‘Vietnam?’
The corporal had waited a moment before replying. ‘Yes.’
The ticket clerk had given him back his money.
He had ignored Wendell’s surprise. Maybe he had taken it for granted. He had simply said a few words to smooth things over. Words that, for both of them, said everything there was to say.
‘I lost my son there, two years ago tomorrow. You keep that. I think you need it more than the company.’
The corporal had walked away, feeling the same thing he’d felt when he’d turned his back on Jeff Anderson. Two men alone for ever, one in his wheelchair and the other in his ticket office, in a twilight that seemed destined to become endless.
He had stopped in third-class motels, sleeping little and badly, with his teeth clenched and his jaws tensed, dreaming recurring dreams. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, someone had called it. Science always found a way to turn the destruction of a flesh-and-blood person into a statistic. But the corporal had learned the hard way that the body never completely gets used to pain. Only the mind sometimes manages to accustom itself to horror. And soon there would be a way to show certain people exactly what he himself had been through.
Mile after mile, Mississippi had become Tennessee, which had then turned into Kentucky. Soon, he was promised the familiar landscape of Ohio. Around him, and in his mind, the different panoramas fell into place, a succession of strange locations, a line traced by a coloured pencil across the map of an unknown territory. Beside the road ran electricity and telephone wires, carrying energy and words above his head. There were houses and people, and the people were like puppets in a toy theatre, and the wires helped them to move, gave them the illusion of being alive.
From time to time, he had asked himself what energy and what words he needed right now. Maybe, while he was lying on Colonel Lensky’s couch, all the words had been said and all the forces evoked and invoked. It had been a surgical liturgy, which his reason had rejected the way a believer rejects a pagan practice. The doctor had celebrated that liturgy in vain, while he, the corporal, had hidden what little faith he had, his faith in nothingness, in a safe place in his mind, a place where nothing could hurt him or destroy him.
What had been couldn’t be changed or forgotten.
Only repaid.
The slight lurch forward of the bus as it slowed down brought him back to where he was. The time was now, and there was no escaping it. The place, according to a sign, was called Florence. Judging by the outskirts, the town was like a lot of others, and laid no claim to being anything like its Italian namesake. One night, lying with Karen on the bed in his room, he had looked at a travel brochure.
France, Spain, Italy…
And it had been Florence, the one in Italy, that had most drawn their attention. Karen had told him things he didn’t know about the place and made him dream things he had never imagined he could dream. That was a time when he still believed that hope cost nothing, before he’d learned that it could cost a lot.
It could even cost you your life.
By the inexhaustible irony of existence, he had finally come to a place called Florence. But nothing was the way it should have been. He remembered words he’d heard spoken by Ben, the man who had been closest to a father figure for him.
Time is like a shipwreck and only what really matters staysafloat…
His own time had turned out to be a question of clinging to a raft, trying to find a desperate foothold in reality after being cast out of his own private utopia.
The driver drove obediently to the bus station. The bus jolted to a halt next to a rust-eaten shelter covered in faded signs.
He stayed in his seat, waiting for all the other passengers to get off first. Nobody moved to help a Mexican woman who was struggling with a sleeping little girl in her arms and a suitcase in her free hand. The young man across the aisle from the corporal couldn’t resist throwing him a last glance as he picked up his bag.
The corporal had decided he wanted to reach Chillicothe around sundown, so it was best to stop here before crossing the state line. Florence was a place like any other, which made it the right place. Any place was the right place, right now. From here, he would try to hitch-hike the rest of the way to his destination, in spite of the complications that choice was likely to involve. He didn’t think it was going to be easy to get a ride.
People usually thought physical disfigurement meant a nasty character. It never seemed to occur to them that evil, in order to flourish, had to be seductive. It had to attract the world with a winning smile and the promise of beauty. Whereas he felt like the last sticker needed to complete an album of monsters.
The driver glanced in the mirror to check the inside of the bus. Immediately, he turned his head. The corporal didn’t bother to ask himself if the man was urging him to get off or looking to see if the image in the mirror corresponded to the truth. Either way, he had to take the initiative. He stood up and took his bag down from the rack. He loaded it on his shoulder, taking care to hold the canvas strap with his gloved hand in order to avoid abrasions.
As he walked down the aisle, the driver, who bore a curious resemblance to Sandy Koufax, the Dodgers pitcher, seemed all of a sudden to be strangely fascinated by the dashboard.
The corporal descended those few interminable steps and found himself again alone in a small square.
He took a look around.
On the other side of the square, divided in two by the road, was a Gulf service station and a diner with a parking lot that it shared with the Open Inn, a shabby-looking motel promising vacant rooms and golden dreams.
He adjusted his bag on his shoulder and headed in that direction, prepared to buy himself a little hospitality without arguing about the price.
As long as it lasted, he would be a citizen of Florence, Kentucky.
CHAPTER 3
The motel didn’t live up to the promise of its sign. It was just the usual cheap and nasty kind of place, where everything was strictly utilitarian and lacking in taste. The receptionist, a short, plump, prematurely bald man who made up for the little hair he had left with a big moustache and long sideburns, hadn’t had any visible reaction when asked for a room. Except that he wouldn’t hand over the key until the corporal had put the money down on the desk. He wasn’t sure if this was normal practice or treatment reserved exclusively for him. He didn’t care much, either way.
The room smelled damp, the furniture was nothing special, and the shoddy carpet was stained in several places. The shower he took, hidden from prying eyes behind a plastic curtain, alternated hot and cold unpredictably. The TV set worked intermittently, and he had finally decided to leave it tuned to the local channel, where the images and sound were clearer. They were showing an old episode of The Green Hornet.