At any rate, it was enough to say it aloud to know what he would do.
“Whereabouts in Georgia?” asked the tall man.
“Thomasville.”
“Thomasville! Well, I’ll be. You selling out too?”
“No, I’m buying in.”
“You going back?” the tall man asked him.
“You could say.”
“What are you buying, a farm?”
“You could say.”
“You retiring?”
“You might say.”
“A young fellow like you? That could be a mistake.”
“I don’t think so.”
But the tall man wasn’t really listening. He was doing an exercise with his legs, resting his weight first on the ball of one foot, then the other.
“Do you know Ike Nunally’s place?” the tall man asked.
“That’s where I’m headed. I used to hunt there.”
“Is that so? I did too. Many a time. So you going to buy a piece of the Nunally place.”
“Yes.”
“Which part?”
“A parcel of swamp.”
“Oh, for the hunting. You must be a hunter.”
“Of a sort.” But bigger game than you think.
“You must be one of these rich Northern folks who’ve bought up everything around here and down there too.”
“No. That is, I’m rich, but not Northern.”
“But they’re as nice as they can be, the ones I’ve met,” said the tall man agreeably and inattentively, glasses flashing as he sprang gently on one foot then the other to exercise his calves.
“Yes they are.”
“Now isn’t that something. What a small world. We better get our tickets. You go ahead.”
“After you.”
“What?”
“You’re catching the Georgia bus, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“But what?”
But I’ve forgotten something. What? He felt like a man who has lost his wallet. He slapped his pocket. It was there with the five hundred dollars.
The bus swung up the ramp through sunlight and shade and onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. The two men sat side by side, hands on their knees. Will Barrett inclined his head attentively. Between them, like a silent child beckoning to them, sat the burden of the conversation to come.
“Now isn’t that something,” said the Associate. “Both of us going back to Georgia to make the deal of our lives. I’m selling a farm and you’re buying one.”
“Yes,” he said, watching a low ridge which ran just above the tree line like a levee. The Associate was right. This journey would settle it for both of them. One was going back to Georgia to be rid of it forever, to get shut of the old house with its heavy Valdosta-style gable returns, and begin a new life in his garden home in Emerald Isle Estates, watch Monday-night football, do isometrics in the family room, drive to Highlands with his wife to attend Miami-style auctions. The Jews hadn’t left! The other was going back to Georgia to find something he had left there, to find a place where something had happened to him. Or rather hadn’t happened to him. All these years he had thought he was in luck that it didn’t happen and that he had escaped with his life and a triumphant life at that. But it was something else he had escaped with, not his life. His life — or was it his death? — he had left behind in the Thomasville swamp, where it still waited for him. With a kind of sweet certainty he knew now that it was there that he would find it. Finding the post oak — he knew he could walk straight to it — and not coming out of the swamp at all was better man thrashing around these pretty mountains, playing in Scotch foursomes, crawling into caves, calling on God, Jews, and tigers. No, it was in Georgia that he would find it. And it was in Georgia that he would do it.
But as he listened to the Associate talk about his work — talk with pleasure! he enjoyed his work! he enjoyed walking twenty blocks down West Peachtree, sitting behind his desk for ten hours, making loans, good loans! good for lender and lendee, doing isometrics between appointments, he was no loan shark! — his eye traveled along the ridge and came to a notch where in the darkness of the pine and spruce there grew a single gold poplar which caught the sun like a yellow-haired girl coming out of a dark forest. Once again his heart was flooded with sweetness but a sweetness of a different sort, a sharp sweet urgency, a need to act, to run and catch. He was losing something. Something of his as solid and heavy and sweet as a pot of honey in his lap was being taken away.
“I’m not going back to Georgia,” he said, rising.
“What’s that?” said the Associate quickly and in a changed voice (something was up) but making room for him with his knees.
Already at the front of the bus — how did he get there? — he was tapping the driver’s shoulder, the driver a heavy uniformed man who looked like an aging airline pilot except that his fingernails were dirty and his face was sullen. His tanned neck had deep sharp hieroglyphs carved in it.
“Excuse me, driver, but I want to get out.”
“What’s that?”
“Stop the bus. I want to get off.”
“This is an express, Mac. Next stop, Asheville.”
“I said goddamn it stop the bus and let me off.”
The driver went on driving the bus as if he weren’t there. Angry at the beginning, his face dark with blood, the driver seemed to grow angrier still. What was he angry about? Working conditions? Life at home?
He leaned close to the driver. They both watched the pleasant road spinning under them. “If you don’t stop this fucking bus right now, I’m grabbing your ass out of that seat and stopping it for you.”
The driver slowed. Well, he’s going to let me out, he thought. But no, it was in order to reach for a rack on the dash in front of him, and take out cards and pass them to the passengers behind him. “Please pass these along and fill them out. You are witnesses to a crime. This is a hijacking.”
He looked at the four passengers on the front row of seats. They gazed straight ahead, faces like stone. Something is happening, their stricken expressions said, but it is happening too close. We do not know what to do. It was better not to look. But they took the cards dutifully and gazed at the scenery, not daring even to look at the cards.
The bus was still going slow.
“Let the man out. The man wants out.” It was the Associate, standing tall and reared, glasses flashing. He was not smiling. “You heard the man. He wants out.”
“I’ll let him out all right,” said the driver, who in his rage had gone stupid and sought now only the ultimate gesture, the last one-up face-saver, to prove himself to himself and to the passengers, who watched stone-faced holding their legal cards as dutifully as TV game players. The door opened while the bus was still moving and in the moment of his stepping down the driver slammed on the brakes, slamming him forward into metal jamb, then started up rhhhooom, slamming him back into the other jamb not squarely but glancingly so that he was bounced out, which would not have been serious except that the door, itself now part of the driver’s stupidity and rage, was already closing and caught his foot, levering him down hard enough so that the next thing he knew, the pebbles of tar and craters of pavement were coming up at him like a moon landing fast and silent yet slow enough for him to say to himself: right, it’s not going to end like this or in a Georgia swamp either because I won’t stand for it and don’t have to. Then the Eagle landed and the moon went dark.
4
The room was dark.
The table he was strapped to began to move. It slanted up at the foot, then slanted down, rolled over on one side, stood on end. Quick sure woman’s hands moved his body, straightening it. Someone measured his head with a ruler and marked it. There was the sense of conforming his body, its warm wayward flesh and bone, to the simple cold geometry of straight metal edges. A motor went on and off. There was a hum.