I can't get at HCE's house from behind. River Road itself is quite exposed, a long curve with several houses always visible and with no public parking areas. I hadn't noticed any vacant-seeming houses or For Sale signs near HCE's place. Several of the smaller houses on the river side of the road had looked to me to be seasonal, summer places for today's blue-collar people, but this is June and the season has begun; a few boats bob at rickety wooden docks along there, and any or all of those houses could be occupied right now, even on a Monday.
HCE, my ex-Marine, is being harder to get at than any of the others.
The road atlas can't help me. I put it away, and start the Voyager, and drive around the square to head north again up River Road.
HCE's house is now on my left. The woman on the riding mower is making smaller ovals now, her work almost done. And the garage door is open, the interior of the garage empty.
Damn! He came out! While I was in town, he came out and went… anywhere. For all I know, he drove right on by me while I was parked down there, frowning at my road atlas.
I don't know what he looks like. I don't know what the car looks like.
I drive on up to the T intersection with Route 9, where there's a diner just to the south and a big covered mall just to the north. It's almost lunchtime now anyway, so I pull in at the diner, and as I have my usual BLT I wonder if he happens to be working here. Hauck Curtis Exman. HCE. Is this where he drove to, from his house? Is his car outside there somewhere, maybe next to mine? There are only female employees visible out front, but could he be in back? A short-order cook?
Or did he just go out to get the newspaper, and is he home again by now?
Finishing my lunch, I drive back down River Road. The flag is down on the mailbox, so the mail has been delivered. The garage door is still open, garage still empty. The woman and the riding mower are both gone. The mower doesn't seem to be in the garage, so they probably have a shed for it around back.
I drive into town, and through it, and several miles farther south I pull over at a parking area for a scenic river view. I sit there and try to think how to get at HCE. How to find him, and then how to kill him, without using a gun.
But find him first. Identify him, so I can follow him, look for my chance.
How long will he be gone from the house? Has he a make-work job somewhere? Has he a real job, a paper mill job, one that takes him out of contention? Could I be that lucky twice in a row?
But what real job would have him leave the house between 11:30 in the morning and noon?
When the clock in the Voyager reads 1:30 I drive away from the scenic view, which I'd barely looked at. I go back up through Sable Jetty and up River Road, and there's no change at HCE's house. Garage open and empty. He's still gone.
There's nothing more I can do today. I feel anxious, impatient, this business is so close to being over and done with, but I know there's nothing more to be done, not today. I don't want to be careless, in too much of a rush. I don't want to cause another mess, like a couple I've had, and I certainly don't want to be caught by the police, not at this stage.
When I reach Route 9 I turn north, past the big mall and on toward the bridge and, beyond that, home.
32
I'm crossing the bridge again, in bright sunshine, high over the Hudson River, seeing towns and woodland and factories and onetime mansions along both shores, the bustling but grubby town of Kingston out ahead. Wednesday morning; my second visit to the second HCE.
Yesterday, at our counseling session, there was an uncomfortable silence for a while, partway through, none of us seeming to have much to say, as though whatever the counseling's purpose had been was now completed, but then Quinlan said to me, "When you were laid off from the mill, it wasn't a surprise, was it? Not a complete surprise."
"Not a complete surprise," I agreed. "There'd been rumors, and the whole industry was shaking up. But I didn't expect it so soon, and I guess I wasn't ever sure I'd be part of it. I was always good at my job, believe me—"
"I'm sure you were," he said, with a small smile and an encouraging nod.
"I didn't know they were going to move the whole thing to Canada," I said. "We trained them, the Canadians, and now they're cheaper than we are."
He said, "How did you feel, when it happened?"
"How did I feel?"
"Well, I mean," he said, "were you angry? Frightened? Resentful? Relieved?"
"Not relieved," I said, and laughed. "All the others, I guess."
"Why?"
I looked at him. "Why? Why what?"
"Why feel angry, or frightened, or resentful?"
I couldn't believe we were descending down to this kindergarten level. I said, "Because I was losing my job. It's perfectly natural to—"
"Why?"
He was beginning to annoy me. He was beginning to be one of those inspirers they'd set loose on us at the mill during the last months before the chop. I said, "What am I supposed to feel, when I lose my job?"
"There's nothing you're required to feel," he said. "There's not even anything that's perfectly natural to feel. What you felt was angry and frightened and bitter and probably perplexed, and you still do. So what I'm wondering is, why did you take it that way?"
"Everybody did!"
"Oh, I don't think so," he said, and sat back in his chair, away from his desk, farther from me. "Do you remember your co-workers? The ones who were let go the same time as you? Did they all feel the way you did?"
"There was pretty general depression," I told him. "Some people put a better face on it, that's all."
"You mean some of them took a more positive view," he suggested. "Saw there might be an opportunity here—"
"Mr. Quinlan," I said, "they sent specialists around to us, the last five months on the job, people to help us learn how to write resumes and dress for a job interview and all of that stuff, people to advise us about our finances now that we weren't going to have any finances, and people to inspire us, give us all this sloganeering and pep talks and feel-good stuff. You're beginning to sound a lot like them."
He laughed and said, "I suppose I am. Well, I suppose I have the same message, that's why."
"The message is crap," I told him.
I hadn't said that to any of the inspirers at the mill. Back then I was polite and receptive and obedient, just the way you're supposed to be, but I didn't think I should have to go through it all over again, so I just told Quinlan what I thought, to get rid of this Pollyanna stuff forever. Every day in every way we are not getting better and better.
Marjorie looked at me, startled, when I said that, when I told Quinlan he was saying crap, because we'd all been gentle and polite with one another up till now, but Quinlan didn't mind. I'm sure he's heard a lot worse in that office. He grinned at me and shook his head and said, "Mr. Devore, what you're picking up as the message is crap, I'll go along with that. But what you're picking up is not what I'm sending out, and it's not what those people at the mill were sending out. The real message is, you are not the job."
I looked at him. Was that supposed to mean something?
He saw that I still wasn't receiving whatever it was he was trying to send, so he said, "A lot of people, Mr. Devore, identify themselves with their jobs, as though the person and the job were one and the same. When they lose the job, they lose a sense of themselves, they lose a sense of worth, of being valuable people. They think they're nothing any more."