Portland to Bangor is 125 miles north on I-95. As we drove, Angel flipped through my cassette tape collection impatiently, listening to something for one or two songs then discarding it on the back seat: The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, The Gourds out of Austin, Jim White, Doc Watson, they all ended up in the pile, so that the car started to look like a music business nightmare. I put on a Lampchop cassette, and the gentle, sad chords of I Will Drive Slowly filled the car.
"What'd you say this is?" asked Angel.
"Alternative country," I replied.
"That's when your truck starts, your wife comes back and your dog gets resurrected," he snickered.
"Willie Nelson heard you talking like that, he'd whip your ass."
"This the same Willie Nelson whose wife once tied him up in a bedsheet and beat him unconscious with a broom handle? That pothead comes after me, I reckon I can handle myself."
Eventually, we settled for a discussion of local news on PBS. There was some talk of a timber company surveyor who might have gone missing up north, but I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it. At Waterville, we took the off-ramp and stopped for soup and coffee. Angel toyed with saltine crumbs as we waited for the check. He had something on his mind, and it didn't take long for it to emerge.
"Remember when I asked you about Rachel, back in New York?" he said at last.
"I remember," I replied.
"You weren't too keen on talking about it."
"I'm still not."
"Maybe you should."
There was a pause. I wondered when Louis and Angel had discussed Rachel and me, and guessed that it might have come up between them more than once. I relented a little.
"She doesn't want to see me," I said.
He pursed his lips. "And how do you feel about that?"
"You going to charge me by the hour for this?"
He flicked a crumb at me. "Just answer the question."
"Not so good but, frankly, I've got other things on my mind."
Angel's eyes glanced up at me, then back down again. "Y'know, she called once, to ask how you were."
"She called you? How'd she get your number?"
"We're in the book."
"No, you're not."
"Well, then, we must have given it to her."
"You're so helpful." I sighed, and ran my hands over my face. "I don't know, Angel. The whole thing is screwed up. I don't know if I'm ready yet and, anyway, I frighten her. She's the one who pushed me away, remember?"
"You didn't need a whole lot of pushing."
The check came, and I put down a ten and some ones on top of it. "Yeah, well… I had my reasons. Just like she did."
I stood, and Angel stood with me.
"Maybe," he said. "Pity neither of you could come up with one good reason between you."
As we drove back onto I-95, Angel stretched contentedly beside me, and as he did so, the sleeve of his oversized shirt fell down to his elbow. On his arm, a scar, white and ragged, ran from the hollow curve beneath his stringy biceps to within an inch or two of his wrist. It was maybe six inches long in total and I couldn't imagine why I hadn't noticed it before but, as I thought about it, I realized it was a combination of factors: the fact that Angel rarely wore only a T-shirt or, if he did so, it was one with long sleeves; my own self-absorption while we were in Louisiana hunting the Traveling Man; and Angel's basic lack of inclination to discuss anything about past pains.
He caught me looking at the scar and reddened, but he did not try to hide it immediately. Instead, he looked at it himself and went quiet, as if recalling its making.
"You want to know?" he asked.
"You want to tell?"
"Not particularly."
"Then don't."
He didn't respond for a time, then: "It kind of concerns you, so maybe you got a right to know."
"If you tell me you've always been in love with me, I'm stopping the car and you can walk to Bangor."
Angel laughed. "You're in denial."
"You have no idea how deep."
"Anyway, you ain't that good lookin'." He touched the scar gently with the index finger of his right hand. "You been in Rikers, right?"
I nodded. I'd been at Rikers Island in the course of investigations. I had also been there while Angel was a prisoner, when another inmate named William Vance had threatened to take Angel's life and I had intervened. Vance was dead now. He had died from injuries received after persons unknown poured detergent down his throat, after they learned that he was a suspected sex killer who would never stand trial for his crimes because of a lack of evidence. I had provided the information on which his attackers had acted. I had done it to save Angel, and Vance was no loss to the world, but it still weighed on my conscience.
"First time Vance came at me, I knocked out one of his teeth," Angel said quietly. "He'd been threatening it for days, saying how he was gonna fuck me up bad. Fucking guy just had it in for me, you know that. The blow wasn't bad or nothing, but a screw found him bleeding and me standing over him and I got twenty days in the bing."
The "bing" was solitary confinement: twenty-three-hour lockdown, with one hour's exercise permitted in the yard. The yard was basically a cage, not much bigger than a cell, and prisoners were kept handcuffed while they walked. The yard had basketball hoops but no basketballs, even assuming anyone could play basketball with cuffs on. The only thing the prisoners could do was fight, which is what they did when they were let out.
"Most of the time, I didn't leave my cell," said Angel. "Vance had been given ten days, just for getting his mouth cut, and I knew he was waiting for me out there." He went quiet, his teeth working at his bottom lip. "You think it's going to be easy-you know, peace and quiet, sleep, safe most of the time-but it isn't. You can't bring nothing in with you. They take your clothes and give you three jumpsuits instead. You can't smoke, but I boofed the best part of a pack of tobacco in three condoms, rolled it in toilet paper to smoke it." "Boofing" meant taking contraband and inserting it in the anus in order to transport it.
"The tobacco was gone in five days, and I never smoked again. After those five days in that cell, I couldn't take it any more: the noise, the screams. It's psychological torture. I went out into the yard for the first time and Vance came at me straight off, caught me on the side of the head with his balled fists, then started kicking me on the ground. He got five, maybe six good ones in before they hauled him off, but I knew then that I couldn't take any more time in that place. There was no way I could do it.
"I was taken to the infirmary after the beating. They looked me over, decided nothing was broken, then sent me back to the bing. I brought a screw back with me, maybe three inches long, that I'd worked out of the base of a medicine cabinet. And when they put me in the cell, and the lights went out, I tried to cut myself."
He shook his head and, for the first time since he started the story, he smiled. "You ever try to cut yourself with a screw?"
"Can't say that I have."
"Well, it's kinda hard to do. Screws just weren't designed with that particular purpose in mind. After a lot of effort, I managed to get some serious blood flowing, but if I was hoping to bleed to death I'd probably have finished my twenty days before it happened. Anyway, they found me hacking away at my arm and hauled me off to the infirmary again. That's when I called you.
"After some talk, and a psychological profile, and whatever you told them, they put me back in the general population. They figured I wasn't going to harm no one, except maybe myself, and they needed the bing space for someone more deserving."
I had spoken to Vance shortly afterward, before he was due to be released from solitary, and told him what I knew about him, and what I would tell the others if he made a move on Angel. It didn't do any good, and Vance's first act on release was to try to kill Angel in the showers. After that, he was a dead man.