Walkers (35 page)

‘I think I’m dull when I’m sober,’
Henry replied. ‘God knows how I’m going to lecture to my philosophy classes
without the jolly old verbal lubricant. Do you know what sheer unadulterated
torture it is, having to explain Straw-son’s
Individuals
and the shortcomings of linguistic philosophy to two
dozen dozey twenty-year-olds? Even when you’re smashed?’

‘What
are
the shortcomings of linguistic philosophy?’ Gil asked,
overtaking a huge tractor-trailer from Toys R Us.

‘Well, the main criticisms are that
it fails to address the serious and traditional problems of mainstream
philosophy,’ said Henry. ‘In fact, some of the questions it attempts to answer
are not just trivial but completely factitious.’

He stopped, and stared at Gil, with
the slipstream blowing his hair. ‘You don’t want to know all this, do you?’ Gil
smiled, and shook his head. ‘I just love to hear people sound off about their
favourite subject, even when I don’t understand it. You should hear my dad
talking about retail price maintenance and bar codes. You wouldn’t understand
that any more than I can understand philosophy. But he sure gets complicated, and
mad.’

Henry smiled. ‘You get on well with
your parents?’

‘Sure. I’m not going to run a
market, though, when I leave school.’

‘After what we’ve been through
already, I don’t think any of our lives is going to be the same again,’ said
Henry. ‘You can’t blast nightmare monks by night, and sell Danishes by day.’

They left the freeway at the
Tecolote Road exit, and drove into San Diego on the Pacific Highway. The
streets were hot and dusty and run down. A black man in a grubby Hawaiian shirt
was standing by the side of the road, hopelessly holding out his thumb for a
ride. Henry said, ‘Given all the sociological factors, the proportion of blacks
to whites, the local history of crime, political attitudes, etcetera, I wonder
what the mathematical probability of that poor fellow being offered a ride
actually is?’

‘Henry,’ said Gil, ‘You’ve got a
strange mind.’

They drove along the harbour front,
passing the tuna docks and the
Star of
India
sailing ship. They took a left just before they reached Seaport
Village, turning into Market Street. The 600 block was right on the corner of
Kettner. Number 603 was a narrow, flaking building with a second hand
auto-parts store at street level; a decaying remnant of the old San Diego. Gil
U-turned his Mustang and parked outside.

Inside the auto-parts store it
smelled of grease and exhaust and sweat. A thin young man with spiky blond hair
sat behind the counter wearing greasy jeans and a greasy tee-shirt, listening
to Bruce Springsteen on the radio and reading Aquaman. He was surrounded, like
an Arabian thief, by all of his riches: differentials and steering-linkages and
engine-blocks. Steering wheels and mufflers hung from the ceiling, and a smeary
glass cabinet was crowded with side-mirrors and decorative hubcaps.

‘Help you gentlemen?’ the young man
asked, tossing his comic-book on to the counter.

‘I hope so,’ said Henry. ‘We’re
looking for somebody by the name of Esbjerg.’

‘Tommi or Ericka?’ the young man
wanted to know.

‘Either. Both. We’re friends of
Sylvia’s.’

‘Ah...” The young man nodded.
‘Requiescat in par-chay.’

‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘We were pretty
cut up about it, too.’ He looked around the store, and the young man followed
his gaze with thinly concealed interest.

‘That your Mustang out there?’ he
asked. ‘I got an almost-new set of four anthracite steel low-profile wheels,
make your Mustang look like a million dollars. Hold the pavement better, too.
Grip like glue.’

Henry shook his head. ‘I just wanted
to talk to the Esbjergs, that’s all.’

‘Well, they’re not here,’ the young
man said. ‘They took off last night, after the cops came around. They took
their camping gear, everything. They didn’t say where they were going or when
they’d be back. My guess is Yosemite, or maybe even Mazama, up at Crater Lake.’

‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ said Henry. ‘I
was hoping to talk to them about Sylvia.’

‘What about Sylvia?’

