Tony and Susan

NINE

If Susan wants to know what happened, she’ll have to keep reading. She hears the Monopoly game breaking up. Harsh-voiced Mike yanks soft-breasted Dorothy to her feet, while fat Henry struggles up on his own. Through the living room into the hall.

“Good night Mrs. Morrow.” He has a sharp nose and a sharp chin, a white face and grinning mouth. In the hall Dorothy leans her elbow up on Mike’s shoulder and grins sassily at him. Susan Morrow has a prudish streak, wishing whatever happens out of her sight so she won’t have to say anything. Someone slams someone in the ribs. Ouf! you motherfucker. Snuffles and giggles in the hall, hey watch it. Susan Morrow does have a prudish streak: if your friends don’t know what people don’t say where.

From around the corner, nasal and loud, “Good night, Mrs. Morrow, I had a lovely evening.” Hoot, hoo hoo. Susan needs another chapter, it’s going to take a while yet. Tell Edward: you know how to draw things out.

Nocturnal Animals 8

The police car in front of the motel office, a man in police uniform driving, another man on the right, this one in a plain brown suit. The man in the suit said, “Tony Hastings?” He was wearing a hat and twisted his hand out the half-opened window so as to shake Tony’s. Tony got in the back.

“Meetcha,” he said. “I’m Bobby Andes. I look into things.”

“You found my car?”

“They found it,” Andes said.

“In the river?”

“Listen Tony, do you think you can retrace your steps, where you went last night?”

“I got pretty mixed up. I could try.”

“Let me be sure I understand,” Bobby Andes said. He was a fat man short in the front seat, but his hat was big and so was his head, and his round cheeks were shaded with the coarse pepper dots of his clean shaven beard. Referred to as Lieutenant Andes on the phone. “Two of these guys went off in your car with your wife and daughter. And you were supposed to meet in the police station at this place called Bailey, which don’t exist.”

“That’s right.”

“And they called each other Ray and Turk?”

“Yes.”

“And you went with the other man in their car—the one they called Lou.”

“Yes.”

“How did you happen to split up like that?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out ever since.”

“Did they force their way into your car?”

“In effect, yes.”

“In effect?”

“Well yes, they did. I’d say they forced their way in.”

“Your wife and daughter tried to stop them?”

“I’d say yes, they tried to stop them.”

“And you tried to stop them?”

“There wasn’t much I could do.”

“They had weapons?”

“They had something, I don’t know what it was.”

“You saw it?”

“I felt it.”

“Okay,” Bobby Andes said. “Tell you what. If we took you back to Jack Combs’s house, could you backtrack from there?”

“As I said, I could try.”

“Okay then, you try. Let’s go.”

The man in uniform drove pretty fast, and Tony Hastings could not follow the route. No one spoke. They went through the back section of Grant Center, past gas stations and a used car lot with tanks of bottled gas, and a street of stately white houses and arched shade trees. Out onto an open road, straight in a valley of flat fields, rich shades of green, the sun high now and a pair of house roofs on the hill across the valley reflecting it like mirrors. The loudspeaker chattered with radio police voices, and Tony had no idea where he was.

Bobby Andes turned the sound down. He said, “Let’s get some other things straight. You say this guy named Lou, he drove you into the woods and left you there?”

“He made me drive.”

“But he made you go there and then left you?”

“Yes.”

“And when you walked out, you saw them coming in again?”

“Yes.”

“You sure it was them?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Which car was it?”

“I think it was my car.”

“With Ray and Turk?”

“I think so.”

“How do you know?”

“The look of it, the sound of it. I don’t know.”

“Could you see them in the dark?”

“Not very well. They turned off the lights and stopped and called me.”

“What did they say?”

“They said, Mister, your wife wants you.”

“Why didn’t you go to them?”

Though Tony was glad for the effort of explaining things, he didn’t like how the lieutenant’s questions forced him to cram it all into conventional tracks. He tried to think how to say why he hadn’t gone to them.

“I was afraid to.”

“Do you think they were with them?”

“Who?”

“Your wife and daughter.”

The memory made him shudder. This was by a billboard with a cowboy on it, bright in the sunlight at the edge of a village. He said, “I don’t know. I didn’t think so then.”

“Where did you think they were?”

“I thought if they were there she would have spoken.”

“But you had no theory where they were?”

Tony Hastings tried to remember what had been in his head. That they were at the police station in Bailey. That they were in the trailer by the curve behind the curtain in the dim-lighted window. That they had been left in another woody spot like himself. Or worse. He said, “I don’t remember what I thought.”

“All right. And then a little later the car came out again. What happened this time?”

“I decided to approach them, but they tried to run me down.”

“Where was this?”

“On the main road, where the lane came out of the woods.”

Bobby Andes had a notebook, he wrote something in it. “So the one guy took you in and left you there. And the others came there, drove in and then drove out again.”

“That seems to be what happened.”

“What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Well I think we had better find that road in the woods. Don’t you?”

What did they expect to find? Suddenly, no not suddenly, he had seen it all along, but it was a new discovery too, Tony Hastings noticed the cave where his hope usually was, cold, blank, despoiled, a vacancy of future, as if these men were helping him to look for something that no longer was. It was retracing his empty steps that made him feel this, empty steps to the empty roads, empty woods, empty cars. A pretense of looking so you could say you had looked, you had tried. Since there was nothing else you could think of to do. It made you realize there was nothing else you could think of to do.

He wondered why they were stopped in front of this house—small, brick with white window trim, a dirt yard separating it from its barn.

“Okay,” Bobby Andes said. “Can you take it from here?”

