At the front desk in the Chancellor they'd told me where there was a car rental agency that was open on Sundays. I rented a Chrysler there, checked my route with the guy behind the counter to make sure I remembered the way, and half an hour later, after following the same route I'dtravelled fifteen years before to see Rodney's father (up Broadway and across Cunningham Avenue and then the highway north), I arrived in Rantoul. As soon as I got into the city I recognized the intersection of Liberty Drive and Century Boulevard, and also the gas station, which was now called Casey's General Store and had been refurbished with modern gas pumps and expanded with a supermarket and cafeteria. Since I wasn't sure of being able to find Rodney'shouse, I stopped the car there, went into the cafeteria and asked where Belle Avenue was; a fat waitress in a white uniform and cap shouted some directions at me without pausing from attending her customers. I went back to the car, tried to follow the waitress's directions and, just when I thought I was lost again, saw the railway tracks and suddenly knew where I was. I backed up, turned right, passed the closed door of Bud's Bar and soon I was parked in front of Rodney's house. It didn't look much different than it had fifteen years ago, although its size and the slightly faded elegance of an old country mansion contrasted even more than in my memory with the blandly functional neighbouring buildings. Rodney had no doubt renovated it for his family, because the fagade and the porch looked freshly whitewashed, and so I was surprised to see that, between the pair of maples in the front yard, the stars and stripes of the American flag still waved from a small pole stuck in the lawn. I stayed in the car for a moment, with my heart pounding in my throat, trying to absorb the fact of finally being there, at the end of the road, about to see Rodney again, and after a few seconds I went up the porch steps and rang the bell. No one answered. Then I rang again, with the same result. A few metres from the door, to the right, there was a window that, as far as I remembered, looked into the living room where I had talked with Rodney's father, but I couldn't see inside the house through it because a pair of white curtains were drawn. I turned around. A 4 X 4 driven by an old man came round the corner, passed slowly in front of me and carried on towards town. I went down the porch steps and, while I lit a cigarette in the front yard, thought of knocking on the door of one of the neighbours' houses to ask after Rodney, but I discarded the idea after I noticed a woman in a housecoat scrutinizing me through a window on the other side of the street. I decided to go for a walk. I walked towards the tracks, beyond which the city seemed to disintegrate into a disorderly mix of vacant lots, tiny woods and cultivated fields, and then walked along parallel to them retracing the route I'd just travelled by car, and when I reached Bud's Bar again I saw they'd just opened: the door was still closed but there was a pick-up truck parked in front of it and, despite the vertical morning sun, illuminated ads for Miller Lite, Budweiser, Icehouse and Milwaukee Best shone feebly in the windows; above them was a big sign in support of the American soldiers fighting overseas: PRAY FOR PEACE. SUPPORT OUR TROOPS.
I went in. The place was empty. I sat on a stool, in front of the bar, and waited for someone to come and serve me. Bud's was still the charmless small town bar I remembered, with its faint smell of stables and its pool tables and jukebox and television screens all over the place, and when I saw a sluggish guy appear through the swinging door, wearing a Red Sox baseball cap, I wanted to think it was the same waiter who, fifteen years before, had told me where Rodney's house was. The man made some comment that I didn't entirely understand (something about not being able to trust people who start drinking before breakfast), and then when he was behind the bar, a little dazzled by the glare of the sun that came in through the windows at my back, he asked me what I wanted to drink. I looked at his stony face, his slanting eyes, his boxer's nose and the few locks of greasy hair poking out from under his sweaty cap; not without a certain surprise I said to myself that it was indeed the same man, fifteen years older. I ordered a beer, he served it, leaned his slaughterman's hands on the bar and before I could interrogate him about Rodney he asked:
'You're not from around here, are you?'
'No,' I answered.
'Can I ask where you're from?'
I told him.
'Shit,' he exclaimed. 'That's far away, huh?' He corrected himself: 'Well, not that far. Nowhere's that far away any more. Besides, you guys are in the war, aren't you?'
'The war?'
' God almighty, where've you been for the last year, buddy? Iraq, Madrid, haven't you heard anything about that?'