‘Well – we hadn’t seen her for quite
a while. The cops won’t tell us anything. We were wondering exactly what
happened. She went off on vacation, and the next thing we knew she was dead.’

The young man sniffed, and arched
his backside up off the moulded chair, so that he could chivvy two sticks of
Juicy Fruit out of his back pants pocket. He unwrapped them, tossing the
wrappers over his shoulder, and folded the sticks into his mouth.

Henry said, ‘Was she here the day
before she died?’ The young man shook his head, with his mouth full. ‘Can you
tell us where she was?’ Henry persisted.

The young man nodded. But then he
said, ‘I can, for sure. But I ain’t about to.’

‘Why not? We were friends of hers.’

‘Oh yeah? From where?’

‘From Houston.’

‘From Houston, huh? Then of course
you’d know what high school she went to, in Houston? And of course you’d know
what street she lived on, and what her daddy did for a living?’

Henry was silent. The young man
laughed, and chewed noisily, and said, ‘I knew you for what you were, the
moment you walked in here.’

‘We’re not police, if that’s what
you think. We’re not private investigators, either. But we do have an interest
in finding out what happened to her. You see – we have reason to think that a
friend of ours is being threatened by the same person who was responsible for
killing Sylvia.’

The young man sat and chewed
thoughtfully. Then he said, ‘How much do you think those wheels’d be worth? You
know, current market value?’

Henry was no fool. ‘How about a
hundred?’ he suggested.

The young man shook his head.
‘They’re worth two hundred and fifty, absolute minimum.’

‘Two hundred,’ Henry countered.

‘Two hundred fifty.’

Henry reached into his wallet, and
counted out one $100, two $50s three $10s, and a $1. He made up the difference
with a handful of quarters and dimes. The young man scooped the money across
the counter, and arranged it into neat piles, pressing the creases out of the
bills with the side of his hand.

‘Sylvia came here about three months
ago, from Houston. She said she’d been having some kind of a long-running
argument with her parents about going to school and snorting coke and stuff
like that. Tommi and Ericka were always easy going, so they asked her to stay,
and in any case Tommi had some kind of a mild thing going for Sylvia, you know,
she was a pretty good-looking chick.’

‘We know what she looked like,’ put
in Gil.

The young man paused for a moment as
if interruptions annoyed him. But then he went on, counting up the loose change
as he did so and arranging it into piles of $1 value. ‘Anyway, soon after she
got here Sylvia met some guy at one of those rock shows they hold up at the
Planetarium; and the two of them – Sylvia and this guy – they both went to
Mexico for the weekend. I don’t know what happened to her in Mexico, because
she wouldn’t say, but I never saw the guy again that she went with, and she was
kind of strange afterwards, like somebody who’s had some kind of what do you call
it, some kind of religious renovation.’

‘Revelation,’ said Henry.

‘That’s right, revelation.’

Henry said, ‘Is that all? She went
to Mexico for the weekend, and came back strange?’

‘That’s not exactly two hundred
fifty bucks’ worth,’ said Gil, in a tone far more threatening than he had ever
heard himself use before.

The young man glanced up shiftily,
and then said, ‘All I know about Mexico was that she went as far as a place
called San Hipolito, you know? And apparently what happened was she met some
other guy, apart from the guy she went with, and I don’t know, there was some
kind of an argument. Sylvia was never too clear about it.

She was pretty doped up most of the
time, you could never say when she was telling the truth and when she was
fantasising. She used to tell all kinds of stories, how her father secretly
bought himself a ride on one of the space-shuttle missions, that kind of
stuff.’

Henry said, ‘Is that all you know?
Listen, I need everything, absolutely everything – even if it sounded like a fantasy.’

The young man shrugged. ‘She stayed
here for, what, a couple of months, but she kept talking about going back to
Mexico. She said she had terrible nightmares all the time that she was
pregnant. She kept having stomach cramps, but when Ericka told her to go to the
doctor, she wouldn’t, on account of being so high all the time. She was afraid
the doctor would take her off the stuff.’

‘Did she ever go back to Mexico?’
asked Gil.

