The Traveller (57 page)

Jeffers wondered why, instead of his usual rigid delight, he felt a sort of leisurely pleasure, almost a lassitude. He felt a headiness, like having drunk too much of some excellent wine, not stumbling drunk, but giddy. After adhering so strictly to ideas and concepts, having planned right down to the ferry tickets on and off, now he was in no rush. He thought he wanted to savor this last act, draw it out. He felt a rush of blood through his veins, warm, exciting. He listened to his own heart, and thought that it was going to prove to be hard to say goodbye to his old identity. But -he smiled inwardly — thinking of the creation of the new.

They passed through the tiny town of West Tisbury and Jeffers summoned himself to attention. Not far now, he thought. He tightened himself mentally, concentrating on the problems at hand.

Anne Hampton looked over at Jeffers and saw that he was suddenly paying close attention. He had .hunched forward in the seat slightly, and she knew that this meant something was going to happen. It caused her body to stiffen and she moved to the edge of her seat. He had said so much about an ending, and, she thought, now it is starting. She could feel her own sleepiness flee her, and she marshaled her emotions like a military reserve being held in check for that critical moment in any battle when victory and defeat are held in balance.

Jeffers turned down a sandy secondary road and immediately they were bumping along a washboard dirt single-line trail. The scrub bushes and gnarled trees of the island seemed to envelop them in a tunnel, and she felt immediately as if they had stepped from civilization into some wilder, prehistoric place. The car pitched and yawed as he steered it slowly down the road. Occasionally the tires spun briefly in sand, and the cockpit was filled with the scratching, screeching noise of bushes rubbing against the car sides. After traveling what she guessed was more than a bumpy mile, deeper into the beech forest, they arrived at a juncture of four tiny roads. There were a few small arrows in various colors pointing down the alternate routes. The dirt roads seemed ever smaller, tighter and darker.

‘The arrows are for the different homes,’ Jeffers explained. ‘It’s precious. You have to know the right color to get to the right house. Otherwise you end up on the wrong side of the pond.’

He steered down the left-hand fork.

The yawing and bumping of the car started to make her nauseated. She tried to see through the overhanging branches and she caught a glimpse of the moon, high in the sky.

They traveled another ten minutes. At least a mile, she thought. Perhaps farther.

Then, as if by some stroke of a knife, they passed out of the forest into an open area. Jeffers doused the car lights as they emerged from the trees, steering the car slowly by the moonlight.

She could see off to her right a wide expanse of water.

‘That’s the pond,’ Jeffers said. ‘Pond isn’t a good word. It’s actually as big as a lake and as deep as one.’ He stopped the car and rolled down the window. ‘Listen,’ he said.

She could hear the surf pounding on the shoreline in the distance.

‘The pond separates the houses from the beach,’ he said. “We used to have to take a little motorboat or a rowboat over. A lot of people used little sailboats. Canoes, kayaks, windsurfers, too, I guess. Now, look carefully. See across there?’

He pointed over the pond.

‘It’s all wild land. The only person who lives out there is an old sheep farmer named Johnson. He’s crazy. Literally. Steals motorboat engines from the summer pople whose boats he doesn’t like. He shoots his shotgun at folks who drive their cars on the sand dunes. Once he made a homemade land mine and tank trap for the kids and tourists who tried to use his road to get to the beach. The old bastard once chased me off his property at gunpoint. That was twenty years ago, but he hasn’t changed a bit. He was discharged from the Army with a mental disability and it hasn’t gotten any better. He’s certifiable, but an old islander, so they let him get away with things. The summer people, of course, think he’s quaint.’

Jeffers paused. When he spoke again, it was with complete fury.

‘They’re going to blame him at first for what we do.’

Then he pointed down the road.

‘This land ends in a point that projects into the pond. Finger Point. A half mile down this road is a house. If you look carefully, you can just see the roof line. It’s the only place out here. People pay great sums of money for the right kinds of isolation. Anyway, that’s where we’re going.’

