The cafard followed me throughout that trip but it followed me without much guile either because it was lazy or because it was an assassin so confident of its prey that it had no need to exert itself. On Saturday morning I woke, feeling cheerful and randy. I was just as cheerful on Sunday but on Monday I woke in a melancholy so profound that I had to drag myself out of bed and stumble, step by Step, into the shower. On Tuesday we took a train to Fondi and a cab through the mountains to Sperlonga, where we stayed with friends. I had two good days there but the bête noire caught up with me on the third and we took the train for Naples at Formia. I had four good days in Naples. Had the bête noire lost track of its victim or was it simply moving in the leisurely way of a practiced murderer? My fifth day in Naples was crushing and we took the afternoon train back to Rome. Here again I had three good days but I woke on the fourth in danger of my life and went out to take a walk, putting one foot in front of the other. On some broad and curving street, the name of which I can't remember, I saw coming towards me a line of motorcycle policemen, moving at such a slow pace that they had to keep putting their feet on the paving to keep the engines upright. Behind them were a few hundred men and women carrying signs that said PACE, SPEBANZA and AMORE. It was, I realized, a memorial procession for the communist delegate Mazzacone, who had been shot in his bathtub. All I knew about him was that he had been described as saintly in L'Unitd… I did not know his opinions and had read none of his speeches but I began to cry. There was no question of drying my tears. They splashed down my face and wet my jacket, they were torrential. I joined the procession and as soon as I began to march I felt the cafard take off. There were marshals with armbands to keep the parade in order and we were told not to speak so that as we moved through Rome there was no sound but the shuffle and hiss of shoe leather, much of it worn, and because of our numbers, a loud, weird and organic sound, a sighing that someone with his back to the parade might have mistaken for the sea.
We marched through the Venezia to the Colosseum. We walked proudly, men, women and children, in spite of the shuffling sound. This grief which, in my case, we accidentally shared reminded me of how little else there was that we had in common. I felt the strongest love for these strangers for the space of three city blocks. There was a memorial service in the Colosseum-nothing as moving as the procession but when I went back to the hotel I felt well. We flew back to New York soon afterwards and it was sitting on a beach that following summer (I had already seen the picture in the dental journal) that I decided, on the strength of a kite string, that my crazy old mother's plan to crucify a man was sound and that I would settle in Bullet Park and murder Nailles. Sometime later I changed my victim to Tony.
PART 3
XVI
Nailles asked Hammer to go fishing. It came about this way. Nailles was a member of the Volunteer Fire Department, where he drove the old red LaFrance fire truck. To hell over the hills and dales of Bullet Park late at night, ringing his bell and blowing his siren, seemed to him the climax of his diverse life. Mouthwash, fire trucks, chain saws and touch football! The village seemed upended in the starlight and the only lights that burned burned in bathrooms. It was his finest hour.
The fire company had a meeting and dinner on the first Thursday of the month and Nailles attended this. The red fire truck was parked in front of the building. The garage space had been swept and hosed down and tables covered with sheets had been set up as a buffet and bar. Two apprentice firemen were polishing glasses and Charlie Maddux, the self-appointed firehouse cook, was basting a leg of lamb at a gas range in the corner. Charlie was a used-car dealer. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds. He like to buy food, cook food, eat food, and he very likely dreamed of joints of meat and buckets of shellfish. His wife was, predictably, a spare woman devoted to a diet of blackstrap molasses and wheat germ. He seemed, as a firehouse cook, to enjoy a sense of reality that he did not enjoy either with his wife or his used cars and he stirred, basted, seasoned, tasted and served the dinner with absolute absorption and like most amateur cooks he was incurably premature, getting the meal onto the table a half hour before anyone was ready. Nailles went upstairs to the meeting room.
There were thirty members of the fire department at that time. About twenty had gathered. Some part of the atmosphere of the place was that it had been the firemen themselves who had converted it from a loft into a habitable club room. They had, on Saturdays and Sundays, put down the Vinylite floor, nailed and painted the wall-board and wired the fluorescent lights. They were understandably proud of their work. The meeting was, of course, stag but it was, excepting the locker room at the club, the last stag gathering in the village and its exclusiveness had been challenged. Some members of the ladies' auxiliary had wanted to attend the monthly meeting if only to supervise the cooking. They felt that Charlie Maddux was a usurper and that his grocery bills were probably scandalous. They had been forestalled but the sense that the maleness of the place was embattled gave it the snugness of a tree house. The atmosphere of a tree house extended to the ceremoniousness that followed. The chief called the meeting to order with a memorial gavel and the secretary then uncovered an American flag made of stiff silk with a thick fringe of gold. The secretary read the minutes of the last meeting, which were approved, and the treasurer reported that there was eighty-three dollars and fourteen cents in the treasury. All of this and all that followed was performed with an immutable solemnity that could not have been explained by the few facts and figures involved. There was a somber discussion reproaching those firemen who came to the car wash and did nothing but drink beer. Had anyone spoken humorously it would have been a misunderstanding of the gravity of these rites. "We have a new application for membership," said the secretary. "Mr. Hammer, will you leave the room please while we discuss your application?"
Nailles turned and saw that Hammer was in the back row. Hammer left the room. "Mr. Hammer," the secretary said, "lives on Powder Hill and seems to be the sort of man who would fit into the company all right but when we asked about his experience he said that he'd been the member of a fire department in a place called Ashburnham. It's outside Cleveland. So we wrote for his papers and the letter was returned. There isn't any fire department in Ashburnham. There never was. I don't like to accuse a man of lying but at the same time we don't want any phonies in the outfit, do we?"
"How do we know there isn't a fire department in Ashburnham," Nailles asked.
"The letter was returned."
"It could have been a slipup in the post office.
Why don't we take him in? The roster isn't full and even if he doesn't have any experience he could help with the truck wash."
"Do you want to put that in the form of a motion?"
"I move that Paul Hammer be elected a member of the fire department."
"I second the motion."
"All those in favor say aye."
"Aye."
"Contrary-minded?"
"Everything's been ready for twenty minutes," Charlie Maddux shouted up the stairs, "and if you don't get your arses down here now it will all be spoiled. I don't mind cooking but I don't like to see everything get cold."
The meeting was adjourned. Eliot joined Hammer at the bar and asked if he was a fisherman. He was motivated entirely by kindness. Hammer said that he was. "There's a little stream in Venable that I sometimes go to on Saturday morning," Eliot said. "If you'd like to try it I'll pick you up at around eight o'clock. This time of year I use bait."
On Saturday morning Eliot, with Tessie in the back seat, picked up Hammer and they started north on Route 61. Route 61 was one of the most dangerous and in appearance one of the most inhuman of the new highways. It had basically changed the nature of the Eastern landscape like some seismological disturbance, forcing it to conform, it seemed, to some parts of Montana. At least fifty men and women died on its reaches each year. On a Saturday morning the mixture of domestic and industrial traffic was catastrophic. Trucks as massive and towering as the land castles of the barbarians roared triumphantly downhill and labored uphill at a walking pace. Passing them and repass-ing them made this simple journey seem warlike. Nailles remembered the roads of his young manhood. They followed the contours of the land. It was cool in the valleys, warm on the hilltops. One could measure distances with one's nose. There was the smell of eucalyptus, maples, sweet grass, manure from a cow barn and, as one got into the mountains, the smell of pine. There were landmarks-abandoned farms-a stone tower and a blue lake. In the windows of the houses one passed one saw a cat, an array of geraniums, the face of a child or an old man. He remembered it all as intimate, human and pleasant, compared to this anxious wasteland through which one raced the barbarians.