Night Passage Read online

  “It’s my business to know this sort of thing,” Elliott to Jesse. “And your wife here has the goods.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Oh, Elliott,” Jennifer said. “‘I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “My right hand to God,” Elliott said, and put his right in the air. “I see twenty girls a day. All of them are good looking. Everybody out here is good-looking, you know? But none of them come alive through the lens like do, Jennifer.”

  Jesse sipped the tall scotch and soda he’d ordered.

  “What are you working on now, Elliott?” Jennifer said.

  “Got a thing in development at Universal,” Elliott said. “Absolutely amazing story about a plastic surgeon, got an Oedipal deal going with his mother. Women come to him a makeover and he does a surgical reconstruction so that they look like his mother, then he kills them. Great vehicle for Tommy Cruise.”

  “I love the concept,” Jennifer said. “Do you love it, Jesse?”

  “Love it,” Jesse said. Tommy Cruise.

  “Maybe I can bring you aboard, Jesse, you know, you being a cop and all, could use a little professional consult on this. You ever dealt with psychopathic killers?”

  “Not my job to decide if they’re psychopaths,” Jesse said.

  “Oh, Jesse,” Jennifer said, “you know what he means.”

  “Well, you murder somebody,” Jesse said, “probably something wrong with you.”

  “Well, I may give you a ringo, soon as I teach this idiot writer I’m working with how to write a screenplay.”

  “He’s never written one?” Jennifer said.

  “No, he’s a damn novelist, you know?”

  “The worst.”

  “You got that right,” Elliott said. “Can’t tell them shit.”

  He sighed thoughtfully for a moment, looking around the room, then he patted his chest over his shirt pocket, and frowned, and took a twenty-dollar bill out of his pants pocket and handed it to his girlfriend.

  “Taffy,” he said, “go get me some cigarettes.”

  Taffy took the money and headed for the bar near the waiting area out front.

  “I like it back here,” Elliott said. “Lotta people like it out front where everyone can see them. Real Hollywood, right? I’m not into that.”

  “Don’t blame you,” Jesse said. He knew Jennifer liked him to talk around industry people.

  “I’m a blue-collar guy, you know, Jesse. I make pictures.”

  Jesse had never heard of any picture that Elliott had

  But he didn’t pay much attention to movies. He they were boring, except for westerns. Of which weren’t many new ones. Taffy came back with the cigarettes. The waitress brought them another round of drinks.

  Elliott said, “Lemme tell you a little more about this picture, Jenn.”

  Jesse took a long pull on his scotch and soda, feeling the thrust of it down his throat, waiting for the good feel to follow… In Oklahoma City he turned northeast, toward St. Louis. He was in the central time zone now. He remember listening to Vin Scully broadcasting the games from St. Louis, right at suppertime. It was as if he knew St. Louis, the ballpark glowing in the close summer night, the Mississippi running past. Bob Gibson, past his prime but still ferocious. Bake McBride, Ted Simmons. It was how he knew much of the country: Scully’s effortless voice from Wrigley Field and Three Rivers and Shea and Fulton County Stadium, a kind of panoramic linkage under the dark skies of the Republic. He’d listened to Vin Scully all his life. Vin Scully was authority, containment, certainty. Vin Scully was home. He reached St. Louis in the afternoon with the rush-hour traffic clogging the interstate. He crossed the Mississippi and pulled off the interstate and found Busch Stadium, near the river. In front, a statue of Stan Musial. Jesse sat in the car for a moment stared at the statue.

  “Stan Musial,” he said.

  Jennifer would never have understood. Maybe no one who had not played. The feel of it. The smell of the field, the way the skin of the infield felt under your spikes. The way your hands and arms and upper body felt when you hit the ball square, on the fat part of the bat. Maybe you had to have played to hear the oral poetry of chatter and heckling, the jock humor that lingered at the poles of arrogance and self-effacement, the things umpires said every time they defended a call, the things the first baseman said every time, out of the corner of his mouth, while he watched the pitcher, if you reached first on a lucky blooper. They didn’t know that when you were in the field waiting for the pitcher to throw, or that when you were at bat trying to pick up the spin of a curve ball, you didn’t hear the crowd or the coaches or anyone else. They didn’t know that you were in a place of silence that seemed unregulated by time. Though they were men and they often spent time in the company of men, Jennifer’s friends didn’t have any feel for men in groups. Many of them seemed more at ease with women… after a cocktail party in the interests of Jennifer’s career they had a fight about it.

