Phil Sawyer had underestimated him, and that still rankled. Because Phil had thought of him as a sort of trained rattlesnake to be let out of his cage only under controlled circumstances, so had others. The lot attendant, a hillbilly in a broken cowboy hat, eyed him as he marched around his little car, looking for dents and dings. The Di-Gel melted most of the fiery ball in his chest. Sloat felt his collar growing clammy with sweat. The attendant knew better than to try to buddy up: Sloat had verbally peeled the man's hide weeks ago, after discovering a tiny wrinkle in the BMW's door. In the midst of his rant, he had seen violence begin to darken in the hillbilly's green eyes, and a sudden upsurge of joy had made him waddle in toward the man, still cutting off skin, almost hoping that the attendant would take a poke at him. Abruptly, the hillbilly had lost his momentum; feebly, indeed apologetically suggested that maybe that-there l'il nuthin of a ding came from somewhere else? Parking service at a restaurant, maybe? The way those bozos treat cars, y'know, and the light ain't so good that time a night, why . . .
'Shut your stinking mouth,' Sloat had said. 'That little nothing, as you call it, is going to cost me about twice what you make in a week. I should fire you right now, cowpoke, and the only reason I'm not going to is that there's about a two percent chance you might be right; when I came out of Chasen's last night maybe I didn't look under the door handle, maybe I DID and maybe I DIDN'T, but if you ever talk to me again, if you ever say any more than 'Hello, Mr. Sloat' or 'Goodbye, Mr. Sloat,' I'll get you fired so fast you'll think you were beheaded.' So the hillbilly watched him inspect his car, knowing that if Sloat found any imperfections in the car's finish he would bring down the axe, afraid even to come close enough to utter the ritual goodbye. Sometimes from the window that overlooked the parking lot Sloat had seen the attendant furiously wiping some flaw, bird dropping or splash of mud, off the BMW's hood. And that's management, buddy.
When he pulled out of the lot he checked the rear-view mirror and saw on the hillbilly's face an expression very like the last one Phil Sawyer had worn in the final seconds of his life, out in the middle of nowhere in Utah. He smiled all the way to the freeway on-ramp.
Philip Sawyer had underestimated Morgan Sloat from the time of their first meeting, when they were freshmen at Yale. It could have been, Sloat reflected, that he had been easy to underestimate - a pudgy eighteen-year-old from Akron, graceless, overweighted with anxieties and ambitions, out of Ohio for the first time in his life. Listening to his classmates talk easily about New York, about '21' and the Stork Club, about seeing Brubeck at Basin Street and Erroll Garner at the Vanguard, he'd sweated to hide his ignorance. 'I really like the downtown part,' he'd thrown in, as casually as he could. Palms wet, cramped by curled-in fingers. (Mornings, Sloat often found his palms tattooed with dented bruises left by his fingernails.) 'What downtown part, Morgan?' Tom Woodbine had asked him. The others cackled. 'You know, Broadway and the Village. Around there.' More cackles, harsher. He had been unattractive and badly dressed; his wardrobe consisted of two suits, both charcoal-gray and both apparently made for a man with a scarecrow's shoulders. He had begun losing his hair in high school, and pink scalp showed through his short, flattened-down haircuts.
No, no beauty had Sloat been, and that had been part of it. The others made him feel like a clenched fist: those morning bruises were shadowy little photographs of his soul. The others, all interested in the theater like himself and Sawyer, possessed good profiles, flat stomachs, easy careless manners. Sprawled across the lounge chairs of their suite in Davenport while Sloat, in a haze of perspiration, stood that he might not wrinkle his suit pants and thereby get a few more days' wear out of them, they sometimes resembled a gathering of young gods - cashmere sweaters draped over their shoulders like the golden fleece. They were on their way to becoming actors, playwrights, songwriters. Sloat had seen himself as a director: entangling them all in a net of complications and designs which only he could unwind.
Sawyer and Tom Woodbine, both of whom seemed unimaginably rich to Sloat, were roommates. Woodbine had only a lukewarm interest in theater and hung around their undergraduate drama workshop because Phil did. Another gilded private-school boy, Thomas Woodbine differed from the others because of his absolute seriousness and straightforwardness. He intended to become a lawyer, and already seemed to have the probity and impartiality of a judge. (In fact, most of Woodbine's acquaintances imagined that he would wind up on the Supreme Court, much to the embarrassment of the boy himself.) Woodbine was without ambition in Sloat's terms, being interested far more in living rightly than in living well. Of course he had everything, and what he by some accident lacked other people were quick to give him: how could he, so spoiled by nature and friendships, be ambitious? Sloat almost unconsciously detested Woodbine, and could not bring himself to call him 'Tommy.'