thirteen, touring his father’s fields and loading from the separate
baler beds. Before he was out of high school, he had operated the
power, bailer, plow, and all the other powerful equipment that brought a
farm full circle from planting to harvesting to planting once more. When
he went away to college, he helped pay his tuition by driving a delivery
van much like the one he was now pushing across Pennsylvania. Later,
when he was of age, he drove a full-size rig for a fuel-oil company, and
in two summers of that he had not put a single nick on his truck or any
passing automobile. He had been offered a job with the oil company
after that second summer, but he had turned it down, of course. A year
later, when he received his second degree in civil engineering and took
his first real job, he often hopped up on one of the gigantic
earth-moving machines and ran it through its paces-not because he was
worried that the job was going badly, but because he enjoyed using the
machine, enjoyed knowing that his touch with it was sure.
Now, all Monday morning and then past noon, he nursed the rented van
westward. He stayed the same distance behind the black Thunderbird at
all times. When the car slowed down, he slowed down too. When it
accelerated, he quickly caught up with it. For the most part, however,
the Thunderbird maintained a precise seventy miles an hour. Leland knew
that the top-of-the-line model T-Bird had a speed-set control on the
steering wheel which took some of the effort out of long-distance
driving. Doyle was probably using that device. But it did not matter.
Effortlessly, skillfully, George Leland matched the car’s automatically
controlled pace for hour after hour, almost as if he were a machine
himself.
Leland was a big man, six-three and over two hundred pounds. He had
once been twenty pounds heavier, but lately he had suffered a weight
loss because he forgot to eat regular meals. His broad shoulders were
more hunched than they had once been, his narrow waist even narrower. He
had a square face framed with blond, almost white, hair. His eyes were
blue, complexion clear except for a spray of freckles across his blunt
nose. His neck was all muscle, gristle, and corded veins. When he
gripped the steering wheel with his big hands and made his biceps swell
with the unconscious fierceness of his grip, he looked absolutely
immovable, as if he were welded to the vehicle.
He did not switch on his radio.
He did not look at the scenery.
He did not smoke, chew gum, or talk to himself.
Mile after mile, his attention was on the road, the car ahead, the
machine that hummed satisfactorily all around him. Not once in those
first hours of the journey did he think specifically about the man and
the boy in the Thunderbird. His discordant thoughts, but for his
driving, were vague and undetailed.
Mostly he was riveted by a broad mesmeric hatred that had no single
focus. Somehow the car ahead would eventually become that focus. He
knew this. But for the moment he only followed like a machine.
From Harrisburg, the Thunderbird went west on the turnpike, switched
from that to Interstate 70, and passed across the northernmost sliver of
West Virginia. Past Wheeling, barely inside of Ohio, the car signaled
its intention to take an exit lane into a service area full of gasoline
stations, motels, and restaurants.
The moment he saw the flashing signal, Leland braked and allowed the van
to fall a mile behind Doyle. When he took the ramp a minute after the
Thunderbird, the big black car was nowhere in sight. At the bottom of
the ramp, Leland hesitated only a second, then turned west toward the
heaviest concentration of tourist facilities. He drove slowly, looking
for the car. He found it parked in front of a rectangular aluminum
diner that looked like an old-fashioned railroad passenger car. The
T-Bird was cooling in the shade of a huge sign that proclaimed HARRY’s
FINE FOOD.
Leland drove until he came to Breen’s, the last diner in the chrome,