Boot Tracks Read online

  Only the sure thing, he told himself; otherwise, fuck it, go hop a bus to a mall parking lot.

  On the grass bordering the sidewalk, he headed along the road, out of the streetlights’ arc, not liking the odds anywhere—driveways too close to houses, houses too lit up, fences suggesting they restrained dogs, a couple of times only a gut feeling saying blow by her, Charlie—before the last place on the left; illuminated only by a porch lamp the one-level bricker lay between another darkened dwelling and an empty field abutting the house’s sloped driveway. An original model, silver Mazda 626 was backed up into the driveway, under a carport. Rankin walked up the field, parallel to the drive, and over to the car. The driver door was locked so he got out and flipped open his gravity knife. Guessing from its age and model the car would pop easy he slid the long blade into the crack between the door and glass. Glancing through the window as he probed for the lock mechanism he saw the passenger door was unlocked. Feeling almost disappointed, he put away his knife.

  He quietly walked to the car’s other side, opened the door, leaned into its interior, unlocked the driver door. He lifted up the floor mats, then pulled down the visors; the Mazda’s key fell from above the left visor into his lap. Believing good and bad luck were doled out in equal portions to people over their lifetimes, he was wary of receiving at once too much of the good kind and, at the same time, hopeful he was at the start of a night-long streak of it.

  A few seconds later he got in behind the wheel; leaving his door open, he rested one foot on the pavement. The house furnace loudly kicked on. In the yard an overturned tricycle sat in a rotted sandbox. Rankin pictured Mr. Mazda Owner cursing him in the morning as a no good, thieving son of a bitch; he felt bad that the kid whose tricycle it was would have to listen to it, would have to suffer who knew what sort of lame shit from a know-it-all guy who gets pissed off at whoever he can reach after leaving his car unlocked and the keys in it and no light on in the driveway; he saw the poor kid, to get clear of it, riding his tricycle way off somewhere then being given holy hell for that too. Bastard, shit-kicker.

  He decided he’d bring the car back before anyone wised up to it being gone, that doing so would be best not just for the kid but for him.

  He slipped the key into the ignition, the stick into first, the clutch to the floor. Easing off the emergency brake, he gave a good push with his outside foot before pulling the foot into the car and the door quietly closed; he let the vehicle roll slowly down the drive into the street and turned it to the right. The Mazda rolled about fifty feet to a stop in front of the second darkened house. He started it up, let it idle a few seconds, switched on the headlights and heater, and drove off.

  * * *

  The windshield wipers’ squeak and bump. Viperine headlights venting the blackness. Speed and direction from a touch. A familiar boundless feeling; an edgy exhilaration, like swimming naked in a river.

  From the main drag he followed a sign for Willimette, 8 miles, to a boulevard of fast food joints, mini-malls, car dealerships, wondering if other sensations prison had suppressed in him would return to him suddenly, as the bang of driving had, gradually, not at all.

  In a car traveling in the lane parallel to his he saw a girl who looked like Florence. Then he realized she didn’t either, Florence must already have been on his mind. That entire scene; her saying she was and she wasn’t the girl in the movie and him wanting and not wanting to fuck her. The whole mix had been bad; at once watching LuAnn, who’d definitely turned him on, doing those things up there, and listening to Florence going on about her Goddamn dead cat. She even had him doing it, calling them—her, for Chrissake— two different names. And her coming on to him, claiming his boots were talking to her, what was that? The way she’d looked at his gymbag, telling him she knew he was going big time. He shouldn’t have left the money there. But it had been that or bring it with him. Only now he’d have to return there; he’d made certain of that; he couldn’t get his mind around exactly why he’d made certain of it any more than he could get it around the thing he was headed for.

  Suggesting a top a good push would set to spinning, an upside down station wagon sat, empty and unattended, on the median. A helmetless Harley rider roared by him on the shoulder. From the Mazda’s front wheel wells issued a persistent rattle indicative of shot bearings. A mid-eighties dinosaur, older probably than Florence or LuAnn or whoever the hell, the car on the open road sporadically burped and lurched. His recent imprisonment existed in his consciousness as an interminable-seeming dream from which he’d woken feeling mostly numb. He recalled an old lifer warning him he’d get to the same place trying to cull anything worthwhile from his time inside as he would attempting to figure out where he’d been before he was alive and where he’d be when he wasn’t. Unable to put his finger on specifics, Rankin strongly suspected the experience had cost him more than time and freedom.