  “Why were they so boring?” Jennifer said.

  “They don’t know anything that matters,” he said.

  “They are successful people in the. business,” Jennifer said.

  “Nobody in the business knows what matters,” Jesse had said.

  “For Christ’s sake, they talked with you about baseball all night.”

  “They don’t know anything about baseball,” Jesse said. “They just knew the names of a bunch of players.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Jennifer said.

  As he left St. Louis it began to rain, spitting at first, and then more of a steady mist. He stayed the night in a motel in Zanesville, Ohio, and when he came out to the car in the morning it was still dark after sunrise and the rain was coming steadily. He pulled into the Exxon station next to the motel, a half block from the interstate ramp. Most people weren’t up yet in Zanesville. The empty roadways gleamed in the rain reflecting the bright lights of the gas station. He pumped his own gas and when he went in to pay bought himself coffee and two plain donuts in the convenience section. The man behind the counter had a shiny bald head and a neat beard. He wore a crisp white shirt with the cuffs turned back and there was a small tattoo on his right forearm that said “Duke” in ornate blue script.

  “Early start,” the man said.

  “Long way to go,” Jesse said.

  “Where you heading?”

  The man made change automatically, as if his hands did he counting.

  “Massachusetts.”

  “Long way is right,” the man said. “Never been there myself.”

  Jesse pocketed his change and took his coffee and donuts.

  “Safe trip,” the man said.

  There were places like this all across the country, dependent on the interstate, open early, bright, smelling of coffee, not unfriendly. The interstate was an entity of its own, a kind of transcontinental neighborhood, filled with single people, who hung out in the neighborhood places. He swung up onto Interstate 70 and drove east into the rain, drinking his coffee… He still didn’t know exactly when she started sleeping with Elliott Krueger. He knew she was out more and later. He would stand sometimes at the window looking out at North Genesee Street and thinking maybe the next car will be her. He was embarrassed with himself about that, but it seemed as if he had to do it. Sometimes when they were having dutiful sex, a voice in his head which seemed not even his, would say, This isn’t the first time today she’s done this. The voice was not uncertain. The voice knew. He knew. But then he didn’t know. Despite the passion of their courtship, she had become perfunctory about sex. He couldn’t imagine her being so consumed by desire that she would cheat on him. And he couldn’t imagine that she would even if she were. She wouldn’t do that to me, his own voice would say in his head. She wouldn’t do that to me. As he drove through the wet gray morning toward West Virginia he smiled at himself. It wasn’t about me. It was about her, about what she needed, about being an actress. She needed to be an actress more than she needed to be a cop’s wife. He wondered s
ometimes what he needed from her. A kind of richness, maybe. The palpability of her, the odd combination of intellect and ditz that she balanced so beautifully. Maybe it made no sense to try to figure. Could anyone list the reasons they loved someone? Probably not. He crossed the Ohio River at Wheeling, the rain dimpling the iron-colored surface of the wide water below the bridge. He liked rivers. They always hinted to him of possibility. The interstate was uphill now in West Virginia, and it curved around the slopes. The big trailer trucks roared through it, sending up a sheet of water as they passed him on the down slopes. On the next hill they would slow, and he would either have to slow to their speed or pass them, only to have them roar past him again as they made up the time on the downgrade. Time was money to truckers. He sympathized with that. But, especially in bad weather, trucks were a pain in the ass. It was part of his own problem, he thought, that he understood Jennifer’s behavior only in terms of himself. She wouldn’t do that to me. But it was human. He didn’t condemn himself, though his one-wayness, too, embarrassed him sometimes when he thought of it. He’d been a cop too long not to understand the limits on human empathy. I thought she didn’t like sex anymore, when in fact, she didn’t like sex anymore with me. Even the sex she liked, as he thought about it, .had, maybe, been about getting what she wanted, which, at one time, had been him. Maybe she never really liked sex as much as she seemed to. Maybe once she had used it to catch what she was fishing for, she didn’t enjoy it anymore. Because she liked fishing didn’t mean she had to like fish. The rain came now so thickly that it nearly overwhelmed the wipers. He shifted the Explorer into four-wheel drive as the gleaming interstate wound slickly through the hills. She denied Elliott when she left him, saying she had to get away and wasn’t leaving him for anyone. It was probably meant as a kindness. It probably was a kindness at the time, and by the time she dropped the other shoe and talked about Elliott, he had already begun the process of shoring up his self and could hear it. The night she left and he was alone in the house he looked at his service pistol and picked it up and thought about where to shoot himself. A lot of cops shot themselves. They had the means at hand, and they knew how. Put them ahead of the general populace, he thought, in suicide efficiency. Probably putting the muzzle in his mouth and shooting up and back would be the way most likely to take him out instantly. Cops called it eating your gun. He sat on the bed and hefted the gun and felt comforted by it. If he couldn’t stand her leaving, if she didn’t come back, it was always there. It was a comfort to know it was there. Like booze. If it got bad enough he could always drink. He put the gun back in the drawer by his bed and went and looked out the window…. The rain was a constant. Sometimes it intensified as he drove through the north spur of West Virginia. It was never gentle and sometimes it was intense, and Jesse drove mostly by focusing on the taillights of the car ahead. He had a momentary fantasy of a ten-mile-long line of cars, each driver following the taillights ahead of him going one by one over a cliff as the first driver in the long line missed the turn… After she had left and he decided to at least postpone shooting himself, he found that it was bad enough to drink. At first nobody noticed much. Then his partner, a fifty-two-year-old guy named Ben Romero, talked to him about it. Jesse listened and shrugged and went about his drinking. After an incident at night when Jesse couldn’t seem to get the handcuffs on a perp, Romero asked for a new partner.

