Night Road (9 page)

“Did it ever occur to you to write it down?”

“Well, you know. Sometimes I kind of overslept, and I’d have to run, and then I’d forget my notebook and stuff.”

Cole could not for the life of him think of anything to say to that. He wondered if Sandor’s throat-slitting pickpocket was this clueless.

Sandor, however, seemed really taken with the topic. “Once you get used to all this,” he told Gordon, “you could take some night courses. You don’t have to give up your education.”

In the rearview mirror, Cole saw Gordon open his mouth, then shut it. It looked to Cole as if Gordon would like more college about as much as he would like to swallow more beer.

“You should stay with premed,” Sandor added. “Work
hard, get good grades. You could study this question of whether we die and then tell Cole that he is wrong!”

Cole snorted.

“Why do you laugh like that? Of course we will die,” Sandor informed Cole. “It’s part of the cycle of life.”

“We are
not
part of the cycle of life.”

“Don’t be silly. If nothing else, one day the sun will explode and the earth will be destroyed along with it. We’ll
have
to die then, won’t we?”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Look at it this way,” Sandor said. “What if, like Harold, your head got cut off? How could you live with your body unable to receive any messages from your brain? And what if a train fell out of the sky and crushed you flat as a pancake? Of course you would be dead.”

“Unconscious, maybe.”

“When I was a boy in Boravia, you know what they did to the
strigoi
? First they dug them up. Then they cut off their heads, which they threw into a river. And then they burned the bodies that were left. Now you tell me those people weren’t dead! Of course, they were already dead to begin with, but if they hadn’t been, I guarantee
they would have been by the end of the day!”

“If they were already dead,” Gordon asked, “why did anyone dig them up?”

“Oh, those were the days when they thought plagues and such were caused by the
strigoi
, the
vlkodlaks
. So they dug the poor people out of their graves.”

“Even if they weren’t already dead,” Cole said, “it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they just went into sort of a permanent hibernation.”

“With their bodies burned up! You mean just the heads?”

“Yes. Think about it, Sandor. What happens when we die the first time?”

“Oh, we don’t really die then, Cole. Not completely. Our hearts and lungs take a little break, but they start again before our brains are affected. It’s just a pause. There is no such thing as a permanent hibernation. Every living thing must give and take—air, water, nutrition—you name it. Everything must interact with its environment. That’s being alive, by definition.”

“What if a living thing could go a long time between giving and taking—like, say, centuries? Millennia?”

“Cole, it is a very good thing you have us with you.
You come up with such strange ideas on your own.”

“Just because you don’t agree with an idea doesn’t mean it’s strange.”

“In any case,” Sandor said, turning to Gordon, “I thought you did very well tonight. Wouldn’t you agree, Cole?”

The evening
had
been encouraging. And it did seem that the kid had only needed some structure and a firm hand.

But it was still too early for unqualified praise.

“Except for the pawing,” Cole answered. “Except for the ogling and the major breach of etiquette.”

Gordon had been leaning forward, listening to Sandor’s tale of dug-up
strigoi.
Now, in the mirror, Cole saw him sit back—whether thoughtful or stung Cole could not tell.

Either was fine with Cole.

GORDON
seemed to be catching on. Each of the next few nights, he fed on his own after a couple of attempts, with only one try fumbled badly enough to make the omni screech. It was more than Cole had hoped for—he’d figured that he and Sandor would have to get a feed started for the kid fairly often at first.

“Anyone want to scout out locations for tomorrow’s feed?” Sandor asked as they wheeled their suitcases down a carpeted motel hallway. “I saw a nice-looking place down the street that might—oh, never mind. I can see that you’re both tired. We’ll just stay in and watch TV then. Gordon, how about that?”

“Fine with me,” Gordon said.

“Me too,” Cole agreed. He
was
tired. Tired of being
responsible. Tired of playing bad cop. And very,
very
tired of lecturing. Except for an occasional put-upon sigh from Gordon, neither he nor Sandor seemed to be bothered by it; but Cole was sick of the sound of his own voice.

