The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(95)

Salud.

You havent put me off.

Understood. I’ve seen people pushed to the wall by adversity come away very different people.

Some better some worse I assume.

Maybe just wiser.

What else would you like to talk about?

Kline smiled. He rocked the ice in his glass. You see yourself as a tragic figure.

No I dont. Not even close. A tragic figure is a person of consequence.

Which you are not.

A person of ill consequence. Maybe. I know that sounds stupid. But the truth is I’ve failed everyone who ever came to me for help. Ever sought my friendship.

Would this include your friend? The one who died in Venezuela?

You’re just trying to see how weird I am. But the truth is that in all probability Oiler would still be alive if he’d never met me.

You know what that sounds like.

I know what it sounds like. You said that I should get on with my life. Well, I’m not getting on with anything.

I believe you. Sadly.

The hell with it. Dont listen to me. I’m just being morbid. I miss my friends. And of course she was right. People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming. The world is full of people who should have been more willing to weep.

I’m not sure I follow you.

It’s all right.

No. Go ahead.

Western drained his glass and set it on the bar and held up two fingers to the barman and turned to Kline. Let me put it this way. The only thing that was ever asked of me was to care for her. And I let her die. Is there anything that you’d like to add to that Mr Western? No, Your Honor. I should have killed myself years ago.

Why didnt you?

Because I’m a coward. Because I have no sense of honor.

Kline looked out at the street. The cold hard light of the city in winter.

What else has slipped through your fingers?

We’ll never know, will we?

What do you intend to do?

I think I’m going to go to Idaho.

Idaho.

I think so.

What for?

I dont know. It seems to be a popular place with people on the lam.

I would think that might make it a good place to steer clear of.

I’ll let you know.



* * *





The first night he spent in a motel outside of Midland Texas. Pulling in off the highway at some hour past midnight. The cool air that blew in the windows of the truck bearing the smell of crude oil from the wells. The lights of a distant refinery burning out there on the desert like the rigging of a ship. He lay a long time in the cheap bed listening to the rap of the diesel trucks running up through the gears as they came out onto the highway from the truckstop a mile down the access road. He couldnt sleep and after a while he got up and pulled on his shirt and jeans and his boots and walked down the breezeway and out across the fields. Quiet. Cold. The fires from the pipes at the wells burning like enormous candles and the lights of the town washing out the stars to the east. He stood there a long time. You think that there are things which God will not permit, she had said. But he didnt think that at all. His shadow from the motel lights fell away over the raw stubble. The trucks grew fewer. No wind. Silence. The little carpetcolored vipers coiled out there in the dark. The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days. He’d thought of his father little in recent years. He thought of him now.



* * *



—

On a two lane blacktop in southern Colorado late the following day he began to come upon cars stopped along the side of the road. Up ahead a State trooper was pulling them over. The sky was a deep red and smoke was moving away to the south. He pulled over and got out. People were standing in the beds of their pickups watching the fire. He walked on up the road. After a while he could feel the heat. The fire had passed over the road and the country was burning far away to the south. Three javelinas came trotting out of the ash and walked along the road with him. He dropped to one knee and put the flat of his hand against the tarmac. The javelinas watched him. After a while he went back. He slept the night in his truck by the side of the road.

In the morning he sat with his feet crossed under him and watched the sun rise. It sat swagged and red in the smoke like a matrix of molten iron swung wobbling up out of a furnace. Most of the other cars and trucks were gone and he sat drinking a can of tomato juice. After a while he started the truck and turned on the wipers to clear the ash from the windshield.

Driving up the road he could feel the heat blowing off the burned land. He came to a stretch of blacktop that held tire tracks in the tar. He passed a dead doe at the side of the road and pulled the truck over and stopped. He got out and walked back with his knife and stood over the animal and made a cut down the charred hide of her back and laid open the tenderloin. The backstraps, the old hunters called them. He sat on the tailgate and ate the meat with salt and pepper out of small paper packets from a drive-in. It was still warm. Tender and red in the center and lightly smoked. He sliced it and ate it off a paper plate with his knife and surveyed the country where it lay in ashes about him. Birds of prey circling. Kites and hawks. Their heads cocked to study the ground below.

He drove north. Small harriers stood along the powerlines. They lifted and circled and returned to the wire behind him. In the evening he sat on the roof of the truck and finished the tenderloin and studied the country. He pulled up the collar of his coat and watched the way the wind ransacked the grasses. Sudden furrows that ran and stopped. As if something unseen had bolted and lay crouching. He sipped the warm tea from his thermos and then stoppered it and unfolded his legs and jumped to the ground. But his foot had fallen asleep and when he landed he collapsed and fell into the ditch and lay there laughing.