  On the increasingly rural road traffic dwindled. Signs of civilization petered out. People, buildings, highway lights disappeared in succession. To his left and right only darkness; ahead of him the cone of light guiding him, in its invariableness reminding him again of prison, there when you went to sleep, there when you woke up, absent only, as the Buddha liked to say, in your schemes and dreams.

  He turned on the radio, found a sports-talk show. He tried to get interested in it, to act to himself as if he was just a guy out for a drive. He couldn’t bring it off though. He began thinking seriously about the upcoming minutes. He wondered if he should have more of a plan than he did. He recalled an old Charles Bronson movie in which Bronson played an assassin who prepared of each of his marks intricate profiles containing the mark’s every routine, taste, habit; from his observations of one guy he’d determined that at a certain hour every night the guy sat down in his study to read a particular book in the course of which, again always at the same time, he would get up to boil water for tea, information Bronson’s character exploited to blow up the guy’s oven in his face. The movie was all right, but who in the real world lived that way—a life so regulated you could count on it? Nobody Rankin knew. If he’d learned one thing it was to count on nothing. That didn’t mean be sloppy. Or unprepared. It meant, while being careful, be flexible, which, come to think of it, is how he’d come to stash the money at Florence’s, to abandon his clothes and toiletries at the Sinclair, and to be driving a stolen Mazda to Willimette.

  Willimette, 2 miles.

  Ahead he saw the glow of lights from the town’s outskirts. In no time he was on another Boulevard that looked no different from the one he’d left ten minutes earlier. The precipitation had lessened. He turned the windshield wipers too intermittent. He surprised himself with how calm and clear-headed he felt. An odd thought struck him that some lives he’d rather not live, that if he were living them he’d as soon someone put him out of his misery. No particular ones, though, came to mind. He remembered the name of that Bronson movie, “The Mechanic,” that it co-starred Jan-Michael Vincent. A few hundred yards ahead of the sign “Willimette, Small City on the Rise,” he swung the Mazda into the parking lot of a combined gas station, grocery store, donut shop. In the darkest part of the lot, he parked beneath some trees, near a pay phone. He glanced at his watch. Almost 9:30.

  He got out of the car. A palpable smaze thickened the air. A feeling told him that the externalities favored him, that from here on only Charlie Rankin could sink him. He envisioned the Buddha nodding to him in solemn agreement. Leaving exaggerated footprints in the smudging of wet snow he walked to the booth. Someone had ripped off the phonebook. He turned toward the plaza; a smattering of vehicles sat before and next to it. In the lighted Krispy Kreme sign over the donut shop both Rs were out. A guy in an Elmer Fudd hat stood beneath the shop’s overhang attempting to hand out to passersby literature of some kind. Pulling his watch cap down to his eyebrows Rankin headed that way. The Elmer Fudd guy offered him a pamphlet on the front of which was a doctored photo of a man with pustules all over him burning alive
under the words, “Salvation, Before It’s Too Late.”

  His glimpse of the picture convinced Rankin he’d seen the roasting guy in the flesh. His heartbeat sped up. Sweat broke out on his brow. He pointed to the cover of the pamphlet Elmer Fudd was pushing at him. “Who’s it?”

  Fudd grinned at him. Rankin perceived the guy was a mute. He shouldered past him into the shop. A counter girl, seventy years if a day old, greeted him cheerily with, “Welcome to Krispy Kreme.”

  Ignoring her, Rankin glanced around for a phone. He saw one in the far corner and a woman talking on it. Still trying to modulate his breathing, he turned back to the counter girl. Smoke trickled from a tiny cigarette nub in one corner of her upturned mouth. Rankin walked past her into the men’s room. He took off his hat, splashed water on his face. The face of a Louisiana redneck, name of Biggins, a presser for a while in the prison laundry, came back to him. As unlikely as it seemed, Biggins, he decided, was the guy shown in flames on Elmer Fudd’s pamphlet. He looked in the mirror. Maybe not Biggins, he thought. Why are you spending time on this shit? he silently asked himself.

