Out of town he walked on tipped, sunken sidewalks, passing bacon-smelling restaurants and used-car lots laid out precisely, wheel facing wheel, headlights polished and aligned, everything eyeing everything else.
In a low gray midday, the windows of the buildings were mirrors, glass glaring back, insides invisible. The lots lay squared and similar, and seams and borders separated every this from every that. A fence, a rail, a line of grass or littered shrubs like the alley where they’d waited for Martha Jefferson. Or just a line of curb coated in tar. Each place marked the line between this and that, here and there. Each one he passed ticked off the passing from then to now.
He heard the motor first; then tires scratched the pavement behind and stopped at his heel. Little fat-tire police car with the windows rolled down. A moustache, bristling.
“How you doing this morning?”
East stopped. Helplessly he imagined the parking meter—it had to be still ticking. Not that. An age of dealing with cops had taught him what not to do.
“Fine,” he mumbled.
“Going anywhere special?”
“Just a walk.”
The cop looked skeptical and East squeezed his shoulders together, mute.
“Know anybody in this town?” the cop added. They asked a question, then stared into you like a fishing hole, like sooner or later the truth would swim up.
“Not really.” East stood still, hands down in his pockets, where now there was only a small fold of bills and the bent California shapes of some guns.
The police radio burped and whistled. The cop glanced at it, then stilled it with a hand.
East gazed down the road and said, “You got what you need?”
The moustache stared through him. Like a gaze you could actually feel, could round on if you wanted to sleep tonight on a concrete floor.
“You take it easy,” the cop said. Not a farewell. An instruction.
East volunteered nothing. Behind him the engine flared. The tires didn’t crawl but cut a hard U-turn. So somebody had sent the cop out just to take a look at him.
The town smelled like corn cooked too long. Up the road, the two-lane broadened out as it sped up—flat shoulders spreading, cars at fifty or sixty, tossing up black grit and cinder tornadoes that bit his ears. He burrowed down in his sweater. No trees to hide behind, no woods line to trace—this would be straight country walking. Out where anyone could see.
A mile of level fields. Stalks sawed into splintered bits, scraps of wind-trash bright in the ruts. He heard Michael Wilson’s laughing voice: Country.
A sign said it was four miles to the next town.
—
At a junction gas station kept by a teenage girl, he bought a long sub sandwich and a stocking cap. The caps said BROWNS and came in two colors, orange and brown. He chose brown. He chose ham. Inside him, his stomach was a drifting ship. But he should eat. He knew that.
By the door, as the nervous girl prepared his sandwich, a map with a yellow tape arrow showed YOU ARE HERE. No Wisconsin, no Iowa, none of those places on a map that meant what they had done. Just this state, just Ohio, the town where the brown car slept somewhere to the west. He didn’t remember the name of the town. He just wanted away. This was running. From the police and from the spinning inside his body, the yaw.
The girl patted his ingredients together through plastic-bag gloves. When he asked for more tomatoes, she took her phone out of her pocket and laid it on the chopping surface, near onion half-moons, within reach. Her movements sharpened: she pressed the sandwich and sliced it with the quick blade, and then she was done with him, everything but the making change.
He knew he must look horrible.
He took his bagged sandwich and used the little restroom. Everything looked like it had sat for years in rusty water. He would have liked to take a shit, but his insides were dry. The fountain, Halsey Taylor, was just a husk.
When he stepped out, the girl was half-hidden in the back room, on her phone. She saw him and disappeared completely. He would have liked a cup of water.
Outside was a picnic table made of concrete with stones inset, under a hard steel umbrella. It was winter-cold, and the umbrella had once been white with a large red logo, but now the red had faded in the sun and was mostly rusted, and the rust had dripped down and begun to stick at the edges of the stones, like cuticles. It was the least comfortable table he’d ever seen, so he ate the sandwich as he walked, shedding bits of food, bouncing them off his trousers and onto the gritty shoulder of the highway.