'Yes,' I said, after lighting a cigarette. 'I have heard something. But I'm not sure we're as much in the war as you guys.'
The man blinked.
'I don't understand,' he said.
Luckily at that moment a girl with circles under her eyes and a shiny silver stud in her belly button suddenly rushed into the bar. Without even saying hello the man began to reproach her for something, but the girl told him to go to hell and disappeared through the swinging door; I wondered if the girl was his daughter.
'Shit,' the owner said again, as if laughing at his own anger. 'These kids don't respect anyone any more. In our day things were different, don't you think?' And, as if the girl bursting into the bar had paradoxically improved the morning's outlook, the man added: 'Hey, would you mind if I joined you?'
I didn't need to answer. While he got himself a beer I thought he must be fifty-five or sixty years old, more or less the same age as Rodney; mentally I repeated: 'Our day?' The bartender had a sip of beer and set the bottle down on the bar; smoothing his hair under his Red Sox cap, he asked:
'What were we talking about?'
'Nothing important,' I hurried to say. 'But I wanted to ask you a question.'
'Fire away.'
'I've come to Rantoul to see a friend,' I began. 'Rodney Falk. I just called at his house but no one answered. It's been a while since I lost track of him, so I don't even know if he's still. .'
I stopped talking: the bartender had calmly raised his hand and, making a screen to defend himself from the light, was examining me with interest.
'Hey, I know you, don't I?' he finally said.
'You know me, but you don't remember me,' I answered. 'I was here a long time ago.'
The man nodded and lowered his hand; in a few seconds the happiness had drained from his face, to be replaced by an expression that wasn't mockery, but resembled it.
'I'm afraid you've made the journey in vain,' he said.
'Rodney doesn't live here any more?'
'Rodney died four months ago,' he answered. 'Hung himself from a beam in his shed.'
I was speechless; for a second I couldn't breathe. Stunned, I looked away from the bartender and, trying to find something to focus on behind the bar, I saw the photos of baseball stars and the big portrait of John Wayne hanging on the walls; in that decade and a half the baseball stars had changed, but not John Wayne: there he still was, legendary, imperturbable and dressed as a cowboy, with a dark red bandana knotted at his throat and an invincible smile in his eyes, like an abiding icon of the triumph of virtue. I put out my cigarette, took a sip of beer and suddenly had an icy feeling of dizziness, of unreality, as if I'd already lived through that moment or as if I were dreaming it: a solitary bar lost in the Midwest, the light pouring in through the windows and a lazy, talkative barman who, as if he were whispering a message in my ear that had no precise meaning but for me at that moment had all the meaning in the world, gave me the news of the death of a friend who I actually hardly knew and who, perhaps more than a friend, was a symbol whose scope not even I myself could entirely define, a dark or radiant symbol like maybe Hemingway had been for Rodney. And while I unthinkingly thought of Rodney and of Hemingway — of Rodney's suicide four months before in the shed of his house in Rantoul, Illinois, and of Hemingway's suicide in his house in Ketchum, Idaho, when Rodney was just a teenager — I thought also of Gabriel and Paula, or rather what happened is that they appeared to me, happy, luminous and dead, and then I felt an irrepressible desire to pray, to pray for Gabriel and for Paula and for Rodney, for Hemingway too, and at that very moment, as if a butterfly had just flown in through the open window of Bud's Bar, I suddenly remembered a prayer that appears in 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place', that desolate story by Hemingway I had read many times since I first read it that long ago night when Rodney's father called me in Urbana to tell me the story of his son, a prayer that I knew instantly was the only suitable prayer for Rodney because Hemingway had unknowingly written it for him many years before he died, a bleak prayer that Rodney had undoubtedly read as many times I had and that, I imagined for a second, maybe Rodney and Hemingway recited before taking their lives and that Paula and Gabriel wouldn't even have had time to pray: 'Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.' Mentally I recited this prayer while I watched the bartender approach from the back of the bar, fat and grave, or maybe indifferent, drying his hands on a rag, as if he'd stepped away for a moment out of the pure necessity to do something or as if he too had been praying. For a moment I thought of leaving; then I thought I couldn't leave; stupidly I asked: