DEVRIES DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING after that. I rewound the film and put it back in the box and took it into the main room, where I gave the librarian the date and page number and asked for a printout. She got up with it and went through another door, moving crisply and silently on low heels. I wondered if during the job interview they made them walk up and down and assigned points according to how much noise they didn’t make. While we were waiting I asked DeVries how he was holding up.
“I’m cool. I feel like someone changed the sheets on me is all.”
“A lot’s different. Cars and movie screens are smaller. Girls are women, when they aren’t persons. There are as many telephone companies as telephones. Movie stars are politicians, politicians are doing guest shots on TV. Cigarettes and cholesterol are out. Computers and carbohydrates are in. When a woman you don’t know approaches you in a bar it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s in business. That’s for starters. About the only thing that’s slowed down is records.”
“I know about all that. I read.”
“Reading it and seeing it,” I said.
“Yeah.”
She returned with the printout — a grainy reproduction of the Marianne picture — and I paid for it and she put it in a manila envelope for us. The sympathy had gone from her face, leaving cool untouchability in its wash. Back in the car I turned on the radio. The game had finished. I had to wait for the announcer to dispose of all the other scores in both leagues before learning that Detroit had dropped it with two errors and a base on balls in the ninth. I flipped the knob. “Where to?”
“Detroit. I got an appointment with my parole officer Friday.”
“Today’s Wednesday. They don’t give you much rope.”
“What’s rope?”
The way to US-41 took us along a broad, sun-sloshed main stem with fresh pavement ruled in bright yellow. It was lined with clean store windows and parking meters against the buildings to clear the curbs for the plows that removed twelve-foot drifts in the winter. A few tourists were out pushing the season in tank tops and shorts and blue knees and elbows. Hope and pneumonia spring eternal in the breasts of Michiganians.
We were four hundred miles from home as the crow flies, if it flew across the Great Lakes. Our route was considerably less direct and half again longer. The Upper Peninsula, which belongs geographically to Wisconsin, was Andrew Jackson’s left-handed gift to Lansing in return for surrendering Toledo to Ohio. There had been some hollering about it at the time because a port on Lake Erie was worth twice as much as a rocky wilderness, but Ohio had more voters. Then the lumber industry started up and copper and iron were discovered in abundance and the hollering stopped. The war with our neighboring state goes on, however. There’s no sense in wasting a good hate.
Two miles outside Marquette we passed through Harvey — two blocks of boarded-over storefronts and depressed tourist trade — and turned away from the lake. DeVries never looked back at it. The road opened up and so did I. The only other vehicle in sight was a dot of color in the rearview mirror.
“Marquette’s for incorrigibles,” I said. “What’d you do that made you too hot to hold in Jackson?”
“Cut my hand.” His domed profile was sharp against the evergreens striping past his window.
“That shouldn’t have done it.”
“I cut it on a guard’s front teeth.”
“Bad move. They use angry young men for warm-up exercise inside.”
“What do you know about it?”
“I’ve been in jail a time or two. It’s the same neighborhood.”
“You was just visiting. I lived there.”
I said nothing. He tipped his head back against the padded rest.
“I feel like shit. I thought I’d be happy when I got out.”
“That’s normal.”
“There was guys inside didn’t want to leave. One of them had to be dragged out when his time was up. I never figured that to happen to me.”
“Freedom’s scary. You’ll get used to it.”
It was his turn to say nothing. The dot of color in the mirror had become an old maroon Dodge truck with a plank for a front bumper. It was making good time for the amount of smoke it was laying down behind it. The driver must have put in oil as often as he filled the tank.
“There’s something to be said for knowing tomorrow’s going to be just like today and yesterday,” I said. “We’re all looking for that. Living on the edge is too hard on the heart.”
“It’s noisy out here. That’s the first thing I noticed. You don’t know quiet till you been on the block. Some nights you can hear the hopes drop.”
The truck flashed its lights. I let up on the accelerator and crowded the shoulder to give it room. It swept past with a swish and a click and a clattering of lifters. Smoke tangled around us.
“Guess I got out just in time,” DeVries said. “My ears are institutionalized.”
“Hang on.”
Sixty yards ahead the truck swung into a sliding turn across both lanes, rubber scraping the pavement like nails on steel and gushing black smoke into the gray. It hinged up on its inside wheels, hung there for an instant, and came back down bouncing. By then I was already turning in the opposite direction. My tires wailed and the rear end came around with a snap that sounded and felt as if the car had bent in the middle. DeVries’s palm smacked the windshield. When the nose was pointing back the way we’d come I squashed the pedal to the floor. The front wheels spun, grabbed, and lashed us ahead. The steering wheel yanked my arms straight.
The third vehicle, a new black Monte Carlo that had been exposed for the first time when the truck pulled out to pass, was turning, but I’d reacted too fast for the driver and he had only one lane blocked when I tore around in front of him, slinging two wheels up the grassy bank. Just then the fuel injector cut in with a deep gulp; the inertia broke the catch that held my seat in place and it slid back in its track and from then on I was reaching with all four limbs to maintain control from the back seat.
“Hell’s going on?” DeVries was gripping his door handle.
I couldn’t answer and drive like an idiot at the same time. In the mirror the Monte Carlo had engineered its turn into a U and was coming on. From the amount of smoke I saw behind it, the truck was following suit. Harvey flashed past like a subliminal commercial and then I had a turn coming up and a sign advising me to slow down to thirty-five. The sign wobbled in my seventy-mile-an-hour wake.
I felt the wheels leave the road and knew the instant when they decided not to come back. Gravel sprayed, grass swished, and then we were hurtling down a grade with nothing in front of us but blue Superior.