"The surcharge for nonlocal return will be fifty dollars," he said, and hung up.
I called the airline and upgraded my reservation to first class. According to C. Clayton Creech, I had at least ten million dollars, and what was good enough for Grennie Milton was good enough for me. My companions in first class were going to love my pink jacket, and they give you an extra bag of pretzels up there at the front of the plane.
•135
•A few ghostlike relics wandered through the fog thickening on Word Street. The neon stripe ofhote paris tinted the cobbles a soft, slippery red. I threw my bags onto the back seat and got behind the wheel. At Chester Street I turned north, thinking that eventually I would see a sign to a bridge across the Mississippi and the highway to St. Louis. Before I reached College Park, the buildings on either side had retreated into vague backdrops, and the headlights of oncoming cars were like cats' eyes. I remembered Mousie's teeth rising into the pillow, and I saw inky flak bursting within the bands of deep red glowing across his abbreviated body. The dirty spiderweb that body had become, the bowling-ball weight of his head in the pillowcase. The empty expanse of the Albertus campus slid past my car on what seemed the wrong side. I kept driving. I had not turned, therefore I was still going north and following the river as it wound toward St. Louis.
Then I remembered that Chester Street became Fairground Road when it crossed into College Park, and Fairground Road did not go past Albertus, it came to an end at the southern boundary of the campus. Somehow, I had managed to circle around and drive south on an unknown street. Albertus had not shifted its geography, I had shifted mine. Fortunately, I still had hours to get to St. Louis. All I had to do was turn around.
Mousie's pillowcase landed softly, although not softly enough, at the bottom of the hole in Joy's neglected garden. I heard it hit the ground, and thought about the words I had spoken over Mousie's grave. They had not been the right words. Mousie deserved better from his murderer. Mousie had been one of the real Dunstans— Clark had told me that I was turning into a real Dunstan, but I was nothing compared to Mousie. Mousie was up there with Brightness and Screamer. What leaked from the cannon's mouth and the crack in the golden bowl was a being like Mousie. Howard had known it, and the knowledge had poisoned him.
I could not see where I was, and I could not tell where I was going. Looking for a familiar name, I bent over the wheel and peered through the windshield. Ten feet beyond the front of my car, the green banner of a road sign materialized out of the opacity and advanced toward me. A runic scrawl slipped behind me a moment before it would have become decipherable. No matter, I thought: I was still going south when I wanted to go north, so all I had to do was turn right, or west, on the next street, then right, or north, at the one after that.
Two more indecipherable road signs floated past, and I was headed north, moving parallel to the river. In my mind, I could see a map of the Mississippi and the towns in Missouri and Illinois on either side. I was looking for Jonesboro, Murphysboro, and Crystal City. North of Crystal City lay Belleville, only a little way from East St. Louis. The fog would lift; even if it did not, eventually I would drive into clear air. As long as I kept moving, I was making progress.
At ten miles an hour, at five, I followed my headlights through a yielding gray wall. When I could see nothing but the headlights, I stopped, put on the emergency lights, and waited for the boundaries of the road to reform before continuing. If headlights came toward me, as they sometimes did, I pulled over and slowed to a pace that would have let a jogger swing past. An hour crawled by. The fog parted and thinned, and I saw two-dimensional houses set close together on narrow lawns. I had come to Jonesboro, I thought. The fog drew in to erase the houses. Half an hour later, I drove into a gleaming mist widening out over open fields on both sides of the road. It gathered itself into a melting darkness and forced me back down to five miles an hour.
Then I slammed my foot on the brake pedal. The blue plastic of the steering wheel seemed to be rising through my hands as they faded from view. I felt a tingle at the back of my neck and became aware of a presence behind me. I shouted Robert's name and twisted my head to look at the empty back seat. I spoke his name again. Hostility swept toward me like a winter wind.
"Robert, I have to . . ." His invisible presence had left, and I was alone in the car.
"Where are you?" My voice bounced off the fog and died. I held up my hands and saw them restored and solid.
I have to talk to you? I have to know what you want from me?
I remembered the face burning from the end of a lane across Veal Yard.He wants everything, I thought.
Beyond the window, a regal figure in a dashiki of gold, ink-black, and blood-red emerged from the swirling fog. I cranked down the window, and chill, damp fog seeped into the car. Walter Bernstein nodded like a king granting a benediction.
"Walter, where is he?" I asked. "Where did he go?"
"Can't no one tell you that, but you're on the right road. As right as you can make it, anyhow." He faded back into the purple fog.
I wrapped my fingers around the door handle, opened a nimbus of hazy light deep enough to enter, and pushed myself off the seat. At the front of the car, the headlights picked out the shadowy pole of a road sign. Robert hovered beside me, behind, I could not tell which.
"Show yourself," I said. "You owe me that much."
Robert thought he owed me nothing. Robert was like Mousie, he had leaked from the crack in the golden bowl, he had trickled from the mouth of the cannon. Moi aussi. I went up to the shadowy road sign, stood on tiptoe, peered at the white marks on the green metal, and laughed out loud. I had come back to New Providence Road.
I walked past the sign. Because my life depended upon movement, I kept moving. Quiet footsteps ticked from behind, and I whirled around to see no more than two blurry yellow eyes and the glow spilling from the open door. Profound silence rang in the gray air. "This is where we are, Robert," I said. "Do your best."
A hesitant footfall, then another, sounded from behind me. I did what I had to do and went forward. The ground rose to meet my step, and I felt the release of a crazy sense of joy.Where we were was the place we all along had been fighting to reach. Footsteps ticked through the shining fog. I did the one thing my furious double could not and slid thirty-five years down my gullet.
•On the seventeenth day of October in the year 1958, I was standing at the rear of a densely crowded Albertus University auditorium. Sweatered girls, still innocently "co-eds," and boys in sports jackets filled the pitched rows of seats facing the stage, on which a drummer with thick glasses and close-cropped blond hair, a smiling bassist who could have been Walter Bernstein's cousin, and an intense-looking piano player were hammering their way toward the end of what sounded like "Take the A Train." Hands folded over the body of his alto saxophone, a storklike man with retreating hair, black glasses, and a wide, expressive mouth leaned into the curve of the piano and attended to the sounds coming from his fellow musicians. His mingled detachment and involvement reminded me of Laurie Hatch.
Looking down over the audience, I went toward the top of the wide central aisle. Crew cuts; ponytails; daffodil flips; French twists; sleek, short hair with definitive partings. A few measures before the conclusion of "A Train," I caught sight of my mother's dark, unmistakable head. There she was, the eighteen-year-old Star Dunstan, seated ten or twelve rows back from the stage, one seat in from the aisle. The angle of her neck said that she had heard enough of this concert. I moved across the aisle until I had a good view of her companion. The piano player nailed down a chord, the drummer announced a conclusion. The man sitting next to my mother raised his hands and applauded. His profile looked too much like mine.