“Do you think you could find the place where you stopped?”
“On the Interstate? That would be hard.”
“Well it’s a long shot anyway.”
“What?”
“Evidence they might have dropped, who they were, tracks, footprints, that kind of thing.”
“It was on the hard shoulder.”
“Yeah.”
They sat on the country road by the entrance to the Interstate. Bobby Andes was thinking. He said, “They went in and when they saw you they turned out their lights and called you? What did they turn the lights out for?”
“Damned if I know. Maybe they thought they could sneak up on me.”
Andes laughed, without mirth.
“And they went in, and they came out again, and they tried to run you down?”
“Yes.”
He was tapping on his notebook. “I hate to say this, but I think maybe we’d ought take a look up that mountain road.”
Tony Hastings clutched as if something fatal had been said.
“Go the McCorkle way,” Bobby Andes told the driver. He turned around and explained to Tony: “We’ll go the other way so we don’t have to go by the trailer. If someone’s in there and sees a police car twice.”
They went fast, a strong highway up the side of the ridge. It took Tony a long time before he could ask. “What are you expecting to find up that road?”
“We’ll find out when we find out,” Bobby Andes said. “Nothing, I expect.”
TEN
Upstairs, water running, Dorothy taking a shower. Susan Morrow thumbs ahead, trying not to see words, finds PART TWO not far ahead. How sad it is, she thinks. Sadness in the news to come, which nobody mentions but all expect. She gropes for the possible loophole Edward might have allowed, but finds none. Meanwhile, despite the sadness, she feels this energy and does not know if it’s her own chemistry or the book, Edward in a state of excitement, enjoying his work? She likes to see Edward enjoying his work, it sparks her up. She awaits the horrible discovery her spirit deplores, she awaits it avidly.
Nocturnal Animals 9
The reason Tony Hastings was afraid to go back up that mountain driveway. There was no reason and hence no fear. An ir-rational residue of the night. No reason to be afraid now, he was safe in the back seat of the comfortable police car with two officials (representatives of the civilization which had taken him back) whose whole effort was for him, to help him get back what he had lost.
A newly built highway with cars, making a long sweep up the wooded ridge. At the crest was a curio store, pennants and carved wooden owls. The reason he was so afraid. No reason. They were simply checking out possibilities. Reason to hope, actually. If Laura and Helen had been in that car driving in, if they had been left there as he had been, if the intention was that they all three would meet there. They should have walked out before now, however. That was the trouble with that idea. Unless they had decided to go to sleep and wait for day. But even so, by now almost noon after driving all over the countryside, they should have walked out by now.
As they drove Bobby Andes asked friendly questions about his life. His work. His place in Maine. The happiness of his marriage. His only child. Bobby Andes’s only child. Why Bobby Andes had only one child, it wasn’t deliberate. I mean we didn’t deliberately attempt not to have another child. Did you?
The car stopped in a straight stretch where the road was above the floor of the woods on both sides, except right here where. He had not recognized it because they had approached from the opposite direction. He did not know how they had got around to the other side. It would be the direction in which the men drove off after trying to run him down.
The reason Tony Hastings was afraid to go in gulped in his heart as the driver turned the car and bumped across the ditch past the broken gate into the woods. The reason was, it was too late, the sun approaching noon with driving around all morning, much too late to meet Laura and Helen walking out from there.
Since it was too late, there was no reason to go in.
“I just want to see what they’ve got in here,” Bobby Andes said.
“I didn’t see anything but woods.”
“That was at night.”
“You think they got a still in there?” the driver said.
Andes laughed. “Maybe there’s a house.”
“They took me to the end of the road, I think. I don’t think there’s anything in there.”
Tony Hastings did not think there was a house, nor did he believe Bobby Andes expected to find one. The track was narrow, it turned sharply around dodging rocks and trees, the car jounced and banged, “Jesus!” Bobby Andes said. The woods were light and airy, messy with chunks of underbrush and fallen branches. Trees grew up around boulders and rocky outcrops. Tony Hastings could not connect what he saw with anything he could remember, either driving in with his headlights flashing on the trees or coming out in darkness guided by the power of his dilated eyes to distinguish shadows. He looked for the outcrop where he had hidden while Ray and Turk went by. He saw several that could have served but none like what he remembered.
The reason Tony Hastings was afraid to go into the woods was the credibility it gave to his imaginings. That the lieutenant, Bobby Andes, thought it should be done. To be checked out, eliminated. The act of driving up this agony road, the strain with every minute doubled by the additional minute it would take to drive out—it made a reality of what otherwise would have been a mere ghostly dream. It turned the ghostly dream into a fact.
Driving in, he felt again the grief which made him want to cry last night. It slashed him for his failure when the men had called, for now he was sure they had meant to reunite him with Laura and Helen. Dead or alive. And if he had thought it wise to escape being killed, how stupid that wisdom seemed if they had been killed. And if they had not been and were in the car at the time, with still a chance, how much worse.
He saw the log bridge and realized the thinning of the trees ahead was the clearing. His heart tightened. Already, as they dipped down to the bridge and lurched up the steep short slope, he felt the pure deep relief of having seen enough to know nothing was there. The clearing opened out, it really was a grassy field, empty, with recent tracks of cars turning around.
“Uh oh,” the driver said.
“Oh shit, god damn it!” Bobby Andes cried out.
Tony Hastings did not know what the matter was, he was so relieved and disappointed to see nothing in the clearing, nothing of what he had either expected and feared or what he had hoped. He saw someone had been here, the red kerchief and dark sweater and pair of jeans draped on the bushes across the grass. When Bobby Andes moved his head, he saw the lovers naked under the bush, their naked limbs, asleep.
“Easy man,” Bobby Andes said. He wondered why they were so concerned about him. Already he was out of the car walking fast over to where the lovers lay, and Bobby Andes and the policeman were after him, running, someone trying to hold his arm as if he needed restraint. That was not the problem. He merely wanted to eliminate once and for all the grotesque assumption his officer companions were making, and even if they were naked make these lovers, boy and girl he could see, wake up so they could tell these men who they were not. Boy and girl, though which was which he was not yet sure, one lying on her back, the other close by, face down. It was possible, he realized as he approached, that they were dead, not asleep, that they might have been killed by someone. If so, that was proper business for his officer companions, not him.