The Night Listener : A Novel

Francisco” back at him, and the place cracked up all over again.
    I had basked in that moment, the joyful recklessness of it, the way all those strangers could see for themselves that we were a couple and didn’t give a damn who knew it. When Jess conked out before I did, and his fuzzy blond head sank onto my shoulder, I wore it there for ages like an epaulet of honor, proud as a man could be as I waved off the flight attendant who had come to bring us supper. It was wonderful to have witnesses.
    The Milwaukee airport was chaos itself: a slushy pileup of flatulent buses and angry people scrambling for home. I had packed lightly enough for a carry-on, so there hadn’t been the usual delay at the carousel, but my rental car took almost an hour, thanks to a computer breakdown. While I waited, I had a cup of coffee in a snack bar, surrounded by more apple-cheeked white people than I’d seen in ages. Once removed from the mindless purgatory of the plane I felt slightly overwhelmed by the logistics of what lay ahead. Wysong was much farther north, and it was already late afternoon and getting dark. Should I crash here and get a fresh start in the morning or press on into the night?
    I decided to press on. A map I’d been given at the rental counter made my route clear enough: north along the limp dick of Lake Michigan past Sheboygan and Green Bay, then west on Highway 29 toward Wausau. I probably wouldn’t make it to Wysong that night, but I could stop anywhere I wanted: and anywhere would surely be preferable to the great bland nowhere of the airport. Besides, the longer I sat still, the more I began to question the wisdom of this pilgrimage. I was fearful of losing my nerve.
    So I trudged across a snow-scabbed lot to the white Taurus I’d selected. (I’d decided against anything fancy, since I wanted to remain as neutral and invisible as possible.) The air was numbingly cold—a cold I’d all but forgotten—and the sky was the dingy off-white of an old T-shirt. My fingers felt brittle as I wiggled the key into the car door, and, once inside, I was greeted by the icy kiss of blue vinyl. I started the engine immediately and fidgeted with the heater controls, muttering “fuck, fuck fuck” as I waited for the blast of air to feel anything close to warm.
    Moments later, I looked up to see a face that already seemed to belong to another world entirely. It was Vera, my fellow traveller, bundled up in a huge Christmas-red coat, crossing the lot with two other adults, presumably her daughter and disgruntled son-in-law.
    I was sure she wouldn’t see me, but somehow she did, turning to twiddle her fingers merrily and mouth the words Mr. Lomax before disappearing behind a row of cars.
    Vera is my welcoming committee, I thought with an odd little shiver, my very own white rabbit.
    And now that she’s led me down the hole I’m strictly on my own.
     
    NINETEEN

    MAN’S COUNTRY

    AFTER AN HOUR on the interstate, the snow began. It seemed to fall in all directions at once, gusting in sideways from the lake or spewing up like gravel from the wheels of hell-bent tractor-trailers. In this blinding blur even the signs on the overpasses became hopelessly hieroglyphic, blobs of green ectoplasm that lunged out of nowhere to set my nerves on edge.
    I found a pop music station on the radio that calmed me for a while, but I was forced to abandon it when its bouncy songs proved to be invoking Jesus with disturbing regularity. I eventually settled on an all-polka station—just the right sound track for the territory, I thought—though it faded out after half an hour, casting me back into Top 40 hell. Then I remembered my proximity to Pete and searched in vain for Wisconsin Public Radio, combing the left end of the dial for the spot where the boy had first discovered me.
    It was odd to think that my voice had preceded me here, a place so frozen and desolate that a shopping mall at a cloverleaf could believably pass for an arctic weather station. There were folks here who knew me already—or thought they did—somewhere out there in the warmth of those stoic little houses. I had listeners here, for God’s sake, so why should I feel like such an intruder, someone who had come to upset the natural order of things? If this story was happening to me, I had just as much right to live it as to tell it.
    Even if I didn’t have an ending.
    Dinner happened at a truck stop outside Wausau. It was a mammoth warehouse of a restaurant: a