bulb, while the husband went out to do the early morning barn work that had roused him to turn on the lights Tony had spotted. Her look was cautious, she did not respond to his thanks, and he ate in silence.

“Never went in for traveling, myself,” she said. “People is different in foreign parts. Never know what kind you run into.”

He nodded, his mouth was full. Criticism disguised as sympathy, yes maam, he thought, but this happens to be your country where I ran into these people you never know what kind. Nevertheless, be grateful for the good police and the kind if cautious hosts.

By the time the police car came for him it was full daylight though the morning sun was still behind a hill. The car had an official shield on its side and a rack of lights on top. The lights were off. The policeman was a large young man with a small fuzzy brown mustache and a broad front. He looked like a childlike student who kept coming to the office last year to ask for help, Tony couldn’t remember his name.

He said, “I am Officer Talbot. Sergeant Miles told me to tell you there has been no report on your wife and child.”

The disappointment in that, he realized he was expecting to be notified any minute that Laura and Helen had called in. He thought, it’s still not eight, most stores and offices are not yet open.

The big young student in uniform idled his engine and spoke into his microphone. The radio snapped in dark male machine voices. Officer Talbot looked serious, grim. He said, “You sure you didn’t have no prearranged meeting place?”

“Yes we did, the police station in Bailey. Only they took me and dumped me in the woods instead.”

“What’s Bailey?”

“They said it was the nearest town. We were supposed to go to the Bailey police.”

“Ain’t no Bailey I ever heard of. Ain’t no Bailey police, that’s sure.”

Bad, bad—although not really new, this news.

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

They started up, the police car going in the opposite direction from where Tony had come. He felt unexpectedly afraid, as of leaving something behind. He lost track of this new journey immediately, he could not remember the turns nor the frequent villages they passed through. As if riding in this sealed protective car left the nightmare behind but at the same time destroyed the path back to it and therefore the way back to life. He remembered Miles asking if he could find his way back to where he had been from the Combs house and thought, should I have asked Talbot to help me retrace my steps? But he had not made the suggestion, lest there be something obscene about it.

The countryside was green and yellow, rolling and fresh in the morning light. The roads shone black in the sun. They sped suspended high on the sides of hills overlooking broad valleys full of fields and patches of woods, and they descended into woody groves and rode up curves and climbed long straight slopes and slowed for villages and passed clusters of farmhouses and sheds and fields of corn and other fields with cows and yards with pigs and sheep on the opposite slope and dark patches of trees on the tops of the hills. He thought, how beautiful this country if he had Laura to say it to.

The police station was a new one-story brick building surrounded by a chain link fence at the edge of a town. There were cows beyond the fence and a motel across the street. Tony Hastings followed Officer Talbot through a corridor and past a bulletin board and through an office with a counter into another office with two desks. The man at the desk in the farthest corner got up. “I’m Lieutenant Graves. Sergeant Miles went home.”

Lieutenant Graves was a small man with round cheekbones and a small chin like a cartoon squirrel and a black mustache that descended below his mouth on each side. His eyes or the shape of his face made him look a little like Ray in the night. I must not look at him, Tony said. He was afraid the lieutenant’s face would obliterate the memory of Ray’s. While Tony sat in the chair by the desk, Lieutenant Graves read the handwritten document on his desk. He was a slow reader and it took a long time. Then he asked Tony to repeat his story. He took it down on a pad of yellow lined paper, though Tony did not understand how he could compress it into so few laborious words. When the story was finished, he repeated the questions Sergeant Miles had asked. He sat a long time with his chin in his hand.

“Well,” he said, “we’ve already put out an alert for the two cars. That ought to turn up something. Don’t know what else we can do except wait.”

He looked at Tony. “Meanwhile, you ain’t got no car. You got a place to stay?”

“No.”

“There’s a motel across the street.” He wrote something on a card. “Here’s the taxi number, you want that. Money?”

“I have credit cards. My checkbook is in my suitcase. That’s in the car. All my clothes.”

“There’s a bank on Hallicot Street. Opens at nine.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s still early yet. Quite likely they went to sleep somewhere.”

“Where?” Tony said.

The lieutenant thought. Nodded. “Must say it don’t look too good, with nobody calling in. But you know what I’m thinking. Maybe they left them some place like they left you and it take them a while to walk out. Fixing to take your car no doubt.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking, too,” Tony said, meaning that’s what he was hoping, not saying what he was thinking. The lieutenant was tapping his forehead with his pencil, as if he were thinking other things as well.

“You want to stay at that motel?”

“I guess so.”

“We’ll call you if we get anything.”

Tony Hastings walked across the street to the motel. “No car?” the fat woman said.

“It’s stolen.”

“Well, no kidding! So that’s what you were doing at the police. What can you give me for security?”

“Credit card.”

The motel smelled of plastic and air conditioning, the closed thick brown drapes made an unreal darkness in the room. He lay on the bed in his clothes and instantly the night was back with wind and a swirl of galactic clouds. Ray sitting on the radiator, laughing and saying, Don’t take it so serious, man, we was only kidding. But that was a dream, for now he was awake and crossing the yard to the police station where he saw, newly washed and sparkling in the sun, his car, safely returned. His heart leaped and he went inside. Laura and Helen were on a bench in the hall, there they were, and they jumped up and ran to him, smiling with relief, hugging and kissing and saying, “We’re all right, they only wanted us to meet their friends in the trailer,” and Tony Hastings held them, saying, “It’s not a dream, is it? It can’t be a dream because it’s too real for a dream.”

The horrible loud telephone on the table next to his ear. He grabbed it to stop it, heart crashing.

“Tony Hastings? Lieutenant Graves. Bad news.”

He saw a broad net spread under the trees hung from several treetrunks to catch whatever might fall from the high branches.

“They found your car in the river over at Topping. Looks like they was trying to get rid of it.”

The strands of the net were gathered in white nodes, spots, dots, pulses, at wide intervals all across the field. “What about my wife, my daughter?”

“Still no word.”

Catching fruit, bodies. “They weren’t in the car?”

“The car was empty. They’re pulling it out now.”

He looked at his watch. He had been asleep a half hour, it was only quarter past nine. If that was Lieutenant Graves’s idea of the worst in bad news.

“What do you make of it?” Tony said.

“Don’t know what to make of it.”

A silence while they pulled up the net, rolled it in.

“Sir, we’re turning this case over to Lieutenant Andes. He wants to look around. Can he pick you up in a few minutes?”

Tony Hastings’s body full of sandbags. “I’m ready now,” he said.