He was just about to step out onto the lawn when the faintest noise cracked open the night, a mechanical wheeze feeling its way along the dense compacted air from the direction of the driveway out front to fan across the individual blades of the grass and find surcease in the baffle of the woods at the edge of the lawn. To his ears, fanatically attuned, it sounded like the stealthiest all-but-silent easing open of a car door, the hand at the latch, dome light switched off, nothing but the unlubricated protest of the hinges to betray it. “Jesus! What was he doing?” He sank back into the shadows. On hands and knees, aware of every stick and fallen branch that might betray him, he crept along the inside verge of the lawn, heart thundering in his ears, determined now to see for himself-because it could have been Natalia, in his fantasy anyway, Natalia unwilling to leave without him, and waiting there for him so they could pack up the essentials in the dark and make for the next town before the pigs showed up in the morning with their search warrant.
Another sound. So distant and muted he couldn't be sure he was hearing it. He froze. Strained his eyes to see across the moon-dappled lawn and into the dark clot of shadow that was the driveway, the shape there, a deeper shadow, denser, the blackest hole of the universe. What was it-a car? A car pulled up under the trees where nobody could see it? And then that sound again, faint but distinct, the further protest of pea stone compacted underfoot, one stealthy sole down and then the next, and the flaring itch of a zipper worked and finally the sound of water hitting the gravel in a fine directed stream. That told him all he wanted to know. That hardened him. The alcohol burned through his system and evaporated as if it had never been there, replaced in that instant by the adrenal discharge that fueled him to fight, kill, run, and there was no creature of the night, no opossum or coon or copperhead snake, that faded as silently away.
When he reached the car, he slipped into the driver's side without a sound, turned over the engine and made his way up the neighbor's drive to the highway. He waited there a moment with his lights off till he saw the headlights of a single car approaching, and then he flicked on his lights and eased out onto the road in its wake, heading south.
What he dreamed that night, if he dreamed at all, he couldn't remember. There was a void, and he arose out of it to the sharp sudden stab of a column of sunlight that had worked its way up the rear panel of the car, through the back window and onto his face. For a moment, he didn't know where he was, and then it all locked in, the gray carpet and leather seats, the still life of the dash and the arc of the steering wheel, an intense, almost painfully articulated world of sharpedged leaves pressed against the rolled-up windows. He was sprawled out in the back of a rental car-an SUV, gas hog, four-wheel drive-his throat dry, bladder full, a six-hundred-dollar Italian silk suit filthy in the knees and elbows and clinging damply to him as if it were made of Saran Wrap. There was a bad taste in his mouth. He had no toothbrush, no clothes, no house or fiancée or daughter. For a long while he just lay there, the sun on his face, considering his options, but then he heard voices, a dog barking, and sat up.
Outside the window, on the near side of the car, was vegetation, dense and Amazonian, and on the far side, just beyond a little white house set in the exact center of a square of lawn, was the river, right there, not a hundred feet away, driving down against the tide. The sun gave a shout. A bird shot past the window, folded its wings and plunged into the green. There were two people, a couple, the man in a sun-bleached shirt and the woman in an ankle-length hippie dress with bare shoulders, walking a black Lab down the dirt road and lifting their eyes periodically to throw a shy curious look at the car and then dropping them again to pat the dog and fling something over the charging wedge of its head and four scrambling paws-a stick, sailing out and coming back to them again in the wet grip of the animal's jaws.
He hadn't gone back to Beacon to hide himself along the back roads and he hadn't gone into Peterskill either, to cruise past his mother's house and snatch a quick glimpse of the place, just to see what it looked like, to see if the lights were on, to hope against reason that the sight of it would turn a key in the tumbler inside his head and let him know what was coming next. He hadn't done any of that, because when he left that driveway in the dark the full weight of the day suddenly hit him, a crushing glacial forbidding weight he couldn't begin to lift, and he'd gone no more than three or four miles and found himself winding through a dark turning that took him across the railroad tracks with a slow grinding bump and down this one-lane dirt road laid flat against the river and then on up the shoulder of it and into the bushes. Which was where he was now, dry-mouthed, needing to piss, watching these people and their dog watching him.
It took him a moment to come to his senses-he didn't need them calling the police on him, “Officer, I don't know, there's a drunk or something in a dirty suit crashed in his car out front of the house”-and then he was in the driver's seat and wheeling the SUV across the road in a broad pitching humping U-turn that took a bite out of the lawn and the people looked up at him out of unsmiling faces and he didn't wave. There was fast food in Peterskill, crap in a bag and crap in a waxed cup with a plastic top and flexible straw. He pulled into the drive-up lane because he really didn't want to show himself in public if he didn't have to, and he ate mechanically, without tasting it. Afterward he drove around without purpose, just to feel the wheels roll under him, and he worked his way to the outskirts of town and ducked into the bushes along Croton Reservoir to release the pressure on his bladder and move his bowels. Squatting there in the woods, with the mosquitoes at him, and using the paper napkins from the fast-food place in lieu of toilet paper, he couldn't stop punishing himself. The shit smell rose to his nostrils. There were burrs or seedpods flung like drift across both sleeves of his jacket. Mud on his shoes. The crystal of his watch was cracked. What was wrong with him? What had he come to? He gave himself a quick once-over in the rearview-the reddened ear, the thin crust of the scab, the black stubble coming in so that he looked like a cartoon bum-and before he could think the car was moving and he had the cell phone out, dialing information for Peterskill Hospital.
The road was narrow here, climbing now, and he was so focused on the phone he nearly ran a little Japanese car into the bushes, but then he had the number and for an extra charge they connected him and he was talking to the receptionist.
“Peterskill Hospital. How may I assist you?”
“You have visiting hours today?”
“All day till nine p. m., for all patients except intensive care.”
“And can you tell me if someone's been admitted-if he's there. Or still there, I mean?”
“One moment, please.” A pause, the sound of keys tapping. “And what was the name?”
“Martin,” he said. “Bridger Martin.”
He picked up a newspaper on the way and a cheap bouquet of flowers, the stems wrapped in tinfoil under a cone of plastic, just in case anybody should wonder what he was doing there parked in the lot amongst the sunstruck chassis and glinting windshields of a hundred other vehicles. It was hot, eternally hot. The radio gave him nothing, classical, talk, a garble of Sunday devotion, hallelujah and amen. Very slowly, with infinite patience, he read through the paper, section by section, keeping one eye cocked on the front entrance. And when he saw her there, finally, at half past two in the afternoon, her features working and her hands jumping in the face of the woman beside her as she came out the double doors and into the sun, it was no less than he'd expected. And when she ducked into a rust-streaked yellow Volvo with New York plates, the other woman at the wheel, there was nothing he could do but crank up his rented SUV, with all its ominous high-riding authority, and follow her out of the lot.