The empty parking space taunted me. Here was the poof of particles into thin air, it said, here was once the magician. You are the sucker. You and Lily are the suckers.
“Lily,” I yelled, “Lily is the one who is supposed to disappear!”
“Shut up!” said a window on the street, and I wanted to go to that window and silence forever whoever had uttered that hateful phrase at me. I did not. I remained focused. The dragon slayer does not chase frogs. Or curse the sky, no matter how black and cold it may get.
Where is your resolve? I asked myself.
This is one minor setback, I told myself.
My car’s trunk was full of resolve. I opened it there, under those color-shifting orange lights, those lights illuminating the empty space in which Raven’s truck had sat. And Raven’s tire tracks leading out of there, merging with and disappearing into the tracks of every red-blooded hillbilly who lived in that miserable gray town. I had my trunk open, thank god, or I would have spent the night in a fury hunting down random yellers in random windows and firing precious bullets at orange lights until the police showed up.
From the lid of that trunk hung one little life-saving countervailing tungsten bulb, shining on my files and papers (which they have taken away in an effort to unmoor me, I now realize, it was to unmoor me they did that) with the clement glow of soft white light. Soft white light! My world now is fluorescent. I am trapped in a green-lit box without my papers or files. But the trunk, what I saw in the trunk, if it didn’t soothe me, at least it reminded me what was at stake.
I shed hot tears at the sight of CJ’s journal, at the photographs Raven and I had sent each other, at the letters, the pile of letters, the documents, the tangible documents attesting to the briefest window of time during which two hearts had opened themselves to each other, despite all the odds, as they say. Of course it was a trap, and Lily was fictional, but who would know that, if they were to stumble upon our correspondence? Patty hadn’t guessed it right away. I stood over the trunk in the cold night, flipping through pages, organizing my rage, focusing it. I had had a perfect opportunity and I had failed. I had succumbed to invisible forces. I would not succumb again. I could not allow myself to collapse into a tantrum. My mind turned involuntarily to the moment at which he had lit my cigarette, how I was so close to him. The pile of papers in the trunk. The gun under the seat. Raven somewhere out there. Owen.
What had Calvin Senior said? No one ever taught you to be a man. I’m teaching myself, I thought, I am following through on this, I am going to make it right again, I am not going to let invisible forces hold me back. I have never truly followed through, I thought, I have never had anything to follow through on, I have never been given the opportunity to follow through on anything.
I drove to an all-night gas station and convenience mart. I filled the car with gas and my stomach with coffee and pastries. Mount Pleasant was not such a big place. I would find him again. The factotum behind the register told me where the creeks were. The creek, the ravine, the green shed with white trim … I would find the world Raven had described in his letters, and I would find Raven again. His house was here somewhere, it had to be, and I would have my second chance.
I drove up and down those streets at just above a walking pace. A light snow had begun to fall. When I wasn’t looking at every driveway, every little parking lot, every carport, I looked forward into a slow-motion undersea world, the result of which was that these roads and streets would unfold as long as I had the time and gasoline to drive them. Houses that looked like other houses went by one after another, the same parked cars again and again. I had driven onto some giant snowy Möbius strip. The screened-in porches floated past, as did the decrepit apartment buildings, the suburban-style homes. Fewer and fewer lights as I entered the early morning hours. My tires scraped the curb more than once as I tried to stay alert. There were police in that town, I know for a fact, but I don’t know where they were that night.
I drove, I stalked, Mount Pleasant slept.
Who were these people, I wondered, and what were their lives? Did they know they had a murderer in their midst as they lay there, peacefully dreaming? I must admit I had to stop the car several times to wipe my eyes when I considered the contrast between these happy normal families and what had become of all of us, Stockings and Pattersons alike, as a result of Raven’s actions. With one squeeze of the trigger, he had stripped us of the right to be all those other people, all those innocent sleeping people.
Some hours later, I refilled with coffee at the convenience mart. The factotum had been replaced by another, who wanted to chat. I was all business. I returned to my car to sip my coffee and watched, in the dank colonnade stretching across the front of the convenience mart, a lone black bird, feathers in poor shape, pecking around the back of an out-of-order ice freezer. There was a pay phone. I needed to hear her. I thought she’d be at work, and that I’d get to hear the voicemail greeting she’d recorded for us, back in the halcyon days.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
Her voice was groggy. A moment before, she’d been one of the sleeping innocents.
“Owen, is this you?”
It was me, and it wasn’t. I could not speak.
“Come home, Owen.”
She breathed. She sighed. The line went dead.
At that moment, I built a wall within myself. I could not rest, I could not tear down that wall or even peek over it or drill a hole in it until I had settled accounts with Raven. Listening to Patty’s voice, I had indulged a part of me I couldn’t afford to indulge. I was swirling with invisible forces. There was no room for the sloppiness of feeling, for the way Patty and the sleeping innocents of Mount Pleasant had become involuntarily superimposed through some hidden operation of my emotion-brain. In the movie version, a shadow-Owen remains at the phone as I turn back and proceed to the car, coffee in hand.
I took to the streets again, endless snowflakes spinning in the cone of my headlights, the same houses, the same lawns. The roads became slippery. I stayed my course. The sun threatened in its barely perceptible indigo way. I must have driven every street in Mount Pleasant. The things we seek are always in the last place we look. I know why it’s so: because when we find them, we stop looking.
I found Raven’s truck parked at the curb in front of a modest bungalow. I pulled up behind that hateful red Dodge, leaving enough room so as not to arouse suspicion. I tried to turn off my headlights, but they would not turn off with the engine running, and the engine was the only thing keeping me warm. I retrieved the fuse chart from the glovebox, not to see whether I was dreaming this time—I was not—but to locate the fuse for the headlights. It released from its socket with a snap. I idled there, in the warm darkness, the sun on its way up, and waited, focused on the door to that little house. I considered ringing the bell, pumping him full of bullets, but the man I had met in the Hart’s Head seemed the type to answer the door with gun in hand. There would be no doorbell for Raven, just a surprise waiting for him at a point equidistant from his house and truck, a slightly familiar face, an arm, a hand, a gun. A few words. The end. I could wait all day. I had achieved a state. There was no doubt in me.