Jeffers abruptly rolled the window up and thrust the car into reverse. The car bumped wildly while he backed it into the forest. He spun the wheel sharply, sliding the car

into a small turnoff that she hadn’t noticed. Then he shut off the engine.

‘All right,’ he said. “We’re here. Wait.’

Jeffers walked to the back of the car and seized the duffle bag where he kept the weapons. He opened the zipper and pulled out a pair of black workmen’s coveralls and several other items. He slipped one of the set on, then put a pistol in the belt. He reloaded the rifle and chambered a round. Then he slung the duffel over his back.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Out of the car.’

She complied instantly.

‘Put this on.’

She slid on the black coveralls and thought: I am part of the night.

He appraised her.

‘Good. Good. You almost look the part. You just need this.’

He handed her a small knit hat. She looked at it quizzically.

‘Like this!’ he said, his voice suddenly at the edge of rage. He stepped to her and grabbing the hat, thrust it on her head. Then, in a single, violent motion, he pulled the rolled brim down. It was a ski mask. She thought she might suffocate beneath the tight-fitting wool. She saw he’d pulled his down as well.

‘Real horror show,’ he said. He turned and trotted down the road and she hurried to keep pace.

13 An irregular session of the Lost Boys

18

Detective Mercedes Barren waited impatiently in Martin Jeffers’ office, agonizing over lost time. She had trouble sitting; whenever she rested in a chair, she felt as if an angry impulse surged through her, reminding her that the killer wasn’t waiting for her somewhere with his feet up on tome desk. He’s out there, she told herself, just past my reach. He’s doing something. Her head flooded with the images she’d stolen from his apartment. She grimaced and thought: I’ll never lose them. Those pictures will be with me forever.

She slowly rubbed her hands across her eyes and remembered a lecture from her first days at the police academy, when an FBI agent had come in, arms and pockets and head filled with crime statistics. He had used clock models and a steadily droning voice to demonstrate how often each armed robbery, each burglary, each murder took place in the United States. She thought: 10 p.m., a ghetto crap game turns to knives; 11 p.m., a suburban couple’s argument results in gunplay; midnight, Douglas Jeffers sweet-talks another woman into his car. She wanted to grab hold of something and shake it violently. She wanted to see something shatter and break. She wanted crashing noise. But all that surrounded her was a steady, infuriating silence, and she had to console herself by pacing around the room, fiddling with her papers, envisioning moments past and moments to come, trying to prepare herself mentally for confrontation.

It will happen, she told herself.

And I will be ready.

She thought of herself as a warrior preparing for battle. Mercedes Barren remembered how Achilles had oiled his body before his fight with Hector. He’d known he would win, because that was preordained, but known as well that his own demise was fast approaching, signaled by his victory that day. Then she dismissed the image: He won, but lost. That isn’t what you intend. Knights in the Middle Ages would pray before a fight, imploring divine guidance, but you know what you have to do. No one, not even the heavens, needs to tell you. Of course, Roland was obstinate; he would not sound his horn, and it cost him his friend’s life and his own, but he gained immortality. She smiled to herself: Bad idea. Then she asked herself: Are you any different? She refused herself an answer. She considered the rituals of the samurai and the ghost-dancing of the Plains Indians. The spirit filled them and they believed that the horse soldiers’ bullets would pass right through them. Unfortunately they were right. The only problem was that the bullets took their lives, as well, which wasn’t what had been advertised. Sitting Bull was old and wise, and knew this, but fought anyway.

She considered whether John Barren had done anything special before a fight. Had he dressed with any special care, like some superstitious athlete who wears the same socks every game so as not to upset the god that guides victories and prevents injuries? She imagined that he had; he was a romantic, filled with foolish ideas about chivalry and myth that probably penetrated even the muck and swamps of Vietnam. She smiled, recalling that when they had sent home his possessions, weeks after they’d sent back what remained of him, what made her eyes redden and tears flow freely was a dog-eared copy of The Once and Future King.

She wondered what he’d failed to do on the day he died. Was there some special charm or amulet that he’d neglected? Did he violate the order of dress in some small yet deadly way? What did he do to upset the delicate equilibrium of life?