  He put his hat back on. He pulled it even lower onto his brow than it had been. He got out of his wallet the slip of paper he’d written Maynard Cass’s phone number on and reentered the main room. The woman who’d been on a call passed him, trailing a stale, perfumy stink, on her way toward a fat guy slopping down a headlight at the counter. Rankin took her place at the phone, which was enclosed in a three-sided metal case dangling a chain-length attached to a local phonebook. He turned his back to the room and dialed Maynard Cass’s home. After four rings a man answered. Okay, thought Rankin. He listened to the guy say hello three times, then hung up. He opened and found in the phonebook a four page street map of Willimette. After glancing around to make sure no one was watching him he tore out the map, folded it, slipped it into his peacoat’s inner pocket. He left, buying nothing and without looking again at the guy in the Elmer Fudd hat or at his proffered pamphlets.

  * * *

  Old brick buildings with facelifts, cutesy boutiques of the sort that sold nothing anyone he knew ever bought, antique shops displaying in their windows used junk at jacked up prices, restaurants named after famous people, gussied up lunch joints called delicatessens or eateries or bistros backed a creosoted boardwalk on a river cutting through an historic district.

  Back from the water, out his left window, replicas of 19th century gas pole lamps lit a maze of poorly-signed, narrow, cobblestone streets lined with walk-ups and brownstones so close together a postage stamp wouldn’t fit between them.

  The Buddha, for Chrissake, had said a secluded neighborhood; Rankin had pictured a tree-lined, suburban street.

  This shit unnerved him.

  He recalled how the mechanic would take days, weeks, casing a layout, how he’d go so far even as to take up residence in a mark’s neighborhood, how ahead of blowing up the tea drinker the mechanic had spent hours in the front window of a room he’d rented across the road from the tea drinker’s apartment eyeing the tea drinker through binoculars. Okay, but that was bullshit; in real life even a moron wouldn’t move in next to and suddenly start showing up around the guy; even a moron understood that the fewer connections he had to the dead guy the better for the moron; for conducting business the way he did the mechanic, decided Rankin—as much as he’d liked the film—had to have been more than a moron; he had to have been an idiot.

  Still, he wished he’d gotten here an hour or so earlier when the grid of tangled streets wouldn’t have been all but deserted (only a couple of restaurants weren’t closed up tight as a clam); when he wouldn’t have felt so conspicuous inching through the area, hunting unsuccessfully for Viner Lane, fearing he was sticking out like a sore thumb to the few people who were about or to some local busybody staring out her bedroom window. Finally, he drove several blocks past the section, pulled onto a dark cul-de-sac, and stopped the car next to the empty curb. He switched on the domelight. Once more he got out and spread across the steering wheel the map. By his reading of the fucking thing Viner Lane was exactly where he’d looked for it, between two other streets he’d failed to find. What he couldn’t fathom was what the historic section had been doing there. Then he realized he’d transposed north and south; the historic section, for God’s sake, was on the other side of the river, actually his side of the river, and Viner Lane, which in fact wasn’t a part of the historic section, was across the water, not off of River Run Avenue, as he’d been searching on, but off of River Run Way.

  He reminded himself that he was smart, so to quit acting dumb.

  He remembered, at least, passing a bridge.

  He began retracing his route. He checked the time. Close to ten. Buddha had claimed the guy was an owl, that even an early night to him was in the a.m. Of course Buddha had also said the guy was separated and lived alone, which Rankin had to wonder about after a woman had answered his first call. Her being someone besides a maid or visitor who’d by now left the guy’s place was a potential complication Rankin cared not to think about. As he entered a metal drawbridge spanning the river, it occurred to him that maybe the guy who’d picked up the second time wasn’t Maynard Cass, but a housesitter or whatnot and that the woman was the housesitter’s or whatnot’s wife or live-in girlfriend. What had seemed to him crystal clear as he’d hung up the phone at Krispy Kreme suddenly struck him as anything but. The thought hit him that he ought to turn around, go back, and start searching for Charlie Rankin because this wasn’t him crossing the water.

