CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THEY DROVE NORTH JUST after breakfast. Nobody followed them. As they left the city, Louis employed all the skills of evasion that he had learned—sudden stops, doubling back on himself, the use of dead ends and meandering roads through residential areas—yet he discerned no pattern among the vehicles in his wake, and neither did Angel. In the end, both were content that they had left the city unencumbered by unwanted attention
Their conversation of the previous night was not mentioned. It would serve no purpose to disinter it now. Instead, they behaved as they always did, interspersing periods of silence with comments on music, on business, or on whatever happened to strike them at the time.
“Philadelphia,” said Angel. “City of Brotherly Love, my ass. You remember Jack Wade?”
“Cactus Jack.”
“Hey, that’s unkind. He had a skin condition. Nothing he could do about it. Anyway, he once tried to help an old lady across the street in Philly and she kneed him in the balls. Took his wallet, too, he said.”
“It is one unfriendly city,” Louis agreed.
Angel watched the scenery go by. “What’s over there?” he asked.
“Where?”
“East. Is that Massachusetts?”
“Vermont.”
“Least it’s not New Hampshire. I always worry that someone’s going to take a pot shot at us from the trees when we drive through New Hampshire.”
“They do breed ’em tough there.”
“Tough, and kind of dumb. You know, they refused to pass a law requiring people to wear seat belts?”
“I read that somewhere.”
“You rent a car in New Hampshire, you start it up, and it doesn’t make that ‘beep-beep-beep’
noise if you forget to put on your seat belt.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, instead, if you try to put it on, a voice calls you a * and tells you to grow a pair.”
“Live free or die, man.”
“I think that was referring to the forces of tyranny and oppression, not some guy who misjudges the brake time on his Prius.”
“Cheap gas, though.”
“Cheap gas. Cheap liquor. Easy availability of weapons.”
“Yeah,” said Louis. “Hard to see how that could go wrong.”
They left the interstate close to Champlain. At Mooers, they took a right and headed through the Forks, then crossed the Great Chazy River, which was little more than a stream at that point. The towns all blended into one: there were volunteer fire departments, cemeteries, old abandoned filling stations at intersections, now replaced by glowing edifices at the town limits, the vintage pumps still standing like ancient soldiers guarding long-forgotten memorials. Some places looked more prosperous than others, but it was a relative term; everywhere, it seemed, they saw things for sale: cars, houses, businesses, stores with paper on the windows, no hint now left of their former purpose. Too many homes had wounded paintwork, too many lawns were littered with the entrails of vehicles, cannibalized for parts, and the discarded limbs of broken furniture. They passed through places that were hardly there at all: some towns seemed to exist only as a figment of some planner’s imagination, like a joke on the map, a punchline to a gag that had never been told. Halloween jack-o’-lanterns glowed on porches and in yards. Ghosts danced around an old elm tree, the wind picking at their sheeted forms. They stopped for a coffee at Dick’s Country Store and Music Oasis at Churubusco, mainly because they liked its advertising: “500 Guitars, 1000 Guns.” Angel figured that somebody had to be kidding, but Dick’s was for real: to the right of the door was a little convenience store with a fridge full of bait worms, and to the left were two separate entrances. The first led into a guitar and musical instrument shop that seemed to be staffed by the usual benevolent guitar heads and amp aficionados. A young man with long dark hair sat on the floor, trying out a black Gibson guitar, his fingers picking a loose melody in the fading afternoon light. The second door, meanwhile, led into a pair of linked rooms filled with shotguns, pistols, knives, and ammunition, and was staffed by a pair of serious-looking men, one young, one old. A sign warned that a New York state pistol permit was required to even handle a gun. Beside it, a heavyset woman was filling out the paperwork for a four-hundred-dollar pistol.
“I’m buying it as a gift for someone,” she explained.
“That’s acceptable,” said the older of the two men, although it wasn’t clear if he was referring to the legality of the transfer or the nature of the gift. Angel and Louis looked on in bemusement, then returned to their car to drink the coffee, and continued north. A wind farm occupied the hills to the west, the blades unmoving, like playthings abandoned by the offspring of giants.
“It’s a strange part of the country,” said Angel.
“That it is.”
“Lot of people out there who didn’t vote for Hillary.”
“Lot of people in here who didn’t vote for Hillary either.”
“Yeah, fifty percent of them. I don’t care. I always liked her.”
When they came to Burke, they spotted the first of the brown U.S. Border Patrol vehicles, and although they were only doing five above the limit, Louis slowed down. They almost missed the right onto Route 122 as it grew dark, and only a closed campground, its power outlets covered by upturned plastic trash cans, alerted them to the presence of the turning onto 37. A chimney stack for a house never built appeared on the left, concrete slowly succumbing to the onslaught of green, and then, about twelve miles from Massena, motels appeared, and a Mohawk casino, and Indian smoke shops. A sign advised that they were only a mile from the Canadian border. Another, draped across a warehouse, announced that “This is Mohawk Land, not NYS Land.”
They were close now.
They stopped in Massena, checking in separately at an anonymous motel and booking different rooms. Louis slept. Angel watched TV, the volume at its lowest audible level, alert to the sound of cars entering the parking lot, of voices, to the presence of anonymous figures in the gathering dark. It was too early for him to fall easily into sleep. He was a night owl by nature. It was mornings that were hard for him. At last, he forced himself to turn off the television and lie back on the bed. Maybe he napped for a time, but he was awake when the clock by his bed indicated that it was after 4:00 A.M., and he stilled the alarm before it had barely had a chance to sound. Louis was already waiting in the car when Angel emerged from the room. No words were exchanged, no greetings. Instead, they drove from Massena in silence, their attention fixed on the road, on the darkness, and on the work that lay ahead.