The man sweating the jack flagged me, but Dolan wasn’t the only one capable of dismissal. I looked indifferently beyond the arm-waver, wishing him a heart attack or a stroke or, best of all, both at the same time. I drove on — but my head pulsed and throbbed, and for a few moments the mountains on the horizon seemed to double and even treble.
If I’d had a gun! I thought. If only Id had a gun! I could have ended his rotten, miserable life right then if I’d only had a gun!
Miles later some sort of reason reasserted itself If I’d had a gun, the only thing I could have been sure of was getting myself killed. If I’d had a gun I could have pulled over when the man using the bumper-jack beckoned me, and gotten out, and begun spraying bullets wildly around the deserted landscape. I might have wounded someone. Then I would have been killed and buried in a shallow grave, and Dolan would have gone on escorting the beautiful women and making pilgrimages between Las Vegas and Los Angeles in his silver Cadillac while the desert animals unearthed my remains and fought over my bones under the cold moon. For Elizabeth there would have been no revenge — none at all.
The men who travelled with him were trained to kill. I was trained to teach third-graders.
This was not a movie, I reminded myself as I returned to the highway and passed an orange END CONSTRUCTION THE STATE OF NEVADA THANKS YOU! sign. And if I ever made the mistake of confusing reality with a movie, of thinking that a balding third-grade teacher with myopia could ever be Dirty Harry anywhere outside of his own daydreams, there would never be any revenge, ever.
But could there be revenge, ever? Could there be?
My idea of creating a fake detour was as romantic and unrealistic as the idea of jumping out of my old Buick and spraying the three of them with bullets — me, who had not fired a gun since the age of sixteen and who had never fired a handgun.
Such a thing would not be possible without a band of conspirators — even the movie I had seen, romantic as it had been, had made that clear. There had been eight or nine of them in two separate groups, staying in touch with each other by walkie-talkie. There had even been a man in a small plane cruising above the highway to make sure the armored car was relatively isolated as it approached the right spot on the highway.
A plot no doubt dreamed up by some overweight screenwriter sitting by his swimming pool with a pina colada by one hand and a fresh supply of Pentel pens and an Edgar Wallace plot-
wheel by the other. And even that fellow had needed a small army to fulfill his idea. I was only one man.
It wouldn’t work. It was just a momentary false gleam, like the others I’d had over the years —
the idea that maybe I could put some sort of poison gas in Dolan’s air-conditioning system, or plant a bomb in his Los Angeles house, or perhaps obtain some really deadly weapon — a bazooka, let us say — and turn his damned silver Cadillac into a fireball as it raced east toward Vegas or west toward LA along 71.
Best to dismiss it.
But it wouldn’t go.
Cut him out, the voice inside that spoke for Elizabeth kept whispering. Cut him out the way an experienced sheep-dog cuts a ewe out of the flock when his master points. Detour him out into the emptiness and kill him. Kill them all.
Wouldn’t work. If I allowed no other truth, I would at least have to allow that a man who had stayed alive as long as Dolan must have a carefully honed sense of survival — honed to the point of paranoia, perhaps. He and his men would see through the detour trick in a minute.
They turned down this one today, the voice that spoke for Elizabeth responded. They never even hesitated. They went just like Mary’s little lamb.
But I knew — yes, somehow I did! — that men like Dolan, men who are really more like wolves than men, develop a sort of sixth sense when it comes to danger. I could steal genuine detour signs from some road department shed and set them up in all the right places; I could even add fluorescent orange road cones and a few of those smudge-pots. I could do all that and Dolan would still smell the nervous sweat of my hands on the stage dressing. Right through his bullet-proof windows he would smell it. He would close his eyes and hear Elizabeth’s name far back in the snake-pit that passed for his mind.
The voice that spoke for Elizabeth fell silent, and I thought it had finally given up for the day.
And then, with Vegas actually in sight — blue and misty and wavering on the far rim of the desert — it spoke up again.
Then don’t try to fool him with a fake detour, it whispered. Fool him with a real one.
I swerved the Buick over to the shoulder and shuddered to a stop with both feet on the brake-pedal. I stared into my own wide, startled eyes in the rear-view mirror.
Inside, the voice that spoke for Elizabeth began to laugh. It was wild, mad laughter, but after a few moments I began to laugh along with it.
The other teachers laughed at me when I joined the Ninth Street Health Club. One of them wanted to know if someone had kicked sand in my face. I laughed along with them. People don’t get suspicious of a man like me as long as he keeps laughing along with them. And why shouldn’t 1 laugh? My wife had been dead seven years, hadn’t she? Why, she was no more than dust and hair and a few bones in her coffin! So why shouldn’t I laugh? It’s only when a man like me stops laughing that people wonder if something is wrong.
I laughed along with them even though my muscles ached all that fall and winter. I laughed even though I was constantly hungry — no more second helpings, no more late-night snacks, no more beer, no more before-dinner gin and tonic. But lots of red meat and greens, greens, greens.
I bought myself a Nautilus machine for Christmas.
No — that’s not quite right. Elizabeth bought me a Nautilus machine for Christmas.
I saw Dolan less frequently; I was too busy working out, losing my pot belly, building up my arms and chest and legs. But there were times when it seemed I could not go on with it, that
recapturing anything like real physical fitness was going to be impossible, that I could not five without second helpings and pieces of coffee cake and the occasional dollop of sweet cream in my coffee. When those times came I would park across from one of his favorite restaurants or perhaps go into one of the clubs he favored and wait for him to show up, stepping from the fog-gray Cadillac with an arrogant, icy blonde or a laughing redhead on his arm — or one on each.
There he would be, the man who had killed my Elizabeth, there he would be, resplendent in a formal shirt from Bijan’s, his gold Rolex winking in the nightclub lights. When I was tired and discouraged I went to Dolan as a man with a raging thirst might seek out an oasis in the desert. I drank his poisoned water and was refreshed.
In February I began to run every day, and then the other teachers laughed at my bald head, which peeled and pinked and then peeled and pinked again, no matter how much sun-block I smeared on it. I laughed right along with them, as if I had not twice nearly fainted and spent long, shuddering minutes with cramps stabbing the muscles of my legs at the end of my runs.
When summer came, I applied for a job with the Nevada Highway Department. The municipal employment office stamped a tentative approval on my form and sent me along to a district foreman named Harvey Blocker. Blocker was a tall man, burned almost black by the Nevada sun. He wore jeans, dusty workboots, and a blue tee-shirt with cut-off sleeves. BAD
ATTITUDE, the shirt proclaimed. His muscles were big rolling slabs under his skin. He looked at my application. Then he looked at me and laughed. The application looked very puny rolled up in one of his huge fists.
‘You got to be kidding, my friend. I mean, you have got to be. We talkin desert sun and desert heat here — none of that yuppie tanning-salon shit. What are you in real life, bubba? An accountant?’