  Then he was to the far side, passing two bundled up black guys with lines in the drink, sipping from bagged bottles on a concrete abutment. He was tempted to ask them for directions to Viner Lane, figuring anybody juiced enough to be out angling in this shit with a hope of catching something besides pneumonia wouldn’t recall anyone or anything they saw while doing it, but he didn’t want to chance being wrong and doubted anyway they knew much beyond their names. Between marsh land, dotted with scotch pines, three or four estates overlooked the river to both sides of him. Smaller, ramshackle places filled gaps in the woods bordering the street perpendicular to the water. A few hundred yards brought him to an intersection with River Run Way; ahead of him was a gated community named Pine Crest; to his left a 7-11, a grocery store, a mini-mall; in the other direction, sporadic house lights.

  He double-checked the map, then went right.

  * * *

  Modern houses with big lawns and paved drives, between skeletons of barns and farmhouses, on recycled pastureland; the river, silent and dark, pacing the transitory terrain; a sign for the River Run Country Club pointing, quicker than he’d expected to be here, down Viner Lane; thinking, as he made the exit, stealing one thing was like stealing another: a pair of sneakers, a car, a life; rounding a curve; seeing on the asphalt directly ahead of him a prone body; slamming on the brakes, wondering had he just opened his eyes while not being aware he’d closed them or had he only shifted them briefly from the road; the Mazda screeching to a halt in front of an unmoving German shepherd-sized billygoat.

  Darkness seemed to have consumed his surroundings. Suddenly he could see no buildings, no vehicles, no headlights in any direction. He opened the Mazda’s driver door.

  A foghorn blowing out on the river. In the dank air a warmish current caressing like a finger his face. A memory of the Buddha telling him that, given mortality’s highwire act, an unnatural or an unexpected death is impossible. An eerie sensation that the goat as he approached it would jump up and charge him. The brown-andwhite body showed no signs of trauma. The animal’s eyes were open, aimed at the Mazda. It lay on its left side. Rankin kneeled down next to it. He put a hand to its neck.

  The body was at once dead and as warm as his own. A shiver went through him. The Buddha saying, “People hate it, Charlie, having to admit we’re just another upright animal so we invent laws for ourselves we think will distinguish us,” then, as if the two thoughts were connected, “Never, for example,
is it said that a monkey swallowed by a python died of unnatural causes or that the python is a murderer.”

  He dragged the goat by its hind feet to the road’s shoulder. He dropped it in the high grass there, then returned to the Mazda which he’d left running with its door open. Driving past the body he thought how the goat wasn’t long gone from this world, as short as a few minutes, and how it had looked as healthy as any goat still in the world and he wondered where it had come from and if it had been hit by a vehicle or had just keeled over dead. The whole thing gave him the spooks. In less than a hundred yards, he rounded another bend; instantly lights fractured the darkness, most of them shadily illuminating the outsides of what looked to be good-sized houses set, in leafless woods, well back from and to both sides of the road.

  He slowed the Mazda.

  At intervals the approximate length of a football field the homes sat at the tops of steep driveways; from what he could see of them the first three buildings faced, oddly enough, away from the road. He looked for numbers on their street-side mailboxes; branches obscured two of the boxes; the third had only a name written on it. On the shoulder ahead of him a sign declared “River Run Clubhouse and Restaurant, .5 of a mile.” He surmised from the sign the residences he was seeing the backs of were fronting on a golf course. A car going in the other direction went by him. Then headlights appeared in his rearview mirror. The thought occurred to him that, at this hour, in this highbrow area, a local person spotting an unfamiliar car might take note of its tags; if their suspicions were raised they might even call the police with them. Who knew if maybe one of those neighborhood watch groups wasn’t about? Even a rent-a-cop. He considered increasing his speed but worried in doing so he’d draw only more attention to himself. Seeing only an external porch light on at the house a little ahead of him on his side, he put on his left turn signal. Before, he hoped, the lights of the vehicle behind him had drawn close enough to him to delineate to its occupants the particulars of his car, he pulled into the near-darkened house’s sloping driveway and started slowly climbing it.