George Pelecanos: Shoedog

Hall continued: once out to sea, the crew was followed by a black cloud, beneath which trailed a huge waterspout with three smaller spouts orbiting around it. In the ensuing hurricane the wind sent a fuel-loaded pontoon boat careening toward Hall (he had by now “lashed” himself to the mast), which sheared off the bottom half of one leg. Constantine at this point in the story glanced at the hairless, intact legs of Richard Hall and decided it was time to leave. But Hall kept on, his face ghoulishly lit by firelight. There was an awful lot of talk about his dreams, ancient Indians hiding in the hills above Newport, the lost library of Montezuma, and an octogenarian couple that kayaked from San Diego to Panama during the Great Depression. All ending with that grin and Richard Hall’s obscenely frightening laugh. Constantine excused himself and headed for his room.

He packed his bag, walked quietly across the grounds, and spent that night in the bed of a waitress from the Southside Marina bar. In the morning he caught a ride to LAX, where, he booked a flight to New Zealand. He had picked New Zealand because of its distance, because he felt that he had seen the States, and because the country reportedly had no snakes. Constantine sat in the airport bar and drank vodka over ice for eight hours, eating 10-mg Valiums at regular intervals (a gift from his waitress friend), then stumbled onto the plane and fell asleep before take-off. He awoke once in Honolulu (the baggy-eyed stewards and stewardesses were all wearing leis) and once more to urinate, and the next time he opened his eyes he was touching down in a strange country on the other side of the world.

Constantine bought a map at the tourist information desk from a cute blonde with crooked teeth, and hitched out of Christchurch. He was picked up quickly by an older couple who drove him through hours of green hills dotted with sheep. They dropped him that evening at a campground on Lake Tekapo, where they told him to “bust off.” He guessed they meant to wish him a safe trip.

In the morning Constantine drank coffee on the gravelly shore of Tekapo and listened to the honks of geese as the morning sun blazed off the lake against the rise of brown, snow-capped Southern Alps. The mood was shattered by the crack of. 22 rounds coming off the opposite shore and the sudden flutter of geese. Constantine grabbed his pack and hit the road.

He stopped at the sportsman’s paradise Queenstown, nestled beneath the splendor of the aptly named mountain range, the Remarkables. Constantine pitched his tent on a hilltop campground at sundown and walked down to town, which was colorfully lit by Christmas lights below. He talked to a man walking a Newfoundland pup on the way down. The man said, “Check you later, hear?” as they parted, and Constantine headed for the nearest bar.

He found a stool at a pub named Eichard’s by Lake Wakatipu, and slowly drank a couple of tall dark Steinlagers. Next to him sat a man named Neville, who remarked that he was glad to be drinking with a “Euro” instead of another “fuckin’ Japanese.” New Zealand was a beautiful country, and its people very friendly, but Constantine had long ago decided that ignorance was everywhere, even in paradise. After a while he tuned out Neville and focused on the bartender, a big-boned brunette named Joey with wet brown eyes. She seemed to have a hearing problem, as she constantly had to retake the patron’s orders (one young man said, “Read my fuckin’ lips, Joey,” to the laughter of his friends), but she took it in stride. Constantine liked her and told her so before he left for the walk in the cool night air up the hill to his tent.

The next morning Constantine took a gondola up to the top of the mountain and stood with his hands in his pockets amid a group of gawking tourists. On the trip down he rode with a man on a holiday from his western Australian sheep station, and two giggly, unrelated girls from Auckland who called themselves the Smith sisters. He lunched on grilled hupaki with marmalade sauce and green Indonesian mussels, then found himself back in Eichard’s, thinking of Steinlagers. Joey put one on the bar as soon as he walked in. She seemed glad to see him.

At dusk the two of them took a walk on the wooded trail that wound around the lake. Joey stopped Constantine in a grove of birch trees to listen to the song of a bellbird and then she kissed him on the lips for a long time as the lake flowed almost inaudibly near. They said good-bye after their walk and Constantine slept alone at the top of the hill under what seemed to be thousands of stars. He had been with plenty of women, though the number was not an issue with him, but for some reason he would not forget that kiss.

He was picked up hitchhiking the next morning by a young Auckland college student named Chris and his girlfriend Julie. They drove a small camper van loaded with gear and Dead tapes, which they played the whole day. Constantine could see that they were loaded on something, and when the endearing Chris offered him some mushrooms, he shrugged and chewed a fistful, choking it down with a DB beer from the cooler.

They drove on one dirt lane, cliffside around Lake Wanaka, then headed into Mount Aspiring National Park, whose snowy peaks, waterfalls, and massive evergreens surpassed everything Constantine had seen in the American West. It was a fine place to be while doing psilocybin. They picnicked at Davis Flat, then stopped near the Haast Pass, where Constantine slept shirtless in a bed of pine needles in the woods, thinking happily as he drifted off that there was zero chance of snakes. Afterward the road opened up to the Tasman Sea and an expanse of northern California-style coastline, complete with tropical fauna and white beach.

Chris and Julie dropped Constantine at the foot of Mount Tasmin and moved on. There was a rainbow coming out of the clouds, reflecting off the mountain and its main attraction, Fox Glacier. Constantine watched it for a while and walked to Fox Glacier Motor Park, a campground in the middle of a meadow. He took a room there on the end of a cinder-block row, and settled in for the night. He could not have known then that he would sleep in that room for an entire year.

What made him stay was hard to determine. He would tell himself that it was the white kitten who adopted him the next day, though he suspected it was the job he landed almost immediately (Constantine could never resist a no-tax restaurant gig) as a cook in the no-name local that sat on the edge of the campground. The pub housed two pool tables, kept a friendly staff, and had Speight’s and DB on tap. Most of the talk was about the glacier (the townies called it the “glaah-sheer”) and the daily stream of tourists it brought into town. Constantine only went up on the glaah-sheer once, led by a guide he knew named Kevin. He was surprised it wasn’t colder, standing on the ice.

Mostly he spent his mornings walking in the woods and the mountains, his days at the local, and his evenings reading popular novels left by travelers in the bar. The white kitten grew to be a slow and heavy cat; beyond that, Constantine noticed little change in himself or his surroundings, though the feeling he had then was in general a wary contentment.

That ended, too, one night behind the pub. Constantine was sweeping the kitchen when he heard a woman’s cries through the rear screen door. He walked out the door with the broom in his hand and saw a group of three young men raping a Dutch backpacker in the dirt. After that he recalled swinging the broom handle, and the sound of it as it collapsed the skull of the largest, smiling man. The pub’s staff got Constantine under control eventually, but not before he had taken the other two almost completely out, ramming one man’s skull flat into the cinder-block wall of the pub. Later, he remembered that the blood smelled like the jar of copper pennies he had kept in his room as a child.