He thought, if he was this slow recognizing Combs’s place in the bright morning, how could he recognize his track from the night? Despite its heavy engraving in the dreams he had not yet had time to have.

“I came down that road,” he said.

Tracking, in reverse. The queasy reiterating panic—“Go slow”—because nothing was familiar, not even the general shape of the valley which he had built in his imagination out of vague night shadows. This valley now was close and bumpy, the road turned and turned back more than he realized, the farms were small and getting smaller, it bumped into the woods, sliced corners of them, yet every few moments his panic unpulsed in the sight of something he recognized, usually not until it was passing or passed and he was looking at it from behind, which was the direction from which he had seen it before—mailbox, broken fence, house with porch and tool shed, narrow bridge over stream.

The road climbed out of the valley into the woods, and he remembered the pull on his feet coming down. The trees were raggedy, he had not known that, and then they thickened and grew tall, a high forest on the sides of an endless hill, which he had not known either. They came to another road level along the side of the hill, intersection, what should have been a memory checkpoint though he did not recognize it. So they pulled up onto the level road and stopped, and then he remembered the turn he had made down and deduced the left turn they should make now.

A road came in from the right, higher up, the fork which he remembered from his unslept nightmares as the probable point of deviation from the original route with Lou, the route where the lost church and mountain curve and dim-lighted trailer were. It did not look like much of a fork now, the upper road narrower and turning up sharply, no wonder he had missed it.

All the while Laura and Helen were in his mind asking, where are you going? He tried to take them out of past and future, where they absent-mindedly occupied their usual places, chattering and joking, and put them into the actual present, the question being just where are you and what are you doing right now? He listened, trying to see or hear, and in the silence he heard their silence slam across the stillness like a thunderbolt and saw their still faces frozen in a crash of marble. He tried to bring them to life—after all, they must be alive somewhere after who knows what kind of traumatic experience like his own?—and postulated them continually just around the next turn in the road: there they are now! walking down the middle of the road, mother and daughter, jeans kerchief traveling slacks dark sweater. Why aren’t they there? You never find what you’re looking for when you’re looking, or if you do, you call it a miracle. Another reason for dread, as if the mere hunting for his wife and child on these empty roads where they clearly were not were the surest way to assure they would never be.

“There!” Tony Hastings said. Sooner, much sooner than he expected: the broken gate, the diagonal white board, memorized to identify the entrance to the mountain woods road, which looked even less like a road now, a lane, a path, a pair of tracks.

They stopped. The lieutenant wrote in his notebook. “That’s where they took you, huh?”

Tony Hastings saw the ditch, the barbed wire, the bushes on the other side of the ditch, shallower, closer to the road than when he had jumped in the nightmare.

“Want to go in?” the driver said.

Bobby Andes looked at Tony. “Any point in doing that?” he asked.

Tony Hastings frozen, paralyzed, unwilling, afraid. “What would we be looking for?”

Bobby Andes looked at him again. He had hairs in his nostrils and the little pink nodes swam moist in the corners of his smeary eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let’s check out the other sights of your journey.”

“There wasn’t much to see,” Tony said.

They turned around, and for a second time Tony Hastings left the mountain drive, with a second sharp agony of partition from his love a prisoner there and he cowardly abandoning her. Begging her to understand why.

They stopped where the road from above joined. “I lost my trail somewhere coming out,” he reminded them, “but I think it might have been here.”

“Makes a difference,” Andes said. “That road comes across the top of the ridge from the next valley.”

“If he came that way he probably got off at the Bear Valley Exit,” the driver said.

“Let’s try it.”

The road wound up and in a few moments was going down. They went around a curve with an old white trailer in the trees just above. “There’s the trailer!” he said.

No car parked.

“Keep going, don’t slow down,” Andes said. They were going fast and it was out of sight in a moment.

The trailer must have been stationed there for years, with young trees grown up all around, locking it in.

“You sure?” Andes said.

Then the small white church.

“That’s the one I saw, I’m sure of that. I don’t know if it means anything.”

“What happened, your guy stopped there?”

“No, I thought I saw my car parked there. He said it wasn’t, and I could easily have been wrong.”

“We’ll check it out.”

They came down into a village with a greenhouse which Tony Hastings recognized.

“Bear Valley Exit, more and more obvious,” the driver said.

There were signs to the Interstate, then the entrance ramp and the highway bridge crossing above. They pulled over again.

“Do you think you could find the place where you stopped?”

“On the Interstate? That would be hard.”

“Well it’s a long shot anyway.”

“What?”

“Evidence they might have dropped, who they were, tracks, footprints, that kind of thing.”

“It was on the hard shoulder.”

“Yeah.”

They sat on the country road by the entrance to the Interstate. Bobby Andes was thinking. He said, “They went in and when they saw you they turned out their lights and called you? What did they turn the lights out for?”

“Damned if I know. Maybe they thought they could sneak up on me.”

Andes laughed, without mirth.

“And they went in, and they came out again, and they tried to run you down?”

“Yes.”

He was tapping on his notebook. “I hate to say this, but I think maybe we’d ought take a look up that mountain road.”

Tony Hastings clutched as if something fatal had been said.

“Go the McCorkle way,” Bobby Andes told the driver. He turned around and explained to Tony: “We’ll go the other way so we don’t have to go by the trailer. If someone’s in there and sees a police car twice.”

They went fast, a strong highway up the side of the ridge. It took Tony a long time before he could ask. “What are you expecting to find up that road?”

“We’ll find out when we find out,” Bobby Andes said. “Nothing, I expect.”