had said, “Doyle, you are just not a handsome man. You’re attractive,
certainly, but not handsome.
When you say that I look smashing, I want to reciprocate-but I just
can’t lie to you. But your smile . . . Now, that’s perfect. When you
smile, you even look a little bit like Dustin Hoffman.” Already they
were too honest with each other for Doyle to be hurt by what she’d said.
Indeed, he had been delighted by the comparison: “Dustin Hoffman? You
really think so?” She had studied him a moment, putting her hand under
his chin and turning his face this way and that in the weak orange light
of the bedside lamp. “When you smile, you look exactly like
Hoffman-when he’s trying to look ugly, that is.” He had gaped at her.
“When he’s trying to look ugly, for Christ’s sake?” She grimaced. “I
meant . . . Well, Hoffman can’t really look ugly, even when he tries.
When you smile, then, you look like Hoffman but not as handsome . . .”
He watched her trying to extricate herself from the embarrassing hole
she’d dug, and he had begun to laugh. His laughter had infected her.
Soon they were giggling like idiots, expanding on the joke and making it
funnier, laughing until they were sick and then settling down and then
making love with a paradoxically fierce affection. Ever since that
night Doyle tried to remember to smile a lot.
On the right-hand side of the street a sign announced the entrance to
the Schuylkill Expressway. “Give your FBI man a break,” Alex told the
boy. “Let him tail us in peace for a while. The expressway’s coming
up, so you better turn around and buckle your seatbelt.”
“Just a minute,” Colin said.
“No,” Alex said. “Get your seatbelt on, or I’ll also make you use the
shoulder strap.”
Colin despised being bound up by both belts.
‘Half a minute,” the boy said, straining even harder against the back of
the seat as Alex drove the car onto the approach ramp leading up to the
superhighway.
“Colin-” The boy turned around and bounced down onto the seat. “I just
wanted to see if he followed us onto the expressway. He did.”
“Well, of course he did,” Alex said. “An FBI man wouldn’t be restricted
to the city limits. He could follow us anywhere.”
“Clear across the country?” the boy asked.
“Sure. Why not?”
Colin laid his head back against the seat and laughed. “That’d be
funny. What would he do if he followed us clear across country and
found out we weren’t the radicals he was after?
At the top of the ramp, Alex looked southeast at the two empty lanes of
blacktop. He eased his foot down on the accelerator, and they started
west. “You going to put your seatbelt on?”
“Oh sure,” Colin said, fumbling for the half of the buckle that was
rolle up in the trough beside the passenger’s door. “I forgot.”
He had not forgotten, of course. Colin never forgot anything. He just
didn’t like to wear the belt.
Briefly taking his eyes from the empty highway ahead of them, Alex
glanced sideways at the boy and saw him struggling with the two halves
of the seatbelt. Colin grimaced, cursed the apparatus, making problems
with it so Doyle would know just what he thought of being tied down like
a prisoner.
“You might as well grin and bear it,” Alex said, grinning himself as he
looked ahead at the highway again. “You’re going to wear that belt the
whole way to California, whether you like it or not.”
“I won’t like it,” Colin assured him. The seatbelt in place, he
smoothed the wrinkles out of his King Kong T-shirt until the
silkscreened photograph of the gigantic, raging gorilla was neatly
centered on his frail chest. He pushed his thick hair out of his eyes
and straightened the heavy wire-framed glasses which his button nose was
hard-pressed to hold in place. “Thirty-one hundred miles,” he said,
watching the gray roadway roll under and behind them. The
Thunderbird’s power seat elevated high enough to give him a good view.
“How long will it take to drive that far?”