However, lecturing was what he was here to do. “Notice that we try to stay in a hotel with an inside hallway,” he told Gordon, as their suitcases whined along the carpet. “If there’s a choice, you don’t want a room that can be entered from the outside, because maids have been known to ignore the Do Not Disturb sign—and when they open the door, in comes the sun. Okay, here you are. One forty-five. I’m in one forty-seven.” He stopped outside their door, wanting to make sure they went in.

“Cole, why don’t you come over in a moment, and we’ll play a game or something. Does this hotel have video games in the rooms?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Nevertheless, you will come over anyway?”

To his surprise, Cole found that he wasn’t averse to the idea. He’d forgotten that he enjoyed being with some of the other hemes, especially Sandor. Forgotten that it
was actually amusing to argue and debate with someone who took a strong position but never got angry or offended about being disagreed with.

Being alone wasn’t something he’d undertaken on purpose. Somehow it had just seemed to come about gradually over the decades. The others liked to settle down for weeks or months at a time and Cole didn’t, for the most part.

The truth was, he’d gotten into the habit of spending hours watching the road roll toward him, disappearing endlessly under the front wheels, while he thought about other things. He hardly even noticed the landscape anymore: Sometimes there were dark mountains looming outside the car windows, sometimes stars stretching down to meet open plain, sometimes lights from suburbs or squares of farmland under the moon. It all ran together into a blur.

Not for Sandor. Even just driving along a few nights ago, Cole had already zoned out when Sandor exclaimed, “Oh, I love this part of the state!”

Cole had blinked, looked around at the trees pressing up against the sides of the highway. It took him a moment to realize that Sandor meant New Jersey and
that yes, this
was
an attractive spot, especially compared to the more utilitarian area where he’d parked his car while in the city.

“Will you come?” Sandor asked again.

“I was planning on being off duty for the rest of the evening.”

“Then for the rest of the evening,” Sandor said, straight-faced, “I give you permission to be as uninformative and uninstructive as you wish.”

“All right, then—”

“I swear to you: If you say something even slightly edifying, I shall cover Gordon’s ears so that he cannot hear.”

“Okay, Sandor. I’ll be there as—”

“And if you forget yourself and we
accidentally
find ourselves in the midst of an educational moment, I’ll leap up and start singing Boravian folk songs to drown you out. Ah, look, Gordon. That is the first nonfeeding smile you will have seen from Cole thus far. Charming, isn’t it? I promise; he will loosen up more and more as your progress wins his approval.”

“Right,” Gordon said. “Well, if it helps, I promise that I won’t learn a thing.”

Cole looked sharply at him. The kid had cracked a smile. He was joking.

Come to think of it, that was the first nonfeeding smile he’d seen from Gordon, as well. Still nothing like his brother Guerdon’s quick flash of a grin, Cole knew, although precisely what that grin looked like he couldn’t recall. He could only remember the essence, the
feeling
of it.

“I’ll come over in a minute,” Cole told Sandor and Gordon. He waited to see them safely into their room before going into his. As he unpacked, he let himself think about Guerdon a little bit. He remembered some of the events of his childhood, but mostly as something in a story, blurred and wrapped away under layers of years.

One crystal clear picture he had was of the long night after Guerdon’s death—of watching over the body with his mother and sisters and the neighbors.

The women would dip the cloth in cool water with soda and, wringing it, lay it over Guerdon’s face to keep away the flies.
This
Cole remembered, because of the intensity with which he had watched the clinging wet cloth make a featureless mask of his brother’s face.
He’d been eleven or so, a year older than Guerdon; and he’d sat rigidly upright, unmoving, waiting and hoping to see the cloth rise or collapse when Guerdon started breathing again.

That was neither here nor there though.

Anyway, Gordon’s hadn’t even been a real smile, now that he thought about it. More like a half smile. Almost reaching the eyes but not quite.

A little bit later, when Cole walked into Sandor and Gordon’s room—a mirror image of his own—Sandor had moved the desklike table over to the bed and pulled the hard-backed chair up to one side. Gordon was seated on the bed on the other side.

