“I think I’m about to fall down.”
“Stay here.”
She left the counter, then returned with two aspirins on a napkin. She was tall and dark-haired and middle-aged and seemed out of place and too old for her job. A globe and anchor were tattooed on the inside of her forearm. “You don’t look too good, gunny.”
“How’d you know I was in the Crotch?” he asked.
“I can tell.”
“Can you do something else for me?” he said.
“Depends.”
“Would you look over my shoulder at the gas pumps and tell me if you see an ice cream truck out there?”
“One isn’t there now.”
“Now?”
“I saw an ice cream truck after you came in. It left.”
He put a ten-dollar bill on the counter and checked into the motel behind the truck stop. As he walked toward his room, he felt as though his feet were stepping into holes in the floor. He chain-locked the door and fell onto the bed and pulled a pillow over his head. Behind his eyelids he saw artillery rounds mushrooming in a rain forest, scribbling trails of smoke on the night sky like giant spider legs. A navy corpsman was holding a thumb on Clete’s carotid, his hand shiny with gore, struggling to get a compress on it with the other. The corpsman’s face looked made of bone under his steel pot.
Chapter Thirty-Four
SMILEY DID NOT measure time in terms of clocks or calendars. Time was a series of sensations, like bubbles rising from a caldron, without meaning or predictability. A therapist had told him he’d been raised in an environment where cruelty was masked as love, and the consequence would remain with him like a stone bruise on the soul for the rest of his life.
He associated sleep with a brief respite from the world, followed by a wet bed in the morning and a belt across his buttocks. Breakfast was a bowl of porridge and a glass of cold milk unless he was assigned to the punishment chair. As a runaway, he learned that the streets of Mexico City were shady and cool in the day and cold at night, and the male and female prostitutes in front of the cantinas were not his friends. He also learned that the hands and lips and genitalia that moved over his body were a testimony to his status in the world—namely, that Smiley Wimple was food, and the scabs and rags and stench on his body and the lice nits in his hair would never be a deterrent to the class of men who preyed upon him.
Two nights ago he had boosted an ice cream truck from inside the corporate creamery in Lafayette, and yesterday he had driven it to a playground in the little town of Sunset and handed out boxes of Popsicles and Eskimo Pies and ice cream sandwiches to a throng of black children. He did the same in back-of-town Lake Charles and a poor neighborhood in Baton Rouge. He changed license plates twice, although there was apparently no need. A sheriff’s deputy in West Baton Rouge Parish bought a f
rozen sundae from him.
Early this morning he had driven to New Iberia to try to get rid of his growing obsession with Clete Purcel. Why did this man bother him? Smiley wasn’t sure. Smiley trusted children and some people of color but few white adults, including himself, the latter in large part because he had been taught he was worthless.
So he kept his contact with others minimal. When he had a problem, he did what addicts and alcoholics call a geographic: He went somewhere else. That was why he liked airplanes. An airplane was an armored womb that not only protected him but was detached from the earth and all its troubles.
Regarding his line of work, he had no illusions. The people he worked for paid well and gave him Disney World tickets but laughed at him behind his back, at least until someone told them of his capabilities. In fact, Smiley had made a mental note long ago to get to know some of them better after he retired and could afford to do a freebie or two.
Then why the obsession with the man named Purcel?
The answer lay in the man’s eyes. There was a calmness in them, a lack of either fear or hostility, a green glow that was unreadable but seemed to absorb everything and nothing. The pale smoothness around the sockets was like a baby’s. Most of the people Smiley knew had scales around their eyes.
Maybe he needed to prove himself wrong about Clete Purcel. The people he had trusted usually turned out to be traitors, which meant they had to be punished. This man was different. He was a violent man capable of great kindness, a protector not only of abused children and women but people who had no voice or power and were used and discarded. He could have been the male companion of Wonder Woman. The two of them could have married and been Smiley’s parents. That thought filled him with a sensation like sinking in a bathtub of warm water.
He had followed the Caddy into East Texas and watched the graveyard service through the binoculars, then followed the Caddy back into Louisiana, even into the truck stop, where the man named Purcel had bought a thermos of coffee.
That was when Smiley, in his preoccupation with Purcel, got careless and picked up a tail of his own.
He recognized the vehicle from Miami’s Little Havana, a silver Camaro with oversize rear tires and a grille shaped like the mouth of a sea creature and mufflers that throbbed on the asphalt. The owner was Jaime O’Banion, a psychotic button man from New Orleans whom Tony Nemo used to call “half-spick, half-Mick, and half-anything-else-that-don’t-use-rubbers.”
Of course, Smiley had taken Tony Nemo off the board with a container of Drano and had always wanted to do the same for Jaime O’Banion. Word was Jaime had done a whole family with a bomb in Mexico City, children included. Jaime presented another problem. He was the only button man in the business who was so dangerous and good at his craft that he got away with hits inside Miami, which had been an open city since the days of Lansky and Trafficante. Worse, Jaime obviously knew Smiley was following Clete Purcel, and he may have seen Purcel check into the motel behind the truck stop.
Smiley had made a mess of things, as when he had messed in his underwear at the orphanage. He could almost hear the whistle of the belt. After sunset, he abandoned the ice cream truck and boosted a vintage pickup from behind a bar. He threw a backpack loaded with the tools of his trade onto the passenger seat and headed for the motel, wondering if his own time had come.
• • •
CLETE COULD NOT explain the affliction that had spread through his body since the afternoon. It had begun with violent spasms he associated with food poisoning, an aggregate of intestinal pain worse than his wounds in Vietnam, coupled with the fever and chills that went with the malaria he had picked up in El Sal. He was curled in a ball under the bedcovers in the motel, his teeth clicking, the buzz of nonexistent mosquitoes in his ears, when he realized he was not alone.