1
For once, the Weeder thought, I ought to do myself:
In his mind’s eye he could see himself, the frayed collar of his once serviceable, now threadbare overcoat turned up against the thick crystals of snow slanting down at him like tracer bullets. His hair, a deep brown, had grown out since his divorce; he was once again wearing it as he had during his college days, which was long enough to indicate he was a marginal member of the establishment, as opposed to being in its mainstream. He was paler than usual, having spent the last eight months indoors installing and programming his computer. Wrapping his fingers around a paper cup full of scalding coffee—he had bought it to warm his hands—he made his way through the burying ground of Coventry, Connecticut, pausing to read the messages to posterity carefully selected by the late lamented before their deaths and fastidiously engraved on the thin gray stones jutting at odd angles from the frozen earth. Where time and wind had worn away the writing, the Weeder ran his fingertips over the engraving, deciphering the messages as if they had been written for the blind.
Halt pafsenger as you go past
Remember time it runneth fast
Skill was his cash
Virtuous Men will Delight in Virtuous Actions
The Weeder had a historian’s fascination for cemeteries. Old tombstones, he had long since decided, were the American equivalent of morality plays. Nate, of course, didn’t have a tombstone. He had what was properly called a cenotaph—a marker for someone whose body was buried elsewhere. The inscription on it began
Durable Stone preserve the monumental
record
If only durable stone could preserve the monumental record of Nate, like the Weeder a cranky but ardent patriot, a reluctant spy who thought that reading other people’s mail was the lesser evil. Unfortunately durable stone wasn’t the solution. The only way to preserve the record—to discover it and illuminate it and preserve it—was through the good offices of the historian. And time was running out on him. History, like a great mass of snow on a glacier, was piling up; it would one day come spilling down, burying the historian in an avalanche of facts.
The way the Weeder saw it, the outlook for the historian was bleak. The more history that piled up behind him, the less chance he had of coping with it. It was one thing to study the last three or four hundred years. It was altogether another to study three or four hundred thousand years, or three or four million. Imagine trying to specialize in European political history between the years 100,000 and 200,000. Or writing a history of the American presidency when there had been 50,000 presidents. The prospect would be too daunting. Only mad dogs and your occasional Englishman—here the Weeder smiled to himself; history desperately needed a giggle now and then and he couldn’t resist supplying it, even in his thoughts—would even try. And they would fail. The human race was destined to lose history. What the Weeder was describing was the end of the world, or at least the end of the world as he knew it. He believed the day would come when there would be too much of a past for historians to make a systematic investigation of it. Which would leave everyone stranded in a present. And stumbling toward a future that they would have to confront without benefit of a sense of where they came from.
The train of thought depressed the Weeder. He saw himself fighting a rearguard action. Slowing down the inevitable. Holding off the hordes from the steppes.
Very dramatic, the Weeder thought. Another intellectual convincing himself that what he did was important.
The coffee, cooling, no longer warmed his hands and he decided to drink it as he headed back toward his beat-up Volkswagen Beetle, which he hoped would one day qualify as a classic car. He had accomplished a good deal in the last two days. Before leaving New York he had purchased an old violin in a pawnshop, hidden the Stufftingle printouts inside it and deposited the violin in another pawnshop. He had slipped the pawn ticket into an envelope and mailed it to himself care of General Delivery, Concord, Massachusetts. That out of the way, he had headed for New Haven and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He wanted to arrive late Saturday and work in the library Sunday, when nobody would disturb him, which explained the detour to Coventry, Connecticut, to the burying ground with the morality plays on the tombstones and the monumental record on Nate’s cenotaph.
Arriving in New Haven late Saturday afternoon, the Weeder checked into a motel on the outskirts of town, confirmed his appointment at the Beinecke with a quick phone call to the head librarian, then on the spur of the moment drove downtown. He left the Volkswagen in a crowded faculty parking lot just off campus and wandered around until dark. Yale evoked a flood of memories in the Weeder; he looked back on his undergraduate and graduate years with much more than nostalgia. It was the scene of his first love—and his first hate.
Was it a comment on him, or the world in which he lived, he wondered, that he could no longer recreate the love, but the hate had the rich, fresh aroma of newly turned earth?
He browsed around the student bookstore to see what texts they were using these days, then installed himself in a booth—his booth, with his initials, and hers, carved into the back of the bench—at the Copper Kitchen and ordered a hamburger, well-done, with french fries and a milk shake. In his day the same meal had cost eighty-five cents. Now it was five dollars. He eavesdropped on the conversation in the next booth—three young men, obviously Yale students, were discussing the pros and cons of registering for the draft. As he waited in line at the cash register to pay his check, the Weeder read the notices tacked up on a bulletin board. Rides were being offered and sought. Apartments also. Used stereo equipment, roller skates, a small refrigerator, an electric guitar, a double bed were for sale. Not much had changed over the years. It was dark out by the time the Weeder paid his bill and started meandering back toward the faculty parking lot.