Sandor sat down in the chair. “Look, I have my cards,” he told Cole, holding up a deck. “Shall we play gin rummy?”

“Gin is for two players,” Cole told him.

“Not when I play. When I play, it is for as many people as I want.” There was a hotel pad and pen on the table in front of him. Sandor picked up the pen and wrote three names at the top of the first page.

But Cole was feeling restless now. He wasn’t ready to
settle into a game of cards just yet. “It’s a little hot in here, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Set the temperature anywhere you want,” Sandor said. “Then come sit down.” Cole walked over to the thermostat and adjusted it down a few degrees. He didn’t go to sit down but wandered over to the window.

“What city did you say this is?” Sandor asked Cole, shuffling the cards.

Cole pulled the curtain aside and looked out. “Harrisburg,” he said. Below, gated amid concrete, there was a hotel swimming pool. It was dark, the lights off. He liked swimming; it was one of the few things he truly enjoyed and looked forward to.

“Pennsylvania?” Sandor was asking.

“Uh-huh.” That’s what he wanted to do tonight. He wanted to go swimming.

“That is one thing about being on the road, Gordon,” Sandor informed him, shuffling the cards. “Places run together in your mind. When you are able to be more independent, you can stay somewhere for years at a time if you wish. Then you can remember where you are.”

“Will we be staying anywhere more than one night on this trip?”

“Yes,” said Sandor. “Soon. You’re doing very well, Gordon, you know.”

Cole did not agree, not out loud. Didn’t want the kid to get cocky.

He leaned one shoulder against the wall, focused on the pool area. “Don’t deal me in just yet,” he told Sandor.

“Yes, you must brood at the window first, of course. Cole is one of those brooding hemes,” Sandor said to Gordon as he dealt the cards:
slap slap slap.
“In spite of it, he’s good company. But as I was about to say: Sometimes I remember a place if there’s something interesting about it. For example, if it’s the Pumpkin Capital of the Midwest. Or there’s some kind of roadside attraction, like…What was the name of that place with the swimming pig?” he asked Cole.

“I can’t remember.”

“A swimming what?” Gordon asked.

“Pig,” Sandor said, picking up his cards and spreading them into a fan. “His name was Ralph. Are we playing for money? Not yet, perhaps? Here, I’ll go first. Anyway, Ralph the Swimming Pig is what it said on the billboard. But we never got to see him.”

Cole looked at them over his shoulder. Sandor would
win, he knew. Gordon
didn’t
know it though; the boy frowned at his hand, planning his strategy.

“I didn’t know you wanted to see the pig,” Cole told Sandor.

“I didn’t then. But now I think maybe I wish we had. When will we again get the opportunity to see a swimming pig?”

“It was somewhere in south Texas. Next time we’re down that way we can keep an eye out for it.”

“It’s been so long,” Sandor said. “The pig is probably dead. But,” he said, brightening, “maybe he’s like Shamu, and they merely bring in a new swimming pig and call him Ralph as well.”

No one answered. The slap of cards was the only sound. Cole watched them: Gordon’s brow beginning to furrow in concentration, Sandor seemingly inattentive. “It’s worse now, with the days so long,” Sandor said, glancing at the clock on the bedside table. “So many fun places are closed by the time it’s dark. In the winter there’s more to do.”

“What about bars?” Gordon asked.

“Bars get boring very fast, my friend.”

“I guess so, if you can’t drink.”

Instead of replying, Sandor laid his cards out on the table with a flourish. “Gin.”

“Already?” Gordon peered at his hand, then at Sandor’s, on the table. After a reluctant moment, he laid down his own cards, spreading them out.

Sandor began to add them up. “I started with a good hand,” he said vaguely.

“Don’t believe him, Gordon,” Cole said. “And never, ever play poker with him.”

“Forty-one, forty-two. I get forty-two; does that seem right to you?” Sandor didn’t wait for an answer but wrote down the number. “Cole, are you ready to play yet?”

“No.”

