Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

On the way back to Manitou Sands, Bobby described, in unprecedented detail, the furnishings and decor in Wendell Banjo’s mobile home. He talked about it exhaustively and with the special contempt one reserves for those who don’t fully avail themselves of their privilege. Then he was silent. He didn’t say a word until after we’d gotten back and then said only that I was to make sure that nobody bothered him for the rest of the day, a job I was only too happy to take on.

FROM HERE, THErest of the story is merely a matter of mechanics. I promise that, in due time, I will deliver the rest. I want to pause, though, to comment on how the doomed often are badly served by narrative. Whatever remains for the doomed to do before they meet their end, it is tainted to the exact degree that the audience has foreknowledge of their fate. The doomed character, though — he imagines, plans, anticipates, expects, looks forward to. His life is not the dull continuum of a beast, plodding unknowing from day to day, from season to season, year to year, until it meets knife or needle: even the simplest of us are, have to be, able to imagine how we will accommodate ourselves to a future that hasn’t happened yet, while knowing as well that it may never happen, not to us. The thing we don’t know is just how much of it may never happen.

And so while I went about my business in all innocence, as the saying goes, Bobby began to devise his scheme that very afternoon, in cunning silence. If he treated me more kindly than usual over the days that followed, I am willing to ascribe his motivations partly to residual sentiment rather than pure calculation (we did share a history), although I know better, I may know better, I certainly should know better. In the end, is there a difference? It was unnecessary to be especially kind; as ever, I was not inclined to suspicion as far as Bobby was concerned. But if I had been at all mindful, I might have become wary of the anxious way that Bobby asked me each day for the running tally of the money I would soon be transporting to South Richmond. I assumed it was concern about the considerably larger-than-usual amount — perhaps even concern for me, for my safety and security. If I had been mindful I might have discerned that Bobby’s anxiety had been supplanted on Friday by relief, and that his relief had been supplanted on Sunday by greed. I didn’t know then that Bobby owed Wendell Banjo $220,000, including the vigorish Bobby had agreed to for paying late. By Sunday I could report that roughly twice that amount would be transferred to South Richmond. Bobby harbored a few lingering doubts about his plan; that amount served to dispel them. I don’t know that I can blame him; to fantasize about money is the perfect idiot’s delight.

I made it easy for Bobby in many ways. On Sunday evening, when I was preparing to leave to drive east, he asked me to meet him on the road heading up into Manitou County, at an old gas station that had been closed for at least as long as I’d lived there. I pulled in under the canopy that had once sheltered the pumps from the elements. Bobby jogged out of the shadows under the eaves of the garage and told me to pull my car around to the back. He said that he needed to drive me somewhere to show me something. I parked and then we drove together to the state hospital grounds. I recall being mildly annoyed because while I was getting mud on my shoes and slacks, Bobby was dressed in old khakis and sneakers. He had a flashlight to light the way as he hurried us through the groves. Finally we came to the clearing and Bobby stopped. I was out of breath; we both were panting in the dead quiet. He gestured at the running board of a small backhoe that was parked there and suggested that I sit. As I was lowering myself onto it, I noticed a dead crow lying on the ground. I pointed it out to Bobby.

“What the hell happened to it?” he said. “Take a look at it, would you?”

As I bent over to examine it more closely, not even the faintest presentiment came to me. He shot me in the back of the head.

Here Bobby was stricken by grief and guilt. He sat on the running board and wept over my body. As well he should have: I will stress once again that Bobby could have relied absolutely upon my aid and discretion; Bobby knew that, had always known it. Under other circumstances he would have valued it, and while he even wished that he could have valued it under these circumstances, my life stood between him and his own safety, between him and the fulfillment of his wishes, finally and most decisively between him and his gratification, and not long after he started digging the hole for my body, he began to blame me. It took over an hour for him to dig a hole deep enough to bury me in, strip me of my identification and belongings, fill the hole in, and disguise it. It took another hour to get back to my car, drive it down the fire road to the beach, and then walk back to the gas station. Finally he had to change his clothes and find a place to dump them and then a different place to dump my things. By the time he returned to Manitou Sands he was filled with self-righteousness. He felt good about himself. Gradually he came to feel, faintly at first and then fully and unselfconsciously, that I was to blame for my own death. And as his plan began to work as if of its own accord, so that the crime I was supposed to have committed became a story other people pressed upon him, a story that he pretended to accept only reluctantly, he began to believe that the story was true.

BOBBY ANTICIPATED THEheat he’d receive from our old cronies on Hylan Boulevard about this significant loss, and he felt that, steady hand that he was, he could ride it out. Throw himself into the job and earn his redemption. At his core, Bobby was an optimist, which marks him, perhaps, as the gambler he always denied he was at heart. Even at the end, he had trouble understanding what Hanshaw told him about what he’d brought upon himself. But so much crowded that simple, devious mind in its last moments. For example, he was still wondering what Kat Danhoff’s game could be.

While Kat is hardly innocent, she is not responsible for my reappearance as the storyteller Salteau. It’s more accurate to say that Salteau is responsible for her appearance on the scene. Her game is exactly as you might have surmised: to find a means to attain escape velocity yet again, having determined yet again that her situation is not to her liking. This woman, not so young anymore, who exists in a state of constant anticipation, who has never been capable of being, but only of looking forward to being, who views everyone and everything as a mirror in which she is reflected, was conjured by Salteau, by me, whom she instinctively recognizes, perhaps without putting it to herself quite this way, as the perfect distorting mirror. As for Alexander Mulligan (to whom Bobby devoted considerably less thought), he is always willing to join in a union of desperate people. He has a cultivated eye for the bored and the impatient — potential partners in crimes of passion, so to speak. This is properly characterized as a personality flaw, this unavailing search for perfect fulfillment with people who, and in circumstances that, distort and exaggerate the ordinary transactional aspects of human relationships, even (or especially) sexual relationships. Sandy Mulligan has never had an ordinary relationship with a woman in his entire life, as he himself has helpfully suggested in one of his moments of unwitting candor. And what about Rae, you ask, the wonderful and steadfast Rae? Married for two years when Sandy barged into her life, stirring in her the desire that things should become “interesting” once again. In omitting any mention of Rae’s marriage, Sandy was quite dishonest, but we must forgive him. A habitual liar, he overlooks the truth in this instance in order to cast Rae in the heroic role to which he believes she is entitled as a sort of consolation prize for his having deserted her (she is, I can assure you, far less interested in that than in the not-quite-as-generous-as-he-would-have-you-believe financial provisions that he has made for her and their children), and also to try to convince himself that in ending his marriage and fragmenting his household he has done something both extraordinary and necessary, when he knows perfectly well that it was neither of those two things.