Tradecraft had never been one of the Weeder’s strong suits—at Camp Perry, known in Company circles as the Farm, he had more or less laughed his way through what the new recruits referred to as “Freshman Cops and Robbers.” But coming out of the restaurant, the Weeder found himself doing something he hadn’t done since the Farm—working the street. He absently tracked the two young men with long hair taking turns pushing each other down High Street in a supermarket shopping cart. He observed the gray-haired professor wearing a thick bathrobe over designer blue jeans, walking a toy poodle fitted with a bright green muzzle; the professor was talking to the dog in Latin. The Weeder saw a bearded man warming his hands in the pockets of a greatcoat as he tried to flag down a taxi with his chin. He took in the courteous drunk—it was the Weeder’s feeling that liquor brought out the Renaissance man in some people, the fascist in others—who finally got the taxi with an airy wave of his hand. He watched the fat bag lady rooting through the garbage in a wire trash can, and the thin one, fat with layers of clothing, curled up on a basement grate. He even noticed the rail-thin middle-aged woman wearing high-heeled galoshes and a 1930s scalp-hugging feathered hat with a black veil that fell like a mask over half her face; she appeared to be studying the map at a bus stop. But he never saw her take the tiny walkie-talkie from her carpetbag and talk urgently into it after the Weeder passed. And he never saw the shadowy figure in the doorway farther up the street lazily shift his weight from one foot to the other; he never saw the sudden brightening of a flame, as if a breath expelled from someone’s lungs had been momentarily ignited.
The Weeder was just reaching the entrance of the parking lot when he heard footsteps gaining on him. He glanced over his shoulder. A hulking figure of a man wearing a sleeveless fur-lined leather vest and leather trousers was jogging with short mincing steps to catch up to him. His arms were covered with tattoos; the man, passing under a streetlight, was near enough for the Weeder to make out “begun to fight” on his right arm. His hair was cropped short, his head cocked to one side, his pewter-colored eyes fixed with great intensity on the Weeder, his mouth curled up in a crooked smile. Something was obviously tickling him. A transparent jug dangled from a forefinger hooked through its handle. From time to time the man with the patriotic tattoo brought the jug to his lips and threw back his head and gulped some of the contents, then spit it into the gutter. Frightened, the Weeder called out, “What is it you want?”
The wino, which is what the Weeder took him for, stopped a few paces away. “What I want,” he replied in a brittle voice, “what I need to have is your money and your life.” He took another swig of mouthwash from his jug and spit it out again.
The Weeder, backing away, tried to protect himself with humor. “You mean, ‘or.’ Your money or your life.”
The wino didn’t laugh. “I mean and.” He slipped a cigarette lighter from his vest pocket and lit it with a flick of his thumb and adjusted the flame until it was long and thin.
The wino was close enough now for the Weeder to hear the hissing of the gas. “You’re crazy,” he cried.
“That’s one possibility,” the wino shot back. “There are others.”
“Who are you?” the Weeder whispered in alarm. The wino seemed vaguely familiar. Where had he seen him before?
The Weeder backed up against the hood of a car in the parking lot. He stood, transfixed, as the wino brought the lighter to his lips and bellowed out a burst of flame. The wino had misjudged the distance. The flame only warmed the Weeder’s clothes.
Terror flooded through the Weeder’s body like a tide as he scurried away between two cars. He looked around in desperation for a sign of life, but there was no one in sight. He scrambled behind a polished Ford and cast a panicky look back. The wino was wading into the parking lot after him, gulping from his jug and gargling and spitting mouthfuls of kerosene onto the pavement. He brought his cigarette lighter to his lips again and exhaled several trial breaths of bluish fire. Then he bellowed out another great breath of flame. The Weeder ducked under it and darted away. Fingering an imaginary hair mole on his neck, he remembered one of Nate’s favorite maxims: A long life has a lingering death. And he heard Nate’s laughter peeling through his skull—the laughter of a twenty-one-year-old who feared death and longed for it.
The wino breathed fire again and the Weeder felt the heat on the back of his neck as he slipped between two cars. He realized that the peal of laughter trailing after him wasn’t Nate’s but the wino’s as he worked his way between the parked cars toward the Weeder, all the while forcing him back toward the corner of the lot where the high, windowless rear wall of a brick building met the chain link fence with the neat coils of razor wire strung across the top. “What I like, what I do well,” the wino shouted between fiery breaths, between bursts of laughter, “is violence.”
And then there was only a handful of cars left to hide behind and it filtered through to the Weeder’s confused brain that what was happening was unreal. He tried to push it away as if it were a bad dream but it wouldn’t go. He looked around wildly. The car he was cowering behind seemed familiar and he thrust his hand into his pocket and found a key and jammed it into the lock of the beat-up Volkswagen and pulled open the door and threw himself in, slamming the door behind him and hammering down with his fist on the button that locked it as the wino tugged viciously at the handle. The wino backed off and swigged more mouthwash and brought the lighter up and bellowed fire at the car, engulfing it for a long moment in flame, singeing the paint, melting the rubber on the windshield wipers. Fumbling with the key the Weeder fitted it into the ignition. He twisted the key and pumped the gas with his foot. The motor resisted, then spurted into life. He threw the car into gear and slammed it into the car ahead, pushing it forward a foot or two as another avalanche of flame buried the Volkswagen. The smell of burnt rubber, of singed paint stung the Weeder’s nostrils as he threw the car into reverse and slammed it into the car behind, forcing it back slightly. In the space he had created he maneuvered the Volkswagen out of the line of parked cars and, accelerating through a wall of flame, sped toward the entrance of the parking lot and the safety of the street.