And what was he thinking? He was thinking he could just step out of the bushes and lay the guy out, break him up, and her too, some applied discouragement to end it right here. But no, that wasn't the way. The way was just to cut his losses and move on. He still had Natalia, he still had money-and a new Mercedes S500 in Bordeaux Red. Peterskill wasn't Mill Valley, maybe, but he'd missed the leaves changing in the fall, snow for Christmas, all of that, and it wouldn't be so bad, not once he got settled. Plus there'd be Florida, Florida in the winter, and they had this whole trip ahead of them with nothing to do but see the country and kick back and enjoy themselves.
For a long while he crouched there in the bushes, watching the back end of the car, letting his mind run-Natalia would be in a state, no doubt about it, and there'd be no rest at all, not till he got her in the Mercedes and pulled the door shut behind him. The story, as it was evolving in his head, the one he would refine at length as they rolled cross-country, had to do with his bankruptcy, the failed restaurants, a fictitious name to smooth things out so he could track his investments, and yes, of course they were going to keep the condo for a summer place, no need to pack the dishes, towels, cutlery, and did she really think he was going to leave his wine cellar behind? He put a fist down in the wet to ease the pressure on his knees. There was a smell of rankness, of knife-shaped leaves and eucalyptus buds going over to rot. Across the lawn, up against the buildings, a bank of sprinklers started up with a hiss of released air. And then, finally, the Jetta's brake lights flashed and the engine turned over and he watched the car back out and glide across the lot to pass on into the black grip of the night.
When he got out of prison he didn't spend a whole lot of time dwelling on his hurts and sorrows, on what could have been and what Gina had done to him and all the wasted effort and sweat and blood he'd put into Pizza Napoli and Lugano or the fact that he was bankrupt and an ex-offender who didn't even have his silver Mustang anymore because he'd sold it and everything else he owned to pay his fish-faced lawyer. No, he was too wise for that. His wisdom had been accumulated through the twelve-ton nights in his bunk and the zombie days doing food preparation and staying out of trouble-and he had to work hard at that. Had to work to rein himself in. Dwell deep. Control the rage that beat in him like a hammer every minute of every day. Because there were some very twisted people inside and the sole meaning and extent of their lives was to fuck with you, and to respond in kind was a lock on extending your sentence. He'd heard the stories. And he put his head down and counted the days off the calendar and when push came to shove he let his hands speak for him, hard and fast, so fast nobody saw it coming and if some dickhead had to go to the infirmary with a pair of sausage eyes and a broken nose, it was nothing to him. He wasn't like the rest of them-of all the put-upon victims of circumstance in the place he was the single one who really truly didn't belong because he hadn't done anything anybody else wouldn't have done in his place and there was no way he was going to complicate things by letting people get to him. That was the beginning of wisdom.
And then there was Sandman. The College of Sandman.
Sandman had been around. His most recent infraction had, regrettably, involved a certain degree of forcible persuasion, which was why he'd been locked up here amongst the violent offenders. As Peck had. The rest of the inmates, to a man, were losers, the kind of scumbuckets and degenerates who deserved what was coming to them-after a year inside Peck felt like a Republican: lock them up and throw away the key-but Sandman was different. He was educated. He believed in things-the environment, clean air, clean water. The man could go on for hours about restoration ecology or the reintroduction of the wolf and how capitalism had sucked up all the resources of the world just to spit them back out as hair dryers-he had a real thing for hair dryers-and greenback dollars. Six-three, tattooed over most of his body, with a physique honed in the weight room, Sandman, who wasn't much older than he was, showed him the way. “You know how they say, 'Be all you can be'? In those Army recruiting ads? Well, I say, 'Be anybody you can be.'”
He was talking about the Internet. He was talking about the greed of the credit card companies, online auto loans, instant credit, social security numbers skimmed at the fast-food outlet and the gas station and up for sale on half a dozen sites for twenty-five dollars per. He was talking about Photoshop and color copiers, government seals, icons, base identifiers. The whole smorgasbord. “Be anybody you can be.”
Two hundred dollars. That was the gate money they gave you when you walked out the door after eleven and a half months of chopping cabbage, dicing onions and sucking up the reek of the grill, burgers, dogs, sloppy Joe on a bun, strip steak that was like jerky softened in water and then jerked all over again. Most of the morons blew the whole two hundred the first day on women and drugs and then they were out on the street trying on one scam or another and the probation officer just begging for a chance to send them back up. But not Peck, not William Peck Wilson.
He went straight back to Peterskill-to the office park on Route 6 where the orthopedists and urologists and pediatricians had their offices. Out back were the Dumpsters. It took him maybe an hour, slinking around like an immigrant bagging cans for redemption, and he had what he wanted: a sheaf of discarded medical forms, replete with names, addresses, birth dates and social security numbers. Then he sat in a bar over a scotch and made a phone call to Dudley, the busboy, because he needed two things: a ride and a connection. Dudley, he reasoned, was the very man to hook him up with a false ID because Dudley had been clubbing since he was sixteen in a state where the drinking age was twenty-one, and he wasn't disappointed. For less than half his gate money, Peck was able to get himself a social security card and driver's license, with color photo, in the name of one of the patients at A&O Medical, and after that it was easy. He opened a checking account with the remaining hundred dollars and started writing checks for merchandise, which he turned around and sold for cash, installed himself in a hotel and applied for Visa and American Express cards. Once the cards arrived he took a cab out to the local Harley dealer. He'd always wanted a Harley, ever since he'd seen “Easy Rider” on TV as a kid, and Sandman had stoked him on the idea during their late-night fantasy excursions, a whole vista opening up in the shadows, blooming like a radiant perfect flower, the vision so intense he could feel the wind in his hair and see the sun spread like liquid gold across the road in front of him.
The dealer was a fat-faced longhair with what they called a hitch in his git-along, wearing a leather Harley jacket over an embroidered white shirt and some sort of racing medallion dangling on a cord from his throat. He was clueless, absolutely clueless. And Peck Wilson sat down with him and neatly signed all the paperwork in his new name, the credit references sterling, the bike-an Electra Glide in black with the Harley logo a sweet blaze of red on the swell of the fuel tank-being prepped even as they ran each other a line of bullshit about unholy speeds and wrecks and wild men they'd known, and then he swung a leg over the thing, fired it up with an annunciatory roar and blew on down the road and out of town. For good.