Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“But—”

“All children under fifteen. No exceptions.”

“But I’m not under fifteen,” I said, floundering to produce my official-looking state-issued New York ID. “I am fifteen. Look.” Enrique—envisioning perhaps the likelihood of my having to go into what he called The System—had taken me to be photographed for it shortly after my mother died; and though I’d resented it at the time, Big Brother’s far-reaching claw (“Wow, your very own bar code,” Andy had said, looking at it curiously), now I was thankful he’d had the foresight to carry me downtown and register me like a second-hand motor vehicle. Numbly, like a refugee, I waited under the sleazy fluorescents as the clerk looked at the card at a number of different angles and in different lights, at length finding it genuine.

“Fifteen,” she said suspiciously, handing it back to me.

“Right.” I knew I didn’t look my age. There was, I realized, no question of being up-front about Popper since a big sign by the desk said in red letters NO DOGS, CATS, BIRDS, RODENTS, REPTILES, OR OTHER ANIMALS WILL BE TRANSPORTED.

As for the bus itself, I was in luck: there was a 1:45 a.m. with connections to New York departing the station in fifteen minutes. As the machine spat out my ticket with a mechanical smack, I stood in a daze wondering what the hell to do about Popper. Walking outside, I was half-hoping my cab driver had driven off—perhaps having whisked Popper away to some more loving and secure home—but instead I found him drinking a can of Red Bull and talking on his cell phone, Popper nowhere in sight. He got off his call when he saw me standing there. “What do you think?”

“Where is he?” Groggily, I looked in the back seat. “What’d you do with him?”

He laughed. “Now you don’t and… now you do!” With a flourish, he removed the messily-folded copy of USA Today from the canvas bag on the front seat beside him; and there, settled contentedly in a cardboard box at the bottom of the bag, crunching on some potato chips, was Popper.

“Misdirection,” he said. “The box fills out the bag so it doesn’t look dog-shaped and gives him a little more room to move around. And the newspaper—perfect prop. Covers him up, makes the bag look full, doesn’t add any weight.”

“Do you think it’ll be all right?”

“Well, I mean, he’s such a little guy—what, five pounds, six? Is he quiet?”

I looked at him doubtfully, curled at the bottom of the box. “Not always.”

J.P. wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gave me the package of potato chips. “Give him a couple of these suckers if he gets antsy. You’ll be stopping every few hours. Just sit as far in the back of the bus as you can, and make sure you take him away from the station a ways before you let him out to do his business.”

I put the bag over my shoulder and tucked my arm around it. “Can you tell?” I asked him.

“No. Not if I didn’t know. But can I give you a tip? Magician’s secret?”

“Sure.”

“ Don’t keep looking down at the bag like that. Anywhere but the bag. The scenery, your shoelace—okay, there we go—that’s right. Confident and natural, that’s the kitty. Although klutzy and looking for a dropped contact lens will work too, if you think people are giving you the fish eye. Spill your chips—stub your toe—cough on your drink—anything.”

Wow, I thought. Clearly they didn’t call it Lucky Cab for nothing.

Again, he laughed, as if I’d spoken the thought aloud. “Hey, it’s a stupid rule, no dogs on the bus,” he said, taking another big slug of the Red Bull. “I mean, what are you supposed to do? Dump him by the side of the road?”

“Are you a magician or something?”

He laughed. “How’d ya guess? I got a gig doing card tricks in a bar over at the Orleans—if you were old enough to get in, I’d tell you to come down and check out my act sometime. Anyways, the secret is, always fix their attention away from where the slippery stuff’s going on. That’s the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.”

xxi.

UTAH. THE SAN RAFAEL SWELL, as the sun came up, unrolled in inhuman vistas like Mars: sandstone and shale, gorges and desolate rust-red mesas. I’d had a hard time sleeping, partly because of the drugs, partly for fear that Popper might fidget or whine, but he was perfectly quiet as we drove the twisted mountain roads, sitting silently inside his bag on the seat beside me, on the side closest to the window. As it happened my suitcase had been small enough to bring aboard, which I was happy about for any number of reasons: my sweater, Wind, Sand and Stars, but most of all my painting, which felt like an article of protection even wrapped up and out of view, like a holy icon carried by a crusader into battle. There were no other passengers in the back except a shy-looking Hispanic couple with a bunch of plastic food containers on their laps, and an old drunk talking to himself, and we made it fine on the winding roads all the way through Utah and into Grand Junction, Colorado, where we had a fifty-minute rest stop. After locking my suitcase in a coin-op locker, I walked Popper out behind the bus station, well out of the driver’s sight, bought us a couple of hamburgers from Burger King and gave him water from the plastic top of an old carry-out container I found in the trash. From Grand Junction, I slept, until our layover in Denver, an hour and sixteen minutes, just as the sun was going down—where Popper and I ran and ran, for sheer relief of being off the bus, ran so far down shadowy unknown streets that I was almost afraid of getting lost, although I was pleased to find a hippie coffee shop where the clerks were young and friendly (“Bring him in!” said the purple-haired girl at the counter when she saw Popper tied out front, “we love dogs!”) and where I bought not only two turkey sandwiches (one for me, one for him) but a vegan brownie and a greasy paper bag of home-made vegetarian dog biscuits.

I read late, creamy paper yellowed in a circle of weak lights, as the unknown darkness sped past, over the Continental Divide and out of the Rockies, Popper content after his romp around Denver and snoozing happily in his bag.

At some point, I slept, then woke and read some more. At two a.m., just as Saint-Exupéry was telling the story of his plane crash in the desert, we came into Salina, Kansas (“Crossroads of America”)—twenty minute rest stop, under a moth-beaten sodium lamp, where Popper and I ran around a deserted gas station parking lot in the dark, my head still full of the book while also exulting in the strangeness of being in my mother’s state for the first time in my life—had she, on her rounds with her father, ever driven through this town, cars rushing past on the Ninth Street Interstate Exit, lighted grain silos like starships looming in the emptiness for miles away? Back on the bus—sleepy, dirty, tired-out, cold—Popchik and I slept from Salina to Topeka, and from Topeka to Kansas City, Missouri, where we pulled in just at sunrise.

My mother had often told me how flat it was where she’d grown up—so flat you could see cyclones spinning across the prairies for miles—but still I couldn’t quite believe the vastness of it, the unrelieved sky, so huge that you felt crushed and oppressed by the infinite. In St. Louis, around noon, we had an hour and a half layover (plenty of time for Popper’s walk, and an awful roast beef sandwich for lunch, although the neighborhood was too dicey to venture far) and—back at the station—a transfer to an entirely different bus. Then—only an hour or two along—I woke, with the bus stopped, to find Popper sitting quietly with the tip of his nose poking out of the bag and a middle aged black lady with bright pink lipstick standing over me, thundering: “You can’t have that dog on the bus.”