She wondered too, whether he knew it, walking along

beneath the sun, eyes wide, senses on edge, but aware in the recess of his mind that something was not right on this day that looked and smelled and sounded like every other day.

He would have shaken it off and marched on, she thought.

March on.

He would say to me: Do what you must. Do what is Might.

She thrust her hands out in front of her.

They were steady.

She turned them over, looking at the palms. Dry.

It is time to get ready, she thought.

Then she clenched the hands into two solid, balled fists. Choose the battle ground, she said, directing her mental energies at the ethereal Douglas Jeffers. Do something. Contact your brother.

She envisioned Martin Jeffers. She glanced at the wall dock. He’s on his way to that damn group, she thought. I’m stuck here, waiting for him to remember something, or his brother to call, or the mail to arrive with a postcard that says: Hi! Having wonderful time! Wish you were here!

Fury filled her and she struggled around the office for the hundredth time, realizing how tenuous was her grasp on the brother, how dependent she was upon him and thus incapable of doing anything save the hardest, most impossible work of all, which is waiting.

Martin Jeffers stared out at the assembled men and saw that he had always been wrong, pitying them the weakness of their perversions when his acquiescence and unseeing impotence were infinitely more depraved.

Oedipus, at least, looked upon the horror and tore his eves from his face. His blindness was just. Martin Jeffers forced a smile, reflecting the inward thought that the Oedipal myth was sacred to his profession. But we don’t acknowledge what happened after. We don’t remember that after the desire and the act, the one-time king was

forced by guilt to wander blindly through life in rags, his feet driven step upon step by the depth of his despair.

He wondered if the same emotions were so clear on his own face. He tried to force his usual semi-detached professional gaze out into the center of the room, but he knew he was unsuccessful. He looked across at the men, warily.

The membership of the Lost Boys was restless. They shifted about in their seats, making small, uncomfortable noises. He knew they had noted his fatigue in the previous day’s session, knew, as well, that he had spent another sleepless night, and he wore that exhaustion equally obviously. He had sleepwalked through Monday, after returning late from New Hampshire, barely listening to the usual mix of mundane complaints and ills that made up his routine day. He had thought he would embrace a day of regularity, that it would somehow postpone all the difficult feelings, but he discovered that they were too powerful. His mind remained filled only with images of his brother.

He was overcome with a sudden rush of anger.

He saw his brother in a familiar pose, insouciant, grinning. Without a care in the world.

Then the vision grew darker and he pictured his brother with eyes set, deadly: the stalker, all business and bitterness.

A killer.

Why have you done these things? he asked the man in his mind’s eye. Why have you become what you are? How can you do it, over and over, and not show it every waking instant?

But the brother in his mind faded, refusing to answer, and Martin Jeffers realized how foolish his questions were. Even if it is ridiculous to ask, he thought, I still must.

He felt his hands tighten on the arms of the chair and his anger redoubled, bursting forth, flowering, and he wanted to scream at the brother in his mind: Why have you done these things? Why? Why?

And then a greater anger still:

Why have you done these things to me?

He took a deep breath and looked out again at the

waiting therapy group. He knew he had to say something to get the group started, and then he would be able to lose himself in the steadiness of their conversation. But instead of tossing out a subject or idea for the men to worry and chew, he thought instead of New Hampshire and tried to remember the last moment he’d seen his real mother. She was fixed in a memory, a pale face, framed in a car window, turning back just once before rolling steadily out of his life. He could see it as clearly as on the night it happened. He had never described the sight to anyone, least of all his own therapist. He knew that violated a fundamental trust, one that he hypocritically demanded of his own patients. I am not free, he thought. I don’t expect to be. I never will be. He thought again of his real mother. What had we done wrong? He knew the answer: nothing. The ancients had it completely backward, he thought. Psychiatry has proven that it is the sins of the parents that are visited upon the children. We were abandoned, then we were treated cruelly, lovelessly. The twin pillars of despair. Is it any surprise that Doug has risen up, as an adult, to exact a measure of revenge on a world that hated him so?