  “I got five kids,” Romero said. “Two of them in college. I can’t risk it with you anymore, Jesse.”

  Jesse nodded and shrugged. Romero shook hands with him, opened his mouth to say something, and closed it, and shook his head and walked away. When his new partner quit him in less than a week, Jesse was transferred inside to records. When he started not showing up for work, Cronjager called him in and talked to him and sent him to the police doctor. The doctor got him to AA. He thought the meetings were full of self-satisfied assholes, and he hated the higher power crap. After the second meeting he went home and drank nearly a fifth of scotch and slept through most of the next day. The day after that Cronjager offered him the chance to resign or go through the firing process. Jesse resigned. And went home and sat in his small kitchen with ice and scotch and found himself without connection or purpose. I’ll drink to that. He sat and drank scotch and the tears ran down his face.

  Chapter 8

  HER SISTER HAD AGREED TO take the kids for the night, and Carole Genest had the house to herself. Before she went to dinner with Mark she had changed the bed linens. She and Mark had had two margaritas and a bottle of white with dinner and they were laughing as Mark pulled the BMW sedan into her driveway and parked under the tree near her side door.

  “You better lock the car,” Carole said when they got out. “I don’t think you’ll be leaving for a while.”

  As Mark beeped the lock button on his key ring, and the locks clicked in the car, Jo Jo Genest loomed out of shadows by the side door.

  Carole said, “Jesus.”

  “Where’s the kids?” Jo Jo said.

  “Get out of here, Jo Jo,” Carole said.

  “You gonna fuck this pipsqueak?” Jo Jo said.

  “Watch your mouth, pal,” Mark said. But he didn’t say with conviction. Hulking before them in the half light, Jo looked like a rhinoceros.

  Jo Jo put his huge hand against Mark’s face and slammed his head back against the roof of the car. Mark’s legs buckled and he staggered but remained upright, leaning on the car, clasping his head with both hands, rocking slowly from one side to another.

  “Get outta here,” Jo Jo said.

  Mark went around the car, still holding his head, got into it, and backed down the driveway, the car running off of one side of the driveway and then the other as he overcorrected, going too fast backward in the dark.

  “You son of a bitch,” Carole said. “I got a court order on you. I’m going to put you in jail, you bastard.”

  “Kids are at your sister’s, aren’t they? You stashed them there so you could come home and fuck that faggot.”

  “And if I did, what’s that to you. Don’t you get it, you jerk. We’re divorced, D-I-V-O-R-C-E-D.”

  She unlocked the side door as she talked and pushed past him into the house. He followed her.

  “Get out of my house,” she said.

  “Your house? Your fucking house? You paid for it?”

  Jo Jo kicked the side door shut with his heel.

  “I’m calling the cops,” Carole said.

  “No,” Jo Jo said. “No. I came here to talk. Lemme talk with you.”

  “Nice start to a talk,” Carole said. “Smacking my date against the car.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jo Jo said. “I just can’t stand seeing you with somebody, you unnerstand? I can’t. You and me are forever, Carole. I can’t stand it, you’re with somebody else.”

  “Well, you better get used to it, Jo Jo, because that is how it is.”