The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(58)

Josie motioned him over with a jut of her chin.

You had a call. Here.

She handed him a scrap of paper with a number on it. He turned it and looked at it.

Male or female?

It was a guy.

Thanks.

He called the number but there was no answer.

He fed the cat and went out and down the hall to the bathroom. He went in and closed and latched the door and opened the ancient tin medicine cabinet and stood looking at it. There were old bottles and jars and a couple of twisted empty tubes of toothpaste. He went back to the room and got the empty grocery bag and came back and raked everything out of the cabinet into the bag and folded the bag and put it in the wastebasket. The cabinet was fastened to the wall with four screws. The heads of the screws were flanged boltheads. He reached into the trashbasket and tore a small piece of paper off of the bag and reached and pressed it hard with his thumb over the head of one of the fasteners and came away with a good impression of it and he put the strip of paper in his shirtpocket and closed the cabinet door and left.

When he came back he’d been to the hardware store on Canal Street and he had a cheap imported set of three-eighths-inch drive sockets. They were in a little tin tray and there was even a small ratchet with an extension. He got the packet of letters from under the mattress and went back down the hall to the bathroom. He shut the door and latched it and opened the medicine cabinet and found the right socket and fitted it over the extension and fitted the ratchet and backed off the two bottom screws. He’d put the rubber stopper in the sink in case the screws fell in and he backed off the top two screws while holding the cabinet by the mirror and then he set the cabinet in the floor. The wallboard had been cut away to get to the studs. The crosspieces that the medicine cabinet was screwed to were stepped forward the thickness of the wallboard and it was easy to wedge the pack of letters between the two-by-fours. The holes in the back of the cabinet were keyhole in shape and he left the screws slightly loose so that he could just hang the cabinet over the screwheads and he wouldnt need a screwdriver to lift it off again. He got a few of the jars and bottles out of the trash and put them back in the cabinet and shut the cabinet door.

He went up to the A&P and bought a dozen cans of catfood and came back and went up to the room. He set the bag of tins on the table and lifted the cat by its armpits and looked into its eyes. The cat hung bonelessly in his hands. It blinked peacefully and looked away.

Vigilance, Billy Ray. Vigilance. And catfood.

When he’d fed the cat he went down and called Lou but he was gone for the day. He went out and walked through the Quarter. The rich dank smell. The smell of oil and the river and ships. Whitman had once lived in the house at the corner. Windowlights coming on in the dusk. The old lamps down Chartres Street like burning gauze in the fog. The Shelby ran for twenty-six laps and then it didnt show up. It was too dark to see smoke but he scanned the far side of the track for signs of fire. He walked down to the pits where Frank was waiting for the cars to come around again. No flag on the track. So far so good. I know you’re hoping that it aint the engine.

I’m hoping that it’s not the car.

It wasnt. The teeth had begun to strip off of the cluster gear until the box seized up and then the rear U-joint came uncoupled and the driveshaft went clanking off across the concourse and Adams pulled the car off onto the grass and unbuckled the threeway and got out and walked off across the fields carrying his helmet. He told Frank that the car had come apart like a cardboard suitcase in a California rainstorm. They went into town to a bar, Adams still in his Nomex, and sat in a booth. Adams raised his hand. Let me have a double scotch with water back. Or just make that three. He turned to the others. What are you guys having? he said.

The race was on television but they couldnt really see it from where they were sitting. Later Western walked out down to the chicane and sat in the grass and watched the cars come down, downshifting on a trailing throttle and braking with the headlamps moving from side to side as they approached and the front discs lighting up until they were sun-red with bits of fire coming off the edges and then fading to black again as the calipers came unclamped and the cars accelerated out of the turn in third gear and upshifted and howled away down the straight.





VI


From the day she’d stood in the vestibule of St Mary’s with her classmates all in white like dead children in a dream. Their white patentleather shoes. Their chaplets and veils and the white prayerbooks with the gilded buckles they clasped between their palms in prayer. From that day the God of her innocence had slowly ebbed from her life. In a dream she’d seen him weeping over the cold clay of her childsbody in a nameless crossroads, kneeling to touch his dead handiwork. Until finally the Kid showed up with his companions. On the nature of that which God might flee or God abandon there was only silence, but she thought that she and the visitors to her attic might well be candidates. The Kid and his shadowkind had come trekking across a vast waste. A landscape bleak and interminable. She thought it to be alive and she saw little merit in it. She spoke her virgin sins through the wicket. Once. Again. And then no more. Hell hung on longer. She saw the resurrect vomited up from the pit to wander vacanteyed and smoking through the streets. Blinking in the unaccustomed light. She woke from dreams of struggle. Of leaden flight. Some sat and she listened for the sound of rain on the seamed metal roof but the rain had stopped in the night and there was only the drip of water from the eaves. Something on the road. Something coming. Some sweatsoaked beast, some hooded and wheezing abhorrence atrundle upon the footpath. Just the faintest movement of the air like a gradient of ill come unshelved and drifting toward her lonely outpost.