‘Is that where she lives?’
‘I don’t know. That’s where she went. I never asked her where she lived.’
‘Well, I’m a little disappointed,’ I said.
Stephanie caught my eye. ‘I am, too,’ she answered.
‘Lois or no,’ Barter said, ‘we can’t accommodate you.’
‘Then I guess I’ll be shoving off.’
‘That would seem to be the thing to do,’ Barter said.
‘Nice meeting you both.’
‘Try us again,’ Stephanie said.
‘I will.’
‘If you see Joe,’ Barter said, ‘give him my regards.’
‘I will.’
‘He still lives in Murraysville, don’t he?’ Barter asked.
‘ Murraysville?’
‘Yes,’ Barter said.
‘I wouldn’t know where he lives,’ I said. ‘I met him in a bar.’
‘Where?’
I took a wild shot in the dark. ‘Davistown,’ I said.
‘Well,’ Barter said, sighing, ‘give him my regards.’
When I got outside, the truck was gone. I pulled the car away from Stephanie Barter’s Cadillac, and headed down the road.
I drove for four minutes before I doused the lights and pulled over into the bushes.
Chapter fourteen
I’m a city boy.
I was born and raised in the city, and that means a lot of things. It means you don’t see grass or trees unless you go to a park. That sounds like a banality, but many banal things happen to be true nonetheless. It means the sky is always etched with concrete. It means that sometimes, on some streets, you feel you can’t even see the sky. It means dirt, and garbage, and noise, and violence. A city is a lot of small towns clustered together. And so you get all the bad things of any small town, but you get the good things, too.
If you weren’t raised in a city, you won’t understand the good things.
You won’t understand the joy of playing marbles alongside a curb after a summer rainstorm. You won’t understand the deep pleasure of sticking your hand into a black puddle of water to span your marble and your competitor’s. You won’t savor the unparalleled thrill of riding a pusho which was made out of a two-by-four, an orange crate, and an old ball-bearing skate. You can hear the ball bearings rattle around in the wheels, because you purposely used a skate which had wheels with worn rims. You can feel the black asphalt skimming under the pusho, and you bounce on the two-by-four and skirt along with the other pushos, and in that moment you’re Lawrence of Arabia on a white steed.
In the summer heat, you turn on the fire hydrant, and you bend a coffee tin and put it over the nozzle, and the water sprays up in a force-packed shower, and the kids dance under it, the black pavement slick and wet. When the cop comes, you run like hell, and you watch solemnly while he turns off the pump with a Stillson wrench until the water becomes only a trickle, and then only a memory.
In the summer, too, you sit on the front stoop with the other kids, and the city has its own song at night, especially on a summer night when the heat has baked into the street and the sidewalk and the brick walls of the tenements and a cool breeze blows in over the river. You can hear the city’s song very clearly on a summer night. You can hear the horns, and the tugs, and the voices, and the people. You can hear the sound around you like the sound of mingled voices at a public beach, hovering on the air, indistinct, unintelligible, and beneath that the whisper of your friends beside you on the stoop, and the cool comfort of a cup of ices clenched in your fist, and the vast exchange of sex and religion and philosophy.
In the fall, the city doesn’t have turning leaves. In the fall, the city has a bite on the air, a bite as sharp as a dragon’s tooth. You put the summer to rest, and you buckle down, and if you’re a kid you shop the five-and-dime for your new looseleaf folder, and your new pencils, and you can smell school in the air, and the smell is a good one. The tempo is picked up. You can’t feel tempo anywhere but in the city. In the city the footsteps are magnified by a million, and you can feel the quicker beat, and there’s suddenly purpose to the city — the summer is gone, the loafing is over, the city is tightening its belt for the cold winter ahead.
You didn’t ice skate in the city. Ice-skating was something you learned later, when you were older, something you would never be really good at because you learned so late. But the snowplows rushed through the streets like giant tanks, pushing the snow to the curb, making tall fortresses. You climbed the fortresses, and the city became a mountainland of cold and ice and you felt for a moment a part of the people all around you, and you longed for the greater intimacy of a really snowbound community.
In the spring, you had Saint Paddy’s day. You weren’t Irish, but your blood sang on that day anyway, and you made sure you had a green tie, and there was an Irish girl in your class you kissed, and you sang ‘Did Your Mother Come from Ireland?’ and you cut classes to watch the parade downtown. You saw cops then. Lines and lines of cops. Marching in precision, lines of blue. You became a cop later for different reasons, but you’d never forget the marching blue uniforms, or the sudden mild breeze, mild for March, the sudden warm sun, so warm for March, that heralded the day of the Irish and the beginning of spring.
You loved the city because the city had been part of you since the day you looked up from your carriage and saw the buildings reaching for the sky. You could go to the country for picnics, but the city always called you back, and you heard her keening song in the strangest places — on gangway watch in the yards at Boston, on the fantail of a destroyer on a quiet moonlit night with the Pacific as still as a sleeping babe, behind the heaving smoking barrels of a 40 mm. gun trained on an enemy plane, the pom-pom, pom-pom bursting your ear-drums, the acrid stench of cordite powerful in your nostrils. You didn’t forget the song of the city. You couldn’t forget it because you helped write it.
I’m a city boy.
The country doesn’t gas me.
I don’t like lonely roads without lights, and I don’t like the hum of insects, the incessant goddamn chirruping and croaking and cccsssking, and chipock-chipocking. I don’t like getting out of a car and being hit in the face with the eerie strand of a spider’s web. I don’t like stepping in soft mud, and I don’t like the feeling that the next time I put down my foot it might be on a wasp’s nest, or in a bed of quicksand, or on a snake.
I’m chicken that way.
I’m a coward.
I got out of the police sedan on the night of June 4th, and there was nothing I’d rather have done less. I brushed the spider’s web from my face, feeling crawly, wondering if the spider were entangled in my hair, and then I started through the woods. I was about as absolutely quiet as Davy Crockett with his leg in a plaster cast. A deaf Parisian sitting in the shade of the Eiffel Tower could have heard me. A dead Indian buried under the Taj Mahal would have perked up his ears at my coming. Martians paddling down their canals undoubtedly wondered what all the racket was about.
There was only one thing I wanted.
Mike Barter had driven somewhere with Hezekiah on business. I didn’t know what the business had been, but they’d driven in the truck. I wanted a look at that truck.
There were sounds in the woods. I didn’t like the sounds. They scared me. That’s the absolute truth. I pulled the .38 from the holster on my belt, and edged my way through the woods listening to the sounds. Branches snapped. Animals seemed to lurk behind every tree. Birds screeched every now and then. The insects buzzed and hummed. There wasn’t a light showing anywhere. A country boy would have made a beeline for the motel. I’m a city boy. I didn’t know where the hell I was going. I hoped I was going in a straight line. I hoped I was heading for the motel. I hoped I could find my way back to the car if it turned out I wasn’t heading for the motel.