The Traveler by John Katzenbach

Author:John Katzenbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Published: 2013-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

VIII

OTHER DARK PLACES

13. They drove north, paralleling the Mississippi River.

Douglas Jeffers called it “The mighty Miss-sah-sip” and gave Anne Hampton a short course on Mark Twain. He was clearly disappointed to learn that she’d read only Tom Sawyer, and that when she had been a senior in high school. She was uneducated, he told her bitterly. If she did not know about Huck, he said, she knew nothing. She certainly would find it more difficult to understand him. “Huck is America,” Jeffers insisted. “I am America.” She did not reply, but scribbled down his words in her notepad.

He spoke this in a low voice. Then he adopted a pedantic, lecturing tone and told her that the river had once been the most important route for commerce in the nation, that it had been the signaling point for the jump across the West, that it slid through the heart of America, carrying politics, culture, civilization, and sustenance on the backs of its waters. To understand the river, he said, was to know how America formed. He told her that the same was true of people; one merely had to determine what river coursed through a man, or woman, then follow it to the basin of comprehension. She looked bewildered and he suddenly screamed at her, “I’m talking about myself, goddammit! Can’t you see what I’m saying? I’m trying to teach you things that no one, no one in the world knows! Don’t sit there like a slug!” She cowered, waiting for the blow, but he held off, though she saw his hand clench into a fist. Then, after a momentary pause, he continued musing about the river.

Occasionally they would swing close enough in the car for her to see the gleaming wide surface reflecting the daylight, the waters flowing ceaselessly, steadily onward toward the gulf that lay behind them. He insisted she take down all of his rambling speech, almost word for word, saying that someday she would recognize the value inherent in the phrases and fragments, and she would be thankful that she had managed to copy them down properly.

She did not understand that, but during the past days she had found it comforting when he would talk about the future, no matter how vaguely, as if there were some world extending beyond the windows of the car hurtling through the countryside, a life past Douglas Jeffers’ long reach. She obeyed, scratching letters, shaping words as quickly as she could.

When he asked her to reread it to him, she obeyed.

He asked her to make a small correction, then a small addendum. She obeyed.

She obeyed everything. To refuse him anything was utterly alien to her.

Several nights had passed—she had trouble saying to herself precisely how many—since he had shot the derelict. Since I shot the derelict, she thought. Then: No, since we shot the derelict. They stayed each night in some forgettable motel near the edge of the highway, the kind of places with neon red vacancy signs blinking in the

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