The young man said, ‘Not as far as I
know. But she lit out of here maybe two or three days before they found her
dead, and she could have been anywhere during those two or three days. Mexico,
L.A., who knows? She was always going places just on impulse.’

‘What about the police?’ asked
Henry. ‘Did you tell the police about any of this?

About Sylvia going to Mexico, and
having those nightmares?’

‘No,’ the young man told him. ‘I
just said that she stayed here, that’s all. I don’t tell the people nothing,
not for free, anyway. I’ve got a living to make.’

‘Sure you do,’ said Henry. ‘It’s a
pity you don’t take Visa. I’d have bought those wheels, just for the hell of
it.’

They left the auto-parts store and
climbed back into Gil’s Mustang.

‘What do you think?’ Gil asked
Henry. ‘It sounds to me like Sylvia could have gotten pregnant with those eels
when she was down in Mexico.’

‘My feelings exactly,’ Henry agreed.
He checked his watch. ‘It’s just after twelve now.

Provided there isn’t too much of a
hold-up at the border, we could make it to San Hipolito and back in maybe five hours.
It’s only seventy miles south-east of Tijuana, just past Ojos Negros.’

Gil said, ‘I want to make sure that
we get back in time to go looking for Susan tonight.’

‘I don’t think it matters where we
are, Gil; our dream personalities can travel a whole lot faster than our waking
bodies. Even if we get stuck in Tijuana tonight, we can still make it to
Springer’s house. And when we’re flying, we don’t need to go through border
control.’

‘Okay,’ said Gil. ‘Let’s get back
home. I have to tell my parents that I’m going to be late. Then we’ll pick up
everything we need, passports and stuff, and go straight through to Mexico.’

He started up the engine and steered
the Mustang back towards the Pacific Highway and 1-5. It occurred to Henry as
he sat in the passenger-seat, watching the dry summer hills flash past, that he
had never worked so well with anybody in his life as he did with Gil, and as he
had with Susan. The thirty-year disparity in their ages made no difference.
They worked as one person, their minds and their actions interlocking, so that
there were scarcely any wasted words.

All those years of teaching
philosophy had given him such a narrow and distorted view of how young people
thought and behaved; and he had never seen such a practical demonstration of
how alert and wide ranging their thinking processes could be. Up until now, the
only time he had been in contact with anyone under forty was when they were
struggling to understand Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Faced with less speculative
problems, however, they were quick and creative and instantly decisive.

‘I should have had children, you
know,’ he told Gil, as they sped over the bridge which took them across the
Inland Freeway.

‘Oh, really?’ asked Gil, glancing
behind him. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Encroaching old age, I guess,’
Henry replied.

Gil said, ‘You’re not old at night,
are you?’

‘Old? If I have to go through many
more nights like last night, I’ll wind up dead, not old.’

Gil gripped his shoulder for a
moment. ‘You’re Kasyx, the charge-keeper, and don’t you forget it.’

‘Could I ever?’ asked Henry.

‘W
e have suffered many earthquakes
here this year,’ the priest told them, without expression. His English
vocabulary was perfect; but he had not had enough conversational practice to be
able to emphasise the right words. ‘The earth has opened here, and here. A wall
of the church fell here. And there, you see, we lost one complete row of
houses. Four people were hurt. One was killed. Do you wish to look at his
grave?’

Henry flapped his Panama hat in
front of his face to cool himself down. Beside him, Gil was dressed in nothing
but his sawn-off denim shorts, but his face was still scrunched up against the
mid-afternoon glare, and his forehead was studded with sweat.

They had reached San Hipolito after
a dusty, winding drive up into the Sierra de Juarez. The sky was as dark blue
as concentrated copper-sulphate solution, and utterly cloudless. You could have
driven through San Hipolito without even realising that it was there; two rows
of adobe houses, a small dust-coloured church, a farm gate and a collection of
rusted milk-churns. A monotonous bell rang far away across the hills, reminding
Henry uncomfortably of the bell that had tolled in last night’s dream.