Sandor started shuffling again.

“Sandor,” Gordon asked, “how come sometimes you have an accent and sometimes you don’t?”

“Hmm. Very observant of you, Gordon. Sometimes it’s wiser to appear to be from nowhere. But when I am free, when I am among friends, I choose not to lose sight of where I came from. Cole, now, Cole dropped his heritage as soon as humanly possible. Oh ho, you know it’s true, Cole! Gordon, Cole used to say things like,
By
hokey day,
and let me see, there was
varmint
and
critter,
and of course there was my favorite,
I’ll be jiggered.”
Sandor began to deal the cards. “I feel it was a terrible shame to let such a descriptive dialect slip away.”

“It didn’t slip away,” Cole told him. “You can still hear some of it down South.”

“Where it is dying in this age of satellite dishes and worldwide webs.”

“Dialects are living things, Sandor. They evolve; they die. That’s the way it goes.”

“Not as long as I am here to keep them alive. It’s like you and your photos. Did you know Cole is a photographer, Gordon?”

“No.”

“Count your cards and make sure you have ten. Not only does he take photos, but Cole used to draw, too. And he painted when he had the chance. There was a time we traveled together, as we are doing now, and when we stayed for a while in—Where was it, Cole?”

“South Carolina.”

“Yes, in South Carolina, Cole painted.”

“What did he paint?”

“You go first, Gordon, since you lost. He painted people mostly. Always omnis. He never painted me, that’s for certain!”

“Why would I want to paint you, Sandor? I can look at you anytime I want.”

“To capture a moment in time, of course. Isn’t that what you do with your photos?”

“I don’t really do that anymore.”

“No? Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen your camera, this trip. Are you back to your sketches?”

“No.”

“I always thought drawing must be more fun than pointing a camera and pushing a button. Put a little of your own sweat into it.”

“Well, if as you say the point is to capture a moment, then photos are going to be more accurate. A painting or drawing is always going to be distorted, because the image passes through the artist’s eyes and hands.”

“Distortion? I would call it
style.
It’s what gives the whole thing
feeling.
”

“In any case,” Cole said, “I think I’m going to bow out of any card games for now. There’s a pool here, and I’m going for a swim.”

He thought Sandor would make some comment about Ralph the pig, but Sandor just looked up at him, amused. “Why, Cole, I am shocked at you,” he said. “It’s two in the morning. You know the pool must be closed.”

“I don’t care.”

“Take note, Gordon. The end of the world must be near if Cole deliberately intends to flout a rule.”

“They don’t even know, if you’re quiet,” Cole pointed out.

“If he ever decides to go skinny-dipping, then we will know that the apocalypse is upon us. Anyway, I have something regrettable to tell you,” Sandor said to Gordon.

“Aw, no.”

“Yes. Gin.”

Cole eased into the pool area, holding the metal gate so that it wouldn’t clang and announce his presence. He sat on a plastic chair and pulled off his sneakers. He’d already changed in his room, already had a white hotel towel. When he took off his T-shirt in one quick, practiced movement, he felt as if he were shedding the last of a binding skin.

Of course, he could not dive. That would make noise. He sat on the side of the pool and slipped quietly into the water. His one vice: swimming in hotel pools at night. When they caught you, they didn’t do anything—only reminded you that you weren’t supposed to be there. The only times he had been caught were when omnis had come in after him—usually noisy, splashing, sometimes drunk. Then the other guests called the desk to complain. But when Cole was alone, he was silent, and mostly underwater. He liked the eerie cool feeling of floating in another atmosphere.

Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he just
stayed
under the water, if he stayed past the point where he could hold his breath. What would it feel like to run out of air, lose consciousness? He knew he could not die, but he was curious how it would feel to drown. Probably it would hurt. It would certainly be very intense. He’d read a description once of what happened, second by second, when a person drowned. It sounded as if it would be frightening and painful, until your brain started shutting down—and then, he thought, it might be peaceful. He wondered if someone like him—someone whose soul was permanently welded to his
body—could have a near-death experience.